I bought a gold anvil way back when because it made my lower-level resources more valuable. With a gold anvil, by converting your lower-level to advanced resources, it created resources, in essence.
With a gold anvil, it takes 2169 logs, for instance, to get from level 0 to level 10. But it takes only 348 square wood. That works out to a 2.5x increase in value per level for resources for 6.23X “gain” factor between basic and advanced.
By turning basic resources into advanced, you create higher level resources faster than the gain factor whenever you roll 2 or 3 stars, meaning you effectively create resources. For example, if you roll a single star going from logs to bamboo, you convert 50 logs into 20 bamboo, but with the gain factor of 2.5X going from logs to bamboo you broke even (meaning those 20 bamboo give you the same enchantment bump that 50 logs would have). Roll two stars though, and you turn 50 logs into 30 bamboo, which are worth 75 logs in terms of enchantment, so you “created” 25 logs. If you get 3 stars, then you get 40 bamboo, which are worth 100 logs, and you created 50. You get a similar step by going from bamboo to square wood. So if you rolled nothing but 3-stars you would quadruple the effective number of basic resources you had (you would turn 1000 logs into 640 square wood, which are worth 4000 logs in terms of enchantment).
Back when it took a lot of resources to enchant (like 440 advanced to go from level 9 to level 10), it seemed like a good idea to me to buy the gold anvil so I would always at least break even (in terms of creating resources) when crafting advanced resources. Then they lowered the amount you needed and I was kicking myself because it was a waste of LCs, I had *plenty* of resources to enchant as much as I wanted and it went back to shards being the limiting quantity.
