Arcane Merchant is a shop simulator set in a medieval fantasy world, where you have to manage a shop in a trading town, surrounded by customers of all types. While you start with just an empty shop where you have to do everything yourself, you can slowly grow into a majestic store with multiple employees.
For more information on the game, please visit its official Steam page here.
Table of contents
Starting Out
As the game begins, you’ll have to head downstairs to your shop. Before you can do anything, you have to purchase a Cash Register and a Research Table from the market. You can press TAB to open the shop menu.
After you’ve purchased everything, the chests will appear outside of your store immediately. You can then interact with the chests and put them in the store.
You might’ve noticed a little mimic following you around. The mimic is like your portable trash can, and you can feed it any items that you don’t want to sell or want to get rid of, and the mimic will gradually return around 90% of the item’s base cost.
First Research
Head inside your store and interact with the research table. Here, you can either research Way of the Sorcerer or the Art of Steel nodes in the research tree. You can also research them both right away.
Researching a node unlocks new items in the shop. Now, open the shop by pressing TAB, and head to the Buildable category. From here, you can find the Enchanter’s Shelf or the Sword Rack structures.
Purchase any of them, and then you can switch to the items category. Buy Potions or the Grimoire if you’ve purchased the Enchanter’s Shelf. You can also purchase a Long Sword or a Hook Dagger if you’ve got a Sword Rack.
Note that the items in the shop aren’t individual items but entire crates of items. You can fill an entire row of a shelf or a rack with one purchase from the shop.
To get rid of the empty chests, you’ll have to throw them inside the trash box outside the store. It’s glowing red with flames on it and is hard to miss.
First Day In The Shop
Before you can start the day, you’ll have to rename the store. Head outside the store, and you’ll find the name’s banner on the front. Interact with it, and then, you’ll be able to name your store.
Next, interact with the board on the side that says Closed. Once the board says Open, customers will start flowing into the shop.
Once the day begins, you’ll have to stay behind the Cash Register and wait for customers. Once the customers have gotten everything they need, they’ll come to the Cash Register.
You’ll have to click all of the items the customers put on the table and then take the cash from the customer’s hand.
After that, you’ll have to open the register and give the change back to the customers. Note that you can give more than the required amount of change to the customers, but not less.
Once you’ve got the change ready, you can press the Space bar to complete the transaction, and the customer will be on their way.
Ending The Day In The Shop
Customers often leave dirty footprints and mud marks on the floor. You’ll have to switch to a broom by pressing CTRL.
Clean each dirt mark from the floor to keep the customers happy. If the store gets too dirty, you’ll start losing Fame points every second.
To end the day, you’ll have to head to bed, but you can only do that after the clock hits 20:30. In the early days, you’ll have to wait around, but as you progress, your shop will be so busy that you’ll only get free after the clock hits the closing time.
You can find the bed on the upper floor of the store. You can access it via the ladder, which is outside of the store.
Hiring A Hero
You can hire heroes and then send them on missions to retrieve items and gold. However, heroes also have a daily salary that you’ll have to pay. The higher their base combat power is, the more money they’ll demand every day.
Once you hire a hero, you can further increase their power by equipping them with the same gear and weapons that you sell in the store. To equip these items on the hero, you’ll first have to put the items inside the open chest in the hero camp.
After that, interact with the hero, and that will open up their equipment menu. You can select the items you’ve put in the storage chest.
For most of the early game, you’ll only be able to hire one hero. However, after you’ve completed a required number of missions, you’ll be able to hire a second or even a third hero, but that comes much later.
Keep in mind that as your Fame grows and you’ve completed many missions, you’ll start getting heroes with higher base combat power. You can then fire the weaker heroes to hire the stronger ones later on.
Annoying Customers
If you’re playing on Normal Mode instead of Cozy, you might get two types of annoying customers. Shortly after you’re done with the initial hero-related tasks from the To Do List, it will ask you to knock someone out with a book or freeze them with the wand.
Both of these options can be activated by pressing CTRL. You’ll regularly encounter dirty customers with a green aura around them. These customers spread dirt everywhere they go inside your shop.
You can knock them out with the book. You won’t get any penalty for it, and they won’t disturb your store.
From time to time, you may also get thieves. You can spot the thieves by the exclamation mark on their heads. You have to stop them before they reach the port on the other end of the town, which can be easily done with the wand.
Once the thief is frozen, you can knock them out with the book. The thief will drop the items they stole inside a chest, and you can place them back. Later on, you can hire a guard who will automatically stop all the thieves from running away.
Betting
Next, the To Do List asks you to check out the Shell Game and the Horse Race. The shell game can be played at the stall outside of your store.
