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Vendor cash and Devious Followers


Lupine00

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Somebody on the DF forum asked if it's a good idea to change the vendor cash limits.

 

As this was such a good question, I decided to make the answer into a blog post...

 

 

I would't expect it's necessary unless you want to make things much easier, or you had some mod reducing it that you want to override.

 

I'd generally advise not changing vendor reserves, and adjusting your game around the defaults, as otherwise you have too many things to adjust and it can become a constant circle of tweaks.

 

 

The gold limit forces you to do things like go to one town one day and a different town the next; to maximize how you use traders generally; to encourage spending precious perk points on otherwise useless speech perks; and to limit where you can buy out of slavery.

 

The default costs are set up with some awareness of vendor gold limitations, and the bother you need to go through to overcome that.

 

 

It's impossible for a default config to ever be perfect though. The new DF config is more workable than the old system, but it's not going to work for every game.

 

Some games will be cash poor, others will suffer more or less mid-game cash explosion, and may (or may not) suffer a serious slow-down in cash increase-rate in late game; so while you might be making more cash each level, the rate at which that changes is usually slow, then fast, then slow again, over a hundred level progression.

 

So, you can change your daily cost config in DF more easily than you can change vendor reserves, and you can adjust the curve on that.

Everything scales together (almost) so you can adjust the level one and level 101 costs and maybe the curve, and not have to worry about the other values.

That said, I recommend using some amount of Chaos Mode, as it adds considerable spice. Not all the values need to vary.

 


Personally, with the default vendor limits, I've rarely been in a situation where I couldn't vend everything over a couple of days, if I took the trouble to travel around enough ... but ... I'm limited in what I can carry.

 

But... If you aren't using any encumbrance mods, and have vanilla loot levels, you might be carrying a whole lot of loot that feels hard to get rid of.

 

I think in most cases you can still do it, but there are some things that have sale values above most vendor's base cash pool and you can't move them early-game unless you want to lose a lot on their value.

 

e.g. expensive enchanted armor or weapons that are valued well over 1000 even on resale.

 

That is a "feature" of vanilla, and it remains. Personally, I sell those items well below their "true" value and simple get whatever the vendor caps out on, because that's usually better than just letting them sit around unsold. If you don't do that, sometimes expensive items can end up sitting in a chest for a while before you can move them, but it's also good to have those "rainy day" items around for times when you might not be able to adventure because of hazards you introduce in your game.

 

 

A way to increase cash flow, but avoid raising vendor caps is to simply add more vendors. As there are various mods that add just one vendor, or vendors without big cash pools, you can exercise a lot of fine control that way, and balance out towns that otherwise seem lacking in vendor availability too. This has the benefit of giving you more reason to go to places. In vanilla, some towns are places you go, do some quests, and then avoid for the rest of the game.

 

One particular optional vendor, the Dollmaker in DCL, is a massive exploit, as she carries a huge cash reserve, and if you have the speech perk to sell anything to anyone, you can exploit it to sell her armor, weapons, scrolls, gems ... and so on ... I generally consider selling to the Dollmaker "cheating", but she hasn't been in my game for a long time now, and probably won't return until a new DCL content release if that ever happens.

 

 

As well as encumbrance mods to limit what I you carry, I would guess many people reduce their overall loot availability to some extent through scarcity mods. There are numerous scarcity mods. Some focus on gold in particular, while others will reduce gems, jewellery, or armor and weapons.

 

For a long time I played with patch of my own that reduced the base value of armor and weapons significantly, as well as sorting out a lot of modded items with crazy values (which it blocked from sale completely). I think that SLS nerfing my vendor exchange rates removed the need for that. I get a pittance for most items now, so vendor limits can actually be hard for me to hit.

 

 

There are so many ways to go at this, and changing vendor caps is probably the least preferable for me, but I don't think that choice is objective; it's a highly subjective choice and depends on how you're modding your game. For another player it might be the best choice. Up to you.

 

What I do recommend, is that you limit how many things you change. If you change everything at once, it becomes a shapeless mess. Pick one thing and adjust that until it works: DF costs, loot scarcity, vendor caps, vendor availability, vendor exchange rates, encumbrance limits, speech mechanics, taxes, food expenses, etc. It's best to do one thing at a time and see how that works before adjusting something else.

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