In any game with collectable resources, you can often expect to find That One Component — the resource which, whenever it appears in a new recipe, Fetch Quest, or upgrade, leaves the player grinding their teeth in frustration.
It achieves this by being both an absolute pain in the ass to obtain, and very helpful (in many cases necessary) to progress further in the game. It's not part of an unusually challenging side mission, some sort of Easter Egg, or required to construct the unnecessarily powerful but nigh-unobtainable weapon, but something you must collect, often multiple times, to forge Plot Coupons, equipment needed to bypass environmental hazards, or better weapons and armor you'll need to stand any chance against those tough enemies you're about to fight.
Common features of That One Component include:
- It's dropped or guarded by Demonic Spiders, or even worse, That One Boss.
- The game gives you next to no information about where to find it.
- It's an incredibly Rare Random Drop, requiring you to perform the same actions over and over again.
- It blends into the environment or is otherwise very well hidden, usually in nearly inaccessible places.
- It's only found in one area or level, usually a really dangerous one.
- It's the reward for completing a nasty puzzle, dungeon, platforming segment or Timed Mission.
- It's a strictly limited resource, with only just enough of it existing in the game to craft every possible recipe with it, forcing the player to hunt for each individual instance.
- And if this is the case, there is no information that it is not Shop Fodder or just Better Off Sold until well after some of it has been found and likely discarded, causing it to become Permanently Missable Content.
- You can only obtain it, or try to obtain it, a limited number of times every day/week/month, possibly due to overzealous Anti Poop-Socking measures.
- You need to collect it many, many times.
It's possible for That One Component's rarity to be acknowledged In-Universe, with it being some form of Unobtainium, but it could be a Commonplace Rare instead. If the item requiring That One Component is powerful but with very low durability, there's a good chance it's Too Awesome to Use.
The crafting recipe equivalent of That One Level. If the entire crafting system behaves like this, it might be a Scrappy Mechanic. Contrast with Bragging Rights Reward, which is often similarly difficult to get your hands on, but serves little to no actual purpose.
Examples:
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Video Games
Action-Adventure
- Horizon Forbidden West: Sac webbing. Given that it can only be collected from dead machines with an unexploded chemical sac, you'll have to go out of your way not to hit the gigantic glaring weak spot on their body, and you may even still explode the sac by accident if you don't have the right weapons for the job. Still, it's pretty managable even with something like a bellowback(where the chemical sac is 40 percent of its body) just by being patient and shooting the eyes of the machine for weakpoint damage instead. Then you realize that fireclaws have chemical sacs, and that a key strategy to defeating a fireclaw is destroying its sac so it can't use its fire attacks, and you realize you are in for one slog of a battle if you want that Machine Strike piece.
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
- Star Fragments randomly drop from highly occasional shooting stars and can only be found at night, disappearing the morning following them landing. You'll need to track where one lands and rush there to have it for yourself, and they're required for a vast selection of powerful armor upgrades.
- Dragon Parts are similar, and unlike Star Fragments, you'll need to collect at least one Scale from each dragon to unlock three shrines in the game. On the positive side, the three dragons—Dinraal, Naydra, and Farosh—have set schedules, appearing in certain places each day and night, unlike the completely random Star Fragments. But the negatives outweigh that one benefit: you can only collect one part from each dragon every day; you have to hit increasingly-small areas on the dragons to get particular parts (in order: Scales, Claws, Fangs, and Horns), and a single misfire will result in you having to wait another full-day cycle to try again; the dragons might not appear in their predetermined spots because they can follow multiple routes; and like Star Fragments, high-level armor upgrades require multiples of each part. And as the icing on the cake, Naydra can only be unlocked after freeing her during a challenging sidequest that involves freezing temperatures and firing arrows at globs of Malice goo from mid-air.
- Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has the Flying Beef, an important ingredient for the Exquisite Steak that is needed to complete Susie's final quest. It can only be obtained as a drop from a single enemy, the Haagenti, which only spawns in a few locations in one area of the castle, and has an absolutely pitiful 1% drop rate. The only saving grace is that there is a small one-screen-wide room with a Haagenti that the player can quickly enter and exit to grind for it, but don't be surprised if you end up spending an hour or more before it finally drops. Oh, and did we forget to mention that you need two Flying Beef for the recipe?
