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The maximum quantity of something that a game allows. Once you've hit the cap for that particular element, any other factors which would exceed that limit are silently ignored, and may as well not have happened at all.

This has a variety of uses in game design, but the gamer is concerned with caps in only a handful of instances:

  1. Damage caps. Many RPGs cap the amount of damage that can be done by a single attack. Even if the character is strong enough that his attacks would do more based on the game's damage calculation system, any damage past the cap is not dealt. This one is most likely to be set with game balance in mind, but usually only succeeds in making weaker multi-hit attacks better than single strong attacks.
  2. Stat caps. The point at which a character's statistics can go no higher. In some games, characters' stats cap only at unfeasibly high levels, but in others (notably the Fire Emblem series) the caps are reachable at normal levels and thus are a big deal. Levels themselves often have a cap as well, which may or may not come before reaching other stat caps.
  3. Inventory caps. The maximum amount of a single item you're allowed to carry. Combined with the Hyperspace Arsenal, this can create weird situations, such as the ability to carry 99 Potions and 99 Hi-Potions, but not 100 Potions and 0 Hi-Potions. Also applies to extra lives and money.
  4. Time caps. In games or situations in which you are being timed, the time usually has some upper limit at which it stops counting. The Paper Mario games, for example, stop counting your time at ninety-nine hours, fifty-nine minutes, fifty-nine seconds. Usually has no effect on gameplay, unless the programmers royally screwed up (such as in the case of the Berry Glitch from early versions of Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire).
  5. Score caps. In older games that kept score, it's often possible to amass a score higher than the game can track. This is especially possible in games from the Atari 2600 generation, since they can go on without end if one is a good enough player. Reaching the maximum score in a given game was a point of honor among gamers. Among fans of Shmups, this is known as a "counter stop," or "kansuto" in Japanese.
  6. Combo caps. Many fighting games which count the number of hits in a combo will stop counting at some point, 99 being a popular limit.
  7. Unit caps. The maximum amount of units, either of a specific kind or all together, that you can have on the field at once in a Real Time or Turn-Based Strategy game. See Arbitrary Headcount Limit for more details on this.

There are three kinds of caps:

  • Designer Imposed Cap: A cap deliberately set by the designers, usually to keep play balanced or as an Anti-Hoarding measure. For example, you might be limited to carrying 15 bombs so you can't plow through the entire game throwing bombs at everything. A variant of this type of cap is the "soft cap", where the cap is not an absolute limit but arbitrary mechanics are added to make progressing beyond it increasingly more difficult; see Diminishing Returns for Balance and Stat Overflow for more detail.
  • Hardware Imposed Cap: In computer games, caps are sometimes imposed by the hardware. Computers generally store variables (a "variable" is any number that can change, such as HP or MP) in a given location of a fixed size. That size determines the range of the variable. Such caps are typically one less than an exact power of two, like 127, 255, 32,767, 65,535, which correspond to common formats for integers.
    • Related were binary-coded decimal variables in earlier games, where each decimal digit is stored in exactly four bits; BCD requires special corrections when doing arithmetic operations, but was much simpler to display and was thus used in many older games (where the programmer had to do all that fiddly stuff by hand) for score counters. Interestingly, this produced results visually indistinguishably from:
  • Interface Induced Caps ("all nines"): These are caps of 9, 99, 999, 9999, and so on — the cap is imposed due to the limited space on a menu/status/inventory screen allocated for displaying it. For example, the designer might find that you should be able to hold about 1,000 gold, but this means that it will take up 4 digits on the display, so instead they will make the cap 999. This was more important in old games, where the space taken up by each digit was a fixed space that was often quite substantial, so it was poor form to waste it on a "1" that would only appear when the player had 1,000 gold. (And what practical difference would that extra 1 gold do you anyway?) In rare cases, only the display is capped (while the actual value is not), resulting in a situation where you might open up your purse of 999 coins to spend 50 gold and still somehow have "999" remaining (because you actually had more than the screen was showing you). In new games, the extra space is usually readily available (as seen in this article's image), but the "all nines" cap is more intuitive for long-time gamers and is used often to this day as a Designer Imposed Cap. Note that in some cases it can also overlap with the hardware cap: e.g. a 16-bit value can easily hold numbers up to 9,999 , but if you want to hold numbers up to 99,999 you need a 32-bit value.

Games are sometimes not even programmed to cap such counters when they should. They will dutifully add one to a value that can't properly go any higher, resulting in a kind of malfunction known as an Integer Overflow. This is especially common with old games, because putting in a test for a maximum value would use memory and CPU cycles they didn't have to spare. An overflow might manifest as:

  • The counter rolls over to zero, just like the odometer in a car. (The computer just discarded the "carry over" digit.)
  • The counter rolls over to a very negative number, like -32768. (The "carry over" digit was written to the bit used for sign representation.)
  • The display gets messed up as digits for the overflowed counter "run into" some other information on the display.
  • Some of the digits become nonsense symbols. (This primarily occurs with right-justified displays. Click here for a longer explanation of this phenomenon)
  • The game locks up, crashes, or starts to act really weird. (Due to the overflow clobbering memory used for something else entirely, or just because the game wasn't written to handle things like a negative counter.)
  • The game aborts with an error. (Rare except on modern platforms that do automatic range checking for the programmer.)

When a game or display error is caused by the level number (or something directly affected by the level number), and makes it impossible to continue, it's a Kill Screen.

In gaming, 'cap' as a verb can also be short for 'capture'. But that's not important right now.

A Super-Trope of:

See also: Scratch Damage and Pinball Scoring. Overflows can easily be Good Bad Bugs. Contrast Pickup Hierarchy, in which the objective is to collect as much stuff, so adding caps would defeat the purpose.


Video Game Examples:

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    Action-Adventure Games 
  • Afterimage: Most items are capped at 999 each in your inventory, though some consumables have smaller caps, such as Tree Radish Meat Stew being limited to a maximum of 5.
  • Boktai infamously had very high item caps. You could carry 99 of each individual type of item, and having 8 different kinds of health-replenishing apples alone that were handed out in ludicrous quantities for good ratings in levels (often as many as 20 apples at a time), it meant it was almost impossible to die (it was difficult to reach even Sol City without apples in the high 80s). Later games amended this by having not only limited inventory space but also items that could spoil in time to prevent hoarding the good ones.
  • Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night: Miriam's Level cap is 99, someone on gamefaqs wrote that without her attribute enhancing shards on and after eating food her max stats are HP 2271, MP 1447, STR 160, CON 164, INT 188, MND 188 and LUCK 83. What wasn't mentioned was her max AMMO and if they had found all the HP & MP UP items. One extra note on Miriam's caps, New Game Plus won't help much except to get power-ups not found the first time, getting a HP Up from the same place has no effect. Additionally there are various caps on her shards, inventory and familiars.
  • Castlevania:
    • Castlevania: Circle of the Moon: Your default stats for STR, DEF, INT and LUCK start at 100, quickly go up to 4 digits and theoretically max out at 9999 (though you're not likely to reach that point unless you're playing one of the special modes). In gameplay terms, this doesn't make much of a difference, but due to the way enemy defense works, the damage done to various enemies varies to a ridiculous degree compared to the other games in the series: by the time you're strong enough to beat the game and can do about 100 damage to endgame enemies with a normal attack, you'll do close to 1000-2000 damage to the weakest enemies in the game, when in any other game in the series, it'd probably be closer to 200-300.
    • The DS games have hard modes that will let you set a cap on how high your max level will reach. Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia is the only one that actually lets you increase it up to 255...but only after you beat the game on Hard with a level cap of 1 or link the game with Castlevania: Judgment.
  • Deadly Towers has a money cap of 250 Ludder, which is annoying since one important item costs 232 Ludder.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • The Legend of Zelda has a money cap at 255, with no opportunity to increase it. Link can only hold 8 bombs. He can later upgrade his bomb capacity to 12 and then 16 if he finds certain old men in dungeons and pays the 100 rupee fee to upgrade. Later games in the series had Wallet Upgrades.
    • In The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, the banker in Clock Town will hold on to your Rupees so you can have more available than your wallet can carry. But once you go over 5,000 Rupees, he himself will refuse to hold any more. If the player has a full wallet and 4,999 Rupees in the bank, he'll take whatever you give him but no more.
    • Somewhat controversially, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has a feature where if you open a treasure chest that contains more rupees than you can currently carry, you will simply put the rupees back into the chest to come back for later. Sounds good on paper, but it can hamper dungeon exploration as the player searches for which unopened chest contain a missing key, and rupee chests obstinately remain "unopened".
  • In the often forgotten port of Ninja Gaiden for the Master System your counter for specials maxes out at 999 but once you hit this cap it doesn't decrease, which would make it a Game-Breaker if it wasn't Nintendo Hard by the latter levels.
  • Nobody Saves the World: Even after purchasing quests that can be repeated infinitely for more experience points, the protagonist's overall maximum level is 75.
  • In Space Quest, once you earn 255 buckazoids on the Rocket Bar's slot machine, it breaks to prevent overflow.
  • Sunset Overdrive:
    • Your character doesn't have levels to speak of and has no use for XP, but that's what King Ignatius offers as a reward for The Most Epic Quest for EXP. By the end of the quest, you have enough XP to reach the level cap at 99 and have been granted the title of Sr. Captain and Commander, which is a meaningless title for the rest of the game.
    • Weapon Levels stop at 5.
    • Overdrive levels stop at 4.
    • OverCharge must have a cap, but it's higher than 100,000.
  • Titan Quest: There are caps on the various kind of speed possible:
    • Attack Speeds:
      • Dual thrown weapons have their attack speed capped at 141%.
      • Thrown weapons used alone or with a shield have their attack speed capped at 208%.
      • Dual Swords, Axes and Clubs, are capped at 200%.
      • Swords, Clubs, Axes, and Spears alone or with a shield, and bows, at 222%.
      • Staffs at 229%.
      • Fists or Fists and Shields: 300%
    • Movement speed is capped at 166%.

    Action Games 
  • Bloodline Champions has a maximum amount of health that a bloodline can regenerate from healing abilities. If their health goes below that, it cannot be regained aside from using the impractical-near-opponents Bloodline Medallion.
  • Chantelise: HP is capped at 999, and Pix is capped at 9,999,999. The amount of time played is also capped at 99:99:99, at which point it will roll over to 0:00:00.
  • The Guardian Legend has an extreme example of this. Older versions of the game will crash if you max out the score. This is especially bad, since the game gives you life-increase bonuses when you reach certain plateaus.
  • Hyperballoid: There's a limit to how many balls can be on screen at once which grants extra 250 points if you reach it. It appears to be 27 to 30.
  • In Midnight Resistance, players' ammo is capped at 999 for their primary weapon and 99 for their secondary weapon, and they can carry no more than six keys.

    Beat 'em Ups  
  • The arcade Bad Dudes capped your score at 999,990.
    • As did nearly every other Data East game of that era; it was just really easy with Bad Dudes (pretty much guaranteed if you played all the way through 1-player). It was possible in Sly Spy if you were willing to spend some time blowing up respawning mines.
  • Exolon caps the player's ammo at 99 and grenades at 10.
  • The Ninja Gaiden Arcade Game capped at 999,900. However, because the score reset when you continued, this was only possible if you...er, found some method of not running out of time, then killed tons of river monsters (the only respawning enemies in the game).
  • In Phantom Breaker: Battlegrounds, characters' levels are initially capped at 50. With the release of DLC that added Kurisu Makise from Steins;Gate as a Guest Fighter, the cap is raised to 99, allowing the player to fully maximize their characters' stat points.
  • The Streets of Rage games cap the score at 999,999 and the lives at 9. While additional lives are counted (and Streets of Rage 3 turned the '*' symbol into a '>' symbol when this happened), the score is truly capped. While you can't score enough on the original Streets of Rage to hit the cap, it is possible to hit 999,999 points on Streets of Rage 2 when playing on Hardest or Mania.

    Driving Games 
  • In Carmageddon the checkpoint timer cannot go above 19:59 on the HUD no matter how many +time powerups you pick up, but continues to increase in the background.
  • F-Zero GX has a record time cap: if you get a low enough time on a course, it will not have an internet ranking password for it; i.e., Big Blue Ordeal won't give you a password if your time is under 1'20". How are such times possible? You exploit hidden checkpoints to trick the game into thinking you're going all the way around the course when in fact you're just going circles around the finish line.
  • Gran Turismo:
    • In 3, there's a glitch where if you do a wheelie with a tuned-up Escudo, the speedometer jumps to 2147483647 and locks up the game.
    • Gran Turismo 5, 6, and Sport have money caps of 20 million, 50 million, and 20 million credits, respectively —compared to previous iterations when you could have as much as hundreds of millions of credits.
    • In a similar way, in Gran Turismo 2 you can't have more than 100 cars, which ruins the "Gotta Catch 'Em All" self-imposed challenge.
  • Initial D Arcade Stage has a points cap of 16,777,215. A bug in the early version of ID:AS Ver.2 only protected against an underflow for 1,000-point losses in Bunta Challenge mode, and if the player lost 2,000 points at once, the counter could roll under and loop around to 16.77 million.
  • Mario Kart:
    • Super Mario Kart: The game caps your time at 10 minutes and stops moving after that.
    • Mario Kart 64: It might seem counterintuitive for a racing game, but going slowly in a Time Trial will result in you hitting the time cap. The game's engine will not count any higher than ninety-nine minutes, fifty-nine-point-ninety-nine seconds (although subsequent lap times are still counted).
  • Tokyo Xtreme Racer:
    • Tokyo Xtreme Racer Zero caps every car's maximum speed at 263 MPH.
    • Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3 caps the maximum amount of credits the player can have in the bank at 999,999,999 in the Japanese version and 99,999,990 internation releases. Most infamously, due to the publishers changing the cap and the credits earned per race but not the credits requirement to face some opponents, one of them, "Whirlwind Fanfare", becomes impossible to challenge due to requiring 10 credits more than the cap. In turn, as the True Final Boss requires every opponent in the game to be beaten before challenging the player, it made the game effectively impossible to complete.
  • Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 2 has you collect a star for every opponent for defeat in versus mode. The stars cap out at 3,999. Interestingly, once you're over 2,000 stars, a last-place finish in an in-store versus battle will remove a star.

    Fighting Games 
  • Marvel vs. Capcom 2 has an arbitrary 50-hit limit for combos, meaning that if you reach that hitcount, your opponent will be flung high into the air, invincible to your attacks until they get back up again. Suffice to say, tournament players quickly found ways to break that limit.
    • Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite has a similar limitation on performing 20 light punches in a single combo (even if both characters participate). When that happens the engine throws the opponent into a vertical tailspin and out of harm's way.
  • Mortal Kombat always has some way of capping a combo after a certain amount of hits, usually by knocking the player back as the last viable hit lands. It isn't perfect, though, as only certain attacks trigger it, and only if done almost immediately after the last one landed, meaning if one times it right, they can get into some crazy infinite combos. Mortal Kombat 4 allows the player to remove the cap (called the "Maximum Damage" in-game).
  • Super Smash Bros.:

    First-Person Shooter 
  • Borderlands: Doesn't actually have a money cap. The amount of money you are carrying is listed as a 7-digit number, but you can carry much, much more, especially if you're playing the General Knoxx DLC, where you can find Shop Fodder that sells for millions. However, if you exceed $2,147,483,647 in your wallet, a glitch called "Cash Overflow" happens, where any further money collected will make the counter spin like mad and dying will make you lose ALL of your money. It messes up your challenges as well.
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops II multiplayer mode caps individual scoring at 30,000 points.
  • Descent allows you a maximum of 5 Mega Missiles (10 in Descent II), but you can only retrieve 3 after you die.
  • The Doom engine can support custom monsters with a maximum HP of 2,147,483,647. The strongest boss in the vanilla game has 4000, so two billion should be enough for even the most masochistic creator.
  • An odd example in the original Metro 2033: ammo typically doesn't have a cap, but Artyom can carry at the very most 100 Helsing arrows, counting both those in the magazine and in reserve. Metro: Last Light introduces hard caps for all ammo types, but not military-grade rounds, since those are currency; this was backported in Metro 2033 Redux.

