A couple game weeks into a first playthrough, I'm starting to get the feeling that dungeons aren't really optional. Ingredients don't seem to spawn anywhere else, and crafting seems to apply significant increases in gold value.

Buying wholesale and selling for 20% markup gets you reliable merchant XP, but it limits the income by the rate at which you can move your merchandise.

Early on, that 3k helm that sells for 3.6k is only 600 in profit, while you can bring back 20 items from a dungeon, where anything worth less than 1k had better be an unidentified ingredient or else it's not worth it.

So far, it looks like you want to do mostly shopkeeping, leaving a day or two per week for dungeon runs. This probably entails leaving gaps in your pre-order queue for this purpose.

So has anyone tried shopkeep-only without Game Over restarts? I did notice that eventually, either the level-ups or the decor increase business per turn by a lot, so maybe I'm selling purist shopkeeper a little short. But I don't know for sure.

I've also heard talk of a dungeon-based endgame. So at the end of the day, I probably shouldn't recommend this to a simulation-only player who isn't much into action. That's the sort of warning that would belong in a review, but I'm not confident enough that combat really is mandatory to go ahead and say so yet.

Marked as a solution because I've played more and it feels correct to me.

I've had a few failed runs, and one of them was shopkeeper-only. That was actually my strongest run so far. The most recent run went bad because I didn't push my expensive goods enough. I kept hoping Louie would ask for a weapon or armor recommendation, but instead, he came in three times a day wanting to buy a goddamned apple. X-D

I don't know if it's even worth holding onto expensive things ever. I guess I should just put the expensive things on display, and hoard cheap things for customers who want a random hat. It would suck to craft an elite sword just to have Grandpa buy it, but if that's 20k I otherwise wouldn't earn in time, I guess I have to let it be. Still, Louie is a moron. Or he's just broke. Probably both.

About raising prices - it seems like you can haggle 2-3x instead of just once if that customer likes you enough, but you expend goodwill or something like that. It seems like the conventional wisdom is to level-up off of haggle-free sale combos, and then after a couple weeks, you can try to haggle for more *only* when you're selling an expensive item, but otherwise, keep trying to milk the XP and goodwill.

Regardless of how much money he logically would be making, Louie is always broke.

He's also about as smart as Recette.

I've done only shopkeeper for my run (Although i got a boost from a early restart).

When items are on sale (in red) you can usually get 250% or higher prices when selling. This is likely going to be your biggest profit margin when playing. It doesn't hurt to buy things when they are selling low (in blue) for stocking up on items.

I'd say, Sell the most expensive items you can all the time, preferably when they are higher priced (red). You may have to change out your shop every day from foods one day to weapons on another day to all treasures on a third. Etc. If you get a chance to stock up on inventory (especially the limited stocks) you'll probably be fine with keeping up with what's currently selling.