Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Help Tips & Tricks Do merchants store junk we sell to them forever?

Hello, I sold lots of junk to a merchant and when I come back several full rests later all my sold junk is still there. If merchants we sell junk to never "reset" will there not down the road be issues with file save size and crashes when a merchant might have to store 10k junk items?

EDIT: While I am on this subject, how long does items we "drop" from our inventory stay out in the world? I suspect this too might become a issue if we drop 10k items on the ground?

Yes, they keep them forever, but ONLY if you sell via the Barter system. If you sell directly, then no.

I suppose the reasoning for this is in case you sell something you didn't mean to and realize 9 hours later that you had, so you wouldn't lose 9 hours of progress. Like when it happened to me when I accidentally sold the Idol of Sylvanus and then 7 hours later noticed it's gone from my inventory. So it does serve a purpose.

As for the technical aspects and possibility of problems, there wouldn't be any. Divinity Original Sin 2's merchants also stored all items you sold and there were no issues.

Well, to make a long story short I use the mod BasketEquipmentNSFW (for science purposes and nothing else of course) and when I sell bags that collective is over 600 items the entire game struggle to load up (in this case) the druid vendor's stock when 600-1200+ items are on display in it. I'll test to "sell directly" and see if I can circumvent this issue. I'll load up a fresh save and report back.

EDIT: alas no. Selling directly still leaves items in the store i.e. I do full long "rests" in the camp to reset. I have tested to discard items in the river/drop on the groupnd and that does not work. Technically there are no ways in the current Baldur's Gate 3 to 100% get rid of items and this issue is something I experienced first hand in Cyberpunk 2077 where the savegame got corrupted (before the developers make an emergency patch) when we crafted too many items.

Some sort of "purging" of the vendors store (of user sold items) must be done automatically after X days. If it takes 20+ seconds for a vendor to open up it's store with 1600+ items, imagine what a XBOX S/X ore PS5 will do beside turning into a toaster. And let's not forget the size of the savegames. Another short term way to solve this issue might be if the "camp" have some sort of junk-bin that cleans up every rest.

Well, it might be wise to confront this problem in a beta than when the game is LIVE...

EDIT 2: Oh, I just discovered I could use the bag we summon with the necklace from the mod BasketEquipmentNSFW that is active for 10 turns and then deletes itself to store all my junk in it (instead of selling them to a vendor). This is at least a partial fix for this issue.

- Merchants keep items you sold to them forever
- They drop everything you ever sold them if you kill them, but they do not drop their own goods.
- The intention was (probably) to avoid accidental selling of importent items.
- The actual results are long loading times and it is hard to see what new goods the merchant got after the last long rest.
- It was already like this in DOS1+2 and there I found it very annoying too.

In DOS (not sure if 1 or 2 ) you could break the game by crafting and selling items.
When I reported this the devs first told me I must be cheating.
But then they found out its a real problem and it got fixed in a later patch.

You are talking about a base issue with the engine itself, not just BG3

The 'fix' (assuming we have the option) is to reset areas once we move to the next act after full release

Marking important quest items as bound + a different colour is how Larian is currently trying and that's a terrible system making us clink from all the keys

I think it was like this in all Larian games.
On top of DOS1+2 I also played Divine Divinity and Divinity 2.
Its just that you could not kill merchants in some of those games, but they kept sold items forever.

My solution to avoid confusion: switched selling
I sell all equipment to a shop that does not sell equipment and I sell other items to a shop that sells equipment.
So when I go to a weapon shop I know I can ignore everything that is not a weapon, even though the inventory is full of items.

barrels [of anything that goes bang] spring to mind so Larian has the option to clean things off the map