Money
Take the discounts, and know which one you are taking.
Today's Special at the Convenience Store takes 30% off 10 items at the ordinary 30% to 60%, which costs you nothing. Clearance takes 50% off 53 items and charges for it in freshness, 10% to 40%. Every one of those 53 has a shelf life, so there is nothing on it the discount cannot reach: 12 of them arrive with under a week left even at the top of the range.Spend the discount on the long-dated tins and pay full price for the rest.
Slots and space
Furniture is what the entrance limits, and the game stops the sale rather than warning you: "Not enough delivery space." The entrance holds 8 packages, nothing is placed until you unpack it in Planning Mode, and a package you have not unpacked is a package slot you cannot buy into. So make furniture its own trip, buy up to 8, unpack before you buy again, and count the fitting time: the 8 slowest pieces a build shop stocks are 2 hr 27 min of installation on top of 15 min of unpacking each.
Stock
Buy where the days are, which is Instant Food at the Discount Mart at 60% to 80%. On Canned Luncheon Meat Food · Meat Satiety +20 Morale +1 1000 g 2×1 cells 20.0 Satiety/kg $30 360 d shelf life Waste at day 1800 Meat Requires cutting tool to open that is 216 to 288 days against 108 to 216 days from a standard shelf, for the same $30. Then buy long: only 14 of the 160 perishables on sale still cover a hundred days at the bottom of the standard range, and they are the tins, the rice and the drinks rather than anything fresh.
Open the supplies list Opens Canned Luncheon Meat with its price, weight, shelf life and bag footprint, which is the half of the sum this page does not do.
Nothing you buy is fresh, and not everything you buy can go off. The 45 shelves in the game sell 246 different things between them, and 160 of those carry a shelf life. On that 160 the shelf decides how much of the life is already gone; on the other 86 it decides nothing at all.
This page covers the whole of the shopping system: what each shelf hands over, what the two discounts really cost, where the shelves are, and the second shop, which sells furniture, prices it in delivery slots rather than in freshness, and works nothing like the first.
What a shelf hands over
38 of the 45 shelves give the standard 30% to 60%. These are the ones that do not, plus the two that discount.
| Shelf | Where | Shelf life left | Discount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Instant Food | Discount Mart | 60% to 80% | none |
| Hot Cabinet | Used Car Lot | 40% to 70% | none |
| Today's Special | Convenience Store | 30% to 60% | 30% off |
| Freezer | Used Car Lot | 20% to 50% | none |
| Large Freezer | Discount Mart | 30% to 50% | none |
| Clearance | Discount Mart | 10% to 40% | 50% off |
| Travel Goods Shelf | Used Car Lot | 10% to 40% | none |
| Tobacco & Liquor Cabinet | Used Car Lot | 10% to 30% | none |
Instant Food at the Discount Mart is the freshest shelf in the game at 60% to 80%, and Tobacco & Liquor Cabinet is the worst at 10% to 30%. The gap between them is the difference between buying something with most of its life ahead of it and buying something already two thirds gone.
It matters more than a single shelf, because the same item sits on several. 67 of the 160 perishables on sale are stocked by shelves that disagree about freshness, so for those the aisle you happen to reach for changes what you get. The rest are on one shelf, or on shelves that all give the same thing, and for those there is nothing to decide.
What that costs in days
The fraction is abstract; the days are not.
| Item | Printed shelf life | At the standard 30% to 60% | At Instant Food |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hardtack | 360 days | 108 to 216 days | 216 to 288 days |
| Organic Fragrant Rice | 360 days | 108 to 216 days | 216 to 288 days |
| Canned Luncheon Meat | 360 days | 108 to 216 days | 216 to 288 days |
| Canned Yellow Peaches | 360 days | 108 to 216 days | 216 to 288 days |
| Canned Herring | 360 days | 108 to 216 days | 216 to 288 days |
| Crackers | 90 days | 27 to 54 days | 54 to 72 days |
On the longest-lived item that shelf stocks, buying from Instant Food rather than a standard shelf is worth 72 extra days at best, for the same price.
The two discounts are not the same offer
Today's Special at the Convenience Store takes 30% off at the standard 30% to 60%. There is no catch: the same freshness as every ordinary shelf, 10 items, and a straight discount. If it stocks something on your list, buy it there.
Clearance takes 50% off, and charges for it in freshness, 10% to 40% against the standard 30% to 60%. Taking the middle of each range, that is 1.8× less shelf life for half the price, across 53 items.
Everything on Clearance spoils. All 53 of its items carry a shelf life, so there is no corner of it where the discount is free: the shortest 12 arrive with under a week left even at the top of the range, while the 10 longest still have a month at the bottom of it. That split is the whole decision.
One tin, four prices
Canned Luncheon Meat Food · Meat Satiety +20 Morale +1 1000 g 2×1 cells 20.0 Satiety/kg $30 360 d shelf life Waste at day 1800 Meat Requires cutting tool to open is stocked by 6 shelves across 4 shops, at 4 different combinations of price and freshness. It is the clearest thing in the game to work the system on, because the tin never changes.
| Shelf | Where | Price | Shelf life left | Days per dollar |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Instant Food | Discount Mart | $30.00 | 216 to 288 days | 8.4 |
| Canned Food | Farmers' Market | $30.00 | 108 to 216 days | 5.4 |
| Fast Food Rack | Used Car Lot | $30.00 | 108 to 216 days | 5.4 |
| Provisions | Convenience Store | $30.00 | 108 to 216 days | 5.4 |
| Today's Special | Convenience Store | $21.00 | 108 to 216 days | 7.7 |
| Clearance | Discount Mart | $15.00 | 36 to 144 days | 6.0 |
Read the last column rather than the third. Instant Food is the best value on this tin even at full price, 8.4 days per dollar against 5.4 from a standard shelf, because it hands over 1.6× the days for the same money.
