Baldur’s Gate 3 merchant attitude or trader affinity impacts the price of items of a particular vendor. Having a high merchant attitude will lower the price of items for trade or barter, and increase the price of items you sell. Combined with a high Charisma stat, having merchant affinity in the green or, better yet, maxed out affinity at 100 will significantly reduce the gold cost of the trader’s inventory. This will make it it easy to keep your party geared up, your camp supplies high for long rests, and equip members with the best gear available. Here’s how to improve merchant attitude in Baldur’s Gate 3.
How to increase Baldur’s Gate 3 merchant attitude
To increase merchant attitude, you need to donate 6 gold pieces (or 6 gold’s worth of items) per attitude point, up to a max of 100 points. This means donating 600 gold pieces will max out a vendor’s attitude.
At 100 attitude, the cost of buying items from a particular vendor is reduced by 25%, while the sell price of items you sell to the vendor is increased by 30%. This particular bonus might change depending on the trader, but that’s the general impact of trader affinity. Either way, we suggest improving merchant affinity with vendors who you’ll interact with many times during your campaign. So you may want to wait until you reach Baldur’s Gate before worrying about merchant affinity.
From our testing, changing the difficulty setting to Explorer or Tactician does not impact how much it costs to raise merchant affinity. Nor does having a high Charisma character speak with the vendor, though doing so does greatly impact buy and sell prices in general. In fact, putting both of these bonuses together can easily cut purchase costs by half and double sell prices.
Of course, you can always your luck at pickpocketing vendors instead and reloading the game if you get caught. Doing crimes and getting caught stealing will lower merchant affinity of course. But if you’re trying to play the game without being a sneak thief, raising merchant affinity is the way to go in the long run.
Larian Studios has changed how merchant affinity has worked during Early Access, so it may be altered in the future. Fortunately, the amount of gold it costs to raise merchant affinity hasn’t changed in the day one patch notes.
