It’s important that you grind. But with no Inns, how are you supposed to heal? Tonics are found through the mansion, and automatically heal everyone in your party 100% regardless of your levels. That may sound too convenient, but remember, you can’t buy tonics. You’ve to ration the handful littered throughout the whole mansion.
There is a vital gameplay element — perhaps fuel, or money or air or healing — which is finite and irreplaceable; if it runs out, you're done for. Therefore, the whole game begins to revolve around managing your supply. If you upset the Unstable Equilibrium by failing to scrimp resources, the game can become Unwinnable.
Do not confuse with Refining Resources, which is a different type of resource management.
Strongly related to Too Awesome to Use, and Unstable Equilibrium. Also see Wizard Needs Food Badly, Anti-Grinding and Min Max.
Examples:
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Roleplaying Games
- BlueSkies Series:
- Delvin: Origins: The game has a limited amount of encounters with fairly low money drops, making it important to ration items and spend money efficiently. This is even stricter on Hell Mode, which prevents saving outside of safe rooms and takes away full recovery from entering a safe room.
- The Final Prayer: The gameplay loop is based on Delvin: Origins in that there are a finite number of enemies and treasures, and the player can only buy from the Dungeon Shop once per area. Additionally, characters can only get stronger through stat-boosting items, making it important to play in a way that minimizes item usage so that more stat-boosts can be purchased instead of consumables.
- In Citizen Sleeper, the player character's bio-mechanical body begins slowly deteriorating if it is not regularly injected with a special stablizer that is very hard to come across outside corporate channels. The corporation that made the body designed it that way as a slow-working kill switch in case the user of the body would try to run away with it. This means that the player have to find a way to semi-regularly acquire stablizers to maintain the player character's health. The player-character also have to maintain their energy levels by eating meals or their condition will drop. To perform actions, each day the player gets a number of dice rolls, based on the player character's current health, which represent the player character performing an action as well as how useful the action is. There are also a number of inventory items such as the stablizers, credits, scrap and non-physical data to manage.
- You're going to have a very tough time in Dark Souls if you don't learn to how ration your spells and healing items between bonfires. Even combat is a challenge of resource management since each attack/roll you make will deplete your stamina meter, as well as attacks you block or parry. To make matters worse, keeping your shield up drastically cuts the recovery rate of stamina, meaning that if you don't do things right, you'll either try regenerating stamina and get killed, or keep your shield up and get knocked over. Then killed.
- The Deus Ex series has always involved some basic resource management, which extends not only to the items, tool and weaponry one is carrying around, but to the player's decisions which cybernetic implants to install and improve into the player character's body.
- Dragon Slayer II: Xanadu counts as the Ur-Example of this. There is a limited number of enemy encounters, some of which boost your Karma stat to a point where you can't get any experience points (you have to acquire a cursed potion to reduce your Karma, which in turn will cost you some hit points). And the icing on the cake? All slain enemies stay slain for good. That, and you also have to keep a healthy supply of food, and properly make decisions on when to upgrade your equipment.
- Esper Unleashed: Although Axephus is strong due to his combined psionic and hex powers, he takes constant Damage Over Time in both the field and combat due to his memory slipping away. Additionally, all encounters are finite, making it impossible to simply grind for resources forever. The player has to avoid unnecessary movement and make efficient use of items in order to clear the game.
- Very important in Evil Islands. You'll want to grind as much as possible, not only to gain experience, but to earn money, since Money for Nothing is completely averted in this game. Besides, the best materials in each island are not available in shops and you'll only be able to get a few from enemies.
- Hard leather (the best leather in the game) is mainly acquired from the Lizard Men (also from Ogres, but there are few of them). You can stock it without too much difficulty, as you'll fight lots of Lizard Men in Gipath. However, although you can craft stronger leather armor in Ingos and Suslanger, you can't get hard leather anymore, meaning you can only use whatever you saved from Gipath.
- Strangely, the opposite situation to the one just above happens with fur: you can get lots of snow tiger skin in Ingos, but there is no new fur armor, so you can only upgrade the one you saved from Gipath.
- Zig-Zagged with hide, as the best one, red dragon hide, can't be acquired by killing red dragons (they drop red dragon bones instead), but by buying it in Suslanger. Before that, however, there's only troll hide, acquired from trolls, who are seldom encountered, and buyable only in Ingos.
