I'm working on a scene right now, but I don't want to go too far ahead with it (at least without making some changes) before I find out that I can't do something.

I was wondering if you can manually place gold in specific areas in the ground, or at least in an easier/better fashion than constantly placing the gold pile object in a certain area.

Yes, there is a terrain color that corresponds to gold, look at the attachment.

Create a new terrain equal to the regular dirt, and set it so that gold only appears in there.

Alright! Thank you very much for this!