i don’t think that there would be any large scale currency to begin with but i would think it likely that people would start using certain items and goods as they would currency becease it has some of the same convienence and practical benefits that money provides (storing/transporting of wealth/surplus, making it easier to round out trades and do lower valeu transactions when you only have many high valeu goods and some low valeu goods you don’t want to trade away) as some people start to do this others would see this and do the same thus a defacto currencies
You would value your last gun higher than if you had a rack full of them. But right now you probably wouldn’t sell your only house at market value either unless you had a replacement lined up.
The same as lead (Lead(II) iodide is golden), Pyrite (well, with a strong enough magnet and/or enough knowledge, you might be able to see its paramagnetism - but not in small enough quantities), brass and bronze, tungsten, …
This does not help if you have a bar whith a thin gold coating on it.
That’s the problem with tungsten: It has almost the same (and I mean it: it’s really, really close) density as gold. You can read up on a lot of cases where tungsten bars where layered with a thin gold coat or gold bars filled with tungsten to trick other people, sometimes even including banks and treasuries (although not anymore, since this method was discovered).
… And that’s the problem. You take a look at it from now, where you know it has value. Like… current currency. You even stated that the dollar would lose its worth because the “assigned” value is gone, but the gold would keep its value (or at least some of it) because people now know that it has value - well, we also know now that money has value; why does it lose it then but gold doesn’t?
A gold cube messuring 8’869.743 m³ would have a weight of 171’363,43476 metric tons. Assuming a population of, let’s say… 8 billion humans and 0.1% survivors, there would be 21,4 kg of now useless gold for anyone (well, more for raiders and less for people bunkering down, i guess). Are you sure this is what you call “rare”?
The other less rare things you named can all be used if you come into a place where you need to.
If the cataclysm just struck and there are living (haha, well, that’s debatable) monsters just roam the street I wouldn’t weigh myself down by carring gold…
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If you can trade for stacks of gold than that indicates that that stack of gold would have enough value. converting my glut of surplus high value goods like guns into one resource that can be traded everywhere and is much easier to transport and thus trade with than the goods in quesion. Yes, i would certainlly trade for my extra guns for a stack of gold. This also makes looting more interesting later in the game when you have most of the gear you need and are astablished. Since you aren’t just looking for things you might want to use yourself but also for things that traiders might want or you could get a good price for that you can than trade for things like gold to prevent these things from cluttering up your base while still having a use. this would make trading a lot more meaningfull and easier.
becease the dollar is given value by the fact that the government which the people trust/believe says it does and regulates the supply of it but seeing as the government has collapsed i highly doubt that people still trust the dollar no that the ones regulating it are gone, gold has no government backing it up instead the history of people valueing it, the cultural perception around it and the fact that the it is rare is what gives it value.
edit:
tungsten is magnetic so any tungsten bars that you make would be picked out be a magnet. if a trader where to combine these tests for any gold that he got to check of it was real you would have to make a really convincing fake to get anywhere which i doubt many have the nessecery skills, resourses and equipment to do, and even then if you do you would just be better of actually using those skills resourse and equipment to make other highvalue goods or loot more goods.
like you alluded to just like in our own world gold would also be used to store value like is the case nowadays. this means that a few people or groups have the vast majority of gold. in a post cataclysm world i dont see why this would be different. factions and succesfull survivors or scavengers groups would have the majority of the gold in their possesion as a form as savings and wealth thereby increasing their power. this means that the amount of gold in circulation is far smaller than the actual amount that is phyically available and since it is only the gold used in trade or that is looted at any moment (which is not all at once) that constitutes supply. I think that it would be a rare good indead since getting your hands on that 21,4 kg would be take years to aquire via scavening or you would need to trade a lot of high value trade goods to get that amount of gold. so ye, i would call it a rare resource.
It is possible to prevent things from cluttering up your base by simply not hoarding the resources you can’t possibly consume. Accumulation of wealth in any form (gold, tools, extra guns, beef jerkies) is pointless by itself. You need to have a plan how to use it.
It is easier to get some use out of something practical, though. Zombies are more impressed by your firepower than soft, shiny stuff.
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The tricks to gather NPC’s, make them a bunch of pipe weapons, and then cast bullets out of gold. You can make use of anything with enough conscription and slave labor 
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Always good to see a true entrepreneur. 
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The exact question, and I posed it very precisely, is that the only trade good you have available is your backup gun, and you can get 1 useful but not essential item from the NPC for the gun or a stack of gold. And my contention remains that when it comes to giving up a useful item - not a surplus item, but an actual useful item - no one is going to do it for gold but they may do it for a different useful item.
Gold has no intrinsic value, because nothing has intrinsic value, and it has low practical value. It’s only value is a trade good, and it’s value of a trade good depends on other people valuing it. Scarcity doesn’t matter much and is subject to all kinds of price shocks.
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i don’t see your point, yes you wouldn’t trade away a item with a lot of practical value to you for a item that didn’t have atleast as much or more practical value to you in a world like the cataclym. but this is irrelevent when we are talking about surplus items that hold little to no practical value to you (you really don’t need that 6th backup shootgun) but do hold trade value. the use for these items is to serve as wealth and trade goods so you don’t have to trade away the items with practical value to you while buying things. if the surplus you have is so great that there aren’t enough items that hold practical value to you to buy, you couldn’t carry/transport all the items that you would need to buy to get your moneies worth or there simply aren’t that many or any items that would want to buy anyway to you can take gold or silver instead for your surplus items and use these. gold and silver are also usefull in filling the gaps in barther trading when trading items that have different prices and closing the gaps between the combined value’s could be done effecantly by a relatively high value trade good that is divisable in smale units and doesn’t take up much space.
edit: grammer
If the only time you’re willing to take gold in a trade is when you’re getting rid of your surplus junk, then everyone else is only going to take gold in trade when they’re getting rid of their surplus junk. So having sold all your surplus junk for a pile of gold, you can only use the gold to buy a new pile of surplus junk. Therefore, the value per ounce of gold is low and no one is really basing their currency on it.
