Draft:Shiren 5 Vita:Merchant's Hideout

Merchant's Hideout
Information
Entrance Location
Final Goal Floor	50
Total Floor Count	99
Backtracking
Bring Items In?	Yes
Bring Items Out?	Yes
Bring Gitan In?
Time	Day
Can Find Adventure Allies	None
Rescues	3
Characters
Pre-ID'd Items	None
New Items	No
Visibility
Shops	All 3 types, appearing ~3x as often as normal
Monster Houses	Normal, Pop-up
Monster Spawn Rate	"Normal"
The Winds of Kron	"Normal (slow)"
Boss

An easy bonus dungeon focusing on merchants, shops, and durable (non-consumable) items. A great place to find a wide variety of durable 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. It's also a great dungeon to win due to the valuable reward item for victory.

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. (Fair warning: IIRC, you can't request rescue if you died while branded a thief by the shopkeepers on the current floor.) The dungeon is daytime only and the initial goal floor is 50 F. After first victory, the goal floor becomes 99 F and you can never play the 50 F version again.

Gaining Access

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

Unique Features

• Items pre-placed on the floor outside of shops will only be durables (swords, shields, bracelets, and pots).
• The number of items pre-placed outside of shops appears unchanged, but the diversity appears to be greater than baseline.
  • So this is a great place to find a wide variety of swords, shields, bracelets, and pots.
  • The apparent greater diversity may be an illusion caused by generating the same number of items from a narrower set of item types.
• Shops are more common than usual (they seem to appear about 3x more often than usual).
• Shops apparently only sell consumables (all the item types that don't appear randomly on the floor outside of shops).
• Vaults may also appear more frequently than usual, but it's hard to say for sure.
• Daytime only.

Those appear to be the only differences. The number of differences is small, but the impact is huge; this dungeon plays completely different from normal play.

Final Reward

Every time you beat this dungeon, whether it be the initial 50 F goal or the subsequent 99 F goal, you get a Wonder Pick. This may be the only way to get a Wonder Pick outside of multiplayer exchanges. 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. It's not the best place to find every rare item, but it's the best place to find many things.

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 at least an Undo Grass can revive you. Likewise, you can't request rescue if you died while branded a thief, and, you probably can't get your items back (e.g. at the Sentry) if you died while branded a thief. (All of this needs confirmation.)

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.

Strategies

This section is all about surviving and beating this dungeon. Frankly, it's not very difficult. There are loads of great reasons to come to this dungeon though; see Farming Opportunities for details.

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 Crafting page for details on building up fantastic equipment.

As with any dungeon that lets you take items in, always bring multiple emergency backup items in as well. Specifically, to be very safe, it's always good to bring in at least two blessed Undo Grasses, stored in different blessed Preservation Pots. Escape Scrolls are also fine, but Undo Grasses have some advantages over Escape Scrolls. Namely, Undo Grasses are less expensive at the Points Shop, they trigger automatically if you die, and you can still consume them manually to escape home on demand just like an Escape Scroll. One downside is that, if you do eat them yourself, you consume the whole Undo Grass, there's nothing left to bless. Regardless, if you should fall and automatically revive via an Undo Grass, and if you choose to keep going rather than return home, make sure to re-bless it ASAP so you again have two chances to revive. In addition, you should always take at least two Blank Scrolls (again, blessed, and again, stored in separate blessed Preservation Pots). The more scrolls you have read once at any point in your game diary, the more things you can write on Blank Scrolls, including Escape. Being able to write *any* scroll on a Blank Scroll makes them extremely powerful, such that you may want to take many Blank Scrolls into dungeons that let you take items in, for ultimate flexibility. It's also good to carry a blessed Balance Staff, to help prevent breaking pots by tripping on Trip Traps. (Why should all these things be blessed? To help protect them against curses from monsters and traps.)

Additional items to consider taking in if you have access to them:

• Identity Bracelet (or new item bracelet with Identity as one of the powers), to greatly simplify identifying the wider-than-normal variety of items you'll find, especially pots and bracelets.
• Floating Bracelet (or new item bracelet with Floating as one of the powers), to greatly reduce the chance of bad things from traps.
• Alert Bracelet (or new item bracelet with Alert as one of the powers), to reduce the chance of being put to sleep e.g. by traps or monsters.

Needless to say, if you do take in loads of valuable stuff (which you should), be cautious and escape home if you're in danger. There's nothing so valuable in this dungeon that it's worth risking your main set of equipment and emergency gear. It's also a good idea to backup your game periodically, esp. when carrying tons of great items around, as the game has been known to crash and wipe out your current run including everything you were carrying.

Everything above here is standard best practice for a dungeon that lets you take items in. [TODO: move this content to a page about ideal emergency gear and link to it.] The rest of these tips are specific to this dungeon.

Probably the most dangerous thing about this dungeon is the possibility of starvation. There are no consumables placed outside of shops, though defeated monsters can drop them. It's best to have the CR Diet rune synthesized onto your shield (the rune that causes you to burn food at half speed). With that rune, you shouldn't have any problem, and in fact can survive and win just fine without taking any food into the dungeon with you. If you don't have the CR Diet rune, maybe take some extra food in with you just in case. Either way, buy food when you have the chance at shops, and buy extra over and above what you tend to need in other dungeons (because your instincts will be slightly off given you won't find any food randomly in the dungeon), and don't eat the food until you're hungry enough to get it's full value. Since money is basically no object in this dungeon, consider eating the grasses/herbs you find in shops as well just for their minimal food value. If you supplement your diet with grasses in the shops, be extra careful not to make a game-ending mistake. For example, don't eat a Dragon Grass while facing the shopkeeper, and don't eat a Warp Grass while you have any unpaid debt (including the Warp Grass itself). (Remember, Escape Scroll and Undo Grass don't let you escape the dungeon if you're a thief, and using Warp Grass is not the best or safest way to attempt theft.) For any food you buy or bring into the dungeon, keep it in Preservation Pots to avoid it spoiling or being damaged in various ways.

You'll find more than enough money in the dungeon to buy all the food you'll need, plus you'll find tons of stuff to sell at the shops, but you might want to take extra money in anyway in case you find something great to buy in an early shop.

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)

Open Questions

• Any other great ways to exploit this dungeon?
• Why aren't there expert badges for most Dungeon Center dungeons?