How do you make a gold piece based economy actually make sense in a pesuo-medieval fantasy setting?

>Make sense
Fuck you.

I always wondered, what would realistically happen in your average pseudo-medieval country if adventurers start using the tons of coins the dragon they killed accumulated in centuries.

Total inflation? Starvation rampant?

I'm talking about if OP wants the economy to run like The Elder Scrolls where you hand the bartender a dozen gold coins for a bottle of shitty wine. Of course that shit wouldn't actually work that way in any world designed by anyone who even heard of economics.

Seriously, though, how much fucking gold does your average PC carry? That shit would be heavy and loud, but any time you try and point that out to PCs they throw a fit over it being "Autistic" to even think about that. Yet they'll argue with me all night about the melting point of their fucking sword.

If you want all of the coins to be made from gold, you could do them in several shapes. Really thin rings would be the least valuable since they'd have the least gold, then onto the coins with a big hole in the center and the normal solid coin, that would probably also be bigger and thicker.
Just making the coins different in size would be impractical since it's to easy to lose the small ones and the big ones are too large and unwieldy.
Using different compounds was generally considered cheating, and since you're talking about all-gold...

I hate this recent attitude of everything having to be justified just to satisfy autism. Can you people not just go with stuff anymore? None of this stupid shit matters.

You guys really need to take an introductory microeconomics course. If there's one thing that Veeky Forums gets wrong on a regular, stubborn basis, it's economics in game worlds.

Economies are remarkably resilient, and the laws of microeconomics hold up perfectly well under a very wide range of conditions. In fact, some degree of property rights and some degree of free choice of transactions is really all that's required. Economics isn't a system imposed from without, it's the dynamics that a social system tends to fall into by default.

A brief period of inflation, followed by a return to normalcy. In other words, as the supply of gold goes way up, prices would go up. Not because that stuff was getting more valuable, but because the gold that backs the currency was getting less valuable. That includes salaries, because of course that's just the selling price for labor.

That's the immediate short run. Following that, there would be an out-flow of gold to neighboring cities/villages/regions. The supply of gold would go down and the supply of the things that gold buys would go up. Prices would in very short order drop back down to their original levels, with everyone in the area slightly better off than they were before.

Look up how gold rush economies worked in the American West during the nineteenth century. Or the oil rush economies of the present day. Those were all far more severe as shocks go because A) they were bigger, and B) they lasted for much longer (the equivalent of finding many dragon hordes every month for several years). A few wagonloads of gold won't be anywhere near as big as either the gold rush or the oil emirates were.

They negotiate with the local kingdom exchanging the entirety of the horde for hereditary titles of nobility, trading privileges and large swathes of prime pastures and forests, of course the adventurers stash away the greatest jewels and special magical artifacts for themselves, but after that the kingom's intellectual elites take over and devise a method of dispersing the gold into the local economy to stimulate trade and facilitate the education of a new middle class that specializes in the manufacturing of high-tech commodities and specialization in a variety of crafts. The rest of the gold is used to bribe their neighboring kingdoms with alliances that ease trade and commerce, effectively exchanging a mass of practically worthless and potentially economically crippling gold for an investment on their country's future, ensuring a regional prosperity the likes of which had never before been seen.

For another clue, look to the American Civil War. Severe inflation plagued the Confederacy for its entire history.... except one brief episode. When the Union overran the South's printing presses, it took several months to get new ones online and printing money again. During that period, inflation screeched to a halt and the economy stabilized.

Then the printing presses were re-built and started up again. Immediately, inflation resumed and the economy fell apart again. It probably didn't decide the war, but it was one more example of confederate incompetence. And more importantly to this thread, it shows how quickly inflationary shocks and appear and then disappear and then re-appear based on events.

Whatever the economic impact of your dragon-slaying, a good DM should rule that it's mostly played out within a month, with a few very minor lingering issues lasting up to a year before it all goes back to normal.

i have a god making currency and placing them on monsters and in the wilderness

Cause economics is interesting?

I'm not saying you can't run a fantasy economics simulator at your table. That's your thing. But I will judge you for it and call you a boring twat.

You boring twat.

Personally I like it a lot when an author takes the time to explain the aspects of his world in great detail and doesn't take it for granted that I'll just fill in the blanks with what tolkien and friends have told me. Having a world that doesn't fall apart under scrutiny makes the entirety of the story feel that much more whole and allows me to immerse myself in it.

