This week has been all about getting myself set up to take on combat in Melvor. From the onset, I had an idea to level one combat style at a time for a bit of a challenge. I chose to start with Range in homage to my original Runescape character way back in 2007. Of course, I chose one of the more involved styles in terms of gearing. It might not be optimal to do it this way but here I am.

I started with leveling Fishing right off the bat. For one, it’s an idle skill that continues collecting while I’m offline and I also know I’m going to need a lot of food.. The added benefit Fishing first is the chance to receive “junk” instead of fish. Selling the junk early on lead to some decent gold gains so I could purchase more bank slots to…store more junk….

At Fishing level 20 I was able to fish in Lemvor Pier which gives a base 1% chance to fish up a special item. These have been gems so far but there was a tooltip that said some special items can unlock additional fishing areas. Since I didn’t have the crafting level to use the gems I sold them for gold. I spent that gold on better fishing rods so I could fish faster and so the cycle continued. I’m currently sitting at level 68 Fishing and 8k food items after letting it run overnight.

Once I had all of this raw fish I needed to cook it. I had saved all of the fish I caught from each level bracket in hopes of leveling Cooking without having to go back and fish lower level fish. This worked out nicely and my Cooking level has kept pace with my Fishing level. With 55 cooking I can now cook Raw Fanfish which is the highest level fish I can catch in an area with a chance for special items.

With the food situation taken care of, I turned my attention to Woodcutting and Fletching. One of the things I’ve always loved about Runescape, and now Melvor, is how skills flow into each other. I needed to level Woodcutting to gather wood to use to fletch arrow shafts and bows. I needed to level Mining so I could gather ore to use for Smithing to make arrowheads. I ended up getting all of the above up pretty high over the week and I can now make up to Mithril arrows. Those should be a nice mid-tier ammo to start fighting the higher combat level creatures.

The last piece of all this was Crafting. If I had gone with melee I could have been progressively improving my armor and weapons through Smithing. That would have given me 4 tiers of armor and weapons to go through. Unfortunately, there are only 2 tiers of ranged armor: Leather and Hard Leather. Leather was pretty quick to get but the full hard leather set requires getting Crafting to level 50 which took me most of the week. Leather can be bought in the shop but it was a bit expensive when I first started leveling Crafting. So I did dip my toes into the combat system since cows drop up to 3 leather a kill. Cows have a combat level of 2 so after the first few they weren’t much of a challenge. It was just a matter of waiting to kill enough cows and making sure my loot inventory didn’t fill up.

So with a full Hard Leather armor set, a few thousand Mithril Arrows, and a Maple Short Bow, I’m ready to check out combat this weekend!