Shop Fodder

"Some may call this junk. Me, I call them treasures."

— Every general merchant in existence, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Shop Fodder is a kind of item found mostly in RPGs, but it can appear in other genres. This item doesn't heal you or buff you, it can't be equipped, it doesn't harm the enemy when you throw it, it won't open the Sealed Cave of the Sidequest or encourage the palace guard to finally let you see the king, and it can't be combined with other items to do any of the above. In fact, having it does nothing but take up space in your inventory. You might as well throw it in the trash.

But wait a second — one man's trash is another man's treasure, and didn't the shopkeeper tell you We Buy Anything?

Shops throughout the realm will pay money for useless trinkets like that! Money that you can use to buy something actually useful (maybe). Sometimes a respectable amount, too, depending on the nature of the item. In rare cases, the Shop Fodder actually appreciates in value throughout the game!

In-setting, this is often justified by making the Fodder something that might be valuable in real life, like a jeweled ring, a bar of gold, a piece of art, or a historic artifact, but which has little or no practical use in combat or survival. It can also be justified if the game reveals what the merchants actually do with the bizarre things you sell them, which also allows for Worldbuilding — for instance, even if you can't do anything with all those weird Organ Drops, a wizard might consider them to be valuable Eye of Newt-type ingredients for his magic. In games that follow Color-Coded Item Tiers, such items are almost always in grey color (junk tier) if it's not used for generic weapons.

This is often used to avoid the Money Spider trope, and it may be used to start a rumor that it can be used for a hidden event.

Related to Better Off Sold, which refers to items that have a use other than simply being sold, but are generally sold anyway due to players having no use for them.

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Examples:

Action Adventure

• ANNO: Mutationem: All manner of junk items are explicitly only meant to be sold for credits. At Harbor Town, Ann can be allowed to catch as many fish from the water. Fish can be sold for a much higher price at shops than the usual materials she picks up around the area, making easy money.
• Brave Fencer Musashi had some fun with the concept, as you find items in dungeons but need to have them appraised before they can be used. They will always have a vague, and often misleading, description based on what Musashi thought it was when he picked it up. The Old Shield turns out to just be a frisbee and the Helmet turns out to be a bedpan (let's hope he didn't try it on), while things like the "Ugly Belt" turns out to be the L-Belt which lets him Double Jump. The "treasure" that ends up being worthless and mundane junk is only worth selling to Connors for some extra money.
• The Game of the Ages: You struggle to sell an old life preserver you found. You eventually get a single coin for it, a coin that proves essential.
• God of War Ragnarök has shattered runes. You'd be forgiven for assuming they'd be used to upgrade equipment, like every other resource, but shattered runes aren't used in any crafting or upgrade recipes. The description even says they still have energy in them, which could encourage you to hold on to them. Since a stack of 50 sells for a hefty 5,000 hacksilver, it's in your best interest to sell them to every shop you stop by. It also has a more straightforward type in the various collectible sets, which have a dedicated quick-sell button in the shop.
• Ōkami:
  • The various Treasures, most of which were pottery and figurines. Issun recommends selling them, because what else would Physical God Amaterasu need them for?
  • Most of the fish you fish up in the Fishing Minigame only exist to be sold. However, considering Ammy still eats and pees, one wonders why she can't just eat the fish.
  • If you collect all 100 Stray Beads you get the game's Infinity Plus One Weapon. In the sequel, Ōkamiden, they're the cheapest type of shop fodder you can get.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker introduces a character who accepted monster-dropped shop fodder items for rewards above simple cash. However, this was never expressly stated in the dialogue with him.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass: There's a whole line of treasure items (Goron Amber, Ruto Crown, etc.) that are nothing but shop fodder. The exact amount for each item varies from game to game and there is a way to trade these items between games to increase your profit. Treasures return in the sequel Spirit Tracks, but this time you can also trade them for ship parts.
• Mega Man Legends 2: The large refractors you find are only good for selling for some cash. Even though the description explicitly states this, many players remembered back to the first game where the large refractors were important Plot Coupons and were reluctant to sell them, thinking they might ultimately find some manner of machine to stick them in.
• Mystik Belle has countless junk items strewn about the game world, which can be disposed of in the Dumpster. Doing so with all of them yields an achievement.
• Sly Cooper: From the second game onwards, Sly can steal valuable items from enemies, which can be sold on ThiefNet for cash to purchase new skills for the trio. The third game cuts out the middleman and automatically sells the loot you get once you take it and adds its coin value to your wealth.
• Weird West: Junk items litter the West, from shoe spurns to old rags, which clutter up your inventory but can be quickly sold in bulk with one button. Strangely, most junk items sell for a dollar, no matter how useless the item is, with wine only worth a buck while a red rock is worth four bucks.

Adventure

• Fallen London: The game's economy is based around having a very large amount of different currencies that can be traded for each other at various rates. You can always sell one currency item for Echoes and pence and buy up another currency item with it, although this is at a loss — you can also exchange quantities of one currency in bulk for another, usually slightly increasing total value. That said, Rostygold, Nevercold Brass, and Relics of the Fourth City are relatively useless/abundant enough to let you simply sell them off without a weight in your mind. That said, there is one particular situation in which the term is given a whole new meaning: Certain trades in Uncertified Scrap give you extremely rare and valuable items that are, nonetheless, rather useless in terms of actual storyline or storylet usage. Which leads to conversations between stars, velvet spun from the fur of a Master of the Bazaar (read: An eldritch being that runs the local Bazaar of the Bizarre), intel on where the princes of Hell are hiding, and an entire intelligence network being sold for money because they were simply useless to you.

Collectible Card Game

• Magic: The Gathering has many Junk Rares; cards that are indeed rare but have no real competitive value. Head designer Mark Rosewater coined the phrase "rare but well done" to describe them. Their rarity means they can still be sold for a pretty penny, but they usually go to collectors looking to fill out their collection rather than competitive players seeking to actually use them.

Deckbuilding Game

• In Crop Rotation, some cards such as Chickens and Vouchers are only sold for extra money. Chickens in particular have their value increased with each upgrade done by merging them.

First-Person Shooter

• Dishonored: Shop fodder is almost everywhere, but for simplicity's sake it is instantly converted to money the moment you grab it, so you never have to explicitly sell it.
• System Shock 2 has replicators and vending machines that, among ammo and useful items, also dispense small junk objects at very low prices. You can hack one of the replicators to get a tool that can turn these pieces of junk into nanites.

Metroidvania

• Castlevania:
  • Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has an array of different jewels that you could only sell to the Librarian for cash. They're given a use in the Saturn port.
  • Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance: Jewels exist solely to be sold, though the things are so rare you have to wonder why they bothered.
• Hollow Knight:
  • The game has four different types of relics that can be sold to Lemm, each with its own price — Wanderer's Journals sell for a little, Hallownest Seals for a modest amount, King's Idols for a lot, and Arcane Eggs for a small fortune. In-universe, they're historic artifacts of strictly academic value, making them essentially useless to the Knight but very valuable to a scholar and collector like Lemm. Unlike most games, it's advisable NOT to sell them immediately, and instead hold onto them until you're actually planning on buying something — geo is lost on death, but the relics themselves aren't. Lemm will also give a lore blurb when selling some relics.
  • In a normal playthrough, you can give Rancid Eggs to Confessor Jiji to retrieve your Shade. In the game's Final Death Mode (where you cannot retrieve your Shade), Confessor Jiji is replaced by Steel Soul Jinn, who offers you money for the eggs. In the same mode, Tuk (the NPC in the Royal Waterways who sells you Rancid Eggs) is dead so you cannot abuse this feature for infinite money.

