Coins arent convertable to TU
thanks for the thought though
Generate Coin (cost: 1 time)- Create a "coin" object. This object represents 1 time. This is the only object in the game that will never have the cost change. It will always require someone to spend 1 time to create.
Really? Because everything costs an X amount of time.
So yeah. I believe they are.
Tattle Unholy_Pariah for being too modest, or on GlyphGryph for...wait, that's all Pariah's fault for misunderstanding. ().
There is no mechanism for coins to be converted into time, just as there is no mechanism for current health to be adjusted to maximum health... You would need some sort of convert coin action in order to convert them into time, and such a thing simply does not exist. I doubt that coin conversion will ever exist, because it would invalidate the ability to have multiple in progress tasks because you could just make coins instead until you had enough to perform the whole task in one turn. Additionally, coin sharing could allow a communal effort to achieve a technology more swiftly, which I think is not intended either.
Basically, coins are just a currency, they are used in place of trade goods. Coins allow you to have small values, say you want to be taught fishing(50 TU to research) and all you have to trade is knowledge of converting lead into gold(500) and knowledge of twiddling thumbs(5). You don't want to trade advanced alchemy for something as easy as fishing, but they aren't willing to accept thumb twiddling for fishing, you can add some coins to thumb twiddling until both parties feel that they have gotten a fair trade.
Coins attempt to have a fixed value by fixing their supply at 1 per time unit spent, where as other commodities can have their supply increased by using technology and tools to reduce the costs of creating them. Unfortunately, as time units become capable of doing more due to research, the time units become more valuable, so the supply of the currency is not as fixed as it may seem. Additionally, the demand of the currency is based purely upon the willingness of folk to accept it, which at present is somewhat low. Maybe there should be some sort of bonus for having lots of coins. If you gained one happiness for every 50 coins you have, it would be impractical to get that on your own, but if Talvara had one coin for every time someone socialised with them, then maybe they could amass a nice little fortune to sleep on...
But yes, it has been explicitly stated that coins are forbidden to be converted into time units. They are just like most other coins, you can't eat them, they won't work for you, you shouldn't try to live under them, but you might just be able to use them to convince someone else to help you with such things...