Traders in settlements don't have inventory

[Premu]

I set up a few different trading stands in my settlements. The problem is the traders don't have almost no inventory or caps if I barter with them.

There are several proposed solution for that - switching out settlers, rebuild the trade stand, just come later, try at a different time - none of those work.

The root cause is most likely caused by the shops not being connected to the stash for the settlement traders as it should be. All items I can buy are items the assigned person have on them before.

I'm certain it is somehow a crooked up mod breaking that. I had SimSettlers2 active, but deactivated it for this game - might that cause this strange behaviour?

[Xenon The Noble]

I've seen that.
I've also built a trade stand, assigned a settler, and then go to trade and they have lots of stuff. Sometimes they don't but usually they do.
It's a mystery to me.
If you buy from your own stands, does it increase the caps of the settlement as if it was a discount?

[Premu]

I tested it a little bit.

Items I hand over to the trader with the "Let's trade" dialog option appear afterwards in the list if I barter.

If I buy or sell anything via barter, the bottlecaps or items don't appear if I check the "Trade" dialog option afterwards, though. So there seems to be a different stockpile for the shop, but it looks like it's completely filled via the trader's personal inventory.

Nothing pops up in the settlements inventory after selling to the trader.

[The Inept European]

Any trader has a personal inventory as well as a shop inventory. both are presented to you at once when you barter with them as a merchant. The terms 'barter' and 'trade' are used kind of ambiguously in this game. Barter means 'buy/sell' (kind of not what 'barter' normally means) and Trade means 'swap around for free' which is kind of not what Trade means in the context of a trader. With any trader/merchant you can usually buy their personal weapon and ammo off them, leaving them unarmed. There isn't much of a way to exploit this however.

There are the most common causes of seeing PC settlement traders unexpectedly out of caps and items

1. Not understanding that settlement trader inventory (including caps) is global not local. If you get all the inventory and caps from a weapons trader in Abernathy, then all weapons traders in all your settlements are now out of inventory and out of caps. Same with all other types of trader (general, clothing, armour, bar, medical, etc).

2. Talking to them while there is an outstanding quest completion condition, such as a settlement attack reward. In this situation settlers are not able to function as traders until the outstanding condition is cleared. Normally this means talking to the settlement leader to hand in the quest / get the reward / get thanks dialog. Look for the indicator over their head.

[The Inept European]

There is a refinement of 1 above: if you clear out the inventory of a level 1 armour dealer (for example) in one location, the level 2 armour dealer(s) elsewhere will have a small residue of additional caps and inventory, but the level 1 portion of their caps and inventory will be gone.

[Premu]

I'm aware of the shared pool of all settlements - I didn't clear out a different trader of the same type somewhere else. Because it doesn't matter, they have an empty inventory everywhere. I never even saw an option to buy anything else than their own inventory.

And this doesn't change after 48 hours either in which normally traders' inventory should be reset. It simply stays empty forever.