History Main / AntiHoarding

In ''VideoGame/NewHorizons'', once the captain gets one million gold on the ship, crew gets envious and demands to sign articles. The crew's morale will plummet as long as the amount isn't reduced, either by going to a loanshark or spending it. The biggest the amount is, the worse it gets. Extra pays and double rum rations only help temporarily.

In "VideoGame/NewHorizons", once the captain gets one million gold on the ship, crew gets envious and demands to sign articles. The crew's morale will plummet as long as the amount isn't reduced, either by going to a loanshark or spending it. The biggest the amount is, the worse it gets. Extra pays and double rum rations only help temporarily.

* In ''VideoGame/{{Heretic}}'', each time you complete a level, you can only carry one of each inventory item you've collected into the next level (except the Wings of Wrath, which cannot be transferred at all), encouraging you to use as many items as you can before the end of the level.

* ''{{VideoGame/Darkest Dungeon}}'': Each expedition is limited to sixteen inventory slots. Some similar items can be "stacked" but even these have a hard limit. There's no way to expand these slots, although there's limited ways to increase the stacking (some Hamlet upgrades or the Antiquarian). The sequel, ''{{VideoGame/Darkest Dungeon 2}}'', continues this, although it's much more forgiving as the stagecoach has a pretty large capacity, and you can expand it with upgrades.
* ''{{VideoGame/Elsword}}'': many items have different caps in your item storage. Like how you can only hold 100 {{Emergency Energy Tank}}s in one slot or 300 of a certain crafting item in a slot. If you don't expand your item slots, managing your items will be harder. There are also the "temporary" items (most notably the promotional costumes) that you can only hold for a certain amount of time, ranging from a day to a month.
* ''VideoGame/WarcraftIII'': Heroes have an inventory capacity for six items, and at most three heroes per game. The expansion's orc campaign gives you a persistent six-item stash. The game also discourages the hoarding of your ARMIES through its upkeep mechanic. Having too large an army imposed a percent reduction, up to 60%, on your resource gathering. Competitive play resolves around keeping an army just under the first threshold until you are ready to rocket to maximum army size for a full assault.
* ''VideoGame/{{STALKER}}'': You have a [[LimitedLoadout weight limit that's not particularly generous]], and everything you can carry has an assigned weight, even ammunition. Going one gram over the limit makes your SprintMeter deplete incredibly fast.
* In ''VideoGame/ShinMegamiTenseiIV'', each item has its own inventory {{cap}}, and the better items tend to have lower caps to encourage you to actually use them. The lowly Life Stone (small HP restore) has a cap of 50, while the amazing Summon Stone (revive with full HP ''and'' summon into battle with one action) has a cap of 5. The only exception to that pattern is the RareCandy items, which invariably have a cap of 99. The same behavior is displayed in the 3DS remake of ''VideoGame/ShinMegamiTenseiStrangeJourney'' to downplay the ItemCaddy role of the protagonist.
* An NPC in ''VideoGame/MOTHER3'' encourages you to use your items as needed and to not hoard everything. The game has a pretty small inventory limit per character in order to make you use common items more frequently.
* In ''VideoGame/LetItDie'', there are three currencies: Killcoins, [=SPLithium=], and Death Metal. While Death Metals can't be stolen, the banks for Killcoins and [=SPLithium=] can be broken into when other players invade your Waiting room. While both banks can be upgraded to hold more of each, the more you have in your banks, the more an invader receives, causing most players to hold parcels of them in their reward box, which can only hold 50 before preventing more rewards from being received. Combined with a small storage box and inventory space, players are forced to decide what's worth keeping and trying to keep their currency banks low unless they're willing to risk losing it to invaders.

* ''VideoGame/RiseOfTheTombRaider'' has a (increasable to a point) limit to how much salvage you can carry, which means that if you don't start using that stuff after a while, everything salvaged from kills and boxes will be wasted, as finding salvage when inventory is full causes the stuff to disappear.

