store inventory

[jayhova]

How does store inventory work? I've noticed a lack of anything higher than chain gauntlets at forth level. I can find dwarven weapons but armour seems to lag way behind. It also seems like store quality has no real effect.

[Interkarma]

The code for generating store inventory is here.

Material selection rules follow player level, not shop quality level. Shop quality determines the rarity of items available. Items of highest rarity (e.g. unicorn's horn) will never appear in shops with lower quality ratings.

I understand that Allofich has reasonably matched inventory stocking behaviour to classic. Likewise the material selection has had a pass to better match classic. If classic uses shop quality to elevate material selection, that's something which could easily be added. But my authority on this is going to be Allofich, and he didn't link up shop quality to material selection during his review.

[jayhova]

Thank you. My impressions from classic are very old. I just found it strange that I could not find steel armour in shops while I was finding dwarven weapons. Trust me I checked a lot of shops. Shop quality seems to have very little impact when it comes to forges. They all seel to sell the same items regardless of quality at least at low levels. I'll look at the information in your reply and thanks again.

[jayhova]

I've been trying hard to confirm how the stores, in particular those that sell weapons and armour work. For instance I have found that dwarven longswords are not particularly difficult to find at 4th or even 3rd level. However after visiting close to a dozen cities and going to all the stores that might sell armour I have not found a single one that sells anything over chain gauntlets. Unfortunately my attempts to learn to code have not gone well so I am not able to parse C#. However I am curious as to is this normal. I'm okay if it is. But the system definitely seems biased to upgrading some items and not others. At 4th level my character still has chain gauntlets and an Iron cuirass. I have seen several left silver pauldrons but no rights.

[jayhova]

Okay, After visiting something like 100 stores and looking on all the shelves (say an average of 5 per shop) I found 1 pair of iron gauntlets at 4th level. That seems a bit on the strange side to me. Are gauntlets really that rare. The really funny thing is I found then in a poor "...cobbled together..." shop. This sort of thing would really be hard on characters unable to wear chain or leather. Maybe Classic worked this way but again it seems quite strange. I am still curious how it was determined how classic worked and how to match it. Just to give you an idea each shop I went to I bought arrows. By the time I found iron gauntlets I had close to 800 arrows.

[Flylighter]

What you've actually stumbled on is an arguable deficiency that existed in the base game!

I'm playing through the game as we speak in vanilla DosBox Daggerfall. At level 19, I've found a fair share of daedric weapons, and shops regularly carry daedric weaponry; however, the vast lion's share of armor in any armorer/weaponsmith are leather or chain.

The behind-the-scenes folks around here might have a more fact-backed explanation for this, but I can give you my theory. Weapons range from iron to daedric, and in general (emphasis here), higher materials are tougher to find. However, armor pieces are split into 3 classifications: leather, chain, and plate. When armor is generated (say, on a corpse or in a shop), it has to pass through two different rolls: classification comes first, with lower materials such as leather or chain more likely, and then a material roll (iron through daedric) if the armor generates as plate, with lower materials such as iron and steel being much more common. Since weapons can't spawn as 'leather' or 'chain', it's naturally more common to see more high-end weaponry than armor.

Regardless of the exact methodology in the code, gauntlets are always exceedingly rare. Fun fact: per kilogram, gauntlets are worth more than any other piece of gear in the game!

[jayhova]

Here is the strange thing. Once I found iron gloves and bought a pair, they started appearing. I have also noticed a strange tendency for left pauldrons to be over represented. This may simply be a case of which one gets checked first. However if I see an iron pauldron it's significantly more likely to be a left over a right.