I welcome feedback on individual merchant selections. Faction smiths, like vampire, Dawnguard, and thieves guilds in particular may need adjusting to support gameplay.
I’m also interested in any lore details I’ve missed that should alter inventories.
I've said it before, but I think the concept behind this mod is amazing. And it's a great extention to Heavy Armory, so I've added it as recommendation to the mod page. Thanks for sharing!
I've updated Smith Armory Inventory Overhaul (SAIO) to version 1.2
Besides fixing a mistake with dwarven projectile weapon lists it also updates how enchanted items are treated. Skilled smiths, who typically didn't have magic items before, now have a chance to have a few items. Master smiths, who had the usual generic magic item lists before, now have lists that lean towards level appropriate gear while still using vanilla sublists for compatibility. Heavy Armory lists are represented of course, although much like base HA, they probably don’t come up as often.My reasoning for this is that SAIO strips away a lot of sources for buying enchanted gear by making most merchants not enchanters. For players that aren’t enchanting their own items this can make things harder. But I also didn’t want to add back in tons of magic items. I figure a few better items is more fun than a lot of weak items you don’t want.
Player level matching “best” lists for enchanted gear was something I had wanted to do originally but I hadn't figured out which lists to use to preserve at least some vanilla compatibility. I finally had the time to work that out. I have a few other ideas I’d like to integrate into this mod, like signature gear types for some smiths, and an optional add on for Khajiit caravans, but I’m currently working on a new mod related to Alternate Perspective’s starting room gear.
I like what your mod does and how it does it. The reason I can't use it is because of the way you've redone the inventories, that if you use other weapon and armor mods, you won't see any of their contributions in the blacksmith inventory, only the HA additions. I could make my own patches to integrate content from IA, IW, LWE, Jaysus, etc... but its a whole lot of work. Another method would be to use generic instead of HA specific custom levelled-lists for the weapons and armor, or build it as an addon to OWL or MLU and use their LLs.
Unfortunately what you describe is an expected limitation of this mod, which I know doesn’t make it any less annoying. I knew when I published this mod it would be a hard sell for anyone making uses of the many excellent armor and weapons mods.
If I could see a reasonable way to do what I wanted, which is to personalize the inventory of each smith, while still making modded armors/weapons I don’t use show up in proper places, I would have done it. It wasn’t really possible to edit the vanilla lists to do this and still have them retain compatibility with other mods that touch them. It more likely causes weird garbled inventory selections and breaks mod added smiths. Best case scenario even if a user bashed them is any mod added items would show up everywhere, in defiance of this mod’s stated purpose, because the vanilla lists are so generic.
In the absence of a good way to do it, I decided to simply bypass the vanilla lists entirely so my edits are very specifically only the containers, and to try and leave behind some easy to use lists for other modders that wanted to add things. Bypassing the existing lists means I’m not likely to break things like OWL by accident.
But you’re right: integration of new mods, especially larger overhauls, would be a lot of work. Anyone interested in doing so has my permission, but I fault no one for deciding this mod isn’t for them because of the lack of integration of their favorite armors and weapons.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I'd like to have something like this for the large scale armor/weapon mods Legacy of the Dragonborn supports. If I can get my head around the structure of your mod and the armor/weapons mods I've got, I'll get back to you with patches.
Most smith lists have a dagger (and a random 1-2 more daggers), a 1-handed weapon, a 2-weapon, a HA weirder “polearm” (uses animation) item. Each of which is picked from a level list that usually starts with 8 items, often with 1 in 8 being a location appropriate nicer item, and sometimes a 1/8 weaker item. As levels increase the ratio of nicer items improves.
Armor is done similarly with each armor slot, head/body/hands/feat/shield, getting its own leveled list for both heavy and light. A few locations with a density of smiths, like Whiterun, will specialize different merchants. Warmaidens does heavy armor and melee weapons. Drunken Huntsman does light armor and archery. (Also heavy armor and melee weapons only if some elvish related patches are in use, otherwise those list only provide steel arrows instead.)
A few mods I’ve got patches for have things like capes. For those, I usually make a set and link it with something else, so for example in the Bosmer Armor mod, the mod’s hoods always come with a cape while the helmets don’t.
i ended up inventing my own list naming:
”Call” lists return all, and are usually for getting collections of related things. All the Basic Melee weapons for example.
“Litems” lists return one thing, often but not always based on player level. Such as picking a single weapon from all the one handed weapons along a theme.
”Sub” lists return one option from a few variations. Different iron helmets for example.
“Set” lists return groups of related things, with most being bows with matching arrows.
“Limited” lists are for rare times, usually for lore reasons, I want a particular list or vendor to have 1 of some small list of things. A random elvish item in Riverwood, for example.
”Patch” lists are weird. Basically I pre built support for a few mods into mine, such as elvish steel weapons. The lists for those items exist, populated with alternatives or equivalents, and if the patch is installed, it replaces those items with the modded ones.
There are also “zComp” lists that each contain a single gold coin as a place holder. Their names indicate which smiths they interact with, and they do overlap. They exist explicitly for people to patch things into them without needing to figure out all of the above. It’s good for saying this/these smiths carry X or leveled list Y but aren’t ideal for deep integration.