- Obsidian, the best type of stone, can only be acquired from elite Orcs (standard Orcs drop just flint, although you can't buy it either).
- The best type of bone you'll be using is shell bones, acquired only from Armadillos. There's one type below (hard bone, acquired from skeletons) and several above (several types of dragon bones; in Gipath they're only acquired as a quest reward, making them Too Awesome to Use, and in Suslanger they're made obsolete by metal).
- The best metal in Ingos is steel, acquired from both the Woodsfolk and Wormheads, so you'll be able to get lots of it. However, Meteorite, the best metal ever, is mainly acquired from Black Wormheads and Imperial Guards (also from Desert Ogres, but again, they are seldom encountered); the first ones can't be encountered after you complete the Wormheads' Cave, and the others are the toughest regular enemies in the entire game, so good luck getting some Meteorite.
- The Fallout: New Vegas DLC Dead Money strips you of all your equipment and dumps you in a toxic villa where everything is trying to kill you. There is a palpable dearth of supplies and you have to scrounge for every healing item you can. Hope you were a melee/unarmed character because there isn't a lot of ammo and the ghost people don't stay dead...
- Final Fantasy X doesn't have this trope, but the Final Fantasy X Masters Challenge Mod makes it a major focus. Because random encounters and minigames give zero rewards, the resources available are finite and players must use them carefully. MP stats of characters also start out lower, so MP conservation is important.
- Fire Emblem games. You can't repeat battles, and the items you have are the ones you'll use in the next battle, so not wasting your equipment is crucial for progress. Many of the games give you heaps of gold on an irregular and unpredictable basis, so you can end up with no gold for several chapters if you spend it all too early.
- METRO QUESTER: Every step you take in the underground ruins consumes fuel, and even more will be spent if you have to flee from battles. Finding food is critical to your survival; failing to reach a certain threshold every ten days means all of your heroes will starve. You also need lots of raw Materials to upgrade your equipment, as well as leveling up your Questers, and many of the special moves you can unleash in battle require different resources. While these battle supplies are restored after fights, you can still easily run out mid-skirmish... though it's possible to gather more during combat, provided you have a Quester who knows the specific ability required.
- In the Mount & Blade series, you have to manage the health, morale and income of both your character and his band of companions and adventurers. Availability and variety of food, how well you handle battles or diplomacy with rivals, and how much you regularly pay your companions (the better the soldier, the higher the wage) all factors into troop morale. Additionally, there's also the matter of buying or acquiring better mounts, armour and weaponry throughout the course of the game, as you start alone and with humble equipment. Though the vanilla games and most of their mods simply use universal currency for recruitment, payments and rewards, some mods play around with making this more complex. For example, a well-regarded mod about the War of the Ring replaced the currency with "resource points", which the player had to earn separately from each of the many factions present in the mod to purchase or recruit within their territory.
- Prey (2017) follows in the footsteps of other Immersive Sims by requiring a lot of resource balancing. Your character has hit point, suit integrity (armor), and psi points (mana points used for Typhon powers). You acquire abilities via Neuromods. All interactable objects (including enemies, machines, and people) can be broken down into four types of materials, which are then used to assemble things like kits that refill your bars, Neuromods, upgrades, quest items, ammo, and even weapons. For that extra level of balancing, you can spend Neuromods on a handful of abilities that do nothing but generate other resources (which you are free to spend on Neuromods, albeit requiring you to complete a side quest).
- In Roadwarden, you need to deal with your character's health, hunger, armor and cleanliness, all of which affect their performance in combat and social interactions. These lower during travel and combat, and can be more easily managed with various supplies (or by spending money).
- Ultima Underworld and the sequel give you limited inventory space and weight limits to carry all the many, many things you'll need to survive. Light sources such as candles, torches and lanterns can burn out, food is finitenote , and sleep is required every so oftennote .
- In Various Daylife, your inventory space is limited when embarking on an expedition, requiring the player to manage their rations and other gear and having to decide whether to take a risk and keep adventuring once supplies run out. To add to the challenge further, the expedition team members' max HP decrease steadily while trekking through the field on expeditions, more rapidly in harsh weather conditions.
