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Misc. Items
12 September 1996

There are many items in Daggerfall which either appear to have a purpose but don't, or don't appear to have a purpose but do.

1. Light type objects, candles, lanterns, torches etc... are useless and can be sold at a general store or pawn shop.
2. Holy tomes, holy daggers, and other objects don't appear to have any value other than for selling.
3. Bandages don't appear to have any real use, but apparently if you sleep with one in your inventory when you wake up it will be gone. Not sure if it actually helps heal you or not.
4. Some quests require finding a particular object in a dungeon. I have sometimes missed the object as it wasn't familiar.
   1. Auriels Shield - A dull metal plate floating in air.
   2. Finger - A large object which looks more like a bed roll. Was evidence in a missing persons case.
   3. Ingrediants - These will look just like they in your inventory except perhaps a bit bigger and brighter. Usually hard to miss.
5. Small Statue Sitting on Dungeon Floor: If you click on it it makes a funny noise and opens one of the red teleport doors. Go see if this happens.

Shields and Helmets
October 1996

The shields and helms in Daggerfall don't appear to be labelled with the appropiate material. i.e., an admantium helm will appear as just 'a helm', similarily with shields. To tell what quality a shield or a helm is, use the info feature in the inventory screen. This will tell you the weight and armor bonuses of the shield/helm. The shields also seem to be the proper color (i.e., a dwarven shield is yellow) and seems to be another way of determining the shield type. Similarily with the helmets, i.e., a daedric helmet will be red.

Cheap Items
November 1996

Several people have noticed that the magical items bought in the mages guild are much cheaper than usual. For example, the list price of a daedric longsword of obvilion is around 7,000 gold, compared with a price of around 40-50,000 for a regular daedric longsword found in a shop. The only possible downfall of buying these cheap items, is that they are already enchanted. You will have to find a normal pair in dungeons or a shop if you wish to custom enchant a set.

Good Places to Sell Items
13 December 1996

A general comment about making money. I've discovered that no matter what I have to sell, I get more money for it by taking it to the Alik'ra desert somewhere and selling it. For instance, a holy tome worth 2500 gp may net you about 1000 - 1200 gp somewhere else, but in the desert it's value is almost double and you'll get 2300 - 2400 gp for it. I've actually sold some things in the desert for more than they were worth elsewhere. Especially good are any holy tomes, holy candles, stuff like that. Some of the better ingredients are worth a bunch there too.

It appears that items sold in the desert give you around 78% more retail value than elsewhere.

Computing Item Prices
20 October 1997

I've long been wanting to figure out how DF computes its item prices, mostly armour and weapons so I can figure out exactly how much all my magical items are worth (there seems to some bug in the game such that all magical items can only be sold for _much_ less than their worth, a daedric cuirass of force bolt for 4000 gold, I don't think so).

Material Price Modifiers
First, the price modifications of the various materials for armour and weapons. It works like this:

 	Non-Magical Item Price = (Base Item Price) * (Material Modifier)

Notes on Material Multipliers:

1. These values computed by basic trial method by selling/buying various items at a variety of stores. Prices used are the ones displayed in the upper left corner above your character potrait.
2. The prices of items vary by as much as 20% depending on an unknown variable (reputation relative to storekeeper?). The price flucates independantly of store quality (stores of same quality can have vastly different prices), and item quality. One can assume this is a random fluctuation and not worry about it too much (ex: the range of the daedric multiplier could actually range anywhere from around 1000-2000). Take the above values to be the average multiplier.

Base Item Prices
In order for one to calculated the price of any armour/weapon one needs to know not only the material multiplier (above), but the base price of the item. This base price is simply the price of the leather item. For weapons, which don't have a leather material we take the price of the iron weapon and divide by three to get the base price.

Notes on Base Prices:

1. The base price of items flucates as much as 20% from store to store. The price also fluctuates according to which region you're in. As such, the above values are _mostly_ average item prices from a large variety of stores (where possible). They probably won't be 100% the same as the prices you get with your character since the price most likely depends on the mercantile skill (mine's at around 70%) and reputation with merchants.
2. The prices here are the ones seen above your character's picture at the left when you're selling/buying. The actual selling price will of course be much less but with a good reputation, the worst quality store, personality and mercantile skill you can get up to 70% of this price when you sell items. On the contrary, if you pick your store poorly the selling price may drop to as little as 25% (or so).

