If you ever saw someone with a lot more runic than you and immediately assumed they paid to win, you would likely be wrong. Utilizing every FREE method available, a skilled player can make over 20,000 runic per year.

1. The best method that only involves playing the game and not watching ads is the boss rush event. For the uninitiated, for 3 to 7 days every once in a while, you are invited to beat up your favorite piece of trash timewasters, but with speed. Your times are tracked, and at the end of each round, your best time is compared up against thousands of others. For your valiant efforts, you may earn between 100 and 500 runic based on if you placed in the top 1000, top 100, or the rather extreme top 10. This is all completely free, and the event happens 4 times per year. Let's assume you are a decently skilled boss fighter and the event is 5 days long. Rounds are 24 hours a piece, so you could potentially earn 1250 runic. This is partially why I said a skilled player could make so much in a year.

2. With the exception of the last few months of the year, events run every single week. If you are consistent and participate in every event, you will get 100 or more runic each time. On top of this, some events like the boss rush and meatloaf party also come with items you can purchase in the shop that reward 50 runic a piece.

3. To squeeze every last runic out of the game, we must resort to the more tedious and slow methods. By a landslide, the best "free" method is the magical runic machine. Due to steam not supporting ads, this option is only available to mobile players. Pro tip, you can link your account to multiple devices at once. Under normal circumstances, any player can watch 30 ads and be rewarded with 30 runic at the cost of anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes. Personally, it's only ever taken 15 minutes or less, but some people get those pesky 2 minute ads. Very bad for efficiency. The machine refills once per day at 8pm EST.

4. Unfortunately after this, we are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Daily rewards can give 7 runic every once a while. How often? No idea, I don't feel like checking every version of the daily calendar (you can upgrade it in the ascension tree). You may have also noticed from time you time you get runic from 3 hour free chests, what you probably didn't know is that the runic rewarded runs on a cycle. For the first 2 times opening the free chest, you get nothing, the third opening you get 1 runic. For the next 2 times, you get nothing, the sixth opening you get 2 runic. This same cycle repeats until you get 3 runic, which then resets the cycle. If that sounds weird, then the cycle goes 001002003 then loops. If you opened 3 free chests per day for a year, you would only get about 250 runic. When combining all the methods previously mentioned, a skilled player can theoretically make over 20500 runic per year, again, for free.

This is how you see people with so much runic, they don't cheat or pay, it simply takes consistency over a long period of time. Even in the short term, you can potentially make thousands of runic in a month if you are lucky with the timing of boss rush and are skilled.