Adventure Games
- Alone in the Dark:
- In the original Alone in the Dark (1992), you have a limited amount of oil for your lamp. Keeping your lamp lit is necessary in some dark rooms. If you run out of oil, you're screwed because you won't be able to get past some rooms or find important stuff in them, and it's required to kill the Final Boss. Same applies to healing items: you find very few of them throughout the entire game. Not to mention weapons, which break or run out of ammo rapidly, and are also finite in number. Fortunately, the enemy population in the mansion is relatively low for the genre and are finite in number, and unlike most games in the genre fisticuffs are a viable means of dispatching many of the otherworldly horrors.
- The above also applies to the second and third games, with the additional factor that many of your enemies wield guns and thus you can't just punch them to death.
- The New Nightmare is perhaps the most extreme example. It has the usual limited ammo typical of the genre, as well as areas (including narrow hallways) where enemies respawn either when you backtrack through or actively while you're in the room. You have to be very smart with your ammo management, as there absolutely isn't enough to kill every enemy in the game or even every enemy that gets directly in your way.
- The late 1980s Japanese horror adventure game Sweet Home (1989), described in the opening quote. Often cited as an influence on early survival horror games, including Resident Evil.
- The central gameplay mechanic in Ice-Pick Lodge's Turgor (a.k.a. The Void). This is further complicated by the fact that there is one resource to manage that does everything (health, ammo, currency, etc.), along with overharvesting causing wastage and an increase of enemies. A limited amount appears in each time cycle, and it's alarmingly easy to render the game Unwinnable through clumsy or reckless spending of color.
- YU-NO has a time traveling mechanism which allows you to instantly hop between distant parts of the storyline branches, letting you carry items between unrelated scenes. There's a catch, however: you can only travel to moments where you've "dropped" beforehand a "save-jewel", a magical jewel. There's a limited amount of these, 8 in the PC-98 and Windows versions and 10 in the Sega Saturn and remake versions. This system is in place of a conventional save-load system. The timeline is extremely complex, with dozens of confusing branches, loops and U-turns, and some of the routes require items from the end of another route. It's important to leave jewels in important moments so you can return to them later. "Loading" a dropped jewel also automatically puts it back into your pocket, so you may have to remember to instantly drop it again to keep the moment easily accessible. Furthermore, to view the in-game map which you use for loading jewel-saves, you must have at least one unused jewel in your possession. Screw up, and you may have to replay a significant chunk of the game.
- Dreams in the Witch House (2023) tasks the player with keeping Walter Gilman well-fed and rested, warm, and dry as he continues his studies the Miskatonic University and his investigation into the supernatural. Making him eat usually costs a ration (though it is possible to get meals from other sources), and he can recover from rain and cold by being near a lit fireplace, though if he uses the one at home, this means he will have to supply his own firewood. If Walter goes hungry, tired, cold, or wet for too long at a time, it will adversely affect his health, making him more susceptible to getting sick, make it harder for him to recover from injuries, and drag down his exam scores. On some days, the weather will affect Walter's wellbeing, and nightmares or strange noises his apartment at night will conspire to ruin his sleep. The player can give Walter some more permanent protection against the weather by making him buy a raincoat or a pair of insulated trousers, and help him sleep better with a pair of earplugs, and certain medicines (or alcohol and cigarettes) will temporarily soothe his nerves as he gets into traumatizing encounters with the supernatural. Most of these thing costs money, and Walter is on a tight budget, as his only real income at the beginning of the game is his weekly allowance from his aunt, though she will give him a bonus if he does well on his exams. As the game progresses, Walter will find other ways of earning a bit of money.
Survival Horror
- In Alien: Isolation you have to look out after the protagonist's health, her flashlight batteries, her ammunition, secondary items, and the craftable resources to make more of them. She needs to balance progressing away from the xenomorph against exploring to find enough of these things to keep surviving against it, then figure out best how to apply them. The game also encourages not using your resources: the xenomorph will learn if you overuse a tacticnote , encouraging using multiple devices or avoiding Complacent Gaming Syndrome.
- Barotrauma has strong elements of this: medical supplies, ammunition and nuclear fuel are all limited. It's possible to obtain minerals and underwater plants to craft additional supplies, but if the submarine doesn't have an on-ship deconstructor and fabricator, then those unprocessed resources are only useful if and when the submarine gets to a station that has those facilities. In particular, if the submarine runs out of fuel and has no way to craft more, then it's only a matter of time before the entire crew is dead.
