Worthless Yellow Rocks / Video Games

• In Age of Empires the Gold resource isn't entirely worthless, but you don't need it nearly as much as you need Wood and Food, or even Stone. This is especially true in the early game, where units generally take Food and buildings generally take Wood. It's also true if you have no allies and therefore can't trade resources. If there is a good amount of Gold in your territory but not much Wood (possible in some of the desert maps), you're going to think it's a worthless yellow rock. And even if you can trade it, the value goes down every time you do.
• One random detail in Among Us is that the clogged garbage chute sometimes contains a whole diamond.
• Bloodborne: Money's worthless in Yharnam. Coins, no matter their denomination, are only good as markers.
• Civilization: Beyond Earth: In previous Civ games, Gold was a major luxury that players would fight wars over. Now, Gold is just a basic resource that gives a minor bonus to culture, industry and energy. Of course, for someone living in a survival-oriented planetary colony, gold really is a worthless yellow rock that's only really useful for components in electronics.
• Zig-zagged with the in-game "news" feeds in Cookie Clicker. The Alchemy Lab is stated to work by transmuting gold into cookies. One "report" states that a defective lab was "found to turn cookies into useless gold." But another remarks that "National gold reserves dwindle as more and more of the precious mineral is turned to cookies."
• Dark Souls:
  • There are bronze, silver and gold coins that can be collected in Dark Souls, though their descriptions make it clear that they're utterly worthless, as Souls are the currency of choice in Lordran. Luckily, there's an immortal guardian who is willing to give you a fraction of their worth in souls... if only to munch on the coins.
  • Drangleic and Lothric use similar economies. In II, the room with the Twin Dragonslayers is covered in what appear to be gold coins, which cannot be interacted with in any way, for example.
• In Dead Light, Randall can pick up a $100 bill. He keeps it because it has a funny drawing over Ben Franklin in pen, saying explicitly that it's worthless.
• Diablo:
  • This goes back to the days of Diablo (1997), where particularly rare items were used as currency. Because gold could only be handled in stacks of up to 5,000, unique rings, elixirs and the like became a far more fungible currency for items priced at hundreds of thousands. (Of course, since the game was commonly hacked to death and back, there was very little real 'economy'.)
  • The player market of Diablo II:
    • Due to the in-game currency of gold being ridiculously easy to obtain, it didn't take long for any item worth buying from another player to quickly become worth more gold than it was physically possible to carry. Players started using a rare drop as a de facto currency instead.
    • What makes this even more interesting is that the rare drop item used as currency (The Stone of Jordan, or SoJ) was originally a very highly sought after ring, so much so that it was duped/hacked to hell and back, leading to a massive supply. When the item was later nerfed to counter all the hacking, it lost its intrinsic value and thus the market was full of these essentially worthless, but still hard to come by (legitimately) items. Hence their adoption as currency.
• In Don't Starve, huge gold nuggets can be found fairly readily among the other rocks in the wilderness. They do have practical use since they can be used to craft tools and other useful things, but many of the stranded characters point out that they can't spend it on anything out there, and at least one of them remarks that they can't eat it. Averted/zig-zagged by the Hamlet DLC, where there are towns with shops, gold itself is much more rare, and there are NPC's who will buy gold from you with the local currency, which you can then in turn buy other things with, including food.
• Dota 2: Lone Druid declares gold to be "minerals, nothing more" in one of his last-hitting quotes and is probably the only hero that doesn't have laughter lines when gaining money, besides heroes which don't speak any language at all. Ironically, he has double the slots to fill and because of that he is one of the most item reliant heroes in the game. Shopkeepers' views matter more and they demand gold.
• In DuckTales Remastered, the Terra-Fermian king refers to diamonds as "garbage rocks" and acts as though Scrooge is doing him a favor by taking them all away. This is likely a reference to their playing with this trope in the Scrooge McDuck story "Land Beneath The Earth".
  Terra Firmie King: Diamonds? Oh, you mean garbage rocks! We have no use for garbage rocks. They're hard and sharp, and you can't roll on them at all.
