Player's guide

This page is largely opinion, not fact, and mostly covers the early game. There's also a strategy guide which, sigh, I (Pinkbeast) hadn't noticed when I wrote this.

The very basics
When the game begins, four craftsmen will offer their services to you, and you'll pick one. Then, each day, you'll tell that craftsman what to produce, using up the raw materials in the storage bins in the middle of your shop. During the day customers will come in and request items - generally, initially, items you don't make, but you can try and suggest items you do make. At the end of the day you pay wages to your craftsman and can restock raw materials. After a few days, a second craftsman will volunteer their services, but after that you'll have to build workshops for them at a high cost.

Tokens
If you've got tokens - you might have got a hundred for free - resist the urge to spend them. If you go bankrupt, you'll lose whatever you spent them on, so you want to save your tokens until you know the game well enough to avoid bankruptcy.

There's almost nothing you can buy with tokens that you can't also get ingame eventually.

Isn't running out of days annoying?
Yes. You CAN pay for more days, costing 30 tokens for 3 days, 70 tokens for 7 days, and 140 tokens for 14 days. Not really recommended, since days regenerate for free every 15 minutes anyway.

What are the easiest ways to go bankrupt?
These are the most common mistakes - and not, to the novice, obviously bad ideas. They're discussed in more detail below.


 * Hiring a thug. They cost money and they do nothing for the foreseeable future.
 * Levelling up workers without good reason. Their wages go up, and wages are your only unavoidable expense.
 * Buying a third workshop the instant you have 25,000 - leaving you with pocket change and an increased wage bill once the third worker joins.
 * Expanding all your materials storage. Only expand storage that actually empties during the day. Until you have all four workers, some of your materials storage will go virtually untouched.
 * Moving to a district where you cannot easily afford the rent.

Which craftsman should I hire initially?
There are a number of opinions on this; you can get someone to recommend any of the four professions. My view is that what you really want is craftsmen with high crafting skills (the two rightmost skill numbers) and especially the "primary" skill (the left of those two rightmost numbers) at level 1. Any further improvements to crafting skills will come with training and an increase in wages, but a high base skill is free. Hence, I'd employ whichever applicant has the highest primary skill.

However, if you want to decide on some other basis, there are two main factors. Firstly, how easy the worker's items are to suggest - what proportion of customer classes accept them. This only matters early on; later in the game you will always have an item in the appropriate category (eg a sword when the customer wants a sword) which offers a greater chance of making the suggestion.

Secondly, how much in demand the worker's improvement points are. This affects the difficulty of getting your third and fourth shops built, and even improvements after that until all four workers are at a similar level; and it also affects the availability of the lucrative early quests - arena improvements, repair armour, build shelter, farmer bridge, scrolls. If you can't get any of the early quests that pay, your shop buildup will be greatly delayed.


 * The sorceress has the great advantage that you can suggest her items to anyone; all classes accept consumables (potions and the like), albeit with a low chance of success, and so you will find it easy to make money early on. However, because of this, many players do take her first - so her improvement points are not at all in demand for trading between players. To add insult to injury, they are needed for exactly none of those five early quests.


 * The blacksmith makes weapons, which are not bad from a suggestion point of view. Knives, swords, throwing knives, and copper shields can all be made by blacksmith level 5, and cover nearly every kind of customer. His points are in relatively low demand from players, but are in four of the five early quests - three with the carpenter, one with the tailor.


 * The tailor is more tricky for suggestions. Early on, she can make little but light clothing, which more martial classes simply do not accept (although the leather shield covers much of that gap). However, her improvement points are in good demand, and they are used in two of the quests - one with the blacksmith.


 * The carpenter is definitely tricky for suggestions, although again researching his first shield helps. Bows, staffs, musical instruments are not widely accepted. However, his improvement points are in the most demand from other players and are in three of the early quests (always with the blacksmith).

Don't make me choose for myself. Honestly, which craftsman should I hire?
If you've gone bankrupt quickly in a few attempts at the game, hire a sorceress first. She's probably easiest in the very early game. After that she is less useful than others (especially the carpenter), but of course eventually you will have all four workers in any case, and your objective is to survive the early game.

Can I have more than one of a given type of employee?
No, you can never have more than one employee of a given type. If you hire another, they replace your existing employee of that type.

Can I fire an employee?
Yes, with the September 1st update you can fire your employees as well as hasten them into completing a project.