I'm not above just enjoying a quick and dirty fantasy world with no real logic to it either though. I consider the above to be the author going the extra mile.

Alright, enjoy your game and odd, pointless annoyance at mine.

this
this is what separates great fantasy and especially sci-fi from enjoyable but mediocre ones

>Stop having fun wrong

FTFY

Yes, I absolutely love it when an author spends a few dozen chapters discussing the deep and involved economics of his setting. I also adore when the GM takes time out of our busy games to spend a couple of hours explaining the price fluctuations of gold.

Detail is nice, but there is such a thing as too much detail.

>author spends a few dozen chapters discussing the deep and involved economics of his setting
>GM takes time out of our busy games to spend a couple of hours explaining the price fluctuations of gold
noone ever does that, while people build incoherent worlds without any internal logic by skimping on detail all the time. if you have the attention span of a 10 year old and can't handle 5 minutes of worldbuilding, just play a vidya or watch a shitty action flick

>noone ever does that
One look at any worldbuilding thread on this board shows me that you're wrong. Hell, this very thread and the people advocating for this amount of justification proves your argument is bullshit.

The reader/player is not stupid. They can extrapolate things on their own without you explaining every single little thing to them.

Good suggestions, but I would say that you're downsizing what epic loot in fantasy would amount to.

I mean, I'm still on the impression that Smaug's treasure was at least 5 years or something of Gondor's GDP, considering the line Gandalf had about Bilbo's chainmail's worth (more than the entire Shire).

Though yeah, it would be really crippling/historically relevant only it the country X does see a lot of adventurers looting for some time. Still, I think it would be interesting if they return to a region and people have not-so-found memories of their economic boost to the local activities...

the worldbuilding threads here are just discussion though, and autistic discussion at that
any non-irredeemably shit GM won't spend 30 minutes explaining the economic system

So we're in agreement then?

yes
most arguments between two reasonable people usually come down to semantics or minute details

I like this guy's train of thought.

Make silver the common money and gold the currency of the nobility

Gems can also be added but that would be the currency to deal with exteriors

>They can extrapolate things on their own without you explaining every single little thing to them.

Therein lies the difference between a good author and a shit one. You don't need to explain something you'd expect your reader to already know, but when your world/setting has something that makes it different and you can't possibly expect your reader to know it just from extrapolation, that's when you go ahead and splurge on a page or two of details that let the reader get a clearer picture of the world you're trying to create.

The reader is never stupid, but he might be misinformed or uninformed regarding some of the more intricate details of a particular subject. If the author is an engineer then I'd expect his story to include beautiful descriptions of all the machinery and the underlying principles that govern them. If the author has a background in economics he might take the time to paint a picture of how goods flow and the power structures that govern his world. The same for an author with a degree in chemistry or physics or an author who happens to be a veteran.

it's not that I need everything laid out for me, but the author might be able to lay things down in a way that I as a reader didn't expect or never thought of before.

By being closer to reality and making actual gold coins the realm of extremely wealthy aristocrats.

Crassus, one of the richest romans in history, was said to have estates worth 200 million sestertes - small silver coins, worth about 1/100 of an Aureus - a gold coin.
So one of the richest men in history had a total wealth of 2 million gold coins.

You can imagine how few gold coins that makes for actual spending money. IIRC, he had about 6000 annually. Again: One of the richest men in history.

Your average (PC) adventurers would be lucky to get 100 gold coins a year.

Because magic is a thing wizards used to make literal mountains of gold copper and silver.
The Mage council has put an end to that but the hyper saturated economy of those metals remain, this was a long time ago but it is why you can use gold coins to buy relatively cheap things

Well the currency we have now is a decimal system, so if you used gold like in a pre decimal system similar to that of Britain before 1971 (or harry potter). You could make the most worth coin or amount of money be very rare so gold could be used as the other anons said for the very wealthy. This way you could make the money system seem more flawed than the decimal system while still having some form of sense to it.

I think the better question is why you care so much about shit that exists to buy shit that actually matters.

My thoughts right away.

Are you ok OP, you need to go to doctors? Your brain not working?? Do you have fever?

A couple of games do this. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Song of Swords both use the Carolongian pound. 1 gold coin is twenty silver and one silver is 12 copper. Warhammer somewhat ruins the fluffy monetary system by having everything be in gold pieces anyway, but Song of Swords uses mostly smaller coins. It's sometimes a bit of a hitch to learn at first but people can learn quick.

