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Instant Container

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In fiction, especially video games, whenever someone finds a substance or object that they need to carry with them, but that isn't convenient to just carry around by itself, it will often come with a suitable container to carry it in, even if such a container could not plausibly be found in those circumstances. Such materials might include water, mysterious slime, potions, a handful of berries, etc., and will appropriately be held within a jar, vial, box, pot, or plate. Often a character will pull the appropriate container out of Hammerspace, but just as often, they'll break down a wall and find a perfectly good roast chicken sitting on a plate, or magically summon a potion of healing that comes in a handy glass vial.

This happens doubly often with Item Crafting. Your character opens their crafting menu or sits down at their crafting table, is obliquely implied to have bashed some raw ingredients together, and ends up with a cake sitting on a pristine porcelain plate with a fork. Once the item is used, the flatware disappears into the void it came from. Whatever the case, the existential nature of these containers is never discussed, even if other facets of the crafting system are.

Generally, but not always, a subtrope of Hammerspace. See also Just Add Water, a factor of crafting systems in which a complex product can be synthesized by combining two items.

A subtrope of Acceptable Breaks from Reality, since having to obtain (and store if applicable) containers and the like separately would typically make things unnecessarily tedious.

Item-Drop Mechanic is a common situation that involves this.


Video Game Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Action Adventure 

    Action RPG 
  • The Elder Scrolls: Different entries handle this differently:
    • Played very straight in Oblivion. You can make potions anywhere, but you have to have alchemical equipment and ingredients with you — items which take up a substantial percentage of your inventory. You do not, however, have to have empty potion bottles with you.
    • Skyrim:
      • Downplayed in that, while there's still no such thing as an "empty potion bottle", potion-making can only be done at fixed stations called Alchemy Labs. It makes some sense that each Alchemy Lab would include a supply of empty potion bottles.
      • Skyrim plays the trope straighter with regards to making weapons using the Smithing skill. Most types of swords automatically come with matching sheaths, but the required materials never include sheath-making materials. The "Dawnguard" DLC adds the ability to make arrows and crossbow bolts, which automatically come in a matching quiver.
  • Fallout:
    • Fallout 4:
      • Breaking down "junk" items into their component parts for Item Crafting causes this. After breaking down, for instance, a Hot Plate and then checking your workshop inventory, you'll see that the screws are represented in a small, labeled cardboard box as well as the circuitry.
      • Cooking certain dishes, especially the soups and stews, also causes this. Even though only meat, plants, and water go into the dishes, they always come served in a ceramic or metal bowl.
      • Downplayed when it comes to crafting drugs at the Chemistry Station. Unlike the other crafting stations, each drug requires a junk/aid item that you're implied to be crafting into its container. For example, Jet requires plastic to make the inhaler part, Psycho requires a Stimpak, which you use for the injector part, while Fury requires the Berserk Syringe from the Syringer rifle. Exactly how the player character transforms these items into what is needed for the drug is left up to the imagination.
    • Fallout: New Vegas:
      • Gunpowder is put in a repurposed pickle jar.
      • Red Paste/Thick Red Paste is stored in a jam jar.
  • Horizon Zero Dawn, any resource you drop from your inventory will be in a large satchel that comes from nowhere, even if it originally came in its own specialized container, or is a single leaf that you had picked up moments before. This applies to inventory drops from other characters as well.
  • In No Man's Sky, the milk you can get out of wildlife comes in bottles materializing seemingly out of nowhere.
  • In Outward, most types of crafted foods are just loose in your inventory, but some come with pleasantly designed containers. Jams come in jars, teas come in small ceramic cups (or color-coded mugs if prepared with materials from the Caldera region), and particularly mushy foods are on plates. These items are individually 3d modeled, so you can watch your character shove them indelicately into their face until they disappear.
  • Pokémon Legends: Arceus: While most crafted items are depicted without outward containers, some, such as potions, manifest inside glass jars despite being made entirely out of wild herbs in the crafting menu.
  • Played straight in the Riftwar Cycle-based game Return to Krondor. To brew a potion, a character must have a) the Alchemy skill; b) a full set of alchemical equipment; c) the required specific ingredients to brew the desired potion; and d) several uninterrupted hours, such as camping overnight, in which to brew the potion. They do not, however, have to be carrying any empty potion bottles.

    Roguelike 
  • In Deepwoken, the Potion-Brewing Mechanic has you drop various ingredients into a cauldron before mixing them together and a potion is added into your inventory. The potion comes in a round-bottom flask, despite no such item being present when making the potion, or even able to be found, picked up, and stored as an item. Similarly, the flask just disappears when the potion is used.

    Simulation 
  • In the Animal Crossing series, any bugs or fish you catch outside can be placed in your house, and doing so will conveniently spawn a bug cage or fish tank to display your catch in.
  • In Oxygen Not Included, bottles for liquids and tanks for gases magically appear when a Duplicant uses a resource extractor.
  • In The Sims, a Sim who is preparing food will pull plates and similar crockery out of any nearby cupboards; if none are present, they'll use the nearest flat surface by itself. The plates have an inexhaustible supply, but have to be cleaned after the food is eaten, after which they vanish again. In a more macabre example that overlaps with Instant Gravestone, a Sim who dies while indoors or has their gravestone placed indoors will instantly transform into an urn carrying their ashes.
  • Story of Seasons :
    • Milking cows has the milk appear in metal milk cans as soon as it's harvested in every game.
    • In Story of Seasons (2014) harvesting vegetables will have a bin appear holding the produce the player picks up; the container is gone again as soon as it's placed in storage (such as the rucksack).

