Master Trader – Merchants Never Run Out Of Gold
Merchants never run out of gold even if they only have a maximum of 6500 gold (lower for most types of merchants). How is this possible? Simple, I reset the merchants’ gold whenever you ask them to barter with you. Now you can spend your time killing dragons and bandits instead of traveling around Tamriel just to sell your loot…
Notice
I’ve rewritten the whole mod for Skyrim Special Edition and removed many of the limitations and downfalls. I’m pretty sure it will run with the original Skyrim game so if you want to try a much better version of this mod, you can check Master Trader SE – Merchants Never Run Out Of Gold
True story…
One day, I came out from a bloody dungeon with barely any strength left. My bags were filled at capacity, I even had to drop some valuable loot to be able to travel safely to the nearest city. When I arrived in Whiterun, I visited Adrianne Avenicci to sell my treasures. After a couple items, she ran out of gold so I had to visit Ulfberth War-Bear next. Then, I went to Belethor, Arcadia, Elrindir, Eorlund Gray-Mane and finally Farengar Secret-Fire. The town’s merchants litteraly ran out of gold. So I decided to visit Solitude’s merchants then Riften’s to sell what remained of my treasures. It took me over a week to sell everything.
So what! That’s a common tale, I hear you say? What does it have to do with us?
Let me enlighten you and let us rejoice in the glory of the Nines as our prayers have been heard! As of this very moment, all merchants across Tamriel and beyond have been granted an infinite amount of gold!
Ahhhhh! But there are other mods that give merchants a ton of gold you replied to me.
Oh no! Noooooooo young one! No mod does what mine does… Simply adding gold to a merchant merely delays your misery, wouldn’t it be much better if merchants never run out of gold instead? Let that sink in for a moment… NEVER RUN OUT OF GOLD…
I can hear you asking yourselves if your first born will be enough? Fret not brothers and sisters as this one is granted for free, we’re of Dovahkin blood, we’re family. Just help this humble prophet spread the word so all our brothers and sisters can see the light!
So what this mod does?
— Master Trader (perk) —
Every merchant in the world open up their trade route to you. This guarantee they’ll have at least 5 times their basic gold on hand to barter with you and they’ll never run out of gold.
— In simple words —
It modifies the barter dialogue so every time you select “What have you got for sale?”, it adds 5 times the basic amount of gold to the merchant if you have the Master Trader perk. That means that even when the merchant has 0 gold left, all you have to do is exit the barter menu and select the dialogue option again to get a fresh amount of gold. Thus, gold is unlimited.
— Limitations —
I use the Master Trader perk, you need to invest yourself to get some goodies. It’s obvious you can’t just give that awesome time saver to everyone that starts a game.
“Unlimited gold” doesn’t mean you’ll be able to sell a sword for 25K. To address the gold problem, all the mods I’ve seen go in the same way: they add a lot of gold to merchants. The unfortunate effect is you can sell 1 item for a disproportionate amount of gold. My mod address this problem by limiting the total amount of gold available, but replenish the merchant’s gold to avoid waiting the usual 2 days or the need to find another merchant. You thus get unlimited gold without getting an “unlimited price” for 1 item.
To be more realistic, the gold added is proportional to the merchant type. For example, a city blacksmith has 1000 gold, so with Master Trader he will have an extra 5000 to spare, which brings it to a total of 6000 gold. On the other hand, a street vendor has 50 gold, so he will have an extra 250 gold which brings it to a total of 300 gold.
To avoid messing with leveled list, I changed the gold from the vanilla Master Trader perk from 1000 to 50 instead of just removing it. An extra 1000 gold was balanced for a blacksmith, but it was out of proportion for a street vendor who had 50 gold to begin with. Since an extra 50 gold won’t unbalance a street vendor, I think it’s a good compromise to avoid compatibility problems.
This mod doesn’t affect directly the merchant’s “barter” gold, only the gold “on” the merchant. This one is a bit complicated. Merchant don’t usually have gold “on” them, the gold you see when you barter with them is hidden in their trading chest just like a sword would. This “barter” gold is thus not “on” the merchant and is governed by the laws of leveled list by the game. This means that “barter” gold cannot be tempered with directly, at least not in a live fashion. To circumvent this problem, this mod adds gold directly “on” the merchant before the barter menu appears which has the effect of adding temporarily the gold “on” the merchant to the “barter” gold. To avoid exploits, the mod removes the gold “on” the merchant as soon as you quit the barter menu. So even if you kill the merchant, you won’t find the gold on the corpse. You also can’t exploit the “replenished” gold by selecting “What have you got for sale?” 5 times in a row and expect 5 times the extra gold.