And let's be honest here. My group and I play Song of Swords. We're autistic enough to deal with pre-decimal pounds.

>Warhammer somewhat ruins the fluffy monetary system by having everything be in gold pieces anyway
Sounds pretty dumb if you have a system in there and not even use it what was the point in making it?

This is on a much larger scale, though. Generally PCs of fantasy games are capable of outspending the richest of nobles on a whim. In DnD this is especially a weird quirk, since the city building mechanics used in 3.5 and 5e show plainly that adventurers have more money than the biggest cities. An adventurer can easily flood economies with four times the amount of money they usually have in one sitting, and that's ONE adventurer, when there's meant to be a party of four or more in mainline DnD. Even with the standard amount of rewards an adventurer can get, not with any modifications to give them more money than intended. 5e toned it down, but not enough, and the assumptions of how much a peasant makes in 3.5 disallows them from owning anything a peasant could be reasonably expected to own, IE livestock, farming tools, etc. Meanwhile, an adventurer can buy entire towns, or outspend minor nobles after one adventurer at level 2 or 3. At the worst, you're dealing with an issue where Adventurers completely unbalance and destabilize society as a whole by inflation on par with pre WWII Germany. At the best, money means absolutely nothing to adventurers at all.

TL;DR: This is utterly incomparable to the gold rush unless every single miner had more gross than New York.

I figure out the economics of my settings for my own notes to figure out who's got money and who's got power. That sort of thing.

It's just how I like to lay it out. It gives me a nice tense framework to push around, and my players enjoy when the results of their actions have logical in-game effects on the setting sometimes.

Why not just use fiat currency?

What spice or commodity would you buy, that would have a better weight/value ratio than gold?
Finely crafted jewellery?
You know the expression "worth its weight in gold" ?
Gold is worth... a lot.

Gold is also very heavy

At the end of the silk road nutmeg was worth more than it's weight in gold. In Africa salt was worth more than gold by weight. Even today many drugs are worth more than their weight in gold.

And so on and so forth, gold was only really particularly useful because a great many cultures started using it as an intermediary, but in a pure barter system there are better things to trade depending on local needs.

I sincerely doubt that anywhere, in any economy, salt has ever been worth more than gold. While gold may not have been useful, it has been a stable of coinage for ages.

A small real-life example of 15th-century England;
A daylaborer would make about a sixpence for a days work.
That would buy about - hold on now - 12 pints, or roughly 12 kilos of salt. If he cared to spend ALL OF IT on salt, for some retarded reason.

A sixpence is also the same as half a shilling.
And 20 shilling make a sovereign.
You know, one single fucking gold coin.

Don't spew this retarded bullshit. Salt has never been worth more than gold.

It's fantasy, user. Gems are the thing.

Actually on this topic I liked how Exalted used jade.

pellet currency?
how much is a BB worth?
bounce tests to check if its real.
different alloys.

Do you have a source for this claim?

Also, while I'm not the guy you were arguing with, I have heard that roman soldiers were paid in salt rather than coins since salt was a universally sought after commodity for its role in preservation of meats and was therefore more valuable than gold in roman outposts where the local civilizations didn't recognize roman currency as holding any value.

Running a game is very different from reading a book, which I don't think is a big assumption to make on Veeky Forums. I could have merchants haggle over every transaction. I could institute non-standard measures and differing face values of coinage minted by a ton of petty duchies. I could have a web of interlocking economic demand modifiers that require Excel spreadsheets to parse. Or I can be simple and have a fixed price list and cut the time needed for shopping drastically.

Some of this might be interesting to particular groups and GMs, but it's going to eat a lot of time and will inevitably be the focus of the game.

>you...make gold the currency people buy things with?
this,
Gold and silver was the preferred material used to make ACTUAL CURRENCY back in the medieval and ancient world, in fact, the paper bank notes we use today only got popular in the 1650's and it wasn't until the 1800s that it would outright replace gold and silver coins as currency.

So what's the problem?

Fine it wasn't "more than" it was approximately equal.

