Can Merchants Run Out of For Sale items?

[Tejaye]

I read in the EQTC Guide that Merchants have only a "limited" supply of items for sale in regards to the components needed to make Ornate Chain Armor.
It said you can farm "unrefined ore" and give it to Merchants to resupply them.
Does this work?
How do you give the Unrefined Ore to Merchants. Do you hail them, is it a quest, or do you just give it to them.
What happens when you give it to them anyway, how many components get restocked from unrefined ore?
What components do the merchants run out of anyway?

[Dunthor Warsmith]

Most items on merchants are unlimited in quantity - you can buy as many as you want, and they will never run out. There are a handful of exceptions however, and once a specific number of the item have been bought, the merchant has no more to sell - it dissappears from inventory, like when you buy back all of the player-sold inventory of an item.

The different merchants with limited-item inventories work in different ways. Since you mention ornate chain, I'm assuming you're concerned with the High Quality ore merchants. They are restocked via a quest - hail them and go through some text, and they will hand you a 4 slot container. Fill it appropriately (unrefined ores), hit the "Combine", and hand it back to the merchant. That "completes" the quest, causing the merchant to despawn, and then respawn will a full supply of the limited-quantity ingredients.

The high quality ore merchants have limited quantities of High Quality ore - all the sizes are limited (blocks, lrg bricks, sml bricks, pieces) and will eventually run out. I don't know the specific number that they have.

[kumgum]

The quest for restocking ore

Is listed on this websight and can be found here

[Jetfire]

While I was working on my brewing skill over the weekend, I did sort've see merchants run out of materials, but not really.

I was in Halas making the Minotaur brews. I was just selling everything back to the merchant and buying up supplies for another 5 stacks worth when I noticed this.

Apparantly somewhat randomly, the merchant I was selling/buying from would tell me "I have no more of that item available" or "I am not interested in any more of that item." The item was still in their inventory but they wouldn't sell to me nor buy it.

If I would move just a little however, including just twisting a bit, they would start selling/buying again happily.

I suspect it is some anti-macroing code that got put in or something. If you do encounter it, just move and you can continue; you don't even have to close/restart your bartering session with the merchant.

[Sluggo]

Jetfire,
That is interesting, I am wondering if that was an added feature to limit people using Bots to work on skills? ie if it was software controlled, it would keep doing the same thing over and over. By requiring a response from you, this would eliminate that.
Sluggo

[Jetfire]

Jetfire,
That is interesting, I am wondering if that was an added feature to limit people using Bots to work on skills? ie if it was software controlled, it would keep doing the same thing over and over. By requiring a response from you, this would eliminate that.
Sluggo

That's what I suspect it is in there for. At first I thought it was just glitches or something until it happened fairly regularly. At first I would close out the sell session and restart, but then I figured out that movement was enough to reset this flag. It definitely seems to be anti-bot code though.

[oerin trubble]

HQ ore

For HQ ore the quest is more trouble than it's worth. Unless you just don't want to farm and buy the unrefined ore so that you can continue to buy the HQ ore.

Better to farm what you need, well cheaper anyhow.

Sol A is where i would suggest. HQ ore drops and FS weapons.

Get your CHA up with opal steins or other CHA items.
Get your gnome faction up by killing kobolds (or sit with someone that is killing them and assist, heal, cast on the dogs to get faction hits).
Get some weight reduction bags.
Kill goblins.

Kill and loot everything till your bags are full.

Visit the gnome merchant and sell off everything but gems, HQ ore, and FS daggers. (FS daggers have the lowest weight of the FS weapons and can be converted in a forge to HQ ore)(gems weigh less than the PP they are worth. And will go in a non WR bag. So sell them when you get to town.)

To convert your small change to PP, Buy bricks of fiery ore and sell them right back to him. (When you purchase from a merchant your copper and silver are always used first.) You will lose maybe 15% this way, but it's better than destroying all your copper and silver or being weighted down by it.

When you're done with the merchant you should only have gems, HQ ore, FS daggers, and PP in inventory.

Kill more, sell more . . till you are encumbered and it's time to go to town.

In a couple hours I regularly trudged out of Sol A with 1600pp, a sack of gems, 30 bricks of HQ ore, and 20 FS daggers.

Good luck. Happy hunting.

[Tweedledea]

As you can now have the new UI open as well as the merchant window, I did some JC with both windows open.

I noticed that the merchant wouldn't buy anything in a highlighted bag slot that had been autoequipped - ie, I had to to click on it before he would buy it, even though the item was already selected, ready to sell. It was something like 'I am not interested in buying that at this time'.

[Shagbert]

Given that I've seen bots moving under their own steam before now, this really wouldn't make a jot of difference would it? Surely scripts could just have a "strafe 1 space left" added at random intervals, or something?