Investments and the leveled gold from the vanilla Master Trader perk are part of the “barter” gold. Thus, they will have no effect on the gold added “on” the merchant. Including those would unbalance merchants’ gold unnecessarily and would require a much more complex solution.
The gold “on” a merchant will never be greater than 20k. Technically speaking, it’s impossible for a vanilla merchant to have 20K “on” him/her/it. The only way this could ever happen is if a mod introduces a custom merchant with gold “on” himself. In that case, this mod caps the gold to 20K to avoid the “merchant gold bug” where the gold get “stuck” at 30k something and you receive nothing for things you sell. I chose the 20k value because I didn’t want to get in the way of other mods too much. Normally, you’ll never get near that amount of gold “on” a merchant.
A merchant that doesn’t use the standard dialogue to barter with you will not benefit from this mod. You could ask the author to add the functionality to his mod or do it yourself. I include the sources for that reason. Normally, it should work out of the box as modders don’t tend to stray too far when it comes to this aspect of the game.
— Gold formula —
“Barter” gold = Basic gold + New Master Trader gold + Investment gold + Vanilla Modified Master Trader gold
“Basic gold” depends on the type of merchants.
1000 -> City blacksmith or fence
750 –> General goods or some of Riften’s street vendors
500 –> Apothecary, spell vendor or town blacksmith
400 –> Orc blacksmith
100 –> Innkeeper
50 —> Hunter, jeweler, peddler or street vendor
“New Master Trader gold” is 5 times the “basic gold”.
“Investment gold” is 500 if you invested in the merchant or 0 if you didn’t.
“Vanilla Modified Master Trader gold” is always 50.
Installation, requirements and compatibility
— Requirements —
Latest version of Skyrim
— Install (auto) —
For an automatic install without risk of errors, I suggest you use the NexusModManager.
— Install (manual) —
For a manual install, extract the files from this mod and copy them to the appropriate folders.
— Compatibility —
Compatible with everything that doesn’t modify the “barter” dialogue branch. To my knowledge, only Vendor Sale Delay – GONE does that.
Compatible with mods that modifies the Master Trader perk as long as you load my mod first. The only downside to having such a mod is the Master Trader description in the perk screen won’t be the one from my mod. It’s only aesthetic, my mod will be perfectly fine.
Compatible with mods that add gold to merchants, but the gold added/replenished by Master Trader won’t change, nor does the 20k limit.
F.A.Q.
— Known issues —
It seems that all merchants enthralled by Miraak to build pillars in Solstheim simply don’t work. The problem isn’t easy to fix as they’re not considered by the game as NPC, at least not by the console or the Papyrus engine. Since they’re not NPCs, I can’t resplenish their gold. Fixing this would mean changing a couple things in the Dragonborn’s main quest… Let’s just say I wouldn’t dare try to touch this with a ten foot pole, so I don’t plan on fixing this. In any case, you can still find merchants in Solstheim that weren’t enthralled and work flawlessly, use those instead.
— Do you use scripts? —
There seems to be a lot of FUD about scripts so let me explain a couple things. Scripts are part of the game, without them vanilla Skyrim wouldn’t work at all. All vendors and trainers are purely scripted. Most of the quests wouldn’t work without scripts and there must be countless other scripted things in that game I never thought about. Scripts aren’t inherently bad, inexperienced mod authors are. Because mod authors used badly explained functions in the past, which is the Creation Kit wiki’s fault, scripts have been pointed as the cause for all the problems in the world… Like most things in life, clueless people will mess things up, but those that do know how to work with them can do wonders. As a professional programmer myself, I make sure to the best of my knowledge that all my scripts won’t cause you any trouble. I also make sure they are upgradable and can be stopped at anytime.
With that said, yes there are scripts in my mod. In fact, the game is made in a way where the barter menu is always called by script so I kinda had no choice. Those scripts cannot mess your game and are extremely fast to execute. I also packaged the sources in case you want to look at them and decide for yourself. Stop worrying your world’s gonna implode and enjoy the mod.
— Any future plans? —
I’ll fix problems (if any), offer support and answer questions when needed.
