Melvor Idle

Balance Update #1 - Melvor Idle 2 v0.7.5-alpha

Added 2025-12-10 05:22:25 +0000 UTC

Welcome to our first patch specifically related to game balance. These updates are designed around making sweeping changes to various aspects of the game based on feedback and playtesting.

We name these "Balance Updates", as they are too impactful to be called a Minor Update, and too small to be labelled a Major Update.

In this balance update, we are making some big changes to Ranching, the Grain Mill, Cooking XP and also GP rates.

Firstly, how is the game balanced?

Before I get into the changes, I'd like to give some insight into how the game is currently being balanced.

When we balance content for the game, we are taking the whole game into consideration and setting values knowing there's many bonuses still to come.

Currently, there are many missing bonuses from the game that are still yet to arrive which will boost your character. This includes:

New utility Skills designed to boost your character like Astrology, Construction, Herblore, Summoning, Thieving, Agility, Prayer, Enchantment.
Actually being able to equip items that buff your character.
Quests and rewards obtained from them.
Mastery Guild bonuses.
Skillcapes.
Content over level 99 that provides even more content to increase GP and item rates.

The current rates in the game are balanced knowing the above boosts are coming.

A key example of this is Coal - obtaining Coal feels like a chore as Smithing consumes a lot if it in the higher levels. But we know there's new content being added alongside Agility that will vastly improve this area of the game. We can't add Agility yet because we need player damage which is being added alongside Combat.

Developing a game like Melvor has many similarities to how you actually play it:

Playing Melvor: Set a goal to beat a Boss in a Dungeon, only to realise you need food, but now you need to Fish, oh and you need more Herblore Potions, but you now need a new secondary from Firemaking, but now you need Logs to burn from Woodcutting, but what about Summoning? Now I need to prepare this as well.
Developing Melvor: We need to develop Agility to get these bonuses out, but now we need player damage as a mechanic, but this requires the Hitpoints Skill as player HP is based on this, but we need to actually let the player level this up, which actually requires a functional Combat system, oh but now Combat requires the equipment system to be developed to function, and to let the player level up Hitpoints they need actual Combat content which requires Enemies and Weapons and Combat Effects etc etc (You get the idea)

We have a very good indication of what the rates in the game are going to be at every level range (every 10 levels). This is done by setting desired limitations on bonuses we give you throughout your progression.

Its not 100% perfect (as you'll see further below with the changes), but by setting desired limits on bonuses and rates, we can effectively balance the game without needing to nerf so much content every time we add something new.

This is done so when we actually add new Skills and content to the game, you can feel the impact it has on your character. By adding a new Skill like Astrology that solely provides bonuses to the game, you can experience the true nature of the buff you receive because the rates in the game were already set knowing this was coming.

This approach has a few benefits:

Every update containing new Skills/content would increase the power of your character.
We don't need to nerf existing content due to the power increase of a newly added Skill, because it was already accounted for.
You are able to test the actual impact the new content has on your character, and we can determine whether its too low/high/just right and make changes accordingly.

However, this approach has some big downsides:

Without the new content, the game feels slow and sluggish, much like a chore.
It can get frustrating waiting for this content to finally arrive.
Everything we add could feel bad, because there are no bonuses to help make it feel better.

There have been suggestions to add "temporary" content to mimic what's to come, but this isn't something I'm interested adding as it would simply feel bad loading an update and losing access to this content.

Changes in our balance methodology

This Alpha period is proving to be extremely beneficial due to the feedback we receive from everyone, especially via the surveys. There's a good amount of you participating in Discord discussions, but the anonymous nature of the surveys really brings out the collective feedback which is vital in making sweeping changes to the game.

The alpha period has shown us that our original plan of balancing just isn't cutting it, and we need to adjust how we balance for the future of the game. We're too harsh on some content that would be eventually be solved by external Skills, but this basically creates a situation where those external Skills become a requirement instead of a choice.

Here's a breakdown on what some key changes to our balance methodology behind the scenes:

Our balance approach to passive Skills has completely changed, with the goal to make them feel less like a chore and more of a nice to have so you can focus on other important active tasks.
Completely change how XP rates are balanced for Artisan Skills. We are using Cooking as our test dummy in this update to determine if the change is healthy or not for the game.
Give more competitive GP sources, instead of only a select few we decided should be top 3.
Give the player more agency in choosing the path they wish to take in the game, instead of forcing them to certain areas because the rates without it are just not viable.

This is of course only a very summarised list of what we are changing behind the scenes, but your feedback is basically being fed into any new Skill that is being planned and has already made a pretty large impact on the design and balance of upcoming Skills like Hunting & Herblore.

===THE ACTUAL UPDATE CHANGELOG===

Everything from this point on is the changes listed in the update.

Important Note: This update does not touch of every point of feedback we've received. This is touching on some very important areas based on Survey #4's responses, while other larger changes require more time for discussion and implementation on our end.