If I was going to integrate something like Animated Armory into this I would put semi normal things like the rapiers into the various 1 handed weapon lists by type, but I’d probably add a 5th exotic items list so smiths always carry 1 item of the whip/claws/etc gear.
Armors I typically integrate directly into the slot lists unless there’s a good reason for them to be alongside the normal selection.
I’m just using vanilla enchanted lists to avoid the compatibility nightmare of patches for things like Thaumaturgy. Mostly only the “master” smiths have enchanted items.
CID is useful for adding to containers but it doesn’t remove things from containers, and a big part of this mod is what’s no longer in the merchant chests.
There wasn’t a clear way to do this without direct container edits so I decided to just do the mod directly.
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I’m also interested in any lore details I’ve missed that should alter inventories.
Thanks for sharing!
Besides fixing a mistake with dwarven projectile weapon lists it also updates how enchanted items are treated. Skilled smiths, who typically didn't have magic items before, now have a chance to have a few items. Master smiths, who had the usual generic magic item lists before, now have lists that lean towards level appropriate gear while still using vanilla sublists for compatibility. Heavy Armory lists are represented of course, although much like base HA, they probably don’t come up as often.My reasoning for this is that SAIO strips away a lot of sources for buying enchanted gear by making most merchants not enchanters. For players that aren’t enchanting their own items this can make things harder. But I also didn’t want to add back in tons of magic items. I figure a few better items is more fun than a lot of weak items you don’t want.
Player level matching “best” lists for enchanted gear was something I had wanted to do originally but I hadn't figured out which lists to use to preserve at least some vanilla compatibility. I finally had the time to work that out.
I have a few other ideas I’d like to integrate into this mod, like signature gear types for some smiths, and an optional add on for Khajiit caravans, but I’m currently working on a new mod related to Alternate Perspective’s starting room gear.
Unfortunately what you describe is an expected limitation of this mod, which I know doesn’t make it any less annoying. I knew when I published this mod it would be a hard sell for anyone making uses of the many excellent armor and weapons mods.
If I could see a reasonable way to do what I wanted, which is to personalize the inventory of each smith, while still making modded armors/weapons I don’t use show up in proper places, I would have done it. It wasn’t really possible to edit the vanilla lists to do this and still have them retain compatibility with other mods that touch them. It more likely causes weird garbled inventory selections and breaks mod added smiths. Best case scenario even if a user bashed them is any mod added items would show up everywhere, in defiance of this mod’s stated purpose, because the vanilla lists are so generic.
In the absence of a good way to do it, I decided to simply bypass the vanilla lists entirely so my edits are very specifically only the containers, and to try and leave behind some easy to use lists for other modders that wanted to add things. Bypassing the existing lists means I’m not likely to break things like OWL by accident.
But you’re right: integration of new mods, especially larger overhauls, would be a lot of work. Anyone interested in doing so has my permission, but I fault no one for deciding this mod isn’t for them because of the lack of integration of their favorite armors and weapons.
Armor is done similarly with each armor slot, head/body/hands/feat/shield, getting its own leveled list for both heavy and light. A few locations with a density of smiths, like Whiterun, will specialize different merchants. Warmaidens does heavy armor and melee weapons. Drunken Huntsman does light armor and archery. (Also heavy armor and melee weapons only if some elvish related patches are in use, otherwise those list only provide steel arrows instead.)
A few mods I’ve got patches for have things like capes. For those, I usually make a set and link it with something else, so for example in the Bosmer Armor mod, the mod’s hoods always come with a cape while the helmets don’t.
i ended up inventing my own list naming:
”Call” lists return all, and are usually for getting collections of related things. All the Basic Melee weapons for example.
“Litems” lists return one thing, often but not always based on player level. Such as picking a single weapon from all the one handed weapons along a theme.
”Sub” lists return one option from a few variations. Different iron helmets for example.
“Set” lists return groups of related things, with most being bows with matching arrows.
“Limited” lists are for rare times, usually for lore reasons, I want a particular list or vendor to have 1 of some small list of things. A random elvish item in Riverwood, for example.
”Patch” lists are weird. Basically I pre built support for a few mods into mine, such as elvish steel weapons. The lists for those items exist, populated with alternatives or equivalents, and if the patch is installed, it replaces those items with the modded ones.
There are also “zComp” lists that each contain a single gold coin as a place holder. Their names indicate which smiths they interact with, and they do overlap. They exist explicitly for people to patch things into them without needing to figure out all of the above. It’s good for saying this/these smiths carry X or leveled list Y but aren’t ideal for deep integration.
If I was going to integrate something like Animated Armory into this I would put semi normal things like the rapiers into the various 1 handed weapon lists by type, but I’d probably add a 5th exotic items list so smiths always carry 1 item of the whip/claws/etc gear.
Armors I typically integrate directly into the slot lists unless there’s a good reason for them to be alongside the normal selection.
I’m just using vanilla enchanted lists to avoid the compatibility nightmare of patches for things like Thaumaturgy. Mostly only the “master” smiths have enchanted items.
There wasn’t a clear way to do this without direct container edits so I decided to just do the mod directly.