Xenowars | Defense, Dungeon, And Dung
Melvor Idle | Township A Drain On My Gold
If you ever watched the movie The Money Pit, then you already have an idea of what Township did to me in Melvor Idle. For those not in the know it was a constant money drain with endless things happening requiring even more money. I just could not see the light at the end of the tunnel for even getting involved with it until i had it almost maxed out.
The township is one of those things constantly running. If you have storage room for the resources the town is gathering you can just let this thing run until you can afford to upgrade further buildings. Every hour your town collects those resources. The town also has worship and four different seasons that have different impacts on production.
Early on I thought Township was going to be this fun little side activity that would start making me some money. It turns out that without making some insane investments of over a billion gold into buildings and lots of resources. I’d be finding my wallet drained always looking for ways outside of the township to get more gold to progress this thing along.
It started easily enough. You have the first four of ten biomes unlocked that all produce the lower-level resources. I first started off getting some basic shelter and farmland in the grasslands. I then had to wait a bit to get enough gold to start getting the basics in the forest for the woodcutter's camp and carpenter's workshop.
Slowly over time, I progressed along collecting more resources and endlessly waiting to have enough gold to progress even further. It was clear my money-making outside of the township was my bottleneck.
Even more so since as my town progressed it would end up costing more and more to repair the decay of my buildings. This seems a small cost at the start would end up dwarfing it to some insane levels if I could not be around for a while to repair my buildings and if it was the highest repair season such as winter.
The carrot that kept me spending endless amounts of gold on my township and all the resources for quite some time was noticing I could collect from a tax rate. I did not realize early on to be able to collect taxes I needed to invest into the town hall building. It has eight levels of upgrades for a 10% increase in taxes that cost 100 million gold and some resources for each upgrade.
Needless to say, at the time I did not even have a million let alone 100 million gold to spare. Any gold I had was going into other things like upgrading tools for mining or woodcutting. The first million gold I'd spend would also be saved up for a skill cape. It would end up being quite some time before I'd invest in the town hall.
The town hall also has quite an insane repair cost as it decays over time. Once I got to the first level of it, I swore my repair bill was almost higher than the gold it was bringing it. That is because I had a lot of other expensive buildings as well and it would take a few levels in town hall to break even overall per repair cycle on my buildings. It’s also not like I could build the town hall until I had a township level 80 and 40k population.
When my lack of gold was not holding me back in township it was not having enough of a population or level in the skill itself to progress further along. Every time that happened whatever upgrade I thought I was getting next would have to take a back seat to upgrading any buildings that affected the population from housing to
I ended up going with the worship of Aeris which gives me bonus production in mountain and valley biomes. While I could go into the town information tab and change my worship it would destroy any building that is related to worship and cost me easily 100 million in gold and many more millions in resources to repair.
With the good of worship comes the bad. With Aeris, I'd also be getting a reduction of 50% in desert biome and 75% in water for production. Thankfully water only has one building and it produces meat that I always had way too much of. The desert had some mines which sucked as I needed stone a lot of the time. Along with producing rune essence that I never ran out of. For the most part, this seemed to not be as bad of a drawback as other worships for the boots I was getting out of it.
After being disappointed at the constant drain of gold township ended up being. I ended up looking at other aspects of it. One that was a major overlook on my part was tasks. For these tasks you could earn a bit of money and in many cases items that would be upgrades you could not even get yet for things like combat.
Finishing main tasks ended up having quite a bigger side effect than I was expecting. To be able to unlock something called The Trader you needed trading posts. This was something I did not end up building for quite some time. Even once I did, I failed to realize that was a way to make lots of gold.
The trader allows you to exchange resources the township is producing for things like boxes of ores or even scrolls that grant a 3% skill increase towards a single profession that is consumed by each action.
These purchase options under The Trader are locked behind a skill wall such as 99 cooking for Food Box II and having completed enough main tasks such as 85 of them. So early on I could not even buy anything. I also thought it was a bit lame to only get 3% more experience at the cost of resources.
My opinion started to change a lot once I started unlocking more options from The Trader and I started having resources that I had way too much of that I no longer had enough storage space just to hold onto. For a while not knowing better, I was just dumping things like food, not realizing I could make a lot of gold off my excesses.
End the game for Townhall I now know better. Once I had all the building finished, I only needed resources for repairs. Everything else I traded at The Trader I then sold off at the shop for gold. Needing me an easy 30 million or more depending on how often I wanted to trade and sell. I’d sometimes hold onto something for any profession I was working on. Otherwise, I would have been converting stuff into gold!
Final Thoughts
My opinion of Township changed a lot from the start to the end of maxing it out. While it took an insane amount of gold and time to max it out. Now every time I log in, I have millions of gold collected in taxes waiting for me. Along with resources worth millions more to sell off when needed.
Other Content
- Melvor Idle | Making Money Fishing
- Melvor Idle | Taking A Look At The Agility Skill
- Melvor Idle | My First Two Level 99 Skills
Information
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Melvor Idle. If you wish to further support my content you can use enjargames at checkout or this referral link for Melvor Idle on the Epic Game Store.
Disclosure: The game was received for free.
Disclosure: As a creator of the Epic Games’ Support-A-Creator Program, I may receive a commission from certain purchases.