When do merchant inventories refresh?

If I haven't said it before, a thousand "thank yous" to the Circle of Eight for keeping TOEE alive. This is the single single-player party-based AD&D game ever made, bar none.

Now, to my question...

I'm playing TOEE 6.0.1 NC, and I was wondering when merchants' inventories get refreshed, removing the items you just sold to them. Now that Brother Smythe has made masterwork items available for sale to me, I frequently find that I am trying to sell him more suits of goblin leather armour and hobgoblin longswords than he has room for.

A similar thing happens with Otis's assistant in Nulb, too.

Do I need to rest for 24 hours? Does the resting have to occur at an inn in the same town as the merchant? I've gone back and forth between Hommlet and Nulb several times, yet I'm having a hard time pinning down the correlation.

... and while we're on the subject, what causes different merchants to value the same item differently? Brother Smythe will pay me twice what those scalawags Ranos and Gremag will pay me for a longsword in suitable condition.

 

Not sure on the time for merchant stock to refresh, someone else will have to answer that.

But as to the selling prices, different merchants have niche products that they buy for more. It is usually tied to what they sell, so you get better prices for leather goods from the leatherworker, metal arms and armor from Smythe, wood weapons sell for more at the cabinet maker, etc. IIRC, Rannos and Gremag buy everything for the lowball price, just because they suck. oke:

 

There are so much gold in the game that you do not need to sell normal gear to the any traders. Sell gems to the jeweller, magic to the church and masterwork and magic weapon and armor to the blacksmith.

Not sure about restocking but it seems to be once a week or so, at least for mother schreng and bazar of the bizarre takes at least a week it seems.

 

Not 100%, but pretty sure I saw on these forums that merchants refresh after 24 hours.

 

Thanks for the responses. I wa hoping someone from COO8 with intimate knowledge of the code might come along and share the internal workings of the merchant setups. If I figure anything else out by trial-and-error, I will let you all know.

I noticed the difference when merchants gained "assistants" that buy and sell for them; Burne, Otis, and even Mother Screng have them now. Does this imply that all three of those NPC's might, at some point, join your adventuring party? I know Otis will.

I also tested out the suggestions in Dreddnawt's post, and it sure makes a big difference. After I gave Zaxis a magical chain shirt to wear instead of his magic leather armour, I sold it off to Jakk Borton and the price he gave me over Brother Smythe was substantial to say the least.

This doesn't sound like we're playing the same game. Especially early on, I needed a lot of money to finance my purchases, and got quite a bit of it from selling hobgoblin longswords to Brother Smythe...

Now, I have a seventh-level cleric and a seventh-level wizard, plus an eighth-level thief with a high Int and Appraisal skill, so, in theory, I could just craft magical items and sell them off to Calmert or Burne's assistant to make myself some decent money, but I take pretty hefty XP hits to my two main spellcasters when I do that.

Is there something I've been missing all these years, chano? Have you found a really clever way to finance a few +6 Amulets of Health that I don't know about?

 

No, no craft/selling is even needed. Just sell off all the gems and +1/+2 items you find and don't use. You will be amazed how quick it adds up once you get to the temple. There are also various charged items scattered around (The Wand of Hold Person comes to mind) that aren't worth using due to low DCs, but sell for a crazy amount.

Killing the traders for their magic amulet gives an insane amount of gold as soon as you can pull it off, but even that isn't needed.

Giving your entire party +6 con amulets is costly, though it isn't needed.

 

Originally posted by Gaear:

Note: this information and the information that Dreddnawt provided earlier in this thread are from the Game Guide sticky thread, which is at the following link:

http://www.co8.org/forum/showthread.php?t=8742