- The Arctic setting of Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason has the player character keeping warm as a central survival mechanic. It's similar to managing one's health in other horror games. The mechanic has the player searching for any useful sources of heat aboard the game's abandoned icebreaker, and using them to fend off the omnipresent frost. Another resource to manage is ammo, which is relatively scarce, especially some particular types.
- Matches are used in ENIGMA: An Illusion Named Family to reveal plot-vital items and keep Minhyuk's fear of the dark under control. There's only a limited amount of them to be found, they each last only five seconds each, and don't count as 'plot-important', meaning you'll have to hunt for them. And randomly checking objects can make noise, attracting the killer's attention...
- Extermination has a squad of Force Recon Marines investigating a bizarre hostile situation in Antarctica that turns out to be a result of a monstrous virus infection turning people into monsters. While the player always has a knife to fall back on, the basic weapon (an M-4 assault rifle) starts with only two magazines for a total of 60 bullets. Magazines can be refilled at save points easily enough, and additional magazines can be found to increase the amount of bullets available between refills. Special weapon attachments (such as an underbarrel grenade launcher or flamethrower) have a finite number of ammunition pick ups throughout the game. The player character is also notably not immune to the infection, and at maximum infection levels health will drop steadily (and disrupt actions) until the player is dead. There's a limited amount of immediate-use infection-reducing items, and a very small number of locations where infection can be fully cured without using any resources.
- This is the whole basis of Five Nights at Freddy's 1. You are being stalked by hostile animatronics. You can't leave your station, but you can check their locations with your camera tablet, use door lights to check if they're right outside your door, and shut the doors to prevent them from getting through. However, when the defenses are active, they drain power, and you only have a finite amount (which already drains slowly because of your office lights and fans). When the power runs out, Freddy will kill you, unless you're just on the edge of the clock flipping to 6 AM. Later games in the series vary on this formula.
- The second, third and fourth game keep the same formula of surviving to 6 AM, but the third game requires you to distract Springtrap by using a pre-recorded voice clip, which will need to be rebooted (along with your other systems) after you've used it too many times.
- The fourth and sixth game make your attention the resource to be managed: you need to keep the animatronics from getting to you by keeping a physical eye on them. The fourth game requires you to keep an eye on three (and eventually four) points of attack, while the sixth game requires you to complete certain tasks on your computer (such as ordering supplies and printing things) while also keeping an eye on the vents around you so that the animatronics don't get too close. You can turn off your computer to lower your noise level so they leave you alone, but that also turns off the cooling system, and getting to too high of a heat level also kills you.
- A staple in Frictional Games' survival horrors:
- The episodically published Penumbra series has packets of painkillers as healing items and the battery life of your flashlight (luckily, you can find replacement batteries fairly regularly, if you look around). Your other light source is a glowstick which never runs out, but it's weak for illuminating larger distances. The opening episode, Overture, also has the occasional packet of food supplies, the contents of which you can throw to lure away certain enemies. The sequel, Black Plague, was somewhat criticised for nerfing the battery life of the flashlight quite a bit, forcing you to replace batteries more often (though that also adds to the tension and loneliness).
- Amnesia: The Dark Descent has lantern oil for your lantern (similar to Penumbra's batteries for the flashlight), and tinderboxes for lighting candles, lamps, static lanterns and other light sources strewn across the environment. Without light, your Sanity Meter drops rapidly. The healing item stand-ins for the previous painkillers are, appropriately enough for the period, vials of Laudanum
.
- Look Outside: Much of the gameplay revolves around scavenging for weapons, money, food, and others items from around the apartment building. Weapons break after too much usage, ranged weapons use ammo, battles require using numerous food and healing items to continuously replenish health and stamina, and more valuable equipment tends to be pricey from traders, several of which only appear irregularly, usually requiring you to sell stuff in order to scrounge up funds to afford a lot of it, so it's a constant balancing act to avoid using too much stuff when exploring.
- Ice-Pick Lodge's Pathologic, and its remake Pathologic 2, have fairly extensive survival resource management. Everything from food and water (in various states of freshness), medical supplies (major items, given the story; incl. tablets, painkillers, special potions, tourniquets, bandages...), protective clothing (for medical reasons), to ammo (different bullets for each gun type), extra fuel for your lamp (not as important) and various baubles and cheap goods you can use for bartering. You have to have clothes and weapons repaired over time, due to wear and tear. Even resting and sleeping is something of a resource, as it's ill-advised to continue investigating or solving NPC quests without regularly caring for the player character's needs. The extensiveness of this management is logically justified by the premise, as the town the game takes place in is overrun with an ever-expanding mysterious plague. Even the prices of all these goods can grow and fluctuate a lot, both in official shops and while bartering with people, due to the ongoing crisis. The authorities and society as a whole are slowly crumbling, even though the player can somewhat dampen the worst of the spreading epidemic while also investigating the backstory of the town and the locals.