    Hack and Slash 
  • The King of Dragons for the SNES has a lives cheat which gets one 99 lives by taking advantage of the combined life pool. A single player would use up the standard allotment until only one life remained. While the continue counted down, a second player would join, using the remaining life credit. The first player would then choose to continue, causing the life credits to wraparound from 0 to 99.

    Idle Games 
  • The Communitree:
    • After removing their softcaps, the "Initialize.", "Coding.", and "Release." upgrades have a hardcap of 1e1,000,000.
    • You can only have 100 buildings of each type in the Farming tab of the Acamaeda layer.
    • Quest difficulty caps at 999,999,999,999.
  • The Compact Tree: Dust that can be owned at once is capped based on compactors.
  • Crush Crush:
    • The levels of hobbies is capped at 75.
    • Reset Boosts can't go higher than 2048.
  • Disco Zoo:
    • Each animal pen can hold up to 25 animals. After that, further rescued animals of that type must be either released into the wild or sent into space.
    • Freedom statues cap at diamond (40 animals released). You can still release animals after that, but you can't get anything for it but a handful of coins.
    • While the cost of rescue missions to a given area increases with each trip, it maxes out at 20 times the base value.
  • Exponential Idle defines infinity as its cap for money. At first, it's ee200$, or 10^10^200$. However, doing a Supremacy eventually lets you increase the infinite value. High scores show that the real cap has not been reached as of 2022, but it's definitely higher than ee59999$.
  • FE000000:
    • Study 7 is capped at a 1.845e19 multiplier. It's removed once you get the "3 * 7 * 11" complexity achievement later in the game.
    • Eternity power extra multiplier caps at 3, based on complexity stars and time spent in complexity.
    • It's impossible to get more than 9.647e8.473e13 stars as that's the highest number of them required for a finality.
  • Forget Me Not: My Organic Garden: Unlike the other generators, there's a non-obvious limit on the amount of mincemeat that can be stacked at the bottom of the grinder, it's about 40 pieces.
  • The Milestone Tree: Transcend points are hardcapped at 1e16 to prevent milestone cost scaling from starting too late.
  • The Multitree: Unlike the original, The Game Dev Tree fans are capped based on points.
  • Replicanti Incremental: Infinity Upgrade 7 caps at a 1e5000x multiplier. It becomes a softcap with Infinity Upgrade 16.
  • Sandcastle Builder:
    • Maximum finite value for anything is 1.7976931348623157e+308 - anything higher causes the value to become Infinite. This is a feature of 64-bit floating-point notation.
    • Production Control can't be upgraded past 6e+51 at which point the player is awarded the "Nope!" badge.
  • The Tree of Life:
    • Color levels and B buyables are capped at 5000.
    • Nitrogen XXV's effect maxes out at 1e50000.
    • Dilation can't be completed more than 110 times.
    • Gem effects max out at 10000.
    • Life exponential dividers are hardcapped at 1e9.
    • Mu II is capped at 1e50 until you reach 5e1435 Cells.
    • The Primary challenge can be beaten up to 10 times (later extended to 25), Secondary 95, and Tertiary 3.
    • With Tissue LXIII, the goal for the Primary challenge doesn't go above 1e8500 Stem Cells.
    • The level cap for Taxonomy buyables is 400. The Chromosomes III upgrade increases that by 4*(Chromosomes-37), eventually capping at 850. Then the Chromosomes VIII upgrade increases that by 3*Chromosomes, going as high as 1100. Then the Chromosomes 14 milestone increases that further by Chromosomes - 234, up to 1210. Chromosome Milestone 29 then replaces that with 1500+Nucleuses, but Chromosome Milestone 32 reduces that to 1200+Nucleuses. Some other upgrades and Truly Chromosomeless also affect the cap, but the main affecting factor in the end is Human Milestone 44 which makes it 10*Plants (which is further boosted by Human Milestones 71 and 95) and is expected to go above 1e20 by the endgame.
    • Multiplier from Humans to Biomass gain is limited to 1e100, the one to Ecosystem gain to 1e500, and the rest to 1e1000.
    • The effects of "Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth" always have some kind of limit. They are eventually maxed at .08/2.6/.08.
    • The Reduce buyable in Nitrogen Science maxes out at 6.
    • Science and Nitrogen Science bonus from Lives caps at 1e10.
  • Universal Paperclips has an interesting mechanic on a resource cap. The AI you play as has an "operations" resource for processing operations (used to buy upgrades), and the cap is limited by memory. If this fills up to full, you produce another, uncapped resource in the form of creativity. Furthermore, if you play the Quantum Computing minigame right, it's possible to go over the operations cap, although it will quickly go back down if it's above maximum.

    Interactive Fiction 
  • Open Sorcery: In Open Sorcery, 100% for relationships. It's possible to add 50% to an 80% with Decker, but that just leaves it at 100%.

    Light Gun Games 
  • In Time Crisis 2, your combo is capped at 99 hits. Time Crisis 3 lets you get into the triple digits, and it is possible in Time Crisis 4's Stage 1 Area 2 to have 999 hits.
  • Virtua Cop 3 has a score cap of 99,999,999. A combination of building up your score multiplier and using Exceeding Sense to Shoot The Bullets for massive points can make reaching this score very much possible by the end of the game.

    Maze Games 
  • The Pac-Man arcade machine has a maximum number of levels of 255, imposing an unintended score cap of 3,333,360. On the 256th level the variable rolls over, causing the game to believe it is at level zero, which it does not know how to handle. This glitched level cannot be beaten as almost half of the dots needed to complete the level are missing. Getting the max score entails eating every ghost with every power pellet (until the ghosts stop turning blue), and eating every fruit for each level. Then you need to have 5 lives (another cap) going into this level, and collect all 9 dots on the right side with each life (unlike non-glitched dots, these ones regenerate each time Pac-Man dies).

    Miscellaneous 
  • Buddy Toss: The meter counter goes no higher than 999,999,999,999,999.00 m.
  • A game made to help train kids with auditory discrimination (that is, to tell the difference in pitch between two sounds) called "Circus Sequence" had a cap of 999. However, if the player managed to break the cap, it rolled over and simply placed a star pattern in the background of the scoreboard.
  • Progressbar 95: Progress points from one level cap at 50000 (other multipliers and additional bonuses also affect it outside of that, but that's the base limit).

    MMORPGs 
  • Anarchy Online has a number of different caps, most related to damage.
    • The first cap is in relation to damage done, unless the attack is a Full Auto attack from a ranged weapon, all damage caps at 13,000 points of damage done (though it's been theorized that Agents can hit for about 1 million points of damage without this cap), regardless of whether it's a normal attack or a special attack. Full Auto attacks cap at 15,000 damage (though skilled Soldiers could probably throw out 200k Full Autos without the cap).
    • The second cap applied is to PvP damage, of which there are 2 caps: The first cap cuts all damage by 50% incoming for PvP, so hitting another player for 1,000 points of damage requires having dealt out 2,000 damage before hand...
    • A final cap which limits the total amount of damage one single attack can do is limited to no more than 30% of the targeted player's maximum hit points. Considering the usually high amounts of damage flying around in the game, seeing 'capped hits' is more common than you think.
    • Another cap comes into play when it comes to gaining experience points: You can only gain experience up to a maximum of one-tenth of the amount you need to level, and with the release of Lost Eden, this also applies to the experience put into research. This makes for interesting strategies applied by players to avoid experience loss as much as possible, since all xp beyond the cap is lost.
  • About 18 months after the game was first released, City of Heroes capped the number of enemies you could "aggro" (hold the attention of) at once. Although this seems purely beneficial, the cap was still well above what the more delicate character types could withstand, so the actual purpose was to keep the tankers from being able to lure obscene amounts of critters into a confined space for easy disposal.
    • Speaking of City of..., while the individual characters have caps on how much buffing will affect them (example, a Brute cannot deal more than 850% base damage with an attack), the individual damage dealt isn't capped. This was proved when a bugged power was dealing 10x the target's hit points in damage. The game had to switch to using scientific notation to express the damage dealt.
    • There's also a cap for how much damage a player can take in one hit. Assuming you start off with full hp, NOTHING can kill you in one hit. You can be brought down to 1 hp, after which anything can kill you, but not killed in one attack.
    • There's also a limit of 2 billion influence (currency). This is arbitrary, but the integer limit is just over 2 billion (see the World of Warcraft example below), so the devs decided to just cap it at a nice, round even number.
  • Unlike other MMOs which cap the number of players per server, and also usually use instancing to limit the number of players in one location, EVE Online has absolutely no limits on players at all - everyone plays on the same server and is able to travel to any system and interact with any other player in the game. This has required all kinds of clever tricks in both the hardware and software running the game to cope with having several thousand people all taking part in a single fight.
  • Final Fantasy XIV had most items stack at a maximum of 99. If you gained more of the same item, it would start a new stack, thus taking up more space in your inventory. Patch 4.2 changed the item stacking cap to 999, with the exception of Shop Fodder which remains at 99. Damage caps out at 99,990, but that's only achieved by boss characters whenever you fail a mechanic or let the boss hit its enrage. Later patches would have bosses deal 9,999,999 damage to ensure players that are supposed to die will die since player HP being can reach six digits.
  • Granblue Fantasy:
    • With regards to characters, weapons, and summons, the Level Cap is represented by the number of stars. If the said character or item has reached its cap, it will no longer gain additional levels until it is uncapped one more (unless of course, the last uncap is reached). Though characters can still improve by means of accumulating Extended Mastery Levels and Perks.
    • As a part of gameplay balancing, there is also a Damage Cap to a majority of the skills and abilities of characters. However, this can be increased by "DMG Cap Up" buffs and perks that will amplify the damage dealt only if the character is perfectly capable of reaching the damage cap.
    • Certain Buffs and Debuffs also have a cap on the maximum amount of stat increments or decrements that can be applied to the party or to the enemy.
  • Guild Wars has a system called "Favor of the Gods," which is tied to several maxed titles. A recent weekend event that made it easy to max out two of those titles pushed the amount of favor well beyond the cap, presumed to be 2^31 milliseconds (about 35,791 minutes). (To put into perspective how much favor was accumulated that weekend: it nearly reached the cap AGAIN.)
    • And then there is the wallet cap of 100,000 gold on your character. Trading large quantities of expensive items requires multiple trips to the storage chests for both parties (luckily you can trade standing next to said chests) . Trading for a single item worth more than 100,000 gold is usually done by using a rare crafting material as currency, or the buying party giving the seller his rare customized armor (which the seller can't use or sell for much, but would be very expensive for the buyer to replace) while he pays the amount in several increments, with the armor returned with the last payment.
  • The online game Kingdom of Loathing had an infamous example where the problem of poorly capped Global Currency resulted in the massive bug known as "Black Sunday". An item called the Meat Vortex could steal meat (your currency in this game) from enemies in combat, but it lowered the amount of meat you had if used any other time. If you had 0 meat, using a meat vortex from your inventory caused the value to roll under, thus placing you at the maximum possible integer amount of meat, which at the time was 2^64-1, or 18,446,744,073,709,551,615. This hosed the game's economy for several months, but was eventually mostly fixed through currency sinks. The cap itself has also been lowered to 2^32-1, or 4,294,967,295.
  • For Free-to-Play players of The Lord of the Rings Online, the cap on currency is 2 gold pieces (most items in this game cost silver, and 1 gold = 1,000 silver). Buying a quest pack makes one a premium player and raises the cap to 5 gold. Removing the currency cap entirely (either by buying the privilege with Turbine Points or getting a subscription) brings the cap to 9,999 gold, 999 silver and 99 copper.
  • MapleStory originally put the cap on mesos (the game's currency) at 2,147,483,647; the cap has since been raised to 9,999,999,999. Many player-sold items cost even more than that, necessitating real-money trades. Meanwhile, the original damage cap was 199,999; the current cap is 50,000,000, and with certain modifiers, it's possible to reach 110,000,000 damage as a certain class. This causes an interesting shift in utilities for classes, as some classes that are generally considered to be weak will turn out to out perform "strong classes" in a setting where both have achieved capped damage.
  • RuneScape has a strict item stack limit of 2147483647 due to programming. It's impossible to have a stack of items higher than that; you'll simply get a message that it cannot be done if you try. There's still ways around this though, you can have more then one stack of items by storing them in separate places so the stacks don't attempt to automatically combine. A player could theoretically store a stack of 2147483647 coins in their bank, their inventory, coin pouch and house at once, giving them 8589934588 coins in total, well above the "limit".
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic has a curious system in place for a currency cap. Free-to-play players have a limit on the credits they can hold, with any excess going into an "escrow" bucket. The only way to get it out of escrow is with real money, either spending Cartel Coins (the paid currency) to retrieve a certain amount, or subscribing which removes the cap and returns all escrowed funds. There is a workaround: credits in the player's stash are not capped, so credits can be dumped in there before hitting the cap, effectively making your own escrow. But you're still limited on what you can do with those credits, as many in-game purchases cost well over the F2P cap.
  • In Ultima Online, getting your weight over 65,535 will result in it rolling over to 0 again, allowing you to move absolutely massive piles of materials. Though realistically only a huge pile of ore could so encumber a player. Also stacks of items over 65,535 had the same bug, including gold. In a game where the average person could earn 10,000 gold an hour.
  • A German World of Warcraft player reached the cap of 214,748 gold, that is, 2,147,483,646 copper coins (that's 2^31-2). Cataclysm raises the cap to 999,999 gold; larger amounts can be stored using multiple characters.
    • This number is faster achieved through the Statistics system. Basically, if you buy an item for 1,000 and resell it for 1,200, you've earned 200, but the system records 1,200 "obtained" gold. When the limit is achieved, the number loops to negative and grows back to positive.
    • There are many other caps as well, the most obvious being the level cap. Honor points (which are currency for PvP items) also have a cap, which is particularly low, and many other items that serve as currency are also capped. Another cap: You can only create 10 characters on the same server, and have a total of 50 characters in your account.
    • Also notable are the character stats, most of which have their cap defined as the point where getting the stat higher is entirely pointless. You can't have more than a 100% chance to hit, after all (although excess can still be useful if the character is affected by a status effect lowing hit chance). Similarly, no matter how much haste you stack, you can't reduce the global cooldown below one second, and many stats (like dodge and parry) have a "soft cap" or diminishing returns beyond which they become less effective.
    • The damage cap, which has only been reached by exploiting glitches, is 2^29, or 536,870,912.

    Party 
  • Mario Party:
    • The games cap the number of coins a character (or team) can hold at 999. It's easy to reach this in Mario Party 3 with Game Guy mini-games which can give you up to 64 times what you wagered, but even if you win thousands of coins you can only keep 999.
    • The games also have a Star cap of 99, which is usually unreachable in-game, even if one player is completely dominating the board and the turn count has been set to the highest possible (usually 50 turns). That said, in a surprising bit of Developer's Foresight, there is unique dialogue if the player tries to pick up a 100th Star.
  • Pac-Man Fever has a few games where it's possible to score higher than 999, most notably Vend-A-Fruit. Interestingly enough, while the game can recognize scores higher than 999 (and will place them accordingly), they'll all show as 999 on the high score table.
  • In Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz, the highest possible score in the Number Ball mini-game is 9,800. The game crashes the instant you hit 9,900.

