there is still a high chance that people would figure out what trade items are the easiest to store and transport, have high value almost everywhere and can be stored for long periods of time without losing value (so food is out). both ammo and drugs fit this bill so i could see a travelling trader/caravan or scavenger band that is a little business savy figure this out and sell any surplus good that they don’t want to carry around or happen to find for these exact items since this allows them to use these items later to buy stuff with. This wouldn’t make them a pseudo-currency perse but it would make them the closed thing to it to the point that if you wanted to hoard wealth you might try to do so in these items since they are easier to trade with and usefull as payment for services (mercenary might like it if het is pay in a good that is easy to transport and can be used to buy small things with instead of just being handed a extra gun that he has to trade himself).
Currencies don’t necessarily need intrinsic value to have a value. Gold’s practical value has increased vastly since the bronze age (mostly electronic and industrial uses), but gold still became a major currency in the fertile crescent very quickly after the touchstone was discovered, which made it much easier to verify that something was actual gold. (It helped that gold-plating was virtually unknown.)
Yes that’s what’s known as durable trade goods and that’s what we’ve been saying the whole time but gold is not that thing because it does not have enough intrinsic value in this post cataclysm scenario.
Of course. It’s irrelevant for currencies, but currencies are backed by some organization such as a government or a trade group. In the absence of such a thing you’re not going to have gold as a material or gold bullion or gold coins having a particular value outside of the extremely marginal value of gold to use as jewelry or other forms of ornamentation.
I don’t mean durable goods in general i mean spicific durable goods like ammo or drugs. These are relatively high value, easy to transport and store and so are easy to use for trade. People would in many situations when they have durable goods than they don’t need and or have the ability to store/transport, which would happen regurally given all the pre-cataclysm stuff lying around, try to trade it for these spicific goods since they are don’t weigh much and don’t take up much space compared to the amount of trade value they hold. These are the goods im refering to, the items that everybody would be willing to trade for, not nessecarly becease they intent to use them but also becease they are easy to trade with on a later date.
The downside of ammo or drugs as a currency is that they get consumed. Particularly for kinds which are rarely or not at all produced anymore, there is hard-to-control inflation as stocks get consumed.
On the opposite end, if there is production then that affects price, with the valuable good being more valuable if production capacity is further away.
Similar effects would apply to faction-specific currencies; these would be valued higher by people who aren’t in the faction if they frequently trade with the faction, and lower if the closest members of the faction are far away.
ammo and drugs might get consumed but these are some of the things that are producable with reasonable equipment and relatively abundant resourses. when pre cataclysm stocks started to become so low that the price started rising than factions and groups would start to make there own ammo and drugs. therefore they would be things with a reasonable stable price.
I’m not clear what your point is, no one said durable and compact trade goods don’t exist.
A important difference between pre-industrial and post-apocalyptic economies is that the latter has lost manufacturing capabilities. This makes the raw material composition less relevant than before. Gold might be a comparatively valuable metal, but only in comparison to scrap copper or steel. Compared to ammunition, medicine, drugs, electronics, spare parts, etcetera, it becomes less appealing. There might not be new production of nuts and bolts for some time, for example, making them more valuable than their steel content.
Most viable currency in Cata: bottlecaps, screws, forks… because they don’t spawn ingame.
Honestly, you could just abstract it to “currency” like Ashes 2063 TC doom mod
https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?t=47573
which cash system was “scrap item pickups instantly converts into player money”, and nobody would notice.
Are you sure they don’t spawn?
List of spawn location of forks
Information taken from Cataclysm DDA Item Locator (might be inaccurate):
abandoned_warehouse
bandit_cabin
bandit_garage
basement/basement_survival
bunker
cabin
cs_market_small
dollar_store
farm
farm_2side
farm_dairy
farm_horse
farm_stills
fema/FEMA_trc_03
fire_station
gambling_hall
Glassblower
homeless_shelter
house/crack_house
house/detached_house
house/house04
house/house05
house/house06
house/house07
house/house08
house/house09
house/house10
house/house11
house/house12
house/house13
house/house14
house/house15
house/house16
house/house17
house/house18
house/house19
house/house_2story
house/house_dogs
house/house_duplex
house/house_fortified
house/house_garage
house/house_garage2
house/house_garage3
house/house_garage4
house/house_garage5
house/house_garage6
house/house_garage7
house/house_garage8
house/house_garage_prepper
house/house_gardener
house/house_library
house/house_modern_lx
house/house_patio
house/house_porch
house/house_prepper
house/house_quiverfull
house/house_rural
house/house_rv
house/house_suicide
house/house_tool_shed
house/house_vacant
house/whaleys_house_river
isherwood_farms/cabin_isherwood
isherwood_farms/dairy_farm_isherwood
isherwood_farms/farm_horse_isherwood
lab/lab_floorplans
lab/lab_rooms
lab/lab_rooms_wall
lab/lab_surface/lab_surface_big_z1
lab/lab_surface/lab_surface_big_z2
lab/lab_surface/lab_surface_big_z3
lab/lab_surface/lab_surface_big_z4
lake_buildings/cabin_lake
lake_buildings/lighthouse
mall
mansion
missile_silo
motel
movie_theater
necropolis/necropolis
necropolis/necropolisB3
office_cubical
office_doctor
office_small
outpost
park
police_station
Pottery_Sewing_Shops
ranch_camp
recycle_center
refugee_center/refugee_center
regional_airport
restaurant
roadstop
robofachq_static
s_coffee
s_gas
s_grocery
school_1
storage_units_large
storage_units_medium
sugar_house
swamp_shack
town_hall
trailer_park
warehouse
ws_biker_dump
ws_regional_dump
Huh, I see.
