Currency Texture and Name

[LouisTBR]

Even now, in 2015 (nearly 2016!!!), we have a decent currency. So, why, may I ask, in 5500, do Rimworld colonies/factions still use medieval silver? Here's my ideas:

Coins - Coins, like today, will stack 100 per square, and have the same monetary value as silver. It is basically just a new texture.

Currency Name - My personal favourite is Rims, but I'm sure that you guys have much better, less crap ones than that!!!

[cultist]

Because currency requires a stable society, and there is no real connection between planets far from each other.

Think about the American dollar. Now imagine America is 1.000.000 times bigger than it is today and spans 7 diffferent planets in the universe. Now think about how stable the dollar has been for, say, the last 100 years. Not terribly. Ups and downs, sometimes extreme. Imagine how much worse it would be if the economy is affected by factors on other planets as well.
With the way we approach economics today, a galaxy-spanning currency is just crazy. It would never work and it would never remain stable.

[DoctorNick]

I'm going to look at things a level deeper.

From the RimWorld fiction primer we know that:

A) All starships are slower than light.

B) Tech levels from planet to planet can vary wildly.

C) The above frequently being caused by either getting nuked back into the stone age (bad) or reaching some sort of wundertek post-singularity trancendence (good?).

What does this mean in practice?  When your interstellar trading ship decides it's done in one star system and spends the next couple decades beboppin' to the next star over there's always going to be some level of uncertainty as to what exactly you're going to find.  Sure you might find relatively the same society that your star charts claim should be there, with roughly the same tech level and all of that.  But it's just as likely you'll find burned out, cratered worlds with only a remnant population of C.H.U.D.'s gnawing on the bones of whoever they catch all because someone a few years back decided to push 'the button.'  Or maybe instead in the meantime the world you were heading for perfected mind-to-machine transfers, mass uploaded the population into the great global meta consciousness and this civilization now only exists as massive computing sever farms, tended by robots and with no interest in the outside world.

Even if you are in luck and you find relatively the same world with relatively the same tech level they still might have had sort of political revolutions, economic upheavals and so on so forth.

Add all of this up and the idea of maintaining any sort of universal interstellar space cash starts to feel more and more preposterous.

Things like gold and silver however always have some sort of intrinsic value due to their inherent scarcity, so whoever's around willing to trade will probably be willing to deal in it.

[REMworlder]

There's definitely a lot of potential depth here to explore with how trade is conducted in Rimworlds, but I don't think Tynan's particularly interested in exploring it. The trading system itself is really shallow.

The question is how any particular aspect of trade could be made really interesting with minimal effort. And that's a big question that lots of trading games struggle with, and probably why they're not as popular as they once were. And being accessible to players is another big question. Imagine the howling players would do if, for example, a desperately needed food trader showed up but they player lacked the proper currency to feed his starving colony. Unfun nerf!

I think the first step is to build off whatever changes the faction system sees. Spess trade is odd and variable -- do they use blockchain credits? Weird pelts like in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch? - planetary trade is much more intuitive and easier to understand.