History Main / ThatOneComponent

* 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, ''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 [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonalds_Monopoly#Fraud here]]; the documentary ''[=McMillions=]'' explores the scam in-depth.

* ''VideoGame/KingdomHearts'':
** The original game 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.

* In ''[[VideoGame/{{X}} 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 PortalNetwork -- requires the PlayerCharacter to deliver, among other things, a total of 75,500 Microchips, a relatively rare VendorTrash item that is basically impossible to get enough of by just relying on the {{NPC}}s. 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.
** The quest requirements are so ridiculous that they ended up being the subject of a [[SelfDeprecation self-deprecating]] BrickJoke 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.

** 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 to have it for yourself, and they're required for a vast selection of powerful armor upgrades.

* ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaBreathOfTheWild'': 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 to have it for yourself, and they're required for a vast selection of powerful armor upgrades.

** And if this is the case, there is no information that it is not VendorTrash that can be casually sold off until well after some of it has been found and likely discarded, causing it to be LostForever.

* 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, ''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 [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald's_Monopoly#Fraud here]]; the documentary ''[=McMillions=]'' explores the scam in-depth.

* 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.

* ''VideoGame/BloodstainedRitualOfTheNight'' 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 Beefs" for the recipe?

** 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; and the dragons might not appear in their predetermined spots because they can follow two routes. 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.

* ''VideoGame/{{Meteos}}'': Soul and Time Meteos are [[RareRandomDrop 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 require them, most notably [[FinalBoss 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, [[MoneyForNothing you won't have a use for Soul and Time anymore]].

** ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim 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 could always find daedra to hunt, since they always drop hearts as part of their loot. However they 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 especially if one doesn't have the Dragonborn DLC.

** 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 be 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.

** 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.

* ''VideoGame/{{Subnautica}}'' has Stalker Teeth. They're required to construct Enameled Glass, used in the [=PRAWN=] Suit, Cyclops and [[spoiler: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.

* In ''VideoGame/{{Warframe}}'', crafting a [[MiniMecha Necramech]] not only trivializes most of the game's open-world content, but is mandatory to access "The New War" quest from the main story line, 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 LightningBruiser with [[AttackItsWeakPoint only shoulders and spine vulnerable]] and [[ElementalRockPaperScissors damage resistances]] not matching those of every other Drift enemy, but the best option is the highest level bounty, where you have to defeat [[DualBoss three of them]], because despite declared drop rate being 12.5% for each part, damaged pod and engine seem to have [[RareRandomDrop about 5% if not less]].

[[quoteright:350:[[WebVideo/ZeroPunctuation https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/backtothewiki.png]]]]

* ''VideoGame/MarioAndLuigiSuperstarSaga'': 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, and even then you must DoWellButNotPerfect ''multiple times'' to earn a good amount of said beans (since you only get one per successful try).

** 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.

* In ''[[VideoGame/{{X}} 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 PortalNetwork--requires the PlayerCharacter to deliver, among other things, a total of 75,500 Microchips, a relatively rare VendorTrash item that is basically impossible to get enough of by just relying on the {{NPC}}s. 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.

** 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 {{Bonus Boss}}es -- ([[spoiler: [[MirrorBoss esseJ]], [[GiantSpaceFleaFromNowhere FORMER]], [[BotanicalAbomination Mould-1]], [[FlunkyBoss The Anchor and Tommasi]]]]). Given that every single one of these is a tough fight and can kill you in a handful of two hits, you're in for a rough time if you want to max out your full arsenal.

* ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim'' 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 could always find daedra to hunt, since they always drop hearts as part of their loot. However they 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 especially if one doesn't have the Dragonborn DLC.
* Practically any conditional drop in the ''VideoGame/EtrianOdyssey'' series that requires you to kill a monster with [[UselessUsefulSpell curse damage]]. Due to HealthDamageAsymmetry, this will generally be a long, drawn-out process that will have players reaching for a [[RandomDropBooster 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.

It will typically have several or even ''all'' of these to ensure maximum frustration -- though to take this trope to its most obnoxious form, the game will feature inventory loss on death too, to ensure that you can lose this precious item while running the gauntlet back to wherever you're supposed to take the damn thing.

* If available in finite quantity, there is no information that it is not VendorTrash that can be casually sold off until well after some of it has been found and likely discarded, causing it to be LostForever.

* 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.

[[folder: Action-Adventure]]

[[folder: Puzzle Games]]
* ''{{VideoGame/Meteos}}'': Soul and Time Meteos are [[RareRandomDrop 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 require them, most notably [[FinalBoss 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, [[MoneyForNothing you won't have a use for Soul and Time anymore]].

[[folder: Roguelike]]

[[folder: Role-Playing Games]]

[[folder: Simulation Games]]

[[folder: Survival Games]]

* ''VideoGame/{{Subnautica}}'' has Stalker Teeth. It's required to construct Enamelled Glass, used in the [=PRAWN=] Suit, Cyclops and [[spoiler: Neptune cockpit]], as well as the final depth upgrade for the Seamoth. However, it only drops, ''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.
* ''{{VideoGame/Valheim}}'':

[[folder: Third-Person Shooters]]

[[folder: Literature]]

[[folder: Real Life]]

** 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 {{Bonus Boss}}es -- ([[spoiler: [[MirrorBoss esseJ]], [[GiantSpaceFleaFromNowhere FORMER]], [[BotanicalAbomination Mould-1]], [[FlunkyBoss The Anchor and Tommasi]]]]). Given that every single one of these is a tough fight and can kill you in one or two hits, you're in for a rough time if you want to max out your full arsenal.