Shops and economy

Currency

There is one currency, stored server-side as a single copper integer and converted for display:

1 gold (g) = 100 silver (s) = 10,000 copper (c)

New characters get no starting money. Your first income comes from selling monster drops. The starting weapon is the Worn Iron Sword, and it deliberately has no price — merchants refuse it, which shuts down rerolling characters to cash out starting gear.

Rica’s stock

Rica sells 30 things and buys at 40% of base price.

30

Item	Category	You pay	She pays	Weight
Horse Reins	Horse reins	1g 50s	60s	0.5 kg
Rowboat	Rowboat	1g	40s	4 kg
Torch	Weapon	50c	20c	1 kg
Dagger	Weapon	25s	10s	1 kg
Spear	Weapon	35s	14s	4 kg
Bow	Weapon	40s	16s	2 kg
Iron Arrow	Ammunition	3c	1c	0.05 kg
Steel Arrow	Ammunition	10c	4c	0.05 kg
Fishing Rod	Fishing gear	3s	1s 20c	2 kg
Wooden Shield	Armor	25s	10s	6 kg
Leather Belt	Accessory	8s	3s 20c	1 kg
Leather Pants	Armor	25s	10s	4 kg
Healing Potion	Healing potion	6s	2s 40c	0.5 kg
Greater Healing Potion	Healing potion	15s	6s	1.25 kg
Scroll of Return	Return scroll	8s	3s 20c	0.2 kg
Scroll of Estate Return	Estate return scroll	8s	3s 20c	0.2 kg
Scroll of Party Summon	Summon scroll	10s	4s	0.2 kg
Whetstone Oil	Reagent	1g	40s	0.2 kg
Apple	Food	3c	1c	0.3 kg
Bread	Food	60c	24c	1 kg
Cheese	Food	12c	4c	0.4 kg
Jerky	Food	30c	12c	0.25 kg
Lembas Wafer	Food	1s 20c	48c	0.15 kg
Campfire Kit	Campfire	30c	12c	2 kg
Busker's Hat	Tip hat	2s	80c	1 kg
Peddler's Stall	Peddler's stall	20s	8s	8 kg
Cape Dye	Cape dye	8s	3s 20c	0.5 kg
Cape Transfer Kit	Cape print	50s	20s	0.5 kg
Phoenix Talisman	Phoenix talisman	50s	20s	0.3 kg
Celestial Timekeeper	Timekeeper	80s	32s	0.5 kg

The shop list is deliberately minimal. The rule is: only stock the pieces a tier-1 dungeon does not drop reliably, as insurance for players whose rolls keep failing. Guaranteed drops need no insurance, and higher-tier pieces stay out to protect the farming loop.

That’s why the Leather Helmet (Old Crypt’s guaranteed drop) and the Iron Sword are not in the shop.

Sold something by mistake?

The last 10 items you sold to a merchant can be bought back for exactly what you were paid. It’s a recovery path for misclicks, and the round trip is gold-neutral so it doesn’t disturb the spread — something you haggled a high price for costs that much to buy back.

The list is kept per character and per merchant, survives reconnecting, and has no time limit — but it is lost when the server restarts.

After hours: Wick, the night merchant

Rica goes to bed at night, and a sleeping merchant won’t even open a trade window — even one already open gets force-closed. After dark, head to the Aldermark road and find Wick instead: he sits idle at the western edge of town by day and only sets up shop at night.

Wick sells 7 things and buys at 30% of base price (lower than Rica’s 40%):

7

Item	Category	You pay	He pays
Torch	Weapon	50c	15c
Healing Potion	Healing potion	6s	1s 80c
Campfire Kit	Campfire	30c	9c
Bread	Food	60c	18c
Jerky	Food	30c	9c
Scroll of Return	Return scroll	8s	2s 40c
Scroll of Estate Return	Estate return scroll	8s	2s 40c

The stock is deliberately narrowed to night-travel essentials — a torch, healing, a campfire kit, rations, a scroll of return. It’s a convenience for being out after dark, not a better deal than waiting for morning.

Merchant stalls (/lay_stall)

Merchants can type /lay_stall to spread a table out as a visible sign they’re open for business, and /pack_stall to fold it back up (logging out packs it up too — one stall per merchant, outdoors only). The merchant class is operator-only, so in practice this command is NPC-only.

Players reach the same table a different way: buy a Peddler's Stall (20s) and use it to spread the table as a consignment stall — price bag items onto it and customers pay the marked price straight off the table. Full rules in Player trading.

Haggling

Rica is an LLM-driven NPC, so you can talk the price down. All the price protection sits on the server:

1. The server computes a price band [min, max] from the base price, the spread and a CHA modifier.
2. The LLM can only pick an adjustment inside that band — never an absolute price. Anything outside gets clamped or refused.
3. The server guarantees arbitrage is impossible — the most discounted buy price is always above the highest sell price.
4. There are daily budgets and cooldowns: 1 gold per game day for the merchant, 40 silver per player, a 30-second haggle cooldown, and any deal is single-use and expires after 5 minutes.

