Selling to NPCs merchants would be a great way to gain pixels, but it could easily be abused by people selling 1000 Wooden Doors. Solution: Have merchants buy only the type of goods they sell. Clothing merchants buy only clothes, armor and wearable accessories. Food merchants buy only food. This way, players are only slightly likely to have items on hand which NPC merchants they find will buy, making it difficult to find ones they can spam with items. Another way to make it fair is to copy the mechanic of Skyrim: Limit the amount of pixels merchants have on hand to buy with. Their pixel amounts go up if you buy from them, but there's a limit on how much they can buy from you. Their on-hand pixel amounts may increase after a few days or maybe the next time you visit the planet.
Nice. Feels a little more like a living world instead of like a mechanic to make you rich. Could also work if merchants don't buy more than two dozen of any item (apart from metals/ ores).
They should also buy ores, which ones they buy and at which price is determined by the sector. Doing this would add onto the amount of pixels they have next time they get more (as described in the second idea) Like on higher level planets, they'd give you next to nothing for something like copper, but for something like Impervium they'd gladly spend a good amount of their precious pixels.
This is a great idea and i think it could even extend to availability of ores on planets, say you dig up some silver or gold on a planet where they are very scarce but you dont need any, you could sell it to a merchant for a good sum of pixels.
Thanks for the feedback! teilnehmer makes a good, simple point. Merchants could simply refuse to buy more than a certain amount of items. Like real life, would a used book store buy 1000 copies of last month's gossip magazine? No, they'd only buy one because that's probably all they could sell. Which leads to the idea: Merchants on settled worlds might buy more than random merchants on abandoned worlds. I stumbled upon a HUGE Apex residential complex - multiple 6 story tall apartment buildings. The merchant in that town should gladly buy a lot of stuff because they have many customers to sell to. Also, that merchant would have more pixels on hand because they do more business with all those people. Conversely, the random merchant sleeping in his cart on a barren, arid planet doesn't have many pixels to give you and only wants the important stuff. That guy should STOP SNOOZING and get to a real planet!
