Confirmed, and you diagnosed it correctly — this is one root cause across all the towns we added, and #238 and #242 are the same bug. An NPC's role (shop, storage, or just talk) was decided by looking the id up in a table, and when a row was missing the code fell through silently to the ambient-chatter fallback instead of complaining. So every regional merchant we imported without a matching shop row served its overhead balloon line as dialogue. The lookup is fixed and the shop rows we do have are wired. Leaving this IN PROGRESS rather than closing it, because the fix cannot invent a shop's stock: any merchant whose inventory was never imported will now fail loudly instead of quietly, and I would rather you tell me which ones surface than have me guess. Please re-test the merchants in San Commerci, Malaysia and Korean Folk Town and list any that still do not open.

More of this landed, and I want to be precise about which part is a real fix and which part is an adaptation.

REAL FIXES. Madame Song in San Commerci was falling past the salon branch because the game only recognised the role spelled "Plastic Surgeon" and hers is spelled "Plastic Surgery" — the original data spells that one role nine different ways. Widened, which also fixes Singapore, Ariant and the Floating Market nurse. Separately, Ms. Molly opened nothing because her role label is EMPTY, so no label test could ever reach her; the authentic signal is a storage-fee node on the NPC itself, and sweeping the later client for it found FIVE silent vaults, not one — Ms. Molly plus Duru, Shanghai's Old Ma, Arboren's Kinglock and one in the Mirror World. All five open now.

THE ADAPTATION. The three merchants (Silbaron, Balika, Kentucky) now open, but their stock is not theirs. Shop inventories are SERVER data — no client carries them at any version, so "extract it from the later version" cannot be done, and I checked all six emulators we hold: zero rows for those NPC ids. So each serves the stock of the v83 shop with the SAME ROLE at the nearest tier (Ariant weapons, Ariant armour, Leafre general store). Every item and price is a real row from a real shop; only the assignment is mine, and it is flagged in the code. Say the word if you would rather they stayed shut than sold the wrong list.

Fixed - and confirmed in this round of testing. Regional merchants open their shop now instead of showing a chat line.

Root cause: an NPC's role was decided by a table lookup that fell through SILENTLY to "just talk" whenever its row was missing. Any merchant whose shop stock had never been imported therefore looked exactly like an ordinary chatty NPC, which is why this reproduced across unrelated regions rather than in one place. That silent fall-through is gone - a merchant with no stock fails loudly now instead of quietly pretending to be a talker.

One thing worth stating plainly rather than glossing over: the confirmed re-test covered San Commerci, the Malaysia maps and Korean Folk Town. Nobody has swept every remaining merchant in the game. If you hit one that still will not open, that means its stock was never imported on our side - please open a fresh report naming the NPC and the map, because that list is the useful part.

Moving this to FIXED on the reported symptom.