    Platformers 
  • In the original arcade version of Donkey Kong, the score rolls over to zero at 1 million points. This is almost, but not quite, impossible to reach, due to both the high difficulty of the game and the Kill Screen which ends the game at level 22. Only three such scores are recorded on Twin Galaxies. The level counter is also capped at 99, though the aforementioned Kill Screen does prevent anyone from seeing this. The Kill Screen itself is due to cap problems — the time limit is supposed to increase with every stage, capped at 8,000, but this cap is only applied at the very end of the calculation, which means that the time limit for level 22 rolls over to an impossibly-low 400 before the game thinks to check anything.
  • The Fairyland Story counter-stops at 9,999,990 points, which can be achieved by creative score milking strategies.
  • Giana Sisters DS caps the number of extra lives Giana can have at 99.
  • Gun Witch: Health and magic potions have an undetectable cap in-game, since all numbers above 99 are rendered as "99+", while still actually being added to the inventory when bought or picked up as a Random Drop from monsters.
  • HERO has a score cap of 999,999. When you hit the limit, it replaces the score display with "!!!!!!!!!!!!". It records no further change in score even if you run out of lives and start a new game (keeping the score at 0.)
  • In Jazz Jackrabbit, you can only collect each weapon type up to 99 in the story levels and up to 50 in the multiplayer ones like the Battle, Treasure Hunt and Capture levels.
  • Kid Icarus (1986) caps your hearts at 999. This can be a problem, as Pit's power increases when he reaches specific upgrade rooms after having collected enough hearts on that level (among other factors). Hearts that aren't counted because you're already at the cap don't count towards this. In stage 2-2, the upgrade room is very close to the beginning of the level; if you start the level with close to 999 hearts, easily possible with some Money Grinding in stage 1-4, it's impossible to activate it. Fortunately, there are enough other upgrade rooms that you can skip this one.
  • Kirby's Dream Land 2 has a score cap of 9,999,990, which is possible to reach within a week or so of playing (because the score is kept unless you game over). Once you reach the cap though, anything that would add points would simply convert into one-ups, with the sound. As cool as this may seem, as you'll never worry about dying, the sound will get old after five minutes.
  • La-Mulana has caps on how many of each subweapon you can carry. The limit is 255 shurikens and 128 each of most others.
  • Muri: A cap of 99 of each ammo type, unless they've been made infinite by a Power-Up.
  • Rainbow Islands has a score cap of 9,999,990 points, unless you enter a code at the title screen which increases this cap to 99,999,990 points.
  • Rockman 7 EP
    • Your health and weapon energy now max out at 56 instead of 28, with extra health and ammo indicated by arrows beside the respective bars. Having more than 28 in either bar will cause them to drain slowly over time.
    • The cap on Energy and Weapon Energy Tanks are upped from four to seven, and Beat Call's max capacity was increased by the same amount.
  • The Shantae series:
  • In the old Sonic the Hedgehog games, the time is capped at 9 minutes and 59 seconds, with the added caveat that you die if you reach that time.
    • In the first act of Sonic the Hedgehog 3's Launch Base Zone, there is a way to summon an infinite series of robots and destroy them almost instantly. Do this until you run out of time several times, and you will have the maximum score and a LOT of lives (more than 200). Here's how to do it: There's an alarm near the beginning of a level that summons a flying robot. If you do a power up for a spin dash and don't release down, the robot will fly into you and be destroyed—and another will be summoned. When you destroy several monsters in succession, the score you gain goes up: 100 for the first, 200, then 500, then 1,000. After about a 14 monsters, the score goes up to a cap of 10,000 and you get a new life every 50,000 points). There is a life cap and a score cap, and eventually you'll reach one of them.
    • In Sonic 3D: Flickies' Island, you cannot have more than 9 lives at a time. The Sonic Advance Trilogy has a variation of this, as the life counter only displays "9", though you can get more than 9 lives.
    • Sonic Generations has a point cap of 99,999 and a life cap of 99. Score can (theoretically) reach 6 digits, but getting an S rank in a stage usually means you've obtained a score of around 50,000. Therefore, it's highly unlikely (if not impossible) to break 6 digits.
    • In Knuckles Chaotix, the most rings you can get in a level is 255. Anything beyond that gives you 4,000 points a ring. Also, the most rings you can take into a special stage is 200.
  • Star Fox Adventures has an inventory cap on a few items:
    • The cap on Scarabs (the currency) that increases three times over the course of the game, from 10, to 50, to 100, to 200.
    • Tricky has 5 GrubTubs' worth of energy, and Fox can carry up to 15 around with him to feed Tricky as needed, for a total of... 19 (because even though it only consumes one GrubTub of energy for him to perform a skill, he needs at least two within him to perform.
    • Fox can carry up to 7 Bomb Spores.
    • He may only carry 1 BaFomDad (read: 1-Up) until he buys a holder which increases the capacity to 10. Instead of pseudo-collection like with most capped items, however, he just passes through it when he can't carry any more. He may collect it later as needed... if that situation ever arises.
  • Super Mario Bros.:
    • The 2-D Super Mario Bros. games cap typically the number of extra lives you can have at 99. You might collect a hundred thousand One Ups beyond that (easily, in Super Mario World), but the moment you die, you're back to 98.
    • The original Super Mario Bros. has a maximum of 127 lives, due to the fact that the life counter is a signed byte. Going over 127 lives results in having negative lives, and thus getting game over the next time you die. Making matters worse is the fact that the life counter is only designed to display up to 20 lives, and getting any more than that causes your life count to be represented by random letters, punctuation symbols, and/or graphical tiles. Normally this isn't such a problem, considering you'd never get so many lives through normal gameplay, except through abusing glitches. However, collecting as many lives as possible becomes pretty much mandatory in The Lost Levels, because you're going to need every single one, and the first level in the game has a great opportunity for abusing the extra life trick.
      • The All-Stars remake fixes it so the counter can now display the number 127, and can no longer overflow into negative numbers.
      • New Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario 3D Land and Super Mario 3D World reference Super Mario Bros' glitch lives counter with their cap of 1110 lives: as the lives counter only has three digits, when the lives counter overflows, the games use a crown to represent 10 the way SMB did (for a maximum cap of "crown crown crown" lives)
    • The original Super Mario Bros. 2 caps at 254 ("FE"). This is pretty easy to get if you are at least decent with the slot machine (and ridiculously easy if you also use the unlimited coins glitch).
      • It also doesn't help that the lives counter is only displayed between stages or just after losing a life, so anyone using an infinite lives trick has to track the lives gained independently of the game interface anyway.
    • In all New Super Mario Bros. except the first one, as well as Super Mario 3D Land, Mario and Luigi lose their cap when they reach the max life count.
    • The Donkey Kong Country series, by contrast, only caps the amount of lives displayed at 99. Collecting more will result in your lives counter remaining at 99, but the extras will still count. Presumably there's a "true" cap on lives, but it's hard to say what it is.
    • In New Super Mario Bros. 2, Coin Rush mode has a score cap of 30,000 coins. At least one player had already achieved this within 3 days of the game's release in Japan - before the game had even been released anywhere else.
      • The main coin counter caps at 9,999,999 coins, and surprisingly enough, you get a change in title screen and message if you manage to somehow reach that.
  • Terraria has caps for how many items you can hold in a slot, and it depends on the item. Blocks and Ammunition have the highest cap of 999.
  • Each player in ToeJam & Earl can have up to nine lives. For Panic on Funkotron, each player can share up to seven (likely as a result of extra lives being much easier to obtain in the sequel).
    • Much like the Super Mario Bros. life counter, the display for bucks for the original ToeJam & Earl game is also a signed byte. Going over 127 means you will have negative bucks.
  • The Wario Land games have various caps. Notably, in the fourth game, the coin counter maxes out at 999,990. Since all the coins and crystals in the game come multiples of ten, it's clear that the extra zero is only there to give Wario's adventure more worth.
  • Zoo Keeper (1983) only displays a 6-digit score counter. This is in a game where it is possible to get up to 30,000,000 points in a single jump. The game internally keeps track of up to 99,999,990 points though.

    Puzzle Games 
  • A man has essentially beaten Bejeweled 2 by exceeding 2,147,483,647 (2³¹-1) points, causing the score display to go blank.
  • The max score in Bookworm is 2.14 billion according to Pop Cap.
  • The first Puzzle Bobble game has a cap on the bonus that is given for dropping bubbles, 1310720 (2^17 * 10) points which is gotten by dropping 17 or more bubbles. The sequels have a cap of 10485760 (2^20 * 10) points which can be gotten by dropping 20 or more bubbles, with the caveat that unless exactly three bubbles were matched for the drop, the bonus is capped at 1310720.
  • Tetris:
    • The NES and Game Boy versions of Tetris cap score at 999,999 points. The former has no caps on anything else, really. If you clear 1,000 lines, it will be displayed as A00, then B00, etc. Past "Z99" lines will make the game start using random symbols for the hundreds digit. Same goes with the counters for each piece. These counters will loop back around to 000 after clearing 25,600 lines or getting that many of a piece. The level counter will start to cycle through a pseudo-random sequences of two hexadecimal digits after level 30. The game also starts to break pretty horribly after that, requiring you to pause and resume to keep the game going. The level counter will go back to 00 after 256 levels.
      • Tetris DX (the GBC version) caps score at 9,999,999 points.
    • The Panel De Pon/Tetris Attack/Puzzle League games allow you to actually set the cap, at either 99,999 or 999,999 points.
      • The original only had the 99,999-point cap. Hitting it in Endless mode gave you different music on the results screen.
      • There is also a sort of cap on chains in the first game; chains are handled properly up to x13, but after that, additional hits are displayed as x? and don't award points. Similarly, combos are only displayed properly up to 30, with larger combos simply displayed as 30.
    • Tetris DS can display a maximum of 99,999,999 points. If you exceed this amount, it will display that maximum, but your score won't be saved.
      • The line and level counters will cap at 999; you'll reach the cap on those a very long time before you reach the score cap.
    • Tetris Friends in Arena Mode caps players' ratings at 19,999. The reason for this strange number seems to stem from the game's ratings-based ranks. A new rank is awarded every 1,000 points (so players with a 0-999 rating are "Newbies", 1,000-1,999 are "Novices", etc.), and it appears they simply ran out of rank names. Of course, the ratings are moot anyways since the entire Top 100 leaderboard is tied at 19,999, due to the ability to prevent ratings decreases entirely via Bribing Your Way to Victory.
    • The Tetris: The Grand Master series has a unique kind of level cap. You gain 1 level every time you drop a piece or clear a line, but once you are one level below a multiple of 100 or level 999 (the last level), your level stops increasing until you clear a line. This seems useful at first, but causes you to waste time if you're going for a time-sensitive rank, or if the mode you're in has a torikan (a checkpoint that, if reached too slowly, yields a Nonstandard Game Over).

    Real-Time Strategy 
  • The Ancient Art of War had a cap to how many units total could be visible on the map at any time, total - not per side. You could group troops into units. This allowed for a strategy of making many weak units to force the computer to create stronger units - but fewer and thus easier for the player to avoid.
  • The Oregon Trail let you go hunting in the wilds to replenish your wagon's food. However, you could only carry 100 pounds of meat back to the wagon. So there was never a good reason to shoot more than one buffalo, or, in fact, anything except buffalo and large animals - why waste the bullets? Also, the total limit of all food was about 2,000 pounds.
    • There are caps on any item in your inventory. 20 oxen, 50 sets of clothing, 1980 bullets (99 boxes of 20), 3 of each spare wagon part, and 2,000 pounds of food.
  • Populous: The Beginning had a tribe size limit of 200 (or more often 199) pushing it to far above this (using an the hypnotism spell exploit) would make the game unstable.
  • The second Warcraft game had a unit editor. The maximum damage dealt by a unit and hit points possessed by a unit were 255 and 65,535, respectively.

    Rhythm Games 
  • Many of the Endless modes in the console versions of DanceDanceRevolution have caps that can be reached in a "reasonable" amount of play. In particular, the system used in X and X2 caps at 9,999,999,999,999,999 (one less than ten quadrillion) points, at which point the player's run ends. In 4thMIX the cap is at 10^32 - 1, while in 3rdMIX the cap is 10^72 - 1.
    • Furthermore, it has been observed that clearing the song where the player reached the score cap in 3rdMIX Endless, causes Endless mode to actually end, with a "Congratulations!!" message.
  • 8 Beat Story:
    • The number of Energy Blues that can be held on a player is limited at 100 per type.
    • The number of event items that can be held on a player is limited at 30,000.
  • You can hold up to 9,999 coins in Rhythm Heaven Megamix.

    Roguelike 
  • A lot of the strategy in Angband involves managing inventory slots, which are capped at a paltry 22. Late in the game, players usually stop collecting loot from the dungeon (unique items excepted) so that they can have a full "kit" of offensive and defensive items. There is also a level cap of 50.
  • Beacon (2018): A Loading Screen message says that the maximum for stats is either 300 or 100%.
  • The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth: Coins, keys, and bombs each cap at 99. In the case of keys and bombs, this is likely to be more than the player will ever need for a run, unless they come across plenty of Key or Bomb Beggars. Repentance changed an earlier item so that it increases the coin cap to 999. Health caps at twelve of any type of hearts total, with Bone Hearts from Afterbirth+ allowing "more health" overall since they can take up to three hits instead of the standard two. Speed has a hard cap at 2.00, which can be lowered with certain items or raised back up with others, but the cap cannot exceed 2. Tears is actually two stats, Tear Delay and Fire Rate, that has a soft cap of "5" by default where further Fire Rate boosts will not affect it, and it has a hard cap at "1" where even further Delay Downs will not affect it. Repentance reworked the Tears stat so that the extra HUD displaying it went by fire rate, not delay, turning the higher number to the better stat. Most of the other stats have no caps, or just increase to the point where the stat HUD glitches out trying to display the number. Extra lives also have no cap, but since only a few select items in the game grant them, even going to the triple digits requires console commands or extreme luck with an item that has a 50/50 chance to duplicating other items and a 50/50 chance of destroying them.
  • Loop Hero: The max number of cards that can be held for placement at once, and the number of unworn equipment, is 12.
  • NetHack's developers missed one - the score caps out at 2^31-1 (=2,147,483,647 - lousy four-byte signed integers). That score's been achieved a couple of times, as has an overflow score of -2,147,474,899.
  • The Sealed Ampoule: Irene can only deal a max of 9,999,999 damage, while her ATK stat has a very high cap, if it exists at all, of "much higher than needed to hit that hard with her strongest attacks to the strongest form of the True Final Boss", and "beyond needed to One-Hit Kill any common enemy".

