The Investor perk allows you to “invest 500 gold with a shopkeeper to increase his available gold permanently,” which is, in addition to being very gender-specific, and not really at all how investment works, is a pretty great perk.
Investing 500 gold into a business with the Investor perk immediately increases their current gold by 500. Investing is as simple as speaking to a merchant NPC and selecting the ‘I want to invest in your business’ option. This can only be done at the same time of day as they would normally allow sales.
Source: UESP.net
What’s Adamant Do?
Adamant improves Investor by increasing the amouunt of Gold the vendor has beyond 500.
Below is the vanilla Investor perk record next to the same record in Adamant. Investor "Investor" [PERK:00058F7B]
We can see that Adamant’s modifications include:
- Changes the
EDID - Editor IDfromInvestortoMAG_Investor - Updates the Description, removing any mention of a specific amount of gold (500 in this case)
- Modifies the Conditions which allow you to purchase the perk in the first place.
- Changes the Merchant perk requirement to Supply and Demand (new in Adamant)
- Increases minimum Speech value to 80 from 70.
Vanilla Investor/Vendor Mistake
If you believe the USSEP crew there are a handful of NPCs who you should be able to invest in that, at least in vanilla, you cannot.
BlackPete addresses this on this USLEEP bug report way back in 2016 (crossing out an incorrect reply to someone who asked why they couldn’t use the Investment perk on street vendors):
The game text claims that “any” merchant should be able to be invested in so this is something that should be investigated further. It appears that there is audio for all voice types, so this should be possible to address.We’ve examined this more thoroughly and discovered that the game actually says “shopkeeper” which would indicate one of two things: 1. A shopkeeper with a physical building to their name. 2. A court wizard.
This means that the four street vendors in Riften (Brand-Shei, Grelka, Madesi, and Marise) should not have been fixed to begin with and the same goes with Anoriath in Whiterun. So those should actually be undone.
The following NPCs (who currently cannot be invested in) would follow the criteria that the developers use though and should be fixed:
– Falion (Morthal)
– Filnjar (Shor’s Stone)
– Madena (Dawnstar)
– Moth gro-Bagol (Markarth)
– Glover Mallory (Raven Rock)– Elynea Mothren (Tel Mithryn)Edit: her voice type doesn’t have any audio available
Here’s how USSEP fixes that issue:
How the Investor Perk Works
The Investor perk works by adding an entry to the Items field of the merchant’s chest record.
Below is the vanilla Container record for Radiant Raiments’s chest in Solitude (MerchantSolitudeRadiantRaiments "Chest" [CONT:000A6C04]). You can see the highlighted line, which references PerkInvestorSolitudeTailorList [LVLI:000AC970], a LVLI - Leveled List record.
Let’s take a closer look.
PerkInvestorSolitudeTailorList is an unusual record because, though it’s a LVLI - Leveled List type, it doesn’t function as a traditional list, and only contains a single Leveled List Entry (what kind of list contains only one item?). Compare this (in the image below) to the LootWerewolfGoldBoss record, a leveled list with multiple entries that determine the amount of gold a Werewolf boss will drop upon death, the amount scaling with the player’s level.
A bit strange to have a leveled item record that’s not a list at all, but it’s just how Bethesda build the game.
Inside PerkInvestorSolitudeTailorList look at the Leveled List Entry itself: It’s another Leveled List: PerkInvestorStoreUpgrade [LVLI:000ABD99]. If you were wondering, like I was, what record specifies the exact amount of gold the vendor gets with the Investor perk, here it is.
You may have noticed that there’s a different Investor Perk Leveled List record for every vendor. The left pane of this image shows only some of them. And if you review the right side, you’ll see that the actual Leveled List Entry references the same record: PerkInvestorStoreUpgrade [LVLI:000ABD99]. Every one.
Perhaps odd that Bethesda built things this way, since a single Investor-perk-specific LVLI record could have be slotted into the Container records of every Investor-related merchant, though likely there’s a logical reason for it that I’m not aware of. Regardless, this structure does seem to allow for more flexibility in modding, and I imagine mod authors have taken advantage of this many times.
Gettng back to USSEP and Adamant
Let’s get back to the record Investor "Investor" [PERK:00058F7B] which Adamant has not given the EDID - Editor ID of MAG_Investor.
This is a desired conflict. We installed Adamant to modify vanilla perks and that’s what it’s doing.
Note: USSEP, which modifies many vanilla perks, happens to not touch Investor, which is why its not showing up here despite it having so many other conflicts with Adamant.