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
You can play Merchant's Hideout 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. 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 to get hints.)
Gitan
This dungeon is easily the best 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).
You can make some money by picking up items and selling them at the many shops. You can also find money in the vaults, visible with an Item Detector, if you can dig / fly / wall clip / waterwalk your way in there.
A much faster way to generate money is to sell your own stuff and steal it back. Bring in all your best gear and your most valuable pots of items to sell, such as 5-spot Preservation Pots filled with 495 talismans. Sell them all, and get / steal them back safely using a Black Hole Pot or a Blank Scroll (as Coupon Scroll). The Coupon Scroll method is repeatable as long as you have enough Blank Scrolls, and can result in the maximum 999,999 Gitan at the first shop you find. You can further improve the efficiency using a Blessing Pot to bless the Coupon Scrolls, then use another Blank Scroll as an Extraction Scroll to get more uses out of each Coupon Scrolls, but this is only necessary if you don't have much valuable stuff to sell. (Blank Scrolls are available at the Point Shop for 200 points. Lost Well is a good place to get points, although you can also find Point Switches in this dungeon.) If you decide to sell your main equipment, you should pick it up and re-equip it right away. Also note that it will not have its tag when you get it back.
Alternatively, you can grab all the items (that were formerly yours) and run for the exit. 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.
- 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.
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 good 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.
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.
If you are down to your last Undo Grass, always choose to escape. Escape Scroll and Undo Grass will not let you escape the dungeon if you are stealing from a 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)