Shoppe Keep 2 Helper Bots & Bot Fuel

When it comes to playing Shoppe Keep 2 the reality is that the game becomes fairly repetitive, especially when it comes to keeping your Shoppe open.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent a number of hours with your Shoppe closed in order to simply enjoy the other aspects of the game and have sold a number of objects under the counter by interacting with Villagers to receive the income you do need.

The makes of Shoppe Keep 2 have tried to avoid having players shut down their Shoppe with the addition of Helper Bots, though unfortunately Helper Bots can be fairly pricy and will require players to constantly refuel them, especially if a player chooses to buy the maximum of 5 Helper Bots.

So how do players purchase Helper Bots, what do Helper Bots do and how can players continuously fuel Helper Bots in hopes of making sure that their Shoppe is always kept open and fully stocked?

HOW TO PURCHASE HELPER BOTS & BOT FUEL

In order to gain access to the Helper Bots, players must first upgrade their Town to the point where the Cook reaches level 2.

Players must first pay 7,500 coins to upgrade their town to tier-2 and then must pay a total of 12,000 coins in order to upgrade their Tavern, essentially bringing the Cook up to tier-2.

Upon levelling up the Tavern, players will witness a new NPC sitting at the second table on the left named Chris.

Chris will be able to provide players with a variety of items, though the two we will be talking about today are the Helper Bots and the Bot Fuel to essentially keep the Helper Bots working.

While many players have reported that Chris never appears or that Chris appears and goes missing every so often, it seems like this is either a glitch or due to players having old save files.

In the most recent update of Shoppe Keep 2, upon reaching tier-2 with the Cook and Tavern, Chris should always be available to make purchases with.

HOW MUCH IS THE HELPER BOT?

To purchase the primary Helper Bot from Chris, players must cough over 35,000 coins.

The initial purchase will only provide players with a single Helper Bot, which may be useful for a small Shoppe, though players will want to quickly purchase other Helper Bots if they have a medium-large size Shoppe as Helper Bots can be assigned various tasks and are unable to “pick up the pace” essentially making a single Helper Bot useless and a waste of money.

Additional Helper Bots can be purchased directly next to the Helper Bot station which is located next to the management building players pay their taxes and collect their money from. Players will locate the Helper Bot station directly to the right of the building when facing the entrance, closest to their Shoppe.

When facing the Helper Bot station, players will see 4 empty Helper Bot slots, it is here where the player will see a prompt of whether they would like to purchase another Helper Bot, essentially having to pay an extra 20,000 coins for each Helper Bot they require.

It is recommended that players purchase the remaining 4 Helper Bots as soon as possible.

HOW MUCH IS BOT FUEL?

Bot Fuel will cost players 300 coins for a single fuel canteen. Each Bot Fuel will be able to fuel 10% of the fuel tank’s capacity, however, the amount of Bot Fuel a player requires will highly depend on how many Helper Bots are running and whether or not the Helper Bots are actually doing any work.

Essentially, Helper Bots will only wake up when there is a task that they need to complete and will remain inactive if there doesn’t seem to be any work for them or if they have run out of Bot Fuel.

HOW DO I USE BOT FUEL?

Using Bot Fuel can be fairly confusing and I have to admit, I spent a good chunk of time trying to figure out the mechanics on how the Helper Bot station works, especially because Shoppe Keep 2 doesn’t seem as intuitive as the developers probably wanted it to be.

To use Bot Fuel, players must stand directly in front of the Bot Fuel tank, located on the far right of the Helper Bot station, towards the back of the management building where players pay taxes. Players must then place their Bot Fuel in one of their active inventory slots and must use their interact button, initially set to “E” to put the Bot Fuel into the tank.

Be aware, players can over-fuel the fuel tank, essentially wasting extra canteens of Bot Fuel as for some strange reason the fuel tank will not stop accepting Bot Fuel when it is full, so beware because you’re not going to want to waste 300 coins on indefinitely fuelling Helper Bot as this can honestly be the demise of a Shoppe keeper especially if they are running low on funds and not turning a proper profit.

Players should always hover over their fuel tank to double check whether it is full or should simply get used to the visual of what a full tank looks like as these will be the easiest methods players will be able to tell whether or not the fuel tank is full.