Should I hire a thug?
No. Until you move out of the first city district, you're immune to the PVP game, and so a thug just soaks up wages. Even after that, it may be a long time before other players' thugs cause you any annoyance.

Changing craftsmen
As long as you've still got level 1 craftsmen and most of your applicants are level 1 - making it easy to compare base skills - you might as well swap any time a level 1 craftsman applies with a higher crafting skill. Sure, you lose a bit of experience, but generally you have more experience on craftsmen than you need.

Training craftsmen
Training craftsmen increases their wages, so don't do it without a good reason. You might train craftsmen because you need to increase their level in order to research more items, or because they can't keep up with demand for their items. In the latter case, improving crafting skills to multiples of 25 is a good idea, because most items cost a multiple of 25 to build.

What does that star mean?
When a craftsman awaiting orders has a star above their head not a question mark, they have enough experience to be trained up at least one level. Experience still builds up in this state, so you don't have to train them up right away to start making progress towards the next level.

How do I get a second craftsman?
After playing for a bit, a second workshop will become available automatically.

How do I get a third craftsman?
You can buy a third and fourth workshop by clicking on the chest. It costs 25,000, and you should aim to have a few thousand gold left over after building it - and read about guilds and improvements, below.

Why can't I research this item?
Some items need two craftsmen to work together. You can't research or produce them until both craftsmen are free. You can tell which craftsmen are needed by the tiny icons at the bottom of the dialogue box when picking an item to research.

Some of these items will take different amounts of labour from the different craftsmen, and so they will finish at different times. This makes them a pain to produce, and if you want to make a stack, you'll have to do some arithmetic to give the faster craftsman a job that takes up just enough of their time to be ready again when the slower one finishes. I try to avoid suggesting them because of this difficulty.

Some items just need a higher craftsman level than you currently possess. The aforementioned icons glow red when you don't have enough of something.

Market and profit
Whenever you buy or sell an item, the offered price is shown, along with "profit" and "market". The "profit" number is effectively always positive, and shows the difference between the offered price and your cost for manufacturing the object. The "market" number is often negative, and shows the difference between the offered price and the "market price" of the object. The market price is a nominal value for the object; there is no market where you can buy and sell objects at these prices. It is also high - until you build up market affinity, you will expect to always see prices offered below the market price.

Should I haggle?
Generally not. Haggling is not often successful, although it is more likely to succeed if the offered price is especially low (or high, if the item is being sold to you). If you make an item, the worker who makes it can make a surplus, and it doesn't include rare materials, the choice isn't between selling the item for the lousy price and selling it to someone else later for a high price - you can sell another one for a high price later.

If the item includes rare materials or is one you don't make, the supply is limited, so you will want to haggle until you get an excellent price.

Should I buy items from customers?
If you make them and they don't involve rare materials, no (except perhaps if you have none of the item, the offered price is good, and you expect not to be able to make more for some time). You can make the item yourself for a lower price than practically any sale offer.

Otherwise, the answer is probably yes if you have spare cash and the offered price is not well above market, but beware of tying up all your capital in items that may take some time to sell. Eventually someone will offer a good price for the item, and you will have turned a profit. Bear in mind, too, that all sales net you XP - if the shop is generally financially healthy, making a small loss on an expensive item can be worth it.

Raw materials
If you run out of raw materials, craftsmen stand idle and collect wages. It's nearly always worth expanding your raw material storage if you run out during a given day.

If an adventurer offers to sell you rare materials at 625 gold, always accept if you have the money. There are three other ways to get these materials: 1) purchase them with tokens, 2) recieve them from questing adventures and 3) as a reward from quests. The second option is not very likely until later in the game, so purchasing them from sellers is a good idea.

When adventurers offer normal materials, the ones you can buy at the end of the day with gold, they charge 25% more. It is only worth buying these if you were likely to run out during the day.

Suggestions
It is best to suggest an item from the requested category (the small white icons next to the item pictures) and an item with a similar price - it can be better to suggest a similarly priced item of a different type to a very differently priced item of the same type.

That said, if you suggest an item, the price will be the same proportion of the market price as was the case for the customer's originally requested item. This means that if someone comes in requesting an item at well above the market price, you might try suggesting an expensive item. Vice versa, it is not recommended to suggest an item that includes rare materials to a customer that is requesting an item below market price. In this case you may first try to haggle the price to an acceptable level and then suggest the expensive item, but this requires that you own the first item and the chances of succeeding with both haggling and suggestion may be rather low.

