Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

The free merchants and associated refugees get the short end of the stick for content because they're seen as not worth it by a lot of players. At least some of this is because the store stock is highly random and not reliably helpful.

Describe the solution you'd like

1: Revise the stock that the free merchant vendor carries to mimic "old time dry goods store".

The merchant should sell a wide variety of useful, common components and tools for fabrication, tailoring, and mechanics. In general, if it's annoying to loot and should be common, the merchant should have a copy. Common expendables should be stocked in large quantities. These guys are supposedly a hub for scavengers to bring in goods... they should not have a shortage of this stuff, they should be swimming in it.

The merchant should not sell food. Canonically they're usually low on it. The theme should be "raw supplies", like sheets of cloth, thread, toolkits, clay, nails, etc.

2: Give the doctor NPC some science gear.

Not every item should be available but the doctor should have some of the common reagents and science tools for sale, allowing you to stock up on these things without raiding research centers.

3: add a teamster NPC behind the center with a small garage full of large building supplies.

This fellow should supply the larger things: pipes, lumber in all shapes, logs, sheet metal, rebar, sheets of glass and plastic, spare car parts. Adding a new NPC lets us put them outside so that you can bring up your vehicle and load it easily.

make sure they have guards, they'll be exposed to zombies and things by being outdoors.

Initially we should not have this guy sell the stuff tacoma needs for their missions. This should go along with the Tacoma Ranch missions commenting that the supply caravans from home base are always too slow, and at the same time, we could reduce the amount of supplies they need, since it's now established they're getting most of their stuff from the home faction and you're just topping them up. Then, when you finish their supply missions, the teamster can comment something like "thanks for your help over at tacoma. We have all these spare construction supplies now that they're not all going to the effort there, don't suppose you're looking to buy?", and at the same time that would trigger an update_mapgen to add those stocks, giving an extra boost for further helping the faciton.

Later on, this teamster should be a source for procgen missions to escort caravans and things, in turn adding a story-convenient way to learn about other factions and add them to your map.

Describe alternatives you've considered

other themes for items would work.

Additional context

I'd love to do this myself, but let's be honest, I'm spread too thin.

When adding these goods they don't all have to be in the merchant's personal inventory, many could be in item groups stacked on the nearby shelves. The merchants should still have their own stock as well though since that refreshes automatically while the items around them will slowly dwindle.

Some day we should be able to add a flag to itemgroups in mapgen that causes them to respawn over time.

feel free to post in the comments about what common items are annoying to loot, and we'll see if they can be added