[LE] Adding custom items to existing merchants

[DataNalle]

I have a few spell tomes I made that I would like an existing merchant (Phinis Gestor) to sell. I've read that it's not good practice to simply edit the existing merchant chest as it would override other mod's changes to this chest if they were loaded before my mod. As such I've been trying to add a custom merchant chest and make the merchant use two chests instead of one. So far nothing has worked. I've been actively Googling and found two ways to do this but neither worked:

 

1. Create a custom chest, add in a leveled item list, and make the merchant the owner.

 

2. Do the above, then create a custom vendor faction with the custom chest being the container, and add the new faction to the merchant NPC's faction list.

 

I also came across these functions:

http://www.creationkit.com/AddForm_-_FormList

http://www.creationkit.com/AddForm_-_LeveledItem

 

But the latter seems not to work as this person noticed in the talk page:

I am still observing an issue where forms added to a LeveledItem through script are not showing up in an NPC's inventory / vendor menu. The problem seems easiest to reproduce when loading autosaves.

I'm stuck. I just want Phinis Gestor to sell my two spell tomes so the players don't have to use console to add the spells.

[NemesisTheWarlock]

Have you considered doing it as a mini quest and just adding the items directly to the chest for the quest?

[DataNalle]

Have you considered doing it as a mini quest and just adding the items directly to the chest for the quest?

I'd rather not do it like that. You'd imagine it would easy to do something like this but I guess not?

[NemesisTheWarlock]

In my experience with the Creation Kit/Scripting, it never is! It should be easy as you say, but then I was trying for ages to spawn a chest and add and remove items from it until I eventually discovered it was just about impossible. I think what you're trying to do should be possible though, I'll have a think and, if I come up with anything I'll let you know :)

[NemesisTheWarlock]

I think that the best way forward for you is to try dynamically adding the new tomes to the "all conjuration" levelled lists such as LitemSpellTomes25AllConjuration etc. in game using a run once script as part of a quest that fires at the beginning of the game. I know it's not exactly what you had in mind, but it's probably the best solution as, on investigation, the multiple chest idea won't work, he'd either have his standard chest OR the new one you created, vendor's can only have one. Otherwise you can add your list to the MerchantWCollegePhinisChest, but I expect the previous solution is better as it will avoid conflicting with other mods and only Phinis uses those lists as I recall.

[icecreamassassin]

yeah I'm having this issue as well, but I want to add a one time purchase item to the merchant. I've gone so far as to create a custom chest, vendor faction using the chest and trying a complicated (to me) script to associate the actor as a reference and add the actor to the faction but it doesn't seem to work at all. Why the hell did Bethesda make this so freaking complex? I mean you literally just drop crap into a merchants cell in oblivion and if he owned the cell he would sell the item if he dealt in that item, so infuriating.

[icecreamassassin]

So I finally figured it out! Here's a little tutorial I wrote up which I am posting in several places, because this was truly a pain in the butt to discover:

 

How to add items to a merchant so they will sell them

Item will appear randomly in their sell list, sometimes not, just like all items, and will respawn as well. This is not the solution for unique items at merchants, although subsequent quest stages can be coded to remove the item from their inventory. Please note that this sets the item for all merchants which sell that type of item

 

1. Create a new quest that is “Start Game enabled” if you want the item to be available right from the start, or create a quest where at a certain stage, the item will become available.
2. Place the following code in the quest stage papyrus fragment:

 

LEVELEDITEMLIST.AddForm(ITEMNAME, #, #)

Ex: LItemMiscVendorMiscItems75.AddForm(DBM_PaintingItem, 1, 1)

LEVELEDITEMLIST is the name of the item list which your item would fall into, my example is the misc category because my item is a misc item. The ITEMNAME needs to be the editor ID of your item. The first # is the quantity of the item you want to be made available when the merchant has it available to sell. The second number is the minimum character level that the item will be picked from the list (so if you set it to 20 and you are only level 15, the item will not ever be sold until you reach level 20)

 

1. Choose “Properties” tab and select “Add Property” from the drop down menu select LeveledItem and enter the editor ID of the leveled item list you want your item to go into
2. Add another property and choose the Item type for your item in the drop down menu, for mine is was MiscObject, and axe would be Weapon and a potion would be Potion, etc… enter the actual Editor ID for your item

 

If you wish to no longer have the item appear you can use the reverse of the code you made and instead of AddForm, use RemoveForm. You can apply this to another quest stage if you like, or even attach it to your object in a script with the added to inventory event parameter.

[bluemarvin]

I'm revitalizing this thread because I'm running into this problem, but the above solution won't work for me.

 

I want to add a custom item to Belethor's inventory that shows up at a certain point in the question, but I don't want to interfere with other mods.

 

If I just add the item to his chest, it shows up.

 

Now, I took these steps:

 

1. Duplicated his chest, called it something new.

2. Deleted all the items from the duplicated chest, added my item.

3. Created a new faction by duplicating Belethor's vendor faction, called it something new.

4. Changed faction to point to my duplicated chest with the one item.

5. Verified the new faction vendor settings with respect to store hours, location, etc.

 

At this point I cheated just to try and verify this works, and added the new faction to Belethor directly via the CK.

 

Loaded a save, went to his shop. Does not work.

 

I've double-checked every possible setting. I even tried to add Belethor to the new vendor faction through the quest. The item will NOT show up no matter what I do.

All settings in my new faction match the vanilla vendor faction for Belethor, except the vendor chest, which points to my chest.

 

All settings for my new chest matches the vanilla vendor chest, except the name and what it contains.

 

Any help/thoughts about what I may be missing is greatly appreciated.

[bluemarvin]

Bump for desperation.

[BigBizkit]

That would mean Belethor is in two Vendor factions, linked to two different containers. I seriously doubt that can work.