- Kingdom Hearts:
- Kingdom Hearts features the items procured from the White Mushroom Heartless. In the first place, those Heartless only appear in specific areas in certain levels, and only at random times, so even finding them is a pain. Once you do, the White Mushrooms will encourage you to hit them with specific magic spells via charades (if one is shivering, use Fire; if one is fanning itself, use Blizzard; and so on in that fashion). If you hit one with the same spell three times, it will reward you with Mystery Goo (required for high-level weapon crafting) and that spell's particular Art (Fire Arts, Blizzard Arts, etc). Some of the charade messages are hard to guess (spinning rapidly around = Aero?), and you have to be extremely careful to target the Mushroom, or it will get angry and leave. Players need to get all seven Arts to acquire the Lord's Fortune, a powerful staff for Donald, but by the time you put in the work for it, it's highly likely that they'll already have better equipment.
- Both Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Heats II have weapons for Donald and Goofy that can only be obtained through extremely rare (as in, 0.2% in the first game) item drops from certain high-level enemies (the first game has the Wizard's Relic and Defender; the second has the Shaman's Relic, Akashic Record, Nobody Lance, and Nobody Guard). Some of them are the second-best weapons in the game for the pair, but getting them can take hours. The only way to make it easier is by using weapons like the Sweet Memories Keyblade, which increases rare item drops...in exchange for having absolutely zero strength-boosting power.
Match-3 Games
- Columns Crown: Unless you're using a guide, figuring out how to get all of the gems is practically impossible. Special notice go to the 2 gems (what gems they actually are vary between Jade and Ruby) that are locked behind pausing pass the 1st stage in Survival Mode for 5 minutes and playing multiplayer battles and winning 5 sets, with each set lasting until one of players wins 4 times.
- In Puzzles & Survival, manuals are required to "evolve" characters to new levels, and only drop from doing quests, and even there, they may not always drop. Worse, brown and green manuals, the most basic ones, stop dropping in later quests, necessitating the player having to go back and re-do old quests in the hopes of obtaining enough to evolve a single character.
Puzzle Games
- Meteos: Soul and Time Meteos are Rare Random Drops that can occasionally appear in any mode; you can often go dozens of rounds without seeing a single one. A vast selection of Fusion recipes requires them, most notably Meteo which requires five of each. This is offset slightly once you unlock their Fusion recipes... except they require a lot of Meteos to Fuse that you'll probably be saving for the more expensive planets. By the time you have enough plain Meteos to fuse them casually, you won't have a use for Soul and Time anymore.
Rhythm Game
- KALPA has Dark Matter, which is needed for some important unlocks like some Mero's Lab unlocks, performing Reverses on characters, and unlocking certain cosmetic items, many of which cost at least 100 Dark Matter. The problem is, you earn exactly 1 Dark Matter after clearing each song. While you can get up to 30 Dark Matter every day from completing Daily Missions and 270 Dark Matter every week from completing Weekly Missions, trying to obtain any further Dark Matter within a short period of time becomes a chore. If there's a Dark Area season in progress, you can do a 5-pack run for 14 Dark Matter each (note that each run is 3 songs). If there isn't, each run only nets two Dark Matter'', and the next best method is to use certain characters that have a chance to drop an extra Dark Matter if you All Combo songs of certain difficulties, which can be a stressful task. As a last resort, you can trade 500 Fragments for 1000 Dark Matter or purchase special song pack bundles that also provide Dark Matter, if spending real-world money is not an issue to you.
Roguelike
- Deepwoken: The Dread Serpent Tooth is required to obtained the Dread Breath Mantra. For obvious reasons, it's only dropped by the Dread Serpent, who has a chance of not dropping it and instead drop either Petra's Anchor, which is a decent consolation award, or something Better Off Sold. Oh, and like all the items needed to get Monster Mantras, it can't be dropped (which thankfully prevents you from losing it in the event you die).
- Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers: On its own, Aegis Cave isn't a difficult dungeon. The real problem comes from the fact that you need to collect Unown Stones (dropped by the Unown in the dungeon) corresponding to the Regi Trio's typings to proceed. Firstly, all 28 Unown spawn, even the ones whose stone has no relevance to the puzzle. Secondly, even if one comes across the right Unown, it isn't guaranteed to drop its corresponding stone anyway, leading to a repetitive slog of the dungeon.