MMORPGs

• Billy vs. SNAKEMAN has "Treasure Items", most of which were initially only good for their sale price — and they all had to be assessed from their "ash-covered" state before they could be sold (thankfully, even the lowest value is always worth more than its assessment price). Some of these were initially useful for building Wasteland gear, and the rollout of PizzaWitch made a lot more of them usable for crafting, but Small Gems are still only resaleable.
• Dream of Mirror Online: If it wasn't used for a quest or for alchemy, it was most likely meant to be sold; this was the main source of income as the money you got from finishing most quests was abysmal.
• The Elder Scrolls Online has two types of sellable items. The first is the standard kind dropped by various monsters, such as hides and ectoplasm. The second kind are various valuable but useless items stolen from containers and NPCs and sold to fences. These range from portable chamberpots and children's dolls to precious artifacts, but for some reason sell for more than any other type of item does.
• Final Fantasy XIV contains several sellable items, all helpfully identified with the phrase "Exchangeable for gil" in their Flavor Text. The most obvious would be the Allagan <some-metal> Pieces typically given as alternatives alongside more material rewards the player might not need, which are literally currency once used by the local Precursors. As an oblique measure against Real Money Trade, these items retain the original 99-per-slot Cap and were not affected when patch 4.2 increased the cap to 999 for everything else.
• Forum Warz has an entire item category of shop fodder called "Useless Junk". The value of the items ranges from the marble, which sells for only 1 unit of currency, to the nude Mary Magdalene, which sells for over 5000. To avoid quest items being mistaken for useless junk, they cannot be sold. Why is it necessary to make quest items unsellable? Because otherwise you couldn't tell the difference — many of the quest items look, from the descriptions, utterly pointless...
• Kingdom of Loathing: Items like "fancy seashell necklaces" can be bought to enable one to convert non-exchangeable currencies into the Global Currency.
• Guild Wars 2 has a reason for why; every piece of trash has "Trophy" below its name, implying that when you sell something useless to an adventurer like yourself, you're giving it to a merchant to pawn off on someone as basically a dust collector or a conversations starter. On the other hand, the game admits to the nature of these items with an achievement track called "Trash Collector".
• LEGO Universe: Gems are completely worthless to players, but they can be sold to vendors. Depending on the color of the gem, you can receive anywhere from a measly 10 coins to a grand 50,000 coins by selling these gems.
• MapleStory has sellable items with a very appropriate name of "etc items." While some etc items are needed for quests, there are many others that will never be used for anything but selling. Most are pretty standard but there are a few that are really bizarre like soiled rags, a fish's thoughts, werewolf toenails, and zombie teddy bears. Notably the design of the game has evolved to phase this out as a concept, and you can tell how old an area is by if the monsters have etc drops or if they just drop currency instead.
• Ni No Kuni: Cross Worlds: Although monsters do directly drop gold and there are a number of other ways to obtain it directly, one of the most popular ways is by fighting enemies that regularly drop coins or statues of varying gold values which have no use other than to be sold. Dark Magic Crystals, which are used for providing enhancements to weapons, also sell for 10,000 gold each, making them very appealing for selling for gold if you build up a stock of them since you probably won't be using them all for enhancement due to the other requirements.
• Puzzle Pirates features Fruit (everything else is useful for, well, a trade, since tradeskills are literally half of the game).
• RuneScape: After the mining and smithing rework in 2019, monsters no longer drop melee armor and weapons that players can make. Instead, they now drop salvage items whose only use is converting them into coins with alchemy, disassembling them for invention parts, or selling them to other players.
• Tales Of Pirates has Trade Items, which can only be used for buying in one port and selling it for more money in a different port.
• World of Warcraft:
  • The game goes as far as color-coding its sellable items. If you see an item with its name in gray, you can rest assured its only purpose in the game is to be sold to vendors^note If it's a piece of equipment, you can theoretically equip and use it but its stats will be so abysmal that past level 5 you won't want it. Otherwise it will be literally impossible to do anything with it other than sell it. One example is an item "Goldenscale Vendorfish," a rarely caught fish that sells for an impressive amount of money for its item level. There is so much of this in the game that there is more than one addon for the game that allows players to almost instantly auto-sell anything with a white or grey color to a vendor (and since most players have at least one mount that has vendors on it...)
  • Some so-called shop fodder can be sold to vendors for more than even legendary weapons, though these are fairly rare items contained within the daily fishing quest grab-bag. The Beautiful Glass Eye goes for 18 gold pieces, while the Ancient Coins go for 25!
  • Mists of Pandaria simplified the sellable items somewhat as well. Now, pretty much everything that drops it only has two sellable items they can drop (different specific items depending on the type of monster), one being very common and worth a couple silver each, and the other being considerably rarer and worth several gold apiece. Examples of the latter tend to include handy flavor text explaining why the vendor has a use for the item, even though the player doesn't.
• WildStar: There is a gigantic variety of items you can loot, and given their convenient Vacuum Loot feature which sucks up all the loot in an area, you can collect the strangest of things without realizing it. These could be looted jewelry and knickknacks from your enemies, scraps of their equipment, their body parts, and anyone will buy them.

Pinball

• In Red & Ted's Road Show, the Indian Trader in Albuquerque will buy the various kitschy souvenirs Ted has collected and trade them for points.

