First Week Money Guide, 10M Mesos on a Fresh Classic Server

The fastest way to make mesos in MapleStory Classic during the first week is boring: kill things, pick up everything, sell the junk to an NPC, and keep the handful of drops other players will pay for. Ten million in seven days is realistic for someone playing a few hours a night, and it does not require a mage, a guild, or a lucky Chaos Scroll. It requires not wasting what you earn. Here is the plan we are following ourselves.

Founders access opens on 6 October 2026, so the first week is when the economy is thinnest. Nobody has mesos, everybody needs pots, and prices for basic gear are strange for a few days. That is an opportunity if you treat it as one.

Days one and two: pick up everything

Below level 20, your income is NPC sales: every Slime drop, every Stump drop, every equip you cannot wear, and a full bag vendors for 20,000 to 40,000 mesos at level 15. The habit itself, and which etc items to NPC and which single stack to keep for a Henesys or Kerning quest, is in our level 1 to 30 farming guide.

The launch-week twist is that quest stack. Players who skipped the grind will pay silly prices for 50 Slime Bubbles or Stump Tree Branches on day three because a quest is blocking a level, so hold one stack past what you need and sell the surplus to them rather than the NPC. We sold Tree Branches for more than the quest reward was worth in 2006 and expect the same here.

Equipment drops are where the first real mesos come from. A clean Work Glove or a Leather Purse with above average stats will sell to a player for ten to twenty times the NPC price. If the stats are average, NPC it and move on. If you are not sure what "above average" means yet, read our guide to how mesos work before you sell anything with a slot on it.

Days three and four: sell to people, not NPCs

Once you are past level 20, the strategy flips. Now you are selling to launch merchants, the players who parked a character in Henesys or the Free Market to buy low and sell high. They want three things: scrolls, etc stacks for quests, and mid-level gear.

Scrolls are the first flip worth doing. A 60% scroll for Gloves for Attack drops from ordinary monsters and every warrior and thief in the game wants it. Sell it to a player, never to an NPC. The same applies to 10% scrolls, which merchants buy for the long game. Overall scrolls for Dex and Weapon for Attack in any percentage are money.

One personal rule from our guild days: never sell a scroll to the first person who whispers you. The price they offer is what they think you do not know. Wait an hour, check the Free Market once, then sell.

Expected mesos per hour, by level

These are estimates. They assume a solo player with normal luck, no leech, and a habit of picking up everything. Pre-Big Bang drop rates were not generous, and Nexon has not published Classic's rates, so treat this as a shape rather than a promise.

Level bracket	Where we would be	Mesos per hour (estimate)
1 to 15	Henesys Hunting Ground, Slimes, Stumps	15,000 to 30,000
15 to 25	Kerning construction site, Pig Beach	30,000 to 60,000
21 to 30	Kerning PQ for exp, swamp Ligators between runs for the mesos	30,000 to 50,000
30 to 40	Sleepywood, Zombie Mushrooms, Wild Boars	60,000 to 120,000
35 to 50	Ludibrium PQ plus the bonus stage, if Ludibrium is in at launch	80,000 to 150,000

Those numbers do not include a lucky equipment drop, which can be a day's income in a single pickup. They also do not include selling etc stacks, which in week one can double the figure for the 15 to 30 bracket. KPQ pays in exp; the mesos in that bracket come from the swamp.

Days five to seven: the store question

Renting a store from the Cash Shop is tempting the moment you have a bag of scrolls. Our answer is usually no in week one, unless you have enough real money set aside and at least 20 items worth listing. A store that sits with four scrolls in it is a waste of the fee and of a character slot that could be grinding.

The alternative is the old way: stand in the Free Market channel one entrance with a shop-style name, or use the trade window in Henesys. It is slower and it works, and our Free Market guide covers the stall side. By day five or six, when you have 3M or more and a stack of gear, the maths on a store changes, and our merchanting guide covers the pricing side.

If you would rather skip the whole week and just play, people will be looking to buy mesos from day one; that breaks Nexon's rules, a fresh server is when bans are most visible, and our honest take is worth reading before you consider it.

What not to waste on

Nearly everything that eats launch-week mesos is gear you will replace within a day, and the farming guide has the full list of what not to buy before 30. The launch-week version is shorter: no Maple Weapon on day two because it looks cool, no tipping a leecher, and no shiny overall when a clean Work Glove or a steady Ilbi supply matters far more.

Spend on potions, spend on scrolls that flip, and put the rest in the bank.

Our own target for day seven is 10M, with a Work Glove scrolled to +5 attack on the side. If we get there, the first thing we do is stop selling and start buying, because week two is when the prices on gear finally settle down and the people who NPC'd everything start wondering where their money went.