It is still sustainable, although you don't have quite as much freedom as you did before. As long as you are in T2 and focus on deep strata runs (read: skipping the first half of each tier whenever possible, Jelly runs, successful FSC runs), you make more than you lose on CE costs. Arenas, Danger Rooms and Castles are your money-makers.

In 4 star gear and with a good sense of self preservation you can also run the citadel for a terrific income. You'll be skipping out after three floors probably, certainly not fighting Vanaduke.

Personally speaking, there was a narrow window where I was geared enough to play all day on crowns, but that window closed when energy was pushed up. I'm going back to mostly playing on mist.

I don't really have a problem with this, because I'm hitting 4* gear on both characters and I don't intend to waste resources on 5* any time soon, so I'm running out of new items to try anyway. It's pretty much all sidegrades, partly because item balance is so bad and partly because so much stuff doesn't have 4* upgrades.

1. Spend a few bucks on CE
2. Buy 5* recipe for popular item
3. Continuously craft and sell this item and other 5* items for CE
4. Play comfortably for free in full 5*, at least until new content comes out

As long as you find some other source for CE besides crowns, you won't even need to use the market. Even if you can't/won't spend a few dollars on CE, as long as you can get a 5* recipe for something that will actually sell, you can be self-sufficient quite easily as long as you don't die all the time.

Also, it seems to me that FSC gives a lot more crowns than JK runs, certainly if you include the mats you can get there.

Yeah that "not going well" part might mean that you're not grouping up with the sharpest knives in the block. If you aren't already, get into a guild somewhere. You'll find that people not in guilds tend to stick to their own way of doing things, whether for good or bad, but in a guild you can consistently find those people whom you do well with.

Maybe on AVERAGE 7k, if you include amount of danger rooms, arenas, Jelly gate or not, etc, etc, etc.

...

I just ran the Iron Bishop gate from 1-18 without paying any attention to the floor I was going into and made 10.5k, which is 500 crowns less than I stated. That's still enough to support continual play with crowns left over before starting to sell any materials or tokens or anything that I got from doing it, and I only came across two danger rooms and didn't hit any arenas. Usually when I play I do "cherry pick" gates that are likely to have a lot of danger rooms, arenas, and graveyards. I guess I am crazy for enjoying things like fighting monsters and getting rewarded for it.

I said I wasn't interested in anecdotes because it goes without saying that if you micromanage you'll do much better. I don't think most players do that, either because they're new or because that's just not fun. You're also glossing over all of the times you've had a group go disastrously wrong or you've gambled on danger room and lost. I don't believe for a second that these things don't happen to you too. I don't care about your leet guild. This is what I meant by cherry-picking anecdotes.

Again, people need to start discussing this stuff realistically, avoiding the urge to boast about how well they play. It's not doing the playerbase any good. Personally I tend to run all of the gates, for variety, and I almost always skip danger rooms. I find that even if the monetary cost is worth it, the time cost is not. Running in circles for ten minutes is not fun. I do all the devilite and wolver spam, and I get less than 5k for a typical T2 run.

Sometimes I do aim for the best maps. Right now there's a gate open with two Jelly Farm maps on floor 1. If you're interested in grinding some crowns, try soloing that over and over, returning to Haven after floor 1 and going right back down again. Wait a few minutes for the floor to cycle over to Jelly Farm. 1k crowns per run.

hmm..when I played Friday I got 500-600 crowns out of that Jelly Farm d1 stage...sorta good sorta not, that's like bare minimum profit since energy is at 5000 or headed towards 5000 (so 10 energy to enter the stage means it costs you 500 essentially, exclude mist, we all know that is free). Maybe if I did it more with more people I would've been luckier to get 1000 cr, I only did it twice and was solo mostly because I was doing a personal test.

Anyway, like others have said, join a guild, add lots of people, do the second half of any tier (even exclusively doing the second half of tier 1 is awesome, I've gotten 3k for 30 energy (so that's 3000-1500 =1500 profit) , but that's harder to pull off since parties are usually full by then.) JK is easier to get lots of friends for though. I'd recommend joining at d14 though if at all possible, but sometimes people do tend to get their parties filled up on d13 so d12 as suggested is fine. There's two threads in this forum for people looking for friends, I advise you to check them both out AND add people you work with in game. You have a friends list of 250, use it.

Skipping JK himself my be best until you know you can win with only 1 revive (two max). Because winning that way is a cost of 15 energy (10 to enter +5 for first revive) which is 750 crowns roughly. And unless you regularly monetize on your JK tokens (by either trading in 15 for jelly armor and selling it back to a vendor for 3500cr or getting into the sealed sword/antigua upgrading business), then there's not a big point if it causes you a lot of trouble.