System mechanic — not covered elsewhere

Roaming Merchants

They roam roads, sell real stock, buy your goods, and remember every honest trade or robbery against a guild-wide reputation score

Travelling merchants wander the game's roads and paths, each carrying a random selection of goods to sell and a purse of coin to buy from the player in return. They can be traded with honestly, robbed, or killed outright — and every one of those choices is tracked against a single guild-wide reputation score that follows the player everywhere, affecting every merchant they'll ever meet afterward.

A merchant's purse is finite and can genuinely be sold dry — for a buyer who never runs out, see The Roadside Shop, a fixed building that pays a flat rate instead, with no reputation involved at all.

What a merchant carries

Each merchant's stock is generated from a coin budget per line of goods, rather than a flat count of items. A cheap raw material like a plank gets a large stack; an expensive finished good like a wand gets far fewer units — deliberately, so a merchant's shop ends up carrying somewhere between roughly 80,000 and 140,000 coin worth of goods total, large enough that buying materials genuinely competes with gathering them by hand, small enough that spending real money still means visiting more than one trader. No single line can exceed 500 units, so even the cheapest material stays a shelf rather than becoming an entire warehouse.

Pricing: cheap stays cheap, expensive becomes expensive

Buy prices scale on a curve tied to each item's own base value rather than a single flat markup — a plank barely costs more than its listed value, while a 360-coin wand costs roughly seven times its base price. This deliberately resolves two demands that would otherwise conflict: keeping cheap materials worth buying instead of only ever gathering them, while making sure the game actually has some purchase expensive enough to feel like real money changing hands. Sell prices — what a merchant pays the player — are left completely untouched by this markup, so raising buy prices never quietly inflates what the player earns on the other side of the same trade.

Guild reputation: five tiers, both prices move together

A single reputation number, shared across every merchant encountered, runs from -100 to +100 and moves in one clear direction depending on behaviour: it climbs slowly through honest trades, and drops hard the moment the player commits a crime against one. Five tiers apply a combined discount or markup to both buying and selling at once:

At the Hunted tier, merchants become outright hostile on sight. Every honest purchase raises reputation by a small, deliberately slow amount — trust is built gradually, not bought in bulk.

Rare wares: locked behind trust, not luck

A separate pool of high-tier crafting materials — otherwise obtainable only by farming their specific source creature or biome — becomes available to buy once reputation reaches Trusted (25+): a chance at one rare item appears in a merchant's stock. At Honoured (60+), one rare item is guaranteed, with a further chance at a second. These are deliberately priced well above the normal goods table, so drop-farming stays the efficient path for players who prefer it — buying rare materials is framed as a convenience earned by reputation, not a replacement for the drop.

A couple of specific materials run the opposite direction entirely: the Nightbloom Petal and Sunstone Shard can be sold to any merchant but never appear in any merchant's stock to buy — the only way to ever hold one is to actually gather it yourself.

Robbing and killing a merchant

Standing beside a merchant and choosing to rob them takes 60% of their carried purse and one random item from their stock — for a flat 30-point reputation penalty and a merchant who turns hostile on the spot. Killing one outright refunds whatever the player had spent buying from them across that encounter, on top of anything looted, at the cost of a much steeper reputation hit.

The Dry Purse

A merchant's own coin — separate entirely from the value of their stock — starts between 300 and 800 and only ever shrinks, spent every time they buy something from the player. Once it's gone, the sell button for that merchant reads "MERCHANT BROKE," and no further honest sales are possible to that particular trader until a fresh one is encountered. Selling to merchants was, for a long stretch of the game's history, tracked nowhere at all in the save — every coin spent buying from the player left no trace, unlike buying from them, which the save had always recorded in detail. That asymmetry was eventually closed by giving the sell side its own tracked "drained" state, using the existing broke-merchant condition as the actual payoff rather than a dead end that had meant nothing since the system's earliest version.

Version history

• v704 — stock sizing reworked from a flat 1-5 units of each item to the coin-budget-per-line system described above. Directly answers an operator complaint: "available in very large quantities... i have millions of bucks i cannot really spend bc merchants only have a couple of bars, buying should be a viable alternative to just grinding."
• v705 — buy prices reworked from a flat markup to the progressive, unit-price- scaled curve described above — resolving a real tension in the same operator request between wanting "everything... much more expensive" and wanting buying to remain "a viable alternative to just grinding." Verified directly against the game's own automated crafting-loop tests rather than predicted by hand: three of fourteen profitable buy-craft-sell loops flipped unprofitable (the three with the thinnest margins), against a hand prediction of zero — recorded honestly as measured rather than as predicted, since the two disagreed.
• v132 — rare wares added, gated behind Trusted and Honoured reputation.
• v224 — the sell side finally tracked, giving the long-standing "merchant broke" dead end an actual mechanical purpose for the first time.

Trivia

• Robbing and repairing an aircraft share the same key, context-sensitive on whether the player is flying or standing next to a merchant. Neither use of that key ever appeared in the game's own 239-row reference panel for a long stretch, despite 39 other key bindings all being listed — both are only ever discovered by already being in the exact situation that prompts them.
• The full merchant reputation range runs from -100 (permanently hostile) to +100, but the tier table above tops out its effect at +60 — reputation can keep climbing past that point without unlocking any further discount.