But what about the negative XP for suggestions?
Don't worry about it. If the suggestion had a better than 15% chance, your expected XP gain is still positive. If it didn't, it was a bad suggestion to make anyway. (It seems that % goes up with your level, but the loss is unsignificant before you have really expensive items (over 20k) so go for it anyway)

What about someone selling an item to me?
If you can make it, you generally can make more than you sell. In that case it's almost certainly cheaper to make one than to buy one at almost any offered price.

If you don't make it, it's worth buying it at pretty much any below-market price and selling it on at above-market - a modest profit but a chunk of XP - provided that you have the capital to tie up in what may well be an expensive item.

People always want things I don't have. What am I doing wrong?
Nothing. For essentially all the game, many customers will request things you can't make - but often things you can research, or will be able to research in a few more craftsman levels. It seems clear that what customers want is not completely random... and furthermore, intentionally a bit frustrating. Concentrate on making good suggestions, and accept that the day where everyone asks for something you have got is a long way off.

What customers want changes in different districts. It may be best to move down a district and sell more lower-value items.

Can I trade with other players?
Only improvement points (see below). You can't trade gold, tokens, items, workers, recipes, or anything other than craftsmen's improvement points.

Should I buy a recipe that is offered?
It depends. If it will cause you to be significantly short of gold, certainly not. Otherwise, it depends on whether the relevant craftsmen can produce items faster than you can sell them. If so, they'll only be sitting on a giant pile of stock at some point, and you might as well save your money and do the research. If not, it might be worth buying the recipe.

Which skills are best?
This section is even more a matter of opinion than the rest of this page.

Fame and Market Affinity. Fame attracts more customers. For most of the game, you'll be able to produce more stuff than you can sell, even if you avoid needless levelling up of craftsmen; high Fame cuts down on that problem, and of course more customers means more money.

Market Affinity raises average offer prices. This is obviously desirable.

Why not the adventurer-attracting skill? This comes into play later in the game, but early on giving items to questing adventurers is difficult because you only have a limited range of items and you cannot afford to gamble on them failing quests.

Why not Silver Tongue? Because you aren't going to haggle very often, whereas Market Affinity improves every single price you are offered; and you can't both suggest an item and haggle the price, but Market Affinity improves the price on suggested items. Silver Tongue also improves the success of suggestions, but later in the game that will not be as important because you are more likely to have stocks of whatever the customer desires. Market Affinity and Fame will continue to pay off even in the later game.

Note from another user: Market Affinity is also know as Mercantile, so if you get an achievement that says "mercantile increase" or something similar that basically means better market affinity. For your skill points, the skill that increases your market affinity is called Mercantile, but if you hover over it the description says that it increases your market affinity. I agree with this recommendation of upping Mercantile skill. Generally you should put 5+ of your first 10 skill points into the Mercantile skill.

Note about Fame from third user : Those people who enjoy researching recipes early may want to concentrate on market affinity rather than fame as they will run out of items less quickly with fewer customers, but will get more gold for the ones they actually have. Having less customers also means less stress to cope with the demand for those who like to have the exact item a customer asks for, to save themselves the hassle and risk of suggestions. However, whenever you get one more customer visiting per day, you will have one more transaction, which potentially represents a lot of money. But that is provided you have the requested item or can successfully suggest an item. Market affinity will also rise the income very significantly for each transaction. Which is why some users recommend putting all of your skill points in your market affinity. This will also ensure that you are selling items requesting rare materials at an interesting price. Remember that all of your items require materials to craft; so selling them at a good price may be more interesting that to craft and sell plenty. This is a matter of how much time and energy you want to spend on organizing your production and crafting.

When should I move between city districts?
When you move between districts, your new customers typically want more valuable items. However, you have to pay rent, which increases as you move to posher districts. Don't move until you can cover several days of the rent in the new district; do move when you are making expensive items your customers seem never to demand; and don't be too proud to admit it didn't work out and move back to your old district.

You can't raise your shop level beyond a certain point in each district, but don't worry about that too much - it's not worth risking financial insecurity just to gain another shop level.

Someone asked me for money
Sometimes someone will come to your shop and ask for money - a homeless beggar, a scammer pretending to be a taxman, your landlord, etc. Always pay these people if it won't bring you close to bankruptcy. If it will, tell them to come back later and start saving up cash. All these requests for money unlock series of missions that give greater benefits later.

Are you sure I should give money to the...?
Yes.

