What is the benefits of settlement stores?

From my experience if you are trying to become a merchant mogul and make lots of caps you will be disappointed.

High tier stores require a lot of investment in caps and perk points for minimum benefits

First caps are generated in real playtime outside settlements so emulating sleepin beauty and sleeping for a century or become fossilized sitting on a chair wont help.

Caps generated from a store will be available in your workbench under the misc category. To make back your investment in a store will take dozens of hours of playtime.

Bethesda claimed that the best equipment will be sold in high tier store but if you are like me then you'll have your character decked in legendary gear before lvl 30 and I've yet to see legendary gear in a settlement store

So what are the benefits? For me the only benefit is to sell my loot quickly while I store my junk. The best shop for a ranged character is the weapon store as at tier 3 there is lot of ammo to be bought and it's the best source to pick up .44, .50 and shotgun shells for my character

If you can point out other benefits then please do

I build the trader to buy junk, the armorer to buy ammo and a bar to have settlers spend their nights on furniture I built for them.

I think adding vendors to the community also increases happiness...... For what its worth.

Pretty much a place to dump my junk items for caps, and yeah, weapons traders to buy ammo from. You can get special named pc people to come to your settlements and set up a shop. The Vault tec rep for instance. I have him but so far he has only ever had a single legendary for sale and it is absolute garbage. I got another two but so far they haven't actually turned up at my settlements so I am thinking they are dead enroute or some kinda bug. Mass purified water is still the best way of getting caps that I have found.

So named npc's have some better equipment, that I didn't know. I gave up making named npc's vendors because they were bad shopkeepers always doing something else when I had to sell stuff. I sat Mama Murphy with an easy job selling food instead of growing it.....and she repaid me with sitting in a chair all the time doing nothing. I've tried to explain to here that she won't get no unemployment benefits but I suspect she's collecting the profits from my shops.

There's also the achievement for getting a settlement to max happiness, but its kinda stupid to try.

I wonder if people who have it got it properly or just used cheats. I can't for life of me increase it over 90.

I have other things in my life to do rather than chase achievements....like playing computer games. I don't see the benefit but more glory to them who like to collect them.

No, no, no. It's not that just any named NPC that works for that. There are specific trader NPCs that you can encounter and recruit. If you tell them to work at a tier 3 stall of the right kind, they boost it to a tier 4 and supposedly have more caps and better stuff for sale.

Cool, I didn't know that....I have the Vault Tech representative but he was delegated to clean the outhouses.

Apparently it involves getting 30 something settlers in Sanctuary then building and assigning 20 surgery centers and baby sitting the town for a few hours in realtime without leaving.

^This. My level 4's have a little over 1k caps and items I see rarely or not at all while looting the wasteland. I was shocked at the amount of stuff they had for sale the first time I looked at their inventory. If I ever find the weapon merchant I will personally escort him to his destination.

The weapon merchant is faction quest related I think.

I've been wondering about that. I've met all the others but can't recruit a couple yet. My first character blasted through to get the story and get the gist of the settlement system. Built up the Castle and Sanctuary until I was cheating past the build limit. Had most level 4's at Castle since Sanctuary is so remote and filled with npcs I don't like. Now going through and exploring everything I come across and ignoring Preston so haven't done any building yet. Not going to build anything this time until I've seen all building locations.

Does anybody have a list for where those merchants can be found?

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_4_settlements#Stores

I know the Dr. and armorer are random encounters. Good luck. Trader Rylee (general goods) can be found at Longneck Lukowski's Cannery the first time you visit. Clothing store woman at a radio station se part of the map. Vault Tech Rep (general goods) Goodneighbor. Not sure about the others.

https://i.imgur.com/DhdcfyN.png

The level 4 merchants are all bugged, except for Vault-Tec. None of them will show up in your settlement. Even if you use console commands to move them, Smiling Larry still can't be assigned without more console commands, and Rylee will just disappear again. Ron Staples never even offered me the recruitment dialogue.

Drats I have met the scribe often but never talked to him after I set shop

Clothing merchant, Scribe, and Rylee worked for me. Xbox though, sounds like you're on pc.

Not true. Both Smiling Larry and Doc Anderson work for me on PS4

vault tec rep and the clothing merchant worked for me on xb1. i tried doc anderson but she never showed up so i stopped trying to recruit vendors.

Minutegold said that he tried to use console commands that means he is playing on PC

They can be killed en route to your settlements, babysit the ones you deem essential.