Role-Playing Games
- Assassin's Creed: Odyssey: Ancient Tablets are required for most ship upgrades, but they're also the only resource you can't just pick up in the wild everywhere, or get from disassembling equipment. They're found in ancient ruins all over the Greek world instead, a measly four pieces at a time, and since most of them are locked behind a Beef Gate of some sort, you won't be able to fully upgrade the Adrestia until well into the late game no matter how much leather, wood or iron you've stockpiled. They can also very rarely be bought from blacksmiths in limited quantities, but there are dozens of blacksmiths in the game and you can't tell which ones are selling the Tablets/
- Counter Side:
- Fusion Cores are needed to perform Limit Fusion on units, raising their level cap from 100 to 110 and also giving appropriate stat bonuses (of particular note is that level 110 is required for Rearming a unit). They're also very hard to earn or craft for how many you need, with 15 required to fully limit-break an SR unit and 75 for an SSR, forcing careful triage by players to avoid maxing out weak units at the detriment of more effective ones. This cost used to be circumventable with dupes of characters before the New Origin update, after which the perceived value of all the farmable SRs and SSRs took a hit.
- Set Binaries are used for modifying set bonuses on gear, which is more or less required for optimizing end-game equipment for your units. In addition to being very rare to get, the lack of a pity mechanic on rerolling set bonuses means you go through far more of them than you have to almost all the time.
- Dark Souls:
- The Soul of Sif, required to craft the Greatshield of Artorias and both versions of the Greatsword of Artorias, all required for the Knight's Honor achievement. As with all boss souls you can only get one per playthrough, but it's the only one with three potential crafting results, requiring you to do another entire NG+ cycle (or at least half of one) for it alone if you want the achievement.
- The Souvenirs of Reprisal or Dragon Scales needed to progress in the Blades of the Darkmoon or Path of the Dragon covenants are dropped at an absurdly low rate by Demonic Spiders who often fight in packs, have insanely high health and have a relatively unpredictable A.I. pattern. This is the only way to get them without fighting powerful players online, which is especially bad for Dragon Scales since 30 of them are required for every reward. The other covenants have much easier grinding items to collect, whereas the Forest Hunters' Ring of Fog (which requires going online) can be gotten from one of Snuggly's trades instead. Making matters worse, the Dragon Scales are also the upgrade materials for the powerful Dragon weapons, meaning you have to choose what to use your limited supply for.
- Seen in Dragon Age: Inquisition with regards to the specializations. Each specialization requires the player to craft a specific unique item using components which, in many cases, are Rare Random Drops. They can be extremely hard to find, depending on which specialization the Inquisitor takes, and some of them can take hours to collect in sufficient quantity. This is slightly mitigated by the fact that, if the player takes the correct perks on the perk trees in the war room, certain merchants will sell some of the components... but the game won't tell you which merchant.
- Dragon Ball: Fusions: Super Saiyan is arguably the most difficult move in the game to obtain. The way to do so is by first completing Story Mode and then battling and knocking out by ring-out certain characters (Skwash or Sesamy) who respectively are part of teams located in corners of 3F and 6F, with the move's drop rate being so low that you're likely to spend hours if not days trying to grind for it. You can try to improve your luck by including one or both of the two aforementioned Saiyan characters who are the only ones capable of using it, but even then, the odds are still very slim.
- The Elder Scrolls:
- Morrowind has grand soul gems. They are the highest quality soul gems in the game and are the only ones that can be used to create powerful "Constant Effect" enchantments. However, no merchants in the base game have a restocking supply, there are limited places to find them in pre-set locations, and the only other place to get them is as a rare spawn in Randomly Generated Loot. The Tribunal expansion thankfully adds a merchant with a restocking supply, but that still entails purchasing it (or the Game of the Year edition) and making the trip to Mournhold (which entails surviving an attack by tough Dark Brotherhood assassins).
- Skyrim has daedra hearts. They are required in order to make daedric weapons and armor, but finding a heart can be a royal pain because of their rarity. Only a select few spawn in certain locations, and enemies rarely drop them. To farm them reliably, one can find daedra to hunt (since they always drop hearts as part of their loot). However, those only spawn in one or two locations, and in small numbers. That, combined with how long it takes them to respawn, makes trying to craft daedric gear extremely time-consuming and at times tedious. Especially because ebony ore can be a chore to find as well.
- Practically any conditional drop in the Etrian Odyssey series that requires you to kill a monster with curse damage. Due to Health/Damage Asymmetry, this will generally be a long, drawn-out process that will have players reaching for a Formaldehyde. The few conditional drops that are based on RNG rather than killing a monster in a certain way can also be examples, especially if it has a low drop rate.