• Dwarf Fortress players consider gold mainly useful for pacifying nobles and making jewellery, goblets and so on to trade for more practical metals because it's very heavy and holds an edge poorly, making it largely useless for forging weapons and armour. And while it still generates a lot of foreign exchange, that can be a very mixed blessing, as wealthy settlements attract larger and more frequent raids by goblins and other hostiles.
  • Rarely, though, a weaponsmith in a Strange Mood can produce a golden or platinum warhammer, which is worth its weight in... well...
  • Silver, on the other hand, can be forged deliberately into weapons— but again, is only really good for warhammers, floor spikes, and other weapons that base damage on weight rather than an edge.
• Big Eater Lancelot in Eiyuu Senki: The World Conquest discovers buried pirate treasure because she was able to smell the food they buried with it. What does she do? Uncover the food and leave the rest of the treasure behind.
• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind:
  • One sidequest has you running messages between two exceptionally stupid Orcs in and around the mining town of Caldera. Your reward for your hassle? A "useless rock" — which happens to be a diamond. The orc thinks he's pretty clever conning you.
  • The Ashlanders firmly consider gold coins to be this. That doesn't mean they won't take them off your hands, however. After all, you aren't the only clueless city slicker in the world...
• In Frontier: Elite II there were some worlds that had rather unusual notions of waste. One, Cemeiss, would pay traders a small sum to remove gemstones and a rather larger one to remove precious metals from their worlds. Woe betide anyone who brought any such materials into the Cemeiss system... they'd be promptly fined for smuggling waste.
• In Escape Velocity: Nova, railgun rails and ammunition must be made of, naturally, a material with high conductivity - "something cheap, like copper or gold". One can only theorize that, somewhere in the game's universe, there exists a planet(s) with obscene amounts of the stuff. Metal even seems to have more worth, being a tradable commodity.
• EverQuest II uses gold as part of currency system (100 Copper = 1 Silver. 100 Silver = 1 gold. 100 gold = 1 platinum). However, both Copper and Gold clusters are commonly-found harvesting materials for low-level tradeskills. Not too many residents of Norrath actually find gold to be all that valuable (other than goblins, but they like anything shiny). Silver clusters, on the other hand, is an exceptionally rare high-level harvest that players will pay a lot of platinum to buy, yet nobody ever thinks about smelting down all the commonly found silver coins to use for other purposes. (But that's mostly because they technically can't.)
• Fallout Universe:
  • Throughout most of the series, bottle caps are generally used for currency, under the logic that they were incapable of being replicated and were backed up by something of actual value, similar to gold-backed banknotes; in this case, clean water, the most valuable substance in the wasteland. The exception is in Fallout 2 (which switched from the caps of the first game to generic "money"), where you stumble on an enormous heap of bottle caps, which are now worthless.
  • In Fallout 3 and beyond, the player can find stacks of pre-War Money. While they're not totally worthless, they're considered no different than any other item and possess no intrinsic value. Subsequent games allow them to be used for various purposes, and New Vegas makes them highly valuable as part of the Dead Money add-on.
  • In Fallout: New Vegas, a couple more wrinkles are added. Everyone in the game still prefers to deal with caps instead of other currency — only casino cashiers are willing to pay you in NCR dollars or Legion coins. That said, every currency can be traded for caps or vice versa at their respective exchange rate from anyone willing to barter with you, regardless of your barter skill. The NCR starts to print paper money backed by gold. Unfortunately, before the game starts the NCR gold reserves are irradiated by the Brotherhood of Steel, so they have to switch back to backing their currency on water. This massively reduces the value of the NCR dollar. The Legion mints its own money system of gold and silver coins which end up having a higher value than NCR currency or bottle caps, owing to actually being made from the metals. Alice McLafferty of the Crimson Caravan company gives you a quest to destroy a bottle cap press located in a pre-War soda factory, noting that a supply of newly pressed "counterfeit" caps will destabilize the economy. (Unfortunately, you aren't given a chance to use the press before destroying it.) In the Dead Money expansion, you can come across gold ingots - these weigh 35 pounds and are valued at 10,349 caps. This means that many items (like fully-repaired rifles and energy weapons) are worth more than their weight in gold, though this is not to say it doesn't represent a small fortune, just a very heavy one.
