Specie — Your Realm Strikes Its Own Money, for RPG Maker MZ

Your party's gold is a number. Specie is the coin.

It reads the currency, the prices and the names your project already declares, works out the coinage that realm would actually have struck, and draws every piece at run time — an obverse device from the issuing power, a reverse from what that power claims, a legend around the rim in the realm's own lettering, a metal that shows in the colour and in how it corrodes, and a strike that is off-centre or double-struck or worn smooth depending on how old that particular coin is.

There is no PNG in this package, no icon sheet and no atlas. What you see is geometry.

Keep your gold display plugin

Specie does not change your gold, convert currencies, add a shop scene or pop a number over the player's head. Those are somebody else's job and they do them well. Specie answers the question they leave alone: what does the money look like? If you use VisuStella's Visual Gold Display, it asks you to nominate an icon for each denomination tier — Specie is what generates those.

What is authored

• 18 obverse devices — the issuing power
• 18 reverse devices — grain, tower, beast, star, anchor
• 8 metals — colour, lustre, and how each one corrodes
• 6 flan forms — round, milled, scyphate, pierced, squared, clipped
• 72 letterforms — two alphabets of 36, differing in construction
• 5 wear stages — Mint, Fine, Worn, Poor, Worn Smooth

Those are authored things, not a multiplication. The number that matters is not how many combinations exist in principle — it is how many your project resolves to, and that is decided by your data.

What your project gets

• How many denominations the realm strikes — between three and six, derived from your own price spread. A realm whose economy spans ten times does not strike five coins.
• What each is worth, on a ladder whose base is small enough to make change for your cheapest item.
• What the realm is called. Your currency unit is read first, then your title, then whatever else you have renamed. Anything RPG Maker ships is subtracted — all 364 words of it, read out of a stock project rather than guessed at — so your coinage is never named after a default suit of armour.
• Which device, metal, flan and alphabet each denomination carries. Metal rises with value, the way money actually does.

A purse is a mixture of ages

Twelve freshly struck pieces of one issue are twelve very similar coins. The die shifts a few pixels and one in six is visibly double-struck, and a player would still call them the same coin. So the strike alone does not carry it.

What does is that a circulating currency is a mixture of ages. Your purse holds coins struck across generations, and Specie derives each piece's age from that piece's own identity. Small change circulates harder than big money — a copper bit passes through a hundred hands a week while a gold sovereign sits in a chest — so on average the smaller denominations are the more worn. An individual penny can still be fresher than an individual groat, because an individual coin is an individual.

Wear is geometry before it is colour. The high points go first: an old piece keeps its silhouette and loses its eye, its mane and its lettering.

The scene

A coin cabinet drawer with a felt-lined well for every piece the party is carrying, and a catalogue leaf beside it showing the selected coin large — obverse and reverse side by side, with its metal, its flan, its lettering and how worn it is.

It draws no Window_Base at all. There is no windowskin on screen and no stock RPG Maker chrome anywhere. A stock MZ party starts with zero gold, so an empty purse shows the coinage instead — one specimen of each denomination — and says so, rather than showing you an empty drawer.

Notes

• A pierced flan carries no central device. Real holed coinage does not: its identity is the legend set around the piercing.
• The rim legend refuses to draw when it cannot resolve. Below the size at which letters are legible it lays the beading a legend is set on instead — what a small or worn coin honestly looks like, and better than fake letters.
• Coins are baked once and reused, so a drawer of a dozen costs one draw each.
• Raw, readable, uncompressed JavaScript. Full JSDoc on every public function.

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Compatibility

Tested against a stock RPG Maker MZ project, verified by running it in the real engine rather than only in tests. Seven of the eight files touch no core RPG Maker method at all. The eighth extends exactly one — Scene_Map.prototype.updateScene — by saved-original prototype extension, calling through in every case, only to watch for the optional open key. Nothing is replaced and nothing is clobbered, so Specie co-exists with other plugins that patch the same seam, including large suites.

Load order does not matter. Every file resolves its siblings the first time it needs them rather than when it loads. That is tested rather than hoped for: the five headless suites, the store-plate renderer and the in-engine verification all load the eight files alphabetically — the worst order you can create by dragging files in — and this package deliberately ships no load-order file.

It never writes your gold. It calls $gameParty.gold() and draws what that number is made of.