I'm at the point where I have unlocked market 5 and the secret and I must say it's getting really tedious. My trader quests are still at market 3, way too many random artifact pieces (brilliant idea of putting three three-piece artifacts into the secret. Way to ruin anyone's inventory management!) are clogging up the inventory along with the various kinds of basic supplies and overabundant food items. I can't really complete more of those "click and wait 50 times until you get lucky" trade requests because of a lack of space and merchant coins which I would have to actually trade for to get after running out of Rosemary's 4-coin quests are the way to get those slots, so this is a soft deadlock. Now the Halloween event adds more demand for junk from the lower markets (4th request is orange tunics, which requires cotton). Trading takes an annoying amount of time - too long to really consider it active play, too short to really to be doing something else. Click, wait two minutes, repeat. Or ten minutes in the case of the secret market (which seems to be the only long-term way out of the dilemma: Finally get lucky and be able to get rid of those artifact pieces) - another aspect I absolutely dislike: It turns the game into a timer watching chore. Glued to the computer, taking one action every ten minutes, possibly dozens of times until the random generator smiles at you. Of course I could just give in and buy the extra slots (which I am sure is pretty much what the developers would very much want and have designed for) - but $20, sorry, that's too steep for making an idle/clicker game, especially when the purchase starts to feel necessary to have a smooth game. $10 would feel fair to me. Trading also seems to make Rosemary's shop pointless. You need the shards for those gazillions of dice rolls to get the desired items, so you can't really buy anything from her shop unless you want to forgo trades for the day. Another problem is when I run out of space in trading. More than once, the leftover item was exactly the one I'd absolutely want to junk first. However, I can't drop it - I have to free up a slot (which might be holding something better or multiples) just to claim and be able to do trades again. This window needs a "discard" button. The rest of the game feels good and well balanced. You can idle or force on most tasks as desired (which is characteristic for a good idler), but the inventory management and the trade delays (which are entirely artificial, keeping players from what they want to do) just break this flow. It's by far not the only game falling into this trap - a lot of developers add "once every few minutes" elements to their idles, which can be fun in moderation and if they involve strategy. "Make a few more cheapo magics and wait for a good die roll" isn't fun in too much repetition however - maybe a rebalance here would help. (Maybe you could offer an "instant trades for one day" for allium, that would solve it. Pay 500 allium or so, get a massive speed up and a removal of the secret market cooldown).

Yup, that's the way of the secret market, unfortunately. I'm just coming out the other side, having two-of-three artifacts complete now. I had two pieces from all three at one point; that was awful. You might consider focusing on the artifacts one at a time, dropping pieces from the others. The best way I found is to alternate secret market and market 1. Craft yellow magic for market 1, and use that to generate market coins and strange artifacts. Use the coins for more inventory, the artifacts to power the secret market. Also, focus on short days. At level 15, your daily tax is corn, so that lines up with producing yellow magic. Use Rosemary's shop to increase your corn production (growth rate and crops per harvest). Lots of days means lots of rocks means lots of diamonds means the secret market cost is suddenly much less constricting. Using market 1 also lets you save cotton for event or iron for repairing artifacts, when you need it. THE MARKETS ABSOLUTELY NEED A DISCARD FEATURE!! 1000% AGREE!!! :D

There are a lot of tiny details - apart from the excessive randomness - that just make trading and the related quests feel punishing: - The inventory caps of 5 on most items (and 25 on the building materials) just create needless clickwork even when one has all the materials. Collect 10 crates, craft 5 magics, make an essence, make a tunic. (Depending on slots available, you may need to do 6 or even 4 crates at a time...) Repeat n times to fill the request instead of being able to do each step at once - 50 crates, 25 magics, 5 essences, 5 shirts (that seems to be a common number). - With the three relics that increase vats (there might be a 4th in market 6), you get to store 48 crates' worth. And all too many tasks, especially in the Halloween event, call for 50 (5 tunics). Why? (The obvious fix would be to make that third Relic give 1000, not 800). - Inevitably, huge requirements for one building material pile up, while the other two are wasted. Both market 5 relics require big amounts of steel, as does the market 6 base stall. In the meantime, mahogany and silk pile up (or you get to ditch them, which you'll then regret later) - Each reset, you can effectively either trade or go for a big harvest requirement but not both - time shards are needed for Rosemary's as well as to make trades. Now the time waited on a big harvest requirement (100k Tomatoes, hot on the heels of 75k, thanks...) would be a great time to do some of those "I need to feed back the same junk items a gazillion times to finally get what I need" sprees. If... you didn't already need to spend those shards on boosting crops to have a chance at that 100k in realistic times. - Players with even mild color vision issues have trouble with red/brown and tan/green shirts in the recipes for costumes. These are not the same exact hue as in inventories (recipe looks paler) and no mouseover to distinguish them makiing it real hard to figure out which one is needed. Nevermind that both pairs have near identical trim colors - cure here would be to set them apart by trim, e.g. making the red one with pink trim and the tan one with a brown or orange trim (orange might be better in case a player has problems with the tan/yellow pair). Bottom line, it's a really innovative system, but the longer I play it, the less fun it gets because it's just red-taped and marred by easily avoided minor QoL issues that add up over time.

