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He has actually killed 25 bears so far.
"That's all? One quest? Surely you jest. Are there not bears to collect? Perhaps a rare flower that I could pick from which you will make some mildly hallucinogenic tonic which you will then drink, resulting in visions of a great apocalypse? Perhaps the local populace of mildly annoying, ill-tempered gophers are acting up and need to be brought to justice? No? Nothing?"

A type of Fetch Quest that involves going around killing enemies and collecting a certain amount of a specific item that these enemies randomly drop. They are most common in MMORPGs. The common hypothetical example involves a woodsman NPC asking the Player Character to deliver 20 sections of bear to him.

This sort of quest can draw attention to the inherent Fridge Logic of Random Drops, such as when the drop in question is a vital body part that all monster corpses should have, like a liver, feet, skin, or a head. This can make sense if the part needs to be intact for its purpose (like making armor from an animal pelt), and the body part may have been ruined during the fight. However in some cases only pristine bears will do, even when the woodsman just wants proof you killed twenty bears. That is one picky woodsman. How you kill the bear rarely affects the odds of its ass being dropped, either, so psychic or spiritual attacks are no more likely to get an intact drop than attacks that reduce the target to Ludicrous Gibs or burn it to a crisp. The opposite can also happen where the player may receive multiple random drops from a single creature, even if it makes no logical sense for the creature to carry more than one of the item.

This type of quest frequently does not fit in thematically with the other events in the game, but is easily inserted and/or arbitrarily inserted into any location the player is at (Lava Bears, Mist Bears, Greater Bears, ????bears, Sea Bears....) as long as there's a bear with the perfect ??? required to produce some kind of magic spell or... whatever. It may not make sense for the player characters to accept them, and, in the worst case, may be a form of Fake Longevity comparable to a Fetch Quest.

Frequently overlaps, either in the same quest or same area, with Mass Monster-Slaughter Sidequest. Compare Cash Gate, which requires you to collect something useful to proceed, usually money.

If a webcomic or something else parodies MMORPGs, expect to see this trope parodied every time.

Not to be confused with Cheek Copy, which could result in 20 bare asses, nor does it involve ???Shove. Not to be confused either with any fetch quest involving retrieving something from a creature that is always dropped, particularly if the creature is single and specific like a boss.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    4X 
  • In X3: Reunion: Terran Conflict, one category of missions for the corporations requires you to acquire a randomly chosen set of missiles and deliver them. About half the possible missiles are only available as random drops from destroyed ships.

    Action-Adventure 
  • ANNO: Mutationem: At Freeway 42, to repair the broken lift and rescue a merchant trapped on it, Ann must multiple collect machine parts from the nearby enemies and take to the lift's control panel to reactivate it.
  • Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia took the NPC sidequest ingredient from its predecessor, Portrait of Ruin. Unfortunately, it turned simple fetch quests into a bundle of Twenty Bear Asses. To illustrate, one villager sends you on quests to kill a certain number of creatures, culminating in her sending you to kill an optional boss in a location you might never reach. Then there's the blacksmith, who just needs a certain number of random drop metals.
  • God of War: The series, being based on Greek Mythology, has Classical Cyclops as recurring enemies in a few varieties, typically resembling hulking, neckless giants with a bulging white eye; some have horns. A common method of finishing them off is to rip their eyes out, which you can trade in for goodies.
  • Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider: you might be occasionally tasked to pick up a specific amount of certain things like mushrooms, wolf pelts, bear pelts, capibara pelts, or condor feathers, for quests or for some challenges. They are also required if you want Lara Croft to craft many gear and weapons for herself.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • The Wind Waker requires Link at one point to trade twenty Joy Pendants with a teacher to get an island which holds a Triforce map. This example isn't too bad compared to most, though, since Joy Pendants are very easy to get and you'll likely have far more than enough before you need to make the trade. Helping things even further is the fact that you can guarantee certain rare item drops by using your Grappling Hook on the right monster (Bokoblins have Joy Pendants, for instance.)
    • Twilight Princess: Link is rewarded with a bottle of Fairy Tears for collecting 20 Poe Souls. These not only refill his health completely, but they increase his attack power temporarily as well, only for 10 seconds at best.
    • Optional in Skyward Sword where collecting enemy drops allows you to upgrade your items, but isn't exactly necessary. That said, you'd think Monster Claws would be dropping every time you offed a Keese, but the drop rate seems to be completely random besides certain carried items increasing it.
    • A Link Between Worlds: Making any potion other than the red ones requires the collection of ten of a certain type of monster part per dose. Justified as said monster parts are ingredients for the potion.
    • Breath of the Wild has several NPCs sending Link on quests like this. As a bonus, sometimes after completing the initial quest, you can continue bringing more Bears to the NPC, who will buy them for a better price than the normal merchants. Special mention goes to the Great Fairies, who require loads and loads of ingredients to upgrade your clothing.

    Adventure 
  • Pops up in the Quest for Glory series. Certain special potions needed to complete the game require you to gather a list of ingredients. Some utility potions (IE, healing potions/pills) may not even be available for purchase by the player without first harvesting enough of the ingredients for it to be made. For example, the Dispel Potion in Quest for Glory I requires: green fur, faerie dust, a magic acorn, flying water, and flowers from Erana's Peace). The trick is, some of the ingredients require a bit of creativity to even figure out what it is you need: In the Quest for Glory I example, "flying water" refers to water from the nearby Flying Falls: a waterfall where the water appears to be flying when it splashes among the rocks at the base. If you've explored the game world thoroughly before this point, it's pretty obvious you need to get green fur from the Green Meep at Meep's Peep. What's less obvious is that all you have to do is ask him for some, rather than dig him out of his hole or try to fight him.
    • The more traditional type pops up, too, with the various healers, apothecaries or alchemists paying you a bounty for bringing back useful components from the local beasties. Fortunately, the drop rate is fairly realistic (all troll's have a beard, and all of the desert scorpions yield a tail. Cheetaur claws can yield as many as 10-12 claws, with the drop rate justified by some of them having been broken in combat).
    • Competing to become a Simbani warrior also requires turning in certain items, including a dinosaur horn as an entry fee, as does negotiating the bride price to claim Johari the Leopardwoman as a wife. Fortunately, these are all fairly easily to come by (dinosaurs are a relatively common spawn, you only need one, and all dinosaurs have one), and in fact some of them can be outright bought from the market in Tarna.

    First-Person Shooter 
  • Borderlands: Almost every single quest in the series is one of these (there are rare, usually storyline-related, "normal" item fetch quests). Bonus points for Zombie T.K. quests. First, 10 items, then 25, then 50, then 100, then 250. The icing on the cake? The item can be obtained only by killing the mobs with headshots.
    • Worse still, any items you pick up before you activate the quest aren't counted towards the total needed. If you don't know exactly where the quest is located, you could pick up hundreds of items for absolutely nothing.
    • The fourth add-on does this for the sole purpose of padding play time, annoying many players. Not only does it have a quest chain requiring an escalating number of parts, it has achievements that require you to collect rare drops. The rare items drop approximately once per an hour of farming, and one of the achievements requires the player to collect 15 of them. On top of that, the same enemies drop the common and rare quest items, and the common items drop even after completing that quest, meaning players have to sort through piles of useless clutter to find those rare items. The mass item grab feature helps, but what would robots be doing with pink panties and stale pizzas?
    • Borderlands 2 features a variation of this as an early-game sidequest called "Bad Hair Day", where you must collect 4 Bullymong pelts by killing them with a melee attack. Unlike others, the character(s) that sent you actually have use for the fur. Sir Hammerlock wants the Bullymong fur to "look more badass" whereas Claptrap wants the fur to make a "FUR MOHAWK, BABY! WOOHOO!" They also justify the fact that the fur only drops when you're doing the quest by making it only drop if you kill them in melee during the quest; Hammerlock explains that you need to "rip it from their hides with your bare hands" while finishing them off, which no sane person would do under ordinary circumstances (Bullymongs are enormous, aggressive gorilla-like creatures with many teeth, four forearms, and enough muscle to hurl large trucks around like Styrofoam cups). Why you can't do this after the Bullymong is dead is not explained.
  • Many of the sidequests in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. are of this type and rarely worth the reward. The body parts ones are really annoying as you have a knife yet somehow only managed to cut the foot/eye/tail off one out of ten times?
    • Not to mention that every sidequest has a time limit. Combine this with certain bear asses not being available until the player is in an area far away and there being no means of travel between areas except on foot... Definitely not worth the reward. Which was never disclosed until you received it.