I’ve got a few spoon and bowl spawns in the housing areas of my lab challenge runs but never forks lol.
Things like bullets and drugs make more sense since many people and groups would already try to stockpile these thus giving them a much higher price than things like bottlecaps, screws, etc. Therefore people would also start to use these items as a form of easy to use trade good (a.k.a. DEFACTO currency). This would increase demand as people that wouldn’t nessecerely use these goods still would like to aquire them for the afformentiont reason.
Bullets and drugs would be a very very volatile currency.
To be very simple (there are other factors but this is a big one), inflation happens when you add currency to the market. If you have 1000 .223 floating around the market, each bullet is worth 0.1% of the market. If a few groups of people then raid some bunkers, gun stores, etc. that held say another 1000 .223 bullets and put those in circulation, each bullet would be worth 0.05% of the market, halving the worth of all .223 bullets very quickly. This also goes for drugs when you raid pharmacies and hospitals.
Hypothetically as well, as people use ammo and drugs there can be deflation in the market as well. If I take a group to raid someplace and we use 200 of our previous 2000 bullets, the worth of a single bullet would go up 10%!
On top of raiding, most drugs and ammo can be crafted in the game. The ones that can’t either aren’t useful, or so rare that nobody would want to give them up. What happens when I decide to churn out hundreds of bandages a day? Batch craft mutagen? Solder CBMs together?
TLDR: Drugs and ammo are bad currencies because no one group can control their production or their use.
However they are useful trade goods because most people will need them at some point, but trade goods are NOT currency.
My point isn’t that they are currency but the closed thing to currency that people would widely use. In the sence that they are the go to goods to trade with (including smaller transactions like paying for a single meal or spending the night in a safe place) as for your point about bullets the market isn’t as simple as you happend to take out a few turrets and suddenly prices halved. Markets even post cataclysm ones are far bigger than that and simpely do to the size of the market things like that will even out in the end. Sure, you might have a sudden local supply shock if a military base gets cleared or something but that will be resolft quickly by more people buying the cheap goods or it being traded away to places where the price is still high and shocks like that aren’t going to happen often. This isn’t even counting the fact that bullets would be stockpiled by many factions so any drop in price is immediately lead to a increase in demand as every faction tries to buy bullets not that there cheap.
And yes groups could produce drugs and ammo in large quantities but they will be consumed just as quickly since there are monsters to shoot and everyone is in a shitty situation that they need some kind of momentary escape from. This is exactly a good thing since this means that the market is more stable and so is the price making them more relayable as a trading good.
And for the love of god people stop missinterpreting me by thinking that i say ammo and drugs would a ACTUAL currency, i say that they would be used very similarly to currency as thing to easely conduct transactions and trade with. This doesn’t mean that they have to be regulated by a central organization and doesn’t make them a REAL currency, so stop making your arguments as if they are since you are not adressing my arguments that way.
Gold shot for your dollar musket rounds, to flex on the modern world
In my world at the very least, NPC spawn rates is .1, so meeting NPCs is a irregular occurrence. In a world with no organised trade system to speak of, currencies that are themselves pretty useless would not be adopted. That gold is a token of value to be used sometime at a later interaction- if you live in the apocalypse, that interaction likely may not come again, and you might as well have been scammed outright as to trade your precious and immediately useful food, meds and ammo for immediately useless tokens of value. Barter would be a much more rational way to trade value safely without a society to speak of to undercut that currency/metal.
Or no one shows up and the local nicotine addicts smoke away the money supply constantly, leading to everyone hoarding their packs and retarding the economy!
It can be tested by knowing how much gold weighs or just the fact that gold is one of the weakest metals and can be bent easily
actually, gold is VERY VERY VERY slightly diamagnetic no a simple magnet or even a very strong magnet will not repulse it normally it requires a very strong magnet and the metal sample being in a foam boat in water. but that is not saying much as basically every single metal is at least VERY VERY VERY slightly diamagnetic or paramagnetic. here is link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-ex-CAjQhY
I’m sure I’ve stated somewhere that tungsten has (almost) the same density as gold.
It has the same weight as gold.
Nope, not even close to the “weakest metal”. Gold is a lot harder than you think.