Draft:Shiren 5 2020:Merchant's Hideout

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Key Parameters
Initial Goal Floor	50F
Final Goal Floor	99F
Day / Night	Day
Bring Items In	Yes
Take Items Out	Yes
# of Allies	0
# of Rescues	3
Pre-ID'd Items	No
New Items	No
Shops	All 3 types
Monster Houses	Normal + pop-ups are possible
NPCs	Shopkeepers only
Spawn Rate	Normal
Winds of Kron	Normal (slow)

Merchant's Hideout is a bonus dungeon focused on shops and equipment items. A great place to find a wide variety of equipment materials outside of shops, e.g. to synthesize/mix/meld into runes onto your main equipment, as well as to go shopping for consumable items in the many shops. Also a fantastic place to make loads of money, both safely and unsafely (aka via theft). If you've ever wanted to find a shop quickly to test out heist techniques with specific equipment, this is also the place for you.

You can take items and Gitan into the dungeon, but not allies, and you get to keep anything you take out of the dungeon. You can request rescue up to 3 times if needed. (Warning: you cannot request rescue if you died while trying to steal from a shop.) The dungeon is daytime only and the initial goal floor is 50 F. After first victory, the goal floor becomes 99 F and stay there permanently.

Gaining Access

Access to the Merchant's Hideout bonus dungeon is not restricted. You can play it as soon as you reach the dungeon center in Nekomaneki Village.

Unique Features

• Items pre-placed on the floor outside of shops will only be swords, shields, bracelets, and pots.
  • A wide variety of items of these categories can be found.
• Point Switches appear in this dungeon.
  • The amount of points are higher than other dungeons, starting with [TBD] points per Point Trap on 1F and ending with 220 points per Point Trap on 96-99F.
• Shops are more common than usual (about 3x more often).
• Shops only sell consumables (grasses, scrolls, talismans, and food items).
• Vaults may also appear more frequently than usual, but it's hard to say for sure.
• This dungeon is daytime only.

Final Reward

Every time you beat this dungeon (either version), you get a Wonder Pick. This is the only way to get this item in single-player mode. The Wonder Pick has unbreakable dig capability and can be synthesized onto other swords, appearing as the "Max Wall Dig" rune.

Farming Opportunities

This is one of the best farming locations in the game, although it is not the best place to find every rare item.

Base Equipment and Rune Ingredients

This is a fantastic place to hunt for many types of equipment, either to use it as main equipment, or to synthesize/mix/meld it into runes on other equipment. You won't have enough room to carry all the great rune-laden materials you'll find, not even if you max out your inventory with 5-spot Preservation Pots, so here are some options:

• Triage ruthlessly. Don't even bother picking up items that you don't want as base equipment and that you don't want for runes either.
• Purge ruthlessly by selling anything you don't really need at the many stores you'll find.
• You'll find a decent number of Synthesis Pots and Mixer family monsters along the way, which you can use to merge runes onto items that have a high rune capacity. However, in practice, this can make it more difficult to keep track of which runes are on which pieces of equipment, so it may not be worth the effort.

This dungeon doesn't have all types of equipment though. For example, no one has yet reported finding a Parry Shield, Onigiri Shield, Fuuma Sword, Trapper Bracelet, or Floating Bracelet in this dungeon.

In shops on deep floors, you can start finding rare consumables too, e.g. Angel Seed and SuperUnlucky Seed, which can be mixed onto your equipment to make some interesting and useful runes. (You can also buy a fairly large number of Huge Onigiri, which can be used to feed Superspy Daisaku back at home in Nekomaneki Village—in the house in the SW corner of town—to get hints.)

Wonder Picks (Final Reward Items)

Beating this dungeon may be the only way to get the super rare Wonder Pick. You can only get one per run, but still, it is at least worth considering beating the dungeon 3 times and using a small Fever Pot to multiply the Wonder Picks before leveling any of them up or turning any of them into runes. You could also turn a Wonder Pick (or better yet a L8 Wonder Pick) into a New Item via a Secret Pot and then be able to buy one whenever you wanted, and find one randomly in some dungeons, including some dungeons that don't let you take items in, but be aware of the fact that New Items cannot be synthesized onto other equipment. Also, if you want to unlock all the resonances that are possible to unlock, you'll need to save a Wonder Pick to pair up with a Nirvana Board. [TODO: add info here about how/where to find a Nirvana Board.]

