History Main / ShopFodder

* ''{{VideoGame/Arcanum}}'': Because MagicVersusTechnology is a core game mechanic, what counts as ShopFodder 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 ItemCrafting). 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.

** 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 made into Seafood Dinner, which gives the player [[PowerUpFood the Exquisitely Stuffed buff to all stats (plus increased life regen in Expert mode)]] for a short while.

* In ''VideoGame/{{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 [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential snatching up the jettisoned pilot and selling them into slavery.]]

* Many ''VideoGame/HarvestMoon'' 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.

* A lot of the workshop items in ''VideoGame/HarvestTown'', 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|s}} with the desired NPC would probably be at maximum level already, so there's no point wasting expensive items on them.

* In ''LightNovel/BeyondTheBoundary'', 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.

Shops throughout the realm will pay money for useless trinkets like that! Money that you can use to buy something actually ''useful'' ([[MoneyForNothing 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!

* ''VideoGame/ANNOMutationem'': All manner of junk items are explicitly only meant to be sold for [[WeWillSpendCreditsInTheFuture credits]]. At [[PortTown Harbor Town]], Ann can be allowed to catch as many [[FishingMinigame fish]] from the water. Fish can be sold for a much higher price at shops than the usual materials she picks up around area, making by for easy money.

** The various Treasures, most of which was pottery and figurines. Issun even recommends selling them, because what else would PhysicalGod Amaterasu need them for?

** Jewels exist solely to be sold in ''VideoGame/CastlevaniaHarmonyOfDissonance'', though the things are so rare you have to wonder why they bothered.
* Basically spoofed in ''VideoGame/TheGameOfTheAges'', where you ''struggle'' to sell an old life preserver you found. You eventually get a single coin for it, a coin that proves essential.
* The large refractors you find in ''VideoGame/MegaManLegends 2'' 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 PlotCoupons and were reluctant to sell them, thinking they might ultimately find some manner of machine to stick them in.

** In a normal playthrough, [[AntiFrustrationFeatures you can give Rancid Eggs to Confessor Jiji to retrieve your Shade.]] In the game's FinalDeathMode (where you cannot retrieve your Shade), Confessor Jiji is replaced by Steel Soul Jinn, who offers you money for the eggs. [[spoiler:As a consequence, Tuk (the NPC in the Royal Waterways who sells you Rancid Eggs) is dead so as not to abuse this feature for infinite money.]]

* The majority of stealables in the ''VideoGame/{{Thief}}'' games exist to be sold. The entire point of the games (at least initially) is that he 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.

** 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.[[/note]] This was eventually [[LampshadeHanging lampshaded]] with the item "[[http://www.wowhead.com/item=27442 Goldenscale Vendorfish]]," a rarely caught fish which sells for an impressive amount of money for its item level.

* ''VideoGame/StarWarsTheOldRepublic'' includes a feature in which you can have your current companion to go and sell all the items in your inventory while you continue to play.

* There is a gigantic variety of items you can loot in ''VideoGame/WildStar'', 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, [[BreadEggsMilkSquick their body parts]], and ''anyone'' [[WeBuyAnything will buy them.]]

* ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsOnline'' 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 [[VideoGameStealing stolen]] from containers and {{NPC}}s 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.

** 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 [[VideoGame/TrailsInTheSky Liberl]] and [[VideoGame/TrailsFromZero Crossbell]] games, there is no harm in doing this every now and then.
** ''VideoGame/TrailsOfColdSteel'' 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.

* ''VideoGame/QuestForGloryV'': The designers were going to let players use bows and arrows for the first time in the series, but the game was rushed to market and thus the feature had to be [[DummiedOut cut]]. The player can still find arrows on defeated enemies, but since there's no way to ever obtain a bow they ended up becoming this trope.

