I've been using a system for collecting items (plushies and beanbags) that I thought it might be interesting to share. I've been able to add hundreds to my collection each day. Maybe this is well known already (I've been gone from Subeta for a while!) but it's complicated enough to not seem obvious to me. I won't link to external websites but you can find them pretty easily, or you can probably recreate their functions in spreadsheet software.

It only works on NPC shops, so if you have already collected almost everything in the NPC shop, it won't help. It's still manual buying with you needing to put effort in, so I can't imagine that it would be considered cheating/unfair/against any rules. It involves a bit of setup but I think it's useful! Especially since NPC shops are so cheap. They might not beat the User Shop price every single time, but overall you are spending only a few thousand sP on each item and you are buying a lot of them quickly.

I'll use plushies for this example.

First step is to go to your plushie collection and select "Show missing items." Highlight and copy all the items on each page and put them into a list. I also chose to alphabetize the list (searching online for a list alphabetizer) and delete any lines that don't have "plushie" in the name, but this is probably optional.

Next, search online for a way to compare lists. The one I'm using is very user-friendly and has a Venn diagram on it, but again, you can recreate this function in software or other sites.

Copy and paste your list of missing items into "List 1."

Next, open the NPC shop (Plushie Parlor). Highlight all the plushie names, then copy and paste this into "List 2." There will be extra information (the price and the number in stock) but this won't actually matter for what we're doing. Now compare the two lists. For the website with the Venn diagram, you can just click the number in the middle to see which items are on both lists. (This is represented as List 1 ∩ List 2, or the intersection of lists 1 and 2.)

Now you have a shopping list! Use control-F to search for each plushie name in the Plushie Parlor. For me, this takes at least 5 seconds per item, so I don't get that error for buying items too fast.

This isn't foolproof - some items will sell out before you can buy them. In that case, you can use Shop Search to buy them from a user's shop, or you can note them down for later. (I personally prefer to pay 70,000 sP from a user shop than need to remember a third list...) Today, I have 3632 plushies to buy in List 1; the Plushie Parlor in List 2 had 475 total items (although many of these are the prices, so probably about 160 plushies in stock). There were 74 items shared between the list, so 74 Plushie Parlor items I wanted to buy. Out of those 74, I think about 5 were sold out before I could buy them, so I bought them from user shops.

You also will need to do this shopping trip all at once, since otherwise the shop will restock and your list won't be accurate anymore. I spent 10-15 minutes on it today.

Now, you need to select the part of the Venn diagram that represents the items that are ONLY on List 1 (your plushies-needed list) but not on List 2 (the in-stock plushies list). (This is represented as List 1 - List 2.) For me, this is 3558 items, since I had just bought 74 plushies. Copy the new list and save that as your new "Plushies Needed" list. If you skipped any purchases because they were sold out, add them back to the new list.

I know it sounds complicated, but once you have this set up, it will take only a few minutes whenever you want to go on a spending spree at the NPC shop! Way easier than trying to cross-reference the items for sale versus your collection every single time.

It will probably become less useful over time as you collect more items, but that just means that it worked! :)

Whoa, thanks for this new method! This is much more efficient than hitting Account Search for everything or doing a bunch of searches in Subetalodge.

I've been using Subetalodge to keep track of which collection items I'm missing, but it can be difficult to track which ones are in the shop and which ones I have.

I'm not sure if you already know about this external site, but it's great for tracking collections and will make it easier to keep track of what you have and don't have.

I've been trying one page of my missing collection, then whatever's in the shop, and repeating that way so I can get recent lists. When I have time I will probably just compile a full list of missing items to make things much easier.

Thanks! I used to use SubetaLodge a while back, but not since I've returned.