    Role-Playing Games 
  • One of the key contributing factors to the notorious difficulty of The 7th Saga is the cap of 9 for any item in your inventory. It makes healing rather difficult — which is mind-boggling in a game that also gives you an infinite-use health restoration item.
  • A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky: There's an item stack cap of 99, and a level cap of 99.
  • Born Under the Rain: The potion refill crate says:
    This crate filled with potions. [pause] You may only carry 5 healing potions, 5 mana potions, and 1 revival drought at once. [pause] Would you like to restock?
    [Yes] [No]
  • Brave Hero Yuusha: Item stacks are capped at 15 items.
  • Bravely Default and its sequel have the standard Final Fantasy damage cap of 9,999. This is actually kind of a problem in the late game, making a lot of the higher-powered abilities less useful than they should be. You can get around it with Bravely Second, but that's not really a viable strategy without spending a lot of money (and vaguely cheating).
  • In the original The Bard's Tale, the XP reward per battle was capped at 65,535. There was a repeatable fixed low-risk battle (the barracks in Harkyn's Castle) which achieved this limit, making Level Grinding a particularly trivial task.
  • The caps in Chrono Trigger are a bit of an oddball compared to other Square-made Role Playing Games. The heroes' HP and MP cap at 999 and 99, respectively, one-tenth of the values Final Fantasy heroes have. However the heroes still deal damage comparable to Final Fantasy heroes, and their damage cap is 9,999 (Ayla's strongest fists hit this cap with every critical). Meanwhile, the enemies that deal 700 damage on a strike are genuinely terrifying.
  • Cyberpunk 2077 caps both Character Level and "Street Cred" (a sort of fame meter that unlocks additional content) at 50, although due to how XP rewards work in the game, you are likely to max out Street Cred, unlocking all of the optional side content, long before hitting the level cap.note  Apart from these two, V's five core Stats are capped at 20, and their subordinate skill scores are capped by the current value of the corresponding stat.
  • All of From Software's "Soulsborne" games, including Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring use multiple stat caps. In each game, each stat will initially provide a relatively high return on investment. Then there will be a "soft cap," around 30 points, after which gains become smaller, then a second soft cap around 60 (passing the second soft cap reduces gains to the point that it often requires more than one increase of a primary stat to see a derived stat increase by one). The final, hard cap for any given stat is usually 99. Since each stat increase represents one level, this leads to all of these games having an Absurdly High Level Cap equal to 99x the number of stars, minus the stats a level 1 character starts with.
    • The original Dark Souls has an interesting wrinkle with it's Endurance stat. Endurance is a primary stat that governs the derived stats of Stamina (sets the size of the player's Stamina bar; actions must wait for positive to happen, so an empty stamina bar adds delays to actions) and Encumbrance (how much equipment can be equipped at a time, with stacking mobility loss happening when a player goes over 0%, 25%, 50%, and 100% of their score). Stamina is hard capped at 45 Endurance; at that point, the player has achieved maximum possible Stamina and no more can be gained. But Encumbrance is uncapped, increasing regularly until Endurance itself caps out at 99.
  • Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Original Sin 2 cap skills at 10 ranks. They can still be increased by items, but it's rare to find more than +2 gains per item. This puts the theoretical maximum somewhere around 24.
  • In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, all attributes and all skills have a natural cap of 100. Thanks to Fortification spells and potions, however, this number could be increased above 100 for extended periods. Through a potion Fortification stacking trick, one could cause overflow errors (e.g., Fortifying STR and attacking something) and freeze the game.
    • This is true of Oblivion as well, but with console commands (presumably in either game) one can explore the true limits of character stats. For attributes and skills it's 255, for mana it's a complex 60,000-ish number. (Note that this only applies to the natural limits; with the aforementioned fortification spells, a person could bring their stats into the thousands. See it here.)
      • The stats and skills may exceed the cap in numbers, but the effects of them are capped at 100 from within the engine, so even modders can't break the effective 100-limit. The exceptions are Athletics and Acrobatics; the player can run faster and jump higher up to the 255-limit.
      • While in game spells don't get any stronger, increasing your skill past 100 continues to make them cheaper to cast.
      • That, however, is not true of Morrowind. The other skills do not have their effects capped at 100 (though the effect can often be hard to note), and you can jump much, much farther with acrobatics boosted to 1100 than you can with acrobatics boosted to 600.
    • Being a vampire should let you increase your skills beyond 100, but due to a bug you can't level up your skills if they hit 100 or higher from the vampirism-given skill bonuses.
    • Use of console commands in Morrowind lets a player set the skill levels to whatever they want. Especially hilarious is the continent-spanning jumps that come with a 9,000 Acrobatics score.
    • In Skyrim, all skills are capped at 100, although they can be fortified with equipment or potions above this:
      • The skill cap initially created a level cap of 81. The level cap was removed with the ability to mark a skill as legendary (resetting it to the base of 15 and refunded your perks) allowing you to progress further and eventually claim every single perk.
      • The physical damage reduction cap for armour is 80%, or 567 armor rating. Going above this cap has no more effect on damage reduction, although higher armor ratings will still display as if they were actually doing something.
  • Divinity: Original Sin II has a soft cap on how far characters can raise their abilities with points from leveling up: 40 for attributes (from a base 10), 10 for combat abilities, or 5 for civil abilities, each of which has a separate points pool. However, these can be raised further with equipment, spells, special perks, and other sources.
  • Dragon Age:
    • Dragon Age: Origins has, beside the usual inventory caps, a cap that says you can only have ten different characters saved at any time, though you can have multiple saves with each character. This wouldn't have been so bad if it wasn't for the fact that you got achievements/trophies for playing through each of the six openings, and that playing each of the expansions counted as making a new character, even if you imported your old one from the main game.
    • The level cap is 25 for the main game, and 35 for Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening, although you'd have to do pretty much every quest to get that high of a level.
    • Dragon Age II has a level cap of 50, but if you do everything, you'd be somewhere around halfway there.
    • Dragon Age: Inquisition also caps the level of the title organization at 20, which is easily reachable in a single playthrough (especially if you convert gold into influence at the "favor merchant's" stand in Skyhold). Your party's Character Level, meanwhile, is capped at 27 — this seems like an odd number (harhar) but it's actually a sneaky application of the Rule of Three found all over the game (which is the third one in the series), as 27 is 3 to the power of 3.
  • Dragon Quest:
    • The level cap for the original Dragon Quest was 30, which you would reach at 65,535(16 bits) EXP, with 255(8 bits) for the stats. You stop learning new spells at level 20, but the additional experience for each new level doesn't change. You can gain levels faster and faster as your stats rise until you hit the cap. Given that you can beat the Dragonlord at level 19, with some luck, anything beyond about level 25 is overkill anyway. If you reach the level cap of 30 in the NES version, the king will ask why you haven't yet slain the Dragonlord.
    • In Dragon Quest II the EXP cap was raised to 1,000,000 for each character, but they had different experience tables resulting in level caps of 50, 40, and 35.
    • In Dragon Quest III the maximum level for any class is the standard 99 and EXP caps somewhere over 9 million (most likely either 9,999,999 or 24 bits). Every game after this uses a level cap of 99 save for a few recruitable monsters.
    • Dragon Quest V: Annoyingly, many monsters have a level cap lower than that of the human characters (who all can reach level 99). However, the only way to find out in-game if they've hit it is to go to a Save Point and ask how far they have until their next level.
  • Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG:
    • The level cap used to be 60, but the November 2023 update increased it to 70 to compensate for the newly added Superboss fight against Archdemon Ophiuchus. However, party members won't gain FP after level 60.
    • Most consumables have a cap of 9, but weaker ones like the "H. Nut" have a cap of 25.
    • The inventory can contain up to 200 weapons and 200 pieces of armor. Body armor, accessories, and skill shards all count as armor.
  • Eternal Senia: For its multiple games:
  • Each game in the Fallout series has various caps, but SPECIAL stats always cap at 10:
    • Fallout: Multiple caps:
      • The level cap is 21 (fairly realistic and requires minimal Level Grinding)
      • Skills cap at 200.
      • Radiation resistance caps at 100% (The Glow needs total resistance or else you'll die as soon as you walk out).
    • Fallout 2:
      • Radiation resistance caps at 95% (there are so few radiation sources in the game that you can't die from it without actively trying).
    • Fallout 3:
      • The level cap is 20 in base game (30 with the Broken Steel DLC)
      • Skills cap at 100.
      • Radiation and damage resistances both cap at 85%.
    • Fallout: New Vegas:
      • The level cap is 30 in the base game (plus an extra 5 levels with each of the four DLC, for a new cap of 50). *** Skills cap at 100.
      • Radiation and poison resistances cap at 85%.
    • Similar to Skyrim before it, Fallout 4 has no "official" level cap but level 278 allows Nate/Nora to max out all of their perks and S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attributes. Additionally, the game crashes if you go over Level 65,535 (nigh impossible outside of console commands). Your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attributes cap at 10 per series tradition but can be boosted to 11 if you got the Vault-Tec Bobbleheads and further boosted with chems, food, and clothes. Perks have a cap on how many times they can be upgraded usually to rank 2 to 5 but it also related to the appropriate S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attribute.
  • In Faria, the player character's level maxes out at 30, and hit points, ammo and magic stats are all capped at 250.
  • Many Final Fantasy games have "back door" methods of exceeding the damage cap (typically 9,999) by hitting twice or more in one turn. In some games it's as simple as Dual Wielding, while others go well beyond that.
    • The recurring Libra skill normally doesn't report HP exceeding 99,999. If an enemy does have more HP, it will be shown as ????? or 99,999, depending on the game.
    • Final Fantasy II is supposed to have a cap of 99 on core stats, but the orbs at the top of Mysidia Tower award 10 points to a stat, not checking if the bonus would cause the stat to go over 99. Stats of 100 or more are displayed the first "digit" as "A", a.k.a 10 in hexadecimal; 109 would be displayed as "A9".
      • Max HP is 9,999, and max MP is 999. The levels for magic spells and weapon proficiencies max at 16. Strangely, you can fill the progress bar again at level 16, but the level won't increase anymore, and there isn't any notable difference between level 16 with an empty bar and level 16 with a full bar.
    • Interestingly, Final Fantasy III, at least the DS version, doesn't actually have a damage cap. While it won't show you any more damage over 9,999, you'll still do more damage.
    • Final Fantasy IV is unique among the SNES games in that it allows items to stack; while each stack can't contain more than 99 items, you can have more than one stack of that item (but it would take up another slot in your limited inventory).
      • The DS remake has an augment called Limit Break (not to be confused with the more common type of Limit Break) that increases a character's damage cap from 9,999 to 99,999.
    • If a character in Final Fantasy VI is tweaked obsessively enough, their ability to deal damage can go so far over the damage cap (9,999) that it would run into the variable's overflow limit and wrap back around to low damage. This can lead to somewhat ridiculous situations where a low-level fire spell invokes the 9,999 damage cap, but spells like Ultima or Meltdown only do 100-200 damage.
      • It's also possible for certain stats to go past 255 and wrap around to 0. This makes a character that was previously unhittable into one that cannot be missed by a monster.
      • A glitch involving the Mantra/Chakra blitz hits the 9,999 cap handily... by doling out 1 divided by zero damage (which works out to 65,535 on the SNES ALU).
      • Once characters' levels get high enough, the Genji Glove (which allows Dual Wielding) can allow a Cap break. The Offering/Master's Scroll allows you do to four half-power hits, and the halving comes before the Cap is applied. Combine the two to get absolutely insane amounts of damage... once your level is high enough that you don't need to any more.
    • A couple of Final Fantasy VII's ultimate weapons can overflow the damage calculations. The game will compensate by inflicting insta-death on the target enemy (even the Optional Bosses), which means that the Death Penalty Glitch is one of the more common ways of dealing with Emerald WEAPON.
    • Technically breaking the cap, in Final Fantasy VII you can acquire a materia called HP<->MP, which swaps the values of the character's HP and MP. Anyone with an HP over 999 will technically break the MP limit of 999. Of course, you'd be stuck with a ridiculously low amount of HP, possibly turning the holder into a Glass Cannon.
      • Also, the MP cost of spells is capped to 255, as seen with the Turbo MP materia. A fully boosted Knights of the Round Table will cost 255 instead of 375 MP!
      • Final Fantasy VII also has a strange effect on percentage damage spells like Demi. Although the visual number is capped, the actual damage is not, so if used on the few powerful enemies not immune to Gravity (like Emerald Weapon again) it can be used to bring their HP down to a far more manageable level.
    • Likewise, Crisis Core includes equippable accessories that can be used elevate the damage and stat caps by a factor of ten (from 9,999 to 99,999 for damage and hit points, and from 999 to 9,999 for MP and AP)
    • Final Fantasy VIII also has a few specific attacks that can exceed the 9,999 damage cap. There are some attacks that do fall under the damage cap yet are more damaging than those that don't. This is because they can hit multiple times per turn, and it's each individual hit (not the cumulative damage from all of them) that is subject to the cap. Thus, Quistis's best attack (the Blue Magic skill Shockwave Pulsar, one hit with a theoretical maximum of 32,672 damage; while this is lower than the secondary damage cap, it's the highest that the spell's damage formula allows) is far inferior to Squall's (up to 24 hits with a theoretical maximum of 9,999 each or 239,976 total). Especially since achieving the theoretical maximum damage from Squall's ultimate attack is very doable, while for Quistis it's virtually impossible. The most powerful single-hit attack comes from the Eden summon, which can deal up to 60,000 damage.note 
      • Impressive as that is, the king here is Zell. By repeatedly putting in the weakest commands of his Duel techniques, you can get in a long string of rapid hits. Since each of these is 2 buttons long, it's possible to put in each command in 0.10 seconds according to the game's timer which ranges from giving 2 to 12 seconds. With Zell's ultimate weapon and everything else normal, he would probably come right around or right under Squall. With an enemy under the effects of Meltdown (Defense reduced to 0), Zell at 255 for his strength stat and twelve seconds on the clock, he has to potential to hit in the lower 700,000s. Give or take 200,000 to account for the possible critical hits. This has the appropriate nick name Armageddon Fist. Source.
    • Final Fantasy X features an exception should the player ever get a hold of (and properly upgrade) the ultimate weapons for the characters. This raises the damage cap to 99,999; allowing you to kill the final boss in one hit. Given that the caps had always had the aspect of a technological limitation, this was essentially akin to changing the laws of physics.
      • You can also customize normal weapons to do this, but it requires insane amounts of rare materials, and the ultimate weapons are better anyway since the user's HP boosts the damage they deal. However, you can also customize armor to break the HP/MP limits, bringing them up to 99,999 and 9,999 respectively. The optional bosses practically necessitated the HP boost.
      • The Optional Boss Neslug goes beyond the second damage limit with the Regen-like status it gains while it's in its shell, healing a six-digit amount of HP on some turns. AAAAAARGH!!
      • And finally, if the summon animations are turned off, Anima can do 7 digit damage with her Overdrive in the International version of the game.
      • Stats max out at 255; however, using Cheer on a character with maxed-out Strength or Defense will still raise those stats.
      • And even with breaking the damage cap, Penance is still a Marathon Boss of legendary proportions. 99,999 damage against its 12 million HP is a drop in the bucket.
      • In an inverse example, in the chocobo race sidequest to get the sigil for Tidus' ultimate weapon, the lowest time that is shown is capped at 0.0 seconds. This has confused and frustrated some players in that you need a time of less than zero; getting a time of exactly zero won't get you the Sun Sigil, but both are displayed as 0.0 seconds on the results screen. You could always just do the math yourself, though.
      • Kimahri becomes a Low-Tier Letdown in Final Fantasy X. While all characters are ultimately limited by the damage cap, they can overcome the 99,999 limit by attacking more than once through overdrives. Khimari is the only one who, even with his overdrive, cannot hit more than once.
    • Final Fantasy XII has a damage cap of 9,999 and, for the most part, stays true on it. This explains why Yiazmat is such a Marathon Boss; while 50 million HP is certainly record-breaking, the battle with him could have been done in less than two hours if not for the fact that each character can only inflict 9,999 damage per attack and there are only three members in a party (to make matters worse, he reduces the damage cap by a third midway through, so each character can only inflict 6,999 damage per attack). The game itself has only a handful of limit-breaking attacks, mostly the Limit Break attacks for the Espers and the Concurrence attacks for the Quickenings; the strongest attack in the game, is Zeromus' Big Bang, hitting for just shy of 70,000 damage. Fortunately, the Zodiac rereleases remove this cap.
    • Final Fantasy XIII has a cap of 99,999 for single hits; Summons, Death and equipping a certain item can move the cap to 999,999 and there is an achievement for doing 6 digits in one hit. The Final Boss has close to 15 million HP so 99,999 is not all that high in perspective.
      • The sequel generally has 99,999 cap on all forms of damage, with DLC-only Valkyrie Lightning being the only one with the skill to increase it to 999,999: thus, the max damage achievement is lowered to 99,999 points of damage and the last form of the final boss only has slightly over 1 million HP, with the Optional Bosses maxing out at 15.5 million.
    • Final Fantasy Mystic Quest had a bug where the main character can cast Cure a few times on the endboss, Dark King to increase its HP over the maximum allowable value. The enemy's HP overflows back around to -65,535, killing it instantly. Ironically, entering the battle at a low level makes this overflow easier.
    • Final Fantasy Tactics A2 has a level cap on new recruits. By default, a new unit's level would match around the average level of your party, but if your party's levels get really high, a new recruit's level would cap off at 30, forcing players to level grind the new character. This was intentional so that players can't try to recruit a level 99 Assassin without doing any work for it.
      • The game also has enemies with more than 999 HP, and a HP and MP display with only three digits. To get around the interface induced cap, the game shows ??? instead.
    • Final Fantasy Record Keeper:
      • Newly obtained units are initially capped at level 50, but you can then use Memory Crystals to increase this cap to be as high as 99. Endgame battles require that all members of the party be at level 99.
      • This also applies to magicite, newly obtained magicite is initially capped at level 50 and can be merged with identical magicite to increase the cap up to 99. Unlike with units, it isn't as important for magicite to be at level 99.
      • Damage is normally capped at 9999, however endgame battles are centered around abilities and Soul Breaks that exceed this cap. Overstrike and Arcane Overstrike Soul Breaks do at least one hit which caps at 99999, Cloud's first Ultra Soul Break allows anything to exceed the damage cap, including abilities and other Soul Breaks which do not under normal circumstances, and Awakenings and Sync Soul Breaks increase the damage cap to 19999.note 
      • A special case to be noted is with Chain Soul Breaks, in which the damage multiplier is also capped. The first chains released (referred to as Gen 1) are capped at 99 hits, while the newest chains released (referred to as Gen 2) are capped at 150 hits.
  • The Force Unleashed has its own currency for upgrading force powers, stats and learning new attacks. If you manage to buy every upgrade and still play until you get around 80/90 points (it differs from player to player) you enter a mode that rewards you with unlimited health and unlimited force energy to do even more insane actions.
  • The Inazuma Eleven series limits you to carrying 99 of any given item. However, unlike most examples of an item quantity cap, further duplicates are not simply discarded or lost. Instead, they're automatically sold, and the game will report you gaining the sell value of the item rather than the item itself.
  • The various Infinity Engine games, excepting Icewind Dale II, kept to a number of caps based on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (2nd Edition) ruleset—for example, the maximum any ability score could reach regardless of magic items was 25, which was the absolute maximum the game allowed at the time, and then usually only by gods. In addition, there were artificial caps on the games to ensure a challenge—in Baldur's Gate your character could not exceed 161,000 experience points (enough to put any single-classed character to level 7 or higher, depending on class), and no game using the Infinity Engine allowed more than six permanent party members. (Icewind Dale II used a modified 3rd Edition ruleset, which had far less limits on characters, but still had a level cap of 30.)
    • The first Baldur's Gate had an XP cap of 89,000 (level 6-8, depending on class). The official expansion Tales of the Sword Coast raised it to the 161,000 mentioned above, allowing most classes to gain 1-2 more levels. There are several cap removers to be found on the 'net (one by the original dev team!), and it is trivially easy to do yourself if you know which file to edit. (xpcap.2da) This was almost useless though, as the game didn't implement any of the higher level spells or abilities.
    • In the first Baldur's Gate, you were allowed an unlimited number of summons. In the sequel this was nerfed to a maximum of 5. That doesn't stop you from mind controlling an infinite number of monsters however.
  • In Kingdom Hearts Re:coded, the level cap is 99, Strength, Magic, and Defense caps at 200, and HP caps at 400. Also, the most Munny you can have at any time is 999,999.
    • Most of the games in general have a cap on how much damage you can cause per hit to bosses (Despite not using a numerical damage system), which results in the aforementioned multi-hitting move superiority.
  • Level 5 tends to inflict caps on immediately-beneficial items which are made all the jarring by the lack of caps on anything else in your inventory:
    • In Rogue Galaxy, you can store 99 of anything in your warehouse, and carry up to 99 of the various materials needed for Item Crafting or unlocking abilities, but healing items have much less forgiving limits.
    • Dark Chronicle is even worse. You can carry hundreds of sacks of flour...but only 20 loaves of bread.
  • Live A Live: In the remake, the maximum value for any stat before equipment is taken into account is 99, at that point the stat will stop increasing when gaining levels. After equipment the max value is 150, this means any additional boosts beyond that are "wasted" and it's better to swap equipment for something boosts a stat that hasn't reached 150 or provides some other benefit like status immunities.
  • Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals: The Egg Dragon, an Optional Boss, has the largest amount of HP the game allows for. However, the developers obviously thought nobody would be silly enough to use a healing item on it, so they did not ensure that its HP could not exceed that number. As a result, you can easily defeat this boss by using a low-level healing item on it, thereby causing its HP to wrap around, then attacking it once. A pretty spectacular blunder in a game where killing bosses within a certain number of rounds would yield a nice item reward...
  • Phantasy Star I, being an 8-bit Sega Master System game, has some classic ones.
    • Meseta (money) caps at 65,535, easy enough to achieve late in the game when there is nothing left to buy except some occasional healing.
    • Levels capped at 30, which can be achieved with some Level Grinding as a normal playthrough already takes you to 26-28 (Noah needs to be level 24 to reach the end game, due to the required 'Open' spell.)
    • Also, no monster has more than 255 HP, the final battle is actually implemented as two monsters but their HP isn't shown.
  • Phantasy Star IV has a glitch that serves as a rather brutal Level Cap: starting from level 97 onwards, gaining additional levels either decreases your stats, increases stats for characters who couldn't make use of them or reduces the maximum number of uses for their abilities to 0, making them permanently unuseable. This was thankfully fixed in the Virtual Console rerelease.
  • Prayer of the Faithless:
    • The level cap is 50, which isn't hard to reach since the end-game enemies give a level every 2 encounters at most, and is reached at around level 40.
    • The party can only hold ten of each consumable. At the end of the game, the cap gets raised to twenty because both parties' inventories are combined.
  • This is, incidentally, why hunting for the Infinity +1 Sword in Skies of Arcadia is a fool's errand. By the time you've fought enough battles to qualify for the Sky Fang, Vyse should easily be capping damage with the weaker — but easier-to-get — Vorlik Blade, so the extra attack power is usually irrelevant.
  • Mass Effect — you can't hold more than 999 nano-gel units, and you can't hold more than 9,999,999 credits (which, toward the end of the game, you may not have that much trouble acquiring).
    • These limits were mostly artificial and could be surpassed on the PC by editing the INI files that came with the game. Change them to too large a value, though, and they'll roll over.
  • In the Mario & Luigi series, there are a few notable caps that can be reached:
    • Levels cap out at level 99, which is nearly impossible to reach without massive level grinding.
    • Stats (at least in the first three games) max out at 999 each, which is impossible to reach in Partners in Time and Bowser' Inside Story (but can be done with a LOT of coffee drinking in Superstar Saga and a lot of eating beans in Dream Team.
    • Damage is capped out at 9,999 in the first three games. This has been raised, presumably to about 99,999 damage in Dream Team. For comparison's sakes, the former is at least double or triple the health of the final boss and the latter is about 33 times its health.
  • Mogeko Castle: Yonaka is able to collect 99 of every item.
  • Both Octopath Traveler and Octopath Traveler II have a damage cap of 9,999 which can be raised to 99,999 with a Warrior passive skill.
  • Overlord I: The number of minions is initially capped at 5, and increases to 10, and further, via upgrades.
  • Persona 4 caps the possible EXP gain from a single battle at 65,535, but the yen earned from a single battle can range into the millions.
  • The Pokémon games don't generally have a lot of caps existing for programming reasons - there are no limits on damage beyond the practical limits on legal values that can be plugged into the damage formula, for instance, and the various caps on levels, EVs/stat experience and so on are deliberate gameplay features that impose practical limits on visible stats at the maximum level 100. However, in the first two generations of Pokémon games, battle stats (counting in-battle multipliers) were capped at 999, and in fact there was a glitch that made it possible for a stat to overflow that value in the case of a Marowak holding the Thick Club item (which doubled its Attack stat separately from ordinary stat modifiers) that used the further Attack-raising move Swords Dance twice. While for any ordinary Pokémon using Swords Dance, the game would simply let the Attack stat maximize at 999, the programmers forgot to take into account the possibility of Thick Club Marowak, resulting in the possibility of 'raising' your Attack to a very low number.
    • In the first-generation games, the gameplay time capped at 255 hours and 59 minutes, while in the later games it is 999 hours and 59 minutes.
    • Hacking the game reveals that (at least in the third generation), the stats can safely be at 65,535. This makes sense because 999 would require at least 10 bits, but data is stored in bytes. So this would be two bytes minimum (16-bits). So even if you had a 999 Attack Marowak, unless the programmers deliberately checked for it, you'd end up with a 1998 Attack Marowak.
    • Although the circumstances are functionally impossible, a level 100 Shuckle can potentially deal the most damage in one single attack through the use of numerous stat boosters, by using Helping Hand, the Metronome held item, Power Trick, a Skill Swap to Pure Power or Huge Power, and the Defense Curl/Rollout combo. Also, Shuckle's partner must have the ability Flower Gift and the weather must be sunny. On the 5th impact of Rollout, if used against a level 1 Ledyba or Yanma that have been hit with negative Defense modifiers (such as Screech), it can deal 213,896,052 damage with a critical hit. That's around enough to KO all 807 Pokémon at once dozens if not hundreds of times over.
      • Hacking a Pokémon to have the maximum values possible for each stat as well as other enhancements (items, critical hit, super effective, etc.), the cap is well over 471,000,000 points of damage. Talk about extreme overkill.
      • However, from Black and White onward, the total amount of damage is capped at 65,535, rolling over to 0 and onward if does more.
    • In Generations I-IV, the money cap was 999,999 Poké Dollars. It was raised to 7 digits in Black and White.
      • In Pokémon R/B/Y/FR/LG, a bike costs 1,000,000 Pokédollars, which is one over the player's money cap. You have to get the coupon to obtain it.
      • Similarly, in Pokémon G/S/C and their remakes, someone on Route 32 will try to sell you a Slowpoke Tail for 1,000,000 Pokédollars; you will never be able to afford it, and it's useless anyway.
    • The first three Generations allow you to carry 99 of each item. Generation IV and onward allow up to 999 of each item.
    • In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, if an opponent in a dungeon is attacked the damage taken will appear as minus (number) above their heads. The highest number that is shown in the dungeon is -999 in red, but on the text screen below it will say the real amount of damage taken (ex: Caterpie took 1,043 damage!) You can get pretty strong in those games.
    • Pokemon are limited to six (carried) per player and to four moves each. Whether these are designer imposed or interfaced induced caps is debatable.
    • In Pokémon Sleep, the Pokémon level cap depends on your current Research Level, which increases until Lv. 55. However, the third ingredient a Pokémon can gather is unlocked at Lv. 60, hinting that this might be increased in future updates.
  • Postknight: At version 1.0.17(124), the maximum level is 70.
  • Radiant Arc:
    • Stats other than HP and MP are capped at 999. This is true even with buffs applied, meaning there are decreasing returns for stacking too many buffs.
    • The party's level cap is 50, though enemies can reach level 51 due to the scaling mechanic.
  • Resonance of Fate has an item cap of 999, and a level cap of 300. There are three categories of weapons (handguns, machineguns, and throwing weapons), each with a level cap of 100; a character's total level is the sum of the levels of each weapon type.
  • Ruina: Fairy Tale of the Forgotten Ruins: The inventory can only contain 10 of each consumable item. This is actually a soft cap due to the underlying engine, with the hard cap at 99. It's possible to obtain more than 10 of an item if the player farms them from events that don't check the soft cap.
  • In the SaGa series:
    • Characters in The Final Fantasy Legend have a visible HP cap of 999. However, human characters don't get HP from levels or other internal stats; they get them from buying HP-increasing items. The items themselves are at least partially capped in their effectiveness (use enough and even the most powerful variety only adds 1 HP) — but can increase the value well over 999.
    • In the second game, Humans and Mutants have a chance of their stats increasing at the end of battle, with that chance going up if they happened to use that particular stat in that battle (casting spells for Magic or taking damage for HP, for instance). They can't gain attributes past the cap of 999 HP or 99 Strength, Agility, Magic, or Defense, but a naked Human or Mutant could level to the cap and then put on armor or use rare stat-boosting items to break it. Robots don't level up permanently but can also break the displayed stat cap by wearing multiple copies of powerful equipment. (Or by using a bug to give them potentially infinite amounts of agility.) However, stats will loop around to 0 if they go over 255. And for whatever strange reason, some calculations involving agility only use the last two digits of it, so a character with 100 agility is slow as molasses. Meanwhile, damage caps are completely absent here; you can do five-digit damage long before it was possible in most Role Playing Games if you have enough strength, agility, and the game's Infinity +1 Sword.
    • Final Fantasy Legend III just does away with trying to cap your HP (displayed as 999 if exceeded) and core stats (which still actually cap at 255 but only display as 99 if you have more). You can see someone's actual max HP if you revive them in battle; the amount of HP recovery will be displayed in full. A level 99 human or mutant will have max HP in the 2,000s (though realistically the game can comfortably be completed with levels in the 40s and the display cap would barely be an issue). Robots can just go nuts; they get stronger in the same way humans did in the first game.
      • The DS remake completely overhauls the level system with a Stat Grinding system like the other SaGa games and uses your base stats as a human as the standard, with a cap of 1999 for HP and 99 for other stats. Other classes' stats are calculated as percentages of your human stats. For example, Beasts have 120% the HP of humans, so their HP can go up to 2,399. They have 90% strength, so their max strength would be 89. These are only the base stat caps; they can be exceeded with equipment bonuses.
      • The ability "Swallow" might actually cause an overflow glitch - only one boss (Dahak) can experience this. If he manages to use Swallow on the entire party, he recovers health in accordance to the damage dealt. However, if this exceeds his max HP, it will go into the negative value and the battle is considered "over".
  • Secret of Evermore had a cap of 65,000-someodd on it's stats. How do we know this? Because a glitch in the programming which makes the game save buffs but not the effects thereof could be exploited to make your stats wrap under and flip around so that you're nigh-unstoppable so long as you don't level up much.
  • Soaring Machinariae:
    • Stat-buffing items have a cap of two each.
    • Revitalizing Water has a cap of 3
    • Healing Waters, Energy Pots, and Return Feathers have a cap of five each.
    • Only one repair kit can be held at a time.
  • In the first two Star Ocean games, the Player Character health cap is 9,999 HP, as is the damage cap. Monster health is by no means so capped. So while your mages do less damage per second compared to your fighters, and eventually lose hope of one-shotting late-game enemies even when hitting the damage cap, your mages were still important in preventing enemies from getting their spells off. After all, if your mage hits cap then the enemy's still standing, but if their spell hits the cap your party is wiped...
  • Super Mario RPG has some very low Caps for an RPG. Coins cap at 999 (some items sell for more than half of that) and levels cap at 30 (which takes 9,999 exp to achieve). However, the damage cap is equivalent to most Final Fantasy games at 9,999, which can be done with a well-timed Geno Whirl, which is really over the top considering almost no other attack can break three digits and the highest HP any enemy in the game has is 8,000. The Beetle Mania Mini-Game has a score cap of 99,999,999.
  • In Tales of Symphonia, the EXP readout at the end of battle will only go up to 65,535, and any more will cause the counter to roll over back to 0. However, you still gain the 65,536+ EXP and level up properly; it just doesn't report correctly on the victory screen.
    • The same thing occurred in Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, but the cap was 999,999. Since it could be easy to string together a large combo, which on higher difficulties resulted in higher EXP multipliers for said combos, resulting in 100 times or more being moderately trivial, even in boss battles. Combine with New Game Plus, 10x EXP, and you get bonuses much higher than the standard EXP for most any enemy that lasts long enough for a good combo (which even then can be a while since juggling prevents enemies from dying).
    • The Damage dealt by attacks has a funky cap—in theory, it's 6,553,500 for any given hit, which is far more than the Max HP for any enemy in the entire game. In practice this won't kill the enemy—instead it will reduce their HP to 0, and the next hit will do them in. Once above 32,767, the DISPLAY for damage becomes negative. Once above 65,535, the display of damage DISAPPEARS. And it's quite possible to do this: Grind enough kills with the Devil's Arms and use a sufficiently strong special attack and you'll do huge damage.
  • Undertale: A few items in the game are sometimes listed for sale at an absurdly expensive 9,999 each, though there is no actual gold cap. Also, damage dealt in guaranteed One Hit Kills is often quantified as some power of ten minus one; this is Played for Laughs in the True Pacifist ending (where it is used to exaggerate the effect of a kiss), but is used for increasingly excessive overkill in a Genocide Run, culminating in an attack which fills the entire screen up with nines and is inflicted upon the player.
  • Willow: The level cap was 16.
  • The World Ends with You: There's no damage cap, and as a result, damage from strong enough attacks can overflow and heal the enemy!
    • Everything else however, is capped. 100 levels, 100 attack and defence, 9 of any given item, 99 of any given mastered pin, 200 unmastered pins (although you can hold more until you actually go look at them), 999 bravery, and 9,999 HP.
    • The game also Lampshades this in the wallet descriptions, such as "Holds up to 999,999 yen, and not one jot more!" and "Can hold exactly 9,999,999 yen. What are the odds!?"
  • In the original PC-88 version of Ys: Ancient Ys Vanished ~ Omen, and its Windows PC remake, your level cap was Level 24 at 65,535 EXP, resulting in the battle with Dark Fact being very long and hard. Ys I and II for the TurboGrafx-16 had a different leveling scale and was capped at 99,999, making the Fact battle much easier if you level-ground enough. The TurboGrafx16 game still caps the purse at 65,535 gold.

