The Merchant's Promise

The Merchant lied to you.

Early in the trade questline, the Merchant tells you that growing the reputation of your trading business will increase what your crates sell for. Players have been testing this since 2018. One went from 10 fame to over 150 and watched the numbers refuse to move. The wiki has quietly documented it for years: fame has a hard limit and increasing it provides no benefit.

It isn't subtle. Here is what the game actually runs when the Merchant collects your crates:

total_money += item.definition.base_price * item.value;That's it. No fame term. Marketing campaigns buy you pallets, the game caps you at ten, and every point after that is dead weight.

This mod makes the promise real.

Every unspent marketing point now raises what the Merchant pays. Build your ten pallets as usual, then keep running campaigns - the points you bank past that finally do something.

The curve has diminishing returns. Every point helps, the bonus approaches double without ever reaching it, and there is no threshold where the economy breaks. At zero fame the mod does nothing at all and the game behaves exactly as shipped.

The trade report is updated to match. Vanilla prints fixed base prices there regardless of what you earned, which made it impossible to see any change; the mod scales those figures while the window is open so the report agrees with your takings.

Configuration

Press F1 in-game (BepInEx Configuration Manager), or edit

BepInEx/config/gyk.merchants.promise.cfg

Price / Enabled — master switch

Price / MaxBonus — ceiling. 1. 0 approaches double price; try 0. 5 for a gentler run

Price / HalfBonusAtFame — fame needed for half the ceiling. Lower means faster payoff

Debug / LogEveryTrade — writes each pallet's numbers to the log

Troubleshooting

Check BepInEx/LogOutput.log. After your first sale you should see a line like

"Working: 16. 50 -> 29. 68 at fame 159 (x1. 799)".

If it isn't there, you probably have no marketing points banked — spend flyers

on a campaign and the mod picks them up automatically.

Requirements

BepInEx 5. The Graveyard Keeper BepInEx 5 Pack is the easy way to get it.

Compatibility

Safe to add or remove at any time. The mod writes nothing to your save; it only adjusts the payout as it is calculated. Remove it and prices return to vanilla with no trace left behind.

It hooks one method and identifies it by structure rather than by name, so it should survive minor game updates. If a patch ever breaks that lookup, the mod logs a message and disables itself rather than breaking your game.

No known conflicts. It does not touch pallet counts, crate contents, or the crate factory, so it sits alongside mods in those areas without overlapping.

Credits

Thanks to whoever on the Steam forums kept grinding out flyers to 150 fame just to prove the Merchant was full of it.