Essentially, the idea is that this NPC buys materials that’d be considered valuable scrap and gives you money in return for it. Essentially another way for people to make money hauling in things for the Refugee Center/The Ranch. Probably the latter; IIRC, they actually have an NPC with the designation “Scrapper” there.
For convenience, I’ll post some exchange rates for materials such an NPC would trade:
Copper and Lead: $5.00 per 100 Units
Silver and Gold: $1 per unit ($100 per 100 units), Barter Values of $0.10 (per unit?)
Rebar: $75.00 per bar.
Batteries: $120 per 100 charges (literally more valuable than gold now)
Kevlar Plates: (now an Unobtainium like Superalloy, except a lot more useful) $10.00 per plate
Aluminum Bars: $5.00 per bar, Barter Value of $1.25
There’s probably other things such an NPC would accept, but this is enough for an example. Items this NPC would buy would have to meet two criteria:
Have many applications or be a vital/helpful resource (Batteries and Kevlar) or be valuable (Gold, Silver, Aluminum).
Not be super easy to get (so no Rags or Plastic Chunks, despite the fact you can use those in almost everything)
Thing is, most materials like these are going to be in massive supply once 95% of the population is dead and there’s more resources available than anyone could ever use.
Copper and gold would be good for electronics, but survivor groups won’t be interested in that until they actually can make electronics, so it probably wouldn’t actually have any value until 0.5-1 year in, and gold probably wouldn’t be worth nearly that much.
I can’t think of any good uses for silver.
Rebar is pretty much just steel, and in a readily available shape at that. If the giant railguns come into common usage as point defence they might gain some value, but not 75$.
Batteries would be decently valuable early on, but would decrease over time to nearly nothing once they have some solar panels going on.
Kevlar plates probably would be worth a fair bit, but they’d also be fairly common what with all the dead soldiers and abandoned bunkers, so I don’t know what to think.
Aluminum is pretty handy, it’s price should probably be a bit higher depending on the size of the bar.
Not actually sure how ingame dollars convert to real world values so my comments on value might be off, but the rest stands.
Eh. Read about Kevlar prices and remembered my huge stockpiles of stuff that I was hoping to trade for better things. Haven’t found any NPC traders, guess I won’t have any without static NPCs enabled, right?
A note on scarcity:
My assumption is that most survivors are going to try and avoid danger, not entering the zombie infested areas. This includes most NPCs you encounter in a shelter.
So even if certain materials are common, if you have to get them out of dangerous areas, they become effectively rare.
I would say have prices scale with the world loot slider. Not sure how easy it’d be to implement though. Certain prices such as those of vending machines should be fixed at pre-apocalypse prices. Also I’d like to see a system in place to trade wholesale with different survivor groups based on mass quantities of different supplies.
