If you’d asked me yesterday how I felt about Pierre in Stardew Valley, I think I would have said “fine.” I don’t particularly like him but I don’t have any specific gripes against him, either. My biggest issue is probably that he opens his store at 9 am and I’m up at 6 am every day, so if I head straight to his shop I have to hang around a while for him to open his doors. That can be a bit annoying.
But I was wrong. I clearly have some deep-seated seething hatred of Pierre, because when I saw that there’s a mod that lets you open your own shop in Stardew Valley, my first thought was: revenge. I will fill my shop with my seeds and make Pierre come and buy them from me! Then we’ll see who is shopping in whose store! Mwah-ha-ha-ha!
OK, it’s not the most diabolical revenge plot in history—and may not even qualify as revenge at all—but the mod, called Merchant—Become a Shopkeeper is pretty cool anyway. You purchase a cash register from Robin, place it inside a building on your farm (shed, barn, etc), and that building becomes a shop. Set up tables and place items on top of them, then open your store and villagers will pop in to buy something.
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There’s a haggling minigame when someone buys something, so you can try to squeeze a few extra coins out of them, and another mod I installed, called Customer Add-On for Merchant, gives villagers’ store-based dialogue a touch more personality. For instance, when I tried to jack up the price on a jar of honey for Robin, she said “What do you think this is, a house upgrade?” When the Wizard visited my shop, he said “Ah, Goat Cheese… I foresaw this transaction.” Pretty cute.
Anything you can put on a table you can sell (no shade, but Pam immediately bought a bottle of wine) and there are a few things you can do to improve your profit margins. Decorating your shop will make it more appealing and you can purchase increasingly expensive marketing campaigns to drum up business. Your convenience store can be made quite convenient for you, too: one upgrade will re-stock your shelves with items you’ve placed in a chest, cutting down on some manual labor.
And yes, I eventually replaced everything in my shelves with blueberry seeds I’d generated from my own seed maker and lay in wait for Pierre. He eventually came in and bought a pack. He offered me 32, but I haggled him up to 35, then checked the wiki for what I already suspected: he sells them for 80 in his store. My revenge plot fizzled, sure, but it’s still lots of fun to finally have my own store.