I gave out all that money like you said, but nothing happened
Check the requirements lists for quest lines. Most of the early quests need worker levels and some combination of carpenter, tailor, and blacksmith.

Someone asked me to do something, and now I have a gold medal at the bottom of the lefthand edge of my screen
This is a quest. There are two kinds. One - the first of which is to find a "clover bag" - is carried out by clicking the Quests button when an adventurer comes into the shop asking for help killing a monster. The second kind, which typically involves you being asked to repair or build something, is carried out by clicking the Improve button when giving a worker orders - the button will not be greyed out if this is possible.

Another note from the other user! To get adventurers coming into the shop you need to move to the City Gates. Move there ASAP, and the game intentionally provides you with an adventurer to assign to the quest during the first few days. If you failed the quest, repeat the process until you do, then move straight back to the free Countryside district until you are level 10 and have to move on.

Woohoo, I just got 5,000 for looking for a clover bag
This is the first quest; everyone does. Enjoy the sensation of being in no danger of bankruptcy for the foreseeable future.

An adventurer wants an item to kill a monster
Generally speaking, it is worth giving them the item if you have it. The potential rewards are great. If you don't, follow the same general principles as for suggesting, save that a more expensive item is best rather than a similar-price one - give something the class accepts; and give something you have a surplus of, something that is easy to make. At the same time the odds of success are not good unless you raised the Adventurer skill; until you have, it might be better to save your items if you don't have the exact thing asked for.

But surely a Kind Old Lady is easy to kill?
The monster names are often silly and, as far as we know, make no difference at all to the chance of success.

Why is the chat constantly full of "trade 1k carp for 1k tailor"? What does it mean?
See Improvements. Basically, when you build a shop improvement (by clicking on the chest at the back of the shop), other players have to give you "improvement points" to complete it. All craftsmen generate these improvement points, but you can't use your own, so players are always wanting to trade them.

I need a guild!
Improvements, except workshops give small bonuses. You early game will be less confusing if you don't have a guild. Once you're ready to get your workshops, look for or form an active guild to start working on improvements.

No, you're wrong. I do really need a guild to finish this shop improvement
No, you don't, or not for more than 30 seconds. Instead, you can agree a trade of improvement points on the chat channel, and be in a guild with your trade partner for 30 seconds.

OK, how's all that work?
First of all, you need the money for your shop improvement. A third (or fourth) workshop is 25,000. You don't want to build it the instant you have 25,000, though; besides various quests hitting you up for gold, if you do that you've got no money, an extra wage to pay, and not very much extra stuff to sell. I try to keep at least 5,000 in the bank - more if the shop is not very profitable.

Select the chest at the back of the shop and pay for your improvement. Now the list of improvements will show you the faces of the four craftsmen and the number of "improvement points" you need from each one. you cant see it, but when you pay for it, your fellow guild members can see, and choose to spend their points on it .Your craftsmen build up these points, but you can't use your own points on your own improvements.

When a craftsman's waiting for orders, you can see the number of points they have built up to the right of the level-up bar. If you haven't done this before, you almost certainly have 1,000. Go onto the chat channel and propose a trade; for example, "1K smith offered for 1K carp/sorc". When you agree a trade, one of you should create a guild and invite the other; the row of little buttons at the top of the screen lets you send invites and accept them. Now return to the same craftsman and click Improve. You'll see a list of your partner's improvements under construction. If there's more than one, make sure you are adding your points to the right one. Click on the improvement, confirm the number of points to add. Now return to the list of improvements in the chest at the back of the room and wait for your partner's points to arrive. Finally, leave the guild.

What if I give someone my points and they don't give me theirs?
I'm not saying this never happens, but it's never happened to me.

Why does no-one want my sorceress points?
The sorceress's points are not in great demand. Be prepared to offer 1,000 for 500 tailor or blacksmith or maybe even 250 carpenter points.

So after all that, where's my nice new workshop?
If you've got the improvement points in hand, it's a known bug. Reload the game.

You say guilds have no benefits, but what about thug defence?
Doesn't matter until some time after newbie protection runs out.

So when do I want a guild?
When trading points becomes tedious. Bear in mind you should be prepared to get fewer points from a guild than by trading, especially if you are more active than your guildmates; the benefit is in convenience. I recommend you look for a guild with a definite idea of its maximum size, and keep that small - a larger guild has no more points per player, and your improvements may get lost in a vast list of other people's.