Shop

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. The Bargain card will allow slightly cheaper prices for a short time.

Types of Shops

Shops fall broadly into two categories. Most of the shops you see will simply be normal shops, namely, shops that can be randomly placed by the dungeon generator. A second, newer type of shop are vault-defined shops: these are defined by the specific vault they're found in, and can not randomly be found on the level like normal shops; they only ever appear in their respective vaults.

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.
• 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.

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, and 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 can contain Trowel cards. At high power, these can create portals to bazaars, leading to an essentially infinite supply of shops. In theory, a non-worshiper could scum for decks of changes, but using them would be so risky that only the truly crazy would ever attempt such a thing.

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 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. Usually it is 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.