Today's Special comes second at 7.7, and Clearance, at half the price, comes third at 6.0.So half price is not a bargain by itself. On a 360-day tin the deep discount survives the freshness it costs; on the short-dated end of the same shelf it does not, and what happens when food goes off is what you are buying instead.
Where the shelves are
| Location | Shelves | Items | Best freshness there |
|---|---|---|---|
| Farmers' Market | 14 | 105 | 30% to 60% |
| Discount Mart | 10 | 145 | 60% to 80% |
| Used Car Lot | 10 | 59 | 40% to 70% |
| Hardware Store | 6 | 26 | 30% to 60% |
| Convenience Store | 5 | 41 | 30% to 60% |
The prep window is not long enough to visit everywhere. The ten-hour prep window has the travel times and the trip order; this table is the other half of that decision, because a shop is worth a trip for what its shelves give as well as for what they stock.
The other shop: furniture is not sold like food
Of the 6 places open before the outbreak, 1 holds no supply shelf at all. Furniture is a second structure with its own screen, its own tabs and its own limit, and none of the freshness above touches it.
| Tab | Pieces the shop lists | Ordered from |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | 9 | Renovation Company |
| Necessities | 12 | Renovation Company |
| Security | 6 | Renovation Company |
| Energy | 8 | Renovation Company |
| Cooking | 10 | Renovation Company |
| Plant | 19 | Farmers' Market |
| Other | 4 | Renovation Company |
68 of the 101 furniture pieces in the game are stocked by a build shop; the other 33 arrive some other way. 66 of the 68 trace to a shop on the map, and they are not all in one place: 48 come from the Renovation Company and 18 from the Farmers' Market. Every one of that 18 is on the Plant tab, so the planter you want is bought at the market you buy seeds from rather than at the furniture shop.
What a purchase actually does
The game explains this on the Build Shop screen itself, and it is the part players meet late.
Three things follow, and none of them is the price.
| What it takes | How much | Where the limit shows up |
|---|---|---|
| A slot at the entrance | 8 packages | The shop refuses the sale: "Not enough delivery space." |
| Unpacking, in Planning Mode | 15 min | The same for every package the build shops sell |
| Fitting the piece once unpacked | 2 min to 1 hour | Longest is Fridge |
Filling all 8 slots with the slowest pieces the shop stocks is 2 hr 27 min of fitting plus 2 hours of unpacking, against a prep window of 10 hours. You pay that whenever you unpack, before the outbreak or after it, but you cannot avoid it by buying more at once, because buying more at once is the thing the entrance stops. The other refusal is the ordinary one: "Not enough cash".
Open the equipment list at this piece Opens Shredder, whose package is the heaviest a build shop delivers, with its slot, its price and what it does. The list also filters to the 68 pieces a shop stocks and the 33 it does not.
Which piece to buy is a different question from where to buy it, and it is answered by what the piece does: powering the house for the generators and panels, which planter to buy for the pots, doors and windows for the barriers. This page stops at the counter.
What to do
- Assume 30% to 60% of shelf life on anything you buy, not 100%. Every plan built on the printed number is optimistic, and that includes every days-of-food sum on this site. The supplies list prints the shelf life; this page is the discount on it.
- Buy perishables at the Discount Mart if the trip fits. Instant Food gives 60% to 80% on the 13 perishables it stocks, and no shelf in the game hands over more shelf life per dollar than that, discounts included.
- Check Today's Special at the Convenience Store first for the 30% off. It is the only discount in the game that costs nothing.
- Use Clearance only for the long-dated end of what it sells. At 10% to 40% the half price buys months on a tin and days on anything fresh.
- Avoid Tobacco & Liquor Cabinet for anything perishable. 10% to 30% is most of the life gone before you leave the shop.
- Make furniture its own trip and stop at 8. The entrance holds that many packages and the shop will not sell you a 9th until you have unpacked one.
- Look for pots at the Farmers' Market, not at the Renovation Company. The 18 pieces it delivers are all on the Plant tab.
The talents that change this
3 permanent talents take money off at the till, and they do not overlap: one is about what you buy, one about how much of it, and one about which shop.
| Talent | First level | All levels | At the top |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bulk Bargains | 20 pts | 150 pts | Get a 25% discount when purchasing 6 items or more. |
| Clearance | 20 pts | 150 pts | Get a 30% discount when purchasing supplies with a shelf life of less than 5 days. |
| Interior Decorator | 20 pts | 90 pts | Enjoy a 15% discount when purchasing Furniture. |
The first of them shares its name with a shelf and is not the same thing: the shelf discounts 53 named items, the talent discounts by shelf life wherever you are standing. Which talents to buy covers what the tree costs as a whole.
Quick reference
- Standard shelf: 30% to 60% of shelf life left, on 38 of the 45 shelves.
- Freshest: Instant Food at the Discount Mart, 60% to 80%.
- Worst: Tobacco & Liquor Cabinet, 10% to 30%.
- Free discount: Today's Special, 30% off at standard freshness, 10 items.
- Half price, a third of the life: Clearance, 50% off at 10% to 40%, and all 53 of its items spoil.
- The shelf decides on 67 of the 160 perishables the shops sell; the other 86 things on sale have no shelf life to lose.
- Furniture: 68 of 101 pieces stocked, 48 from the Renovation Company and 18 from the Farmers' Market.
- The entrance holds 8 packages, 15 min to unpack each, and full slots stop you buying.