Shop

Version 0.12: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

A shop in the dungeon, beyond sight of the world above, manned by a secretive and reclusive shopkeeper who cannot be bargained with, grants no refunds, and is interested in nothing you may have to sell. Some shops hawk antiques of unknown provenance, and offer little hint as to the quality or nature of their goods.

Courageous merchants have opened shops throughout the Dungeon and its branches. You can enter a shop by using the same key as for going down stairs (>). Each floor has roughly a 20% chance of containing at least one shop and a 4% chance of multiple shops. You may also be lucky and find a portal to a bazaar, which always features several shops, but which is only accessible once.

Unlike certain other roguelikes, players cannot sell items to shops, nor is there any way to rob them. Prices for any given item may vary significantly between shops, but any given shop will always charge more for good items than for bad. The only player action which affects shops is drawing a Bargain card, which grants you a discount for a short time.

Types of Shops

Shops fall broadly into two categories. Most of the shops you'll find are randomly placed by the dungeon generator. There are also vault-defined shops; these only appear in specific vaults and usually contain an unusual or themed array of goods.

There is some degree of overlap, in that a vault-defined shop can vary from being simply in a vault that calls for a specific type of normal shop (e.g. a bazaar that has a guaranteed wand shop, or even the shops on Orc:4) to a shop that is of a completely new type, with mostly pre-defined items. However, for the purposes of this article, vault-defined shops are those that appear as a completely new type of shop.

Normal Shops

• General shops sell a random selection of items, all unidentified, although you will be able to see item types you have identified. Note that for jewellery, only the base type (not any enchantments) will be shown, and artefacts will always be unidentified.
• Book shops sell identified spellbooks and occasionally manuals.
• Armour shops sell identified armour (sometimes magical or artefacts).
• Weapon shops sell identified weapons (sometimes branded or artefacts).
• Antique armour shops are similar to armour shops, but the stock is discounted and unidentified. With luck, you can acquire powerful gear here cheaply (or waste gold buying garbage).
• Antique weapon shops are similar to antique armour shops, but for weapons.
• Food shops sell comestibles, usually mostly rations.
• Wand shops sell identified wands.
• Distilleries sell identified potions.
• Scroll shops sell identified scrolls.
• Jewellery shops sell identified rings and amulets (sometimes artefacts).

Vault-Defined Shops

• Fishing supplies are theme shops only found in vaults surrounded by aquatic enemies; they stock spears, tridents, javelins, throwing nets, and sources of levitation.
• Serpentskin sales are theme shops that sell items pertaining to the infliction of and resistance to poison.
• Pet rocks are theme stores that sell stones, sling bullets, Earth Magic books, and miscellaneous items related to the earth. Often appear in sealed vaults with a nearby wand of digging and several rock-themed enemies like boring beetles, earth elementals, clay golems, etc.; in these cases, you can either open the vault yourself with the wand or wait for a beetle to chew its way out.
• Gadget shops sell decks and a variety of evocable items.
• Branded ammunition shops sell a variety of branded missiles.
• Fire shops are found near pools of lava with various lava-themed creatures swimming in them. As you might expect, they sell fire-based wands and ammunition, as well as scrolls of immolation.
• Zin's Purification Stations are shops found near altars to Zin that sell potions of cure mutation.

In addition, there are two things that appear to be shops, but aren't:

• Shop mimics resemble shops, and will attack you as soon as you step adjacent to them.
• Abandoned shops sell no items and cannot be entered. They are very rarely generated, mostly found in the Abyss or in bazaars, but also appear when you buy out the entire stock of any other shop. There is no way to interact with them, and they will never be restocked.

Supply

Shops are only ever randomly generated in finite portions of the dungeon; neither shops nor bazaar portals can appear in Pandemonium or the Abyss. Thus, once you have explored all of the main dungeon, the Elven Halls, the Orcish Mines, the Vaults, the Shoals, and the Snake Pit, you have found all the shops there are to find (with one exception; see below). Thus, unless you are saving for a ziggurat, you might as well blow all your gold on the items you want, as you will have no other use for it.

Worshipers of Nemelex Xobeh are a little luckier. By sacrificing jewellery, books, and miscellaneous items, they can get decks of dungeons, which may contain Trowel cards. At high power, these cards can, once per game, create a portal to a bazaar.

Tips & Tricks

• Shops often sell items that you haven't identified yet. Purchasing these will identify them for you from that point on. This is very useful for scrolls and potions, saving you from risky experiments or wasted scrolls of identify. As undesirable goods are often extremely cheap, you can almost always afford to use this tactic. Antique shops are an exception; these sell unidentified items (even artefacts), but at a discount.
• Unidentified artefacts for sale will have unique descriptions displayed in white text, even when unidentified. Be careful though; they may have undesirable properties and are sometimes cursed.
• If you lack the gold to buy something in a shop, you can use the menu to add it to your shopping list. The game will then remind you about the item when you've acquired enough gold. You can use the $ command at any time to review your current shopping list.
• If you get messages about a "tolling bell" when exploring, that means a bazaar portal is on your level - hurry up and find it, as it will not stay open forever. If you find a bazaar that is unannounced, the portal will last until you choose to enter it. It's usually best to enter immediately if you have a moderate amount of gold (around 1000-2000); this will let you buy just about any awesome item or a large number of consumables, and the potential benefit to immediate survivability is usually well worth the tiny risk of losing out on particularly awesome (un)randart because you didn't have enough gold.

History

Prior to 0.9, all undesirable scrolls and potions cost 1 gold.