When you deliver ‘food supplies’ to the Broker in the Refugee camp he says how much he’s giving you for them and … according to the definition of the effect ‘u_bulk_trade_accept’ … I should get the Free Merchant’s trading script to that value.
But I don’t get anything? I just traded a whole lot of vinegar to him and should have been given $45 worth of merch. 
Known bug; I need to fix it. In the meantime, just debug in the Merch and my apologies.
Eh, don’t worry. It sort of cancels out with the overly generous merchant bug.
Huh…
And here I thought the broker had figured out that I’m only dealing mutant jerky and dehydrated lettuce.
Nothing wrong with dehydrated lettuce. I make all my vegetable pies with dehydrated lettuce.
They’re like two slices of pastry surrounding empty air, but whatever.
So now I’ve gone and looked at this bug, and it’s happening because the broker is valuing a Merch at $0 and skipping out on the loop where he actually gives you Merch. The part where he skips giving you Merch is correct; what I can’t figure out is why he isn’t valuing Merch at all.
He must have realized that merch is just paper with some squiggles on it. It’s the same reason some nut jobs expect all fiat currencies to fail ‘any day now’.
To be fair to nutjobs, if people stop believing that piece of paper with squiggles on it is valuable, any such currency reallly could collapse overnight. But it generally requires some sort of catastrophic event that shakes people’s faith in the continued solvency of the issuing body.
You’d think.
So when I created the cool new talker infrastructure that will eventually let you have conversations with your car, your intelligent magic sword, and random bits of terrain, I forgot hook all the connections for the value() from the npc class up through talker_npc. Thus, talker was returning the default value of 0.
Fix submitted: https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/46117