Gitan

This dungeon is easily the best, fastest, and safest place to make loads of money. It is even possible to gain the maximum carry-able Gitan (999,999) from scratch in a single run without even trying that hard. Note also that there is a PSVita trophy and minor reward item for maxing out the bank in Nekomaneki Village with 99,999,999 Gitan; it is virtually impossible to get this without massive amounts of grinding for cash, and this is definitely the best/easiest/fastest dungeon to grind for cash. In addition, your Adventure Footprint tracks your personal record for most cash on hand when you win, and the maximum value possible is 999,999. Taking 999,999 Gitan into a dungeon and escaping out probably doesn't affect this record (confirmation needed), but taking Gitan in then winning the run with 999,999 on hand likely does (confirmation needed), so if you're having trouble maxing out this personal record, you can certainly use this dungeon to accumulate as much starting cash as you'd like to take in (might as well be the full 999,999), and, this is also an easy dungeon to beat on 99F, provided you take in strong gear and emergency equipment (see Strategies below for details).

One simple, safe, but slow way to make money is to load up on expensive items placed outside of shops then dump them en masse and sell them at the many shops. Boring. Another slow but slightly more fun way to make money is to tunnel into the many vaults. If you have an Item Detector or equivalent, you can see the vaults directly on your map. If you just have a Monster Detector or equivalent, you can sometimes see a monster in a room that you can't reach, which is likely in a vault (though it could possibly be a monster that can walk through walls). If the unreachable monster is sleeping, it's very likely a pre-placed guard for the vault. If you have the ability to dig (e.g. Pickaxe, Boring Staff, etc.), you can dig your way in and pick up a bunch of Gitan bags. You can also sometimes reach vaults via rivers (with a Desert Scroll, Water Walk Bracelet, or Floating Bracelet), void rivers (with a Floating Bracelet), or just plain by walking through the walls (with a Wall Clip Bracelet). Trying to warp in randomly is very slow and unreliable and likely to exacerbate your risk of starvation, so not recommended. But, the utility of accumulating items to sell and/or looting vaults is low given there are many faster ways to accumulate cash.

Much faster and still pretty safe is to use Black Hole Pots. You'll likely find several Black Hole Pots on your run, which are golden opportunities to steal, without even setting off any alarms or being branded a thief. Save every Black Hole Pot you find. When you're on a floor that has a shop and you have a Black Hole Pot, complete everything else you want to do on the floor, then steal everything you want to steal in the shop, then throw the Black Hole Pot at a wall inside the shop. This will create a bunch of Pitfall Traps inside the shop, which you can then deliberately trigger (via the Feet menu if necessary) to drop to the next floor. Simple. Because of how common both shops and Black Hole Pots are, this may be the easiest dungeon to steal from, with the possible exception of Gen's Turf (because you can actually pick up Pitfall Traps in that dungeon). In fact, it almost seems that this dungeon was intentionally designed to be a thief's paradise.

However, even stealing items from shops is slow compared to selling your own stuff then stealing it back. To fully realize the potential of this trick, carry super valuable items into the dungeon, such as blessed 5-spot Preservation Pots filled with 495 talismans. (All talismans sell for the same price, and unfortunately they can't be blessed to increase their sale price even further.) Said items may be dead weight otherwise, but you can sell them to shopkeepers for gobs of money, then steal them back and use the Black Hole Pot trick to make your escape. When selling and stealing your own items, consider using a Monster Detector Bracelet or equivalent to clear out as many monsters as you can from the nearby rooms, to reduce the risk of something going sideways unexpectedly. It's also best to only sell a few items at a time, and to pick up and re-equip your sold equipment right away, rather than trying to drop all 24 items in your inventory before selling anything to the shopkeeper. Note that, if you decide to sell your own equipment and steal it back, it won't be tagged any more; make sure to tag it again at the next shopkeeper as an added safeguard against losing your most valuable equipment. (Trivia: shopkeepers won't pay a penny for your Points Card.)

Incidentally, if a dirt-throwing monster throws dirt into your Black Hole Pot, it causes the pot to shrink down to zero spots, which might seem like a total loss. But you've hopefully been carrying Blank Scrolls with you, in which case you can write your own Pot God Scroll and add space back to that Black Hole Pot. Just wait to do so until you're about to smash it in your theft attempt, so you don't run the risk of a 2nd dirt-throwing monster shrinking the pot again.

