Title...

I am able to bring up the barter screen just fine, but no matter what I do, the items in the intended merchant container are not there. I have marked it as a persistent reference, given it a ref id, and tabbed over to ownership and added the merchant. I have also opened the menu for the merchant and set the merchant container to the container. Nevertheless, nothing.

I hope that wasn't too hard to follow...

Help would be greatly appreciated!

Alright, someone has to know... this is seriously impeding my mod's progress...

Checkout the Autocalc Services section in the AI Data tab of your NPC. Only check the boxes for the actual item types that are to be sold. Don't check the Autocalc Services box itself. See if that does anything.

Have you created a vendor chest in the vendor chest interior holding cell? It is the one that has nothing in it but chests and boxes and refrigerators that are used by all the merchants in the game.

In order to prevent players from killing and looting merchants of their entire inventory there is an arcane smoke and mirrors method of linking merchants to the actual stuff that they can sell. The whole setup of merchant key and the visible merchant chest and the inaccessible merchant inventory is too convoluted to get into here. I am not sure if there are any tutorials to help you set it up. It seems like a logical tutorial to create that would be well received if it has not been done already.

Without a tutorial to go by, I just sussed out the method by picking a certain merchant or barkeep and searching out every link attached to them. Just be careful to look and not tweak. If you copy things, make sure that your pastes are all unique items that have no connections left to the original merchant.

Question: Are you adding the items directly into the Container or using Leveled Item lists instead?

I ask because I had a similar problem with a custom merchant chest not spawning items for a merchant. I was initially putting the items directly into a custom merchant container, and it didn't occur to me until much later that using a Leveled Item list instead might have been the smarter thing (nearly all original containers you'll notice use leveled Item lists almost exclusively). Was trying to set the health of certain items in the container, which was causing them not to appear for me in the merchant screen. Setting things up through a Leveled Item list and using that in the container fixed things for me though (and stopped the items with varying healths from vanishing from the barter screen).

Thanks for the suggestions, I'm trying them now!

Manually checking services worked! Thank you very much!

Great! Glad it worked for you.

I followed the tutorial on the GECK wiki to setup my first vendor. That tutorial is wrong at this point, as it (I believe...) instructs you to check the Autocalc Services box. Which then leaves your vendor without any wares to sell. It took some experimenting to discover that I had to NOT follow the tutorial, at that point.