    MMORPG 
  • Apart from the usual bounties, Ace Online has lots of missions that require you to get bits and pieces of the various wildlife, from eggs and pollen to "chill" organs from Sediums (presumably where the Sedium's supercooling fluids are produced) and even DNA samples. The Arlington and Bygeniou governments also like to get you to gather parts from mechanical enemies, like the Control Units, CPUs, and Black Boxes of various Scouts and Shrine/Phillon enemy craft.
    • Somewhat logically, most of these mobs drop them almost on a one-kill, one-drop probability, since it is part of their own body. The one mission where the probability is low actually makes sense, as the item is a foreign object eaten by any one of the mobs currently in the area, and hence must be searched through trial and error. The completed mission log that serves as the pilot's diary actually even lampshades the fact on why he/she is forced to hunt down wildlife and take their bounty back like a common hunter.
  • AdventureQuest Worlds has a trillion of these. On a quest? Good for you. Want to progress to the next screen to continue the story? Not until you give me 15 sabre-tooth tiger fangs. Oh, and did I mention that some sabre-toothed tigers don't have fangs? This gets especially bad, as some quests, like those from Dage the Evil, can require you to gather up to 50 of a given item, and you usually have to get 2 or 3 different items per quest. It gets even worse when you realise that logging off forces you to start all over again.
  • Several of the early solo quests in Age of Conan revolve around this sort of thing, usually with a dialog tree attached to the NPC.
  • Animal Jam has a few seasonal adventures that run on this trope. In particular, Bitter Sweets requires the player to collect a certain amount of candy for a mysterious entity, which can be found on the ground and harvested by defeating proto-phantoms. They only drop one candy each, though, and the player has to collect 1,000 in order to be truly done with the mission.
  • Blade & Soul: The main quest mixes it up in places, but the side content is noted for being fairly bad about leaning heavily on this. It's alleviated a little by a few interesting bosses being mixed in there, along with the fact that once you hit 20+, you'll be able to mow through individual bears in a second or so.
  • Champions Online has this, in spades. One particularly onerous mission requires you collect a deck of tarot cards (randomly dropped by enemies) — one card at a time.. That's 78 Bear Asses, if you're counting.
  • Nearly all the quests in Dungeon Fighter Online are like this. Memorable ones include collecting severed goblin hands for a woman's beauty makeover, baby dragon hearts to trade for champagne, and about thirty copies of the same ghost's soul.
  • Elsword has these as well. Fortunately, the plot-required ones will always drop once you kill the enemy and can usually be completed in just one or two dungeon runs.
  • While the standard missions in EVE Online avoid it (mostly), the less common "COSMOS" missions play it straight, requiring you to gather x number of the local space bear ass variant.
  • Final Fantasy XI has a number of these as introductory-level quests; most are repeatable. These are generally used as fame-grinding fodder in order to unlock the good and useful quests.
    • Quests in FFXI do not give experience points, and thus are typically have a purpose outside of "do this to progress your character."
    • A truly soul-killing quest requires giving an NPC 10,000 of a particular kind of fish... and it is only possible to catch 200 fish per Earth day. Your reward? The second best fishing rod in the game - and a certificate telling you to go do something more useful with your time. (It's not all bad; selling this one kind of fish is a staple source of income for many newbies, which spreads the pain around... a little.)
    • One particularly annoying example can be found in the quest "Truth, Justice, and the Onion Way!". Obtain a Rarab Tail, seems simple enough. Kill a few hundred of the local Rarabs and yet no drop? Turns out it is the local name for a type of pea and drops from Bees...
    • Final Fantasy XIV has these kinds of quests, and unlike XI, are worth EXP. Unlike most games however, the items asked for are not the usual random drops from those creaturesnote , and are gained automatically. So when a quest says "I need 6 bear asses" it means "Go kill 6 bears and come back" as there's zero chance of not receiving the item. Even if your inventory is full as it's added to the key items page. Guild Leves however do have a chance for items not to drop, to both make them harder and to make it possible to fail to gather them within the time limit.
  • Also done in Flyff. You have to collect certain amounts of quest items from mobs for quests. Fortunately, you can collect these before getting the quest, and common practice is to do just that, then turn them in when you get the quest for free Exp. They don't drop all the time, however, and the number of them you're told to collect increases at higher levels.
    • The problem is as you go further into the game, the number of these items required, as well as their drop rate, becomes so ridiculous, that by the time you hit the level 50ish range, farming for these quest items 3 levels below when you actually get the quest still will not get you the number you need. It may not seem bad at first, until you realize by level 50 you're getting fractions of experience points. From multiple monsters. Seriously, this game wants you to have nightmares about these sorts of quests by level 30.
    • To make things worse, the game's economy is notoriously messed up, so purchasing surpluses from other players is not usually an option. A quest item from an enemy type whose "small" monster is level n is typically sold by players at the price of 1000(n+3) penya (the in-game currency) apiece. To put this in context, you don't earn more than 100 penya per monster kill at level 50.
  • Guild Wars generally avoids this, but has a few such quests. These quests are about 50/50 on whether the item is randomly dropped or drops from every appropriate enemy. Aside from actual side quests, there are collectors, who often give quite good equipment (comparable to that sold by the local weaponsmith) if you bring them Twenty Bear Asses.
  • An innkeeper in Herokon Online makes you hunt for bear ham. You have to collect exactly 20 from a special type of bear which is mentioned to have "exceptionally large buttocks" in the in-game description.
  • The Bounty Hunter Hunter in Kingdom of Loathing gives out this sort of quest, exchanging a certain number of enemy parts for "Filthy Lucre", which is then traded for gear to help you get better random items from monsters. This is made tolerable by the fact that once you take up a quest, said monster will ALWAYS drop the part in question until you have enough... but then again, being a browser-based game, the enemies THEMSELVES are partially subject to Randomly Drops and the Random Number God. You'll be assigned enough monsters that you should be able, on average, to meet the quota in 40 adventures, but there's no guarantee.
    • But significantly less tolerable is the fact that, if you want everything from the Bounty Hunter Hunter, you need 345 Lucre. And you can only get three Lucre a day. That means if you want everything from him, you need to grind every day for several months.
    • There's a couple other quests/sub-quests that follow this template: Doc Galaktik's Quest for Herbs, in which you have to defeat three particular types of enemy and get them to drop a herb (which can get rather frustrating because, depending on when you do the quest, the chance of that enemy appearing can be quite low and they don't always drop their herb in the first place) and part of John the Trapper's quest, in which you have to bring back three hunks of goat cheese and three hunks of a random type of ore before he can fix the ski lift to the higher parts of Mount McLargeHuge
    • Also seen in some of the side-quests in the Level 12 Quest:
      • The Sonofa Beach quest, where you must kill 5 Lobsterfrogmen. Made especially annoying by the fact that lobsterfrogmen show up very rarely, and while Encounter Bait exists in this game, you're unlikely to have much on account of Encounter Repellant being so much more useful in the rest of the game. But at least they drop their Plot Coupons 100% of the time. If they don't kill you, that is; and there's a good chance they will kill you, since you're likely to have had most of your HP pounded out of you automatically by a non-combat event in the same zone.
      • The filthworm quest is a variation, where you have to find the "stench gland" from each type of filthworm and then use the pheromones from it to infiltrate the next group. Extreme frustration ensues when you fail to get that last gland in time and have to start over.
      • Probably the purest example from the level 12 sidequests is the dirty thieving brigands from the Themthar Hills. Although even then you're not taking Plot Coupons, you're taking currency that was stolen from the Sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Indecision. Fortunately, it's relatively easy to boost your meat drops to speed up the quest.
    • There's also the Seal Clubber nemesis quest, which at one point requires you to harvest body parts from mother hellseals so an NPC can make a suit that lets you infiltrate the nearby fortress. A given mother hellseal will always drop one of the required body parts, but in a rare bit of justification for the "intact bear asses" clause, if you inflict any form of damage on them that isn't a regular attack or Seal Clubber weapon skill while wielding a club, you'll get a smashed/torn/destroyed form of the body part instead, which is useless.
    • The Disco Bandit nemesis quest requires you to collect rave costume items, which the player can get by performing a specific randomized chain of dance moves on ravers. Why you simply cannot loot the items from their corpses is unknown, though the Rule of Cool may apply.
    • The game also makes fun of this. The level 2 quest starts with the barkeep telling you that the Tavern Cellar is being overrun with rats. You ask how many rats you have to kill, and he reprimands you for thinking that you can stop the infestation simply by killing some; you have to stop them at the source, the faucet with the rat tap.
    • One of the more seemingly-endless ones is the Gourd quest, where you have to collect 5 of a certain monster-drop-only item. Then you have to get 6 more of them. Then 7, then 8, then 9...all the way up to 25. All the repetitive subquests put together, that's as many as 315 items. Thankfully, this is an optional sidequest.
  • A somewhat ridiculous example in Lineage 2 is hunting spiders for their legs. The man needs eight legs for something or another. Apparently, the giant spiders you kill only have one leg apiece and are not keen to drop it. Yet somehow they outrun you.
  • The Lord of the Rings Online mixes this up with 'kill X of Y creature'. Often scenarios arise where bears will have multiple asses, commonly a standard one for crafting or selling, one that drops exclusively for the quest, and, if you're really lucky, an intact bear corpse. It gets even crazier if you start stacking quests. With the right quests, with the right luck, and in the right location, that bear can drop a Medium Hide (crafting item), a Matted Fur/Matted Hide (task item), a Bear Pelt (quest item), a Piece of Bear Meat (another quest item), and yet, you still have a Pristine Bear Corpse to give to the taxidermist!
  • Mabinogi has a large number of these, with the requisite random drop rate. The vast majority are optional; and are typically used as a way to gain a bit of extra money/experience/useful items that aren't available any other way. The few that are mandatory are mostly "gathering" quests with 100% drop rates; and are part of the newbie quest chain.
  • MapleStory takes this to disgustingly excessive extents, having quests that reach in the 1000s. Some quests ask you to fetch, for example, 200 of some item. Then 300 of the same. Then 400. Then 500. Then 800. Then 1000. Then 2000. And then you get a novelty reward that's not all that useful.
    • There are multiple quests to kill 999 of the same kind of monster (often or always following on the heels of a 'kill 100' version), and the medic in Omega Sector wants 1500 mateon tentacles (which, fitting the trope, don't drop from every killed mateon), but wants them in quantities like outlined above, and for a reward identical to several other, less time-consuming quests, at that.
      • There are plenty of items that don't drop at all unless you have the appropriate quest.
      • Each slot in your limited space inventory only holds 200 pieces, forcing you to clear a lot of space for useless junk.
    • Maple Story has responded to the incredible complaints with the Big Bang patch, lowering the amount of these vastly, and the ones that remain are at a fraction of the amounts they used to be.
  • A number of the Swift Solutions quests in Ni No Kuni: Cross Worlds are of this type, with the game requiring you to repeatedly battle monsters of a certain type until you've collected enough of a particular item.
  • Perfect World varies in the use of this trope. There are quests like "kill 30 Argenweave Mantises", but there are also ones like "Get 35 Backstabbing Scorpion Tails" - WHICH ISN'T A 100% DROP FROM BACKSTABBING SCORPIONS. On the good side, most of the immensely-rare-item one-drop quests involve something like a document, a magic item, or something else that the Wraiths would bother stealing. In one memorable example, you have to kill a certain type of lynx over and over and over to get a TEDDY BEAR that some girl is too lazy to get herself. One-drop items from bosses, though, are 100%.
