Introduction:

Bethesda games in general tend to give way too much money in my opinion, rewards are plentiful, prices are low, everyone's happy, right? Well, I'm not, I like the challenge of not having money all the time to afford everything that I want, I like perks like Cap Collector and Fortune Finder having longer lasting impact in my game, and I like feeling like I earned my inventory, either by exploring, killing, or paying for it. What good is it Cap Collector if I'm getting better prices but I'm swimming in caps already to a point that even without that perk everything is affordable? What good is Fortune Finder if I'm finding a few extra caps here and there if they mean squat when I get them because I was already rich?

I play with mods like Loot Balance which make the Wasteland loot feel scarcer, every stimpak I find is pure gold and any amount of ammo is welcomed, but all of a sudden I go to a Vendor and the prices don't reflect a world in which goods are a comodity. Making the decision of buying that extra clip of ammo or buying some RadAway should be important, but it doesn't feel like that because of the amount of caps we get and the prices vendors have (and to a certain extent because of their inventories as well, but I kind of like traders having good things and charging an arm and a leg for them, if you want them... then empty your pockets vault dweller). Obviously this mod won't be for everyone, but if you are like me and enjoy the challenge of a harder game economy, you might find it useful.

I had been looking for a mod that just tweaks the game economy globally, without being part of a huge overhaul mod that does 20 other things that I'm not interested in, but the few I found either didn't offer any information as to how exactly their changes worked (most seemed to tweak fBarterMax, fBarterMin, fBarterBuyMax and fBarterSellMax settings without explaining why or how), or the little information they did offer wasn't enough for me to fully understand their impact on the game prices to make an informed decision on which one to install. I just wanted one simple mod to change the economy and nothing else and I couldn't find one to my liking so I made this one. :)

I actually tried to make a mod like this a couple of years ago but back then I didn't quite understand exactly how Fallout 4 calculates prices and I guess this time I put in the time to learn that. The Fallout 4 wiki has some info and one formula to calculate buying or selling price modifiers (but not final prices) but it's not very clear other than to understand that yes, CHARISMA plays a role on prices, and the higher your CHA the better prices you'll get basically.

I ended up having to sit down and break the few formulas I found online down to get to the bottom of those settings, and I ended up rewriting the formulas for myself using FO4 wiki and the old UESP wiki to understand the full calculation fron inital prices --> price modifiers --> final prices and get why and how these fBarter settings impact prices the way they do in Fallout 4. If you are interested in how it works, I wrote How FO4 Calculates Prices article explaining it, but for now I'll skip to what this mod does.


Description:

This mod allows you to do two things: increase vendor prices, and change vendor price limits for when you have very high CHARISMA.

I separated the mod into two modules (ESP plugins flagged as ESL), both are optional in the installer and offer a few different options to choose from.


Expensive Barter Prices

I'll try to keep this short, because understanding how FO4 calculate final prices was a pain in the butt for me. Expensive Prices alters two settings: fBarterMax and fBarterMin, both of which are used when calculating initial base buying and selling prices.

Those two global settings are applied whenever a vendor calculates prices (vendors restock and recalculate prices every 2-3 days, I always wait 3 days to see them restock), they are used for initial base prices and then other things like CHA for example modify the final prices you see. This means just increasing final prices by a flat +25% isn't as straighforward as it may sound because final prices you see always depend on several factors, and unless it's done by a script it's just simpler to make changes to settings that affect base initial price calculations and then let the game calculate final prices as it normally does.

So that's what I did, I increased those global settings by the % indicated below, and then manually did the math to check if the final prices made sense to increase the prices difficulty. These percentages increase fBarterMax and fBarterMin settings specifically by the indicated %, and next to them you'll see how they will impact the final prices for your game.

• Vanilla prices (for reference): With no CHARISMA vendors will sell to you at 350% of an item's base value, and will buy from you at 30% the item's base value. At 10 CHARISMA vendors will sell at 200% to you and will buy at 50% from you. These are the vanilla sell/buy ranges the game normally uses to calculate prices depending on your CHARISMA, perks, items, buffs, etc.
  

• +25% increased fBarter settings: With no CHARISMA vendors will sell to you at 440% of an item's base value, and will buy from you at 20% the item's base value. At 10 CHARISMA vendors will sell at 250% to you and will buy at 40% from you.
  

• +50% increased fBarter settings: With no CHARISMA vendors will sell to you at 520% of an item's base value, and will buy from you at 20% the item's base value. At 10 CHARISMA vendors will sell at 300% to you and will buy at 30% from you.
  

