Merchant 42750 gold bug in Skyrim

Questions: Does this apply to all merchants?

Do the merchants break above 30k gold, or above 42750 gold?

Why does this occur?

Can this be fixed?

Are there anything else I should be careful about when dealing with merchants?

Answers: Possibly. I haven't had the time to go around to every merchant and add 30K gold to their salary ha-ha. All I know is that it effects most merchants that you can either train with them, or they sell expensive items.

It usually breaks around 30K gold - 40K gold. It's due to the fact that NPCs don't hold much data. It's pretty hard to explain, but I don't think Bethesda programmed the merchants to hold more than 40K gold.

It probably can't be easily fixed. From user mojodajojo on nexusmods:

However, you can script a merchant's chest to remove excess gold when it gets over a certain amount.

Probably not to train too much. You can easily level up by just using your weapon, or lock picking. Hope this helped!


In order to express negative values in a binary System one uses signed Datatypes. Means the first bit is the sign (0 means +, 1 means -).

Unsigned word(or integer) 32767 + 1 = 32768 / signed word 32767 + 1 = -32768

That is why this so called 'bug' happends if you go above 32767. It was unwise to use

  1. a signed Type since there are not negative gold amounts and
  2. only give it 2byte size

No known fix unless someone is able the recompile the core is guess. There are, like mentioned, only mods that bypass this issue, but not fix it.