  • Phantasy Star Online 2 has several quests like this. Lola asks you for 1 Gwanahda Jaw & 2 Caterdraan Scales to make a health-boosting drink available, Franka asks you to collect Rockbear Arm Meat, and for some reason, Lisa wants 8 Damaged Darker Cores to prove you're worthy of the Gunner class. Many, many more examples of this exist, often crossing over with Organ Drop.
  • Ragnarok Online. Look forward to spending a week or more searching for the amount of Bear Asses needed just to make or upgrade your nice hat, as almost all of the drops in this game are not guaranteed, and usually tends to have less than 70% drop rate. And the game has tons of headgears only obtainable via item hunting quests.....
    • A few even makes you wonder why are the items even needed to make the hat, especially in the huge quantity required. Examples are Cowboy Hat which requires 108 Claws of Desert Wolf, Cross Hat which requires 500 Destroyed Armors, Striped Hairband which requires 1500 Worn-Out Prison Uniforms, and one of the most absurd ingredients: 300 Black Cat Dolls, which is required to make Drooping Cat, a headgear that looks like a single Black Cat Doll placed above your head.
  • RF Online consists entirely of these, one per level. If it wasn't enough to boost you to the next level (and it rapidly stops being so)...too bad.
    • One such quest in the Bellato line is particularly jarring. A Standard quest for introducing newbies to Sette Desert is to go there and kill 10 Ace Bulky Lunkers. Problem is, the Bellato have Ace Bulky Lunkers in their HQ. However, the quest only counts Ace Bulky Lunkers killed in Sette, despite the fact that the HQ version is identical in every way (down to the drops).
  • The "Understanding M.Kill" quest, one of your very first quests in R.O.H.A.N. Online has you collecting pairs of front paws off the Vargs and Greymane Vargs around the bindstone. And that's just the start — you'll be asked to collect fangs off Fanged Hellhounds, Animal Hides off Slavering Vargs, branches off Drys Ancients, Tough Black Hides off Lycans, and various others, in addition to your standard "Kill X (monster)s then return to me" quests.
  • RuneScape as a whole manages to avert this, as most of the quests don't involve this kind of thing.
    • Probably the one example that stands out the most is the Imp Catcher quest. The wizard Mizgog needs his four beads, and they are only dropped by the imps you see wandering around the country. The chance that an imp will drop a bead of a specific color is 1 in 25, meaning you have to kill on average a hundred imps to get all four. Alternatively, you could skip the killing and buy the beads off the Grand Exchange for a heavily inflated price.
    • The Rag and Bone Man Quest is more in this trope's vein as you have to hunt down a variety of monsters for a specific bone part. The second part of the two-part sequel to Rag and Bone Man fits this trope best — the drops aren't 100% and SHOULD BE (dragon tailbone? Not 100% from a DRAGON?)
    • This trope IS the method of training the Slayer skill — you go to a slayer master and they tell you to kill X of Y. While you whittle down said X, you gain slayer XP. It's not quite as dull as it sounds (really depends on the task, though), and the new creatures you unlock are good ways to make money.
    • When crafting hunter gear, one needs the corresponding pelts of certain creatures. Each said creature will drop a pelt, though infrequently will 'perfect' furs dropped, which can be crafted into hats (while common 'tattered' ones can be made only into tops and legs).
  • In Runes of Magic, every "daily quest" (as in, ones you can do over and over if you like) requires a number of body parts — generally five, eight, or ten. They can drop even if you're not actively on the daily. Sadly, normal quest drops don't.
  • In Shin Megami Tensei IMAGINE Online, there is one quest (one of the few that can be repeated) where you have to go out and collect twenty Empty Cans: Oolong Tea. This actually isn't that bad, but it can only be gotten by "connecting" with White Plasma in the first area. (they make up for it by giving you two at a time)
    • Soul Shards are another such difficult quest, Only Kodamas drop them in Suginami tunnels and they appear in very few numbers.
      • The game allows for people to set up shops easily, and finding items required for quests at such shops is quite easy. The prices are often not worth it, however.
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic:
    • Generally averted; while most missions have a "kill 'x' creatures" bonus objective, it's entirely optional and counts each kill rather than depending on a random drop. However, there are some missions that have the primary objective of collecting Plot Coupons that are generated as random drops from a particular type of enemy. They generally have a very high drop rate, thankfully (assuming you're in the right area and killing the right mobs), and the plot coupons never drop when you don't have that mission. (These items are put in a separate inventory section set aside for plot coupons.)
    • Parodied in one Imperial quest, where you bring the Plot Coupons to the bounty office, and the official there complains about what an idiot you are to bring the entire stinking hides.
  • Tabula Rasa had plenty of these, often upwards of several hundred zombie asses, but thankfully every one of those zombies had an ass. However, you still couldn't collect them until you got the appropriate mission.
  • A Tale In The Desert has some rather horrifying ones, usually involving crafted goods. Mitigated by being community efforts to unlock. Beer brewing needs: 20,000 raw barley, 20,000 raw malt, 50,000 honey. Mass production of paint needs 500 jars each of Red, Green, Blue, Pink, Orange, Indigo, and Yellow (made one at a time, in hand crafted jars, with each player requiring a different formula to make a given color.)
  • Tibia averted this trope for nearly a decade. That was until World of Warcraft became popular — then the developers implemented quests to turn fifty bear asses into fur hats for your character. Sure, the NPCs do make something for you out of them, but it still does not explain why you're lucky to find a single feather on a chicken or why only one out of hundred wolves have paws.
  • While Warhammer Online does have its share of this type of quest, the requested item always has a 100% chance to drop throughout the game. And they are automatically picked up, making it more "Kill x Elves" rather than "Collect x Elf Scrotums". However, they often have to be a very specifically named mob — "Hammerstriker Doombeard" dwarves not having eyeballs, whereas "Hammerstriker Doomaxe" dwarves do.
    • Before the game's release Word of God stated that the 100% drop rate was intentional; to avoid the painful stupidity of a bear not having an ass, or somehow being unable to part with it when dead.
  • World of Warcraft is notorious for this, but it actually varies in its consistency. Some are completely illogical, with no small number of quests demanding feathers from birds, or teeth from beasts, or just chunks of meat; you always have to kill several creatures to get the amount you need even though just one should logically suffice. Others cut the player some much-needed slack, where the item is always dropped while you are on the quest, and others where multiples of an item are sometimes dropped at once. Still others attempt to justify it, by requiring the collected items to be of a certain quality (pristine feathers, for example).
    • Probably the most famous example of this is the quest in Vanilla/Classic "The Zhevra". Zhevra are basically Zebra with horns. The quest giver wants 4 hooves. You'd imagine that's exactly one Zhevra. You'd be wrong. Hooves have a drop rate of 45% and 15% across the two main types of Zhevra. As this is a low level quest located in the start area of Horde players, the quest rapidly became infamous and a running joke for all the hoof-less Zhevra apparently running around.
    • The "Thelsamar Blood Sausages" quest actually does send you out to collect Bear Rumps. You need eight of them, though, not twenty, and needing them for a recipe makes some sort of sense even if the recipe doesn't. This may or may not be an Ascended Meme.
    • Special attention needs to be brought to the item crafting portion of the game, which frequently requires this sort of action en masse. The Heavy Clefthoof armor set, for instance, required leatherworkers to skin 94 Thick Clefthoof Leather hides... which had a drop rate between 8%-30%. This means you had to kill, on average, between 313 and 1175 Clefthoofs. Considering there were rarely more than 50 or so in the game at any given time, this is tantamount to extinction-level genocide. The kicker: the set was aimed at druids, which are supposed to be in harmony with nature.
    • If anything is ridiculous from sheer bag-filling potential, it's making a Reborn weapon, They take 30 Lightning Steel Ingots, Living Steel Bars, and 18 Spirits of Harmony. This takes 84 stacks of Ghost Iron and 180 of Motes of Harmony. The starting backpack you have is only 16 stacks. Fortunately, the most recent expansion lets you stack reagents up to 200, probably because of this kind of situation.
    • Even more blatant than goretusk boars with no livers: animals without hides. It seems that the wolf which you just killed lacks a pelt. The pelt you can see it wearing RIGHT THERE. Parodied in this Dark Legacy comic: "5. Gather 10 bear meats. ... You know, if you had mentioned that you were some kind of magical meatless bear, you could have saved us both the trouble!"
    • One of the worst examples of this comes from the Demoniac Vessel quest in Blasted Lands. You have to collect, among other things, two Screecher brains to create the demoniac vessel. Even with the normally bad drop rates this shouldn't require killing more than a handful of Screechers, right? Think again. Unless you have extremely good luck, be prepared to kill upwards of twenty to get the two brains you need. Oh, and let's not forget that this quest is for both Horde and Alliance characters. So, you have even more competition on top of the ridiculous drop rate.
    • And of course, Johnny Awesome asks a quest giver (you), when you only give him one quest, for more. His subsequent rant is the page quote at the top of this page.
    • The Cataclysm expansion (that also added Johnny Awesome) started poking fun at itself. When you are tasked with gathering 10 kobold ears, only one drops from them. The flavour text? "Taking both would be cheating."
    • Even back in Burning Crusade they would occasionally lampshade it. One repeatable quest in Netherstorm has the player attempt to collect insignia from certain rogue Ethereals. The questgiver warns you that some of the Ethereals might not have insignia. The flavor text for the insignia when you do collect one is along the lines of "Sure enough, not everyone is carrying one. Cowards!"
    • Prior to the Cataclysm expansion reworking the eastern kingdoms, Hillsbrad Foothills offered a Horde quest where aspiring Horde players were asked by a Tarren Mill quest giver to collect skulls from alliance settlers from a nearby town. Only one in every three farmers actually had a skull. An Alliance equivalent to this was a Southshore quest to kill nearby murlocs and gather their heads. The vast majority of those murlocs did not have heads, apparently.
    • The Legion expansion quest "Shard Times" asks you to gather a whopping two thousand five hundred Nethershards. Thankfully, you can get as many as ten at a time from regular enemies and two hundred from rare enemies, but still. After you turn in the quest, the quest-giver admits he got carried away and lets you keep all but one of the Nethershards, which are desirable outside the quest as they can be used for other purposes.
    • At some point, Blizzard thankfully added an Anti-Frustration Feature for this sort of quest. If the quest item was not guaranteed to drop, the probability of a drop would increase each time it didn't drop for a particular player, going back to the base drop rate once a drop did occur.
  • Early in Wynncraft's history, many of its quests were like this, but later had this trope adapted out of them.
    • The Slaying Post Mini-Quests play this straight. They task the player with gathering a few drops of nearby mobs in exchange for some easy Experience Points. And that's it, there's no flimsy Fetch Quest story attached to them.
  • Happens in zOMG!... a lot. One of the most annoying examples is the first Otami Ruins quest, during which you must collect 1 specific drop from each of the 4 enemies that patrol the area, in a specific order. Since all loot is randomly distributed, this means that crews cannot distribute the vital piece of loot to a player who needs it. As for the totems themselves, the only one that is justifiable is the mace head found in one of the Bladed Vases. The others are things you'd expect to find on every single enemy. This is especially true with the Jewel Eyes, since the enemy that drops them is a Boss in Mook Clothing, and is using the jewel eye you need to shoot Eye Beams at you. Drop Rate tweaks have made these quests more tolerable, but they can still be annoying at times.
    • Furthermore, item drop rates are influenced by your level relative to that of the target. The forum gets a lot of threads from players wondering why they can't get any Gramster Goo, when it's because their level is already too high before they attempted the quest. Fortunately, you are able to suppress your level at will — also imperative in the case of repeatable quests that have a level cap.
    • Some of the repeatable quests also invoke this trope, such as a quest to gather spear points from the Tiny Terrors in the Otami Ruins. You have the option of asking the girl why she wants so many spear points: she wants to sell them as souvenirs at the pirate-themed amusement park. Your character lampshades the absurdity of this, as well.

