I set up a clinic, clothing and general trader stations (all level 3) at Abernathy Farm.

I am only able to interact with the doctor to buy / sell and get healed. When I attempt to interact with my other traders they just say, "Yeah". I can't even swap gear with them. Has anyone come across this bug?

I have.

Sometimes they're physically standing at the shop but because it's after business hours they're not acting like shop owners. If you wait till 9am they snap out of it.

Sometimes they want to thank me for repelling an attack instead of trading. Talking to them 2 or 3 times seems to fix this.

And sometimes they seem to be just straight up bugged. My armor vendor in Nordhagen won't deal with me at all, I'm thinking of deleting his store and putting him to work farming tarberries in the Slag. That'll show him.

I've found that the level 4 named vendors in particular all seem to be bugged. Every time I talk to the Vault-Tec Rep (who runs my general trading post), I have the same interaction. He runs through the "look at us, here in Sanctuary. Preparrrrrrred for the future" line. Then I press talk and I say "Hey, now that you're back here in Sanctuary, how would you like a job?" despite him clearly already having a job. Then i talk to him again and he says "They didn't tell much. Vault-Tec. I was supposed to win a pack of steak knives!". Then i talk to him again and I say "what have you got to trade today?" and I can bring up the barter menu. I can barter with him, but getting to it is always this exact same process. I can't trade items with him though. I tried to give him a better gun to use and the dialog tree just doesn't come up for him. He just goes through the same few lines.

Anne Hargrave runs my clothing stand. Every time I walk up to her stand she initially says "we put on some really great plays" or something like that, and then I click 'talk' and say "let's see what kind of clothing you're selling" and I can barter. If I try to talk to her outside of business hours, she won't respond at all. I don't get a dialog tree at all.

The Scribe is assigned as my armor vendor and I can't even get him to stay at my settlement. When he is at my settlement, I can barter with him, but he won't go to the actual armor stand despite being assigned to it. As soon as I leave the settlement, he disappears. I've called him back several times with console commands, and he inevitably just disappears again.

As far as the generic settlers that I have assigned to my vendor stands are concerned, I haven't experienced any issues with them. I can't 'trade' with them (as in equip them with different clothing or guns) during business hours. If I talk to them outside of business hours I'm able to. I don't think this is really a bug, although it's possibly some poor planning. It would be nice to still have a 'trade items' option when they're working at the vendor stands, but I think the lack of the option is simply due to them assuming the generalized vendor dialog tree during business hours. Allowing items to be traded during business hours would require implementing a separate vendor dialog tree than the one that's implemented for other vendors around the Commonwealth. This may not have been too much extra work, but just giving them the generic vendor dialog tree was the simpler solution. I don't have a problem with this. I don't often trade items with my settlers in the first place.

My clothing and general good traders will not trade with me even during "normal business hours".

I will see if deleting the stores, then travel to another settlement to sleep for 3 days will fix whatever bug was there, then try again with those stores.

I had this issue there as well, I moved the stand up close to the Abernathy house and then it was fine. I then moved it back down the hill where I had built a small open air mall type of platform and it went right back to just say yeah but wouldn't sell anything. I even tried assigning a differant settler to it but they did the same thing. I guess it is a placement thing idk.

I end up moving it back up the hill where it seams to work.

Yeah, the shops are pretty far from the permanent settlement. The thing is of the three shops, the clinic is the furthest away, and I have no issues with it.

I can also add same observed behavior - while not always, and some further out shops work just fine, the basic rule of thumb seems to be that some settlement locations have grid zones lets call it - and the further out in the grid, the more likely assigned shops will bug out.


It is almost as if the green border you see is one border - for physical placement, but another invisible one is where shops work or dont.


Some settlements are much less afflicted (or not at all) and some are for me 100% reproducible - plop store here, it works, just over that invisible line, and no assigned storekeep will work. Move store back a few yards back over the line, works fine again.


The size of the settlement is not the determining factor, per se. Sanctuary for example is far, far larger real estate than Oberland Station. Standing in the middle, you can see the entirety of the green border around Oberland, and I find the closer I get to the further edge (the side away from the default station house and the tracks) - the more stores bug out.