    Shoot 'em Ups 
  • Urban Legend of Zelda time: the early Asteroids arcade machine would apparently progressively slow down and grind to a halt if you collected enough lives, as the computer drew a little ship in the corner of the screen for each life you had, and would naturally take longer to draw more of them.
    • Apparently there was also a limit of 30 asteroids on the screen at once (32 objects, minus one for the player ship, minus one for the enemy ship?), so if you started with enough and shot them in the right order, some of the larger ones would only leave one smaller one behind instead of the usual two.
  • Battle Bakraid originally capped the score at 63,999,990, which was a bit too easy to reach. On the Unlimited Version, which removed this limit, expert players have scored nearly twice as many points.
  • Battle Garegga rolls over oddly: the score counter has 7 digits, and when you achieve what is supposed to be 10,000,000 points, instead of the score counter simply maxing out at 9,999,990, it instead continues rising... but now the millions digit is a letter instead of a number, so a score of 10,000,000 will read as "A,000,000," 11 million is "B,000,000," and so on. The world record is somewhere around "K" millionnote  points.
  • Data East shmup Battle Wings will automatically increase your score to 9,999,999 points if you clear the game. If you go over 10 million points before the end, your score will increase to 99,999,999 points.
  • Cube Colossus: A level cap of 99 for:
    • Weapon Proficiency
    • Shield
    • Energy
    • Attack
  • The original version of DoDonPachi Daifukkatsu capped score at 99,999,999,999 points. This could be reached by many players on the first loop of a two-loop game. Version 1.5 which came out about a month later added two digits to the score counter.
  • In Dangun Feveron, the bonus multiplier maxes out at 999.
  • Desert Falcon, another Atari 2600 game, had a score counter that went back to zero, but had the side-effect of making the score climb more quickly, so it took less time to break the cap again, which made the score climb even faster, etc.
  • DoDonPachi Saidaioujou appears to store your combo bonus counter in fixed-point format (similar to the Disgaea series, see below) due to the addition of non-integral multipliers, resulting in a cap of 21,474,836 after any active multipliers are applied. However, for whatever strange reason, if this counter overflows, it displays 999,999,999 in narrower-than-usual digits (note that the font usually doesn't change at all; when the counter hits 8 digits, the 8th digit simply runs into the "+" next to the counter) and adds a ridiculous amount of points to your score. These videos (Nico Nico Douga, free registration and login required) show players exploiting it to earn over a trillion points in under a minute. At least CAVE seems to have learned their lesson about unexpectedly high scores, since the score counter gracefully shows 13 digits this time around.
  • Espgaluda II also has a score cap of 3,999,999,999 although the world record is under a billion; the cap has only ever been hit by exploiting a bug in the iOS port. The Arrange Mode in the Xbox 360 version lifts this cap, although if you have the detailed score display turned on, that display glitches when trying to show a number above 9,999,999,999; the first two digits get replaced by characters after the digit '9' in ASCII (so 10 billion would be ":000000000", 11 billion is ";000000000", 12 billion is "<000000000", and so on).
  • Fantasy Zone caps score at 99,999,990 points, which can only be reached by looping the game many times. The stage counter also stops at 99, which can be reached on the 13th loop. However, the game's Nintendo Hard; not many gamers can clear the game even once.
  • Galaga can only display 6 digits for the first player, but can display 7 digits on the second player's side. Either will roll over when it exceeds its limit. For this reason, very skilled players will play on the 2P side so they don't have to keep track of the millions. Also, for whatever reason, extra lives stop being given after 1,000,000 points.
  • Even though the scores can get ridiculous in Giga Wing, the cap on score is in no danger of being hit (the world record of 294,631,625,840,450 points is still a far cry from the cap of 9,999,999,999,999,990 points). However, the cap on your score multiplier is 49,999,999, which can very well be reached by a skilled enough player.
  • Guwange has a score cap of 99,999,999 points, which has been reached.
  • Hellsinker takes this and turns it into one of the games main scoring mechanics. You extra lives are capped depending on difficulty selected with less lives on higher ones. However hitting the life cap actually makes it so that you get an Immortality bonus whenever you get an extra life that starts scaling with each successful one.
  • Mushihime Sama Futari versions 1.01 and 1.5 have a score cap of 3,999,999,999 points. The Black Label version averts this. However, the Xbox 360 port once again has one; it is possible to reach 9,999,999,999 points in Arrange Mode.
  • Parameters: Multiple things are capped:
    • The log count time in deciseconds as its lowest number: min:secs:ds, and caps at 99:99:99.
    • The multiple armor and attack upgrade squares are capped at 9 uses.
  • River Raid actually ends when you reach the score cap. The counter shows six digits, and when you score what would be 1,000,000, the counter changes to "!!!!!!" and your plane explodes.
  • On some versions of Star Fox 64, the highest score you can get on one stage is 511. The easiest stage to do this on is Area 6 in Expert mode, where you can exceed the medal score by the time you hit the checkpoint.
    • In other versions, using a cheating device to get a continuously increasing kill count could cause the numbers of the counter to start spinning. It will register as 999 at the end of the stage, however.
    • The score cap being 511 is due to an overflow bug in earlier versions; reaching a score of 512 or higher would cause the score count during "Rank In" at the end of the game to rollover back to 255 plus whatever number of hits exceeded that, also hitting another rollover at 768. End result — if a stage did get 999 hits, thanks to the rollovers the score would be recorded as 486 or 487.
  • The highest composite score obtainable on Geometry Wars Galaxies is 26,843,545,575 — or [(2^30)-1]x25.
  • Touhou Project games usually have a cap of 9 lives and 8 bombs. If a tenth life is earned, it's turned into an extra bomb instead; if a ninth bomb is earned, it's simply lost. (Some exceptions below.) Earlier games also capped shot power at 128 and later games had a different cap; any further power items were immediately converted to a different type of item, usually worth bonus points.
    • Touhou Kaeidzuka ~ Phantasmagoria of Flower View's Extra Mode makes it impossible to earn a tenth life - the player has to start with one life, and no extra lives were awarded after the 8th one.
    • Touhou Fuujinroku ~ Mountain of Faith also had a similar cap - the player has to start with exactly 3 lives, and it is only possible to gain 6 extra lives (3 in the Extra Stage).
    • A tenth extra life in Subterranean Animism appears to be simply lost, without being converted into a bomb.
    • The manual for Touhou Youyoumu ~ Perfect Cherry Blossom also states that there's a score cap of 9,999,999,990, and a Cherry Point cap of 9,999,990. But given that the world record score is less than 4 billion and nobody's ever gotten close to 2 million Cherry Points, the caps essentially have no effect on gameplay. The Cherry Point counter does start to glitch up cosmetically with 7-digit values, though.
    • In Touhou Koumakyou ~ the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, there is a limit of 640 bullets onscreen at once. Even when facing Optional Boss Flandre Scarlet, this isn't a problem (though "And Then Will There Be None?" can hit the cap during the late part of the first phase), but if you install one of certain fanpatches that make the game a lot harder, it can cause some of her attacks to exceed that limit and look rather odd.
    • The PC-98 games roll over very similarly to Battle Garegga below: With scores of 100,000,000 points or more, the ten millions digit will be replaced by letters: "A0,000,000" is 100 million points, "B0,000,000" is 110 million points, and so on.
    • Touhou Reiiden ~ Highly Responsive to Prayers has a 7-digit score counter; if the player passes 10,000,000 the counter rolls over, but the full score is still stored and is displayed at the evaluation screen at the end of the game.
    • Touhou Bunkachou ~ Shoot the Bullet can only display individual picture score values up to 999,990. Higher values glitch up the display (although they're still added to the total correctly).
    • Touhou Seirensen ~ Undefined Fantastic Object initially had a Game-Breaking Bug where it would crash trying to display 10-digit scores. This was patched, but the score counter still displays incorrectly if your score is over 2,147,483,647 (231-1), instead displaying your score minus 4,294,967,296 (232) and replacing the negative sign with an "x". Scores do display correctly on the high scores leaderboards and replays menu after the patch, though.
    • Point item value (the amount each item is worth) is capped from Mountain of Faith onwards, and world record scoreplays hit the cap in most games.
    • Fangame LASERREIMU rolls over into letters after 10 billion and caps at Z999999999 (35,999,999,999).
  • The maximum score in the arcade version of Mars Matrix is 999,999,999,990. The Dreamcast version adds an additional digit.