    Platform Game 
  • Various NPCs in Gravity Falls: Legend of the Gnome Gemulets want Dipper and Mabel to go and find several of some item that they lost one way or other. Somehow, Wendy's father throwing her cassette tapes out the window on a road trip caused them to be scattered throughout caves, forests and abandoned mines. If the items are found and given to the character, they'll reveal a secret.note 
  • Parodied in the web game Lucky Tower 2, where a mapmaker (who calls himself a "communist" and will therefore not accept cash for his maps) asks you to collect 15 goblin ears for his soup. Soon after the player accepts the quest, the game will spawn a goblin with 15 ears.
  • Most of Team Chaotix's missions in Sonic Heroes are this. Their levels tend to task them with looking for random things ranging from vast quantities of rings to casino chips and hermit crabs, and they are forced to use a teleporter to go back to the beginning of the stage if they miss anything. Infamously, the game's Marathon Level Mystic Mansion tasks them with blowing out the torches which otherwise serve as background decorations throughout the level, drawing out what is already an unusually long stage and forcing them to go to odd out-of-the-way places. The game tries to Hand Wave these missions as being a series of attempts by their mysterious client to get test their abilities and get them used to working for him.

    Real Time Strategy 
  • Though a Strategy Game, and therefore usually not prone to giving fetch quests, Age of Empires II has one in the Genghis Khan scenario: the Kereyids will join you if you bring them 20 sheep. It's a little strange to be Genghis Khan and running after sheep.
    • Also frickin' annoying, since your enemy tribe, the Kara-Khitai will shoot the sheep if they get in range, and you have to be really careful to keep the sheep close to your troops, or you'll lose them to whatever tribe your mini-horde passes by, and then have to come back for them. Also, the sheep were often in really annoying places.
    • The Uighurs in the same scenario ask you to kill the Ornlu and bring them its pelt. Unfortunately, Ornlu is surrounded by his pack of Savage Wolves who look just like him, so you will slaughter all most of the time, while trying to not bring the attention of all at the same time.
    • The X-pack The Conquerors introduces riderless horse units whose only purpose is this (they are capturable like the sheep, but can't be slaughtered for food). In the first scenario of the Attila campaign, the Scythians will join you if you rescue their prince from a Roman camp and then bring them 10 horses. In the third scenario of the Montezuma campaign, the Aztecs can force the Spanish to withdraw if they steal 20 horses from their pens and bring them to their camp; and in the fourth, they can create their own cavalry and artillery by stealing horses and gunpowder carts from the Spanish.
  • In Brütal Legend, the Hunter gives these quests almost exclusively. Finishing one of these quests will allow you to summon that animal through the Call Of The Wild solo, as well as taming wild versions of that animal once it's stunned, and completing all of the quests gets you a new axe.
  • Wizard101 handles this fairly well, plot wise in that the drops are necessary for such and such a poison or a spell creation or a plot item (even if you don't understand how 5 leathery bat wings could possibly be combined to make a staff or shield). The problem with the handling is at the higher levels and more difficult areas the quantity of item required tends to go up along with the hit points and cards the Mooks use are more powerful and worst of all the drop rate goes down. Due to the nature of the battles in Wizard101, a single battle with a high level Mook can take 10 minutes. This can make a simple gathering quest take an entire day when they lower the drop rate and increase the quantity required.