I read up on early capitalism and period works. The setting I DM is roughly based on the early enlightenment and the rise of the humans, so social-economic features prop up often. The fact that the Silberthaler(of the Maria Theresian variety) is by far the most widely circulating and stable currency to the point when international trade is almost exclusively conducted with them annoys other races to no end. Gold is only used as bullion for banking and significant transfers. The players found out that the entire reason behind this was an ingenious move by the emperors Fugger advisors to wage economic war on the heavy gold mining races like dwarves and elves, compared to the silver-rich Empire. This also greatly enables the mercantilist imperial policies, other races have to cut their prices literally just to be able to sell anything to human traders.

I also enjoyed being a little shit with numismatics. Gold is not just gold. Different coins have different value because of impurities and such, older money might be debased, devalued by inflation, a forgery, or sometimes even heretical to use(usurpers face on it) and if you want to get actual, functional money you can spend at a corner shop for food and supplies you have to take it to a money changer. I also ruthlessly enforced money having significant weight(gold is heavier than lead) because I really hate the fantasy trope of people running around with hundreds of gold coins.

Thats because western africa is historically one of the biggest gold producing area on earth, its very devalued there. The richest person in history Mansa Musa comes from there too. He was so rich, when he did his Hajj to Mecca his lavish gifts crashed the economy for decades.

True, but I never said anything about it always being the case, I even said "in a pure barter system there are better things to trade depending on [the local market]."

economics.utoronto.ca/munro5/SPICES1.htm

This thing has some tables of equivalent commodity prices by day-labourer wages.
The "8d" and "6d" refer to "pence" which are abbreviated "d" for some reason.

Disregarding what a middle-school history book may say on the subject, actual economic history has quite a wealth of sources, particularly from England, who are historically good record-keepers.

Also, use a bit of common sense. Salt-deposits can be found along any coastline in the world, it washes up on shores, it is very, very abundant.
Gold is incredibly scarce. Like, insanely scarce.
Have you ever heard of a salt-rush?
If salt was worth its weight in gold, would the expression "salt their fields" ever have found its way to military history? Someone, just casually ordering something as valuable as gold to be ploughed into the ground?

> require actual XP
XP doesn't actually exist in-world. What's happening? Are blue numbers appearing over people's heads as a little glowing bar at the bottom of your HUD is emptied in payment?

What the fuck is actually supposed to be happening in the fiction?

To be honest, fields were never salted, it was an artistic embellishment.

>DandDwiki

"you just have to turn your brain off and enjoy the movie"
I mean... Enjoy it maybe 10%, yes.

There are regions of Africa where salt is scarce and gold abundant, leading to a massive trans-Saharan trade culture that swapped gold for salt for centuries in West Africa. I cannot say anything about the relative value of one to the other. I also doubt that salt was worth more than gold by weight as well, but the trade was massive. Salt for gold created some of the wealthiest cultures in the world at the time.

Since you cant melt down jade, it seems a waste to turn it into small discs. That way, there's simply no way you can get nice big slabs of it to turn into statues or ostentatious tiles or what-have-you.

That is a page from Frank and K's Tomes, which are *relatively* reasonably written by 3.X homebrew standards.

The best D&D 3.5e homebrew I've ever seen was an overcomplicated mess with no sense of grounding or place within the game world; a slew of numbers and abilities deeply steeped in overly specific "once in a blue moon" conditional statements that often apply tiny +1 bonuses not even worth the effort of tracking.

When I try to imagine how very best 3.5e content I've ever seen (and I've seen a lot) would play out in a real play session, I get physically ill.

But hey, that's just me.

>The best D&D 3.5e homebrew I've ever seen was an overcomplicated mess with no sense of grounding or place within the game world; a slew of numbers and abilities deeply steeped in overly specific "once in a blue moon" conditional statements that often apply tiny +1 bonuses not even worth the effort of tracking.

3.5 casters, then?

Pence are abbreviated "d" because they're one of a pile of coins descended from the old roman denarius, which lived on that end of of the gold-silver-copper piece spectrum.

Literally the whole fucking system to be honest. But the homebrew, and if we're counting Pathfinder as 3.5e (I certainly do,) certain Paizo things worst of all.

TL;DR: DnD numbers don't make sense. Shocking.

>Musa made his pilgrimage between 1324–1325. His procession reportedly included 60,000 men, including 12,000 slaves who each carried four pounds of gold bars and heralds dressed in silks who bore gold staffs, organized horses, and handled bags. Musa provided all necessities for the procession, feeding the entire company of men and animals. Those animals included 80 camels which each carried between 50 and 300 pounds of gold dust. Musa gave the gold to the poor he met along his route. Musa not only gave to the cities he passed on the way to Mecca, including Cairo and Medina, but also traded gold for souvenirs.

