History Main / CommonPlaceRare

* Diamonds, at least according to [[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you-ever-tried-to-sell-a-diamond/4575/ this article]] from the 'Atlantic Monthly'' in 1982. This is less the case now since the [=DeBeers=] corporation, while still retaining significant market control, no longer has a monopoly on diamonds. The pricing is [[http://www.diamondcuttersintl.com/why-do-diamonds-cost-so-much/ still rather high]] given their actual commonality (it's been said that you could give every living human a cupful of them, though not necessarily the highest quality ones).

* ''VideoGame/GoldenSunTheBrokenSeal'':

[[folder:MOBA]]
* The 650 gold ''Bottle'' in ''VideoGame/DefenseOfTheAncients'', which is 200 gold more expensive than a Robe of the Magi. It's just a bottle. It holds water from the healing fountain. A healing potion costs 115 and comes as a similar vial plus contents. Not to mention the very precious ''Cheese'', which fully heals you and is the hardest item in the game to acquire (requiring 3 Roshan kills) whereas the Aegis of the Immortal which resurrects the wielder requires one Roshan kill.

[[folder:RealTimeStrategy]]
* In ''VideoGame/OffworldTradingCompany'', ''glass'' is one of the final resources and is very valuable. It can't be mined, only manufactured by combining Silicon and Oxygen into silicon dioxide--more commonly known as ''sand.''

* Though not rare per se, it takes a lot more effort to find a human bone in the catacombs in ''VideoGame/PlanescapeTorment'' than it really should. Well, the catacombs are being picked over by both human scavengers who are looting corpses to sell them to the Dustmen and by monsters that are eating said corpses.
* In the ''VideoGame/MarioAndLuigi'' series in general, beans are this trope. Yes beans, which basically act like stat boosting RareCandy. That you have to either dig up from the ground, win in mini games or get with certain item equips. In ''VideoGame/MarioAndLuigiDreamTeam'', Wellington Boots. This fairly common place (in the real world anyway) piece of footwear is, in this game, a rare random drop found only on a certain enemy in the final dungeon. And it turns out said clothing is the only practical way to get the aforementioned beans...

* Though not rare per se, it takes a lot more effort to find a human bone in the catacombs in ''VideoGame/PlanescapeTorment'' than it really should.

* ''VideoGame/GoldenSun'':

** ''The Lost Age'''s big ChainOfDeals starts with a... shiny pebble. No, literally, a shiny pebble. You trade this for a brightly-colored piece of cloth, which you trade for a bottle of milk, which you trade for a baby turtle, which you trade for access to the BonusDungeon. Got that? ''You trade a baby turtle for the BonusDungeon.''

* A fairly ridiculous example occurs after leaving the starting planet in ''VideoGame/{{Starbound}}'', the PC is directed to a colony on the edge of the system and will be offered a series of quests. One of them involves fetching Coffee for an NPC, which turns out to be one of the few food items not for sale at the colony(but soda, chocolate and milk are). To complete the quest, the PC has to buy(or find) coffee seeds, go back to a suitable planet, hoe the ground, plant the seeds and wait for the coffee to grow. Once the beans sprout(which fortunately, doesn't take nearly as long as real life), the beans can be placed in a nearby(to the questgiver) coffee pot to brew. The NPC, presented with the coffee, says he wants it in a glass mug(as opposed to any other containers that might be available), which requires collecting sand from a desert planet, forging the sand into glass and then crafting the glass into a mug. Finally, the NPC asks for a steel spoon to stir the coffee, which requires you to forge steel to make the spoon. Steel is made from Iron, which isn't too hard to find at this point, and Oil, which is found on desert planets(often in great pools, waiting to be claimed). The tricky part is that you'll likely need to upgrade to a workbench and forge capable of making steel and steel parts. While it does force you to upgrade your equipment to make steel items(which you need for the mining facility quest so you can leave the system), it seems like a hell of a lot of work to obtain Coffee, a Mug and a Spoon.

* ''VideoGame/MyTimeAtPortia'' has Valves, strangely enough. They're a required element of certain important storyline commissions in the mid-game but can only be found in the ruins rather then crafted. Which comes across as strange when you can craft pulleys, working electrical lights, and various power tools craft and smelt, but a simple valve is somehow too difficult to make.

* Japanese [=CDs=] are often coveted and pricey outside of Japan for their bonus tracks and obi strips... but in Japan they are just regular [=CD=]s. To a lesser extent there are certain vinyl records that are common in their country of origin, most notably ABBA's Ring Ring, which is a bargain bin record in Sweden, and sells for around $30 consistently on eBay. Most UK originals of Beatles albums on vinyl are common second hand, having sold many copies, but are always treated as rare premium items because of the demand for them. Stereo copies are harder to find than the mono ones though.