- Fallout 4 vastly expands item crafting from previous entries and introduces settlement building, both of which require copious amounts of components broken down from "junk" gathered from across the wasteland. A few components in particular stand out:
- Adhesive is required for nearly every low-level gun and armor mod, and there aren't many sources of it. You'll be tearing apart locations for every bottle of Wonderglue and roll of duct tape just to improve your early game gear. If you bother to build up a couple of settlements (no small investment in terms of time or junk), you can farm corn, tatos, and mutfruit. The surplus of these ingredients can be used to craft vegetable starch, which breaks down into five units of adhesive, but that level of investment turns off a number of players.
- Oil is needed by plenty of gun and armor mods, as well as many settlement objects including essential defense turrets. Most of the junk items that can be broken down into oil are heavy, which means prioritizing bringing them back over potentially more valuable loot or other salvage. You can craft it yourself at a crafting station from the get-go... but it requires Bone and Acid, two other rare components.
- Screws. All kinds of weapon mods need them, and some settlement structures need a lot. What makes it worse is that tons of junk items that should logically contain plenty of screws yield none at all. You'll quickly find yourself scanning each office area for desk fans, typewriters, and other relatively heavy junk items just for the one or two screws within.
- Fate/Grand Order:
- Bronze Ascension Materials for Ascending Servants and levelling up their Skills are infamous for becoming less frequent as random drops as the story progresses and Silver and Gold Materials take priority, but still being needed in abundance by Servants both old and new. Evil Bones and Proofs of Hero are notorious for many Servants needing over a hundred of them to max out their Skills (series mascot Saber Altria needs 132 Proofs if one wishes to get the best performance out of her), but being very scarce in later portions of the story and having low drop rates even in the best farming spots.
- Crystallized Lores are always required to raise any servant skill from level 9 to level 10 (the max) and they cannot be farmed at all — they are only given as rewards for completing specific goals or event quests in the game. Players can also purchase one per month from the game's shop for a cost of five rare prisms (which are themselves an extremely scarce resource). Even someone who's earned every available Lore since the game launched will only have enough to max out the standard skills of a fraction of the servants on their roster and the later introduction of append skills, which also require Lores to raise to max level, only made the problem worse. In an Appmedia survey conducted in 2021, players voted Lores as their #1 most-wanted item in the game.
- Final Fantasy is of course full of these:
- Hands up if you tried to get an armor with Break HP Limit or Ribbon in Final Fantasy X (the latter is available only in Updated Re-release or No Export for You version). These abilities are absolutely awful to get: the first requires 30 Wings to Discovery, for which you need to either bribe Malboros for outrageous sums of money (we're talking about hundreds of thousands here at least), or to fight Shinryu, which has 2 millions of HP and drops 2 of them after fight. Dark Matter for Ribbon is even worse, as you need 99 of them, and while there is a reward which gives you needed 99, the requirement is to capture 5 of each capturable monster in the game. It also rarely drops from Species and Original Creations in Monster Arena and it is a regular drop from Dark Aeons, but they drop only 2 of them at once, so many monsters will be slain until you get 99, not to mentions these are the hardest enemies in the game.
- Tournesol in Final Fantasy XII is infamous for involving multiple of these. First, the direct components are not even available in sufficient quantities in the game, so you need to get them indirectly via Bazaar by selling other items. Many of those are also these, because they can be stolen from one-time only Rare Game monsters or an enemy that appears at only one place in the entire game, or have some other requirements. For example, Hell Gate Flames are dropped by Cerberi with 5% rate. Problem is it's a monograph drop, so chaining won't increase its drop rate, and you need to buy specific monograph, otherwise Cerberi won't drop them at all. And that is only one example of this insanity that is getting Tournesol.
- Fire Emblem: Three Houses has eight types of ore that can be used to restore weapon durability and improve weapons by forging. The three types of ore for the most common weapons are easy to obtain, and Venom Stones fall under Junk Rare due to being only used for the unimpressive Venin weapons. The rarer types (Mithrilnote Agarthium note , Umbral Steel note and Arcane Crystals note ) are only available by shattering the barriers of monster units that may be rare too, or as a reward for limited quests. This severely limits the use of many weapons that have to be repaired with these types of ore, particularly as most of them are only one per save file and have a low durability stat, making them Too Awesome to Use.
