I did not know this, and I gave myself money around 25% cause nothing was showing up anymore for me.If you do this early enough in the game, you blow the money cap and ALL items stop spawning.
It's a built-in anti-cheat from the dev that some members here call a 'bug', but is actually a 'choice' by the dev: Play the game as intended (as in, don't cheat), or get trapped by some of these issues.
So as I said, I wasn't finding talismans even before I gave myself money, but the response to my question was just...yikes.