HCCO/Guide/3
Mithril Armour, 
Ice Sword, 
Adamant Dagger 
(G) Adamant Armour, 
Amulet of Looting, 
Rune 2H Sword,
While your next target is 
Adamant Knights, you should know that levelling
and
up to 50 will effectively reduce your healing per Knight from 1700 to 1200. Important note: DO NOT IDLE KNIGHTS. Make sure to always have more
than the max hit of the enemy, and try to eat food right after your attack timer ends, so you don’t reset an attack in progress. Eat until full HP, or at least until you have enough HP to survive any attack. The 2.6s interval of the Adamant Knight is not really a danger provided you’re PAYING ATTENTION and have enough food.
Your Ice Sword is great for leveling all of your combat stats. You may do this at 
Statue, to prepare for gear upgrades, and thus your first Damage Reduction points!
Each 
Adamant piece has a 1/48 chance of dropping. Good luck on that! You don’t necessarily care about the 
Adamant Boots as there are reliable sources in 
Turkul Riders which also drop 
Rune Boots very soon from now. If you are lucky enough to snag an 
Obsidian Cape, rejoice as this item offers the biggest evasion upgrade of any item dropped by Adamant Knights. Its very low drop rate (1/240), however, may deter you from grinding for it. It will be a while until you replace the Cape for anything else, so you will get a lot of use out of it. There is no point wasting 
Silver/
Gold Bars on the Boots. Upgrade the rest of the equipment you get to (G) Adamant as soon as you get them, since each piece gives you 4% Damage Reduction. Since you will be using 2H weapons for awhile you may skip 
(G) Adamant Shield, but it will still be a useful shield until 
(G) Rune Shield or 
Dragonfire Shield so it is worth upgrading.
Your next goal after full adamant is a weapon upgrade. This will come from 
Elerine Warriors and are the Rune 2H Sword and the 
Elerine Spear. With 3 out of 5 (G) adamant pieces and a 
Silver Diamond Ring from 
Mummies totalling 13% DR, this monster can be safely idled with
, 13% DR and 540 hitpoints. Of the two drops we seek, the former is a relatively common drop (1/36) and a considerable step up from the Ice Sword (yielding double the clears/hr of
). The Elerine Spear is a slight upgrade over the Rune 2H Sword, but it is a much lower drop rate (1/180), so it may not really be worth grinding for. It is worth noting that while both weapons are fantastic when used on their correct style(s), they are utterly abysmal at the other style(s). The Elerine Spear should only ever be used on stab to train
, while the Rune 2H Sword can be used to train
and
equally. If you have
, you can consider obtaining a set of 
Gloves of Silence to help with fundraising. This item alone almost doubles the gp/hr of 
Cows and it turns 
Plants surprisingly into one of the best early money makers.
At
, save up enough 
to purchase a 
Desert Hat. You will also transition from 
Basic Resupply to 
Standard Resupply for the rest of the game at this point. This item gives you access to 
Rune Gloves, 
Desert Wrappings, 
(G) Rune Boots and 
Sand Treaders, as well 
Desert Sabre that you may want to farm at one point. You will want to farm for at least Rune Gloves and (G) Rune Boots from the respective creatures in
, as these have relatively common drop rates and won't take long. Desert Wrappings offer a nice 2% DR which will help with
, but can be skipped as they will soon be replaced with 
Paladin Gloves. It is possible to kill 
Turkul Giants at this point to obtain 
Dragon Scimitar or Desert Sabre, but these upgrades are relatively minor over the Rune 2H Sword and will soon be replaced with items from
anyway. BEWARE: Do not
Potatoes in the
unless you have at least
. You will lose all your Potatoes instantly as they will round down to 0 healing.
Killing 
Paladins for Paladin Gloves at this stage is somewhat viable, but they have a low drop rate and the Auto Eat threshold is quite high. Over a long period, the chance of making a mistake and dying is quite high, so it would be better to wait until you can rely on auto eat to do its thing. Around 20% DR and 660 HP.
Chaper III-B: Amulet of Looting
With a hefty chunk of upgrades under your belt, it is time to fight the first early game milestone in the 
Spider King. This monster drops the Amulet of Looting which is a special amulet which automatically loots gear acquired from Combat Areas and
Areas. You may get it from the 
Spider Chest, with a 1/22 chance. This item marks the first paradigm shift in the HCCO game mode, as manual looting is now a thing of the past. Now is a good time to obtain the Amulet of Looting as before this point most monsters either wouldn't drop 100 items in a reasonable time frame, or their drops were largely not important enough to prioritise picking up consistently. Our main food source up until now has been Basic Resupply (or Standard Resupply at
and beyond) which do not need to be looted, so the benefit of the amulet was minimal.
As a point of comparison, by using Mithril Armour, and having around
/
/
, it will take you around 5000 healing from food per run of the
. With access to gilded adamant & (G) Rune Boots for DR and a trusty Rune 2H Sword or Elerine Spear, this boss can be idled with 18% DR and 590 HP for around 10 kills/hr. It is quite possible to beat the zone without having any form of
, and just make sure you time your manual eating right, since the damage of the 
Spiders in the area is not too high. This may be appealing to players wishing to quickly eliminate manual looting from their routine.
Without any DR, the boss can instead be tackled with 710 HP and
. Check Can I Idle for any particular combination of requirements you happen to have. If you wanted to try obtain
before this dungeon, know that this requires 5,000,000
, which would require around 25 hours of active gameplay at 
Master Farmer, since you still don’t have auto looting, or around 40 hours of Plant farming with Gloves of Silence. Bad idea.
Chapter III-B: Making money early-mid: Master Farmer + Auto Eat II
The Master Farmer gives a total of 14 unique items. You want to prioritize your bank slots for the most rewarding items, taking the price and drop rate into account. This mainly comprises the Tree Seeds, requiring 5 slots. By reserving five slots for the Master Farmers grind, you get a total of 84% of the GP drops. That’s around 950 per kill.
Alternatively, equipping Gloves of Silence increases the base GP/kill of every monster by 150. This makes low HP enemies such as Plants and Cows a great source of income too, albeit with lower xp/hr compared to Master Farmers.
Later on at
you have access to 
Raging Horned Elite, which drop a reasonable amount of sellable items (worth about 2,000 each kill) as well as a huge supply of 
Trout. You will likely kill tens of thousands of this monster while gathering food, which can easily fund the more expensive upgrades remaining, so it is not important to over-focus on earning GP at this point.
Chapter III-C: Late to mid Game food: Slayer
Now is a good time to build up
150,000as
is a great purchase to idly build up
. With them, you can purchase Standard Resupply, which nets you both a useful 150 Crab and 500 
Magic Bones per purchase. This is the most efficient HP per
(even moreso than 
Generous Resupply!), and is worth saving up for. These can be used throughout the rest of the game for easy food.
As per usual, free rerolls may be used to acquire Master Farmer as your
task.
As noted before, beware of 
Wizards and 
Fairies when using
, and ensure they can not bypass your
threshold. They should be skipped either way, as they will consume a lot of food due to their high accuracy on melee armour.
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