*** While doing "One Small Favour", you learn to craft an item that you cannot learn to make otherwise, despite the item itself being needed for two other quests ("Swan Song" and "Back To My Roots"), thus making One Small Favour a prerequisite for those quests. The item in question? ''A clay pot lid for those clay pots that you've been making since Level 1 Crafting''.

*** Giants toes area a great example. You would think you could get ten from every giant you kill, you are lucky if you get one.

See also UnusableEnemyEquipment. Contrast JunkRare.

** For most other animal-wrangling purposes, you'll need a lead, i.e. a leash. These let you move passive mobs--pigs, cows, chickens, horses, etc.--wherever you want. This lets you effortlessly corral animals into farms, pull horses across water, drag a pet wolf away from a skeleton it's fixated on, and many other things. Making a leash, however, requires a blob of slime dropped by (unsurprisingly) a slime. More surprising is how difficult it can be to find one; based on other [=RPGs=], you'd expect slimes to appear all over the place, but they only spawn in either the swamp biome (and not "swamp hills" for some reason) or close to the bottom of the world in randomly-assigned "slime chunks" (90% of chunks can't spawn slimes in this way). If you don't happen to start your game near a swamp, you may play for hours or even days without encountering a single slime.

!!Web Original
* In the online game ''{{Website/Neopets}}'', the rarest items initially were... food. The only place food was generated was at the food stores every five minutes. Unfortunately, they ran out in 15 seconds or so. You could feed your pets at the soup kitchen if you were poor enough, which led to lots of people in PerpetualPoverty just so they wouldn't have to spend all their money on an apple. Luckily, you could still get free food every day from the Giant Omelette, Giant Jelly, and once a month from a [[http://www.neopets.com/freebies hidden link]]. The problem has since been negated somewhat by the addition of more food shops and daily activities that sometimes give out free food.
** Played with in the case of paintbrushes - some of the most rare and sought-after items on the site are paintbrushes, but the rare ones are explicitly magical in nature, and have the power to permanently change your pet's appearance. Non-magical paintbrushes exist and are more common... but there are nowhere near as many varieties of normal ones as there are magic ones, simply because they [[VendorTrash don't serve much of an actual purpose]], and there is therefore no need to have over 100 types of boring normal paintbrushes.