** Items as Nuggets, Pearls, Stardust, and Tiny 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.

** ''VideoGame/PokemonBlack2AndWhite2'' adds another item maniac who collects Mulch (items used in berry growing in ''VideoGame/PokemonDiamondAndPearl'' and ''VideoGame/PokemonXAndY'', but rendered useless in ''Pokémon Black and White''). The amount of items that are counted as shop fodder is almost absurd. With {{Disc One Nuke}}s such as Join Avenue and Pokéstar Studios, you'll have more money than you'll know what to do with.

*** ''VideoGame/Persona5'': Most of the treasure you steal from the various Palaces, include 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.

* ''VideoGame/DragonAgeII'' 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. Lampshaded in that the icon for the Junk Items category is a trash can.

* ''VideoGame/{{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.

** ''VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas'' describes sellable items handily as "vendor trash." Some items are bound to personalities and take offense at the player picking up his/her trash.

* ''VideoGame/MegaManBattleNetwork'': The battlechips you start off with, as well as many of the chips you earn early in the game, quickly become useless, filling up your pack with piles of crap chips, and you ''can't sell ANYTHING''. However, you can plunk useless or unwanted chips into Chip Traders, which cough up (hopefully) better chips. Some players actually BUY said chips just to go and pop them back into the machine again.

* Lampshaded and ultimately subverted in ''VideoGame/TheBardsTale''; 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.
* ''VideoGame/The7thSaga'' has various gems. Their advantage is that you don't lose them if you get defeated in battle (unlike gold). And yes, you [[NintendoHard will]] die in battle.

* Cells in ''VideoGame/DigitalDevilSaga''. Interestingly, you're actually ''told'' why they're valuable (the Karma Temple wants the data contained within them), and selling enough of specific types will unlock new items for sale.

* In ''Professor Layton's London Life'' comes bundled with some versions of ''VideoGame/ProfessorLaytonAndTheLastSpecter'', and pretty much 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.

* In the ''VideoGame/{{Thief}}'' games, anything you pick up and keep that isn't a weapon or used to solve a puzzle is only good for selling. In the first two games, these items are automatically sold for you between missions. In the third, you have to track down fences to sell the loot.

** Cheap and expensive copies of [[BreadEggsMilkSquick the left nut of Petrus]]: The expensive variety sells for a good chunk of gold but is useless otherwise.

* ''VideoGame/{{Elite}}'' and games like it (''{{Pirates}}'', ''VideoGame/{{X}}'', ''VideoGame/EscapeVelocity'', 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 which 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.
* In ''Frontier'' versions of ''VideoGame/{{Elite}}'' it's the same, except there are a few more exclusions (game-relevant goods): two sorts of fuel on the list and useable Chaff, plus Rubbish (what normal goods may become if the ship is hit) and Radioactives (byproduct of military drives) that usually have a negative price (you can jettison them instead, but may get punished for littering in space unless you're in a system with no functional government).

* In ''VideoGame/{{X}}'', sometimes, the guy you're shooting will ''abandon his ship'', allowing you to claim it and sell it for probably more than the cargo was worth. Not to mention [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential snatching up the jettisoned pilot and selling him into slavery.]]

* ''Website/{{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 FetchQuest 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). Even items which are useful in theory can become this in practice due to being far more common than they are helpful. All of them end up only being good for feeding to Skeiths and Grarrls (pets which can [[ExtremeOmnivore eat non-food items]]), selling/trading/giving away to [=NPCs=] or other players, or collecting. These things range from mysterious hovering cubes to coffee mugs, broken fishing poles, and even ''piles of excrement''. 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.

* ''VideoGame/StardewValley'' has several literal trash items, mostly found through fishing or rummaging through people's trash cans. However, they can be turned into useful items through recycling machines.

* ''VideoGame/{{Warframe}}'': While blueprints are immensely valuable and people will grind for hours to find the right blueprints, after you build the item the first time, there is absolutely no need to build it again, so any duplicate blueprints found are quickly sold. Special mention goes to parts for the Oberon warframe (which drop from [[EliteMook Eximus units]] you can find on any map) and the Gorgon gun (which drops from a mid-tier Grineer enemy).

