When you want to sell an item, you'll now want to consider who you should sell it to. Perhaps you'll have a powerful weapon, that you would only entrust to your favored faction. Or perhaps you have a series of poor weapons that you wouldn't mind giving to the Bandits. Or maybe, you just need to make a buck, and are ready to deal with the consequences.

Leveled NPCs will become much more dynamic, gaining a chance to equip items that you sell. Sell goods in Solitude, and you will see those weapons actually equipped on Imperials. This adds a huge amount of realism, immersion, and gravity to the game. Not only does selling get you money, but it also makes factions more dangerous.

You can indeed sell custom enchanted and tempered items, and these same items will be equipped by NPCs with their enchantments intact. They will have the same charge level as when you sold them. It's quite literally the same item. This can be used to give powerful (or detrimental) enchantments to the factions.

Depending on the enchantment, most of these should apply the same as they do when you wield them. However some modders have created enchantments that only work when the player wields them, so be aware that is possible.

You can also temper the weapons or armor, and the tempering will persist when they wield that item.

Mods such as Summermyst work exceedingly well with this mod. I would also recommend Loot and Degradation, as well as the patch that brings them both together called Summermyst - Loot and Degradation Patch.

As you progress in the Civil War storyline, you may conquer Holds and install new Jarls, changing the loyalty of blacksmiths. This follows a theme of "conquest" for the Imperials, and "liberation" for the Stormcloaks.

This is based on a check I do to the original Jarl of the Hold. For instance, in Markarth, I check whether Jarl Igmund is still a Jarl. If he's been removed, then the alternate faction kicks in for Markarth blacksmiths. Because I do this per Jarl, if you have mods that affect the Civil War, to add more sieges and such, this will therefore be deeply compatible.

For the Imperials! Some blacksmiths have a 'reluctance' for selling to the Imperials, and while they will change their faction when Skyrim is conquered, they will only stow at a reduced rate for the conquerors. As a whole, the blacksmiths of Skyrim are Stormcloak supporters, so there will be some difficulty with compliance...

For the Stormcloaks! Some blacksmiths have a 'motivation' that increases their rates to stow when their Hold joins the Stormcloak side. This will not only swap them over to the Stormcloaks upon liberating a Hold, but increase their chances to stow beyond what they originally were for the other side.

Overall, there are more blacksmiths that will be pleased with a Stormcloak victory than an Imperial one. If you think this is a Stormcloak bias... you're absolutely right! They didn't get a fair shake, and it's obvious from the blacksmiths that many prefer the Stormcloak side.

Regardless of your chosen side, there will be blacksmiths who will be unhappy with your choices. Can't please everyone, but if you do complete the Civil War for one faction or the other, you will find more blacksmiths will provide to your chosen faction, even if they do so reluctantly!

Faction Economy is fully compatible with mods that affect the base game merchants. This includes appearance mods, or even mods that add items to merchant inventories.

I truly do not foresee any possible issues with the vanilla Skyrim merchants. This is because I use what's called a 'quest alias script' to deploy the changes I make to merchants in an extremely clean way.

However, if you want to extend this mod's stowing feature to new modded merchants, it's relatively easy. Their merchant chest will need to have the script attached, and this can be done through the Creation Kit after loading both mods. The script for this is called 'tc_DivertItemToFactionScript', and this just needs to be added to your merchant. You should customize the script properties to determine who they stow for, what chances they have, etc.

This has been my favorite modding project I've done so far, and I've been modding for four years! It was very motivating to have an audience participating in the mod series as it grew. Much thanks to those who have contributed by testing, by raising hype, and by supporting me on Patreon. It's been really satisfying to do this mod, and I hope you enjoy my work.

Like all mods, this one started small and inevitably grew. I read a Reddit post, and made a little comment about how I might get this done. I planned out 2 simple scripts that could apply to all factions, then I fully implemented just one faction (Bandits), published it, refined the model based on feedback, then added more and more factions (Civil War, Dawnguard, Warlocks) while troubleshooting and fixing problems as they were discovered by testers. I spaced out releases by each weekend, and probably spent at least 100 hours on it over the one month it has all been done in. Like all mods, it's a labor of love, and represents the collective product of this community.

Working in this way helped me learn Papyrus scripting much more than I did before. It's really opened up the possibility of further script mods in the future. I love how script mods can totally change the game, despite being so small! I certainly have more releases planned, so stay tuned using the social media links at the top of the description.

I have some plans for an expansion to this system, though I'm still trying to figure out whether I want to proceed with this, or spend my time on other projects.

Faction Finances would keep track of how much gold you have paid to faction merchants. This gold would be added to the faction chests, same as equipment, and the gold could be used for different faction purposes. This part is easy to achieve, but meaningless unless the gold actually does something in-game. My first inclination is to require factions to pay for the items they distribute from this mod. That would cause 'poor' factions to only be able to afford cheap gear, and act as a filter leading to expensive loot appearing less often.

Faction Warfare would add the next layer of strategic depth, and would come after Faction Finances. Based on the money you are feeding to certain factions, they would become more powerful and take certain 'faction actions'. Essentially this is a strategic minigame. The player would be able to control any faction they choose, including some weird factions such as the Orcs, Falmer, Thalmor, or the People of Skyrim, in addition to regular factions such as the Stormcloaks or Dawnguard.
This would be similar to other mods that do Civil War warfare overhauls, where most of the experience is done via message boxes and options, but differs in that it would allow you to play as any faction at all. I also have a specific spin on it that would require you to be at faction locations to issue new commands.