- Genshin Impact:
- The Northlander Billets are needed to craft some weapons that are free-to-play accessible, and there are five types of Billets for each weapon type; Swords, Claymores, Polearms, Bows, and Catalysts. However, the sheer scarcity of Billets makes them very difficult to obtain because they're a Rare Random Drop from Weekly Bosses that have a 12% chance of being included in your reward pile, which is only compounded by the fact that you can only fight these bosses once per week and there's a random chance of receiving a Billet type you never sought after. Billets are also available in specific flagship events that only air once per update (which is usually a month-and-a-half on average), so trying to get them becomes a game of patience and luck.
- Crowns of Insight are needed to max out your character's Talent levels to level 10, and you would need at least three of them to cover Talents for your Normal Attacks (which includes Charged Attacks and Plunging Attacks), Elemental Skills, and Elemental Bursts. The problem: they're only available in limited time flagship events, meaning that the game demands your attendance and participation in them if you ever hope to see your character's stats maxed out.
- Violetgrass is the most infamous ascension material among the Genshin fandom for being notoriously tedious and time-consuming to obtain, and it's needed to ascend Xinyan and Qiqi. The range of this item covers most of Liyue (which is a very large nation to begin with), and they're very spaced out individually from each other with hardly any concentrated spots to farm efficiently. And since they're found on cliffs, they're very easy to miss and require climbing and/or gliding to reach which costs stamina.
- Onikabuto beetles are needed to ascend Arataki Itto and Heizou, but they're very spaced out from each other across four of the six Inazuma islands and they tend to be found on trees that contain Lavender Melons, making it easy to mistake them as such because both items share the same purple color, size, and shape. The large search area combined with few concentrated spots to farm makes grabbing Onikabuto beetles a daunting task.
- In terms of enemy drops, the Handguards dropped by the Nobushi and Kairagi enemies have a disproportionally low drop rate when compared to others, even on high World Ranks. They're needed for ascending some Inazuma characters like Kamisato Ayaka and their Talents, and you would be lucky to get more than one Old Handguards from a single Nobushi/Kairagi (the lowest-tier of the item group), let alone a Kageuchi Handguard or Famed Handguard.
- Subverted with Naku Weed. For a time, when Inazuma was just released in Version 2.0, Naku Weed was hard to obtain because it was only found in a few select small spots in Mt. Yougou, Tatarasuna, and Jakotsu Mine, and combined with the two Real Life day respawn time made ascending Yoimiya more cumbersome than it needed to be. Then by Version 2.1, Serai Island was made accessible and Naku Weed there are abundant, so by the time Shinobu was released in Version 2.7, the search for Naku Weed to ascend her and Yoimiya was made less frustrating by narrowing the search area to one island.
- Granblue Fantasy:
- Huanglong and Qilin (Omega) Anima are the most infamous drop, as they exclusively drop from their combined raid. Said raid is only accessible with an event exclusive item, two Golden Beast Seals forged from treasure obtained in "Rise of the Beasts". The raid allows 30 players and is incredibly difficult to join outside of dedicated raid rooms because any public raid is almost instantly filled by high tier Japanese players who kill it within minutes of it being made available. This bottleneck of exclusivity has been encouraged due to the high amount of things that require Omega Anima from the two, which include Eternal Transcendence, Beast weapons being uncapped and doubly so if players wish to obtain the four Cardinal beast costumes for the Captain, and Seraphic weapon upgrades. It's worsened to the point where Cygames had to remove blue chests from the raid entirely just to see if it would stop the raids from being killed so quickly for anyone who wanted to try and obtain animas.
- Eternity Sands, which are only obtained via an incredibly rare drop from the high tier Ennead/Six Dragons/Malice/Revans raids or some of the highest tier achievements and their corresponding trophies (ie. fully upgrading all Arcarum summons, recruiting all Eternals or Evokers, upgrading all Eternals, or obtaining the Guider to the Eternal Edge costume). They are only used for two things thus far: Transcending Lucifer and Bahamut or uncapping New World Foundation weapons, which are a requirement for fully uncapping Evokers. Due to this extreme rarity, players have been forced to figure out what to prioritize since all of them represent a significant power boost in gameplay.
- Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga: Hoo Beans are among the four different types of beans you can collect to craft new coffees and obtain unique, powerful equipment from E. Gadd. However, their nature as individual rewards from non-renewable invisible blocks makes them annoyingly hard to find early on and there's no reliable way to farm those until you get access to a surfing minigame close to the endgame. Getting the best possible time nets a pair of every type of bean sans the Hee Bean, and only after obtaining a unique piece of gear for the first time doing so.
- Monster Hunter: Flagship monsters tend to drop gemstones which are necessary to upgrade weapons into their most powerful forms. However, said items are exceedingly rare, generally having no more than a 3% chance of being acquired by carving the monster's body, or 4% by completing certain quests.
- In Nier, Eagle Eggs are only available in one specific location in the Aerie and are needed not only for the "On the Wings of Eagles" sidequest, but also for upgrading the Phoenix Dagger, Phoenix Sword and Phoenix Spear. They can only be found underneath the chief's house, and even then it's only a 1 in 20 chance you get it, requiring you to use Save Scumming until you get one. The sequel, NieR: Automata, makes them available all over the place in the Forest Kingdom.
- Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent:
- Sacred Seals for upgrading a 4.5 star to a 5 star are tedious and annoying to get. You primarily get them from Hunts, but they have such low chances of dropping, that a player may go months without ever seeing one. You can also get them from the Exchange Shop, but they cost 30,000 silver Guidestone Shards, which would require the player to constantly convert all their Guidestones into silver shards, meaning the player wouldn't be able to save them for any other potentially useful items, or wouldn't be able to upgrade any of their 4 star characters. The developers have sometimes given them out as reward items for events or special summon steps, but unless the player gets lucky or hordes as many Guidestones as possible for converting, a player could end up not having the chance to get one for a long time.
- Weapon and armor materials are a constant thorn in the players side, no matter the level. Weapons require items dropped by enemies to purchase or upgrade them, but the drop rates are low, and not all the cities have item spots that will give what the player needs. This is especially frustrating after level 60, where the process of upgrading weapons to their max tier requires a lot of resources, while getting armor for your characters means losing out on weapon upgrades. It doesn't help that, after the "Master of All" story, each new story chapter introduces new zones and items you need for both, making all the previous work pointless.
- Tower of Fantasy: Each farmable mount has parts that are easy to acquire in exploration except for one part that is usually a Rare Random Drop. While the mobs are easy to kill, the percentage of dropping is close to 0.10-20% and rises to 0.50% after a hundred kills. It doesn't help that these mobs are far away from each other, so players have to run, kill, then teleport to the next monster for hours just to complete the mounts.
- There are various collectibles or materials in Xenoblade that are incredibly difficult to obtain due to the RNG nature of collectible and monster drops for building Colony 6. Some of these items can be obtained by trading with other NPCs in each city, but there are others that cannot be obtained this way. Rainbow Slugs and Black Liver Beans are some infamous examples, as are the Ice Cabbages which only become tradable after a certain point in the game, by someone who can move to Colony 6 no less (if this person moves to Colony 6 he won't be trading Ice Cabbages). The Definitive Edition release mitigates this to an extent where all collectibles and materials can be purchased with Noponstones obtained by completing challenges.
- In Yakuza: Like a Dragon, you need increasing amounts of pearls to upgrade your weapons. The only reliable way to get pearls is on floor 14F of the Sotenbori Battle Arena, or the Final Millenium Tower. You can thankfully start from floor 11F, but that still leaves four floors of grinding to get just one pearl, and you will need dozens to fully upgrade your gear.
Simulation Games
- No Man's Sky: As of the Endurance update, Salvaged Frigate Modules, which are required to unlock freighters' base-building components and tech upgrades. Unlocking everything requires close to a hundred of them, and unlike their ground-based equivalent, Salvaged Data (which is fairly easy to excavate from Buried Technology Modules, which can be found underground in every inhabited system in the universe), there is no reliable method of acquiring them other than random encounters in which their drop rate is 4 percent at best. All you can do is hope a frigate fleet finds one, or that you're lucky enough to loot one from a grounded wreck or an intact derelict in deep space (the latter can only be found with a single-use emergency scanner that generally costs five million units or more), or try to hunt down and raid an NPC freighter that might have one in its cargo, or hope for a one-in-a-hundred chance that a mission offers one as a reward.