Higher CHA widens the band the server allows (roughly ±5 to 25 percentage points) — a charismatic character really does negotiate better.

Once a deal is granted, the merchant now says it out loud in a chat message too — the discount or markup, what it’s for, how long it lasts — not just inside the trade window, so you don’t have to open trade to learn one is waiting. Merchants will also occasionally lead with a discount of their own, without you haggling first.

Tip

A good story, a piece of news or some judicious flattery genuinely earn a discount. Being rude can earn a markup — it’s symmetric, and in character.

Not interested? Say “not now”

A trade or deal window an NPC pushes at you now has a “Not now” button, and letting the toast time out unanswered counts as a decline too. Once declined, that NPC won’t push another offer at you for 10 minutes.

Price index (the evening market meeting)

The buy price merchants charge for consumables (potions, whetstone oil, food, scrolls, and the like — limited to items at least one merchant actually shelves) drifts slowly with the server’s per-capita active gold supply, scaled by a price index between 50% and 200%. Durable goods like equipment and cape dyes are completely unaffected, and sell-back prices don’t move either — only the buy side, otherwise buying and selling would scale together and cancel the adjustment out.

• Adjustments don’t run on a fixed clock — they land after sunset on the day the small moon Serin is fully dark (a 20-game-day cycle), roughly every 2.5 real days, and can fall at any time of day.
• When it’s time, Rica and Wick meet up at Rica’s shop for a short “merchant meeting” scene, and their dialogue hints at which way prices are moving and why — eavesdrop to get a jump on the next swing.
• Each meeting moves the index by at most ±10 percentage points, and the index itself is clamped to 50%–200% (90%–200% before protocol v53 — falling server-wide average gold kept pushing the index into the old floor, so the floor moved down).
• The haggling band is calculated on top of the price index — the index applies first, then your CHA-based bargaining range.
• A merchant’s buy price never exceeds the highest-haggled buy price for the same item (protocol v53) — closing a buy-low/sell-high loop the falling index could otherwise open. Resident wishlist premiums aren’t affected by this cap.

Non-merchant NPCs

Merchants aren’t the only ones who trade. The guard Karl has a wishlist and pays 120% of base for what he wants:

2

NPC	Wants	Pays	In coin	Rica would pay
Karl	Torch	120%	60c	20c
Karl	Dagger	120%	30s	10s

Buying from Rica and selling to Karl turns a profit — that’s intended content, effectively an emergent delivery quest. It’s capped by Karl’s wallet (3g), so it can’t run away. His money comes from a 50s per game day salary that stops once the wallet is full.

Note that he only buys while the wishlist is unmet — he doesn’t want what’s already in his bag.

Karl’s spear and full set of leather armor are issued gear, granted and equipped automatically whenever he comes online rather than being loot — that gear can’t be sold, either direction, so logging an NPC in and out can’t be farmed for free equipment.

NPCs remember you (favor)

LLM-driven NPCs keep a rolling window of recent conversation (the last 30 lines, timestamped to game time), so a back-and-forth stays coherent across several turns; bards additionally remember the last 8 songs they played, so they don’t repeat themselves.

Conversations also build up a favor score, server-side, adjustable by the LLM up to ±1 per turn and capped at ±5 total. Once a player’s favor clears a threshold, the NPC starts treating them as a regular worth a private deal — that’s the mechanism behind the keepsake system below.

Keepsakes

Some things a non-merchant NPC carries are keepsakes — they never appear when you browse their stock, and asking to buy one gets you turned down. Only when the NPC makes a personal offer to a specific player can that player buy one, while the offer lives (a few minutes); a sold keepsake is restocked after a while. The current example is Signe’s gilded mandolin — how to become a regular she would offer it to is covered in Music & the bard.

World drops

Beyond the weapon it was carrying, a killed monster can drop these outright:

12

Item	Drop rate	Kills per drop	Sells for
Healing Potion	2.0%	50	2s 40c
Coin Pile	1.0%	100	—
Scroll of Enchant Weapon	0.9%	111	4s 80c
Scroll of Enchant Armor	0.9%	111	4s 80c
Iron Sword	0.5%	200	40s
Scroll of Return	0.5%	200	3s 20c
Wooden Shield	0.4%	250	10s
Bow	0.4%	250	16s
Leather Armor	0.3%	333	24s
Leather Pants	0.3%	333	10s
Raven Shield	0.2%	500	28s
Phoenix Talisman	0.2%	500	20s

The Iron Sword has a 0.5% world drop rate, which is the other route to it besides killing the Orc Warlord — though that’s 200 kills in expectation.

Where gold comes from

Gold issuance is deliberately controlled. There are only three repeatable sources:

Source	Amount
Coin piles (dungeon chests)	1–10 copper
Dungeon chest gold	depth × 500 to depth × 1500
Fishing	8–24 copper expected per catch

Compare that to the NPC guard’s daily wage of 50s.

Weapons dropped by monsters are mostly unsellable “Worn” variants, on purpose — if higher-tier weapons cashed out reliably from ordinary monsters they would be a money printer. Ordinary armed monsters drop at only 10%; only bosses are guaranteed.