This update is now available on Steam, or via Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/100nzjLElJOK4IbFZT-mK1dXKVeCF2413?usp=sharing

Ranching

First up, let's look at the changes to Ranching.

Animal Pricing

We've heavily reduced the prices of Animals:

Sheep*: 90,000 -> 15,000
Chicken: 25,000 -> 6,000
Cow*: 125,000 -> 24,000
Bee: 6,000 -> 2,000
Pig: 80,000 -> 3,500
Silkworm: 8,000 -> 1,000
Mealworm: 8,000 -> 1,000

Animals that do not consume food will always cost more GP than the others.

Animal GP Refund

Anyone that has been here since MI1 Alpha days will know that we sometimes provide GP refunds for large cost changes. This decision is solely up to us when choosing when to refund GP.

For this update, we are refunding the cost difference back to you for all the animals you have purchased. This will be granted when you load into the game. There's no notification or anything, you'll just get your GP back (Yes the game tracks exactly how many of each animal you have purchased).

Animal Food Consumption

Chicken: Grain 20 -> 10
Pig: Grain 60 -> 30

Animal Produce

We've reduced some animal produce quantities (which has helped us reduce the cost of these animals):

Chickens:
- Eggs 12 -> 6
- Feathers 20->10
Cows:
- Milk 12 -> 6
- Cowhide 6 -> 2
- Raw Beef 6 -> 2

Other Changes and Quality of Life

When building an Enclosure, you can now choose which tier to build without needing to build the first one and upgrade.
You can no longer build Chicken or Pig enclosures until you build the Grain Mill in Farming.
Added a "Repair all possible" button to Ranching.
You can now drag and drop Enclosures built on land to rearrange their display order.
Auto Buy has been renamed to Auto Rebuy to be more in line with what it actually does.
Reduced Satisfaction bonus of "Comfort >= 50%" to 40%, down from 50%.
Doubled Satisfaction bonuses of Group Bonuses for Animals to make up for the missing 10% from the above change.
Sheep now eat Apples as Treats (There's another treat coming but it requires Thieving)
Replaced the "-50% Animal Cost" Ranching Mastery Guild bonus with "+50% Animal Lifespan".

A quick note about Animal lifespans

We've seen requests to increase the lifespan of animals, or simply make them not die at all.

Because Ranching produces items passively, and these items have a sale price, and you can have 100s of the same animal, the animals are required to pass away to maintain healthy GP rates. I'm not risking running into another Township situation where a passive Skill generates enough GP to make the rest of the game obsolete.

The GP cost of animals directly relates to the lifespan of the Animal to keep this in check. If we find the pricing changes above to be good, we can easily increase the base lifespan of animals while also increasing their GP cost.

Farming

Some minor changes here to help with Ranching.

The Mill

The Mill now auto collects on production. There's no need to manually collect your items any more.
Basic Grain:
- Wheat cost 20 -> 10
- Grain produced 10 -> 20
Quality Grain
- Wheat cost 40 -> 20
- Grain produced 20 -> 40
High Quality Grain
- Wheat cost 80 -> 30
- Grain produced 40 -> 80
Fine Grain
- Wheat cost 110 -> 40
- Corn cost 110 -> 10
- Flax cost 110 -> 10
- Grain produced 110 -> 240

Other changes

Wheat now only requires 2 seeds to plant instead of 3.
Trees in Farming now produce a base of 250 logs instead of 50.

Cooking

As mentioned in the wall of text above, we are testing a big change in how Artisan Skills are balanced using Cooking as our test dummy before applying the change elsewhere.

These changes only touch XP and Ingredient rates. Mastery Guild will follow suit in a future update.

Cooking XP Changes

We've completely rebalanced Cooking XP by factoring in the time it would take to collect the ingredients. This might need further adjustment as balancing around Farming products is super difficult.

These changes increases the XP rate across the whole Skill.

You can see all the XP changes here: https://pastebin.com/c77DniMm

If an item is missing, then the XP didn't change.
If an item's XP has been reduced, then its because the ingredients to obtain them are a lot faster to obtain than others.

Cooking Recipe Ingredients (Orchard Fruits)

We've slightly reduced fruit requirements on some recipes:

Pancakes 3 -> 2
Cakes 8 -> 2
Pies 3 -> 2

More GP Sources

We've increased the GP rates for many Artisan skills in hopes to provide a competitive GP source other than simply Smithing or fishing Eels*.

*It is very important to note that Eels are a good GP source because they are a >L100 item, so the rates applied to them relate to that. When L100+ content is added, their sale price will also increase.

The Skills that we targeted were:

Cooking
Fletching
Crafting
Runecrafting

You can view all the price changes here*: https://pastebin.com/sEzbvDki

*You will notice there are no changes to Dragonhide Leather gear in Crafting. This is because a big change is planned for these in the next Major Update.