Your list, sorted the way you actually walk the store

Merchants own their own aisles#

Each Merchant your squad shops at has its own ordered list of Aisle records — "Produce," "Dairy," "Frozen," whatever sections that specific store actually has. Aisles can be reordered (MOVE_AISLE_UP / MOVE_AISLE_DOWN) to match the physical path you walk through the store.

Rules connect items to aisles, per merchant#

A MissionItem — "milk," "eggs," whatever's on your squad's shared item list — doesn't belong to an aisle directly. Instead, a MerchantAisleRule says at this merchant, this item lives in this aisle, in this position. That indirection is what lets the same item ("coffee") sort near the front at one store and near the back at another, because the rule is scoped to the merchant, not the item.

Rules carry their own order too, so items within the same aisle still sort the way you'd expect to encounter them on the shelf.

What happens without a rule#

Not every item needs a rule at every merchant. An item with no rule for the merchant you've activated a mission at has no fixed position — Conduit doesn't block you from shopping, it leaves that item unplaced in your walking order until a rule exists. Add the rule once, from the merchant's ITEM_RULES section, and every future mission at that store benefits.

Related: Squads and Missions for how a mission picks a merchant, Data Model for how Aisle, Merchant, and MerchantAisleRule relate, or back to the documentation overview.