Random Loot Exchanger

A feature in games where you can turn in loot you've already acquired to obtain a different piece of randomized loot. This is usually done at a specialized vendor of some kind and not your standard shop, or sometimes with Item Crafting. Often involves turning in multiple items to receive a single one in return.

The main benefit of the system is to allow the player to pawn off underpowered, unwanted, or duplicate equipment to potentially obtain something better instead of just selling their excess items off for money. Many games will implicitly encourage this by having rare or powerful items be part of the exchange's drop pool, or even making some pieces of equipment exclusively obtained this way. These drops typically offset the seemingly unequal exchange rate (e.g. give three guns to obtain one new gun) that is often implemented. Can also help with replay value if you have the potential to grab a Disc-One Nuke.

While the mechanic usually involves trading gear for gear, sometimes you may be allowed to turn in a rarer secondary currency or collectables that can be farmed.

Subtrope of Random Drop and often goes hand-in-hand with games using Randomly Generated Loot. Compare Luck Manipulation Mechanic and Randomized Transformation.

---

Examples:

Action

• Dark Souls II: There is a crow's nest in Things Betwixt where you can drop off certain types of stones to receive random items in return. While you can receive anything from the drop table, higher tier stones give a higher chance of yielding the best items.
• Genshin Impact: Once you reach Adventure Rank 45, you can trade in three 5-star artifacts for a random 5-star artifact of your choice of series from the Artifact Strongbox available at any crafting bench.
• Toe Jam And Earl: The Randomizer gift does Exactly What It Says on the Tin, shuffling all the gifts including itself around. This can be a major headache if you've managed to find the extra life or a bummer present. However, if you can get the randomizer identified before use, it can become an ace in the hole if you have nothing that can save you in your inventory.

Action-Adventure

• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Rock Octoroks inhale a large volume of air before spitting a projectile, and will swallow whatever loose objects are in their range when doing so. Normally, these are simply spat out in lieu of the default magma bomb; however, if the swallowed item is a rusty weapon — one of the weakest, least durable weapon types in the game — the Octorok will crunch off the rust and spit it back out as a clean version of itself. The resulting item can be of either the low-tier but still better Traveler's archetype (50% chance), Soldier's archetype (35%), Knight's archetype (10%), or the very high-quality Royal archetype (5%).
• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: Dondons are large animals that will eat pieces of luminous stone left around them and, after a short span of time, leave behind a flint, amber, opal, topaz, sapphire, ruby, or diamond. While they are likelier to produce lower-value stones than rare ones, this serves as a potentially lucrative but not wholly reliable way to transform luminous stone into gems.

Collectible Card Game

• Plants vs. Zombies: Heroes: If you have four or more copies of a single card, you can trade four in to receive a random card of the rarity one tier higher. This serves as a helpful sink for cards you have too many of or otherwise don't want to use.

First-Person Shooter

• Bioshock 1 has a gene tonic upgrade called 'Scrounger' which, when equipped, allows the protagonist to reject a set of looted items and get another randomized set.
• Borderlands:
  • Borderlands 2:
    • In the "Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep" DLC, you can find a sacrificial altar while climbing the Handsome Sorcerer's tower. Throwing any item onto the altar will either lead to it dropping money, spawning enemies, or gifting you with an item that is blue rarity or higher. The drop rates are not dependent on what item is offered, so you can potentially hand in a low rarity weapon and receive a Legendary in return, or hand in what the altar just gave you for another shot.
    • In a couple of the DLCs, you can feed 5 Eridium to Butt Stallion to have her spit up a random weapon. This can be of almost any rarity, including a small list of the highly powerful Legendary weapons, and this is also the only method to obtain Gemstone weapons.
  • Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! has the Grinder, located in Concordia. You can feed it three items and it'll always output a different item. Certain combinations can grant more powerful items and even Legendaries, and feeding it Moonstones in addition to loot can also output items with enhanced stats.
• Team Fortress 2: You can use Item Crafting to break down weapons and items into scrap metal, which can be turned into random cosmetics after combining enough of them. You can also do the same thing with most any two cosmetics.
• Vermintide II: Crafting can break down unwanted items for parts, create a new item of the player's choice with random properties, and modify items. Modifications include randomizing the item's bonuses, randomizing a high-tier item's special trait independent of its bonuses, and adding a new random bonus or trait by upgrading its tier.

Literature

• Saintess Summons Skeletons: When given a Specialisation, Sofia can either accept it, or pay one level to roll a new random Specialisation. She ends up ten levels in debt before finding something she's happy with for Pareth.

MMO

• Final Fantasy XIV:
  • Mutamix is able to take five unwanted materia and transmute them into another materia that will always be different from the materia used in the process. In addition, transmutation has a small chance to create materia a grade higher than what was spent, potentially turning weaker materia into more valuable ones.
  • Upon reaching Captain rank with your Grand Company, you gain the ability to purchase "Materiel Containers" that contain a random minion or mount with Grand Company Seals. Given that unwanted dungeon and raid gear can be converted into GC Seals, this lets you turn that equipment into fun cosmetic minions or more valuable mounts on rare occasions.
• Guild Wars 2: With the Mystic Forge, you can put in four items with the same quality/rarity to get a random item back. Sometimes the random item will be higher quality, but most of the time it's the same classification as what you put in. The game also has several "Converters"; each one will take a specific crafting material or map currency and convert it into packages of random stuff.
• Star Trek Online: The redesigned crafting system includes "re-engineering", a system where items of Uncommon rarity and above can have modifiers re-rolled for a payment of dilithium: e.g. a phaser array with a [Dmg] modifier increasing base damage can be changed randomly to one with an [Acc] modifier increasing accuracy or [CrtH] for increased critical hit chance. Items can also be broken down into crafting materials.
• Warframe:
  • Transmutation lets you take four unranked mods and, at the cost of a small amount of credits, turn them into one random other mod. If all four mods have the same polarity or rarity level, the resulting mod will have a higher chance of matching these traits, but there's always an element of randomness.
  • The Riven Mods can be fused with a substance called "kuva" to re-randomize their attributes, which can be repeated at increasing kuva costs. With Riven Transmuter, four of these Riven Mods can be fused into a completely new one, just like regular mods.

