MAngband

So i died with my mage. I stupidly had a *lot* of gold with me. Everything dropped...except for most of my gold. I found their to be 32k of gold instead of my large stack. Yeah, that hurt a *lot*, but i guess I angered the RNG when i carried that much AU into the dungon.

This one has been around for a while. I never dive with more than 50k or so, because only 32k will drop (if it drops at all).

I'm not even sure this is a bug, since all money used to drop before the Crimson era. I think he might have added in a limit to encourage people to not dive while carrying their gold, or perhaps if you died in a small area, the gold drop was taking priority over some rare equipment.

It's not a bug. From the source code:

And of course the 32k gold drop will crush any item worth less than 32k if there's no room for it... so better carry the least gold you can in the dungeon.

I think you might be confused with the artifact drop code. And artifact has a chance of destroying another item in order to preserve the artifact. I don't believe gold acts like that, or any other non-artifact item.

The key for death drops is that the highest value item drops first, then the next highest, etc... If room can't be found within 20 tries, the item is destroyed, unless it's an artifact, then it tries 79 more times, finally crushing an item already on the floor if no empty space is found. This is why you can lose that PSDM you've been wearing while you're carrying Rilia as a backup weapon. :-(

What I meant is that gold is treated as any other object...
If you have room for only 5 objects when you die and that you have only 4 items worth more than 32k, then the gold will be dropped as the 5th item instead of something really useful.