* ''[[VideoGame/HeartsOfIron Hearts of Iron III]]'' had the problem of experienced players stockpiling huge amounts of important resources such as fuel before the outbreak of hostilities, making resource management during the actual war trivial. Its sequel, ''Hearts of Iron IV'', took steps to avert this by not allowing stockpiling of raw materials at all, instead only using them directly in production of weapons and other equipment which could be stockpiled instead. This made pre-war buildup less flexible as you'd have to commit to certain types of equipment and couldn't just hoard raw materials to build whatever you happened to need down the line. The game also initially didn't have fuel as a resource at all, instead opting to use oil as a raw material in the production of vehicles and ships. It was eventually reintroduced to the franchise along with the release of the DLC ''Man the Guns'', but the ability to stockpile it was made much more limited.
* ''VideoGame/VictoriaAnEmpireUnderTheSun'':
** The original ''Victoria'' game has the hard cap on the size of your stockpile, but supplemented this with fairly common random events that destroy a large proportion of your stockpile of a particular good.
** ''Victoria 2'' puts a hard cap on the amount of a given good you can stockpile at a time, to stop a top producer or #1 great power from hoarding most of the world's supply of important goods to themselves and starve the rest of the world, something which would otherwise be far too easy to do as for instance the United Kingdom.
* ''[[VideoGame/CrusaderKings Crusader Kings 2]]'' and [[VideoGAme/CrusaderKingsIII its sequel]] have a soft limit on the number of holdings the player can have. Exceeding this limit places harsh penalties on tax income and makes the player's feudal subjects dislike them more. Some players would circumvent this by holding every single title in their realm (AKA "North Korea mode") until Paradox [[ObviousRulePatch implemented harsher tax and levy penalties]] on rulers who did so.
* All equipment in ''VideoGame/ThiefTheDarkProject'' and ''VideoGame/ThiefIITheMetalAge'' (aside from your sword, blackjack and bow) disappears at the end of a mission, and all money disappears when you exit the shop screen at the start of a mission (though if a mission forgoes the shop screen and dumps you right into the action, any money you collected from the last mission carries over). This was done to prevent players from hoarding either and make good use of all their equipment and cash at the earliest opportunity.
* The ''VideoGame/TalesSeries'' games put the item cap at about 20 units instead of the usual 99 for [=JRPGs=], encouraging players to use consumables so that any new ones they get don't go to waste.
* ''VideoGame/BloodstainedRitualOfTheNight'' puts a hard limit on how many healing potions Miriam can carry, making it impossible to outlast bosses by simply healing again and again (there is no such limit on health-restoring crafted food, however, so there is a loophole). Also, while your [[PowersAsPrograms shards]] gain extra power when you carry multiple copies of the same one, you cannot have more than nine copies at once: this encourages you to sell extra copies to Dominique for cash.

* ''VideoGame/AntiIdleTheGame'':
** In ''Battle Arena'', each tab of your inventory has 30 slots. Once you fill up a tab, excess items spill into a "Recently Deleted" tab, and while you can retrieve items from there, it costs Pixels to do so. You can store items you don't need at the moment in the Item Storage menu, but going to that menu will terminate your hit combo and cancel any raids in progress.
** In ''[=TukkunFCG=]'', you can only have up to 6 cards in your hand at any one time, and you draw one card per turn. If you are already at 6 cards when a new turn begins, you will take damage.
* In ''VideoGame/EtrianOdyssey'', you have a cap of 60 items. Note that if you have multiple instances of one item, each of them will count toward that limit (for example, if you have five Medicas, they will take up 5/60 slots, not be one slot with five Medicas). This inventory is also where the drops from monsters and gathering spots go, so it's best to use your items so that you can free up room for more of those valuable drops that can sell for a pretty penny and make new items.
* In ''VideoGame/{{Bonfire}}'', used items will grant you a bonus of 10 gold and 10 XP to the journey's end reward, encouraging you to use as many as possible. There is even an early-game quest cheekily called "Hoarder's Nightmare" that forces you to use several items to complete.
* ''VideoGame/DevilMayCry5'': Nero can hold a maximum of eight [[ArtificialLimbs Devil Breakers]], and they are cheap and easily found as pickups. Switching Breakers requires Nero to destroy his current one (either by using [[ChargedAttack Break Age]]/Break Away, or by getting hit whilst using them), however.
* Equipment in ''Grow Castle'' is generated with random stats and abilities, meaning that it's very easy for a piece of equipment to fall into the category of, "Well, I don't want to equip this right now, but I can see how I'd want it in X situation, so I don't want to just throw it away." This is balanced out by basing the crafting system on stones obtained by recycling equipment, so you ''need'' to ruthlessly and regularly cull surplus gear in order to craft higher-tier pieces.
* ''VideoGame/MassEffect1'' has a maximum number of weapons, armours and mods you can hold in your inventory, exceeding which will force you to turn any new loot into omni-gel until the total number drops to the limit. Thus you are encouraged to regularly sell or recycle weaker, outdated equipment.
* ''VideoGame/CthulhuSavesTheWorld'' features [[RareCandy stat-raising items]] that are applied immediately upon picking them up. The developer commentary specifically mentions they implemented them this way so players wouldn't hold onto them forever (and to avoid making a more complex inventory system).

