uo-buy-items

name	uo-buy-items
description	Buy items from an NPC vendor with the headless UO client — find the vendor, open their buy list with the "<Name> buy" speech command, list what's for sale, and purchase. Use whenever the user asks to buy/purchase something from a shop, vendor, or shopkeeper.

Buying from an NPC vendor

Requires a logged-in character with the map loaded (see uo-login), and usually some walking to reach the vendor (see uo-navigation).

1. Identify the vendor

mobiles only shows generic "Human (Male/Female)" — NPCs' real names only show up via a single-click, which triggers an overhead name bark:

echo "mobiles 8" >> /tmp/cuocmd
sleep 1
tail -15 /tmp/cuolog

Click each candidate to get its name (order of clicks matches order of bark replies):

printf 'click <serial1>\nclick <serial2>\n' >> /tmp/cuocmd
sleep 2
tail -15 /tmp/cuolog

Look for a name+profession like "Deval the bowyer" — that's your vendor, and the shop you want them to open usually matches their trade (bowyer → bows/arrows, tinker → tools, etc.).

2. Get adjacent and open their buy list

Double-clicking a vendor does not open their shop here — it opens their paperdoll. The real trigger is a speech command, and it must be their actual name, not the word "vendor":

<Name> buy

e.g. Deval buy — NOT vendor buy. This is documented shard behavior (UO Renaissance's NPC Commands page: (name) buy — "Will show you any goods the vendor has for sale"). Walk within about 1 tile first (uo-navigation), then:

echo "say Deval buy" >> /tmp/cuocmd
sleep 2

A successful open shows the vendor's greeting in the log (e.g. Deval: Greetings. Have a look around.) and, shortly after, an [INFO] [SHOP] Vendor ... buy list ready: N items line.

Why plain "say" text alone isn't enough

This was the hard-won part of getting opendoor-style speech commands working here. UO has a legacy keyword speech system (speech.mul): the real client checks outgoing speech against a table of command phrases (bank, guards, *buy*, etc.), and if it matches, sends a completely different encoded packet — bit-packed keyword IDs plus the text — instead of plain UTF-16 text, with the message type OR'd with 0xC0. Many servers' NPC command scripts (this one included) only recognize the encoded form; plain text with the identical words is visibly broadcast and echoed back to you, but silently ignored by the command parser. Send_Speech in OutgoingPackets.cs now replicates this: it loads speech.mul (via MapManager.Load, i.e. automatically on loadmap), matches the outgoing text against it (see Map/SpeechKeywords.cs), and encodes accordingly. If a future speech-triggered command mysteriously does nothing even though the words are right, this encoding is the first thing to double check — not the phrasing.

Also worth knowing: while chasing this bug, a second unrelated liveness-check mechanic was found and fixed — the server periodically sends a blank "SYSTEM" speech packet as a ping, and a real client answers with a fixed magic-byte ACK (Send_ACKTalk, see IncomingPackets.cs Handle_AsciiSpeech). This wasn't confirmed as the actual cause of the vendor issue (the keyword encoding was), but it's implemented now regardless since some servers silently penalize a connection that never answers it.

3. List what's for sale

echo "shop" >> /tmp/cuocmd
sleep 1
tail -15 /tmp/cuolog

Prints every item currently in the vendor's buy list with its serial, name, graphic, price, and stock amount, e.g.:

Vendor [000012F3] buy list (8 items):
  [400E3689] arrow fletching           Graphic:0x1022 Price:2 Amt:20
  [400E3693] arrow                     Graphic:0x0F3F Price:8 Amt:80
  ...

If shop says no buy list has been received yet, the speech command either didn't reach the vendor (check adjacency) or hasn't been processed by the server yet (wait a moment and retry shop).

4. Buy

echo "buy <item_serial> <amount>" >> /tmp/cuocmd
sleep 2
tail -8 /tmp/cuolog

e.g. buy 400E3693 20 to buy 20 arrows. A successful purchase gets a confirmation bark from the vendor stating the total cost. buy always targets whichever vendor's buy list was most recently opened — no need to pass the vendor's serial.

Confirm the purchase:

printf 'status\ninv\n' >> /tmp/cuocmd
sleep 2
tail -12 /tmp/cuolog

status shows updated gold; inv shows the new item in the backpack. Note this relies on the backpack already having been opened at least once this session (see uo-equip-items step 1) — if inv still shows an empty/stale backpack despite the gold having gone down, use <backpack_serial> first, then re-check inv before concluding the purchase didn't land.

Gotchas

• Vendors wander. These aren't fixed behind a counter — they walk around a small area. Re-check mobiles for current position immediately before walking to them; a position from more than a few seconds ago may already be stale.
• The buy-list serial isn't the vendor's serial. shop output serials are the individual stock items; buy takes one of those, not the vendor's own mobile serial.
• Selling isn't implemented yet. The shard documents a matching <Name> sell speech command and a corresponding incoming packet (0x9E SellList), but only the buy side (0x74 BuyList, 0x3B BuyReply) has been wired up in the headless client so far.