This is a patch that makes all merchants have Protected status, so they cannot be killed off by random dragon, vampire, Forsworn, and cultist attacks, only by the player.  (There is one exception, who must die during a quest; he otherwise spends his time indoors, so he won't get accidentally killed by dragons, etc., anyway.)

Merchants randomly dying more and more as the game progresses (often with the player not even being aware of it until long after the fact) was problematic in several ways, most obviously loss of places to sell/buy stuff, but more seriously loss of various quest-givers and persons involved in quests given by others, and fewer persons to assist for the thane quests.

The mod is a re-implementation of two previous mods of this sort which made them Essential (not killable at all), and another which used Protected but did not account for the DLCs or USLEP.

This new version does the following:

* Includes ALL vanilla merchants, some of which were missed by other mods; includes innkeepers and market-stall operators, and replacement merchants. (As noted above, there is one quest-required exception now; see spoiler below for details.)
* Includes Dawnguard and Dragonborn merchants, even faction-only ones.
* Makes them Protected instead of Essential so they can be killed by the player (at least one is the target of a Dark Brotherhood assassination quest, and various mods may have additional such quests, plus some vendors have known replacement vendors, so you might want to kill off an annoying one, or kill off expendable ones to complete the Ebony Blade, knowing someone else will take over the shop.
* Preserves fixes (faction memberships, bounding boxes, spells and stats, etc.) implemented by "Unofficial Legendary Edition Patch" (USLEP or USLeEP), which were undone by "EssentialMerchentsMod V2".
* Removes unexplained changes, e.g. to character appearance, made by that mod.  THIS mod touches nothing at all other than Protected status.
* Merchants flagged as Essential (at least to start) by the original game are still also given Protected status, since various quest stages remove Essential status from a number of them.
* Keeps the original EssentialMerchantsMod.esp file name since LOOT already knows about it and has a good load-order position for it.

What it doesn't do:

* Does not affect mod-added merchants.
* Does not affect trainers who are not also merchants.
* Does not affect carriage drivers or providers of boat fast travel (already Essential so far as I've checked), or mill/farm operators, or hunters.  These can be added if we really think it's needed.
* Does not affect Hearthfire carriage drivers (already Protected), home bards (not Protected or Essential but probably always indoors), or followers (sometimes already Protected or Essential) who are hired as home stewards.
* Does not alter any scripts, classes, factions, or races.


Compatibility

This mod will conflict with other mods that edit the same characters, e.g. to prettify them.  You'll need to either manually forward desired changes from
one mod into the other (or into a compatibility patch), or use Mator Smash to attempt to do this for you, and hope (better yet, check) that it does a good
job.

This mod replaces the earlier merchant-protecting mods; you don't use it along with them.

The mod has not been tested with Skyrim Special Edition but is likely to be compatible with it (especially after opening and resaving it in the Construction Kit to update to SSE's ESP version).

If you want to know who the exception is (this kind of gives away a significant quest plot point):


Requirements and Installation

* Requires all three official DLCs.
* Requires "Unofficial Skyrim Legendary Edition Patch".
* Install this mod after those.  If asked to overwrite an existing file named EssentialMerchantsMod.esp, then do so.
* You can safely merge it into a "my personal tweaks.esp" sort of compability patch, with Merge Plugins Script for TES5Edit, the Merge Plugins app, or the zMerge function of zEdit.
* Since this mod affects no scripts or FaceGen data, it should be safe to install or remove in mid-game. The vanilla game itself changes plenty of characters' protection status during various quests; it's not dangerous.


Permissions and Credits

I impose no restrictions of any kind on this, though a credit would be nice if you do something with it.

This mod is loosely based on prior attempts at this by onewiththewamk and Godsman27 and Darth Sidious, though I started from scratch and worked my way through the list of merchants at The Elder Scrolls Wiki.  Both of the prior mod authors who still have Nexus accounts nevertheless receive an equal share of any Nexus Mod Rewards/Donation Points earned by this mod.  Because that's how I roll.