Obviously, you don't need a Black Hole Pot or Pitfall Traps to attempt theft, though the risk goes up substantially if you use a method that sets off the alarm. A full discussion of shops and theft is a huge topic in its own right and out of scope for this page. [TO DO: link to a good page on theft and safety. In the meantime, there's a pretty comprehensive wiki page on this topic in the Shiren 1 section, and it's mostly still relevant in Shiren 5.] But here are a few tips worth mentioning here:

• Shops are much more common in this dungeon than in other dungeons, so if you've ever wanted to try out a heist technique, this is the place. But, it's not great to try out a risky technique when you're carrying a ton of super expensive gear and items for sale! Even if your plan is near foolproof, is it even worth a 1% risk to your most fantastic equipment and those super valuable pots full of talismans?
• You'll certainly find many shops, so can decide which ones have the easiest, safest layout for theft, rather than trying to steal in a high-risk situation.
• If you truly have awesome gear, you can (e.g.) dig a private tunnel that connects to no rooms but goes near both the shop and the exit. Then, steal to your heart's content, Wall Clip through the wall into your private tunnel, walk in complete safety as close as you can get to the exit, then use Monster Detector and wait for an opportune moment to Wall Clip back through the wall and dash to the exit.
• Escape Scrolls and Undo Grasses don't let you escape the dungeon if you're in thief mode, but Undo Grass can still revive you. Likewise, you can't request rescue if you died while branded a thief; however, tagged items can be retrieved from the Sentry as normal. [Verify Undo Grass segment]

But all this being said, the single fastest way to accumulate mass amounts of cash, and it happens to be 100% safe as well, is to use a Coupon Scroll. And of course, once you've read a Coupon Scroll once in your game diary, you can write them yourself on a Blank Scroll, which you can buy from the Points Shop for 200 points. Bring in all your best gear and your most valuable pots of items to sell, sell them all (except possibly your Blank Scrolls), write Coupon Scroll on a Blank Scroll, read it to turn all the items in the shop back into un-owned items, and if you still don't have enough cash, sell them back again immediately and repeat the process. Doing this, you can max out the full 999,999 Gitans at the first shop you find, then Escape or Undo back home. If you have enough valuable loot to sell, you can max out your Gitan with as few as 2 or even just 1 Coupon Scroll. Alternatively, you can max out your Gitan with less valuable loot if you sell it more times and use more Coupon Scrolls. One way to minimize the number of points needed to pull this off is to carry around a 5-spot Blessing Pot filled with Coupon Scrolls, and more pots full of Blank Scrolls upon which you will write Extraction. Extract the Coupon Scrolls from the Blessing Pot, read them once only (to consume the blessing but otherwise leave them intact), then put the unblessed Coupon Scrolls back in the Blessing Pot. With this technique, a single Blank Scroll can turn into the equivalent of 5 Coupon Scrolls. (Unfortunately, reading a blessed Extraction Scroll consumes the scroll not just the blessing, which is a deliberate exception by the designers to prevent players from creating infinite value from a handful of Blank/Extraction scrolls. But, trivia: reading a blessed Extraction Scroll on any pot will bless all the items it extracts from the pot.) To be even more efficient with points, you can make a new item Undo Grass or Escape Scroll, thus spending cash instead of points to escape out of the dungeon every time. This technique allows you to convert a handful of points into millions of Gitan. Having trouble accumulating lots of points to max out your bank at 99,999,999? Lost Well is one great place to rack up points quickly—see the Lost Well location page for details.

Strategy

You can take items into the dungeon, but the monsters are about normal difficulty at any given depth. So, as long as you take reasonably strong equipment into the dungeon, you should have no problem surviving and being victorious. See the Improving Equipment page for details on building up fantastic equipment.

As with any dungeon that lets you take items in, bring sufficient emergency items, including at least two Undo Grasses and a few Blank Scrolls stored in different Preservation Pots. Balance Staff will also help, if you are bringing in many Preservation Pots. Bless all your items to help protect them against curses from monsters and traps. Bring in new item bracelets if you have them. Some of the best bracelet effects are Identify, Floating, Alert, and Scout / Monster Detector. Identify Bracelet in particular simplifies things greatly, as you won't have to identify the large variety of items. Bring in some money to buy items in the early shops, but this is not crucial as you will find a lot of stuff to sell.

If you are down to your last Undo Grass, always choose to escape. Escape Scroll and Undo Grass will not work if you are stealing from a shop,

Since no consumable items are pre-placed (outside of shops), it is best to have the CR Diet rune on your shield to ward against starvation. If you don't have the rune, consider taking some food in with you, although both Undo / Revival Grasses and Blank Scrolls (as Fixer Scroll) can restore fullness. Use Preservation Pots to keep your food from spoiling or being damaged in various ways.

Expert Badges

Expert badges are not available for this dungeon.

Monsters

The types of monsters that can appear in this dungeon have not yet been replicated to this wiki. Here are good external resources:

• https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1C1h9IRPQPLg9g7aE48wlyw8IudHIStawK4mR3kuggto/edit?usp=sharing
• http://seesaawiki.jp/w/shiren5/d/%be%a6%bf%cd%a4%ce%b1%a3%a4%ec%b2%c8 (Japanese wiki page for this location)