Overview
A guide to which merchants give the best prices for different items in Prague and Golem City.
Prague
Generally, you’ll want to sell guns to Mikael, beers to Tars, and sell-only parts to the Tech Noir.
Tars, who lives two floors down from Jensen in room 21 of his apartment complex near Fountain Station, buys alcoholic drinks for twice the price of Mikael, and has a laser guide mod, a 4x Scope, two Praxis kits, as well as 2 boxes of 100 crafting parts for c500 each, but gives terrible prices for guns and ammo. If you handle all the side-quests you can and use proper gun-running techniques, you can earn the c20000 needed to acquire his Praxis kits well before leaving for Golem City, so I’d recommend it.
Mikael, who lives in room 301 of the 33 Hlavni Apartments towards Palisade Station near Praha Dovoz, buys guns and ammo from you for almost twice the price Tars does, and sells a Silencer and a Holosight mod and Gas and Frag grenades, but he doesn’t carry Praxis kits.
They generally buy sell-only items like Neuropozyne for the same price. And taking more than one item from their places will make them too ticked off to do further business with you or even hostile, so don’t do that. There is also a possible bug in the game where if you only sell to them, they give angry farewells, but if you bought anything during your last transaction, they give friendlier greetings.
At the Tech Noir, Costache will auto-trade Breach Software for reward packs in Breach mode. He sells a pack of 100 crafting parts, and buys alcohol for good prices; I think as good or better than Tars’. But he buys guns for as low as Tars does too, so don’t sell him any. He has better prices for some sell-onlys like Stem Processors than Mikael does, too.
AN IMPORTANT TIP ABOUT THE TECH NOIR: Costache automatically buys Breach software from you for 300 Credits each, and redeems them in Breach mode. But you can only get credits from the Breach software once, and then you can never redeem them for credits EVER again in ANY save. So make sure you save after EVERY time you talk to him.
Golem City
In the Golem City market, there are two merchants for selling items: Gallois and Entity. Gallois is like the Mikael of the city; it’s best to sell guns and ammo to him, and he has a few weapon upgrades like a silencer, but no laser sights. Entity’s place is like Golem City’s Tech Noir: she buys sell-only items for the best price, and she has a boatload of hacking software & 2 multitools, but that’s all she’s got.
Gun-Running Tips
An important tip for gun-running in general: taking more than one of a gun puts that gun’s ammo into your inventory and then deletes the extra copy, so don’t pick up a gun you already have with you until you’ve sold it to Mikael. But if you’re more interested in ammo then credits, by all means take guns you already own to bolster your ammunition stores. And if you accidentally equip a weapon you’re going to sell, make sure not to reload it. The few rounds already stuck in guns cannot be unloaded, only switched for other ammo, so don’t reload them. But since I don’t think they add to the buy price of the weapon, feel free to use up the ammo already in there, just as long as you don’t reload it.
If you’re feeling really industrious, you can switch the ammo in a gun for a different kind, sell all the original kind of ammo you have except for one round, then switch it back and sell the gun with one round in it.
Try not to sell all your Neuropozyne and keep a few bottles with you at all times, because as you can imagine it’s in high demand and not an easy thing to come by, and there will be several opportunities to give or trade them to NPCs. All the other sell-only items like Stem Processors have no such uses though, so sell them to Costache or Entity whenever you can.
Professional gun-runners will want to grab the extended inventory augs as soon as possible, unless they don’t mind spending the extra time running back and forth from downed enemies to merchants and back again because they don’t have the space for all the different kinds of guns. But I must admit, many thug-nests have largely homogenous sets of guns anyway, so the extra space might not do you much good early on.
Micro-Assembler
For those of you who own the Tactical DLC, the Micro-Assembler is an experimental Aug that is twice-upgradable and allows you to not only convert weapons and ammo into crafting parts, but reduces the crafting costs for weapon upgrades. If you have more than enough credits and want less time-consuming ways to reduce your inventory without wasting weapons, I’d recommend buying the Tactical Pack if you don’t already own it and activating the aug.
If you haven’t completed the Koller side-quest, please note that only activating the core Micro-Assembler aug will add to your overheat, and the upgrades therein will not, so if you still have 2 Praxis after getting the aug, buy both the upgrades. One should note that 150% Overheat has negligable ill effects on your rig; only on 200% and higher will your augs noticably malfunction. Also know that if you choose to deactivate an aug tree to decrease the overheat, completing Koller’s side-quest will make all your deactivated augs available again. So don’t be afraid to turn off that useless targeting aug; you’ll get it back eventually as long as you give Vaclav the calibrator.
For those of you with the Jensen Story DLC about investigating doctored footage from the bombing, I would highly recommend the Micro-Assembler aug. Because from what little of the DLC I’ve actually played, it doesn’t look like any merchants are available, so disassembling may be your only use for unneeded weapons apart from collecting ammo. The same goes for the GARM Facility.