My Annoyence with the trading/crafting system is the fact you can't even SEE your full inventory at once. Its all squished down in the bottom third of the book when the recipes themselves get a whole PAGE. I really think the "Quest book" part needs to not steal room from the inventory screen. And... why do crates of veggies even need to take up valuble space?? Higher cap on building materials please!! (Actually, higher cap on everything in general would be VERY helpful) So many recipes and quests take up multiple slots for a single item, and artifacts REALLY clog things up.

What I ended up doing was dropping or trading items to make space while I concentrated on completing only one or two quests at once. More than a couple (And usually just one at a time) is just not practical given the very limited inventory space. Sure, that means you will be doing a lot of trading to get back items you had to trade away, but it IS possible to collect all artifacts, make all stalls, etc. The only things I have left to complete from the main game are to collect all outfits and do all trader quests, both of which are tedious and offer me no bonuses I currently need, so I haven't bothered, yet. So I can assure you all that while it may be very frustrating at times, the game can be completed as is.

> *Originally posted by **[ElliotKane](/forums/1044092/topics/1868265?page=1#13266670)**:* > So I can assure you all that while it may be very frustrating at times, the game can be completed as is. But is the point of a game to be "can be completed" or is it to actually be an enjoyable process? I never doubted that it can be done, I doubt the entertainment value of doing the same task a gazillion times while knowing perfectly well that the only way to do it without paying is to rack up even more gazillions of repetitions and knowingly tossing things you perfectly know you'll need to painfully acquire again later. Which is really bad because the game had a lot of potential and unique mechanics. Even trading itself is a good concept - it's just the execution and that some of the aspects like the 5 per slot cap really feel like they are just intentionally making it tedious hoping to coerce the player into paying the $20 for the inventory slots (which I still believe is just too expensive for an idle game)

Thalain, Enjoyment is always going to be subjective, and if I'm honest I did find it quite tedious at points (Others may find it more challenging than annoying; I couldn't say). I never paid real money to get the slots, just worked at getting the trade coins. Not sure how many slots I have, beyond 'enough'. Just wanted to encourage fellow players who didn't seem sure it could be done, to be honest. I agree that the game has a lot of good things going for it, and also that it is something of a flawed gem. It can definitely be too repetitive (Especially when you are up to date and just doing the new content), which I suspect may be the result of the devs wanting a longer play time than the content strictly allowed rather than serious attempts at encouraging real money spending. The gem payments required for the Secret Market are a dead giveaway on that one, as they are a blatant method of slowing the game right down. If you think about it, all limited inventory storage really does is the same thing - slows down the rate at which the content can be completed. There is no point at which you are likely to be genuinely stuck, after all. This would not be my own preferred method of doing things, but such is life. (Sorry for all the second guessing devs. Please don't think I'm trying to be mean, here) The main thing I play the game for is the story, the humour and the quirky characters. I have no clue what on earth the devs are going to dream up next, only that it will involve more utter strangeness, which I love. I'm prepared to suffer through some annoying bits to get to the parts I enjoy, as with pretty much every other game I play, in fact. So, yeah, I think we're kind of sort of in agreement, really...

"Trade 25 hammers in market 5" ??? Some guy named Sisyphus must have come up with that one. Also, it seems like a flavor fail to me to have a task that requires me to trade away items on the only market I can get them from "to flood the market". (e.g. the one that requires me to trade three wands in the secret market). In doing so, I remove as many from the market as I add, which hardly constitutes flooding.