Players can also open the Helper Bot Panel if they are confused with the fuel interface as the Helper Bot Panel will slow clear markers as to whether or not the station is fully fuelled.

HOW DO I SET UP HELPER BOTS?

Helper Bots are pretty straight forward to understand when players see their Helper Bot Panel.

Essentially players will have to walk to the Helper Bot station and make selections as to what they want the Helper Bot to do.

Helper Bot 1 is the closet to the Helper Bot station and Helper Bot 5 is the one furthest away.

The following are the different settings players can choose for helper bots:

STOCK

Selecting the Stock option will allow players to use Helper Bots to stock Shelves, Tables, Weapon Racks and all other inventory slots.

In order to have a Helper Bot restock, players must place items from their inventory into the chest that correlates to the Helper Bot which is assigned with the Stock function.

It is important to double check chests regularly as players may mistakenly place inventory into a chest and change the function of a Helper Bot without realizing that there is leftover stock, especially if Helper Bots have not been given enough time to actually deplete their inventory.

That being said, a Helper Bot will go through inventory randomly unless players have previously imprinted an item onto a certain piece of furniture, meaning that a Helper Bot may place 10 of the same item before placing a unique one.

While imprinting is not considered necessary, avoiding imprinting can become a problem if players have too much of a single type of item in their Shoppe as this will greatly reduce the Shoppe’s appeal rating.

Similarly, players may end up in a precarious position where all of the items the Helper Bot places are considered to be unfit for the event that is currently in place (ie. Alcohol when it is prohibited or Weapons when the young are warned not to yield them.) 

All this being said, players should also note that they will only be able to place 40 unique items in a Helper Bot’s chest, similar to a regular chest.

Players can essentially place an indefinite amount of these 40 unique items, though again I would warn players that doing such may be detrimental as this can result in a player’s Helper Bots placing too many of a single item in a Shoppe. 

It is advisable that if players do not imprint items into furniture that they simply stock a decently conservative amount of items inside of each of the Helper Bot’s chests to ensure that the Helper Bot does not simply place 100 of the same item in their Shoppe.

It should be noted that while Helper Bots must be physically present at a piece of Furniture in order to place an item to be sold, a Helper Bot does not need to return to its chest in order to collect an item to place, thus Helper Bots with the Restock option are decently efficient at restocking a player’s Shoppe.

REPAIR

A Helper Bot with the repair option will essentially be a glorified Hammer and will be able to repair Furniture placed in the Shoppe that have been damaged by angry customers.

While I absolutely love the idea of a Repair Helper Bot, the reality is that they aren’t the most optimal type of Helper Bot as it seems there are many situations where a Repair Helper Bot will either not be able to access the Furniture that is broken or will simply glitch and completely ignore broken Furniture.

Though Repair Helper Bots aren’t the most useful types of Helper Bots players can employ, I do recommend having at least one Repair Helper Bot on your roster as this will help ensure that a player’s Shoppe Appeal doesn’t drop too low.

All that being said, Repair Helper Bots really shine when a Shoppe is closed, meaning that players may actually want to close their Shoppe regularly to provide the Helper Bots with enough time to actually fix all objects. It might even be useful to employ all 5 Helper Bots with the Repair option as this will allow players to get the most out of their Helper Bots, though this may come at the detriment of restocking, which may be the priority for players, especially if they have recently gotten a shipment of purchases.

In regards to the frustrating aspect of Repair Helper Bots not being able to access Furniture that is broken, players can try to avoid this by making sure that there is a substantial amount of space in between objects.

While I know it can be tempting to place Furniture extremely close together in hopes of generating the most income from your store, it can be detrimental to players as it may result in nothing getting fixed. 

I’ve found that in many cases I’m able to repair objects that the Repair Helper Bots are unable to reach, making this glitch a bit frustrating to deal with.

CLEAN

The Cleaner Helper Bot is another fairly useful Helper Bot for players to employ as it is pretty much a glorified Broom.

Cleaner Helper Bots will sweep up any messes that shoppers leave behind helping make sure that no customers complain about the lack of cleanliness in a store.

While Cleaner Helper Bots will sweep, they unfortunately do not empty garbage bins, which I believe is an extremely poor oversight from the development team.