* The argon crystals in ''VideoGame/{{Warframe}}'' are a resource found almost exclusively in the Void that on top of being rare are also transient; every 24 hours, each newly collected batch of crystals starts decaying at a half-life of 24 hours, so it's recommended not to search for them until you have a blueprint that requires them.
* ''VideoGame/MegaMan5'': This is the game that introduces the M-Tank, an item that not only refills Mega Man’s health but all of his sub-weapon’s energy as well, making it very valuable. While it can be found in several stages, the game only lets you hold one at a time, so if the player has one in their inventory it won’t even appear.
* ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'' is constantly moving forward with successive expansions and patches. It is very common for a patch to introduce a currency that will only be useful in the current patch or possibly for the rest of the expansion, with no benefit to hoarding them for later. In some cases, a currency type will be re-used, but before the new planned period, all previous currency of that type will be converted to the more common copper/silver/gold currency at a very low rate.
* In ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaBreathOfTheWild'', all melee weapons, bows, and shields have a durability rating; after a certain number of uses, they will break. Even the [[InfinityMinusOneSword Master Sword]] will "run out of energy" and require time to regenerate after enough hits. There is also a limited number of slots for carrying this equipment and expanding your "stash" [[CollectionSidequest takes significant time and effort]]. This forces the player to continuously replace their weapons, but also encourages them to try out different weapons on different enemies, throw them at opponents when appropriate, and seek out new and interesting equipment.
* ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaTearsOfTheKingdom'' takes this to another level with the Fuse system, which allows you combine random objects with your weapons, shields, and arrows and see what happens, further encouraging experimentation and burning through your inventory.
* The {{Retreaux}} JapaneseRPG ''VideoGame/SeaOfStars'' employs this trope this by replacing all items with MedicinalCuisine and having your first SupportPartyMember, Garl the Warrior Cook, be a, uh, [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin cook]], sitting down at save points to transform ingredients collected in the wild into home-cooked meals. While you can find dishes hanging out in InexplicableTreasureChests that are ''currently'' TooAwesomeToUse, they won't stay that way, as learning new recipes is one of the game's {{Collection Sidequest}}s. Additionally, there's a hard {{cap}} of 10 cooked dishes in the party's inventory, encouraging everyone to eat their fill.
* Unlike most [=JRPGs=] which give 99 cap of any type of item, ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfDragoon'' only allows you to carry a maximum of 32 items total. Many monsters drop things such as healing potions upon defeat, so it encourages actually using them rather than hoarding.

[[caption-width-right:350:[[https://www.deviantart.com/travisjhanson/art/Encumbrance-828496948 Encumbrance]] by Travis Hanson.\\

* ''VideoGame/SecretOfMana'' is ludicrously strict about it, capping your consumable supplies at a mere ''4'' items at a time. It becomes less of a headache as your magic gets stronger, but it sure would be nice to have a few extra recovery items on hand during {{Marathon Level}}s that force you to burn through most of your MP fighting enemies.

Compare AntiGrinding, measures similarly designed to prevent LevelGrinding in a game, and AggressivePlayIncentive, intended to counteract defensive tactics.

* In ''TabletopGame/SettlersOfCatan'', you can hold as many resource cards as you want in your hand, but if anyone at the table rolls a 7 (which is the single most likely roll on a 2d6) when you have at least seven cards, you have to discard ''half'' of them (rounded down). This encourages the players to spend their resources on buildings quickly, or to trade them for others they need. The ''Cities & Knights'' expansion allows building ramparts around up to three cities, each adding 2 cards to the maximum. Given the greater number of different resources in this game, building at least one is indispensable.

* Unlike most JRPGs which give 99 cap of any type of item, ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfDragoon'' only allows you to carry a maximum of 32 items total. Many monsters drop things such as healing potions upon defeat, so it encourages actually using them rather than hoarding.

* ''VideoGame/WarcraftIII'': Heroes have an inventory capacity for six items, and at most three heroes per game. The expansion's orc campaign gives you a persistent six-item stash. The game also discourages the hoarding of your ARMIES through its upkeep mechanic. Having too large an army imposed a percent reduction, up to 60%, on your resource gathering. Presumably to encourage players to constantly attack with smaller forces rather than build up a large force that steamrolls the enemy forces.

* The {{Retreaux}} JapaneseRPG ''VideoGame/SeaOfStars'' employs this trope this by replacing all items with MedicinalCuisine and having your first SupportPartyMember, Garl the Warrior Cook, be a, uh, [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin cook]], sitting down at save points to transform ingredients collected in the wild into home-cooked meals. While you can find dishes hanging out in InexplicableTreasureChests that are ''currently'' TooAwesomeToUse, they won't stay that way, as learning new recipes is one of the game's CollectionSidequests. Additionally, there's a hard {{cap}} of 10 cooked dishes in the party's inventory, encouraging everyone to eat their fill.