I have noticed a curious thing concerning gold in Farthest Frontier - namely that it seems to appear out of nowhere.
“Wait, what?” I hear the reader ask. Allow me to explain. The economy of the player’s settlement is an almost completely closed system; everything within it ultimately derives from the map as raw materials are harvested or mined (or salvaged) and then refined into usable goods of some form or other. The only exception to this are the travelling merchants who will occasionally arrive with goods and gold to trade.
But there is another hole in the closed system: tax money. That gold seems to come completely out of thin air. What do I mean by this? Apart from a select few professions (Rat catchers, soldiers, guards and priests) everybody in your village works for room and board, yet at the same time they have money to pay taxes.
Furthermore the entire town is a perfect command economy, and there is no private enterprise among the citizens, so it is not possible that they would somehow come into money in other ways. So it really seems like that gold just appears out of nowhere.
Resolving this issue would of course require some reworking of the game - I think the simplest thing to do would be rework the usage of gold ingots.
I would propose that tax income from the citizens should simply be done away with - within the game world they simply do not have any means of acquiring cash to pay their taxes.
This in turn would mean that gold ingots would become a lot more scarce. I would then propose that gold ingots should only be used as a building material and quite possibly only for later buildings (I am mainly thinking of the odd fact that gold ingots are used somehow in the construction of garden trails and such) and that coins should be introduced along with a mint.
Coins would then be what would be used at the trading station, and for the early game that should be the main way of obtaining them (the other two ways should be salvaging and dispersing raider camps). Later in the game the mint would be able to refine gold ingots into coins.
This should lead to a situation where mining gold and refining it into money would actually be a worthwhile economic activity in the game.
Of course implementing this would require a lot of rebalancing of building and upgrade costs, and I am aware that at this point it’s probably too late for my ideas to have an impact on the game. Well, at least I got it off my chest.