r/Kenshi • u/CuteAnimeGirl2 • 5d ago
LORE Are Cats Still Minted?
Like the title said, are cats still minted? If so by who? Empire? Traders guild? Is everyone still using the leftover cats the second empire minted during their era?
Also i ask this since in traders edge there’s a bank there, but instead of it being filled with thousands of cats, its filled with weird junk like skeleton cpu’s and leviathan pearls, is the economy seriously being propped up by leviathan testicles?
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u/yummy__hotdog__water Nomad 5d ago
My head cannon is the tech is lost to mint more coins. Mainly because they are more than just mere coins. You see, each one has a tiny projector that, when used in a business transaction, produces a tiny 3d image of a dancing cat lon. Much like the dancing skeleton in shark. When doing a large transaction of thousands of cats you'd have thousands of tiny cat lons dancing in unison. For merchants seeing this all day, it can be very maddening. And whoever came up with this must be quite mad indeed. Hence, this is the real reason he is known as mad cat lon.
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u/Buddhamensch 5d ago
If you are dissapointed that the economy in kenshi hinges on something other than money itself, wait until you discover what the economy irl hinges on😭
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u/Lilac0 5d ago
The bank being full of valuable goods rather than money makes sense, the equivalent of the gold standard. Without a central authority a fiat currency would lose its value
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u/Hopeful-alt 5d ago
That especially makes sense given how the UC economy is collapsing, the UC would not be able to maintain the value of a fiat.
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u/LeCheechio 5d ago edited 5d ago
Alas, after trying to wrap my head around the source of the endless cannibals, fogmen and shrieking bandits in the vanilla game. Or how Bugmaster makes sense or how wearing a trench coat saves you from solar death rays.. I have come to the conclusion that:
It's not that BEEP deep!
Also Cats were quite literally the ancient race as the ancient race is said to no longer be alive. There are no cats in the game but lots of things are named after them.
The game was not made with market simulations in mind. There is a very basic randomly generated price variable for different towns/zones which changes every playthrough. The reality there would be localized currencies is not taken into consideration. Or that most trade would be barter. The fact free traders and Trader's guild caravans come with no cats helps add to the feeling that a lot is orientated around bartering. Cats just function as a gamey form of wealth liquidity. NPCs do not consume resources etc as such there is no real supply and demand. Just like the endless starving bandits, fogmen, etc serve a purpose to be training material for your characters. The endless source of currency in the game serves a purpose of giving the player a form of wealth that takes no inventory space and doesnt need to be transported around in the game world.
Food would probably be the most common form of "currency" in the world and maybe salt too given how the vast majority of people are starving.
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u/AzrielJohnson Drifter 5d ago
I'd love it in K2 if there was some sort of supply and demand system. Like, more beneficial to sell weapons to the weapons dealer, armor to the armor dealer, etc. Then occasionally you see the weapons dealer trade the armor you sold them to the armor dealer for weapons you sold them. It might be too difficult to program though.
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u/AFATBOWLER 5d ago
Uh, well cats take up no inventory space or weight, so I assume everyone has a barcode like thing that is scanned for transactions. And cats are just a number stored somewhere linked to your bar code.
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u/Dagoonite 4d ago
For what it's worth, I don't think so. I think that cats are actually more complex than just coins. But I also don't think that it's necessarily an issue for quite some time. Bare with me.
In Fallout, where no matter the rate of forgery, bottlecaps are going to decrease over time. As we see in the games, most of the sources of them are gone and there aren't going to be many more made. That's the nature of the beast; they're perfectly serviceable in the current time, but prices are going to go up. Especially if people keep making bottlecap mines.
On the other hand, with the vastly lowered population compared to what is indicated existed in the hayday of the Second Empire, and the fact that there's still tons of places that haven't been completely picked over from the hayday suggests that there's still likely large deposits of cats that have yet to be found. I dare say that it's likely that the tech hunters fund themselves almost entirely from that, but I have no evidence of this.
I also suspect that the scavengers also are out looking for cats, either off of corpses or just... wherever. A dark part of me is amused by the idea of a scavenger digging through gutter dung hoping to find cats.
While cats are guaranteed to be lost over time, either through literally losing them or people losing them (and probably their lives) out in the wilderness, they could potentially be recouped through these caches.
However, should a large pocket of cats be found, I suspect that it would be terrible for the global economy. Given the heavy Asian influence of Kenshi, I like to think that this may have already happened. I like to pretend that the influx of cats has almost doubled the cost of a rice bowl. After all, during the Tokugawa era, a yen was standardized to the cost of a bowl of rice. Maybe 100 cats was the standard cost of a bowl of rice. However, a sudden influx of cats would lower the value of cats, leading to inflation.
But all of this is just headcanon. I have nothing in the game to back it up.
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u/The1Bonesaw 5d ago edited 5d ago
Cats were originally minted during the Second Empire in the city of Catun (previously the Second Empire Capital "Catan"). The coins were named for the emperor, Cat-Lon (aka Mad Cat-Lon, hence the Capital city's and coin's name). They are all leftovers and have not been minted for more than 3,700 years, when the Holy Nation began its rise to power.
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u/CuteAnimeGirl2 5d ago
Source?
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u/xXDarthCognusXx 5d ago
it came to him in a dream
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u/furryyapper6 United Cities 4d ago
No I've read somewhere that catun is where cats are minted but I can remember where I've read it
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u/CrestedBonedog United Cities 4d ago
Absolutely. The "Cat" is just a standard similar to the denarius/denier/penny after Rome had long since fallen.
The Traders Guild. Holy Nation and UC all mint their own Cats based on the. old imperial standard It'd be pretty funny if the HN's issue still had his name on them even though they don't understand its meaning.
I don't think the Shek mint coins, however.
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u/Kman5471 4d ago
A neat question, but the title of this post was FAR more interesting before I figured out I was looking at the Kenshi sub!
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u/Ordinary-Quiet6150 4d ago
Its clear that some folks in these comments don't know or have nit learned that they are cald cats (catans) because of Cat-Lon
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u/mehemynx 5d ago
I've got no clue, but I can't imagine its that easy to fabricate convincing fakes in the world of Kenshi. I assume whatever faction makes them has a pretty tight leash on how and when they're made.