Midnight Adventurer’s Supply

Similar to thievery, but without the legal consequences, is the practice of lifting stuff from stores in the middle of the night. This system takes advantage of a "hole" in the game (it's not a bug because Bethesda has known about it since the game’s release and hasn't fixed it). The key is the game's inability to "close" a store for the night.

The easiest way to make use of this system is to loiter in the store until after it closes. The merchant will still be there, but the shelves now function like your wagon does. You "remove" items rather than "select" them. Take the stuff off the shelves and put it on your wagon or in your inventory. If you're feeling particularly diabolical, you can sell it back to the hapless merchant (who is still functional even though the store is closed).

For a more profitable jaunt, note the closing times of the various stores, loiter in the one that closes the earliest, pillage it and sell it back to the merchant, then move on to another store, loiter, pillage and sell. Repeat until you run out of open stores.

To make even more money at it, you can run around town and break into all of the stores. The outer door will be locked, but this is no problem. There are three ways of getting into the store. You can pick the lock (which will bring you to the attention of the Thieves Guild [if you are not already a member] or the guards, depending on your success at lockpicking), you can bash the door (which brings the guards running), or you can cast "Open" on it (which does neither - it simply opens the door for you).

Interestingly enough, the "Open" spell is close to 100% effective on exterior doors, no matter what your level or chance of success. To get the spell, you need to get access to a spell-maker. Set your chance of success to 1% + 1% per 2 levels (that's the cheapest version of the spell in terms of both money and spell points). Now go from store to store and rob them blind. When they open in the morning, sell everything back to them.

The problem with this method is that you have to leave town in order to get the stores to restock. The exception to this rule is the General Store. Although you may remove everything from the shelves, the next time you click on the shelf you will find a horse and cart there. There is apparently a major herd of horses in the store as well as a very productive staff of wagon-building fairies. The way around the restocking problem is to buy a ship. After cleaning out the stores, change your transportation mode to "ship". You will be transported to the deck of your ship. If you change transportation mode again (click on "ship") you'll be transported back to town in the same spot you were standing and the stores will have restocked. Please note that the last store you visited will have empty shelves (even if you didn't take a thing) until you click on the shelves in another store. I don't know what the purpose of this particular feature is aside from keeping you from pillaging one-store towns. Anchoring a "Recall" spell somewhere in town and teleporting OUT of a building will also cause the town to reset and stores to restock. Once you have a ship or a "Recall" and your "Open" spell, you can be a millionaire in a matter of a few hours.

Exercise caution in your depredations, though. Cleaning out a town several times and storing everything on your ship until you can get to a place to sell it can cause problems. The game does not like to track a lot of items in your inventory. The moral of the story? Don't get greedy.

Letters of Credit

Many players have written to say "I don't know what the problem is, but I just can't seem to carry anything. I've put everything on my wagon and there isn't anything in my inventory except the sword I'm carrying and I still "can't carry any more stuff". HELP!!!" It usually turns out that when they click the "Gold" button in their inventory, they find that they are carrying several thousand gold pieces. The solution to the problem is to exchange the gold pieces for a Letter of Credit.

A letter of credit is just like gold except it doesn’t weigh anything (OK, it weighs 0.25kg and carrying a lot of them in your inventory can overburden you, but it's as close to nothing as you can get). You get it from a bank that will charge you 1% of the face value of the letter as a processing fee. In other words, a letter of credit in the amount of 100,000 will cost you 1,000. You must have the amount of the letter plus the processing fee on deposit before the letter will be issued. Taverns and ships are the only places that will not accept a letter of credit as payment. You must have cash to deal with these guys.

When you are selling items and you cannot carry the gold, the merchant will issue you a letter of credit instead. If you are making a lot of sales these will pile up in inventory and a lot of letters of credit weigh quite a bit. If this happens, take your letters of credit to the bank and deposit them and the bank will accept them as money, crediting your account accordingly.

A word of caution on selling items in batches: the value of the batch cannot exceed 2,999,999 GP. Once you hit the 3,000,000 mark, the shopkeeper will offer you 1 GP for all of it. There is no apparently limit to the number of items you can sell in one batch, only the value of the items.

Stores

There are several different varieties of stores in the game and you can recognize them by the signs in front. Herbalists and booksellers sometimes do not have signs and occasionally the Thieves Guild will masquerade as a pawnbroker or inn. It will show on your map as orange or green, but it does not function like a store or an inn. If it shows as a store on your map and there's no sign, you'll have to click on it in "info" mode or enter to find out.

The stores (except banks and taverns) vary according to the variety of goods they sell. This difference reflects the mercantile skill of the shopkeeper and shows in the message you get when you enter the store.

At the top end of the scale, "you can't find the slightest defect" in the goods. In these stores you will have the best chance of finding the high-end items of that type. You will pay top-dollar for whatever you buy and you will receive low-dollar for anything you sell. This merchant has the highest Mercantile skill and, consequently offers the lowest chance of successfully shoplifting anything.

At the other end of the scale you will find stores with "rusty relics" laying around and mice running over you feet. At these stores you will have the lowest chance of finding high-end items. You will also pay low-dollar for anything you buy , but get top-dollar for anything you sell. This merchant has the lowest Mercantile skill and consequently offers the best chance of successfully shoplifting.

The other levels of stores ("skillfully made", "adequate construction" and "cobbled together") fall in between these two extremes.