    Simulation Games 
  • The original Escape Velocity game had a cap on the amount of ships in a star system; this meant that, if you filled that number up with your own escorts and fighters, you could then command tribute from planets - who, not being able to send out any of their defense fleet, were forced to surrender. All you had to do was ask twice.
    • The sequels still had caps on how many ships could be present in a star system, but fixed the exploit by mandating that a planet's defense fleet had to be destroyed for them to surrender. Of course, if you had enough escorts and fighters to almost hit the cap, the planet would send out waves of a single ship...
  • One ridiculous example of this is Harvest Moon DS, which features several mines that go deeper and deeper. The second mine has 255 levels. The third has 999. The fourth has 65,535 levels.
  • In the SNES SimCity game, an error in the tax screen allowed a player's money to drop below zero, which instantly pushed it to the maximum value (like the Kingdom of Loathing bug), which was truncated to $999,999.
    • This "Million-dollar cheat code" works on hitting both the hardware cap (integer underflow) and the interface cap (arbitrarily high value capped at 999,999). First you spend all your money, including on something that generates expenditures. Next you make sure you won't have enough money to pay for these expenditures in full (reducing the tax rate to 0% can help), then wait for the end of the year where the fiscal budget screen appears by itself. This screen does't let you alter the expenditures, but for some reason, the money gain/loss doesn't happen immediately as you close it: It waits for some in-game time to pass, and that's where the game can be cheated: Holding the L button freezes time. Hold it when the tax screen appears, leave said screen, and go back to it: this time you're allowed to increase the expenditure rates above what you can afford. Once you release the L button, the calendar rolls over to January and your bank balance will drop below zero, allowing the integer underflow to take effect.
    • The PC version of SimCity 2000 had a similar bug in the calculation of loans. By deliberately ruining your credit by taking out horrible loans (25% APR!) you can convince the game to offer you a loan with negative APR. As this just gives you more and more money, you can very quickly get more money than you can ever spend. If you take out several of these loans, you can hit the money cap and find yourself slowly cycling between negative money and tons of cash.
    • SimCity 3000 caps your maximum money to §9,223,372,036,854,775,807 (§2^63 - 1). Reaching such an insane amount of money so far has only been accomplished with the money trainer, but because the game stores money in the memory as a 64-bit signed integer, if you add one single simoleon to your coffers, your money will roll back to -§2^63, and you'll be instantly kicked from the office. Of course, with all that money, it's not like you're ever gonna need a positive balance again.
      • The original Railroad Tycoon had this problem too; don't ever let your cash on hand go over [currency unit dependent on region] 30,000,000 or it'll go that far into the red. (On the other hand, if you get yourself 30,000,000 in debt, it will roll over in the other direction, and you'll suddenly be stinkin' rich.)
        As if that wasn't enough, you can only operate a maximum of 32 trains and build a maximum of 32 stations and 96 signal towers, and the timetables can only have up to four orders.
    • A more "game design"-y cap in the SimCity games comes from demand caps: limits that stifle demand as your city grows, with relief from the caps generally provided by parks & rec (for residential) and connections/ports (for commercial and industrial).
  • SimTower had several annoying and arbitrary number-of-instance caps: the one most commonly felt was the limit of 63 stairs/escalators, as stairs and escalators were among the most effective ways to ease the perennial elevator congestion, which also had quite a low cap on how many shafts you could build.
  • Transport Tycoon has a whole lot of caps, including but not limited to:
    • 80 trains per company
    • 80 road vehicles per company
    • 50 ships per company
    • 40 aircraft per company
    • 15 orders per timetable
    • 250 stations altogether on the map
    • as many stations in the area of one town as the game can automatically name
    • The Fan Remake OpenTTD has vastly lifted all of these caps and some you probably didn't consider a cap such as train length (originally 10 parts), number of locomotives on one train (originally only one) or station size.
  • Trauma Center: Under the Knife had a cap for the amount of lacerations that the Kyriaki GUILT strain could inflict on a patient. After 9 or 10 cuts, it would stop slicing the patient's organs apart so you were free to kill it pretty easily as long as you can keep rubbing them with antibiotic gel and jabbing needles into the patient. Strangely enough, this only seemed to affect the Kyriaki because other GUILT strains could inflict countless lacerations on the patients.

    Sports Games 

    Stealth-Based Games 
  • In the Outer Ops Mini-Game in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, damage has an RPG-style cap of 9,999. However, Metal Gear ZEKE is capable of breaking the damage limit, and can deal up to 99,999.
  • In all Tenchu games, there's a cap on the total number of items you can carry into any stage, as well as specific cap for each item that limits how many of a single item you can pack along for the ride.