- X3: Terran Conflict
- The questline to reactivate the Hub — an extremely useful megastructure that can be inserted between up to three pairs of jumpgates to create shortcuts across the Portal Network — requires the Player Character to deliver, among other things, a total of 75,500 Microchips, a relatively rare Shop Fodder item that is basically impossible to get enough of by just relying on the NPCs. Completing the questline in a timely manner requires the PC to build entire dedicated, fully self-sufficient Microchip manufacturing complexes comprising dozens of stations linked together, costing over 100 million credits apiece before you even consider buying and upgrading freighters to run the cargo. On the upside, by the end of the questline, the PC will have cornered several commodities markets by default and be swimming in money.
- These quest requirements were so ridiculous that they ended up being the subject of a self-deprecating Brick Joke in X3: Albion Prelude's significantly easier version of the quest: you are told by an NPC that Mahi Ma (the quest giver in both games) has stuffed spare rooms of the Hub full of container upon container of microchips for no apparent reason.
Survival Games
- Grounded:
- Red ant eggs. With a couple exceptions, you can only generally find them deep within the red anthill, and picking them up immediately aggros all nearby red ants regardless of whether or not you're disguised in their armor set. They also don't appear unless the amount of ants in the colony is low, forcing you to cull several red ants to obtain them. Worse still, if you take too long, they'll hatch into worker or, rarely, soldier ants, even while they're sitting in your inventory. Many mandatory paths to complete the game are hidden behind walls that can only be blown up with bombs made from red ant eggs, so you'll need to gather a few at some point.
- EverChar Coal Chunks. Almost all of these are found in the BBQ Spill biome, and their resource nodes build up Sizzle so quickly they can cook you alive in less than a second if you're not wearing antlion armor or have mutations or food buffs active. Even with as much sizzle defense as the game allows, you'll constantly be running back and forth between hammer strikes to avoid getting burned up, making collecting them extremely tedious and time-consuming. Considering they're a vital ingredient in creating ovens, which are used to make higher-level upgrade materials for weapons and armor, you'll likely be spending a lot more time farming these than you'll want to.
- Twinkling Shells. They're part of the crafting recipe for the final tier of weapon upgrades, and they're only dropped by Scarabs, who appear very rarely and randomly around the shed in the upper yard. As soon as they take damage, they dart away very quickly and soon burrow into the ground, despawning from the map. You essentially have to make elemental arrows to kill them, as even a highly-upgraded Black Ox Crossbow with Splinter Arrows won't down them in one shot and you won't be able to reload before it gets away. An upgraded Insect Bow can fire off more quickly, but considering it moves extremely fast after taking damage it can be very difficult to land that second shot.
- In 7 Days to Die, getting mechanical parts is difficult in the early game due to a Catch-22 Dilemma. The primary source of mechanical parts is disassembling machinery using a wrench. However, wrenches themselves require Mechanical Parts to craft. This means the player is likely to randomly loot an entire wrench before finding enough mechanical parts to craft one. Once the player has a wrench though, the plentiful number of things to disassemble means they'll never want for mechanical parts again.
- Sons of the Forest: Rope is now a necessary ingredient for making Bone Armor, which means you'll need a lot of it to survive in the long term. At the same time, it can't be directly crafted from cloth anymore, so you'll have to raid cannibal villages (risking the armor you already have) or stumble upon the occasional abandoned campsite to get it.
- Subnautica has Stalker Teeth. They're required to construct Enameled Glass, used in the PRAWN Suit, Cyclops, and Neptune cockpit, as well as the final depth upgrade for the Seamoth. However, they only drop, sometimes, when a Stalker bites into a piece of Metal Salvage. This forces you to drop said salvage near Stalkers while trying to avoid getting bitten by them and hoping that they don't get bored and wander off.
- Valheim:
- You only gain knowledge of how to build structures or gear once you've had all the ingredients for them in your inventory at least once.
- Several end-game items and components can only be bought from Haldor the Dwarf, who is mentioned exactly nowhere in-game and spawns at a random location in the world.
- The Forsaken require sacrifices to summon that are either rare (deer heads only have a 50% chance of dropping from deer), found on tough enemies (Ancient Seeds are dropped by Greydwarf Brutes and Nests, which constantly spawn greydwarves until destroyed) or hostile biomes (Withered Bones are easy to find in crypts but require surviving the swamps and the crypts), or both (Chains are dropped by damage-resistant Wraiths that appear only at night in the zombie-infested, rainy swamps; Dragon Eggs in the cold, blizzard-prone mountains, fortunately they can be seen from a distance; Fuling totems are in camps swarming with the Boss in Mook Clothing Fulings).