* ''LightNovel/IveBeenKillingSlimesFor300YearsAndMaxedOutMyLevel'': "Monsters" in the RPGMechanicsVerse [[ItemDropMechanic drop small crystals]] upon death, which the AdventureGuild exchanges for money. The protagonist's titular LevelGrinding comes from killing low-level [[CuteSlimeMook slimes]] every day for a bit of petty cash.

* ''VideoGame/MapleStory'' has sellable items with a very appropriate name of "etc items." While some etc items are needed for [[TwentyBearAsses 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.

* ''VideoGame/EvilIslands'': Some enemies drop items instead of money, materials or items. At least each type is given a short description which explains why it is sellable and what the buyers would do with it. Rat tails, for example, apparently make for a decent beer snack, when salted.

* ''Webcomic/{{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.

** 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. This was eventually [[LampshadeHanging lampshaded]] with the item "[[http://www.wowhead.com/item=27442 Goldenscale Vendorfish]]," a rarely caught fish which sells for an impressive amount of money for its item level.

* The large refractors you find in ''VideoGame/MegaManLegends2'' 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 PlotCoupons and were reluctant to sell them, thinking they might ultimately find some manner of machine to stick them in.

* ''VideoGame/GodOfWarRagnarok'' 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.

* In ''VideoGame/XenobladeChronicles3'', 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.

* ''VideoGame/AnimalCrossing'' revolves entirely around items that can be sold. You grow it on trees, you fish it out of the river, you pick it up off the beach, you catch it in your net, you dig a fossil out of the ground and have a paleontologist clean it up, and then you sell it all. Some of this stuff -- like large fossils in good condition, 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...

* ''VideoGame/{{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.

** ''VideoGame/GuildWars2'' has areason 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".

** In a normal playthrough, Rancid Eggs are used as an AntiFrustrationFeature to retrieve your Shade without difficulty, but the same is not true of Steel Soul playthroughs. Since the services of the NPC who takes them are made useless due to Steel Soul being a FinalDeathMode, said NPC is replaced by a new one named Steel Soul Jinn, who offers you money for the eggs. [[spoiler:As a consequence, Tuk (the NPC in the Royal Waterways who sells you Rancid Eggs) is dead so as not to abuse this feature for infinite money.]]

* Your main source of income in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXII'' 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, where by selling a minimum of certain loot items in one go, you get a special purchase offer of an item, usually at a reduced cost and which would only show up at stores later on; some items, usually powerful endgame equipment like the [[InfinityPlusOneSword Tournesol]], are exclusive to the Bazaar.

** In the reboot ''VideoGame/XCOMEnemyUnknown'', some stuff you can find in [=UFOs=], like alien surgery or damaged flight computers, are only useful as 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.

* The Golden Carp in ''VideoGame/{{Terraria}}'' serves no purpose other than to be sold for an easy ten gold. The Neon Tetra serves the same purpose but doesn't sell as much, to offset the fact it can be caught in the jungle easily.

* ''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. [[GuideDangIt The game gives you no clue about this.]]
* Your main source of income in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXII'' 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, where by selling a minimum of certain loot items in one go, you get a special purchase offer of an item, usually at a reduced cost and which would only show up at stores later on; some items, usually powerful endgame equipment like the [[InfinityPlusOneSword Tournesol]] are exclusive to the Bazaar.

** Chickens, rulers, and protractors in ''VideoGame/EarthBound1994''. Luckily the game also has a "For Sale" sign which causes random people to wander up to you and [[WeBuyAnything 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, ''VideoGame/Mother3'', with the same purpose as in the game's predecessor: Selling for money.

*** 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 at a premium, which lost their functions in ''Black and White''.
** ''VideoGame/PokemonBlack2AndWhite2'' adds another item maniac who collects Mulch (items used in berry growing in ''VideoGame/PokemonDiamondAndPearl'' and ''VideoGame/PokemonXAndY'', but rendered useless in ''Pokémon Black and White''.) The amount of items that are counted as shop fodder is almost absurd. With {{Disc One Nuke}}s such as Join Avenue and Pokéstar Studios, you'll have more than enough money than you'll know what to do with.