>Musa's journey was documented by several eyewitnesses along his route, who were in awe of his wealth and extensive procession, and records exist in a variety of sources, including journals, oral accounts, and histories. Musa is known to have visited the Mamluk sultan of Egypt, Al-Nasir Muhammad, in July of 1324.

>But Musa's generous actions inadvertently devastated the economy of the regions through which he passed. In the cities of Cairo, Medina, and Mecca, the sudden influx of gold devalued the metal for the next decade. Prices on goods and wares greatly inflated. To rectify the gold market, on his way back from Mecca, Musa borrowed all the gold he could carry from money-lenders in Cairo, at high interest. This is the only time recorded in history that one man directly controlled the price of gold in the Mediterranean.

Can't handle the swag of this nigga!

So basically this is an historical renactment.

youtube.com/watch?v=z_Nqfi5T3AQ

Hope you enjoy it when a player with more than two brain cells breaks your shoddily-made game because you were too lazy to build the basic foundations of a decent setting.

Shit like the peasant railgun, bag of holding nuke, CODzilla, and fucking Pun-Pun are all due to glitches caused by D&D's wonky mechanics, and Gary spent far longer trying to regulate that kind of thing than you pal; for every setting like Eberron and TES that manages to use his mechanics to make a convincing world of their own, there are a dozen crappy homebrews that only remain functional when used against novices.

>Seriously, though, how much fucking gold does your average PC carry? That shit would be heavy and loud, but any time you try and point that out to PCs they throw a fit over it being "Autistic" to even think about that. Yet they'll argue with me all night about the melting point of their fucking sword.

Here's how I deal with it as a GM: Coins' weight isn't counted toward encumbrance until you have 1,000 or more, after which point it's 10 pounds (or 1 stone if using OSR encumbrance) for every full thousand. If you act like a cheeky cunt carrying 997 coins, I'll have a chuckle once you find enough to put you over. It just keeps things from getting too crazy.

You can also use gems or jewelry to store wealth more efficiently -a necessity if you get rich. You can get gems of basically any value you want, and each gem counts as a single coin for encumbrance purposes. You can trade a gem as you would trade a coin of equal value, typically using them for big-ticket items like houses and magic weapons. A money-changer will happily convert gems to coins, or vice versa, generally taking 10%. That is, you give him 100 gold worth of gems, he gives you 90 gold in coins. You may obtain a discount for a bulk transaction, or if the money-changer really likes you for some reason.

>Hope you enjoy it when a player with more than two brain cells breaks your shoddily-made game because you were too lazy to build the basic foundations of a decent setting.

Not him, but as a GM with multiple brain cells at my disposal, I am capable of telling my players "I hope you understand, I'm not going to let you use that because it's an exploit that breaks the basic premises of the game I'm running". Or in more extreme cases, "I don't think that this game is for you. Goodbye".

make the gold magic

Does anyone have an archive to that thread on tg a few months back where someone tried to create the most needlessly complex currency system for his players
That kind of shit always cracks me up

Never mind I found it

suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/47183895/#p47184189

Worth reading the whole thread. Funny stuff

>recent
What seems like a new trend to you is actually just the end of a long summer. Actually thinking about things from time to time is actually a fairly old Veeky Forums tradition.

Not that user, but the main reason is anything bigger than a basic meal or small object like that (a weapon or armour or property, etc) is most used in the game, and costs more that 1 gp.

How to avoid alchemy from making gold worthless: nigga gold is the king of metals, master alchemists study for decades just to git gud enough to transmute small amounts of that shit.

>How do you make a gold piece based economy actually make sense in a pesuo-medieval fantasy setting?
Get this, people mine gold, refine it, and then cast it into coins. They use these coins to pay for goods and services. Difficult or rare goods or services cost more than minor goods and services.
A suit of plate armour might cost so much that it would take a peasant farming family several generations of scrimping and saving to buy one. A magical suit of plate armour might be something a minor noble house is immensely proud of and hands down for generations, a very powerful suit of magical armour might be something a royal family has due to a favour from generations ago. The way I think of it as far as magical weapons
>+1 magical weapons are relatively mundane but expensive, can be reasonably bought with an assload of gold
>+2 magical weapons are extremely expensive and can only reasonably be traded for favours, a duke gets a suit of armour in exchange for making a wizard a minor nobleman
>+3 magical weapons are impossible to effectively buy due to the time and effort involved in making them as well as the skill required, getting one might require something like giving a wizard unlimited access to your treasury while giving him a duchy and marrying your daughter to him despite her being 14 and him being 70

Alchemy.