    Role-Playing Game 
  • One optional quest in Betrayal at Krondor requires you to bring a noble half a dozen suits of Kingdom Armor in good condition. Since virtually all humanoid enemies at this point of the game are wearing a suit, finding that many isn't actually that hard, though you may need to repair them before they'll be accepted (Six suits of armor also takes up a lot of inventory space).
  • BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm has a sidequest involving a virtual farmer, whose crops have lost their textures thanks to some of the local enemies. Naturally, he asks you to wander the fields and fight things until you get the textures back. They drop about a third of the time, and it takes thirteen to save the farm, so get ready for around forty battles on average. For helping, all you get is an item that nullifies the Vanish state… which only a few specific bosses can have in the first place. Thankfully, this quest isn’t one of the ones needed to unlock the best ending.
  • The entire North American demo of Bravely Default consists of doing this. Needless to say, it turned some people away from buying the game out of fear that the entire game was like this. (It's not)
  • Chronicles of Inotia: Children of Carnia sends you on several of these. Most of them are just sidequests, but the more annoying ones are actually required to progress, and the game makes no big secret about the fact that the people giving them are only taking advantage of the group of adventurers in a predicament. The most egregious example is an apprentice of a sage who disguises as an old man and dumps all his errands on you for directions to the sage's house, nevermind that you have a comatose girl with you who could die at any moment. Made much worse by the fact that the 10 ladybug legs (one of the things he asks you to bring) are ridiculously hard to acquire. You're lucky if every fourth ladybug you kill drops a single one.
  • CrossCode is absolutely relentless with these. Nearly every weapon is traded to you for some combination of region-specific bear asses (or plant asses). Mildly mitigated by items like Refined Metal which can be obtained in any region for that region's rare drops, letting you ultimately use e.g. hover-panda-bear asses when you're supposed to be using robo-sloth-bear ones. Only mildly, though; there's more weapons that don't require metal or food sets than ones that do.
  • Demon Hunter: The Return of the Wings: A lot of quests involve getting a certain amount of monster material that is dropped separately from the usual loot while the quest is active.
  • Dislyte has bounties, which involve doing a variety of tasks, such as eliminating a number of specific enemies or upgrading relics. Notably, character episodes can be randomly gotten when looking for bounties.
  • In Dragon Age: Inquisition, one of the early quests involves hunting Rams for their meat to cook to feed hungry refugees. You need at least ten whole carcasses.
  • Dragon Quest:
    • Dragon Quest IV requires the player to collect 6 Broad Swords and 6 suits of Half Plate Armor in the third chapter. At least the random drop rate is a bit higher than usual. It's actually possible to buy the items in stores (from a different town) instead, but this takes at least as long.
    • Dragon Quest IX uses this trope for most quests. You either (a) have to find an item held as a random drop by a specific kind of monster, (b) explicitly have to kill X of a certain monster, or (c) have to use a specific skill (often in an arbitrarily hard way) X times against a certain kind of monster.
  • The Elder Scrolls
    • Daggerfall has a few of these to speak of. They're standard Fighters Guild quests and there is a notable Merchant Quest where you are asked to empty some random dungeon of a few harpies, and the last one will have a quest item feather to bring back to the merchant to prove they were killed.
    • Morrowind: One side quest in the Bloodmoon expansion has an armorer who tasks you with hunting Snow Bears and Snow Wolves for their pelts. He will then turn those pelts into Snow Bear or Snow Wolf armor (medium armor and light armor, respectively) which is high quality and comes with a useful Resist Frost enchantment built in. To get both sets, you'll need 22 of each type of pelt. Snow Bears and Snow Wolves are uncommon enemies and are not guaranteed to drop a pelt upon death. Happy hunting.
    • Oblivion:
      • A farmer asks you to kill the bears that have been eating his sheep, and please bring him back the teeth as proof. The drop rate is 100%, but the challenge is finding the things in all the wide-open forest. Who ever heard of keeping sheep in the forest, anyway? And if you do the quest when you have a low Character Level, you'll be going after bear cubs, which are so small they are hidden by tall grass. We recommend the Detect Life spell to make life easier.
      • The quest for master-level Destruction training gets about as close as possible to the literal title of the trope, requiring you to collect 20 bear pelts.
      • Worst is the quest to farm twelve scales from Slaughter Fish. They spawn across an entire lake and the next one doesn't spawn until you find and kill the prior one. There is a compass marker, but it does not help if the fish spawns inside a freakin' rock.
      • Being expelled from the mage's guild will also earn you a quest to get admitted back in-collecting 20 of certain ingredients, which if this is the second time that's happened, are reasonably rare ingredients as well. Being expelled from the fighters guild requires gathering/buying 20 bear pelts to get back in, not too awful as they're common items sold in groups of 5. Being expelled a second time requires harvesting 20 minotaur horns (more than some players see in an entire play through); you may as well load that earlier save from 3 hours ago from before when you were unjustly kicked out, it'll probably save you time in the long run.
      • Gathering the various tidbits to be cured of vampirism also amounts to this. It takes 5 empty grand soul gems that you'll probably have to buy and/or steal from a third of the alchemy suppliers in the country to gather enough, just to get started (one or two less if you noticed the hidden basement entrance in the quest giver's house-fortunately she won't recognize her own property). Then, you need to find a number of different alchemy ingredients that chances are you don't have stockpiled anywhere, and are scattered all over the place. Also, if you've ignored the main quest until now, good luck finding any blood grass - unless you buy the Wizard's Tower DLC, of course.
      • The master speech trainer quest requires speaking to every single beggar in the country. Fortunately, speech is such a useless skill no one seems to bother with this one.
      • There's also the "seeking your roots" quest, and no, its not about discovering any sort of background information on your character. It involves finding 100 nirnroot plants spread through the whole game, for a fairly mediocre reward (a series of potions whose effects a mid level spell caster can replicate in his sleep, and an Nth playthrough player produce as constant effects as early as level 1). Unless the player is shooting for a very long and thorough play through, or is specifically scouring the coastline for them, chances are you won't stumble across anywhere near as many roots as you need for the quest. The only "help" this quest has is there's over 300 of the plants and they naturally ring and glow to help you find them.
    • Skyrim:
      • They've started growing nirnroots on a farm. Unfortunately, they need 20 jazbay grapes for fertilizer. Jazbay plants are inconspicuous lichen-like things, looking nothing like real-world grape plants. Fortunately, they don't fight back.
      • Just for good measure, Skyrim also contains an instance of the archetypal "bring back 10 bear pelts" fetch quest as well. And given the fact that you probably won't be strong enough not to get clobbered by bears when you get the quest, you'll be mostly relying on random vendor inventories to get them, and the things are most likely going to clog up your inventory space for a while. As a final insult, the questgiver (a lumberjack who hates bears for scratching the local trees, rendering them unusable) has no need for the pelts, they're just to prove you fulfilled her request. Bears also drop claws which are much lighter, but only pelts will do. Even polar bear pelts, which obviously didn't belong to the local brown bears.
      • If that wasn't tedious enough, another character demands nirnroot, nightshade, and deathbells, 20 apiece. Another wants a few ice wraith teeth, another wants 10 fire salts (one of the few items in the shop that costs over 100 gold).
      • The game engine generates these on the fly, with in-game programming that goes something like "require _PLAYER_ to get [item] from [dungeon]"
      • A common habit of Riften's citizens is arbitrarily running out of a particularly rare item, as almost all but the literal Bear Asses quest comes from that town. It also includes the fun ones where you have to find several of two kinds of flawless gems, which are not purchasable in any way or form in-game, and is completely level-based on how you find them. Possibly justified as a sort of balance, since Riften contains one of the best and cheapest homes to obtain early on, and the easiest home to obtain if you're deliberately putting off the main quest to avoid fighting dragons.
      • If you're looking for Falmer Ears, you can sometimes loot as many as two of them from Falmer corpses! Similarly, you can always liberate a single Giant's Toe, but never more.
  • Fallout:
    • Fallout 3 justifies it quite well. Part of one sidequest has you testing Mole Rat repellent, applied via hitting them with a stick. To make it a proper scientific experiment, you need to test it several times. Too bad mole rats are rather rare in the wasteland if you've cleared out the static spawns (you need ten, and only four respawn regularly near Megaton). The repellent works very well, by the way. A little too well, actually.
    • Once you reach Level 14, you have the option of taking one of two perks that causes fingers (Lawbringer) or ears (Contract Killer) to spawn on certain characters once you kill them, which you can take to a specific character and trade in for cash and either positive or negative Karma. The justification here is that the player is taking the parts off of the corpse themselves, so as long as the character has the required karma (i.e. good character for Contract Killer), you're guaranteed to get the part once s/he dies.
    • And Fallout: New Vegas has quests whereby you can trade in the dogtags of fallen NCR soldiers, OR the ears of Legion soldiers for bonus fame with a given faction and some bottle caps. The quest-giver for the "Legion Ears" even explains why he wants that specific body part, explaining that it's basically a Pun. The ears only appear in their inventory after taking the quest (but are always there), while dog tags are (almost) always on the corpse of any NCR soldier you kill (you can also pickpocket them) or otherwise come across, even before starting the quest.
    • Subverted in the "Bleed Me Dry" quests for fighting pit the Thorn. You're asked to collect several eggs from various animals, which randomly (and somewhat rarely) drop on killing them, but if you ask for a tip you'll be directed to a single clutch of eggs (which only appears when you take the quest), turning it into a regular Fetch Quest.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • The Rages skills of Gau from Final Fantasy VI. As each skill involves encountering its corresponding enemy, trying to collect them all requires the player to know which enemies show up where during which points of the story, some of which are obscure and easy to miss. Worse still, some of the enemy lineup changes past a certain story point, so if the player misses the chances to meet some monsters until that point it might be too late.