This seems pretty straightforward to me.
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Uhm. No. Tungsten is not magnetic. It is paramagnetic (= slightly attracted to magnets) but you will have real trouble to pick it up with a magnet, even with a strong neodymium one. Magnets will slide around a tungsten bar with not much visible or feelable force. Especially when they are encased in gold.
Same goes for testing. It will be really hard to get your hands onto testing equipment, especially as you, the survivor, would need these.
Not if it’s worth much more to fake stuff and exchange it for more valuable things. Like it is done now.
Or just “rob” a bank and get it in seconds. There’s noone holding you back anymore.
If a faction holds a large amount of gold (let’s say… 1 ton from several bank vaults), they will not even consider to offer to take your 1 gram of gold you scrapped from an earring or your gold coin in exchange for a gun.
If the value is linked to the amount available to each person and we lose 99.9% of people, it will devalue gold really quickly.
Let’s assume it’s at 60 $ per gram nowdays (this is close to the highest value paid for pure gold - which a smashed up ring would not be, but anyway). So, if after the cataclysm I can get my hands on gold of 999 other people, a trader would probably value it at 1000th of the price. I would have to carry 1 kg of pure gold to get stuff with a value of 60 $. That’s what we (or at least I) tried to say. Especially if prices for goods that no longer get manifactured will rise, carry around multiple pounds of gold to trade is just not interesting anymore - not until there’s a larger consent or control instance about its value.
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doesn’t add up, what i a surplus good to me is useful to somebody else, what i sell to the trader is usefull for them becease they can sell it to somebody else at a profit and the person that buys that will use this item becease it has practical value to them. Something like surplus “junk” doesn’t exist since since something that is junk can’t be used as a trade good since nobody would buy it form you. so what you buy with gold wouldn’t be just more surplus junk to you it would either be resourses you would want to stockpile like ammo, food or explosives or items you can’t make yourself but can aquire via trading (EMP genades form hub or factory munitions).
See previous discussions:
tl;dr, no, gold and precious metals aren’t going to hold any significant value, there’s essentially zero demand and very high supply.
The thing you’re missing with respect to precious metals is they have never been pure currency, they’ve always been rare and durable trade goods with high intrinsic value due to workability and ornamentation. Their use as a currency is built on top of this durable value, it’s not independent of it.
The problem is, for that intrinsic value to be realized, you need societal stability. In other words, there need to be enough people wealthy enough to value the precious values as ornamentation, if not enough of these people exist, they have no value. For most of human history, society has been “stable enough” for this to hold, which is why it seems obvious to treat this as a universal truth. In the cataclysm though, what demand is present is trivially realized by looting homes or jewelry stores, leading to essentially zero unsatisfied demand.
To some extent even in the absence of immediate demand, you could anticipate future demand and assign value based on that, but again in the dda scenario, there’s a supply glut as well as bottomed out demand, and even worse, no expectation of that demand increasing in the immediate or even medium term future. There is potential that some people would be in denial about the scenario, but that isn’t going to be enough to drive overall demand meaningfully.
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alright loud and clear gold and silver is not worth much in the game
Well, at least not as mainlined currency, I guess.
Of course, I don’t think anyone of us will stop you from creating a mod which increases the value of gold and silver, if you really want to.
Or edit the file for your own game. You can find the metals “gold_small” and “silver_small” in the data/json/items/resources/metal.json file, where you can change the “price_postapoc” to a value that suits your taste more.
That… That’s not how trade works. What is surplus junk to you may be very valuable to another person in another situation, that’s why we trade. This is how gold got to be valuable, as a mercantile commodity that lets the guy with a bunch of surplus crops that he can’t use trade with another guy far away who has a bunch of surplus tools, via a middleman that travels between them buying plentiful things and taking them to where they are scarce.
Gold worked because gold was somewhat difficult to fake, was relatively rare, and especially, had a moderately stable value thanks to the first two.
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I’m reminded of a short story I read online where a rusting apocalypse happened and basically everything metal that could rust corroded away into a powder in less than a week. Metal that couldn’t rust skyrocketed in value for building things where iron or steel would usually do the job, and due to all currency from before the great rust having been iron coins people started using quartz crystals of various sizes as a currency that had engravings to prevent counterfeit.
I wouldn’t do that due to the fragility of crystals but maybe they were in a shape that prevented them from breaking too easilty from falling or something.
My point is that in this world they needed all the metal they could get for industry purposes only, so they couldn’t waste it as a currency and settled on something relatively common that actually has a very low value but they all agreed that certain pieces would be more valuable than others and could be used if you had enough of them to get high value items. We do the same, paper money(I know it’s actually a cloth, shh), something common of little to no value that we all agreed has enough value to be used instead of a straight trade of items.
At first trade will be based off of things people can use even if they’re not in society, eventually though, a society will settle on something to use as a currency that is almost useless outside of that society.
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Until there’s some bastion of human civilisation with a new industrial revolution and proper manufacturing, everything’s value is purely based on use-value, with rarer collectible type things gettting a small boost in value, but not much, as it’s just a gimmick to any survivor.
Copper would likely have higher value than most scrap due to ease of fabricating into useable tools for example.
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I don’t know where you’re getting this, if gold isn’t intrinsically valuable, it doesn’t matter how rare or hard to counterfeit it is, you aren’t going to be able to travel a thousand miles and expect to be able to trade it. You might be thinking of pseudo-fiat currencies based on gold.
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