Role-Playing Games

• The 7th Saga has various gems, which sell for the same price at which they are bought. Their advantage is that you don't lose them if you get defeated in battle (unlike gold).
• Arcanum:
  • Because Magic Versus Technology is a core game mechanic, what counts as Shop Fodder in one playthrough (e.g. chemicals and machine parts as a mage, magical gear, weapons, and armor as a technologist) can become extremely important in another (when playing as a technologist, chemicals and spare parts are used for Item Crafting). Worse, once your affinity with one or the other is too high, the other shops refuse to deal with you anymore, meaning you can only sell it to junk merchants for much lower prices.
  • And then there's the Molochean Hand, which helpfully sends assassins your way whose armor and weapons can be sold in the next town for a decent profit.
• Avadon goes so far as to have an additional bottomless pit of a bag that's shared between all of your party members (in addition to their individual bags) which is meant solely for selling. There are some things (such as dead limbs) that shopkeepers just won't buy.
• The Bard's Tale: The Bard finds several useless things in the chests and barrels he rummages through, but instead of being lugged around with him, they're automatically converted into silver to line his pockets.
• Baten Kaitos: You take pictures of monsters and sell them for money. It's the only way to make cash as the Magnuses/Magni (magic cards holding the essence of something) dropped by enemies or found elsewhere sell for a pittance. There are some exceptions like the Chump Change that eventually change to Vintage Coints and then to Styx Passage Coins that can be sold for a pretty penny or the Consolation Pay that sells for 30000. The series also features inversions of Vendor Trash: a certain magnus (Slight Debt) changes over time to the Debt with Interest, to the Snowballing Debt, and finally the Debt Hell. Attempting to sell the Debt Hell will remove 5000 money from your possession.
• Betrayal at Krondor: You could collect plenty of shop fodder, and some in its sequel, Return to Krondor. Return was perhaps notable for the fact that gems weren't shop fodder because the game actually assigned a weight value to money. Vendors would automatically convert your coinage into lighter-weight gems. The large mid-game section where you're free to explore the coastal wilderness near Krondor without any easily-accessible vendors could easily lead to serious weight problems just from all the cash you weren't able to convert to gems (not to mention all the potion-making crap both your wizards were likely carrying around).
• Brain Lord has things like Gold Coins and Silver Bullion, which have no use other than to take up space and be sold. Fortunately, they sell fairly well and you get a rather large inventory, but money isn't exactly hard to come by in the first place.
• Breath of Fire III has Antiquities that could be sold to any store for money, or to a specific store for more money. However, one of them (the Flower Jewel) is needed to get a certain master to help your party, so don't sell it.
• Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, being a roguelike-influenced game, has a lot of randomly generated, unidentified items to find throughout. Most of these have mediocre or redundant effects, but nearly all sell for a good amount of cash (much moreso than the actual, designated vendor shop fodder, which eat up valuable inventory space and give so little money they aren't even worth bothering with), so it's worth keeping them around just to pawn them off for more resources at the next shop you reach.
• Bug Fables: Dark Cherries are scattered all over the world buried underground, but cannot be eaten and exist mostly to be sold, with even the description encouraging the player to sell it with In-Universe justification that "collectors will buy them for a big price". However, it can also be used for cooking, making either a powerful bomb that can inflict random status effect, a powerful healing item that can restore the entire party's HP and TP, the best TP recovery item, and an item that can revive the entire party.
• Darkest Dungeon: Gems can be sold. This adds a layer of complexity, since your space for items is limited and you may have to choose between gems and greater rewards when finishing the quest, or supplies and a better chance of actually finishing said quest. Additionally, having the Antiquarian class in your party gives you a chance to find antiques whenever other items are found, which also serve only to be sold.
• Dark Sun games generally have either useful items or junk with "0 cp" price tag that nobody will buy. But in Shattered Lands there is one trader in Gedron, who buys and sells literal trash (broken pots, mostly) at huge prices. Unfortunately, he gets better when you save his village from evil wizard.
• Deltarune: The rare Glowshards can be sold for a decent sum of money. Their one practical use is for sparing a Rudinn, but given that Rudinns are among the most basic enemies in the game and exclusive to the first chapter, it doesn't amount to much. The value they sell for increases with each chapter passed. There's also the Dog Dollar, whose value is said to decrease each chapter (while starting at the same value as the Glowshard).
• Darkstone has a number of items collectible from the local dungeons which serve absolutely no point to the player. These include a number of weapons and jewelry pieces which, if wielded/worn by the player character, will actually harm them. Their only purpose is to be sold for extra gold.
• Divinity: Original Sin II: Some decorative items, like art and fancy dishes, have no in-game purpose but to be collected and sold by a Kleptomaniac Hero, which their in-game descriptions lampshade:
  Pitcher Flavor Text: Useless but pretty. Sell it.
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins contains plenty of sellable items. You may not want to sell off your unused gems, crafting supplies, and runes, as they can be used to give you an advantage in the final battle. But during your quest, you'll also find things like blank vellum, silk carpets, and silver chalices, none of which serve any purpose except for selling.
  • Dragon Age II automatically sorts all unusable loot into the "Junk Items" category, which can be emptied at any shop with a single click on "Sell all junk" button. You can also move useless armor and weapons to Junk to greatly simplify loot selling. The icon for the Junk Items category is even a trash can.
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition settles halfway between its two predecessors — the "junk" items still get sorted into a separate category, but so do items that are actually important, including research materials that can be turned in for damage bonuses against various enemies and in one level, items that you need to complete a sidequest.
• Dragon Quest VII: If you play the Memory game for any length of time, you will amass a gigantic collection of dung, which gives you a measly 1 gold at the shop and serves no purpose other than attracting enemies (which you really don't need help with).
• Dungeons & Dragons video games:
  • Baldur's Gate III: "Valuables" are an assortment of items that can be obtained as loot — various gemstones, bronze, silver, gold, and mithral ingots, a variety of silver table settings, paintings, incense, and assorted trinkets and curios — that serve no practical purpose whatsoever, but which traders will purchase for high prices.
  • Neverwinter Nights:
    • Certain types of creatures always drop a specific body part; fire beetles, for instance, drop fire beetle bellies. Shrubs and piles of rock typically yield fenberries and quartz crystals (though the piles of rock can hide more valuable gems). All of these sell for one gold apiece. But just when you've learned to recognize Vendor Trash in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 changes the rules... Now, there's one vendor who won't deal with you until you give her a sellable item (an 'arcane reagent') — every single time you deal with her — and you can also find out how to use some of them in Item Crafting. But you still collect so many of them that they still by and large count as trash. At the same time, certain rare items from the first chapter, worth holding on to for their use in that chapter's Item Crafting, now themselves become Vendor Trash, showing up everywhere. (But fire beetle bellies remain trash.)
    • Books. You can ransack the Pamphlet Shelf for the same dozen or so books the world over. (And the occasional magic scroll.) Once you've read the page of setting-enhancing text, they become pure Vendor Trash.
    • Gems exist solely to keep money in reserve so that when you die you don't lose too much dough. Admittedly, selling gems for money makes sense, but apart from diamonds (which are used in item crafting), they're rarely worth more than 100gp, which is a pitifully small amount of money when you get up to level 10.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall has a number of "Misc Items" with no use beyond selling. These range from "light" items such as candles, lanterns, torches to holy tomes, holy daggers, and other objects that don't appear to have any value other than for selling.
  • The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind adds hundreds of more items with uses (such as "light" items which can now be held in the off-hand to illuminate dark areas, as well as items such as scrap metal, chunks of ore, and the like which are now alchemical ingredients) but also includes plenty of shop fodder as well. Dinnerware, silverware, empty bottles, musical instruments, etc. cannot be used in any way beyond as decorations, though all are at least worth 1 gold if sold to a merchant.
  • The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: The world is filled with objects that you can pick up, add to your inventory and sell. Most of them have no in-game function except as props and shop fodder. However, some items that appear to be shop fodder can actually start a quest.
