Black Market

Especially in later stages of the game, players can find themselves with
large amounts of money that can no longer be spend on anything useful
(barring priest services and fixing equipment in Attnam), as shops not
always offer good items, or everything of value was already bought.

I made a pull request that adds a new dungeon, the Black Market, which is
randomly placed on the worldmap and may be found by players who go
explore the wilderness. (This also gives some incentive to go explore, as
otherwise the player will only go for the shortest route between UT, Attnam
and GC/TX) It has two levels: The first one is full of guards, the second has
a huge shop of overpriced items.

The purpose of this is to have a place where players can spend all their
hard-earned money, with enough items generated to ensure there will be
at least something for every player. However, to prevent unbalancing the
game with new shopping options, the Black Market has intentionally
overpriced items that will only be affordable to players who have
accumulated some excess funds, therefore allowing an end-game
shopping spree.

The shopkeeper and her shop guards were balanced about being next
to impossible to beat even for an end-game player, as the shop holds
too much wealth to give to the player.

Thoughts and polemic are more then welcome.

That's a great idea! I was always ending up with thousands of gold and wondering if I shouldn't be selling stuff anymore. This would usually happen shortly after finding the second shop. Also for shops, when I'm not aligned with Seges. I would then buy out all the food in the shops and would be on the verge of starving most of the time. Having more food or banana restocks in the shop would help a lot with this problem.

I hope we see more additions to the world map.

I like this idea, and I think that the map exploration also helps to balance it, since early in the game it's unlikely that you'd have the resources to go wandering around aimlessly on the world map.

And even in the end game, doing so has a high chance of hurting your weapon skills from lack of use

Sounds like a good idea. First thing that comes to my mind is something similar to spelunky. You have a room full of several different shops selling different types of items. Each and everyone of them will become aggravated if you so as kill or steal from even one of them. It would also be cool to see special black market only items in there too. Basically stuff that wouldn't be allowed to be sold in public shops throughout the game.

You know what would be hilarious?

If the black market only spawned in black tiles.

You find it, enter, buy and leave, then it's gone to another unexplored tile.

IDK for the Black Market, but I will not this down for some cool gimmick dungeon.

Nice work red, looking forward to getting this on the next release

Where is it? I loaded the latest released and explored the entire map in wizmode and haven't found it. Is there an in-game trigger to get it to spawn?

Black market can be accessed after reading a map of black market. I have no idea why it won't appear when you reveal the map in wizmode, so I will check and try to fix it, but in the meantime try wishing for the map.

I feel like getting that map could be a high-level reward for Mellis.

It's already quite easy to purchase it in a dungeon shop.