- Resident Evil: Between having limited ammo, limited healing herbs, and limited inventory space; they often became games of deciding just when to fight and when to find a way to avoid that newest pack of zombies and save your ammo, or risk reaching a point where you're screwed with nothing but a knife to defend yourself.
- String Tyrant: There are a limited number of potions in the game, with the only way to get more to find them by searching the mansion. Compounding this the player will almost always take at least a little damage during combat, often having to burn one or two potions for the harder enemies. You can restore your health up to half of max at fountains but otherwise you have to constantly gamble if combat is worthwhile.
- The System Shock series offers you a lot of resource management, including food and medical items, ammunition, weapon parts, and most impressively of all, cybernetic implant modules and other software (which you can use to improve your abilities, or for accessing devices and hacking). The initial version of the second game was somewhat infamous for overdoing it with quickly-weathering firearms. Due to all the games' heavily RPG-esque approach and cyberpunk-based items, they are something of a precursor to the first Deus Ex game, which built on their ideas.
Survival Games
- A False Saint, An Honest Rogue is a wilderness survival roguelike. It has food and temperature as its main resources. Drop too low on either of those, and you start seeing things.
- In ÁRIDA: Backland's Awakening, water (unlike food) does not regenerate. There are a limited amount of waterholes in the game, each of which have four uses before they go dry- and if you waste them, well, you're screwed. (Luckily, the game is only around two hours, so mistakes aren't too costly.)
- Cairn has protagonist Aava attempting to climb the legendary mountain Kami alone. She has a climbot for assistance, but that's it. In order to make it up the mountain, the player has to find resources such as food and clean water, maintain body temperature as the environment gets colder, and deal with the many inevitable aches, pains and injuries that come with hardcore mountain climbing. Grip tape (for fingers) is a vital resource, and pain medication becomes increasingly valuable. In addition, Aava's backpack space is limited, and resources get increasingly scarce the higher up she climbs. The only resource that's completely unlimited is light: Aava can use her light pole at any time without restriction.
- Keep Driving has it right in the title. You're on a cross-country trip and your goal is to keep driving. You need to manage your energy levels (by caffeine and sleeping), car condition (with repairs and part replacement), and gas levels (with fuel), with money being a resource that can be used to acquire most of that. You also have limited space in your car to pick up hitchhikers (from 1 to 4 extra passengers depending on the car), and limited trunk space to store all the stuff for your trip. If you run out of anythingnote , you'll be in trouble and have to rely on a bailout of some kind. Running out of energy ends up damaging your car, while running out of gas or car condition could result in someone coming by to help you, but more likely will require you to call your parents for assistance. If they answer, you'll be able to continue, but the more you have to call them, the less likely they are to answer. If they don't answer, then you can't keep driving and the game is over.
- The Long Dark, being a survival game, involves collecting and preserving sustenance, supplies, tools, and shelter in the midst of the harsh Canadian winter. The map has a finite amount of food, medicine, bullets and matches on the map, and the game is set up so gaining one resource will mean expending another (for example, you'll need to eat and drink after a long day gather firewood, and melting snow and cooking food will require starting a fire, etc.) so you need to carefully consider your every action. You will run out of something and die eventually, though - the point of the game is how long you can last.
- Misery requires you to scavenge the ruined landscape for food, water, and resources to craft things so you can get food and water, as well as healing yourself from radiation sickness. It also requires you to keep an eye on your mental state: if you eat terrible food or get attacked by certain anomalies, you will start to go insane. All of this is against a timer as well, as after a certain point, the Pale will start to arrive. If you're not in your shelter before time runs out, you die.
- The Pale Beyond: Much of the game revolves around managing three resources: food, fuel and decorum. Food and fuel are used to sustain the Temperence's crew at the end of each week, while decorum will increase or decrease based on the usage of the former two. Running out of food or fuel can lead to scurvy or frostbite (respectively), which can kill crew members; running out of decorum is a Game Over. The game can quickly be made unwinnable if resources are misused, prompting a new (or reloaded) save.