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim features shop fodder that is (probably unintentionally) more trashy than usual: a throwaway clothing item, "Gloves," which is valued at only 1 coin. Probably because it's two left gloves.^note The artist was probably in a hurry and just duplicated the object because who is going to actually look at a pair of gloves? Hopefully not the vendor!
• Etrian Odyssey: Shop fodder is your only source of income. It's also used to improve the shop's inventory: sell the required materials, and new items go on sale.
• Evil Islands: Most non-human enemies can only be looted for body parts or accessories, rather than money, materials or usable items. However, each type is given a short lore description that explains why it is sellable and what the buyers would do with it. Rat tails, for example, make for a decent beer snack, when salted; fire crystals from elementals are turned into lamps and heaters, and banshee cloaks are believed to ward off evil spirits.
• Fable and Fable III include trade items that are only good for resale, keeping an eye out for vendors that will buy them at a higher price than you paid. Examples include sacks of flour, barrels of ale or coffee, and boxes of fish — fortunately, the Hero has a Hyperspace Arsenal.
• Fallout:
  • Fallout 3 supplies vast amounts of useless to marginally useful clutter around the environment and in containers. You only get one ally to load up with unreadable books and unsmokeable cigarettes, but fortunately stacks of Pre-War Money have zero encumbrance. Most of the junk can be used as ammunition for the Rock-It Launcher.
  • Fallout: New Vegas describes sellable items handily as "vendor trash." Some items are bound to personalities who take offense at the player picking up their trash.
• Faria: Collecting jewels and selling them to the jeweler in Somusa is a good way to make money, since jewels, unlike useful items, can be sold for 90% of their regular purchase value.
• Final Fantasy XII: Your main source of income is selling "loot" dropped/poached/stolen from monsters and beasts. An enemy's entry in the bestiary frequently describes which items a monster drops and what they're used for, making the fact that they sell for decent money more plausible; you can even purchase monographs, which make enemies drop additional loot of much higher value than their usual drop tables. There's also the Bazaar system, whereby selling certain loot items (not necessarily all at once), you get a special purchase offer of an item, usually at a reduced cost and sometimes before it's available in stores. Some items, usually powerful endgame equipment like the Tournesol, are exclusive to the Bazaar.
• Fossil Fighters: Selling items is the quickest means of getting money You find "Jewel Rocks" all over the world, and clean the rocks to sell the jewels inside. However, it ends up being somewhat "normal" in that, in order to claim a Jewel Rock, you must generally win a battle first.
• Geneforge: All games have somebody who is looking for otherwise useless Shaper equipment, Shaper records or iron bars. The amount of inventory weight they take up vs. the minuscule amount of money and XP you get for retrieving them means it's really only worth it very early on.
• Gothic: You can collect certain items from dead animals like claws, fangs, talons, and skins after you learn the appropriate hunting skill. These items have no gameplay use other than sale to vendors.
• .hack//G.U. Games: End-of-dungeon chests often contain one to three tradeable items that are very valuable for trading with "other players."
• Horizon Zero Dawn and its sequel Horizon Forbidden West have a lot of loot items that are only usable for trading to merchants. In a slight twist on the trope while some items are only tradable for shards others are also required to barter for gear upgrades.
• Krater has sellable items that include pinecones, dog hairs, and very small rocks.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails:
  • If you are short on mira, you can convert some of your unneeded sepith to pay for needed gear. Considering that they are capped at 9999 in the Liberl and Crossbell games, there is no harm in doing this every now and then.
  • The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel has monsters drop crystals called sepith rather than money. Sepith can be traded for money, or used directly to acquire items and upgrades in certain shops. It also has sepith mass, which is a cruder form of sepith that can only be exchanged for money. The main purpose of the latter is so that the player can acquire money without having to exchange normal sepith, which makes it easier to save up for things that can only be bought with sepith.
• Lunar:
  • Lunar: Dragon Song: You have the option of getting experience or shop fodder from killed enemies. Said trash can either be sold directly or used in the delivery miniquests that ask you to give an NPC 20 Bear Asses.
  • Lunar: The Silver Star had tons of useless items just waiting to be sold in the original Sega CD version. The remakes cut almost all such items out.
• Master of the Monster Lair: Animal enemies will often drop pelts, while humanoid enemies will sometimes drop rare coins.
• Might and Magic: The RPG games have gems of different colours and value. They do not have any use except for selling them. In M&M VIII, there are "shop tours'" you can buy or sell Tobersk fruit, Tobersk pulp, or Tobersk Brandy from various merchants, making some profit.
• Monster Hunter:
  • While on missions you can find such rare and valuable items as shiny shells, rare bugs, monster guts, fruit, mushrooms that have sat in the stomachs of giant bugs, and living fish made out of gold (no really, read the Flavor Text). With a few exceptions, these items serve absolutely no purpose but for cash and are sold off automatically when the mission ends. These are usually referred to as Account Items. A surprising number of them are described as delicacies. The general rule of thumb is: If the Flavor Text describes the item as highly valuable especially if it's followed up by "...but of no use to a Hunter", you can safely sell it without compromising an opportunity for new equipment, assuming the game doesn't sell it for you.
  • Monster Hunter: World makes it simpler, just labeling these with "(Trade-In Item)" in yellow text and even giving an option to just sell all such items en masse. The player can also farm them intentionally by using the Bandit Mantle, a piece of equipment that makes monsters occasionally drop trade-in items when attacked. Then there's Kulve Taroth, a monster that is literally covered in gold which can be broken off and collected; appropriately enough, you fight it in a location called the Caverns of El Dorado.
• Monster Racers contains bronze, silver, and gold ingots. In fact, you're more likely to receive them as prizes and in treasure chests than you are actual money! That's probably because it's set in our world, and attempts to avert Global Currency. Of course, that still leaves the question of why the world is full of random pieces of metal just lying around...
• Mother:
  • EarthBound (1994): Chickens, rulers, and protractors. The game also has a "For Sale" sign which causes random people to wander up to you and buy your things. There's also the semi-rare Meteotite, which is dropped by some enemies and (as the description states) doesn't do anything but can be sold for a high price. And then there's the Insignificant Item... though it actually has a use.
  • The Meteotite appears in the sequel, Mother 3, with the same purpose as in the game's predecessor: selling for money.
• Octopath Traveler: A variety of trinkets and miscellaneous items can be found and stolen from NPCs that are only good for selling for money. These junk items range from a "Silver-Filled Pouch" sold for 8,000g to a "Dirty Ball of Cloth" sold for 2g.
• Opoona has several items to sell. Gems, which can sometimes be found when doing the cleaning side-missions, can be sold as-is to a shop, or to a specific NPC, whose price for Gems changes day to day. Medals can be won from the cheapest Artihella stand, and can be sold back to shops to make back money from the stand. (There's even a hidden shopkeeper hiding in Artihella who's explicitly there to perform under-the-table medal trades.) Finally, some of the Rare Random Drops the monsters have are very expensive pieces of shop fodder, with the most expensive being the Raffelesia.
• Pandora's Tower features books as pure shop fodder. Picking them up copies their contents to the archive, and then they're so useless Mavda will take them off your hands without even asking for confirmation. She'll also buy Beast Flesh from you in bulk to give your excess some value instead of letting it rot, proving that being a minor Plot Coupon and Vendor Trash aren't mutually exclusive categories.
• Path of Exile: The vendors themselves give you trash. You see, the game works on the barter system, and there is no currency. So you can sell items for scraps that eventually combine into something relatively useful like an identify scroll.
• Planescape: Torment has a lot of sellable items, mostly non-magical rings and bracelets, as well as weak weapons dropped off of opponents that you have long since outgrown, that seem to only exist to be sold to the vendors. However, while most plot items are unsellable, a couple are not and it gets very annoying to suddenly need a hammer and prybar but nobody seems to sell them. Luckily, vendors remember what items you sold them and will sell them back, assuming you can remember who you sold them to and that they're in an area you can still return to.
• Planet Alcatraz features a staggering number of clothing items that give no stat bonus whatsoever (beggar clothing, tank tops, skirts, miniskirts, etc), as well as gerbil skins, mushrooms, etc that are only good for selling to merchants.
• Pokémon
  • Nuggets, Pearls, Stardust, Star Pieces, Tiny Mushrooms, and Big Mushrooms are only good for selling in most of the series. The exceptions being that, in FireRed and LeafGreen, Mushrooms are used in Sevii by the Mushroom Maniac Move Reminder, and in Platinum you can give Star Pieces to the guy at Fuego Ironworks in exchange for shards, which can in turn be given to Move Tutors in exchange for teaching Pokémon moves.
