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The Players Manual can't seem to decide if empty casings or live rounds are the currency for this game.

Scrounger Specialty gives bonuses to finding Casings (But there are no tables or charts to determine how this happens) and the character creation states Empty Casings, but the Gear Chapter says Ammo is the currency of the time.

If Empty Brass is the currency, I'd like to hear how people are currently ruling finding it in their games? Do your players all sing the Cleanup Song like kindergarteners and everyone takes 5 minutes to find all the rounds they spent after a gunfight or is it a roll from normal Scrounging? Do you give the player the value of the found item in Brass instead of the item or have the D100 roll value itself be the number of rounds found?

Edit: On the Discord, we've discussed making spent Brass 1/4 the value of a live round, but that doesn't solve the issue of finding spent rounds in the first place.

The economy is more likely to be a barter system, with the value of items varying dependent on need - a starving person will trade a lot for food.

Whether ammo or spent cases such things are just a accounting shorthand to make trading easier. You could probably use gold or silver by weight as ammo has a use other than as currency and hence doesn't make a good medium of exchange.

In MYZ the currency is bullets as well. That doesn't mean that people are only trading for bullets, it is the currency used in the tables as '1'. The players mostly trade in other items than bullets (bullets are to precious for adventurer), like scrap, food, water, even artifacts (items from the past) and sure sometimes bullets (especially bullet types that they didn't want). So this is the same here. A bullet is simply the '1' in the system, the they are more likely to trade in other things they don't have any use for, including bullet types that they don't use.

One of the T2K blogs out there that has done a lot of work within the system through the years proposed a system where the base unit of trade is the "ration ticket." This seems less Mad Max to me than bullets. It acknowledges that currency is mostly not a thing anymore, and that most people's fundamental concern again is "what do I need to do/get in order to eat today?"

Any barter system runs into the problem/opportunity of value being extremely volatile and relative, depending on circumstances.

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Any barter system runs into the problem/opportunity of value being extremely volatile and relative, depending on circumstances.

Like in MYZ, one ark has farms, so the food is fairly cheap there, another ark struggle with food and then we have some enterprising players in the middle

Yes. I think that's good; it provides motivation for adventures. It makes life a little hard on GMs, though.

If my players come up with this idea, fine, makes for some good intrigues. I mean, I'm sure the players won't step on anyone's toes doing this "Clint Eastwood" routine.

In my 1e campaign the players decided to involve themselves in the local trade in weapons and fuel - much to the annoyance of the locals who controlled such trade. I had a small town that was like a old wild west town where weapons had to be left outside of the free market. Thugs attacked the players using steel legs ripped from tables as clubs, but the players managed to out-fight them and gave them a beating with their own clubs.

After that the players kept seeing the thugs wreathed in bandages and casts limping away whenever they came back to that town.