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Moonlighter selling guide1/16/2024 The smartest bit about this is how the stuff you haul back actually loses worth over time: the market becomes saturated with sticks and algae, and you have to venture further into the dungeon, and take on bigger foes, to make any money at all. Leave a dungeon alive and you can sell anything you bring back in your shop, your proceeds then feeding back into your town’s economy with the armour and weapons you purchase in turn. Instead, both halves of the game make the other matter more. Moonlighter's Isaac-like dungeons seem to promise snappy exploration and a combat-focused experience, so you might think that it would get bogged down for placing a lot of importance on its inventory. Carrying a stack of 99 health potions into a dungeon would make it less of a crawl and more of a leisurely walk, after all. Moonlighter has roguelike elements, and roguelikes tend to be stricter with inventories by nature. The general rule is that inventories should aid their players, not pose more questions. You may not know why you’re taking it yet, but at least it vanishes in the recesses of your bag without complaint. You’ll grab stuff, almost against your will, and add another stick to your pile of sticks. Inventories have also bloated, not only due to the variety of uses for whatever you pick up, but of the items themselves. After all, any game that allows you to pick items up has to give you the opportunity to look at them, equip them, organise them, upgrade them and so on, right? In many games, your inventory plays an important role, at least enough that you’ll spend a substantial amount of time going through it. It’s where the name comes from - you’re a shopkeeper moonlighting as an adventurer (or possibly an adventurer moonlighting as a shopkeeper). To stop you feeling as if you’re just collecting stuff for the sake of collecting it, the key aspect of Moonlighter is your shop. A procedurally generated dungeon means a plethora of a) monsters and b) stuff said monsters could carry, as well as c) random loot throughout. This is exactly the kind of feeling Moonlighter tries to counter. Even though game worlds have grown, it doesn’t seem to occur to us that this also means a steep rise in resources, and so we still treat a lot of our finds as priceless. There’s a lot of stuff in games, and always more of it than we need, especially if we start hoarding it “just in case”. We’ve come to expect to be able to waltz into someone’s home and take the bread right off their plate, chests in the woods were left just for us, and all wolves take their purses when they leave their den. Games have, by and large made us into an insatiable, entitled bunch. This week she looks at how Moonlighter makes the inventory really count. Overthinking Games runs every other Monday, and is an opportunity for Malindy Hetfeld to take something about a game and think about it too much.
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