  • Pokémon Mystery Dungeon has the "Gold Ribbons" and the "Lost Loot" for the sake of selling for money.
  • Pokémon Black and White:
    • To make up for the lack of trainer rematches, there are three collectors that will buy certain regular items for more than what you'd usually get and will also give you tremendous amounts of money for rare items you can't sell to anyone else (some of which you only get one of). Star Pieces can also be traded to a guy in Anville Town for PP Ups (but he's only there on weekends).
    • The billionaire in Undella Town will pay you a LOT of money for the Relics you find in the Abyssal Ruins, which you really can't do anything else with. He'll also buy the glass flutes, which lost their functionalities in Black and White, at a premium.
  • Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 adds another item maniac who collects Mulch (items used in berry growing in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl and Pokémon X and Y, but rendered useless in Pokémon Black and White). The amount of items that are counted as shop fodder is almost absurd. With Disc One Nukes such as Join Avenue and Pokéstar Studios, you'll have more money than you'll know what to do with.
• Professor Layton and the Last Specter: In Professor Layton's London Life bundled with some versions of the game, everything you can pick up is shop fodder. Caught fish, picked flowers, you name it — Bruno will buy literally anything you want to sell him, except for those items necessary for the completion of the main plot.
• SaGa Frontier has the gold ingots. Those can be used in the Takonomics glitch that involved the manipulation of the gold market via the shop at Koorong ^notethe price of gold goes down as you sell ingots and back up as you buy, but this calculation is (erroneously) made before any actual physical inventory changes hand. You can therefore manipulate the gold market in the shop menu such that when you actually sell your gold, you get more money back. Then you travel to Nelson, where gold ingots are always sold at a fixed price. Rinse and repeat. and then you will have all the money you'll ever need.
• Shadow Madness, a Playstation RPG, had entire barrels of useless geegaws (farming tools, toys, etc.) that would get you loads of money if sold to specific shops. The game gives you no clue about this.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army: Raidou can acquire "artifacts", such as old coins and pottery, that are only useful when you sell them to Konnou-Ya, the crotchety old owner of the store that shares his name.
  • Persona:
    • Persona 3: Coins you get by killing the game's Metal Slime are usually worth a lot of money, and some of the items dropped by bosses are only there for you to sell.
    • Persona 4: Your first visit to the only equipment shop has the owner tell you explicitly that items dropped by enemies are useless to you and should be sold to him. A nice touch for those worried about selling anything for fear of missing something later on. As an additional reason to do so, new weapons and armor become buyable if you sell certain amounts of stuff to the shop.
    • Persona 5: Most of the treasure you steal from the various Palaces, including the main Treasure each of your heists are targeting, can only be sold at the weapon shop for cash. They have no other uses and stay in a separate tab from equipment and other usable items.
  • Shin Megami Tensei IV and Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse: Relics, AKA everyday items from before the game's events, are the main source of Macca in this game. The game even sells them automatically as soon as you enter a shop. The reason for their value depends on where you sell them: in the medieval kingdom of Mikado, they are valued for being modern-day items, while in Tokyo they are pre-apocalyptic conveniences.
• Skies of Arcadia:
  • The three statues were originally used for a sidequest, but in the remake, Skies Of Arcadia Legends, this quest was taken out, and the statues became shop fodder.
  • The game features Crystal Balls, Gold Bullion, and the Zivlin Bane treasures for the sake of selling.
• South Park: The Stick of Truth: The game is littered with garbage that serves no other purpose than to be sold to vendors. Ceramic shards, broken bulbs, pieces of plastic, used syringes, cardboard tubes, pubes, goo, splinters, tap shoes, etc are only a few of the list of ridiculously useless garbage that you can pick up to sell.
• Star Ocean: The Second Story:
  • There is an example of the rarer "appreciating value" type of sellable item, in which it sells (at an incredible price) a bottle of what was translated to "Seltzer". It rapidly increases in value based on the number of squares you've moved since the beginning of the game. This appreciation happens whether or not you own the item, meaning if you want to buy it you'll have to progress far enough that your ability to make money outstrips the time you've spent playing. You can also create it using ultra-rare cooking ingredients.
  • Inverted with the item Bounced Cheque. In order to get rid of it, you had to pay a shopkeeper to take it off you.
  • No matter which of the Mutually Exclusive Party Members you recruit, you'll always find the same dungeon treasures in every playthrough. Some of these will be weapons that can only be used by characters you didn't recruit. The weapons will be useless to you, so their only value is as Shop Fodder you can sell for cash.
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic: All spike tunnelers serve no purpose in the game (unlike the sequel where they are used for cracking locks), they can be sold for credits since there is no penalty for bashing doors and locks open like there is in the sequel. Any items with no special attributes or modifiers are meant to be sold because of their uselessness.
• Tales of Phantasia: Tapestries, Ukiyo-e paintings, corals, tea cups, pieces of ebony wood, marble fragments, etc. pretty much only exists to be sold at shops for profit. The one exception are the ivory tusks that can be exchanged in a secret shop located on an island for Mahjong pieces, powerful battle items.
• TaskMaker and its sequel, The Tomb of the TaskMaker, have several sellable items, including "Poison" which does bupkis; "old empty chest" which contains nothing; and other objects which can't be used, and have to be sold or discarded.
• Tokyo Xanadu: There aren't any yen in the Eclipse, but small gemstones from the Eclipse are valuable to the Underground and serve as the main source of income.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines has some lootable items — watches, jewellery, pills, car stereos, and the like — that the player character can't use aside from selling them for cash.
• Vandal Hearts II: Heaven's Gate: The bullion (of gold), ingot, and the R (rare) metal are great to sell off, but no use whatsoever except to add weight. Even worse, there are items that don't even sell well and just add weight. Of course, there's a niche weapon with a niche skill that relies on your overall weight to damage enemies. You don't discover it until later in the game though, which means, most usually, you have sold those said items...
• Venetica features various jewelleries, golden tableware, and other assorted antiques that have no purpose except to be sold for ducats at any vendor, especially antique dealers who will buy these items at twice the sale value.
• Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader: Used in a different way than most games. As a Rogue Trader, you don't actually have to worry about individual purchases, you can automatically obtain anything at the level of your current wealth; however, to get the factions to open more options to you for purchase, you do have to manually pack up miscellaneous items as cargo and trade it to them so their opinion of you will improve.
• Wasteland 2: Items have a "junk" category, whose sole purpose is to be converted in cash.
• Weird and Unfortunate Things Are Happening has a whole slew of collectible items that only exist to be sold to the shopkeepers (mainly Erick), with “sell to a collector” appearing at the end of their descriptions. Notably, this is the only way to reliably get dollars to buy weapons and charms, as enemies only drop obols, which are instead used for other things like unlocking abilities for your party.
• The World Ends with You: Items are your only source of money, and the shop fodder is about as obvious as it gets— pins called "[number] Yen", with a design featuring that number, and no other purpose.
• Xenoblade Chronicles:
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 1 features sellable items instead of the Money Spider thing. Every enemy, whether Monster or Mechon, will drop either Weapons/Items, or various pieces of its body. Some are used for sidequests, but the majority of them exist only to be sold.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles X: The golden blatta Tyrants all drop a special item that has no purpose except to be sold for at least 10,000, most 50,000 credits apiece. These items are some of the only in the game that can't be purchased with Reward Tickets.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has Collectibles (spawned by collection points) and Treasure (acquired from salvaging). These are items that can be sold on their own, but they're often significantly more valuable when they're sold in collections (particularly the Treasures). There's an implication that the items sold in batches will be used to reconstruct lost technology, or simply form artistic objects with cultural and historical significance.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 3: The items with no purpose beyond selling are marked with an icon that looks like scales... until the main storyline gets rolling, at which point the game cuts out the middleman, and useless items are immediately auto-sold.
• Xenogears: There are many items (Gold Nugget, Eyeball, Fang, Scales) whose only purpose is to be sold.