• +75% increased fBarter settings: With no CHARISMA vendors will sell to you at 610% of an item's base value, and will buy from you at 20% the item's base value. At 10 CHARISMA vendors will sell at 350% to you and will buy at 30% from you.
  

• +100 increased fBarter settings: With no CHARISMA vendors will sell to you at 700% of an item's base value, and will buy from you at 10% the item's base value. At 10 CHARISMA vendors will sell at 400% to you and will buy at 20% from you.
  

Rebalanced Barter Limits

The second part of this mod changes two specific global settings the game uses to calculate maximum limits vendors will use when selling items to you, or buying them from you, these settings are: fBarterBuyMax and fBarterSellMax.

Since initial base prices (calculated using fBarterMax and fBarterMin) are modified by other bonuses you might have, the game needs to guarantee the final prices will never go higher or lower than a certain amount, otherwise with enough CHARISMA and buffs on your side, the economy in the game could get into a situation where you buy an item from a vendor at a price and then immediately sell it back to them for profit.

To prevent that Bethesda added fBarterBuyMax and fBarterSellMax which make sure there's always a difference between those values, even if your CHA is very high. In fact, those two global settings are applied when you have CHARISMA 16 or higher), and they make sure a vendor will never sell to you at a price lower than 120% of an item's base value, and will never buy from you at a price higher than 80% of an item's base value. There's a table on the wiki which shows this here.

So I made a few options in case you want to change this, after all a very Charismatic trader (say, CHA 10) should get better prices, and the most Charismatic ones (CHA 16+) should get the best ones. You have a few options to choose from in the installer:

• Vanilla limits (for reference): Vendors will never offer you a price lower than 120% of an item's base value, or buy from you at higher than 80% its value. This is the vanilla behavior and applies only when you get to CHARISMA 16 or higher using perks, items, buffs, etc.
  

• +5% increased limit: Vendors max barter limits are changed when you reach CHARISMA 16+: they will never offer you a price lower than 115% of an item's base value, or buy from you at higher than 85% its value.
  

• +10% increased limit: Vendors max barter limits are changed when you reach CHARISMA 16+: they will never offer you a price lower than 110% of an item's base value, or buy from you at higher than 90% its value.
  

• +15% increased limit: Vendors max barter limits are changed when you reach CHARISMA 16+: they will never offer you a price lower than 105% of an item's base value, or buy from you at higher than 95% its value.
  

• +20% increased limit: Vendors max barter limits are changed when you reach CHARISMA 16+: vendors will both sell and buy from you at 100% of an item's base value.
  

These limits can't be increased higher than that without making trades effectively broken by buying an item and immediately selling it back for profit, the closest a master trader can get is buying and selling at the actual base item cost.

All plugins within the same module share the same name, which means you can switch to a different one if you feel the prices or barter limits are too low or too high without the game complaining you are mising a plugin.

Keep in mind it takes around 3 in-game days for Vendors to restock their inventory (and recalculate their prices) so you will have to sleep or wait in order to see the new prices reflected).

Installation:

- Install using your mod manager of choice.
- FOMOD installer, so you can pick what you want to install.
- All ESP are flagged as ESL (they don't count towards your ESP max limit).
- Load order doesn't really matter, I would suggest loading it very early in your load order.


Compatibility:

• Should be compatible with almost everything (unless they specifically change fBarterMax and fBarterMin for the 'Expensive Barter Prices' module, or fBarterBuyMax and fBarterSellMax for the 'Rebalanced Barter Limits' module).
  

I'll list a few mods I either use or have checked that I know are/aren't compatible:

• Greedy Doctors: I also use this mod and it's compatible.
• Loot Balance: I also use this mod and it's compatible.
  

• Rebalancer: not compatible with its 03D - Barter module, either use that or my Expensive Barter Prices module. I haven't checked Rebalancer in its entirety so I don't know if it has anything that conflicts with my Rebalanced Barter Limits module (based on the description it doesn't seem like it will conflict).
• Better Barter Cap: not compatible with my Rebalanced Barter Limits module, either use my module or use Better Barter Cap, they essentially do the same thing.
  

Check out my other mods:

- Bottle Labels Overhaul - Dirty Water Mesh Replacer
- Concord - Broken Minigun on Rooftop
- Concord - Supermutant Boss Instead of Deathclaw
- Crippled Limbs - Delayed Regeneration
- Dogmeat's Backpacks of the Commonwealth
- Guard More Posts
- Harder Barter - Expensive Prices
- Power Armor HUD - Left and Right Indicators
- Unique - Quest Items Are Not Junk
- VAFS Redux - Awareness perk fixes
- Wedding Rings XP
- XP - GEM (Global Experience Multiplier)