However, for the horse race, you have to head to the Lucky Lantern. It is completely based on luck, so if you’re looking for extra money, the Shell Game might be a better bet, as you can get it right with some skill.
If you end up losing all your money in betting, don’t worry, because you can still get a loan from Goldgrin, which is a building on the other end of the town. Goldgrin can pay you a large sum of money instantly, but you have to pay back a share of it every day.
The longer you take to return the money, the more interest the loan will incur.
The Grand Workshop
The To Do List asks you to earn 1,000 gold and unlock the Grand Workshop. You can earn the gold by selling items in your store.
Once you’ve got enough money, you can head to the Enchanters’ Circle to unlock the Grand Workshop for 600 gold. The Enchanters’ Circle is a building near the store.
After unlocking it, you’ll be able to enter and interact with the building called the Grand Workshop. This building provides space enhancements for your store.
The next task requires you to purchase the Foundation expansion. This will increase the space available to you in the initial room. The subsequent upgrades unlock new rooms in the store.
The Beastmaster
After you’ve unlocked the Foundation Expansion, you’ll have to unlock the Beastmaster. Unlocking the beastmaster doesn’t have any immediate effects, but it will allow you to hire employees later on.
Head to the Enchanters’ Circle after you’ve gathered 750 gold and purchase the Beastmaster upgrade. Next, you’ll have to hire a Cleaner.
You can hire a Cleaner by going to the Hiring Hall building, but before you can hire anyone, you’ll have to unlock them from the research tree first.
The Cleaner would be a little ahead on the research tree, so you have to unlock all the research upgrades leading to it. This will also give you more options to expand your shop and increase your revenue.
To hire any employee, you have to unlock them from the research tree and then head to the Hiring Hall building. There, you’ll have to pay a big sum of money initially, and then you’ll also have to pay a small salary to each of the employees regularly.
Warehouse
You must’ve noticed the portal outside of your store, but it’s locked initially. First, you’ll have to unlock the Warehouse from the Enchanters’ Circle for 3,000 gold.
Once you do that, you can access the Warehouse by entering it through the portal outside of the store. It has a lot of empty space. You’ll have to put many Storage Shelves inside it.
The Warehouse is an exceptionally useful building. Research the Vaultkeepers node in the research tree, and that will unlock the Storage Shelf and the Socker employee.
Now, you have to put the Storage Shelves inside the Warehouse. You can then put the chests for extra items inside the Warehouse.
If you hire a Stocker from the Hiring Hall, they’ll patiently wait outside the Warehouse portal. As soon as any shelf goes below 50% storage of a said item, and if that item is placed on a storage shelf inside the warehouse, the stocker will automatically deliver and stock the shelf with the said item.
Later on, you’ll be able to unlock more Stockers with the research tree. Furthermore, there’s an Autobuy option in the research tree that is a must-have.
If you’ve set up a Warehouse table inside the shop and enabled the Autobuy with it, the stockers will automatically purchase and stock the shelves as soon as any item empties out from the store and it is available for purchase in the shop.
Mid-To-Late Game
After you’ve unlocked the Warehouse, the To Do List asks you to unlock the entire research tree. You can take your time with this. Some research nodes require you to complete missions.
These missions are the ones you send your heroes on. After you’ve reached Fame level 5 and completed around 40 missions, you’ll be able to hire your third hero.
From then on, you can get rare and mythical items, including artifacts. These artifacts can only be displayed on Single Shelves. You can also get these items and artifacts from Smugglers, which appear periodically on the port.
Keep expanding your shop. You’ll also have to hire Cashiers to handle customers. Set up around two to three Cash Register tables in your shop in the late game, and it will become a lot easier for you to move around, especially during peak hours.
As you acquire gold armor and mythical weapons, don’t forget to let your heroes equip them first, instead of just selling them at the store.
This will drastically boost their combat power and allow them to take on more challenging missions with ease, which will, in turn, lead to more rewards from their missions.
And with that, most of the stuff will be handled by your employees. You can still do things manually if you want. Interact with a cash register to temporarily remove the Cashier employee from there, and you can take over.
Furthermore, the Autobuy option will take care of most of your restocking needs. You can simply approach a shelf or rack and assign anything you want to sell on it. The stockers will do the rest, and you can continue to enjoy your store life.
This concludes the walkthrough and guide for Arcane Merchant.
You may also want to check out the beginner tips for Arcane Merchant here. If you’re looking for more to read, please visit the following pages:
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Fahad Suleman is an avid fan of fighting games who spends most of his time writing walkthroughs and reviews for cozy indie titles or mashing around in Tekken. If he’s not writing or playing any games, you’ll often find him watching historical videos on YouTube for hours.