Magical Properties Modifiers
The cost of a magical item will be the sum of the object price and the sum of all magical properties on the item.

 	Magical Item Price = (Item Price) + (Bound Souls) + (Magic #1) + (Magic #2) + ....

More Notes on Item Prices
20 June 1998

Sometimes, you just have more items than you can carry, even if you have a wagon. This is especially true when you are fighting inside a big dungeon like castle daggerfall, wayrest, sentinel, etc. You just can not go outside to unload stuff onto your ship. Then what items do you put on the wagon? Elven mace, leather pauldron, daedra's heart or a book. If you have space left for the wagon, pick up all loot by all means. But, when you have more than you can carry, which item should you take and which to discard? From a mathematics point of view, if all you care is to sell all these items, you should put items having the highest cost (in Gold Piece - GP ) per kilogram (kg) on your wagon. In other words, get the most expensive items pound-for-pound, on your wagon. You should take two 1 k.g. items, each having a cost of 15, instead of one 2 kg. item cost 20. Obviously, you must carry your Quest items, and powerful weapons. If you wish to use one item, always carry it. If you just wish to sell it for Gold, you can use the tables below for guidence. Books, clothes, and potion ingredients already have the weight and cost descriptions on them. But weapons and armors have only weight description. So how do you decide what to take ?

The following is a table from Rick Huebner ( rhuebner@probe.net ) detailing relative values of different materials. I added one column cost/kg, which is the relative cost / relative weight.

The above table is provided by Rick Huebner ( rhuebner@probe.net ). From math, it states the cost ratio of Leather and Chain are both X 1. But my personal experience indicates that, if you use X 1.4 instead of X 1 for the cost ratio of Leather and Chain, the items prices found using the formula below will be much closer to actual prices. The base price is based on iron items.

The armor bonus shown is in additional to the protection of the armor itself. All seven pieces ( helm, boot, gauntlet, cuirass, greaves, left/right pauldron) provides a protection of +1. The material bonus is in additional to that protection. So Elven greaves provides protection of +11, +1 from greaves itself, +10 from armor bonus. For weapons, the material bonus is in addition to the base damage mentioned on manual page 60-61. If you are careful, you can figure out most of the table above by yourself. Also, you can figure out the values for bows and axes on page 60-61 are incorrect. Shield is a total different animal. All shields of the same kind (Tower, Kite) provide the same protection. The armor bonus of material is not added to shield protection, though the weight modifier is.

Below is a table listing the base price in cost (GP) per weight (kg) of all weapons and armors. Use it in conjunction with the table above to determine the cost per kg of items made from other material. The formula is :

item price ( in GP/kg. ) = (Base price in GP/kg) * (item material cost ratio) / (Base material cost ratio)

If you don't have the time to do all the tedious calculation, here is some rules of thumb :

1. Armors of one material, in general, are worth more than most weapons of the next two higher metal.
2. Cuirass is worth considerably less than other armor of similar material.
3. Katana and Bows are worth much more than other weapons of similar material.
4. Daggerfall has a classic Supply and Demand pricing structure. Very Rare Items (the only one found so far in the entire game, made from either silver or Orcish ), sometimes can fetch up to 10 times their worth from this table. As you sell more items, the price of similar armors and weapons will drop. The table describes more or less the average price.
5. The money you get depends on a lot of factors, (merchant skill, region, reputation, quality, etc.) But the relative cost between weapons change little.
6. Tower Shield and Kite Shield are the cheapest metal items pound-for-pound. Unless they are made from special material, take anything else to fill up your wagon. Round shield and Buckler fare slightly better. They are on the order of mace, and are not very cost effective either.
7. All price are estimate. Error of 50% on prices for each individual sale are common, considering all the conditions above. If you found more useful pricing formula, please inform me.

The table is in decreasing order of price pound-for-pound.

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