No shops after the Black Market

Verified against the spelunky.ai port v0.1.13 on 29 October 2026.

From level 2 on, each level rolls for a Shopkeeper's shop, with a chance of 2 in its level's number (Shops). The Black Market, found through a hidden door in the Jungle, is a level of shops. But once it has been made, the roll never succeeds again: every level after it, to the end of the game, has no shop.

On seed 9, the player finds the Black Market on level 6. On level 8, two levels on, the shop roll passes and the level's top-left room is beside the path, where a shop could stand. The player walks left along the top row until that room fills the left of the view: it's an ordinary Jungle room, and the level has no Shopkeeper ^[1].

The shop roll is one line of the level generator, run for every level:

// shop
if (rand(1,global.currLevel) <= 2 and global.currLevel > 1 and not global.madeBlackMarket)
{

madeBlackMarket is set by the Black Market's own level, which then returns before it gets to this line ^[2]. Only a new game clears it ^[3]. So the check never applies to the market's level. Its only effect is on the levels after it, the rest of the Jungle, the Ice Caves and the Temple: their rolls are still drawn, but they never make a shop ^[4]. It may be by design, a market that's the game's last shop, but nothing in the code says so.

Find the Black Market (the hidden door on level 5, 6 or 7: Black Market) and play on: no later level has a shop. It happens in every game that finds the market. The clip's replay goes through seed 9's market on level 6 and into level 8, whose shop roll passes, and walks the top row to the room beside the path. No Shopkeeper is made on the level ^[5]. Two longer runs show the same on other levels: level 7 of seed 9's City of Gold run, whose roll is 1 and whose top-left room is beside the path ^[6], and level 8 of the run the clip's replay starts from ^[7].

The spelunky.ai port reproduces it exactly: it's in docs/quirks.md's list of the 1.1 source's bugs ^[4], and the oracle's fingerprint of the clip's replay pins its run, whose story checks that level 8 makes no Shopkeeper. No option turns it off.