Gold Standard: Currency Studio

Gold Standard: Currency Studio

Your world. Your currency.

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* Enhanced Vehicle Store compatibility:

• Enhanced Vehicle Store's compact table prices may differ from the correctly converted detail prices when Gold Standard is active.
• An integration fix has been verified locally and prepared for the store's author to consider.
• This specific issue has not been observed in the game's default vehicle store.

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Give your transport empire a currency of its own.

Gold Standard lets you customize how money appears in Transport Fever 3—from a familiar currency label to a fictional monetary system built for your world. Choose your symbol, set a conversion rate, define a monetary base year, and watch your displayed amounts evolve with the game’s calendar.

Open the gold GS coin-seal button to access Currency Studio, with live previews and settings saved with your game.

A currency that fits your world

Start with a familiar label such as USD, GBP, CHF, EUR or JPY—or create your own. Korean won (₩ / KRW), Russian ruble (₽ / RUB), florin (ƒ), franc (₣), and other real or fictional labels can be entered in the custom-label field. Use a letter code if the game font cannot display your chosen symbol.

Customize:

• Currency label: use an abbreviation, symbol, or fictional name.
• Conversion rate: choose how many currency units equal one game dollar in your base year.
• Monetary base year: establish the starting point for your currency.
• Annual inflation or deflation: give displayed amounts a yearly change.
• Number formatting: select decimal places, grouping separators, prefix or suffix placement, and compact K/M/B amounts.

Currency presets provide convenient labels and formatting starting points. Their rates are editable; they do not represent verified historical or current exchange rates.

How the monetary system works

Your base year anchors the conversion.

For example, suppose you choose:

• Base year: 1900
• Conversion: 1 game dollar = 0.25 GFr.
• Annual display inflation: 2%

An unchanged amount of 1,000 game dollars would display as approximately:

• GFr. 250 in 1900
• GFr. 305 in 1910
• GFr. 371 in 1920

The conversion follows the in-game calendar, not the number of hours you spend playing. A zero annual rate keeps the conversion constant; a negative rate makes displayed amounts decrease over time.

This is a configurable denomination and display system. It does not simulate historical consumer prices, central banks, gold reserves, or changes in purchasing power.

Preview before you apply

Currency Studio shows how your choices affect sample amounts before you commit them.

Experiment with different labels, rates and formatting, then select Apply to this save. Cancel closes the panel without applying your draft, while Reset Preview lets you explore the defaults.

After applying changes, save your game to retain the settings with that save.

What changes—and what stays in game dollars

Gold Standard converts supported money displays. It does not change the simulation’s underlying account balances, transaction costs, vehicle prices, income, or economic difficulty.

The annual rate is an additional display index. The game’s own price adjustments, fare multipliers, and other economic mechanics continue independently. Selecting 2% here does not guarantee that every price in the game rises by exactly 2% overall.

Historical finance entries currently use the current game year’s conversion, rather than the year in which each transaction occurred.

Current preview limitations

Some native game displays bypass the conversion system:

• Native construction previews and floating amounts are not numerically converted.
• These retain an explicit game $ label by default.
• An experimental option can match their currency label, but it changes the label only—not the value, annual adjustment, decimal precision, or label position.
• Editable sandbox/account inputs continue to use underlying game-dollar values.
• Some open panels may need to be reopened before cached amounts refresh.
• The save-selection account preview remains in game dollars; per-save currency conversion in that menu is under investigation.

Disabling the mod requires a full game restart. Native currency-prefix preferences may also need restoration if the game has retained them.

Compatibility and testing

Gold Standard is designed to work alongside financial-statement, vehicle, industry, and gameplay mods by changing supported money displays while leaving their underlying calculations intact.

Financial statements and other mod panels that use the game's shared Lua money-formatting functions can inherit your selected currency and formatting. Panels with their own formatters, hard-coded currency labels, or native money displays may need additional integration. Compatibility with individual mods must be verified; this is not a blanket compatibility guarantee.

Other currency or money-formatting mods may conflict, and load order can affect which formatter is used. When reporting an issue, include the name and version of the other mod and the affected panel.

This is a development preview tested for Transport Fever 3, Steam, Windows 64-bit, build 40425. Other platforms and builds have not been verified.

Please begin with a duplicate save. Broader compatibility, save-persistence testing, and long-session validation are ongoing.

Under the hood

Gold Standard is written in Lua, using Transport Fever 3's built-in GUI and scripting APIs. Its interface uses the game's React-style recipe system, with Lua stylesheet definitions, JSON mod metadata, and small static coin-seal images.

The design uses a single settings window, mod-specific GUI save data, and shared money-formatting wrappers. It adds no per-frame polling, timers, network requests, or telemetry.

For contributors, currency calculations, formatting, preferences, and interface code are kept in separate modules. Automated tests use Python and Lupa (Lua 5.4); these are development tools and are not required to play. Changes still need in-game testing, particularly for rendering, persistence, and compatibility.

Open source. Open to the community.

Gold Standard’s original code and documentation are released under the MIT license.

Suggestions, bug reports, translations, and community improvements are welcome. Whether you have an idea for clearer formatting, better compatibility, or a new feature, you can help shape its development.

Source and contributions:

https://github.com/sm0keybean/gold-standard

Report a bug:

https://github.com/sm0keybean/gold-standard/issues

When reporting a problem, include your game build, mod revision, currency settings, reproduction steps, and a screenshot or relevant error excerpt. Remove personal information before sharing diagnostics.

Support development

If you enjoy Gold Standard and would like to support this and future mods, optional donations are welcome:

https://ko-fi.com/smokeybean

All features remain free. Donations do not unlock content or receive exclusive access.

Created by sm0keybean.

Public beta release

Revision 9. The toolbar, settings panel and custom florin/franc labels have been verified in-game by the creator. Automated Lua checks cover formatting, validation and mocked preferences; these do not replace native compatibility and long-session testing. Private UI patches shown during development are not shipped. Narrow-field abbreviation in third-party panels requires those mods to opt in to the integration helper.