  • Thanks to the new equipment modding and settlement construction systems in Fallout 4, all the junk that was Shop Fodder in Fallout 3 and New Vegas has now become extremely useful material. However, your companions will still grumble about your insistence on picking up every "worthless" item you find, even after they've seen you using it to make high-tech weapons or turn a small shack into a heavily armed fortress. The sole exception to this is Piper, who instead complements you for your ability to figure out a use for all of it.
    • The Junk Jet gun (which fires junk) adds another wrinkle to the value of Pre-War Money. As in previous games, pre-war money is mostly Vendor Trash, though it can also be scrapped for a small amount of cloth. But the Junk Jet does the same damage with any item, regardless of what it is, allowing the player to make use of junk they don't want. The downside is that junk has mass, and the player can only carry so much, whereas most forms of ammunition (even bulky things like rockets) weigh nothing. Pre-War Money, however, also weighs nothing. This means you can carry as much as you want, and one of the most practical uses for it is as ammunition.
    • Since Pre-War Money can be scrapped into cloth, and cloth is required to make most furniture (especially beds), you can literally create a bed made out of money. Pre-War money is something of a subversion, though; despite the economy it traded on no longer existing, the stuff is valuable enough to warrant an exchange rate of 1 to 8 with the currency that is in common use (as for why it's still a desired commodity After the End, another game mentions that it makes for a good toilet paper).
• "To Brother Gil - Bro, I found the sword, like you told me. But there were two. One of 'em had a lame name, Something II. It was a dingy, old thing with flashy decorations, something you'd probably like. So I went with Excalipur. I'll be back after I find the Tin Armor." - note from Enkido found when the player obtains the Excalibur II, the best weapon in Final Fantasy IX.
• Green Hell: Stranded in the Amazon jungle, the main character stumbles upon an old gold mine and can pick up a sack of gold. It's of no use in the game, and the character comments on how he could have sold it online if were back in civilization.
• Grim Dawn takes place in a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting, and what's left of humanity has little use for gold. Iron bits are the currency of choice and quests or bounties frequently pay with ingredients for Item Crafting or components used in the Socketed Equipment. One side-quest has a gang of bandits forcing some villagers to salvage scrap metal for them.
• A Hat in Time: In the Nyakuza Metro DLC, whenever Hat Kid finds a Time Piece, it's taken away by The Emperess and she pays Hat Kid with a big stack of cash. Of course, Hat Kid's ship uses the Time Pieces as fuel, so it's understandable that she would rather have them. In her diary entries she expresses confusion at being given paper that "smells like cat fur". All the money you get stays in a big pile in Hat Kid's ship and she only uses it to roll around on it. Of course, none of the merchants accept any currency besides Pons, so she has no way to use the cash for anything.
• A funny variant appears in Hero of the Kingdom III, in which the miller's son asks the player for a pearl. Pearls are among the most valuable items in the game, but the kid wants to play with it, like it's a particularly shiny ball. If you collect the toys he's left strewn through the area and return them, he gives back the pearl in exchange, because he's decided that it's utterly boring.
• After completing a minor quest for a water spirit in the prologue of Icewind Dale, she gives you a "grain of sand from the lake's bottom" (a pearl that's worth a decent amount of gold at that point in the game) as a reward because she knows that surface dwellers place value on such things.
• Kingdom of Loathing:
  • The local currency is meat, as a play on the Money Spider trope. Items like the "dollar-sign bag" and "pile of gold coins" are utterly worthless and only good for selling from your inventory for a small amount of meat.
  • Diamonds in particular are said to be so common that they're essentially worthless, hence why their selling price is set a paltry 5 meat. There used to even be an adventure in Itznotyerzitz Mine in which you "feel pretty moxious for trading a bunch of worthless rocks for cold, hard meat", those rocks being various diamonds.