    • Final Fantasy XII's loot system is one of the most systematic uses of this trope around. It's one of many examples of this game using elements common to MMOs seemingly without considering why those elements work in MMOs but have not commonly been seen in single-player, offline games, because though the developers try valiantly, it doesn't really make a damn bit of in-world sense.
    • The game also mitigates the "not every enemy has an ass" issue with a mechanic that increases the drop rate and drop quantity if you run up a string of consecutive kills on a particular type of enemy. Kill enough consecutive bears, and not only will the percentage of bears that leave their asses behind increase noticeably, you'll start discovering bears with multiple harvestable asses amongst the ones you kill. While some of the drops make sense (like fangs from some opponents), others... don't.
    • Final Fantasy Brave Exvius features several sidequests that have various townsfolk ask for materials. These are frequently require defeating going after a couple particular monsters and killing/stealing from them to harvest the materials. One that's rather counter-intuitive is one quest available early that asks for raptor feathers. Despite the number of bird enemies nearby, the most reliable source for them close to the quest's location is actually a bat. Averted with "kill X of this species" quests; those count all such kills regardless of location or item drop.
    • In Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, most of the Canvas of Dreams sidequests are of this nature. Fortunately, even though there are a finite number of most species of bear in the game, every bear drops an ass 100% of the time, and there are enough bears of each species that is available in finite quantities to meet the ass quota of every sidequest in a single playthrough.
  • Infinite Undiscovery has a sidequest where you have to collect 10 Harpy Livers, which are dropped by only one type of Harpy and only drop while this sidequest is active. At least they have a 100% drop rate.
  • Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days has multiple variations: To start, there's the "kill a bunch of Heartless and collect Hearts" missions; these are actually justified by storyline, but what makes them Bear Assy (aside from being unimportant to the actual story in general) is the presence of Pureblood Heartless, which don't produce Hearts like the ones that bear Emblems. Then there's the Halloween Town Heartless Killing Missions, where you're further hampered by the need to actually seek out the Heartless in obscure hiding places; sometimes the lock-on is only a few pixels wide, so when you finally find it, it's where you already searched (Zero can be enlisted for help if you bribe him with a bone). The recon missions are a special breed of Bear Ass because they're similar to the Halloween Town missions, but your reward is less clear cut because you need to gather information until you make a "breakthrough". Finally, other members of the Organization will sometimes send you on an errand-either to synthesize something at the shop, or meet certain other requirements within missions. The rewards here tend to be either rare synthesis materials you may be looking for, or new missions.
  • The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel has the An Offering to the Departed quest in Chapter 5, which requires you to go massacre a number of specific monsters (Grass Pom and Rose Shroom respectively) on the Ebel Highway to get 5 hearty powder and 5 clear gelatin for the quest.
  • In Interplay's Lord of the Rings, you have to collect nine cloaks from the Ringwraiths who were washed away in the deluge. This involves a loooooooooong trek up and down the river, and pushing the button everywhere until you can find them all. Finding a couple of them involves fights with Wargs. What's worse, if you go to Rivendell with fewer than the total amount, after Gandalf throws the cloaks into the fire (why the hell did I have to collect them if you're just going to burn them?), the plot will no longer progress and the characters will just sit there forever.
  • Parodied in iOS game Mage Gauntlet. One level has Lexi constantly being harassed by a wizard to collect various boar parts (despite item pickups not being in the game). Eventually, you reach the King Boar — who demands that you go out and collect wizard parts.
    "GO AND DEFEAT TEN WIZARDS FOR ME! AND BRING ME THEIR BEARDS! *Squeal*"
  • None of the delivery quests in Lunar: Dragon Song involve delivering anything. Instead you have to collect various random drops (Which often make no sense as to why a monster would have it in the first place) in various quantities and give it to someone. This is the primary source of money in the game, made even more annoying by the game mechanic which forces the player to decide if he wants monsters to give experience or random drops.
  • In Marvel: Avengers Alliance, there are six missions per chapter, and one of these quests is sometimes required, say, in Mission 3, to unlock Mission 4. The items tend to be small things that prove the Mooks were up to no good, like bolt cutters or fake thumbprints.
  • Monster Hunter loves this trope to the point where nearly every weapon and armor piece requires a couple parts of an animal. However, since most monsters give more than one item when you carve them, it leads to odd results. Sometimes carving the tail of the monster gives a scale/bone, while usually it gives you the monster's tail. Sometimes, you can carve multiples of the same object from a monster, such as three scalps from a T. rex like monster or two tongues from a Woolly Mammoth.
    • Elder Dragons provide one of the best examples in the game, since one of the rarer drops is elder dragon blood! Which becomes even more annoying when that blood sprays all over the place when you hit it!
  • My World, My Way is a non-MMO RPG that is still stuffed with them.
    • And most are required story quests. Although if you're finding one particularly annoying, you can always just whine it to completion.
  • One of two kinds of Side Quests available in the Neptunia series, the other being Mass Monster Slaughter Sidequests.
  • NieR was panned by critics for its excessive use of Bear Asses in its sidequests and weapon upgrade system. Another example of a short (12 hour) game padded out (to 60+ hours) by this kind of thing.
  • Persona:
    • The bulk of Elizabeth or Theodore's Requests in Persona 3 involve hunting down certain types of Shadow in each section of Tartarus and harvesting a representative item, body part, or accessory carried by said Shadow — frequently something that they will only begin to drop after the request has been accepted. Each of them is intentionally vague as to what they want these things for, saying only that they'll leave it to your imagination. As the requests are completed, however, it becomes clear that they are testing your potential.
    • Comically, when the protagonist escorts either Elizabeth or Theo to the mall by their request, they interpret the police station's Missing Persons board as a list of bounty heads comparable to their requests, and assume that similar trophies would be required as proof of the kill.
    • Similar in Persona 4 where quests generally involve finding an item for an NPC, which is always a drop from a certain monster from a certain dungeon. Majority of those drops won't even get dropped unless you activate the quest.
  • Pokémon:
  • There are a few quests in Rakenzarn Tales that require gathering crap for others. Either by the kindness of the programmer or the limits of RPG Maker, these items can be won before you even get the quest and the extras can be sold for cash.
  • In Ravensword: Shadowlands, there are two different quests where you have to acquire a specific amount of pelts from specific enemies. One of them is even about bear pelts.
  • 7th Dragon plays this straight with a lot of quests. There's a quest where you have to collect no less than one hundred bird feathers (which, assuming you have anything else in your inventory, you can't even carry at once so you have to hand it in in parts). You'd think most birds would have at least one of those. You'd think wrong.
  • Shin Megami Tensei IV has a few quests that require you to obtain drops from certain enemies as a subcategory of Delivery Quests under your Challenge Quests.
  • During the shipwreck sequence in Skies of Arcadia, you're required to defeat 20 Grapors and collect their meat. Fortunately, Grapors are fairly common, easy to beat, and you don't have to deliver them anywhere.
  • One of the sidequests in Sonic Chronicles is to obtain multiple samples of Nocturnus technology from enemies and give them to Rouge to deliver to her superiors. After receiving about four or five, she grows bored of it and agrees to give Sonic the reward if he promises to stop giving them to her.
  • Star Ocean: The Last Hope features items created solely for these sort of missions (Wolf Oil, Peryton Droppings, Giant Bird Feather). Some of them are usable in low-level recipes at the very least.
  • There are several quests along these lines in Summoner, such as the gargoyles' blood.
  • Tales of...:
    • In Tales of Phantasia, the innkeeper in Olive village asks the player to bring him at least five Basilisk scales (dropped from Basilisks, of course) while they are waiting for Edward Morrison to show up. Thankfully, the drop rate of scales is frequent and the Basilisks can be met even more frequently with Dark Bottles, but the Basilisks are pretty dangerous nonetheless.
    • In Tales of Destiny 2, there is a quest requiring you to get a certain species of wolf pelts to burn down overgrowth blocking the path through a forest. While the pelts are an 100% drop, capturing the wolves so you can fight them in the first place is an almost painfully tedious task.
    • In order to get all the girls' "sexy outfits" in Tales of Vesperia, you must collect several randomly dropped items from monsters, including from a type of monster that only appears in the very center of a deserted island at night. To make matters worse, they are still a rare encounter and the item drop rate is not very high.
  • The Witcher has "witcher work", a signboard with these kind of quests. There is no real reason to do them, but they supply you with an extra bit of cash. It's made more tolerable by the high drop rate, and the fact that it is ostensibly the main character's job to hunt monsters. The fact that you have to read about the monster before you can "harvest" from them however, does not help matters. Special hunts to target specific mini-boss monsters also exists, but get better rewards.
    • The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings features a quest called "A Sackful of Fluff" that is a tongue-in-cheek take on these types of quests. The dialogue during the quest is laced with satire, and it ends on a visual gag.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 1 follows this fine tradition, adding it with quests where you have to pick up a certain number of shiny collectables from levels that are determined randomly when you walk over them. At least hunting for twenty bear asses means you can selectively kill bears, while the pick-ups all look like shiny orbs. It helps that you rarely have to actually bring the items back: As soon as you have/kill the required amount, the mission is usually done. In addition, most items are traded by various NPCs, so, provided you know where to go, you can turn all the items that aren't what you want into the ones you do want. The main character's ability to see visions of the future actually serves a Mundane Utility purpose here: sometimes when finding a collectable before taking a quest that requires it, you'll get a vision telling you that item will be useful for a future quest.
  • Zenonia couples this with Randomly Drops in all of the side quests and nearly all of the main quests. The sequel ups the ante by making the ingame Weapon creation system completely depended on it.

