I confess: my 100% favorite thing to do in games like Mount and Blade Bannerlord, Battle Brothers, and Starsector is to be a filthy little loot gremlin that goes around buying low and selling high, instead of ya know, playing the actual game. Something about seeing small number turn big on the screen satiates my primitive ape brain.
So it's understandable that I've always felt let down by Skyrim's economy. It has NPC schedules, jobs, civilizations, simplified and nailed pretty well, but the buying and selling suck major balls. One single price, and flat sell and buy global multipliers.
So here's the start of a mod that will do exactly that; make the economy more dynamic.
Features:
The following factors affect the buying and selling price every item:
Relationship between customer and vendor (enemies, friends, lovers)
The size of the civilized settlement you're in. Villages will have cheaper goods to compensate for having less goods, towns will have averagely priced goods, and cities have a premium markup to account for import/export costs.
The following factors affect food and drink prices:
Season (Harvest season = cheaper prices, good luck buying food from stockpiles in the winter)
Establishment type. Farms have cheaper food prices. Mines have cheaper ore prices.
The type of business you're buying from. Inns have cheap food prices.
The following factors affect weapon/armor prices:
Military camps have cheaper prices, military forts have the cheapest prices.
Factors do stack. If you buy bread from an inn located on a farm located in a village and your player character is banging the merchant, prices will be dirt cheap.
Features to be added:
Occupational factors: cheap to buy weapons/armor from blacksmiths, potions from apothecaries, arrows from fledgers, etc.
Trade and dwindling stocks; simulation of NPCs actually consuming goods based on their packages
Trade convoys; rob them to cause a temporary shortage at their destination.
But wait Monitor, you might ask. Aren't there already mods that do something like that already?
Yes, there are mods like Trade and Barter and Trade Routes.
The main differences that this mod brings to the table:
Allows for far finer, granular control over the factors regarding the price of each product, because it runs as a native dll.
Take food, as one example:
If you are in an inn, food will be cheaper compared to a general store.
If the inn is located on a farm property, the prices will be even cheaper.
If the farm is located on a settlement, it will be slightly cheaper compared to a town or city.
If it is harvest season, it will be a lot cheaper compared to summer, or god forbid, winter prices.
If the merchant likes you as a friend, or you are... ahem... romantically entangled with them somehow with the help of certain other mods, the prices are even more cheap.
Entirely save safe to install and uninstall mid-playthrough. Nothing is stored, nothing is overwritten.
Easily extensible with just keywords. Compatible with land mods as long as they use the vanilla keywords.
Non-invisible trade routes; actually see and interact with trade convoys (in a future update)
A (better) simulation of trade and economy. I'm not an Econ major, nor do I care all that much about strict realism. What the aim of this mod will be is to introduce a gamified (key word game) economy to make trading more fun.