This is a bit of a weird one. I wanted to trade a butcher knife to a random NPC for some moonshine (I have spare), but it doesn’t show up on my inventory list. What sort of NPC wouldn’t want a butcher knife? Does he have knife phobia or something?
I mean, he REALLY wanted my glaive earlier but he’s too good for a knife?
[EDIT] P.S. I just checked and it only has a barter value of $0.50, so I wouldn’t have been able to afford the moonshine anyway. Seems severely undervalued to me. Although the problem (one of the problems) with the barter system is that a knife when you don’t have one should be worth a lot, but a knife when you do have one, two, or a dozen, should be worth much less.
there’s a list of flagged items that a trader will generally avoid (usually because its harmful to them in some way… like trying to trade them an active grenade) but the butchers knife isn’t on that list.
also yeah some sort of economy system would be neat, but someone has to code it in first… and then they’d probably have to tie in the current disposition system for the npc liking you or not (more likely to give you discounts), all of that tied to your current stats somehow… etc etc etc.
Some of the items on that list make more sense than the others, but I guess there’s a reason for them. Like, why do they not want a chicken cage? Maybe because it might have a chicken in it and that confuses the game?
Quick question, though. If an item is ‘trader_avoid’ does it not show up on your trading inventory list, or do they just refuse to buy them?
Edit: using an ‘on’ mp3 player as a test and spawning in an npc (he was very aggressive… but my superman’s muscles insisted he trade with me), i can confirm it just doesnt show up in the list of items. if you cant trade it it wont show up. also, be careful of what you trade because your equipped items show up as well.
Things that the NPC does not want to trade do not show up in the trading lists at all.
A cheap knife is below the threshold of things that the NPC wants to buy.
And in general, the price of goods, post-Cataclysm, is pretty low. There’s an enormous supply waiting to be scavenged, and a very small demand from the few remaining survivors. Even guns are only supposed to sell for $30-50 dollars, so something like a butcher knife which can be picked up by scavenging a backwoods cabin is going to be really cheap.
A. Enough moonshine to get blind drunk for a couple of days (and possibly just get blind)
B. A butcher’s knife suitable for melee in a pinch and turning furry critters into food.
Eve economy when? Where you can ally with a faction and maybe ambush another factions trade caravan going from one of their settlements to the next, creating a slight shortage on those items increasing their prices in the region : p
Edit: Settlements not having different mats gives different penalties and they actively go and either trade or search for and establish production of those mats. You have a couple of iron mines in the region and have a monopoly on iron, but another faction finds another deposit and builds and iron mine, lowering the price of it some - You attack the shipments of iron to their settlement so not only can they not sell it, but they run out and their weapons start losing durability and so stats, making it then possible to attack and take over their iron mine so you can keep your monopoly.
Their equipment continues getting worse down to maybe a cap of 25% so you’re then able to either attack and take their settlement too, ransom it back to a faction, ask for more favorable trading terms or generally impose your demands.
That does make me wonder: Why are their so many bandits? It would seem to me to be a lot easier to just scavenge any building you could find instead of trying to seek out those rare survivors. It would be a lot safer to given that if you are halfway decent at fighting and in a group it would be a lot easier to just take on some mutated monstrosities instead of armed humans (on account of guns and the orders of magnitude difference in intelligence).
Survivor with a gun or any other type of weapon would be much more dangerous than the zombies. (The fact that the zombies and mutants exist means that most people still alive are almost certainly armed and have plenty of experience fighting.)
you say that, and yet i find very few npc’s, most of which are in very dangerous situations when i find them and likely to get killed without player intervention
… heck some of em die anyway even if you do save them, and some of them die REALLY stupidly even if you try your best to keep them alive.
Well, that’s the difference between what the game actually does and what you would expect in ‘reality’.
Every wandering single survivor would end up like the player’s PC. Either dead in short order, or well armed and well prepared.
Unfortunately, I don’t think adding mobile death fortresses of NPC protection (or whatever) is viable without a suitably high functioning AI. With practical levels of NPC ‘intelligence’ in the game you’d just be giving stuff away to the player.
all the more reason that a small group of well armed bandit assassins would go after one singular -VERY- well armed survivor… kill him, take his stuff, live easy for a while.
Any targets that are worthwile are probably either very competent (survivalist, former soldier) and thus one of the most dangous creature walking the wasteland or they are a larger group that is well-stocked and armed. Then again most of the bandits might just be scavengers most of the time that just happen to oppertunistically pick on lone or very small groups of survivors.
