I'm currently working on creating a small mod that adds some extra foods and ingredients to merchants who sell that sort of thing. I want my items to appear randomly, not at any specific vendor or in any specific quantity, and to my knowledge the only way to do that is to add the items to the appropriate leveled lists.

But I also know that according to the Rule of One, if I add stuff to a leveled list that means my mod will conflict with any other mods that edit the same list. I don't want to tell people they have to use Wrye Bash unless there's literally no other way, so I went searching around the wiki and old forum posts to see if there's another option.

I think I came across a method that looks like it would work but I want to be sure before I get started in case I'm wrong. Instead of adding items to the existing leveled list, can I just create my own leveled list, put the items in there, and then add my new list to the merchant containers of each food vendor? Would that work to do what I want, and would it create conflicts with other mods in any way?

If that method won't work, is there a best practice for this particular problem of editing leveled lists without causing mod conflicts? I'd read that you can add things to leveled lists via quest scripting, and that sounded promising, but then someone mentioned that doing it that way will result in ingredients that aren't recognized by crafting recipes. If that's still true, it lets out that method because I need my new foods to be usable in recipes.

Any advice would be appreciated.

The only way it will be compatible is if you do it with scripting. Even if you create your own lists and put them in the container, you're still editing the container, so it would be incompatible with any mod editing that container as well. I'm not really sure why the ingredients wouldn't be recognized by crafting recipes, but I haven't tested it so I have no idea. If it's true, then you have to pick between making it more compatible or finding a way around that problem.

Okay, I dug up the reference. This is where I heard the thing about ingredients added via script being borked - 3rd post down, by Amethyst Deceiver:

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1354729-avoiding-conflicts-when-adding-to-merchantslevlists/

I've spent the last few hours searching through the void for a way to make this work, but I can't find one that isn't going to create even worse problems than it solves. I'm thinking I'm just going to have to deal with the incompatibility.

The dynamic addition of items to leveled lists is one of the things that was working just fine before, and got hopelessly buggered by Papyrus. I'm very leery of using Wrye Bash (or forcing others to use it). Hopefully gamesas fixes the AddToForm() functionality eventually.

Personally I love Wrye Bash; it allows me to do a lot of things that otherwise would not be possible. That said, I do understand why some people choose not to use it. It's also got a rather steep learning curve. All good reasons why I'd rather not release a mod that requires its use.

Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a better way right now. The best I can do is make it clear in the mod's description which leveled list I'm editing so that folks will understand that there might - probably will - be problems using it in conjunction with other mods that add foods to innkeepers. I'll add the appropriate bash tags so that anyone who wishes to use Bash can do so, but otherwise they'll just have to decide for themselves which food mod to stick with.

I suppose it gives me additional motivation to make sure my mod is the best it can be!