Stealing from merchants

[Hypnophobia]

Is there a mod that puts everything a merchant has for sale in a chest or something, so that it can be stolen?

[BlackCompany]

There are a couple of mods which move the vanilla merchant chests into the shops so you can steal from them. They might suffice. However, I would caution you on using these for one reason:

 

Each chest is what the game considers a "persistent reference." The location of this sort of reference is stored in your saved game. Thus, when you use any mod which moves any persistent reference, you are stuck using that mod permanently, so as long as you use this character. If you try to uninstall the mod or remove it from your load order, the location of the references will change back to their vanilla locations in game, but NOT in your saved game information.

 

This generally causes crashes to desktop on loading saved games which were made using the mod after the mod is removed. There are mod authors who have found ways around this, and they are very skilled at making sure this sort of thing does not crash your game if you uninstall your mod. Better Cities comes to mind here, as do a few others. For the most part, however, I recommend avoiding mods which move vanilla persistence references, unless you are comfortable with the fact that they become permanent fixtures in your game.

 

Hope this helps.

[David Brasher]

If you wanted to make or doctor a mod so that it would work without the problem that BlackCompany describes, you can have the mod disable the chests under the floor and add duplicate chests inside the shops where thieves can get to them. You don't need to change the settings for which chest is the vendor chest for a particular merchant, because those settings serve no function with an indoor stationary merchant who owns a shop and only does business while there. You can stick any item or container anywhere in the shop cell owned by the merchant, and as long as ownership of the container or item is not set to anyone, or is set to the merchant, then the merchant will offer it for sale.

 

When the mod was deactivated, I do not think it would still be disabling the vendor chests.

 

I haven't tested this approach on this particular modding challenge, but this is my understanding of how it works.