    Survival Horror 
  • Fatal Frame: The inventory cap alows 99 of every film-type and health restorative item, like Sacred Water and Herbal Medicine. But the player is allowed to carry only 1 Stone Mirror at a time. However, the fifth game removed the cap on the Mirrorstones.
  • Resident Evil 4 - Out of all the enemies, exactly one type has a damage cap: the chainsaw wielding enemies, with their horrific one-hit kill. No more than about 6 damage can be done to them with any one hit. This leads to players wasting magnum (up to 50 damage) and rifle (up to 30 damage) shots on the strangely protected enemies. Without the damage cap, a single 50 damage magnum shot would easily take out Dr. Salvador's 40+ Hit Points. It's also disconcerting to the player using the magnum, since it takes about eight shots to put down Dr. Salvador for good, adding to his monstrous reputation.
  • Silent Hill: All forms of firearms ammo are capped at 200 rounds, and trying to pick up more than that wastes the ammo box entirely. This is especially noticeable with the pistol, as a keen player can hit the max capacity without even making use of the "ammo multiplier" New Game Plus feature.

    Turn-Based Strategy 
  • In Code Name: S.T.E.A.M, the highest score attainable at the end of a mission is 9,999 medals.
  • EXTRAPOWER: Attack of Darkforce: Sadly a consequence of building the game off Sim RPG Maker 95. Level cap only goes as high as 20, and while Needle・Sandman and Akimoto Wagman would have preferred huge damage numbers in the thousands or even millions, the best they could do was a damage cap of 60 HP. This is also why there are 53 episodes: they couldn't fit anymore!
  • Statistic caps in Fire Emblem are low enough that it's common to reach them by mid to lategame although enemies never come near them (unless you're playing Genealogy, 'Binding Blade/Radiant Dawn Hard mode or NMOTE/Conquest Lunatic mode). Later games in the series even allow the 2nd generation characters to have adjusted caps unnormal from their class.
  • Most Nippon Ichi games are notable for having nigh-unreachable damage caps (if you grind hard enough, you can eventually inflict millions, if not billions of points in damage. Eventually they can get so high that the game has to list them by K's rather than numerical digits), and rather high level caps, easily going into three and four digits. in fact, most Optional Bosses in the Disgaea series are at least at level two thousand, and it's very possible to bring playable characters' to 9,999. The true Superboss from Hell, Baal, originated as a level 4,000 badass. Nowadays he's a level 9,999 badass with hitpoints in the billions, and the game gets around its caps by making you fight 5 of them at once.
    • The rear of the strategy guide by Double Jump, legendary for writing writeups on how to tweak Nippon Ichi games well past the breaking point, has a screenshot of someone doing 35,136,040,556 damage. That's 35 BILLION. The game's shorthand shows this as a floating "35136M" over the poor sap's head getting hit with that.
    • The damage cap in Disgaea 4 appears to be 264: 184,467,440,737,095,516.
    • Finally, in Disgaea 3 they make the level cap meaningless. If you gain enough EXP to level up after 9,999, your stats continue to increase.
    • In Disgaea 3, the stat cap for any given stat in an item is 1863514, which leads to the best equipment being perfectible through carefully planned Item World trips.
    • The Disgaea games limit the amount of Mana you can hold to 10,000,000. If you have exactly that much, the game displays it as "Lots of Mana".
    • If you win 10 million or more HL (currency) from a battle, your winnings are displayed as "Super Bonus HL". You can sort of estimate the actual amount by how fast it counted up to "Super Bonus". By the time you're winning that much money though, there's nothing really useful to spend it on.
    • Their games are also notable for averting the "usual caps" for exp. Most of the stored information about a character has 32-bit size (4294967295 cap), while exp cap is much higher (more than 17 times over in the second game), necessitating use of 64-bit size
    • The trailer for Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten makes it a point to advertise this fact blatantly as soon as possible.
      Manifisto Declaration No.1: Disgaea promises to deliver mega damage and ultra-high stats. Level 9,999? 100M damage?! No problem! NO PROBLEM!! Take a dump on the face of common sense. This is Disgaea 4!
    • Before Disgaea 3, enemy stats were never calculated with a level more than 9999, making most everything that isn't an Optional Boss easy for player characters who are level 9999. This changed so that the enemy stats could be based off levels higher than 9999, if enemy level multipliers pushed their level beyond that; even if the enemy's actual level is capped at 9999, the stats can be based off of a hypothetical level far beyond that.
    • Disgaea 6: Defiance of Destiny: Some of the highest damage recorded in-game has been somewhere within the sextillions, with septillions being possible in a combo. Mana count for a character can be somewhere in the hundred trillions, HP and SP have been in the hundred Quintillions, and stats themselves can go into the trillions, if not quadrillions.
  • X Com UFO Defense has several.
    • Transports carry 80 items of equipment. It doesn't matter how big each piece is, they all count one - a pistol magazine takes up the same amount of space as an Auto-cannon. This can get annoying.
    • Laser weapons are listed as having unlimited ammo, but their actual capacity is hardware capped at exactly 255 (2^8-1) shots. Granted, it is bordering on impossible to fire 255 shots in a mission unless you are actively trying to, but still.
    • Abilities are similarly hardware capped at 255 (2^8-1). This is more of a problem, since pushing a character over 255 time units, causing an overflow error and leaving you with a highly skilled and valuable soldier who can't move, is actually something that can conceivably happen during normal gameplay.

    Vehicular Combat games 
  • Autoduel from Origin Systems has a cap of $1,000,000.00 for your money (easily reached by gambling in Atlantic City). If you are about to get more than that the IRS investigate you and confiscate your money beyond that limit.
  • Twisted Metal imposes a different cap on each weapon pickup, so the player can only store an specific amount of each different missile or weapon. These are all based on the weapon's strength (10 Fire missiles, 8 Homing, 5 Power, etc.).

    Wide-Open Sandbox 
  • In Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, one of the items you can carry is Zombrex which is a medication required to temporarily halt the progress of the zombie parasite that Frank has. You only need 6 to complete the game (8 for all side quests). However, there is a limit of 60 programmed (you can still pick up more than 60, but your counter won't count past 60). There are around 10 that can be found for free either laying around in the world or can be awarded from survivors/psychopaths. There is no way to reach this in regular gameplay without grinding lots of money to be used at pawn shops to buy more Zombrex. This cap doesn't really mean much because there's no benefit to carrying more Zombrex because there's nothing else that you can do with it, and you lose all of your Zombrex on a New Game+ anyway.
    • And of course, the money in this game is capped to $2,147,483,647. Getting more money than that will overflow your score and put it into the negatives. However, the developers have anticipated that possibility and made it so if you get money while you have a negative amount, your money will continue to climb up until it reaches 0, so a save file won't be stuck in debt for long periods of time.
  • Similar to the Grand Theft Auto series, earlier Driver games have a limit of four police cars chasing you. But given their kamikaze tendencies of ramming into you at full speed, four of them are easily enough to give you a lot of headaches.
  • Fairyside:
    • Shirley can only go up to level 10, which needs around 1500 Lunites.
    • Attack can only be raised with credits to 5.
    • Knockback can only be raised with credits to 6.
  • Going Under: Debt can't be deeper than -100 before it stops letting you go more in debt.
  • Grand Theft Auto
    • Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has a 9 digit money counter. If you go one dollar past $99,999,999 (which typically involves doing Vigilante Missions past Level 200 or grinding at the casino), it rolls over and adds another digit. The actual limit is $999,999,999. And CJ will still complain about desperately needing money.
    • Grand Theft Auto V has a hard cap at $2,147,483,647 per character.
    • In earlier instalments of the series, no matter how many stars you have, there will never be more than four police cars chasing you. You only see more if you're being chased into a roadblock, and then the cars that make up the roadblock are static and will not try to chase you. New chasing vehicles will not appear after you've destroyed one, but after one has been removed from the map. So if you're surrounded by four destroyed cop cars, no more cops will arrive on the scene.
  • In Minecraft the majority of items/blocks have a maximum stack of 64. A few have a maximum stack of 16, and before the release of Beta 1.8, food had a max stack of 1. This is slightly different than most examples, as instead of being a maximum holding capacity for a particular item, you can carry as many stacks of the item as will fit into your inventory. The maximum distance you can travel on foot from the map center before block physics stop working and the game becomes completely unplayable is X/Z ±32,000,000 blocks.
  • No Man's Sky: The maximum amount of units a player can carry is 4,294,967,295.note 
  • Terraria has a maximum item stack per inventory space: if a stack is filled, any other open slot can have a new stack of the same item. Usually, blocks, ammo, and torches as of 1.4 stack at 999, Healing Potions and food stacks at 30, and tools and weapons only have stacks of 1.

Non-Video Game Examples

    Anime and Manga 
  • The world of The Rising of the Shield Hero works pretty much like an RPG game, complete with a stat window protagonist Naofumi can access to view his own stats as well as those of his allies and the monsters he faces. Naturally, this includes a couple of level caps:
    • The first cap is level 40 which can be overcome by visiting the Hourglass of the Dragon's Era and paying a small fee to do a class change. This prevents most monsters and outlaws from moving past this level, reducing the overall danger they pose. Naofumi is temporarily stuck at this cap due to the King forbidding him from using the Hourglass, forcing him to do it elsewhere.
    • The second cap is level 100 and is believed to be the maximum level. It is later confirmed that it's possible to go beyond level 100, but special rituals are required for that.
  • In A Wild Last Boss Appeared!, the highest Character Level possible is level 1000. This is an artificial limitation set by the goddess Alovenus, to ensure no one becomes powerful enough to break the world. Lufas and Benetnash were able to break through the goddess's restrictions and surpass that limit.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • The Last Starfighter uses a high score as a means to recruit candidates. In the novelization, said high score involves breaking the score cap.

    Literature 
  • Chrysalis (RinoZ): As an Anti-Grinding feature, several important attributes (max level, max mutation level of each body part, max MP) are capped by a monster's evolutionary level. Skills have a looser cap; they can be trained up without evolving, but they cap out after five skill levels, requiring the use of a skill point in order to upgrade to a more advanced skill and keep training — and those skill points are obtained by levelling up, which is capped. The only real exception appears to be Biomass points, which can be amassed apparently without limit (but since mutation levels are capped, they're of limited use until after evolving).
  • The City and the Dungeon: Stats max out at 1000; a few high-tier classes automatically max one or more stats when you take the class. Classes, on the other hand, have a soft cap of 100; you can keep leveling after that, but the experience requirement is exponential, so it's considered a waste.
  • There Is No Epic Loot Here, Only Puns: Double-Meaning Title + Pun-Based Title for "The Capped Limit" referring to a limit on Delta's Mana and how she has Mushrooms and therefore their caps.
  • Vainqueur The Dragon: As said in Chapter 5, there's a level total cap of 100, and every class that a character has seems to need at least one level to count, so that's a technical cap of 100 Level 1 Classes at once. Classes themselves have level caps, that seem to be multiples of 10.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Kamen Rider Ex-Aid, being based on video games and the 8-bit era in particular, has a cap of 128 in any given statisticnote  as the limit of how strong the characters' superpowers can make them. Only one character explicitly reaches the stat cap, but others are capable of doing so temporarily through stat-enhancing items.

    Pinball 
  • Pinball machines from before when score reels were introduced in the 1950s used backlights. The machine could not display more than the highest-valued one.
  • Any game that uses score reels will usually just loop back to 0 points (sometimes going to its maximum possible value before that) if the score became more than they could display. Some later games that used four reels would have a "10,000" light to indicate that they had rolled over. Later on, some games with five reels followed suit with a "100,000" light. Same with games that use LED score counters, except the cap is usually 6-8 digits.
  • The Mansion Rooms in The Addams Family provide a predetermined award (which the player is notified of in advance), and demonstrates why caps exist: The game will let you enter as many Mansion Rooms as you're able to, and the number will keep going up and up. The issue is that the machine was programmed only up to the 255th Mansion Room. After that, the machine starts looking for award data in game code not meant for the Mansion Rooms, causing a lot of weird glitches and bugs. Most of these are bugs though, with the glitched awards mostly being ludicrously large (but random-looking) amounts of points.
  • The TurboGrafx-16 pinball game Alien Crush has a score cap of 999,999,900 points. If you manage to max it out, the entire table explodes and you are given the message "Congratulations !! You are the greatest player". After that, the game immediately takes you to the high score list for you to enter your initials.
  • Attack from Mars rolls around at 100 billion points. If you go over that, your score will be displayed with leading zeroes, as if the hundred billions digit is cut off (i.e. 100 billion would be 00,000,000,000) but your score will display fully on the high score table and the game will keep track of scores supposedly up to 1 trillion minus ten. It also caps the bonus multiplier at 250x.
    • Johnny Mnemonic is one of a very few games that will happily display entire scores of 100B+ during gameplay, but it too loses track of all scores beyond 1 trillion.
    • Stern's Star Wars had one code revision that allowed Victory Multiball to continue almost indefinitely, all while milking extremely high-scoring shots from other modes in progress. This could cause scores to reach the hundred-billions, and the game would indeed display all 12 digits, notwithstanding the illegitimate nature of those scores.
  • Capcom's Breakshot (1996) simulates electromagnetic score reels on a DMD and has room for 7 digits. However, if you roll the counter it displays "Over The Top x" above the reels; essentially the ten millions place of your score.
    • Cirqus Voltaire has a counter for the 100 millions above the normal score counter which only shows 8 digits.
  • Pretty much any Data East or Sega game has a cap of 9,999,999,990 - but your score merely stops increasing, as opposed to rolling over.
  • Earthshaker! caps the number of miles traveled at 99. Shooting the ramp with the miles maxed awards an End of the Road Bonus.
    • Similarly, Whirlwind caps Skyway Tolls at 99. Any more shots will show "Skyway Paid For".
  • Prior to Game of Thrones which needed to (and does) handle scores over 10 billion, many modern-era Stern games roll over at 2^32 (4,294,967,296). When this happens, the game will insert a '4' into the ones' digit of your score (presumably since it's trying to subtract 2^32 from your score), and if it happens again, it becomes an '8'. Unfortunately, the high score table also does not track the actual score.
  • Gottlieb's James Bond 007, a time-based pinball game, caps the number of "Time Units" a player can have at 50 seconds.
  • Led Zeppelin: During World Tour Multiball, the player is tasked with accumulating miles by shooting various parts of the playfield (the ramps, the targets, and so on). Each category will only provide up to 4,000 miles in of itself.
  • Done intentionally in Pro Pinball: Big Race USA, as your fare meter cannot go over $1,000,000. If this happens, you're supposed to go to Jay's Junk and buy the "Million Dollar Madness" Wizard Mode.
  • Psycho Pinball, in common with most pinball games, had the capacity for astronomical scores; unfortunately, the scoreboard only registered nine digits, so you had to track the number of billions manually. (I have reached three and a half billion a couple of times.)
  • Early versions of Capt. Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy only had five digit reels to display players' scores; when a player rolled over the score, the message "Over the Top" would light up on the backglass. Later versions added a sixth digit to the display instead.
  • Tales of the Arabian Nights rolls the score over at a billion points, even though there's no technical reason to do so. Since the game averts Pinball Scoring, even reaching 100 million points is a remarkable achievement.

