That preference is on the "Item ACQUISITION" panel of the Preferences, which controls how ACQUIRE decides to get items. "acquire" - and commands that implicitly call it, like "use" or "drink" - are "automated". Everything else is "manual" - the user intentionally decides to do something and KoLmafia obeys the users command. If we change "autoSatisfyWithMall" and "autoBuyPriceLimit" to apply to non-automated purchases, should we do the following?
- On the Purchases tab, if the user selects a store and says "buy", KoLmafia says "no. You said you didn't want to get items from the mall" or "no. That's costs more than 20,000 Meat."
- If the user says "buy ten-leaf clover", KoLmafia says "no. You said you only want to buy from NPC stores" or "no. Even though you didn't specify a limit in your command, that is too expensive for you."
Actually, you ARE arguing for that second one by saying that the "buy" command should be treated as "automated", even though it's always been treated as "manual"; the user SAID "buy", so, by golly, we will "buy".
Well, when KoL started to allow mall purchasing via Storage, we accommodated that but did not change the "buy" command.
Question: if you are out of Ronin (or in aftercore) and have a bunch of Meat in storage, can you still use that to buy from the mall? If so, does the item end up in storage, where the Meat came from, or does it end up in inventory? Looking at our code, I suspect that once you can pull freely from storage, you are expected to remove Meat from there in order to purchase. But I don't recall. I'll check tomorrow, when I free the king.
Perhaps the "buy" command should, like "acquire", always assume that inventory is involved, and "buy using storage" should be used for stocking storage. I don't know.
In any case, I think the Item Acquisition panel of Preferences could stand to have some text that explicitly says "the following checkboxes apply to the "acquire" command" - and we should have autoBuyPriceLimit be configurable in that section, as well.
Edit: I just looked at the mall while in Hardcore. The link to "buy" an item is identical to what I expect while in aftercore. The only difference is that if I click it, the Results say that the Meat came from storage and the item went to storage. Given that, I expect that if I have insufficient Meat while in aftercore (or out of Ronin), KoL will tell me that my purchase failed, rather than going to storage to fulfill it.