If you’ve been playing Metaphor: ReFantazio, like me, you’ve probably been trying to stay frugal while you bid for democratically-elected place in the monarchy. It can be a little hard, even if you shop on Idlesday, given your funds will be spread between items, armour, blessings, and appraisals.

Short of starting a lemonade stand in Grand Trad, I actually stumbled (alongside a lot of other savvy adventurers, mind) into an easy money-making scheme during the early game. And by early game, I mean the first couple of dozen hours—this is an Atlus RPG, after all, everything’s relative.

I’m talking, of course, about the Merchant archetype. You unlock this bad boy by getting your Wisdom to level 2 and bonding with Brigitta, who you unlock as a follower after completing “A Bullish Embargo”, which is an optional dungeon that’s given to you around the same time as the first major one in the city.

If you’re anything like me, you’d have seen this Archetype and gone “pshh, hogwash, a class that uses money to attack? Useless!” Okay, you might not have said hogwash, but the Merchant is absolutely easy to underestimate. What makes this thing sing is its hero passive, Alchemy.

The passive reads: “Chance of winning a small sum of money each time an enemy is stunned or defeated in overworld combat.” Big whoop, one might think—only, the “chance” bit is sort of a lie. If you’re of a high enough level to instagib a mook in overworld combat, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get a bounty of 500 reeve.

This doesn’t seem like a lot at first blush, but keep in mind that doing so only takes a second. So if you go to a place with enough enemies, farming up thousands in fat stacks doesn’t take that long at all. I marched my merry butt along to the Tradia Desert to tidy up the “Man’s Not-So Best Friend” bounty, which had been collecting dust in my log, and got to whacking.

There are a couple of reasons why this place is great for exploiting this passive—it’s flush both with sandworms and packs of roving dogs, making it a target-rich environment for your deadly money maker. Moreover, if you use the handily-placed cat in the heart of the desert, you can bamf back to the entrance, run inside, and enjoy all of the respawned cash pinatas.

I was able to do about five runs and make around 140k reeve in the span of 20 minutes before I got bored—but if you’re a determined JRPG fan you’ve probably spent longer grinding.

Granted, this isn’t mandatory by any means—Metaphor: ReFantazio gives you plenty of dough to be getting on with. The real advantage of this farm is how cheap it is in terms of time. You can rinse and repeat the Tradia Desert, devastating the local ecosystem, repeatedly, all in the span of one “Day”. Tie it in with finishing up the bounty anyway, and you’ve just turned a crummy, low-rank quest reward into the most time efficient payday you’ve ever had.

The only hiccup is that you need to be a high enough level to slap these worms and dogs around willy-nilly. To kill monsters in overworld combat, your party needs to be three levels higher or more than them—most enemies in the desert are around level 11, so you’ll need to be level 14-15 before you go make bank. There’s also a high-level bird to watch out for. Still, by the time you unlock the Merchant you’re bound to be set in that regard.

It’s a good trick to have in your pocket, as it lets you turn low-level sidequest clean-ups from inefficient chores to excellent investment opportunities—overleveled for an area Put on your merchant hat and get more bang for your buck.

Metaphor: ReFantazio is a game all about making the best of your time—which was a little intimidating for me at first, but I’m enjoying stumbling into these petit optimisations. If you want to learn a few more, Lewis Parker’s cobbled together 10 handy tips for us Atlus greenhorns.