Water Merchant
Test, purify, relabel. Liability is yours.
The scenario built around the station’s most expensive liquid: buy dirty water cheap, run it through the cleaning chain, sell it clean. What ends up in the bottle is your problem.
Pure water costs more than most merchandise on the station, which makes the trade look simple until the first liability event. The Water Merchant start hands over a purifier and the base stock to feed it, and leaves the judgment calls — how much to filter, how much to relabel — at the counter.
The water start is a supply-chain problem wearing a shopkeeper’s apron. Nothing about the counter changes: customers still arrive with a budget and a request, but what they are asking for is a bottle whose contents you control end to end.
That control is the margin. A purifier that never stops runs water up the quality ladder while the shop is closed, which is the only part of the trade that scales without more customers. The failure is equally mechanical — an empty hopper and a dead energy cell look exactly like a quiet week until the rent is due.
Counter protocol
- Keep the purifier fed and powered; a stalled purifier turns a quality chain back into base water.
- Bottle stock deliberately: the container is part of the margin, not packaging.
- Relabelling pays until an inspection reads the label against the liquid.
Related stock
Where this comes from
The Water Merchant scenario is defined by testing, purifying and relabelling water, with liability for the result.
“Water Merchant: Test, purify, re-label or don't.”
Water must be tested and filtered before it can be resold.
“Water must be tested and filtered.”
Community guides treat early purifier uptime as the first milestone of the scenario.
“Water purifiers online in the first 8 to”
Caption as spoken (verbatim)
water purifiers online in the first 8 to
Tier 1 is the developer or publisher speaking, tier 2 is a large structured reference, tier 3 is player-made material. Anything a player measured rather than read is labelled as community-reported on this page.