Shop Titans: Tips and Tricks for Beginners
In Shop Titans, you begin as the owner of a small and dusty gear store for adventurers. With a bit of help from other town folk, however, you have the possibility to develop your small shop into a real phenomenon! The more real currency you are willing to invest in the game, the faster you are able to grow your store, but you don’t have to be P2W in order to have fun.
In fact, it’s just as possible for F2P players to build a financial empire, although the road to success is considerably bumpier. The first thing you have to do if you want to stay F2P? Read these 8 essential tips & tricks for beginners to get a fantastic start and avoid costly mistakes.
1. Trust the Tutorial When You Start Out
Not all mobile games feature tutorials that actually help the player. Instead, many of them are geared towards funneling you into a spending spree, but this is not the case with Shop Titans. Certainly, a number of very attractive offers will pop up here and there, but overall, it’s a good idea to follow the tutorial when you start a new game.
Once this stage of the game is complete, you will already have a basic notion of how to run the shop, create new items, obtain new characters, and develop your business.
2. Achieve a Balance Between Surcharges and Discounts
Because Energy is such an essential aspect of Shop Titans, we discuss it in-depth in our guide to making more money. For now, though, you only need to familiarize yourself with the delicate balance between Surcharges and Discounts. These are both actions that your shopkeeper can take when a buyer is interested in one of your items. While Surcharging increases the price and decreases your total Energy, Discounts significantly reduce the price, but recharge some of your Energy.
Overall, the goal is to Surcharge on expensive items, while offering Discounts for cheaper ones. As you’ll soon discover, however, this will take some experience to get right.
3. Join a Guild as Soon as You’re Ready
Guilds can be incredibly helpful or utterly useless in this game, so you shouldn’t rush into any applications during the early-game. You need your guildmates to help you upgrade things around the shop, send you gifts, offer to dust your furniture for Energy, as well as complete milestones and battles for handsome rewards.
Before applying to the guild first recommended to you by the game, take some time to explore the Reddit and Discord threads for Shop Titans. The best guilds will usually advertise open spots there.
4. Decorate Your Shop for Additional Energy
Buying furniture and placing it in your shop adds to your Prestige stat, but this doesn’t affect gameplay in any significant way. If you’re a passionate decorator, you can compete with others for the top ranks on the Prestige Leaderboard, but be warned – this will cost a ton of in-game and real currency.
Even if you’re not interested in Prestige, however, you should still decorate your shop with furniture to allow customers to interact with different items. Whenever an interaction occurs, you gain a bit of Energy!
5. Create Items to Unlock Better Ones
When you start playing Shop Titans, you can only make a few rugged (and very cheap) items. These are good to begin with, given that your access to special resources is limited, but you will soon want to unlock new recipes to increase your profit per item.
One way to find new patterns is to obtain and open chests, but this method is not necessarily the most F2P-friendly. Alternatively, you can check your list of available patterns and look for the ones that have another item displayed near them. Using these patterns a certain number of times will grant you another, better recipe.
6. Upgrade Your Displays for More Energy
Weapon racks and armor mannequins can be upgraded once they are placed in your shop. After upgrades 6 and 11, respectively, they can hold twice and three times more items at the same time. What’s more, each time you upgrade a display, your maximum Energy pool is increased.
You may have also noticed that your shopkeeper gains a bit of Energy per sale. If you want to increase this number, all you have to do is to upgrade the counter.
7. Send Heroes on Quests
While most characters you meet during the early-game fall into the Worker category, you’ll also obtain a champion (Argon) and a hero (Lomeli). As soon as you do, you need to put them to good use and send them on a quest. The tutorial will guide you through the first quest and even help you complete it faster for no fee, but once this step is finished, no one will remind you to keep sending your champion on new tasks.
There are multiple reasons why you should do this. Quests can reward you with necessary materials for superior gear, as well as help you find chests and special items for your champions and heroes. For more information on how to best use your heroes, feel free to check out our guide to characters.
8. Be Frugal with Your Diamonds
Diamonds are the premium currency in Shop Titans and, although you can get some for free, they are a rare commodity for F2P players. If you don’t intend to spend real money on the game, you should hoard your diamonds as much as possible. The game will tempt you, for sure, but if you want to make the most of your resources, you have to avoid most premium offers.
For example, it’s almost never worth upgrading items or resting heroes with diamonds. Instead, you should save this currency for skill re-rolls or for expanding your shop and adding more crafting slots once the required gold reaches outrageous numbers. Alternatively, you can also use diamonds to open chests, although this can quickly turn into a slippery slope.
That’s it! There are still many things to learn about Shop Titans – such as, for example, how to manage your resources, but the tips mentioned above should be enough to get you started. And if you ever feel like your shop is so beautiful that you wish you could display it on a PC screen, don’t forget that you can play Shop Titans on your PC with BlueStacks!
This game is now available on now.gg. Play Shop Titans online.