It does, however, make a bit of sense for Cleaner Helper Bots to be unable to remove Trash from garbage bins as players will gain access to the ability to gamble using trash later on, though I do wish there was a toggle for players to make this decision for themselves.

It’s off to the garburator for you!

GATHER

The Gathering Helper Bot is a somewhat useful Helper Bot allowing players to use Helper Bots to pick up items that fall off shelves.

While players may find this extremely useful, it can be frustrating to note that Gathering Helper Bots will not pick up objects that are dropped from thieves outside of the store, essentially allowing the items to disappear and become lost profit anyways.

It should also be noted that Gathering Helper Bots sometimes miss items that are dropped from thieves who drop items in store, meaning that the Gathering Helper Bot is also a very unreliable form of employment.

As much as I want to say that I like the concept of these Helper Bots, the downsides and lack of coding frustrates me more than anything and I tend not to use them… *sigh*

WHAT KIND OF HELPER BOTS SHOULD I EMPLOY?

While the employment of Helper Bots is going to heavily depend on what a player’s play style is like I personally like to employ 3 Stocking Helper Bots, 1 Cleaner Helper Bot and 1 Repair Helper Bot.

My reason for this decision simply comes from the fact that the Gathering Helper Bot is pretty much useless and will often lead to a loss of income anyways and the fact that Stocking is the most important task in the game as without restocking players will not have any items to sell to customers.

As useful as Stock Helper Bots are, they are fairly slow at doing their job and there is an off chance that Helper Bots will actually follow each other and try to do the same job in the exact same space, being another frustrating thing about these glitchy helpers.

In my opinion, I think it would be awesome if Helper Bots were able to do all jobs, but since we are not playing in an ideal world, having 3 Stock Helper Bots is the best we can do.

If players are in need of more Stock Helper Bots, I would recommend ignoring the Repair option as repairing Furniture can be quickly done and realistically the option not to sweep, although very quick, is the job that needs to be done more frequently, especially if you do not have access to better Furniture which causes customers to complain less.

For that reason I would give the second recommendation of 4 Stock Helper Bots and 1 Cleaner Helper Bot. Hell, use all your Helper Bots for Stocking for all I care… it will make sure your Shoppe is always up and running, as long as you make sure to always fuel your bots.

FLAME THROWER HELPER BOTS

After players upgrade their Town to level 3 and upgrade their Blacksmith to tier-3 they will have access to the Helper Bots Flamethrower Upgrade, which can also be bought from Chris.

The Helper Bots Flamethrower Upgrade is by far one of the best upgrade players can get and will make the use of Gather Helper Bots more useful as it will essentially allow all Helper Bots to kill a thief that is running away with inventory.

I should be noted that the Helper Bots Flamethrower Upgrade still have their problems as unfortunately for Helper Bots to actually be able to use their Flamethrower, the thief must pass the vicinity of the Helper Bot.

In many cases a Helper Bot will simply not pass a thief and due to the fact that Helper Bots won’t seek out thieves on their own, players will still have to rely on the use of a Zapper MK II which may result in the loss of inventory simply because the item was not picked up by the player before the item despawns.

As mentioned earlier, while Gathering Helper Bots have the chance of picking up an item that was dropped on the floor by a thief that was killed in store, there is also a fairly large chance that the Gathering Helper Bot will completely ignore the dropped item resulting in lost inventory.

*sigh* Do we see a pattern with the usefulness/un-usefulness of Helper Bots? It seems like Shoppe Keep 2 still has some frustrating kinks that need to be ironed out.

CONCLUSION

While Helper Bots are inevitably useful in many cases, there are a number of problems with them still.

They tend to be fairly pricy for a player who is still struggling to turn a profit in their store and they tend to… not do their job even when they are employed to do so.

Honestly, I will say that Helper Bots allow the player to adventure without the fear of having their store completely shut down, but due to the expensive cost and lack of efficiency, Helper Bots prove to a player very early on that they are not perfect.

Players will need to micromanage their Helper Bots every so often and will need to make alterations to their Shoppe regularly to ensure that their Helper Bots are doing things to the best of their ability and while this takes a bit of a time investment, I would still say that they are worth it.

But I’m curious, how do you feel about Helper Bots?

Do you think that there are more pros than cons for them? What kind of Helper Bots do you employ and do you find that there’s a best way to get them to do the things you need them to do? Let me know in the comments below!