- RV There Yet? has a lot of this: thanks to having to drive a less-than-optimal route out of Mabutts Valley, the RV is subject to damage. The paneling will protect from some damage, but wheels can be destroyed and require replacement, the engine can be damaged and need a fresh infusion of oil, and the frame can be bent and damaged. Paneling can be repaired with scrap metal, and new tires and oil are relatively available if you go looking, but the frame can only be repaired with a welding torch, which is only available at or near checkpoints. There's also a limited (but relatively abundant) amount of poison antidotes (for snake bites), burgers and chicken nuggets (for normal damage), lotion (for burns) and epipens (for reviving dead teammates). Also, burgers can't be eaten unless they're grilled, and disposable, single-use grills are among the rarest items in the game.
- Sheltered is about a family trying to survive as long as they can in a fallout shelter immediately following a nuclear war. Supplies are scarce and insufficient for long-term survival, forcing the family to go out into the wasteland to find more, which requires fresh water and either radiation suits or medical supplies (for radiation sickness) when they get back.
- Sir, You Are Being Hunted makes being tracked by mustachioed, tweed-clad robots that much harder by limiting you to whatever you can scavenge and fit inside your grid. Rifles and shotguns in particular can really mess up your Tetris game.
- In the same vein as Sheltered above, there's 60 Seconds!. At the beginning of the game, you have 60 seconds to grab all the supplies (and family members) you can and take them to the bunker. After that comes the hard part- surviving until you can be rescued. Supplies can be replenished by scavenging or random events, but they can also be destroyed. Going without food or water for too long will kill family members, and lack of important items can make them get sick, go insane, or prevent you from reaching an ending.
- This War of Mine puts you in the role of an ordinary civilian trying to survive in a besieged city in Graznavia during a devastating modern war (the setting is inspired by the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War). You have to construct shelters in available surviving buildings, scavenge for edible supplies, fuel, materials needed for repairs, etc. You need to regularly venture outside of your (relatively safe) camp and barter or scavenge for new supplies and resources on your own. The game mechanics involve the specific group of survivors working as a team to keep a steady supply of items needed for daily survival. Though you can come across some lighter weapons and ammunition for potential self-defence, these are hard to come by and scarce.
- UnReal World is an open-world roguelike set in a land based on prehistoric, Iron Age Finland. The primary goal is to simply survive throughout the calendar year, and one can go about it in numerous ways. The game is strongly management-focused, with the player regularly needing to eat, drink, rest and sleep, and avoid overheating, hypothermia or catching diseases. Additionally, every tool and structure needs to be built from gathered resources. Resource gathering itself can often take a while, especially if there's a need for larger quantities of building materials (e.g. for building a log cabin) or rarer, special materials (e.g. quality leather, as a tying/binding implement) and certain crops (both wild and agricultural plants follow seasonal cycles, so you can't just pick them whenever you want). Outside of exploring to find new natural resources for everyday life, the player can also barter with NPCs from established settlements and existing tribes.
Stealth Games
- In Dishonored, Corvo often has a limited amount of bolts, ammunition and other devices on hand, forcing him to use them wisely until he can scavenge, purchase or craft more.
- The Death to Spies series has a system of careful pre-mission item and weapon selection, with additional items and weapons being scavangeable during missions.
- Hitman: Codename 47, involves a similar pre-mission menu that also allows the player to buy extra ammo and other smaller equipment, in addition to selecting the equipment for a mission.
- Certain installments of the Splinter Cell series force the player to use his lockpicking tools wisely, as they're one-use only.
- In the Thief games, while some of your tools are virtually always present and available, you can run out of many items, including regular and trick arrows (the ammo), trick explosives (used mostly for stunning or stalling opponents), and helpful potions (for increasing health, breath, etc.). Replenishing these items involves either finding spares strewn around the missions themselves, or buying the items anew in secret shops in between missions. Depending on how a mission is structured and what challenges it poses, one often has to adopt his tactics to ration certain ammo and items more carefully than others. Naturally, you can handle a lot of things with just stealth alone, but certain tools are very helpful in getting to places or ensuring you won't be detected as easily (e.g. water arrows for putting out lights, rope arrows for vertical exploration).