    • In the same mine, it's possible to convert your "worthless" chunks of diamond into useful chunks of coal. Yay!
  • There also exist "fat stacks of cash". You can wave them in front of monsters, but since the currency is meat, all it does is just confuse them. There was a period when the Penguin Mafia would accept stacks of cash in exchange for crates of Crimbo goodies, temporarily making them quite valuable.
• At the beginning of the Left 4 Dead campaign Blood Harvest, you come across a campfire full of burnt dollar bills, which aren't worth much of anything during the Zombie Apocalypse. A similar scene can be seen at the beginning of the Left 4 Dead 2 campaign Dark Carnival.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the rock-eating Gorons have no interest in gems because they taste bad. So they sell them to other races, who are willing to pay a lot of money for them for some reason the Gorons don't understand, nor do they bother to question.
  • However, in Ocarina of Time, the food shortage in Goron City became so bad that at least one of them tried to eat the Mineral MacGuffin, causing Darunia to take it away.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons, a Subrosian can be seen tossing items into a volcano because he likes the resulting explosions. These are items that Link would typically spend lots of money or go on sidequests for, like Gasha Seeds or Pieces of Heart; too bad for the player, you can't get them from him. Also, the Subrosian market sells items Link would find useful for relatively small numbers of Ore Chunks, with an implication that they don't know what some of those items are (they refer to a Piece of Heart as a "Peach Stone" and put it on the counter upside-down.)
• At one point in The Longest Journey, protagonist April Ryan can attempt to buy something in an Arcadian marketplace using her gold ring, only to be informed by the merchant that gold is worthless there—the precious metal of choice in Arcadia is iron.
• Although gold is still very rare in Minecraft, there's no monetary system. As a result, it can only be used in crafting, and, to the dismay of many, a sword made of gold is as useful as one made of wood. Gold tools mine faster than diamond, but a Gold Pickaxe still counts as though it were Wood for purposes of what it can harvest. Gold can also be used to craft a handy watch, and more importantly its conductivity makes it an essential ingredient in Booster Rails, which can speed up or slow down mine carts.
  • At the same time, the trope is averted, however; diamonds are the rarest item in the game, and can be crafted into the second strongest armor and tools available. And a record player. It's also important for making enchanting tables, as their blueprint involves not only two diamonds, but four obsidian blocks which can only be mined with a diamond or netherite pick.
  • As of recent updates, there is a currency system, but it runs on emeralds, not gold. Emeralds are still very rare and hard to obtain through mining, although easy to trade with Villagers. Gold can only be traded for emeralds with a few Villagers, and the exchange is pretty poor considering gold's rarity (especially when you can trade wheat or gravel for the same amount).
  • This finally gets averted for gold in the 1.16 update, which introduces bartering with the Nether-exclusive piglin mob. Throwing gold ingots at one distracts them from attacking the player and prompts them to toss a random item to the player. In addition, full gold armor will prevent piglins from becoming hostile.
  • As of 1.17, gold's status as the game's token Worthless Rock has been largely taken over by copper. It's almost as common as iron, generates at slightly higher elevations (so you'll likely be swimming in it until you start mining deeper)... and can only be used to make decorative copper blocks, spyglasses (which you will likely never need more than one of and which also require the much-rarer amythist to make), and fairly-useless lightning rods.
• Bizarrely zig-zagged in NieR: Automata, where gold is described as being valuable to humans, but worthless to androids. However, not only is gold a useful component of electronics in real life but even in-game it's a useful crafting ingredient in spite of its flavor text.