    Stealth-Based Game 
  • The "Shop Quests" in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood are a very good example of this and Fake Longevity. To make it worse, some of the asses are in finite supply, and the player might have found most of them and sold them off as Shop Fodder before the quest requiring them unlocks.
  • Assassin's Creed III doesn't have any in the main game, but has a good chunk of blatant ones as sidequests where you go around collecting pages of Ben Franklin's almanac, bird feathers in the frontier, letters, and animal pelts to present to random NPCs who often don't say anything more than "You have my everlasting gratitude, sir!" and nothing else. Even without the subquests, collecting bear asses (And deer antlers, and fox tails, and...) is an easy way to earn money.

    Third-Person Shooter 
  • Jet Force Gemini: The game requires you to collect Drone Heads to activate "cheats", which are just gimmicks really. 100 Drone Heads give you Rainbow Blood, 200 give you Jet Force Kids (younger-looking versions of the main characters), and 300 give you... wait for it... Ants As Pants! Yes, Rareware's mascot Mr Pants replaces all the regular Blue Ant Drones. However, you have to kill the drones in the correct way, or you can't collect their heads. You must either shoot their heads clean off with a weapon such as the Pistol, Machine Gun or even the Shurikens, or blow them to bits with explosives (which has the added bonus of making blood and body parts fly EVERYWHERE, making it somewhat hard to see where the head has gone if it bounces off the top of the screen while many other limbs and splashes of blood are flying around). For extra difficulty, to unlock the cheats, you must reach the thresholds with the same character, which means the Mr Pants cheat requires you to gather 300 heads with one character; the accumulated amounts between the three characters do not count.
  • Red Dead Redemption has many stranger quests involving gathering random animal parts or flowers, usually ending up with someone being dead or getting killed.
  • Resident Evil 4 has an early segment which rewards you with a somewhat potent new handgun for free if you can destroy 10 blue medallions (with a free upgrade for destroying all 15). Fully upgrading the Butterfly Lamp is another annoying instance of this trope. It takes a red, green, and blue gem to upgrade the Butterfly Lamp to its highest resale value. Not only do you have to kill some rather dangerous Novistadors, but they very rarely ever drop a blue gem and there are a finite amount of Novistadors to farm them from.
  • Resident Evil 5 ups the ante with 30 BSAA emblems that, when shot at enough... unlock trophies! And no, repeating a level and shooting the same emblem over and over again doesn't work.
    • Finding and shooting the emblems is also one part of the process to getting some of the extra features, such as the infinite ammo upgrade for your weapons.
    • Also played quite straight with the Giant Majini, Licker Betas, and Popokarimu who drop incredibly valuable pieces of Shop Fodder (though it's a randomized drop in the case of the Licker; go figure) that helps you upgrade your weapons faster. Since you can replay any level you want, you can effectively grind these levels for the money.
  • SD Gundam Capsule Fighter has quests that require you to shoot a certain number of Mobile Suits to earn piddly prizes, with the more tougher quests giving you better prizes. However, all missions are time-based, so you have to complete both the quest AND the mission for it to stick.