Roguelike

• Alpha Man:
  • Many items are only good for selling, such as the slinky, the PortaPotty, the cyclotron, and the prosthetic leg.
  • Subverted with items that appear to be shop fodder, only to have useful purposes, like the Home Movie Projector that puts creatures to sleep, the Massage Unit that relieves fatigue, and the Bottle of Seltzer that is effective against fire-based creatures.
• Ancient Domains of Mystery: There are several clearly useless items, like the Scroll of Cure Blindness (to use it you must be able to read it, spot the problem?) or the si. However, there is also a Potion of Uselessness which grants the player a random artifact if thrown on Level 49 of the main dungeon. It can only be used for this. As in NetHack, shops can run out of money — however, they eventually renew.
• Castle of the Winds has a junk store specifically for the player to sell broken or cursed items, as the other stores won't take them. At least in the case of cursed items, if the player hasn't already identified them (say, by Save Scumming to find out what they are), stores will buy as if they were ordinary goods — unless the player abuses this privilege, after which those stores refuse to take unidentified items.
• Caves of Qud: A noteworthy aversion. The main currency is water, which the player needs to store in water skins and has weight in of itself. As such, any trinkets, unusable or obsolete weapons, nuggets, or other items that are literally worth more than their weight in water are better off kept, not sold, unless the player specifically needs to refill their waterskins.
• Dwarf Fortress:
  • Enemy equipment — you can't wear most of the clothing that other races drop, seeing how it's too big or narrow for your dwarves. You can use most of the weapons, but they're usually poor quality compared to what you can make locally or buy. However, depending on the material that it's made out of, traders will sometimes give you quite a bit of money for it. Metal items can also be melted down. As a result, goblin invaders were nerfed to wear leather armor, which had the perverse effect of making defending the fortress harder on metal-poor maps despite the weaker enemy armor.
  • In Adventure Mode, you can sell anything to most merchants, but different currencies are not interchangeable between different towns, so selling a bunch of stuff usually just nets you money with very limited use. But the money can still be thrown for massive damage.
  • There's also stuff you can create that exists largely to be sold to merchants: Jewellery, toys, drinking vessels, etc. Turning a few hundred of those useless quartzite rocks lying around into A Present From Boatmurdered +quartzite mugs+ can be very profitable. It does, however, become odd when vendor-trash material like golden salve or barrels of blood get brought to your fortress by vendors, especially if you then spend hundreds of dwarfbucks on useless barrels of golden salve without knowing what it's for.
• Dungeon Crawl makes sure shops don't buy anything, specifically to avert this trope; the author thinks lugging mountains of shop fodder back to the shops just isn't a fun game mechanic. The sole exception is for followers of the god Nemelex Xobeh, who accepts just about anything as a sacrifice, so in a way you're "selling" items for piety. Besides, apart from cursed and/or damaged equipment and a few malevolent pieces of jewelry, there actually isn't anything truly useless — your lvl 20 Troll Monk might not need that book of lvl 1 completely useless spells, or that potion of poison, or that +2 dagger — but for some other type of character those things might be very valuable.
• Elona: Killed monsters will sometimes drop a bone, skin, heart or bottle of blood. The only use for these is selling to merchants. However, shopkeepers have limited gold, which prevents you from abusing this too much.
• For the King:
  • Jade stones and golden nuggets are Random Drops that can't be used by player characters but have a relatively high sale price.
    Flavor Text: Surely this would fetch a fair price at the market.
  • The Prismatic Fish is a Random Drop that can only be sold or, optimally, traded for specific rare items at the Night Market.
• FTL: Faster Than Light: Once you have no room for installing the drone control system, the drone blueprints become only good for selling for scrap.
• Iter Vehemens Ad Necem
  • The game mixes shop fodder with Elemental Crafting: items made out of gold, silver, etc. are very impractical to use, but shopkeepers will buy them for a considerable price. Gemstones also count, but weapons/armor made of them are actually quite useful to have.
  • Timepieces and grandfather clocks are only good for selling.
  • Cheap and expensive copies of the left nut of Petrus: The expensive variety sells for a good chunk of gold but is useless otherwise.
• NetHack restricts things by limiting the amount of cash each storekeeper actually has to buy your junk. Once that's depleted, the value of the trash is vastly depleted and you can only get store credit. General Stores are the friends here, where you can sell all the random encounter crud — including the elf armor, the elf weapon, the elf shield, and the elf corpse. (Well, it beats eating it — sometimes...) The best type of shop fodder is gems — but you have to have magically identified which are valuable and which are just glass, otherwise the shopkeepers buy them priced as glass, and sell them priced as emeralds, amethysts, dilithium crystals or whatever...
• One Way Heroics has some slain monsters drop chipped or whole gemstones, and sometimes you'll even find Ancient Gemstones, all of which are only good for selling for money although they're thankfully weightless. They're kind of flammable though, so beware of firebreathing monsters.

