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[EuchreJack]

I was watching a history program about the Roman Empires insatiable desire for Gold and how they were able to use Gold to finance and support their armies.

Then I got thinking about the value of Gold in Dwarf Fortress, and whether I could create a mighty empire on a Gold Mine.  But...Gold sucks.

You can't even buy a decent weapon for a gold ingot.  You might be able to attract the first tier of invaders, but you're not going to get a Mighty Empire out of a giant pile of gold.

Thoughts? Am I missing something?

[Doren I]

You can build a pretty heavy empire out of it though.

As of now, before the economics update and with the arbitrary prices for everything, gold is mainly useful as a metal as valuable as steel but not quite so costly to make, and just a bit of quality gold furniture in a dwarf's room can really make their month.  I think that its mass makes it useful in artifact weapons and armor too.

In short, don't atom-smash all of your ingots.  Dwarves still think that it's pretty

[Saiko Kila]

Since gold is worth the same as steel, and steel is the best common weapon and armour material, you need to add value to gold like you add value to steel by making items out of it, to be comparable (in terms of trade exchange). You can start with coins. Or minecarts, if your merchants have wagons.

[Putnam]

Coins add no value, a stack of coins is 1:1 in value with the bar it was made from, you should make crafts instead

[YashaAstora]

What Putnam said. My current embark has no iron and only copper, silver, and gold, and my whole economy is based around making gold crafts. Dig out a ton of gold and have gold crafts orders on repeat. A masterful one can go for 1500 dwarfbucks or so and you get around 3 per gold bar. I can easily buy everything I need from caravans with gold crafts alone.

[Saiko Kila]

Coins add no value, a stack of coins is 1:1 in value with the bar it was made from, you should make crafts instead

My interface shows that stack of steel coins have a value of 300, while the steel bars have value of 150, that's why I recommended coins (minecarts increase value 5x according to the same interface). Does coin stack uses more than one bars of metal?

[Quarque]

As others said, it is still one of the more valuable metals. If you make furniture and statues out of gold, they will add nicely to room value. It has a pretty color in most tilesets, too.
For actually buying stuff from caravans it is not great, but the whole economy would need an overhaul to be somewhat balanced. You can easily buy out whole caravans with masterwork meals.

[EuchreJack]

^This is sort of my point. It's a lot easier to make a Masterwork Meal and buy out a caravan than forging Gold Amulets.

[Putnam]

^This is sort of my point. It's a lot easier to make a Masterwork Meal and buy out a caravan than forging Gold Amulets.

You mean 90 masterwork meals. The stack size shouldn't be ignored.

[EuchreJack]

Gold also has a second terrible quality for trade purposes...it is heavy.
Refined is better, obviously.  Improved with gems, etc...definitely better.

[brewer bob]

^This is sort of my point. It's a lot easier to make a Masterwork Meal and buy out a caravan than forging Gold Amulets.

How about modding gold to be edible? Then you could cook gold into ☼gold roasts☼ and you could buy entire caravans empty with them!

[FantasticDorf]

I've seen entire bedrooms on the discord communities built out of gold blocks, the only limiting factor being that since wood blocks were made 3 a piece over 1:1 of 50.ish, there's really no reason other than to flex on valuable engravings in spending 1 wood per gold block, or getting magma in order to process that much gold into 1:1 (same argument for bricks/glass, which lack convenience of wood blocks other than the materials being 'free').

Each separating door in the gold block grid was shared between two rooms, assumedly also made of gold. Though in old versions i could have just given them a masterfully threaded,woven,made and dyed bag for 1500 urists and gotten straight to fine quality without such expense in a plain unsmoothed 1x4 of a bachelor's necessities (chest/bag, cabinet, door, bed). I normally don't bother with gold, moreso since there's very few graphics in steam edition to put it into paved roads.