- Progressing to bronze gear requires exploring burial chambers, skeleton-haunted tombs with only a random amount of Surtling Cores inside (if any). The other options are even more dangerous as they require exploring the swamp and ashlands biomes and killing the Surtlings.
Third-Person Shooters
- Control:
- Corrupted Samples are needed to construct some of the more powerful Service Weapon Forms, their tier-two upgrades, and in advanced mod crafting. But while most other resources in the game can be acquired in reasonable quantities by completing side missions and Bureau Alerts or opening caches, the only way to get a Corrupted Sample is to kill Mould Hosts. What makes it even worse is that not every Host drops a Sample, and there's only one small area in the entire map where they actually respawn.
- There's also Untapped Potential, a rare resource required to complete the tier 3 upgrade for each of the Service Weapon Forms. While you can get one instance of it for 'free' by completing the first "Langston's Runaways" side mission (which is fairly easy), every other instance must be gained through beating one of the game's Superbosses — (esseJ, FORMER, Mould-1, The Anchor and Tommasi). Given that every single one of these is a tough fight and can kill you in a handful of hits, you're in for a rough time if you want to max out your full arsenal.
- In Warframe, crafting a Necramech not only trivializes most of the game's open-world content, but is mandatory to access "The New War" quest from the main storyline, and therefore all the content locked beyond it. The most tedious part is getting four types of spare parts, one for each component recipe because those parts drop only from hostile Necramechs on the Isolation Vault bounties on Cambion Drift. Even one of them can cause trouble, being a Lightning Bruiser with only shoulders and spine vulnerable and damage resistances not matching those of every other Drift enemy, but the best option is the highest level bounty, where you have to defeat three of them because despite declared drop rate being 12.5% for each part, damaged pod and engine seem to have about 5% if not less.
Visual Novels
- A Little Lily Princess has players choose one activity per weekday, which will give Sara points in one of several stats, which are spent to view story events for character routes. Each activity has one of three outcomes, which usually grant one to three points in one or two stats, although a few outcomes have special effects(doubling stat gain or converting that week's stat gains to another stat). Two stats stand out as exceptionally difficult to level up.
- Vigor in Act 1. It can only be gained through practicing dance, playing with toys, going for a walk or holding a tea party, each of which can only give one point at most. You can double all Vigor by practicing dance, but that's only one of three outcomes, and only has much effect at the end of the week.
- Pain in Act 2. You can get it from any task except Run Errands, but only from one of the outcomes, and none of them grant more than one Pain each, so it can be difficult to gather if you're focusing on it.
Non-Video Game examples:
Literature
- The Everest series, by Gordon Korman, starts with a contest to win a place in an upcoming climb of Mount Everest, by finding all the letters of EVEREST in Summit Athletic's products. There are plenty of E, R, S, and T letters to be found, but only a handful of Vs (which is how Summit Athletic ensures they'll only have the desired number of winners).
- Mother of Learning: For Zorian to really advance his understanding of soul magic, he needs to unlock his soul's innate ability to perceive other souls. However, the standard potion for doing so relies on a key ingredient — a dirge moth chrysalis — that can only be harvested once every twenty years, which will never happen while he's caught in a repeating month. He's eventually able to find an expert capable of brewing a different potion to achieve the effect, with a large variety of much more dangerous ingredients, but ones that can theoretically be harvested within the month by a sufficiently skilled mage.
Tabletop Games
- Splendor Duel: Many cards have 1 pearl in their cost... which is awkward because (1) there are only two pearl chips in the game (which, to make matters worse, can be hoarded by one player), and (2) unlike every other resource, there's no way to get a pearl cost reduced. As a result, this resource is pretty centralizing — there's a good chance that most of your Gold will be spent on substituting pearl costs, and that most of your "steal a chip" bonus actions will be used to grab pearls.
Real Life
- The McDonald's Monopoly promotions worked by giving customers stickers corresponding to Monopoly properties which would give you a prize if you completed a full set. Regular customers didn't take long to realize that there would be specific properties that were FAR rarer than the others in the set, meaning winning the prize was just a matter of getting those with the common ones just being a rather unnecessary contrivance. And to make matters worse, Jerry Jacobson, the head of security for the company that ran the promotion in the US, stole all the rare property stickers and passed them along to associates, making it impossible for actual customers to win any big prizes. You can read more on the Other Wiki here
; the documentary McMillions explores the scam in-depth.