Simulation Game

• Animal Crossing revolves entirely around items that can be sold. Harvest fruit from trees, catch fish from the sea or the river, gather seashells on the beach, catch bugs in your net, dig fossils out of the ground, and have a paleontologist clean them up, and then you sell it all. Some of this stuff — like large fossils in good condition, large and rare fish or insects, or gold nuggets — is genuinely valuable in and of itself. However, Tom Nook and, in later games, the Nooklings have a policy of buying anything, and a lot of the stuff you'll sell their shop consist of seashells, clumps of weeds, rusty cans, old tires, old boots, random bugs... this is at least Justified in Animal Crossing: New Horizons by how even the junk items can be used in Item Crafting (weeds, for example, can now be used to make certain types of plant-based decorative items), meaning all the forms you sell actually have use now.
• APICO: Apicola can be shipped to the Mainland for Mainlander Money, which can only be converted to Rubees by being "sold" to any shopkeeper.
• Elite and games like it (Pirates, Escape Velocity, etc...) have this as the basis of the merchant and pirate occupations. Buy low, sell high. Typically, of all goods the only one you can use is fuel, if it isn't sold separately from normal goods, and there are contraband goods that are game-influencing in that being caught with it may get you fined or fired upon. The rest differs only in prices and places where prices are high/low—or, in the case of Escape Velocity's "jünk" resources, the few places where they can be bought and sold at all.
• Fae Farm: Most of the items that can be crafted at the artisan table are worth a lot of money, but can't be used for anything.
• Freelancer has shop fodder in the form of commodities such as food, fuel, light weapons, and even oxygen and water. It's only good for freighter builds, since for everyone else it is a bloody waste of time to loot a tradeship.
• Harvest Moon: Many games traditionally have "foraged items" that respawn daily in the wilderness areas around town. Some of them can be eaten to restore health, and some can be used for cooking or crafting, but the majority of them are most useful for shipping. Especially early on, when you don't have many crops or animals to work with. Some Harvest Moon games also feature jewels and jewelry, which can sometimes be given as gifts but usually make much more when sold.
• Harvest Town: A lot of the workshop items, such as crafts, jewelry, and (surprisingly) medicine, can't be used as anything aside from filling orders and/or being sold at the Goods Stall. Some of them can be given to NPCs for extra fondness, but most of the items they like require a high Manor level to create that by the time you can start creating the items, your Relationship Value with the desired NPC would probably be at maximum level already, so there's no point wasting expensive items on them.
• Magician's Quest: Mysterious Times: Sellable items provide the general route to money. You can collect mushrooms, wild plants, and gemstones to sell them off. However, a large portion of shop fodder can also be used in incantations for magical effects, and many of the gemstones and flowers make good gifts to give to people you want to be your friends.
• Neopets has a massive number of items, many of which only exist to be sold. A lot of them don't even do anything; they aren't food, and your pet can't play with them, equip them, or read them, nor do they have any other clear function. At best, they have some situational use; for instance, an NPC may sometimes send you on a randomized Fetch Quest and ask for such an item. NPCs which ask for items have even sometimes been added partially to help combat growing garbage problems, as with Granny Hopbobbin and Atsumi, who host the Charity Corner event (during which players give away large quantities of items, which are often this kind). Some of them were intended to have a function, only for said function to be removed or never added; many others were actually intended to be this.
• Nintendogs: Your dogs can find things in the street. Except for toys and accessories, it's all pretty useless and only good for selling. Things that range from actual trash like empty juice bottles to fallen satellites and expensive vases.
• Spiritfarer: The various treasures Stella can find by diving, growing from the Odd Seed, opening treasure chests and crates, or receiving as gifts from Gustav can only be sold to Francis at a high price.
• Stardew Valley: The Treasure Chest, found extremely rarely via fishing, has no purpose other than to be sold for 5,000 gold.
• Tomodachi Life has "treasures" that you can get as prizes from winning a Mii's game or beating the boss in the Tomodachi Quest mini-game. Said treasures are completely random objects like basketballs, rocks, brooms, and so on. Miis that are in love with another Mii can be given a treasure to woo their potential partner, but beyond that, treasures only exist to be sold at the pawn shop. The rare treasures like gold bars and statue busts are worth a ton of money, which can help if you plan to send a Mii on a trip to outer space (costing $9999.99).
• X: Sometimes, the guy you're shooting will abandon their ship, allowing you to claim it and sell it for probably more than the cargo was worth. Not to mention snatching up the jettisoned pilot and selling them into slavery.

Stealth-Based Game

• Thief: The majority of stealables exist to be sold. The entire point of the games (at least initially) is that Garrett steals valuable trinkets for a living. You can't pay the rent with arrows and smoke bombs, at least not in a way that won't attract guard attention.

Survival Horror

• Resident Evil 4 has various treasures scattered around the place whose only purpose is to sell to the merchant for money, which can then be used to buy and upgrade weapons. Several treasures can be combined to form new items that are worth more than the sum of their parts, too. Luckily, they take up no inventory room and are listed separately from key items^note they even have different pickup sounds, so you know you won't regret selling them later, and the compound treasure items point out in their description that they seem to be parts of a whole.
• Dead Space has gold, ruby, and diamond superconductors, which exist solely for the sake of being sold for a hefty price.

Tabletop Game

• Dungeons & Dragons: As a rule, a lot of the miscellaneous loot found in dungeons, monster lairs, villains' holdfasts, or passersby's pockets will consist of treasure, artifacts, curios, and assorted trinkets with no intended use beyond being worth a lot of money.
  • In a pinch, anything you can convince the GM to give a value to can become shop fodder. As a wise gamer once wrote: "if all else fails, steal the doors straight out of the dungeon".
  • Tomb of Horrors: Enough players got frustrated with the Tomb's lack of treasure that they just looted the front doors to sell their precious Adamantium. 3^rd edition revised them to be enchanted steel.
  • This was lampshaded by no less than Gary Gygax himself in the 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide. Gygax pointed out that things like flasks of oil, weapons and armor belonging to human enemies, and pack animals could all be resold for decent prices, even if the enemies the players are looting didn't otherwise have a lot of cash on hand.
  • In 3^rd and later editions, this was codified in the rules for random treasure: rather than cash or items that the party can use, it could also be awarded in the form of gemstones or works of art with equivalent value.
  • Modules both old and new have all sorts of unusual things that have treasure values. These range from gemstones, jewelry, and goblets to statuettes, paintings, and vases to rare clothes and furs. Most of them aren't of any practical use to adventurers and serve as Shop Fodder to increase the amount of treasure the players acquire.
  • Zigzagged by the body parts of various monsters, such as a beholder's eyes or a dragon's teeth. Some sourcebooks note that these can be used in Item Crafting and players can either sell such items as Shop Fodder or even use the parts to make their own magic items.
• The One Ring: Under the rules for random loot in treasure hoards, adventurers have a chance to find items like gems and fancy accessories that have no mechanical effect but are worth a heap of Treasure Points in trade. They're even more valuable if traded back to their culture of origin.
• Pathfinder reconstructs this trope with treasure bizarre enough to make a small side story out of finding a buyer and arranging the sale. Items include embalming oils from a famous tomb and a legendary Gadgeteer Genius' room-sized vintage calliope (with further notes on the difficulty of getting it out in mint condition and the depreciation rate for wear and tear).

