Tutorial: Changing the merchants names, buy and sell rates in the Pocket Plane

This information applies to Innodil's Pocket Plane version 2.0 or higher only!

In this tutorial you'll learn how to change the buy and sell rates of all merchants in the Pocket Plane. You do not need the toolset for this and no modding skills are required. Simply edit a 2DA file, dump it in the override folder and it's done! Read on for a detailed tutorial complete with screenshots and background information.

Getting Started

This tutorial involves editing (M)2DA files. There are 2 ways to edit those files:

1. If you have the toolset installed and know how to use ExcelProcessor.exe: Download the 2DA Sources and edit them as usual. Note: in the remaining tutorial screenshots of GDApp are used. The tutorial also applies to using Excel to edit the 2DA sources of course.
2. If you don't have the toolset. Please download GDApp and extract it somewhere. Next, Download the GDA files and also extract them somewhere.

For those using the 2DA Sources, all the 2DA files are in 1 excel file for easy editing: inno_pp_custom_2da.xls


An important note about the "mod's install dir"
You will have to copy files to the mod's core/override folder. In all tutorials, I will use my own paths on a Windows 7 machine. If you use another OS like Windows Vista or Windows XP, the first part of the folder might differ. It is always in your User Folder under My Documents or Documents on some operating systems. If you really don't know where this folder is, do a search on your C:\ drive for the folder called inno_pp. This folder is the mod's install folder and I will always refer to a folder inside this install path.
In all tutorials I will refer to this folder as  [My Documents]\BioWare\Dragon Age\AddIns\inno_pp. 

Understanding the 2DA

First start op GDApp. Use File -> Open and open the GDA file "inno_pp_merchants.gda".
You should see the following:

Note: some values may be different. You can ignore this.

Since the columns names can not be read in GDApp, I'll list them here for reference:

1. ID: The ID of the row
2. MerchantTag: the tag of the merchant resource
3. MerchantName: the name of the merchant store
4. BuyRate: The buy rate
5. SellRate: The sell rate
6. UseAsContainer: This is a special flag. It doesn't matter for this tutorial, so leave it alone

Basically, the only 2 columns we will be touching in this tutorial are 4 and 5. Do not touch any other values except what is explained below or face the possible consequences of the mod not working!

So how do these values work?

The BuyRate is the percentage of the actual item value a merchant will pay you when you sell him items. So, the default, 75 means you get 75% of the actual gold value of an item. You can go from 0 , or "free", up until 200 , or "pay double". Obviously any value above 100 is considered cheating since you get more than the actual value of the item you are selling.

The SellRate is the percentage of the actual item value a merchant will charge you when you buy items from him. So, the default, 125 means you pay 125% or 25% more than the actual value of the items. Like the BuyRate this value can range from 0 to 200. In case of selling however, any value below 100 is considered cheating since you pay less than what the item is worth.

Editing the 2DA

So now that we understand how these values work, let's play with them a little bit. Let's say the blacksmith is a good friend of ours and he only charges his costs to us. As a result, we don't charge him at all. If he needs something, the good friend we are, we just give it to him! :-) So this would result in a BuyRate of 0 and a SellRate of only 65 for example. To edit the values in GDApp, just select the cell you want to edit and type in the new value. This is how things should look after we edit it:

Obviously, the above was just an example. Personally, I think the defaults are fine and balanced. But for example to compensate with difficulty levels or because of personal preferences you can use any values you like.

Making it happen

OK, so when you are done editing, choose File -> Save. Next copy the "inno_pp_merchants.gda" you just saved to [My Documents]\BioWare\Dragon Age\AddIns\inno_pp\core\override. Now you can fire up the game, teleport to the plane and watch the results of your actions.