The Jeweler

The Jeweler is easy to write off as the shop that sells shiny things. He is the shop that sells mastery, the only vendor holding all three zombie collars, and the man who buys the two most expensive items in the game.

He runs three tiers like every trader, and what changes between them is not the size of the shelf so much as which shelf you are allowed to reach.

He is not in town until you build him a shop

None of the above is available at the start of a run, because the Jeweler has no stall until you raise one. His plot sits at the port among the other market stalls, empty, and the sign on it stays blank until Market Stalls III is researched.

That node is 150 and 50 on its own, and the branch leading to it is 917, 87 and 120 in total. One of the nodes on the way is not bought with spheres at all: it opens at 50 reputation with Jack, so the foreman decides when the jeweler opens at all.

Raising the stall then costs 8 Building Kit I, 6 Wooden Kit I and 3 Iron Kit I, which ties him with the Alchemist as the dearest shop in town. The two upgrades want 10 Furniture Kit I with 4 Sculpture Kit II and 5 Polished Bronze, then 10 Furniture Kit II with 4 Building Kit II and 10 more Polished Bronze.

Those kits are the reason the technology and the building cost line up. A Building Kit I is one Stone Kit and six Brick at a Woodworking Workbench and one Stone Kit and a single Brick at an assembly bench, and an Iron Kit I is one Iron Ingot either way. The same branch that reveals his stall is the one that builds the Factory, so by the time you can unlock him you can make his kits for a sixth of the brick.

Building any shop pays 2 village reputation and a level of the Shop Owner inspiration, and each upgrade pays 2 or 3 more. Twelve shops can be raised in total and Shop Owner tops out at twelve, so the last stall in town is also the last point that line of technology points will ever pay.

He sells Book writing mastery, one tier at a time

The talismans are tools, and they carry mastery on the Book writing track exactly the way a Primer or a Glossary does. Because a book and a talisman are different item types and the game adds up your whole tool inventory, you carry one of each and the bonuses stack.

The price ladder is steeper than the bonus, which is the decision. Two hundred coins for the first point is trivial and twenty five thousand for the fourth is a project. It matters because talent points alone cap Book writing at five, and the best prayers ask for fourteen and sixteen, so bought mastery is how that gap closes.

The only shop with all three collars

He carries the Bronze Zombie Collar from the start, the Golden Zombie Collar from his second tier and the Steel Zombie Collar from his third. Since a collar decides how good a corpse a zombie can be raised from, he is quietly the gate on the whole workforce.

He is the buyer, and his purse is the limit

Precious Trinkets and Fine Jewelry are the two most valuable things in the game at 10,500 and 50,000, and he will not sell you either at any tier. He buys them, which makes him the far end of the gold chain rather than a source for it.

What stops you is his money. He starts with a hundred coins and earns 20 a day at his first tier, 50 at his second and 100 at his third, so a single Fine Jewelry is worth five hundred days of his income. Selling anything expensive means waiting for his purse or splitting it across vendors, which is the general problem covered on money.

He also takes Polished Bronze and Bronze Scrap for town happiness, forty and thirty of them for two smiles at his first tier, doubling to eighty and sixty for four once he is upgraded. That is the one reason to upgrade him that does not backfire on a collar price.