Third-Person Shooter

• Ride to Hell: Retribution has its enemies drop baggies of drugs in addition to the standard weapons and money. The drugs all have different names and prices, but they cannot be used or bought. In fact, there's only one NPC in the game you can sell the drugs to, and the prices don't fluctuate at all. Functionally, they're just a second cash pickup.
• Warframe: You can find blueprints for a Kavat Incubator segment even after crafting and installing one, after which all its duplicates might as well be extra credits.

Tower Defense

• Bloons Tower Defense 6 has the Rare Quincy Action Figure, which can be bought at Geraldo's shop. It does literally nothing when placed. The sole purpose of the figure is to be sold at a profit later on, as the action figure increases in selling value after placing it.

Turn-Based Strategy

• Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen: Several items have in their descriptions that their only use was to be sold off for money; the player could also find that different shopkeepers would offer varying amounts (or trade goods) for certain items.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Throughout the series, enemies or chests will drop gems or bullion that have no purpose except to be sold — except on a ranking run, where selling them kills your Funds score due to the exact definition of the requirement.
  • Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem: In Book II, you occasionally find Silver Axes, and never recruit anybody who can equip them. In the DS remake, you do get several axe fighters, and the Silver Axes are replaced with what they were worth in the first place: gold.

Turn-Based Tactics

• XCOM:
  • Many alien items have little or no use for the player but can be sold for big bucks. Of course, it's not hard to imagine why various civilian and military bodies would be quite interested in mind-reading devices. Alien corpses can also be sold for a pretty penny (though you do want to research your first one to unlock a tech), which leads to the question of what these people are doing with all these dead aliens...
  • X-COM: Apocalypse has several items that were originally supposed to have an in-game use, but were never implemented. One of these things is Psiclone, a narcotic implant often found by gangs and cults in the city (which can lead to X-COM raiding gangs, stealing their drugs, and selling off the take to fund their operations.)
  • In the reboot XCOM: Enemy Unknown, some stuff you can find in UFOs, like alien surgery tables or damaged flight computers, are only useful as a source of cash when you sell them. In a rare display of benevolence from the interface, the player is explicitly notified that those items have no research benefits and should be sold. Raiding the headquarters of EXALT in Enemy Within nets you a number of objects such as art pieces, historical relics, and intel that can be sold for a decent amount of cash.

Wide Open Sandbox

• Chulip: You can literally sell anything you find in the trash... and this includes piles of Poopie.
• No Man's Sky has several categories of items that have no use for the player aside from being sold for units. There are various types of slimes usually found clogging damaged machinery worth only paltry sums of units, various archaeological curios that fetch quite a sum, and commodities which can be bought cheaply in a system that produces them to be sold in another where they are in high demand.
• Spore: A big part of the Space stage is gathering spice, which only exists to be sold for absurdly high prices.
• Terraria
  • The Golden Carp serves no purpose other than to be sold for an easy ten gold.
  • In older versions, the Neon Tetra serves the same purpose but doesn't sell for as much, to offset the fact it can easily be caught in the jungle. In newer versions such as PC and console, they can be cooked into Seafood Dinner, which gives the player the Plenty Satisfied buff to all stats (including life regen) for a short while.
• Yakuza 0 and Judgment have Plates, items which are commonly found in substories or by helping victims in the streets, and which serve no other purpose than to be sold. Yakuza Kiwami has one mission where you need a plate (for a dog to drink from), but they're equally useless after that (and even then, you could just sell your gold plates anyway and buy an iron plate that's 1000 times cheaper when you need it).

Non-Gaming Examples

Anime & Manga

• Beyond the Boundary: Defeated youmu monsters turn into stones, which are taken and sold to humanoid youmu appraisers. This is how most Spirit World Warriors make a living.

Fan Works

• In the Eye of the Beholder: The Shadows leave behind quartz bits upon defeat that Lydia sells in the Velvet Room for large amounts of cash to share amongst the group, which they spend on things including but not limited to clothing enchantments for everyone from the Velvet Room (Lydia), paying for art supplies (Jacob), and spending hundreds on convention merch (Damien and Allie). It's even lampshaded that their parents don't really ask where all their extra disposable income is coming from, though Lydia does insist that they refrain from spending too much at once in the real world lest people get suspicious.

Gamebooks

• Fighting Fantasy have a few entries where you can collect items, which doesn't serve any purpose for your quest, other than something you can sell for money after the adventure is over (assuming you survive). Notably the golden statuette of a skeleton in Temple of Terror: you come across a wounded adventurer who's looking for it, and later on you do find the statuette, which the narration tells you finding it gives you a sense of satisfaction, boosting your LUCK, but otherwise doesn't contribute anything for your quest.

Literature

• 1632: In one of the stories, a mercenary captain asks his XO why there are three packets of tampons in the strongbox, beside bags of various coins. The XO calmly explains that women are paying through the nose for the things, and there aren't any more being made, so they were a better investment than keeping the silver.
• I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level: "Monsters" in the RPG Mechanics 'Verse drop small crystals upon death, which the Adventure Guild exchanges for money. The protagonist's titular Level Grinding comes from killing low-level slimes every day for a bit of petty cash.
• Shangri-La Frontier: Notably averted. During his first session playing the titular game, Sunraku collects a range of item drops from monsters before heading to town to sell them. When he offers goblin swords to a blacksmith, the NPC refuses to buy them as they're useless junk not even worth melting down for scrap.

Webcomics

• Nodwick: More often than not, the haul that the team takes back from a job (which the main character is forced to carry) has as much junk as it does actual treasure. This was taken to its logical conclusion in one story when they had so much junk that Artax decided to hold a yard sale.

Web Original

• "Video Game People Do Not Act Like Normal People" by Jeffrey C. Wells: Madeline Chesney, Savior of Arcanum routinely searches trash cans for pairs of boots, which she then sells to the nearest shopkeeper. Her companions are bewildered by this.
  Jayna Stiles: But... if they’re in good enough condition to sell... and the trash can is only about thirty feet from the shop...
  Gar the Orc: I know.

Web Video

• Critical Role: In one of the early episodes of the first campaign, the players pay in part for one of their shopping sprees at Gilmore's Glorious Goods by trading Gilmore the scales and teeth of a blue dragon they captured. The scales and teeth aren't really useful to the party, but Gilmore can use them in his own Item Crafting.
• Kilian Experience: Discussed in the review of Fallout 3 regarding the huge amount of collectible junk to be found in the game world.
  "When asked to describe Fallout 3, Bethesda said it was a game where you sneak into strangers' houses and steal stuff you can't actually use. I wanted to know if there was more to it than that, and... no. No, there is not."

Websites

• Cracked Photoplasty advertises a vendor that buys everything, specifically naming items that substitute for Money Spider in Ads for Products That Must Exist in Video Games.

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