* Real Life gaming example: ''TabletopGame/YuGiOh'', aside from the regular rarities, actually has two "Short Print" varieties of the Common rarity cards; they look, act, and essentially are exactly like regular Commons, but you'll be busting your butt and your wallet going through hundreds of packs just to get ''one''.
* In the online game ''{{Website/Neopets}}'', the rarest items initially were... food. The only place food was generated was at the food stores every five minutes. Unfortunately, they ran out in 15 seconds or so. You could feed your pets at the soup kitchen if you were poor enough, which led to lots of people in PerpetualPoverty just so they wouldn't have to spend all their money on an apple. Luckily, you could still get free food every day from the Giant Omelette, Giant Jelly, and once a month from a [[http://www.neopets.com/freebies hidden link]]. The problem has since been negated somewhat by the addition of more food shops and daily activities that sometimes give out free food.
** Played with in the case of paintbrushes - some of the most rare and sought-after items on the site are paintbrushes, but the rare ones are explicitly magical in nature, and have the power to permanently change your pet's appearance. Non-magical paintbrushes exist and are more common... but there are nowhere near as many varieties of normal ones as there are magic ones, simply because they [[VendorTrash don't serve much of an actual purpose]], and there is therefore no need to have over 100 types of boring normal paintbrushes.
* Diamonds, at least according to [[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you-ever-tried-to-sell-a-diamond/4575/ this article]] from the 'Atlantic Monthly'' in 1982. This is less the case now since the [=DeBeers=] corporation, while still retaining significant market control, no longer has a monopoly on diamonds. The pricing is [[http://www.diamondcuttersintl.com/why-do-diamonds-cost-so-much/ still rather high]] given their actual commonality (it's been said that you could give every living human a cupful of them, though not necessarily the highest quality ones).
* In the United States, two-dollar bills. The government is sitting on entire warehouses full of them because banks never ask for them because bank customers never ask for them. Since they rarely enter circulation there are many Americans who believe that they're not real money the first time they see them. The same is true of US dollar coins (not quite to the same extent) -- the banks don't stock many because their business customers don't want them (partly their tills have places for one-dollar bills but not coins, and partly they believe their retail customers don't want them).
** This is true of £1 notes in Scotland - they are still legal currency and sometimes appear as change, though are not popular due to not being used in other parts of the UK unlike the coins (England discontinued their £1 notes in 1988).
* Japanese [=CDs=] are often coveted and pricey outside of Japan for their bonus tracks and obi strips... but in Japan they are just regular [=CD=]s. To a lesser extent there are certain vinyl records that are common in their country of origin, most notably ABBA's Ring Ring, which is a bargain bin record in Sweden, and sells for around $30 consistently on eBay. Most UK originals of Beatles albums on vinyl are common second hand, having sold many copies, but are always treated as rare premium items because of the demand for them. Stereo copies are harder to find than the mono ones though.
* AAAA batteries, used in such things as penlights, laser pointers, and styli for certain tablets like the Surface Pro 3. Go into an electronics store and you might find entire bins filled to the brim with AA and AAA batteries in packs of 10-20. AAAA batteries? "Quadruple-what? Sorry, we don't sell those." And when you do find some, they come in two-packs.
* Car manufacturers often make models that often don't sell well due to a lack of marketing, high pricing and so on, but also because they simply don't build that many. The latter point is expected with luxury or exotic car companies (as exclusivity is part of their appeal), however perfectly ordinary, no-frills, basic transportation can often wind up being ''more'' uncommon than a good chunk of other vehicles on the road. This is a slight aversion to the trope, as these cars tend to go very cheap second hand since nobody wanted them in the first place; car enthusiasts often wind up buying them with their strange rarity as an added bonus. That's why when you do see one years later, it tends to be in good condition and meticulously well maintained. This also applies to older cars that were mass produced into the millions, but have since become uncommon due to tighter maintenance / emission control, running costs, part availability, build quality and general age. The Volkswagen Beetle is the best example, as most that are seen these days are either fully restored or clunkers which will more than likely be sold to someone with the intention of restoring it.
* In the ''TabletopGame/{{Paranoia}}'' RPG, the ability to recolour equipment which is above one's security clearance (and therefore punishable by death to possess or be seen using) to a colour you are cleared for (and therefore make the gear usable) is very important. Not least because stabbing each other in the back is the whole point of the game, and a low-clearance RED laser, for instance, will be defeated by not-quite-so-low-clearance ORANGE body armour. Since players are usually RED level, this is more useful than one might initially think. This results in paint being one of the most restricted types of item in the game. Other items requiring high security clearance include really powerful weapons like [[{{BFG}} cone rifles and plasma generators]], but also some things that are utterly mundane in real life, like chapstick and umbrellas.

* Iron is apparently rare anywhere but on Earth in ''WesternAnimation/Ben10'' universe.

* In ''Film/ProjectAlmanac'', the machine needs hydrogen to work, which they resort to stealing from the school. Technically you can get it by running a current through water, but pressurizing and bottling it would be rather difficult.
* In ''Literature/TheGirlFromTheMiraclesDistrict'', oranges are extremely rare and valuable in the Miracles District, as they can only be obtained in the human world, and the people of the district are physically unable to get there. At one point, Nikita manages to buy extremely sensitive information with nothing but a small crate of them.[[note]]This has [[AluminumChristmasTrees some basis in reality]]; in Poland (where the "human world" in question is set) in the height of Communist era, oranges could only be found in shops during the Christmas period.[[/note]]

* ''FanFic/MyMasterEd'', Van’s fascinated by the luxury things Edward creates, including glass dishes, a large mirror, and ice. Edward, being from a time and place were such items are common and able to make them all himself easily, doesn’t think anything of it.

* Iron is apparently rare anywhere but on Earth in ''Ben 10'' universe.

* In ''VideoGame/HyperRogue'', one of the treasures you can collect is a bottle of wine. Which is worth the same as any other treasure - precious gems, [[{{Franchise/Dune}} Spice]], Elixir of Life, and flowers from the shores of Hell itself. The description {{HandWave}}s this with "[[AlienArtsAreAppreciated wine grown under a hyperbolic sun would be extremely prized in your home location]]".

* ''VideoGame/{{Pokemon}}'':

** In Sun & Moon the currency for Hyper Training (which powers up Pokemon's base stats to max) is bottle caps. Subsequently, they are very rare items that you can only find through sending your Pokemon on cave expeditions for treasure or trading shards (previously established to be parts of the items that power up [[OlympusMons Arceus]]) for them or, very rarely, by fishing them up. No, you can't get them by simply buying drinks, that would make too much sense.

** This is true of £1 notes in Scotland - they are still legal tender and sometimes appear as change, though are not popular due to not being used in other parts of the UK unlike the coins (England discontinued their £1 notes in 1988).