• Party Animals ended up developing this problem early-on with its non-monetary in-game currency, Cookies.^note Cookies are earned in-game, but can also be purchased with Nemo Bucks. They can be used to acquire the more common skins, and sometimes for IP Collab skins. Initially, the game would only give out 3,000 Cookies at any level-up beyond Level 100, with no limit. So quite a few players quickly ended up with millions and millions of Cookies...and ran out of things to spend them on. The game was later modified to limit it to two, and later three, level-ups per day beyond Level 100, and instead give out a Mystery Box each time that could yield Cookies (1,500-5,000), Nemo Bucks^note A different currency that, in addition to being earnable in-game, can also be directly purchased. (200-600), or Egg Coins^note Tokens for a Gatcha game that will yield skins, and could win super-rare Legendary skins; they can be earned, or purchased with Nemo Bucks. (1-3).
• Path of Exile: Wraeclast is such a Death World that any gold or jewelry that isn't attached to combat equipment or enchanted in some way is automatically considered dead weight and ignored, no matter how much opulent decoration you pass by through the continent's many treasure hoards. Instead, the locals barter with Scrolls Of Identification as the standard unit of currency, enchanting consumables for large bills, and anything that can be used in combat as the main stock.
• Breeding a Shiny in any of the mainline Pokémon games usually involves a great many clutches of non-Shiny Eggs before you find that elusive 1/682. If the parent is a Metal Slime such as Chansey, or just very rare like Mareanie or one of the starters, they usually end up being tossed into Wonder Trade, potentially for some lucky Trainer to receive and raise (assuming they don't get some troll's Com Mons.)
  • A similar situation can occur with the Starf Berry (at least in generations wherein Berries could be grown.) This berry raises one stat sharply when below 25% HP, and is only obtained via a winning streak of 100 at the region's respective battle facility, and as such, they're quite rare. However, much like a crop of zucchini, it's very easy to let Berry crops grow out of control, leaving you with an overabundance of Starf Berries. If you obtain something via Wonder Trade and it's holding one of these (or another event-only berry,) this is likely what happened on the owning Trainer's game.
• Late in Popful Mail, air-headed elf boy Slick is astonished when Mail mentions to him that she needs to find a set of magical orbs to prevent the Overlord from reviving. They're actually powerful artifacts, but Slick thinks of treasure in terms of gold coins and precious jewels and tells her that he wouldn't bother to pick them up if he saw them.
• The MMORPG Runescape sometimes did this, along with other self-parody. In one quest, there is a cutscene of the Trolls killing an adventurer and discarding the 'worthless' red metal he was wearing (the most expensive set of armor in the game at the time).
  • The Villagers in Tai Bwo Wannai on Karamja consider gold to be not worth much, due to how much of it there is on Karamja, but find some plants to be useful as currency. The TzHaar also find gold useless, because the volcano they live in is hot enough that it melts (curiously, the temperature seems only to make gold worthless in TzHaar city, burn paper, and make Rum vanish, and not affect anything else), so they use bits of obsidian as currency.
  • Played much more literally in the in-game world economy — gold and silver are only used in the Crafting skill, and as such, gold and silver ores and bars are worth far less than mere iron ore. Items made out of gold or silver, if they don't include gems, are generally worth even less than the ores and bars, if only because no more experience can come out of processing them.
  • Similarly, most of the tradable gemstones in the game are nearly worthless because of how common they are. They are cheap enough that they are used for making tips for enchanted crossbow bolts. Only the very rare high level gems, such as the Onyx, which is not a particiarly valuable gem in real life, are worth anything significant.
• Spec Ops: The Line has a couple of instances of this, since its setting is a devastated Dubai - formerly one of the richest cities on the planet. In one instance, rebels are smelting ammo using salvaged silver jewelry. Another shows a doll clearly made after the disaster, as it has diamond earrings for eyes and ripped silk for a dress.
• Orbs in Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage! are more or less crystallized magic spheres that, in sufficient quantity, can power interdimensional portals. NPCs find them jamming up gears, in pest burrows - just about anywhere, and their bartering value is consistent with that (a chef in Sunny Beach was planning to buy potatoes with one). To be fair, most of these characters live on primitive worlds where orbs' scientific qualities would not be apparent or useful.
• Starbound: Gold has some practical uses (it's a component of the battery due to its chemical properties, and needed to build a Pixel Compressor, among a few things), but is mostly used for decoration, such as fossil display cases. You can also use it to make gold blocks, gold platforms, and treasure piles, in case you want to live in opulence.