    Virtual Pet 
  • Lorwolf: The first quest in the campaign to join the Murkwood pack requires you to collect 5 golden apples dropped from Rodills, weak rat-like enemies.

Non-video game examples:

    Anime & Manga 
  • While it isn't necessarily a rule to collect pirates to join the Shichibukai (Seven Warlords of the Sea, to those who speak English) in One Piece, as long as said applicant shows their strength to make other pirates fear them, then the World Government may make a pact with them. In this example, Trafalgar Law extracted and delivered 100 pirate hearts to the World Government to achieve Shichibukai status.

    Fan Works 
  • Comes up a couple of times in I Woke Up As a Dungeon, Now What? when a large number of a specific minion part is needed (such as when they need twenty giant spider eyeballs in a hurry as a reactant for the mana drain).
  • Hilariously played with in The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World. The four desperately need magic that will mask them from scanners, but don't have the money to pay for it, so Frondar at Gold Magic offers to trade them this magic if they fetch nine cockatrice feathers for use in magic item construction. The four angrily turn this down as being unreasonably dangerous. When Frondar offers to let them collect unitaur (one-horned minotaur) horns instead, they turn that down because they won't kill anything. As the four ponder what to do next, it occurs to John that shapeshifter George could help out a lot with this problem... and hence the concept of “harvesting George” is born (much to George's annoyance). They use him to raise money and avoid a tedious side quest later.
  • Sword Art Online Abridged turns what was a straight if difficult quest for a pet-reviving flower in the original show into one of these. (The items they need may not be monster drops, but they only spawn in a monster-infested dungeon.)
    Kirito: (upon finding a flower) Alright, one down!
    Silica: Yay! ...Uh, wait, what do you mean?
    Kirito: Well, I mean, we're gonna need like 50 more of these suckers, then we trade them back in town for a gem, which we'll give to this gatekeeper, so he'll let us into another dungeon, where we fight a series of bosses to get the real flower.
    Silica: That's insane! Who'd design a game this way?
    Kirito: You don't play a lot of RPGs, do you?

    Films — Live-Action 

    Literature 
  • There's an old legend involving the small group of slaves who would eventually be the ancestors of the Aztec race earning their freedom by going to war against their masters' great enemy and bringing back sacks and sacks of the enemy soldiers' ears.
  • Beesong Chronicles: Gathering quests are annoying because you need rare abilities to even have a chance at collecting the materials without destroying them, and the only ones that combat jobs have access to have abysmal success rates. Joy's innate Advanced Harvesting quickly makes her extremely valuable; with her help, Cora's party finishes a series of quests that were expected to take a week in an hour.
  • The Bible—specifically, 1 Samuel. King Saul: "Sure, David, you can marry my daughter, just bring me a hundred Philistine foreskins. Hope you don't get killed when they figure out what you're trying to do!" Worst. Quest. Ever. At least the drop rate is (more or less) 100%.note  Even worse, David apparently got caught up in the "farming" and brought in two hundred, thus proving that Level Grinding and Collection Sidequest (not to mention Bragging Rights Reward!) are indeed Older Than Feudalism (as for why Saul demanded foreskins, it was probably to prevent cheating; heads and hands could be collected from David's own dead soldiers, and unlike their Gentile foes, all of his men were already circumcised).
    • In God Knows, Joseph Heller's novelization — or, rather, quite deep yet humorous deconstruction in Heller's trademark style — David spends a while figuring out how many men he would need to hold down and circumcise a hundred Philistines. General Abner eventually has to explain to him that he is allowed to kill the Philistines first.
    • In The Cartoon History of the Universe, David turns in the two hundred foreskins and quips "I'll take two of 'em!"
  • Journey to Chaos: The only reason that Eric meets Kallen in Mambi is that she's collecting one hundred monsters for mana mutation research. The drop rate for the elemental ice energy that she needs is frustratingly low.
  • In Sienkiewicz' The Knights of the Cross, Zbyszko, having decided to prove his worth to Danusia, vows to defeat three high ranking of The Teutonic Knights and bring the peacock feathers from their helmets as a proof. The hot headed hero he is, he attempts to challenge the first Teutonic Knight he sees and nearly gets himself executed when the man turns out to be an envoy of the grand master.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In the Monty Python sketch Happy Valley, the fairy tale King is a bit tetchy about suitors seeking the hand of his daughter, Princess Mitzi of the wooden teeth and fabulous tits. He therefore sets deliberately impossible tests of their worth, like catching a falling DC-9 airliner, or jumping out of the highest window in the castle armed only with a sword. Finally, running out of Princes, he is forced to give an easy job to the last and least prepossessing Prince: "Nip down the newsagent and get me twenty Rothmans".

    Web Animation 
  • Lampshaded in Unforgotten Realms where Schmopy and Douglas are sent to find wolf hearts and Schmopy wonders how wolves are missing vital organs.

    Web Comics 
  • Parodied by The Noob; Oforf is annoyed when his first quest is to bring his guildmaster five rat tails. A level 20 player consoles him by telling him once he's level 20 he'll get cooler quests - like bringing the guildmaster five wolf tails.
  • Parodied by Oglaf; a local council solicits suggestions on jobs they can give the adventurers who will be passing through come spring, and gets "fetch me thirty buffalo horns" as an answer. After this is amended to "assassinate fifteen buffalo", the first councilor implies he's going to have the guy asking for horns assassinated.
  • Discussed in this Sandra and Woo comic.
    Cloud: Hmm, any suggestions how they could improve their rank?
    Sandra: Rumor has it that they’re able to climb several places by giving Sandra an apology kiss.
    Cloud: I see. But is that worth yet another cootie infection? They’d certainly prefer to bring you ten ogre heads or something…
  • When Torg plays a MMORPG in Sluggy Freelance, he finds his first quest of fetching five salamander tongues very underwhelming. Justified by the quest-giver as necessary Level Grinding to make Torg even remotely useful.
    The Duke: Bring me five red salamander tongues.
    Torg: Salamander tongues?
    The Duke: Yes.
    Torg: That will help "rid the evil"?
    The Duke: You're wielding a stick. Start with salamanders.

    Web Videos 
  • College Saga defies this: when an NPC pops up and demands "10 Bricks, 5 Lizard Eggs, 15 Tree Branches, 2 Iron Ores," the characters Just Blast Him With Magic and continue on their way.
  • Referenced in Shadow of Israphel episode 7. Upon delivering the dirt, sulphur, water, golden apples, and feathers to Fumblemore, Simon Lane says "I would have preferred to collect ten bear asses..."

    Western Animation 
  • Smiling Friends: During their visit to the Enchanted Forest, Charlie and Pim pass by an Elf who asks of them to retrieve 15 boar hides for him so his tribe can survive the winter. He gets a Blunt "No" from Charlie.

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