Not, not transmuting shit, I mean they basically wring out atoms of gold in various stones and can milk them for all their worth with relative ease.

Also, the gold coins are never bigger than a US dime.

salt ever being worth more than gold is a myth
one is one of the most precious and sought-after metals on earth the other is a fucking spice you can also use for preserving food for the winter
gold was always way more rare and valuable than salt

Why is it nearly every major culture has loved gold? Is it just naturally appealing to the human brain?

It's pretty, rare, and easy to work.

and never rots

Gold being rare is actually good for a gold based economy, it raises it's worth

I mean, I agree with the general point you're making here - I don't have to explain a castle to a group I'm playing with, they know what the fuck that is, I should take a moment to focus on something new to them, like how dwarves value wood so much as a luxury item that they use it in jewelry instead of more common metal.

But while this might be all well and good to explain for an RPG, where my purpose as a Gm would be to make a realistic world for the players to immerse themselves in, a story has a more focused point - specifically, telling a damn story. Maybe with some meanings and ideas underlying that, but you can't take five minutes to go and just blab about the world's uniqueness unless it is somehow relevant to the story, or at least the tone you are trying to set. Beautiful descriptions of machinery could show what the engineer main character focuses on, or economic structures might be important for a brush with politics in a story of warring kingdoms. But don't just put it in 'just because.' A good author should be able to keep you on your toes without throwing exposition at you like a textbook.

it also looks different to most metals and can't be used for making tools or weapons

That applies the same way to lead.

lead is extremely heavy, poisonous and not as rare
also it doesn't look that different to other metals

Well Broseidon, gold is very heavy in large quantities so trying to carry several hundred pounds of it isn't going to work. If you did you could make yourself a real target for bandits, cause thats a lot of gold. WHAT IF....instead of trading the gold, we just trade around pieces of paper that are WORTH a certain amount of gold that are easier to carry and make large transactions easier because the gold can be obtained later! It's still there and you still own but you just don't have to physically have it with you. Shoot, you could just carry the gold coins around for day to day purchases or even ask for paper bits that are worth smaller amounts of gold that also can be traded in later for said gold. Ah, who am I kidding....that'll never catch on, paper for money?

Use Influence and Profit Factor.

What's interesting is that, until the computer era, it has no industrial use. Gold, Silver, and Copper are shitty materials to make items out of - copper less so than the other two, with their uses being in... Jewelry, embellishments, and coins. Copper needed Tin to become Bronze, an actually useful metal.
Which is why the ancient sumerians used them to make the first currency - it didn't take away from economically useful metals, but weren't as easy to forge, as say, carved wooden tokens.
And the backing for their currency? Wheat. Farmers were paid for their crop in these coins, which could be exchanged for other goods and services because the people you paid them in used them to get their wheat from the government granary.
As Sumeria began to dominate trade, their grain tokens, these coins of metals that were used in jewelry elsewhere, became valuable simply because of the issuer. And it began to be copied - both in the original form and to create the image of "I'm connected to Sumeria, I'm a wealthy fuck".

Gold, the world's first fiat currency. Why did Sumer use gold? Because a rare metal was a good metal to mint tokens that represented the grain output of multiple farms. Combine that with rarity and the image given by wearing jewelry or using items that have absolutely no use in combat or tool making (really the only exception is in cups, plates, and bowls, where gold is actually superior to any other metal because it doesn't tarnish and leaves very little flavor), and you get something that is valuable because people say it is, despite having only artistic use in times when you needed a food surplus to support the effort to mine, refine, and shape it.

>refine
>gold

> Log Horizon

Only thing I can really say against this is that, in the case of some Native American tribes (at least in North America), cold hammering of copper was common - it was a metal that was easy to find in natural deposits, and could be worked without heating if done correctly.

Sure, it's a shitty metal compared to bronze or iron, but when you can't melt metals down so that you can form an alloy, or produce enough heat to work a metal like iron, copper would be pretty much the best metal. It would be used for religious items and jewelry, but also for things like daggers and maces, and possibly even breastplates.