• Played straight for one particular character in Tales of Maj'Eyal. The transmogrification chest will apparently destroy items placed in it and turn them to gold, but the gold is actually a byproduct of turning the items into energy for the Sher'Tul Fortress. The holographic butler describes the production of gold as a flaw in the chest's design, as the Sher'Tul thought it was useless. The player never mentions that the world started using gold as a currency long ago.
• In Tales of the Drunken Paladin, Save Hobos find gold worthless and build their slum sector out of it.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • A non-canon comic reveals that the mercs have collected so much money from Gray Mann's money powered robots that they use it for everything, from chairs, to fueling a fireplace, to stuffing it in sandwiches.
  • A tie-in comic reveals that the Sniper's real father had been using Australium, an incredibly rare and priceless super-metal, as paint for his rocketships. Most of which have already exploded. The revelation sends Miss Pauling into an alcoholic episode.
• While gold or platinum, depending on the world, is still somewhat valuable in Terraria, by the time you have the means to mine Adamantine, you'll have more than you know what to do with. Gold/platinum still has some uses not just as decoration and vanity but the ore is a necessary component of Spelunker Potions. A slightly better example is silver/tungsten, which serves as nothing but Shop Fodder by the time you beat the first(!) boss as the only other use is for making the respective silver or tungsten bullets which eventually become obsolete by Hardmode as the Arms Dealer starts selling them and you have access to fancier munitions.
• Ultima:
  • In Ultima VI, if you sell the contents of a mostly useless reference book from the Lycaeum through the Xorinite wisps (an interdimensional Hive Mind Information Broker), they will genuinely assume you'll want an equal amount of information in return from the buyer, and are baffled when you accept the initial offer of a small number of valuable metals. Which is to say, all the gold your whole party can carry.
  • Ultima VIII: In the book "Gold: Valuable Commodity or Worthless Trash?", Okapi the Elder argues in favor of gold for its useful properties. The official currency is Obsidians, as metals were deemed more valuable for making crafts and weaponry than to be wasted on being currency.
• In the freeware game Vinnie's Tomb, you encounter an Old Queer Snake living on a heap of garbage who has the key to the aforementioned tomb. Understandably, the player will try offering him various items in their inventory, including an enormous diamond you find in that same heap. Waving the diamond in front of him will prompt dialogue along these lines:
  Vinnie: Will you trade me the key for this diamond?
  Snake: What are you, stupid? Diamonds are worthless! Why do you think it's in the trash?
• World of Warcraft:
  • Inverted with a silly quote for female Draenei, a member of a race of interdimensional refugees: "This planet has a tremendous supply of sandstone. The inhabitants must be wealthy beyond their dreams!"
  • Another example appears in several instances. One example would be Uldaman. At the end of the instance, the group would find a chest of one or two gear pieces that they take. However, your avatar seems to ignore the fact that there's large piles of gold right next to the chest. Perhaps the ultimate example is Utgarde Pinnacle, where the very first room is the treasury. Players have found a use for it though. If you take a detour across the piles of gold you can skip the first encounter! That said, there's a good reason for this — the gold is cursed. The skeletons tending to it are the former companions of the drunken dwarf hanging out by the entrance. So taking any of that stuff is a bad, bad idea.
  • This even applies to the main unit of currency in World of Warcraft, gold coins. As the game has aged and subsequent expansions have inflated the amount of gold in the game economy, they have become more and more plentiful, and consequently less and less valuable.
  • It's played completely straight with the gold you mine, which cannot be converted into coins except by selling it (apparently nobody thought a mint was a good idea) and has relatively few uses in crafting items, most of which aren't all that good even for appropriate-level characters.
  • The people from Sporeggar do consider the use of coins weird. If you want to buy anything from them you have to do so in shiny mushrooms called Glowcaps.
• Mentioned in ZombiU:
  The Prepper: Diamonds aren't worth shite. Bullets, that's the rare mineral now.