📖 About

Vanilla customers are strangely uninterested. Most walk in wanting nothing, the "in demand" list barely rotates, and no matter how big your shop gets, people still turn up trying to sell you 14-cent commons. BetterCustomersAI reworks the shopping and trading brain so customers actually want things, react to your pricing, and bring offers worth your time. Every value is exposed in the config and editable live in-game — no rebuilds, no save edits.

✨ What It Improves

• 🛍️ More customers actually shopThe chance a customer wants items at all is raised across every shop-level bracket.
• 🔄 Demand that rotatesThe shop-wide "in demand" list refreshes every 2 days instead of 7, with far more item types.
• 💰 Pricing that mattersA graded buy-chance curve makes your markup readable — and dampens absurd sensitivity on cheap items.
• 🔥 Fire salesUnderpricing makes customers buy up to 4× the quantity. A real sale clears a shelf fast.
• 🃏 Offers that scaleCards customers offer you have a minimum value that grows with your shop level.
• 🤝 Fair, valid tradesThe card they ask for is guaranteed to be one you own, at a value matching what they give.

👤 More Customers Actually Shop

Vanilla gates whether a customer wants items behind a shop-level roll that starts brutally low. This raises it across the board, and grows each wishlist from 1–4 item types to 1–8 — now drawn without replacement, so they are always distinct.

💵 Pricing That Matters

A graded buy-chance curve replaces the vanilla check, so your markup has a real, readable effect. Cheap items are dampened — a big percentage swing on a $0.50 card counts far less than the same swing on a $50 one.

🃏 Card Offers That Scale With Your Shop

Customers offering to sell or trade you cards now respect a minimum market value that grows with your shop level. If an offer falls below the floor, fresh candidates are drawn exactly the way vanilla draws them and the first qualifying card is used. If the floor cannot be met, the most valuable candidate found is used — so offers always improve rather than falling back to junk. Graded offers are covered too.

minimum = MinOfferValueBase + (MinOfferValuePerShopLevel × shopLevel)
          capped by MinOfferValueCap

🔧 Bugs Fixed

Three of these are genuine vanilla bugs, labelled below.

⚙️ Configuration

All settings live in BepInEx/config/com.mod.bettercustomersai.cfg and can be edited live in-game with BepInEx Configuration Manager (F1).

💾 Installation

1. Install BepInEx 5.x for TCG Card Shop Simulator.
2. Extract the release zip into your BepInEx folder, so you get BepInEx\plugins\BetterCustomersAI\BetterCustomersAI.dll.
3. Launch once — the config file is generated on that first run. The log shows:

BetterCustomersAI v1.1.0 loaded.

Requirements: BepInEx 5.x · Optional: BepInEx Configuration Manager, for the in-game F1 settings menu.

🧩 Compatibility

• Save-safeNothing is written to your save. Every change is behavioural and applies only while the mod is loaded — remove it and vanilla behaviour returns.
• Works with card & creature modsThe trade patches are ordered to run after NewCardTypes, so a custom-border card that already meets the value floor is kept as-is.
• Fails loudly, not silentlyAll reflected game members are validated at load. A game update that renames one produces a clear startup error naming it, instead of a crash mid-game.
• Built against v5.4.xSeveral patches fully reimplement their game method, mirrored from the Jan 2026 build. A major game update may require re-syncing.

🔍 Troubleshooting

Set VerboseLogging = true to trace decisions. You will see lines such as:

[Offer] upgraded $0.42 -> $87.30 (floor $58.50, 3 tries)
[Trade] wanted card fixed: $4723.46 (owned 0) -> $61.20 (owned)
[TakeItem] SALE BONUS: price=$1.20 market=$3.00 multiplier=x4.00 qty=2->8