Trade metals

The fruit of common TL4 asteroid mining, trade metals include gold, platinum, artificial gemstones, and other substances precious on many lost worlds and trivially valuable on spacefaring ones. A kilo worth of trade metals can be exchanged for as much as a thousand credits worth of local products on metal-poor worlds isolated from interstellar trade. Markets flood rapidly, however, and it usually doesn’t take more than a few merchant trips to persuade the locals to demand trade goods or credits.