In sanctuary, the green border IS the real store border. In Oberland, anything down the hill from the default tato patch only works up to the base of the hill, not where the borders allow you to build. Same for other settlement locations. Thats why i said grids.


It is as if sanctuary is considered one gigantic grid, so basically anything you put down is equally close/far from this central 'grid'. Same for the Castle.


But Using Oberland as example, the default tiny station house is one grid, the area below the tato patch another grid, etc, and only stores around the station house seem to reliably function. So reliable i can literally move a store a few feet to consistently mark where this invisible line lays.


Long story short - the green borders lie. Not everywhere you can place a store = functional land. The premier locations - sanctuary, castle, starlight, etc - the places bethesda probably assumed and tested as the most likely places players setup big settlements seem fine, but the smaller, less popular locations are wonky.

What i don't understand is why some stores never have anything to sell (maybe 3 or 4 items), despite being in a settlement with several supply lines (my early game mistake was to think we had to connect to several points) and lots of resources, and having plenty of cash.

Also don't understand why, if I offload some junk as payment to one store, that junk becomes the "shop stock" in the next three or four settlements I visit. They're supposed to be trading that stuff, not selling back to me!

Why do some settlers (and all named settlers, if used) abandon their shop during opening hours? They're still assigned, because they may wander back later in the day.

Yeah the clinic is one of the 2 I couldn't get to work, I also added a dog house even though I didn't have a dog, and soon after the guy selling the dogs came wondering through. Not sure if it was just by chance or not. It is good for 5 on your defense, in case you didn't know.

with vault tec guy, i have the same pain in the ass dialogue everytime before can buy/sell also there is no "trade" option but after business hours i can trade with him normally, have you tried talking to him after busines hours and get the trade dialogue?

anne hargraves works fine for me but she doesnt have anything different for sale than the generic settler i had at my clothing store and she goes straight into barter when i talk to her, she only starts her radio speech when im close to her but can cancel that and go into barter just by clicking on her.

trader rylee is the only other level 4 vendor i found but she completely bugged out, never turned up in my settlement although she added to the settler population. But about 3 game days later the population went back down one she just gone.

all my generic setller vendors work perfectly fine. when in dialogue with them during business hours i can both barter and trade with them (aswell as ask hows it going etc, i get the full and incredibly indepth 4 dialogue option). what ive noticed (im xbox one) is that if their name is "settler" then i can barter and trade with them fine but if they have an actual name (like the level 4s vault tec guy and anne but also other named settlers like sturgis etc) if i assign them as shop keeper they have no dialogue options at all during business hours, as soon as i click on them my character starts with the "what you got for sale" line (except vault guy have to go through that annoying convo first each time)

Just fyi, the normal settler vendors have the option to trade or barter in their dialogue during business hours. You choose which one to use. However, this is when they are not bugged out as the OP mentioned. They will occasionally not respond at all and sometimes their pathing is messed up and prevents them from attending to their store. Aside from these exceptions, though, you should always see the option to either trade or barter (trade is the left arrow and barter is the down arrow).

I have had this same issue, but only with my weapons booth. My clinic, general trader, and bartender stand at their stands, but my weapons merchant is NEVER at his booth. He still trades with me, but makes my whole farmers market - mall, look a little disorganized.

Something is for sure up with it. I am on Xbox if that matters.

I had a similar issue at the Slog. None of my merchants would stay at their stalls. They would all go pick tarberries, or lean against a wall, or do anything OTHER than stand at their shop. However, if I talked to any of them, even if they were farming, they would stop and sell to me.

Try storing all the shops in question and assign those vendors to a farming job. Now place them again, but make sure you place them on the ground and then assign them.

This is the best explanation I can come with my own similar issue: Out of the Tier 3 vendors, only the Medic and Bar worked when I had them placed inside a floor that was up two or three stories. They work fine sitting on the ground.

I had the same problem but just with the level 1 weapon booth. The guy would trade with me but he would never man his stall.

I moved him to another settlement scrapped the booth and built a level 2 weapon booth instead assigned to another settler and that has worked for me.