Roguelike

• The Binding of Isaac:
  • The D6 is an active item that rerolls all item pedestals in the room. In practice, this lets you reroll undesirable items for a chance at something much better. The D4 is a more extreme version of the D6 that instead rerolls all items you're currently holding aside from itself. A 1 or 6 pip Dice Room also has this as a one-time effect.
  • Restock Machines are devices that can rarely be found in shops and item rooms. Paying it enough money will reroll all items in the room, which will work a random number of times before the machine breaks. You can also bomb the machine to get an instant reroll at the cost of instantly breaking it.
• Enter the Gungeon: You can sometimes find green boxes called munchers which you can give two guns to, after which it spits out a random other gun with a quality either between the original two or one tier above the best. There is also a red variant called the evil muncher which always spawns in the secret room of Bullet Hell and exclusively takes the first ten guns you put in before unlocking Gunslinger's Ashes and switching to taking a random amount of guns before giving one with a 75% chance of being A and a 25% chance of being S. Guns put in the Evil Muncher carry over between runs.
• NetHack lets players use wands of polymorph on piles of loot on the ground. If you're lucky, it will turn it into other loot of a similar category (weapon, armor, food, scrolls, wands). If you're unlucky, the junk will fuse into a hostile Golem instead.
• Risk of Rain 2: You can occasionally find cauldrons in which you can trade 3 random common items for a random uncommon item or 5 random uncommon items for a random legendary item, both of which prioritise items you've scrapped.
• Wizards Castle: There are eight treasures available in the castle; five of these are beneficial for the player, while three are almost useless. Vendors will offer thousands in gold coins for any treasures the player carries, then with that gold, the player can purchase armor, a weapon, or potions that increase strength, intellect or dexterity.

RPG

• Fire Emblem
  • Fire Emblem Gaiden: After saving a little girl from the Sylvan Shrine in the Echoes remake, she will return to her home in the Forest Village and ask for cute items (e.g. dolls, pearls) to cheer her up. Obliging her will reward you with random items from a small list, with one of them being a rare Cog to power up Mila's Turnwheel. This can be done up to seven times, as by then you'll receive every possible reward.
  • Fire Emblem Engage: Once per visit to the Somniel, you can throw up to five weapons into the Ancient Well. After participating in a battle and coming back, new random weapons will take the old ones' place, with the quality of weapons thrown into the well affecting what comes out. Some weapons (mainly Joke Weapons) are exclusively obtained this way, while you can potentially also get rare items like staves that are otherwise limited in supply.
• Honkai: Star Rail lets you turn ten 5-Star Relics into a different 5-Star Relic of your choice. Unlike Genshin, where you get a blind box from the chosen set, here you can pick the specific piece you want from any given set.
• Live A Live: During the "Near Future" chapter, you can hand items over to Doc Tobei to let him tinker with them. He will then give you back semi-randomized piece of rare gear.
• Mega Man Battle Network: Every game has a machine called a Chip Trader that allows you to exchange a set number of Battle Chips or BugFrags to obtain a random chip in return. Each Trader has its own turn-in requirements and chip pool it draws from, with the ones asking for more chips or BugFrags having better potential drops.
• OMORI: You can talk to the Tofu Conconnasisseur in the Orange Oasis to exchange 10 Tofu for one random healing item. Tofu is the weakest healing item in the game, bordering on Joke Item, and you can buy them for dirt cheap in another location, so this is always a good deal. He can give you strong healing items that you can't buy in shops, and even the weakest item he gives will be stronger than 10 Tofu.
• Pokémon Sword and Shield: Feeding the Cram-o-matic four Apricorns will give you a random Poké Ball, including a 1% chance of getting the Apricorn ball corresponding to what you fed it. However, other item recipes are deterministic.
• Tales Series: While the titles usually have a Cooking Mechanic, Tales of Eternia is the only game with a choice of cooking a "dark pot." This dish is inspired by a real-life Japanese party dish/game of the same name, which involves guests bringing one food item and adding them to a hot pot when the lights are off. In the game, this means cooking a random subset of food items the Player Party currently has, and the effect will also be random.

Sandbox

• Minecraft: In the Nether, you can find creatures called piglins that really like gold. If you give them a gold ingot, they will exchange it for a randomized item from a special drop table. While some of these can be extremely common — such as blocks of gravel — they may also hand over rarer materials like Ender Pearls, potions, and gear with the Soul Speed enchantment.

Third-Person Shooter

• Aliens: Fireteam Elite: There's machine in which you can insert three Challenge Cards to get a random Challenge Card, the rarity based on the rarity of the cards you place in it. Since Challenge Cards are incredibly easy to come by, this helps you farm for cards you're more likely to want to use.

Tower Defense

• Grow Castle: Weapons and accessories are generated with random stats and abilities, which makes their usefulness very unpredictable (and sometimes contradictory, eg boosting two different elemental types when each hero has only one type). Fortunately, they can be either sold for coins, or broken down into crafting stones that can be used to (randomly) craft another piece. The highest E-tier of equipment can only be obtained in this way (or by slowly gathering the daily reward chests), because you can't directly convert lesser grey, blue or pink stones into red stones at the forge; you have to craft L-tier equipment from pink stones, break each piece down into a red stone, then use those to craft E-tier.

---