    Role-Playing Game 
  • Throughout the Atelier series, the icons for many liquid and gaseous materials you can obtain also show a container for it. This makes sense for items bought in stores or created through alchemy, but can get strange when you collect it in the field or from monsters, where your alchemist will appear to have an unlimited supply of bottles, glasses, and other containers to store the materials in.
  • Golden Sun (2001): Mia's house contains an Empty Bottle item, which is then used to carry the Water of Hermes (using it fully restores one character's HP and heals Tret). It can carry over into the next game, but at that point it's irreplaceable.
  • Legend of Grimrock: In the first game, brewing potions requires herbs and an empty flask, but since those flasks take up precious inventory slots, in Grimrock 2 this is streamlined to just needing the herbs.
  • In Pokémon games, Honey is always shown in a jar, but wild Combee often have Honey as a held item, and Pokémon with the ability Honey Gather have a chance of having Honey appear in their held item slot after a battle.
  • Jagged Alliance 2 has ammunition stored in magazines or clips. If you need to reload ammunition for a weapon that uses the wrong type of container (e.g. a .357 Magnum 6-round clip for the Barracuda when needing a .357 Magnum magazine for a Desert Eagle), it's presumed that characters have a spare empty container required to transfer bullets into, before reloading the weapon — which in turn means it takes slightly longer to reload said weapon.
  • Ruphand: An Apothecary's Adventure: Brill will make multiple potions across her adventure. At some point, she can mention how she's been reusing her bottles, but that doesn't fully explain how she can technically carry multiple stacks of 999 of the over 50 different types of potions she can mix. Mechanically, the lowest tier of craftables are stored in bottles and are crafted from nothing that would explain the bottles' existence:
    Tonic: 2 Common Mushrooms and 2 Aloe
    Pepperflask: 1 Ashes and 1 Jumbo Pepper.
  • Sea of Stars: Several foodstuffs come complete with jars or (in the case of pies) tin-lined crusts despite being made of one or more foodstuffs.
  • Averted in Shadows Over Loathing. Fishing Spots often give you handfuls of their respective waters, depicted as a loose globule. Items gotten from gathering skills are also loose, and the Boiling Blood gotten from throwing Haemetic Ichor down the "H*** Hole"[sic] (their censorship, not ours; and it's an ersatz crafting station that's able to Fire-enchant anything starting with the letter "H" by tossing it into Hell and somehow getting it back) is specifically noted to have been put in a bottle.

    Survival Horror 
  • In Dead Space 3, Health Kits are crafted directly from various quantities of Somatic Gel (depicted as a flat, green plastic jar of the sort hand lotion comes in), and resemble 8oz soda cans clearly made of metal, but don't require Scrap Metal to make the container from.
  • Resident Evil:
    • Played straight in most games, where herbs are ground into powder and put in either a vial or a piece of folded paper with neither mortar-and-pestle nor jar or anything in the player's inventory.
    • Subverted in Resident Evil 0 though, where only Rebecca can mix herbs and actually carries a dedicated kit for doing so as her special item, containing all the necessary jars and equipment to do it. It can even be used to mix non-herbs as well, for a couple of puzzles. Billy can't mix herbs at all.
    • Also subverted in Resident Evil 1 with the V-Jolt puzzle. Using empty jars in the room to mix the chemicals is part of the puzzle, as you actually have to mix ingredients in multiple jars to then combine to make the final chemical.
  • Subverted in Silent Hill 1, where in order to gather the spilled Aglaophotis, you need to find the Plastic Bottle in the hospital kitchen to put it in.

    Real-Time Strategy 
  • Terran vespene refineries in Star Craft parcel their products in an inexhaustible supply of 10-gallon oil drums from straight nowhere. The other two factions have the excuse that they grow (zerg extractors) or generate (protoss assimilators) a container.
  • WarCraft III: Peasants and Peons collect gold in an inexhaustable supply of Stock Money Bags that come from nowhere.

    Tower Defense 

Non-Video Game Examples:

    Literature 
  • The Camp Half-Blood Series establishes early that when a demigod kills a monster, the monster will crumble to dust—except for one body part that serves as a trophy, and may have other magical properties as well. In The Heroes of Olympus, Book 2: The Son of Neptune, Percy Jackson kills the gorgons Stheno and Euryale, and the trophy they leave behind is a portion of their blood, conveniently contained in two clay jars. Neither jar is labeled, but the heroes immediately intuit that one jar contains blood from the gorgons' left side (which is a deadly poison) and the other contains blood from the right side (which is a universal curative).
  • In the Land of Leadale: Some time after Cayna wakes up in the titular game's world, she submits a High Potion (which she didn't realize was Lost Technology at this time) to her daughter Mai-Mai's Adventurer's Academy and her daughter's husband, Lopus, asks Cayna to show a class on how it's made. However, instead of trying to make it normally (not that she actually knew how), she instead just puts the ingredients on the table, without a container, while using her Item Crafting skill, which makes the potion instantly, bottle included. Lopus then questions when the bottle appeared.

    Western Animation 
  • In Alice in Wonderland (1951), the March Hare offers Alice a cup of tea. First, he pours out material for a cup that instantly assumes the right shape, then the tea comes out, then a couple sugar cubes come out.
  • The Transformers: Soundwave is able to generate empty cubes which his fellow Decepticons then fill with an energy source (e.g., oil or energy crystals) and then compress to turn them into Energon cubes. However, in later episodes, Decepticons can be seen carrying Energon cubes even without Soundwave present.

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