	Armorers: sell armor and a few weapons. They will buy any armor or weapons and will repair non-magical items.
	Weaponsmiths: sell weapons and a few pieces of armor. They will buy any armor or weapons and will repair non-magical items.
	Jewelers: buy and sell jewelry and a few precious and semi-precious stones. Jewelry is mainly the items you can enchant (rings, bracelets, wands, bracers, etc.).
	Herbalists/Alchemists: buy and sell potion ingredients (which includes precious and semi-precious stones). They will not buy potions, but may occasionally have one to sell.
	Bookstores/Libraries: buy and sell books. Some bookstores are libraries. You can read the books, but may not buy them.
	Clothiers: buy and sell clothing, including enchanted clothing.
	General Stores: buy and sell a little bit of everything. They are your sole source for wagons and horses. They will buy weapons, books, clothing and jewelry. They will also repair items.
	Pawnshops: sell a little bit of everything (mostly armor, weapons and books). They will generally pay higher prices and will buy everything except ingredients and clothing. Some also repair items.
	Banks: deposit and withdraw funds, make loans, issue letters of credit, buy and sell houses and ships. Any money you have on deposit with a bank is available at any bank within that province. Money on deposit in another province is not available. For example, you cannot deposit money in Daggerfall and withdraw it in Sentinel. Banks are apparently not subject to the quality modifier. A gold piece is a gold piece is a gold piece.

Contrary to popular belief, you cannot rob banks. The closest you can come to free money is to take out a loan from a bank and then skip out on paying it back. Your rep will suffer in the province where you borrowed it, but if you're never planning on going back there again or if you're already considered "pond scum"...

On the subject of store utility, I'm of the opinion that there are only three kinds of stores that are consistently useful: weaponsmiths, armorers and pawnshops. Jewelers are occasionally handy, but you can buy and sell anything they carry in a pawnshop if you're willing to exercise a little patience. Bookstores/Libraries are useful only if you don't belong to the Mages Guild or a good temple, but pawnshops/general stores will buy and sell books, too. Herbalists/Alchemists are necessary for potion creation and they're the only place where you can sell most ingredients (pawnshops will buy precious and semiprecious stones and the occasional Holy Relic), but I've always preferred items to potions since items can be used more than once. Consequently, the only ingredients I pick up are Daedra Hearts, Lich Dust and gems. Clothiers are about the most useless store in the game. Except for selling the occasional enchanted clothing item that can't be sold to a pawnshop or general store, I never use them.

Most towns are randomly generated at the start of the game (at the same time all of the dungeon locations and names are generated). This means that the vast majority of stores you encounter will be the same from game to game (you're planning on playing Daggerfall more than once, aren't you?). The City of Daggerfall always has one high-end weaponsmith with seven (count 'em: seven) shelves of goodies, two high end armorers with two to three sets of shelves in each store and one each of a "skillfully made" armorer and a "cobbled together" armorer. Together they form a rude circle, so it's quite easy to run from one to the next, break in, clean out the shelves, and move on to the next. If you work between 5 a.m. and 9 a.m. you won't even have to dodge the wraiths and ghosts. Then you can sell everything at the "cobbled together" armorer (economics 101: you don't need to worry about a "rusty relics" pawn shop when you're dealing in bulk). The City of Sentinel also has three or four high-end shops, but they're not so neatly arranged.

A few places to help you get started (most reported by other players): The towns of Newtower and Holmarket in the Daggerfall province have a rusty pawnshop pretty consistently. There is usually a high-end weaponsmith in Holleigh, Anticlere and a rusty pawnshop in Bubyrydata in the Alik'r Desert. Blackfort in Daggerfall (SE of Gothway Garden) has a rusty pawnshop and there is a rusty General Store in Gothway Garden. There is a rusty store in Whiteville, Wrothgarian Mountains. There are other rusty stores in Wrothgarian Mountains at Kirkwich and Singworth. The Mages Guild at Phrygias, Phrygias usually has soul traps with working dragonlings and the Guild at Myrkwasa, Myrkwasa usually has a trap with a Daedra Lord in it, as well as Aldingwall, Daggerfall. Penfort Derry in Daggerfall province has a high-end armorer with several sets of shelves to go through.

Repairing Items

Unenchanted items can be repaired in a variety of places, but the Fighters Guild will do it cheaper than almost anyone if you are a member. To repair a damaged or broken item, click on the smith, click on "Repair Item" select the item to be repaired from your inventory, and click on "Repair". The smith will quote you a price and tell you how long it will take. An early bug would not let you retrieve the item from the smith or else it would disappear if you left town. These bugs have been patched.

Frankly, the only items I've ever needed to repair were weapons. No matter how battered I get in a fight, my armor is always "new", my clothing is always "new" and so forth. Weapons and enchanted items are the only things needing repair. If you do a lot of Hand-to-Hand combat, you will probably find that your Gauntlets need occasional repair.

Repairing a magic item can be a complicated process. First, you must have the latest patch (v.212 or v.213 [you don't need both]). Second, you must add the line "magicrepair 1" (no quotes and note that it is a space, not an equal sign) to your z.cfg file in the main Daggerfall directory. The z.cfg is a plain text file and can be edited with any word processor or text editor. Now that the techie stuff is out of the way, let's repair magic items.

Go to an item-maker and enchant an item, giving it the repair ability. Equip the item. Rest, rest, rest. The condition of an item appears to improve one category for each 8 hours of rest (that's an observation, not the formula). When the game selects an item to be repaired, it appears to start at the top of the inventory and work its way to the bottom. The only hitch to this is that in loading a saved game the order of the items in your inventory gets reversed so top items go to the bottom and vice versa.

If you would like to avoid this little problem, there is an alternative method. Remove all magic items you DO NOT want repaired from your inventory. Don't put them on your wagon. Drop them or store them in your ship or house. They won't go anywhere. Now start resting. By dropping the stuff you don't want repaired, you force it to fix the stuff you do want fixed and you don't really have to worry about order. Keep resting until the item(s) have been repaired. Equipping multiple items with the repair function will speed up the repair process.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 683