Shop Titans Complete Guide: Master Crafting, Questing, and Your Shop

Shop Titans looks like a simple idle shopkeeper game, but underneath the charming fantasy exterior is a surprisingly deep simulation RPG. You’ll craft items, send heroes on quests, and sell goods to an endless parade of customers. Understanding how these systems connect is the difference between struggling for gold and running a thriving business.

This guide covers everything from your first hour to midgame optimization around level 40. Whether you just downloaded the game or you’re returning after a break, you’ll find actionable advice for every stage of progression.

The Three Pillars: Crafting, Questing, and Selling

Shop Titans revolves around three interconnected systems. You don’t choose one; you need all three working together.

Crafting

Your workers craft items using resources from your bins. The tutorial covers the basics well, but two concepts matter more than anything else: keeping your queue full and using a proper crafting rotation (covered below).

As you craft items, you’ll gain Mastery progress. Hit certain milestones and you’ll unlock blueprints for the next tier up in that item line. This is how you gradually access better and more valuable items to sell.

Questing

Heroes and Champions go on quests to gather crafting materials. The more you complete a particular dungeon, the higher it levels, increasing rewards. Early game, don’t stress about optimizing your heroes. Just fill your roster with cheap bodies that can run quests. Your Champions will do the heavy lifting for a while.

Selling

This is the only way to gain XP and level up. Customers wander into your shop, browse your displays, and want to buy things. You can Surcharge (costs Energy, earns bonus gold), sell at normal price, or Discount (gives you Energy back).

Critical distinction: selling on the Marketplace gives gold but zero XP. If you want to level up, you must sell through your actual shop. The Marketplace is useful for offloading bulk items or things too expensive to Surcharge, but it won’t help your progression.

Understanding the Energy System

Energy determines how many items you can Surcharge for bonus gold. Master this system and you’ll make significantly more money from every sale.

Increasing Max Energy

Every rack (shelf) you build adds to your maximum Energy. Each upgrade to those racks increases it further. Build at least 2-3 of each rack type and upgrade them all to at least level 2 early on. This is the fastest way to Surcharge expensive items.

Gaining Energy

• Decorations: Customers admire your decor and grant Energy
• Discounting: Sell items at a discount to gain Energy back
• Small Talk: Risky option that can give or take Energy
• Completing sales: Small Energy gain per transaction
• Guild tasks: Help clean guildmates’ shops for bonus Energy

Pro tip: If you have exactly enough Energy to Surcharge an expensive item, do it before pressing Small Talk. That way you don’t risk losing Energy on a failed chat and missing the sale.

Why Guilds Matter More Than You Think

At level 10, you can join a guild. Do this immediately, but not the one the game suggests. The tutorial guild is almost certainly dead. Leave it and find an active one.

Town Buildings

This is the biggest reason guilds matter. Town buildings are upgraded collectively by all guild members investing resources. A higher level Tavern, Training Hall, or other building benefits everyone. You’ll get access to building levels you could never afford alone.

These buildings increase worker and hero level caps, boost quest resources, and improve your resource generation rate. Being in an active guild is essentially free power.

Events and Bounties

Three of the four recurring events (King’s Caprice, Dragon Invasion, Lost City of Gold) have guild-wide reward tracks. Your individual contribution feeds into the guild total, and rewards scale based on collective performance. Solo players miss out on massive rewards.

Bounties are tasks that grant Trophies, filling your weekly Renown bar. The guild earns special currency based on total Trophies, which the guildmaster spends on passive upgrades and temporary boosters for everyone.

Where to Find Active Guilds

• ST Central Discord
• Official Shop Titans Discord
• r/shoptitans subreddit
• Facebook fan groups
• World chat in-game

Important: Your investments follow you if you change guilds. Don’t worry about losing progress.

Hero Management by Progression Stage

The hero system is deep and complicated, but you don’t need to engage with most of it early on. Here’s what actually matters at each stage.

Levels 1-40: Don’t Optimize

This sounds wrong, but trust the process. Early game is designed to be easy. Your heroes’ job right now is to be cheap, functional bodies that can run quests. Their skills essentially don’t matter.

• DO: Unlock hero slots with gold as soon as they open
• DO: Hire the highest tier classes you can afford with gold
• DO: Keep Fighter/Rogue/Spellcaster counts roughly equal
• DON’T: Hire heroes with gems (extremely inefficient)
• DON’T: Try to get “perfect” heroes or reroll skills

Save your skill dice and Titan Souls. Most early heroes will be phased out later, and that’s fine. They served their purpose.

Level 40+: Start Optimizing

Now you can start caring about hero skills. Use Titan Souls to reroll heroes toward better builds. Focus on completing the Tower of Titans monthly for more Souls. Build a proper roster with complementary skills for tackling harder content. Check our hero tier list for which classes to prioritize.

Crafting Rotation Explained

A crafting rotation means using as many different bin resources as possible across your crafting slots. This prevents any single resource from becoming a bottleneck.

Say you have eight crafting slots. A good rotation might look like:

• 2 slots: Iron/Steel/Jewel items
• 2 slots: Wood/Ironwood/Ether items
• 2 slots: Leather/Silk/Ether items
• 2 slots: Herb/Oil/Jewel items

The exact items will vary based on your unlocked blueprints and resource caps. The principle stays the same: spread the load across different materials so nothing runs dry while others overflow.

You’ll need to adjust for bounties or daily tasks that require specific items. When that happens, shuffle other slots to maintain variety.

Progression Milestones

Counter upgrades are critical because more customer slots means more opportunities to sell. Levels 16-20 also provide percentage bonuses to your total Energy.

Fusion at Level 27

The Sol Tower building unlocks Fusion, letting you combine multiple items of the same type into a single higher rarity version. This is useful for getting Superior quality items for crafting, making better hero gear, or creating higher value items for the Marketplace.

Full Moon Fusion activates one day per month during the actual full moon. It offers unique recipes like converting chests into components or combining boosters. If you purchase Mundra as a premium worker, you can access Full Moon Fusion anytime.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Selling on Marketplace for XP. It doesn’t work. You only gain experience from shop sales. Use the Marketplace for gold, but don’t expect to level up.

Staying in the starter guild. It’s probably dead. Leave at level 10 and find an active one. The benefits are massive.

Spending gems on heroes. Gem heroes can easily turn out poorly. Save gems for more reliable purchases. Gold heroes are fine early.

Optimizing heroes before level 40. You’re wasting resources. Early game doesn’t require it, and most of those heroes will be replaced anyway.

Letting furniture sit idle. Always have something upgrading. These upgrades take days at higher levels, so constant progress matters.

Ignoring crafting rotation. Using the same resources for everything creates bottlenecks. Spread your crafting across different bin types.

Rushing customers. They wait forever. Take your time to gather Energy or gold before finalizing sales. No one leaves.

Frequently Asked Questions