What you are actually asking for
Melvor Idle is a RuneScape in a spreadsheet. Games by Malcs built it, Jagex published it, and version 1.0 landed on PC and mobile on 18 November 2021. It costs $9.99 on Steam and is free to try on iOS and Android with an in-app purchase for the full version. A sequel was announced in 2025.
The shape people want back from it is worth naming precisely, because the recommendations that fail all fail for the same reason. Melvor gives you a wide menu of skills that feed each other. You mine ore because smithing needs it, you smith bars because they make the armour that lets combat go deeper, and you fish and cook because combat needs food. None of those skills is the game on its own. The game is the routing between them. And it never resets. There is no prestige, no wipe, no moment where the numbers restart with a multiplier. You just have a character who is a bit better than yesterday, indefinitely.
That last part is the problem. Almost the entire idle genre is built on the prestige reset. Take it away and most of these games have no structure left. Which is why the honest answer to "games like Melvor Idle" is that there are perhaps five, and two of them are not browser games.
Trimps, and where it stops matching
Trimps is the closest thing in our catalogue in terms of how much game there is. It has a real combat system with equipment and stats, it has a map you push through zone by zone, it has resource gathering feeding production feeding military, and it has hundreds of hours of content that keeps opening new mechanics rather than new multipliers. If what you liked about Melvor was that the game kept revealing more systems for months, Trimps does that.
Where it falls short is the thing above. Trimps is a prestige game to its bones. You push until you die, you reset, you come back stronger, and that cycle is the whole rhythm. There is no persistent character, no skill levels that only ever go up, no sense of a save file as a place you live in. It is also far less friendly than Melvor: no tutorial, an opening couple of hours that are genuinely dull, and an interface that assumes you will go and read a guide. It is free in the browser and free on Steam, and the source is GPLv2.
Kittens Game, and where it stops matching
Kittens Game matches on breadth and on the feeling of a save you keep. It is a village of cats made entirely of text, and it has more interlocking systems than almost anything else in the genre: a dozen resource chains, a research tree that runs for weeks, seasons, trade with other species, a space programme. The routing problem is real in the same way Melvor's is. You are always short of storage, always deciding whether a building pays back. People run the same save for years, which is very much the Melvor relationship with a save file.
Where it falls short is that there is no character and no combat. Kittens Game is city management, not an RPG. Nobody has stats, nothing has equipment, and there is no moment where you are stronger than a boss. If the RuneScape part of Melvor was what you wanted, Kittens Game gives you the systems and none of the fantasy. It also does eventually have resets, though they are rarer and gentler than Trimps'. Free in the browser, paid on Steam and iOS. Its licence forbids anyone else hosting it, so we link out rather than framing it here.
Progress Knight is worth an evening for the RPG framing, but be clear about the scale: it is a small game about one life lived repeatedly, finishable in a handful of sessions, not a home for a hundred hours.
The genuinely close matches, none of which we host
Legends of IdleOn, by LavaFlame2, is the nearest thing to Melvor that exists. It is free to play, on Steam, browser and Android, and it is explicitly built out of RuneScape and MapleStory: nineteen skills including mining, fishing, cooking and construction, dozens of classes, and a party of characters you assign to jobs rather than one. It is a real MMO, which is the trade: other people, timed events, and monetisation, all asking more of your attention than Melvor's calm single-player grind.
NGU Idle, by 4G, is free on Steam, and Windows only there. It is the other game people bring up in these threads and it earns it: hundreds of hours, dozens of interlocking systems, gear, bosses, and a genuinely funny voice. It is not RuneScape-shaped though. It is much stranger and much uglier, and it does use resets. Take it as the answer to "what will absorb the same amount of my life," not to "what feels the same." Note that the browser copies still recommended around the web have gone stale: Kongregate no longer carries it, and the Armor Games build stopped being updated in 2019. If being tied to a Windows desktop is the dealbreaker, this is not your answer, and what NGU is actually for is worth reading before you commit to it.
Ironwood RPG is a browser idle MMORPG with the skill list Melvor players are looking for, woodcutting through smithing to combat, free to play at ironwoodrpg.com. It was still in early alpha at the time of writing, so treat it as promising rather than a replacement, and expect gaps.
What does not work, and why
Antimatter Dimensions, Synergism and most of the well-loved incrementals are pure number games. They have one currency and many layers of resetting it, which is the opposite of many currencies and no resetting. They are excellent, and recommending them here is the tell of a list written by someone who has not played Melvor.
Where to start
Legends of IdleOn if the RuneScape feel is the non-negotiable part, and it costs you nothing to find out. Kittens Game if what you actually wanted was the routing puzzle and you can live without swords. And if neither lands, the sequel is coming, and Melvor itself is a game most people have not finished.