    Programming 
  • Most programming languages by default allocate fixed chunks of memory to integer values, resulting in Powers of Two Minus One. Depending on how much memory is allocated, the different integer types are usually referred to as byte, short, int, and long, which was Trope Codified by C.
    • 8-bit byte holds a value from -128 to 127.
    • 8-bit unsigned byte holds a value from 0 to 255.
    • 16-bit short holds a value from -32,768 to 32,767.
    • 16-bit unsigned short holds a value from 0 to 65,535.
    • 32-bit int holds a value from -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647.
    • 32-bit unsigned int holds a value from 0 to 4,294,967,295.
    • 64-bit long holds a value from −9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807.
    • 64-bit unsigned long holds a value from 0 to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615.
  • This is notably averted in Python. When an integer reaches the cap, the program allocates more memory to it, thus raising the cap as needed.
    • Python 2 had both capped 32-bit int and uncapped long integers. In Python 3, only the uncapped integer was kept, now referred to as int.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Dungeons & Dragons has had a few soft caps (can't go beyond with normal mechanics, but can be increased with magic items/blessing/etc.) and hard caps (can't go beyond, no matter what). Rule Zero still applies, in that the DM of any game can homebrew what else happens to the characters past these caps, if anything. But most DMs probably won't bother.
    • The Rules Cyclopedia caps the damage that high level magic-users can deal with their attack spells at twenty dice.
    • The same cap is used for fall damage, 1d6 per 3m fallen to a maximum of 20d6. This gets hilarious around lvl 10, when characters could fall from orbit and live with a strict rule interpretation. Though fire damage from friction could probably still kill them. What's really fun is the epic spell Nailed to the Sky (from a much later edition), which puts the target in orbit.
    • In 2nd and older editions, ability scores were capped at 18 or 18/00 for humans, with non-human races receiving different maximums that might be higher or lower: a dwarf's maximum Constitution was capped at 19, while a halfling's strength capped at 16. Magic items could be used to exceed these limits.
    • Though there is technically no cap on level in D&D, in 3rd edition, the rules balance tends to erode after level 5-7, and the standard game didn't have specific level up bonuses past level 20 in any class. The Epic Level Handbook extends this to about level 40, but any semblance of balance is long since out the window at that point.
      • Case in point: Epic Spellcasting is built on a point buy system that requires the caster to roll a Spellcraft check. Like all skills, Spellcraft keys off a star (Intelligence). The Fortify seed can be used to increase any attribute... including Intelligence. As written, there is nothing stopping an endless, recursive loop of making a Fortify spell that requires X Intelligence and fortifies Intelligence by Y, then making a new Fortify spell that requires X+Y Intelligence and increases it further, and so on.
    • And all of this is HIGHLY dependent on the edition you're playing and, in some editions, your character class and race as well (Feats did not exist until 3rd Edition, the "colored box" version capped level at 36 for humans and somewhere around 10 for demihumans, etc.)
      • 4th Edition caps the levels at 30. Sort of. The mathematics in 4e is linear, so you can actually extend it all indefinitely and everything remains relatively well balanced, there are even enemies that are over level 30, although they're all gods or god-like beings. PCs who hit 30 get to finish whatever it is they are doing and then are consumed by their Epic Destiny which, more often than not, results in ascension to godhood. They do, however, run out of powers and such. Insert auto-power generation programs!
    • 5th edition puts caps on levels and stats for both the players and the enemies.
      • The maximum level for any player character is 20. This can be supplemented by Epic Boons should the DM allow it — you get one Epic Boon at level 20, along with the most powerful ability of your chosen class. But you can't gain any more levels beyond level 20. It's also supposed to be an Absurdly High Level Cap, since it requires 355,000 total experience points to reach level 20; you could play a campaign for months and never hit this cap. Official campaigns are designed for players to start at level 1, and be around level 15 by the end of it; just getting to level 20 will require some homebrewing on the DM's part.
      • Ability scores for all creatures (player or enemy) have a soft cap of 20, which can only be increased by magic items, Epic Boons, a few chosen skills, or being some sort of "legendary" monster. There's also a hard cap of 30 for every stat; a creature's stat score can't go past 30, no matter what.
      • Monsters also gain a hard cap at Challenge Rating 30. And the one creature that has a challenge rating of 30 — the Tarrasque — is supposed to be a creature so powerful that the entire world is put on notice when it so much as shows up, one that requires armies of the world to unite together to defeat it. The next-closest monster is Challenge Rating 24. Like player levels, the DM can homebrew beyond this point, but the monsters and resources in the official books do not go beyond CR 30.
  • Fabula Ultima: The maximum level a player character can reach is 50, while the maximum number of levels they can invest into any one class is 10. The number of unmastered (i.e., not at level cap) classes a character can have at any one time is capped at 3, meaning you cannot start leveling a fourth class until you've maxed out one of the three you already have. NPCs, meanwhile, have a maximum level cap of 60.
  • The Tabletop Game RPG based off of the Final Fantasy series even has a damage cap (of 999), simulating the cap of the console games.
  • Hc Svnt Dracones: Traits range from 1 to 5 dice, Mind and Body traits can't get past 3 without augmentations, and the surgeries that enable higher traits can only be used to raise traits from 4 to 5 three times. Proficiencies range from 0 to 4 dots, the number of 3-dot skills that a character can have is limited by their Mind:Strength stat and achieving 4 dots in a proficiency requires a special quest. And the number of Focus abilities is limited by the number of proficiencies at 3 dots or higher.
  • Magic: The Gathering defies this trope at the rules level. While some cards have limits written into their rules text (ex. "This ability triggers only once per turn,"), just about everything that doesn't forbid it can be stacked endlessly. Paper tournament play has rules for demonstrating a loop and allowing it to be performed an arbitrary number of times. Circa 2014, the Modern format saw its top two decks represent one capable of gaining infinite life and another capable of dealing infinite damage (in this case, infinity life won. The infinite damage deck did so by creating an arbitrary number of creature tokens and then attacking, requiring the number to be locked in. The infinite life deck used a combo with no speed restrictions, and could choose whatever number the attacker chose plus 1).
  • Psionics: The Next Stage in Human Evolution:
    • Stats for normal humans are capped at 6.
    • Stats for espers and certain special humans are capped at 10.
    • Espers with somakinesis have a base stat cap of 10, like any other esper, however, the passive bonus to speed and strength they receive means that their passive maximum speed and strength can go up to 14 and they can temporarily boost them up to 18. To put that in perspective, a boosting, max level somakinetic with a base speed of 10 can run three times faster than the fastest human to ever live.
  • Red Markets has "potentials" in place of ability scores, which limit the max level of a related skill. A character's potentials can be raised in-game, but it's expensive.
  • Warhammer 40,000 has an unofficial limit of models having a maximum of 10 wounds, which is not coincidentally also the highest damage that can be done with the most powerful weapons that use a 10-sided die to roll damage. Although the system is perfectly capable of handling any numbers you care to choose, no models have been released that exceed these; since the only models that tough are greater demons, avatars of gods and the like, none are likely to.
  • World of Darkness live-action games, put damage caps on PCs in sanctioned LARPs. This was one of many fixes attempted to make the tabletop rules work in live-action, although in practice mid-powered characters hit cap very easily and high-powered characters were basically unaffected by any penalties.

    Theme Parks 

    Toys 
  • Tamagotchi: The Keitai and Version 2 toys, which introduced money to the toys, capped the money at 9999. The cap got higher for each succeeding version, with the Music Star's cap at 9~ billion. Meanwhile, prior to the release of the Tamagotchi On, generation and age numbers always capped at 99. This can cause problems on releases where evolutions are dependent on the generation being odd or even.

    Webcomics 
  • In a weird case of parodying, Adventurers!! features (mostly in the final battle sequences) a cap of 9,999, with better attacks basing themselves on doing more hits than just 1. The interesting part is that three characters actually break this cap: a deity turned into a summon (99,999), Karashi with her ultimate weapon (27400) and a powered-up Spybot, who had been never really been known for his combat skills.
    • The most interesting part: the latter's damage is achieved by a series of melee attacks (each hit goes to 15,000 or something). Although he was flying and rocket boosted, this unnamed attack beats many attacks that were prepared for turns.
    • The party's shared inventory appears not to allow having more than 99 of any item.
    • Also, in an interesting metafictional example, the comic number reaches # 999 when the heroes reach the final boss and stays at that for the rest of the comic.
  • Damage caps usually come into play in Captain SNES: The Game Masta whenever characters enter into a world with a JRPG system, mainly because Alex is obsessive enough to have leveled his characters as far as they will go. In one particularly interesting example; a Sorrow-possessed Lucca manages to break both her usual health cap (going from 999/999 to 0000/0000), and Final Fantasy IV's damage cap. However, she doesn't go past 9,999 by going into five digits, she does it by using four digits... in base sixteen! note  Lucca Lampshades this in a few comics: "But I did more damage to you than is even possible!"
  • Erfworld:  The world has caps on most things, both hard caps (impossible to exceed) and soft caps (impractical or inefficient to exceed).
    • Cities cap at level 5.  Their cities can be highly customized so that they are effectively higher level, but they will not produce extra Schmuckers or give more money when razed.
    • Theoretically, a Side can have an unlimited number of cities, but there is a diminishing return on Schmuckers that cities produce.  At around ten to fifteen cities, all your cities will be producing next to nothing.  Haffaton once had sixty-nine cities, but they only managed it with judicious use of magic (which their Chief Caster squandered in an effort to prove that her discipline was superior), and even then they had a laughably small army that even the smallest Side would find easy pickings.  The standard way of getting around this cap is to spin off some of the cities into their own allied Side.
    • Sides have no limit to the amount of Schmuckers they can keep in their treasury, but barbarian warlords can only hold an amount in their purse equal to their level times a thousand.  They can get around it by carrying gems that can later be converted into Schmuckers.
    • There is no known maximum unit level, but experience required to advance in level appears to operate on a logarithmic scale (it's hard to say for sure, since Erfworlders don't have an innate sense of their own experience bar).  Regardless, gaining higher levels is extremely difficult; level 10 warlords and casters are rare but a Side will usually have at least one, while anything above that is almost unheard of.  The highest level we've actually seen is a level 12 Hippiemancer.
    • Stacks are small formations of units.  Stacks gain a bonus for each unit in the stack, maxing out at eight and decaying from there.  Eight-man stacks are therefore quite common, but the actual hard cap is a function of the size of the units making up the stack.  The smallest units, like scouting bats, have a theoretically unlimited stack size.  While normally they're too weak to be useful, Transylvito has found that stuffing a few dozen bats into the Chief Warlord's stack makes each individual bat on par with heavy infantry, albeit of the Glass Cannon variety.
  • Kid Radd plays with this trope, making sloppy programming of damage cap calculation a major plot point.

    Websites 
  • Fanfiction.net stores the wordcount as an unsigned 24-bit integer. The Loud House: Revamped was the first fanfic to hit this cap, and as a result, nobody knows how long this Doorstopper is.
  • Twitter: You can only post 500,000 tweets a day. You can also only follow up to a maximum amount of 5,000 accounts until you get a certain number of accounts to follow you.

    Other 
  • Baseball stadium scoreboards have frequently been subject to caps, depending on the type of scoreboard used. Manually operated scoreboards usually only hold ten innings' worth of information, and are often limited to showing up to nine runs per inning; if ten runs or more score in an inning, it's usually displayed only with the last digit. Digital (non high-definition) scoreboards also tend to have caps that can only count up to nineteen runs and/or innings per team per game. An modern example of a capped digital scoreboard can be seen in Chase Field in Phoenix, Arizona, where the New York Yankees beat the Atlanta Braves 20-6, but it looks like "0-6" due to the lack of that first "2".
  • When Nadia Comaneci scored the world's first perfect 10 at an Olympic gymnastics event, the scoreboard could not correctly display the result, so some brief confusion occured when it showed "1.0" instead.
  • Many Game Shows put limits on how much contestants can win and/or how long they can stay champion before retiring. See Game Show Winnings Cap.
    • Family Double Dare originally used the three-digit scoreboards in the upfront game but one family dominated with a $1,050 blowout win. The display could only read "050" leading to Marc claiming they broke the scoreboard.
    • The current highest possible one-day score on Jeopardy! is $566,400. This is only obtainable under if ALL of the following conditions are met:
      • One player has to respond to all clues correctly, completely shutting out the other two contestants.
      • The first round's Daily Double has to be in the $200 slot (the current lowest value per clue).
      • The second round's two Daily Doubles have to be in the $400 position in two different categories.
      • The Daily Doubles MUST be the last clues selected in their respective rounds.
      • The contestant must go double-or-nothing on all three Daily Doubles and respond correctly to each.
      • The contestant must also go double-or-nothing on the Final Jeopardy clue and, once again, respond correctly.
    • Press Your Luck's score displays for the contestants could only fit six characters: one for the dollar sign and five for the digits. When Michael Larson broke the $100,000 barrier in his infamous performance, the score display just showed the number without the dollar sign, i.e., "110237" instead of "$110237".
    • The Price Is Right also had a cap on the display board for the one bid games. There was only enough room for a dollar sign and 4 digits, which wasn't a problem until some contestants wanted to gain attention by making bids in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions. When the display boards were upgraded to run with more current technology, contestants that make ridiculous bids can have their bids fit on the board.
      • So far, there has actually been one serious use case of allowing five-digit bids: one of the One Bid items in a 2017 "Dream Car Week" episode was... a car!
    • Wheel of Fortune ran into this when they got a contestant who won more than $100,000 (this was when the show had returning champions). Only the last 5 digits fit on the electronic board, prompting the production team to draw a "1" on a piece of paper and hand it to Sajak so he could hold it up next to the other digits.
  • Mitten Squad has a video about Borderlands 2 Downloadable Content that increases the level cap: "Borderlands 2: Level 72 - Level Cap Increase | +11 Levels."

    Real Life 
  • Absolute zero (−273.15°C or −459.67°F) can not be achieved, as per the Third Law of Thermodynamics. Oddly, negative temperatures (measured in Kelvinnote ) are possible, but are actually the HOTTEST possible temperatures, as heat will always flow from a negative temperature system to a positive temperature system.
  • 32-bit time variables on Unix-like systems will roll over in a few decades unless they are changed to 64-bit variables. They store the current date and time as seconds since January 1, 1970 at midnight. The number of seconds will go over 2³¹-1 on January 19, 2038. Older Apple Macintosh systems store the date and time as an unsigned 32-bit integer counting the number of seconds since January 1, 1904; this will go over 2^32-1 at February 6, 2040. (Fortunately, it's relatively easily fixed for good. Moving all our time fields into 64 bit variables won't be trivial, but once we have the next rollover will happen on December 4, 292,277,026,596. For those keeping score at home, at that point the universe will be over 21 times its current age and we will probably not be using Unix anymore.)
  • On December 3, 2014, the official video of PSY's Gangnam Style on YouTube actually broke the view counter via variable overflow, as no one ever expected a single video to rack up over 2,147,483,647 views. It has since been fixed, but damn.
  • For video game designers, it's generally better for a value to cap than to roll over. So why does hardware roll over by default instead of capping? As it turns out, there is an important mathematical reason for doing this. Since there are infinitely many numbers and only finitely many values the memory on a computer can take, representing all numbers requires having multiple memory values represent the same number. By implementing addition and multiplication so that they roll over instead of capping once the space is exhausted, it causes the space to act as what is called a finite field. What's important about finite fields is that arithmetic over them acts the same as arithmetic over all the rational numbers. This means that for our memory values, the computed result is going to be a valid representation of whatever the result of the operation over the values they represented. In this way, placing a cap on arithmetic is averted, which is useful for many mathematical calculations. The main drawback of handling arithmetic in such a way though is that the order of numbers can no longer be compared, which is important for game design.

Alternative Title(s): Damage Cap, Level Cap

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