First Person Shooter
- The original Doom³ is actually noticeably tighter on ammo than most other FPS games. While ammo is common enough that you're unlikely to run out completely, each individual ammo pickup is small enough that you can't rely on any single weapon throughout the entire game, and will need to switch between your guns fairly frequently based on your current ammo supply for each. Only shotgun ammo is found in relative excess, and the Doom 3 shotgun is infamous for being essentially a melee weapon that happens to use ammo. This is averted in the BFG Edition, which roughly doubles the amount of ammo you get.
- Compared to Doom (2016), many weapons in Doom Eternal had their capacity reduced by more than half, strongly encouraging the player to frequently switch weapons and exploit enemy weaknesses instead of trying to solve every demonic problem with a shotgun. The ammo-restoring chainsaw, something of a trump card before, has been reworked in a manner that allows (and all but requires) it to be regularly woven into the cadence of combat to keep your stockpiles at healthy levels.
- Operation Flashpoint and the ARMA series have you managing your and fellow teammates' health, available weaponry and ammunition, available vehicles, etc., in their campaigns.
- The ARMA series even added basic laying out of military camps, based on the resources you have.
- Operation Flashpoint's expansion pack, Resistance, made the management focus even greater due to its storyline focusing on leading a resistance group in an invaded country.
- In Receiver, bullets are only found by threes and fours (or even ones and twos) scattered widely over the map, and you have no Emergency Weapon. Make every shot count, in other words.
- In SWAT 3 and SWAT 4, outside of using your relatively small amount of ammo reasonably, you also have to ration the use of some of your items. You and even your team members can run out of stun grenades, depending on the size of a mission and how often you decide to use the grenades. The fourth game also offers tactical wedges for blocking doors, but the amount you can comfortably carry with you is fairly limited, so you have to think twice about which exact doors you'll be blocking to box in suspects.
- Void Bastards has several important resources. Sandwiches are consumed between levels; if you don't have a sandwich, you lose health, but you can consume extra sandwiches to regain health too. Fuel is required to actually travel to another level: if you don't have fuel, the run is a loss and you have to start again. Kudos are currency, and can be used for everything from opening (or locking) doors and storage containers to purchasing other resources and fixing various systems. You also need to manage your ammunition, and collect various odds and ends to build upgrades to your gear. Every level also has a limited amount of oxygen for your suit, requiring you to refill it at an O2 station (or leave before you run out).
Puzzle Game
- Blue Prince: Your steps are what you use to explore the Big Labyrinthe Building and if you completely run out of them, the day automatically ends and you're sent to the next day with your inventory and most of your progress reset. You also need to collect and carefully manage your keys, gems, and coins to be able to unlock and afford rooms in higher ranks and having none of them can completely halt your exploration for that day with impassable locked doors or dead-end rooms even if you still have a lot of steps remaining.
- Chroma Zero: You have to carefully manage your Red, Blue and Green Energy to avoid upsetting the balance of the world. Seemingly Subverted once you learn how to generate Energy for free, but Zig-Zagged as sometimes you have to deplete Energy in order to progress, and fully Adverted for the Dark Phase.
Strategy
- The BattleTech video game requires the player to manage heat in battle, similar to the source material. Generate too much heat in battle without being able to vent it via heat sinks, and your 'Mech will start malfunctioning and shut down (or, in a worst case scenario, explode catastrophically). This makes heat dispersal the valuable resource that has to be managed on a per-unit basis. You also need to pay for and ration out your available reserves of medical care and technical support, ensuring you have enough of both to recover and repair damaged units and heal injured warriors in anything less than two months. On top of that, you also have to manage your unit's morale and standing with various benefactors; don't expect a warm welcome if you show up on House Liao's doorstep after shooting up their Capellan Home Guards.
- In Beecarbonize, each of the four sectors produces resources, which are needed to make new cards that speed up production and reduce greenhouse emissions in order to save the planet. Also, 1 Industry token is spent for every People token produced to feed the population, and running out of Industry tokens leads to starvation. You must spend 2 People tokens to mitigate this or else you'll lose the game.
- The Caesar series, by the same developers as Pharaoh, has very similar resource-and-distribution management. Due to the ancient Roman setting, this includes building reservoirs and aqueducts for supplying cities with water, and so on.
- Dwarf Fortress derives most of its challenge from this trope, once you get past the controls and other complexities. Every single resource has to be accounted for, whether you produce it yourself, acquire (or "acquire") it from caravans, or loot it from invaders.
- FTL: Faster Than Light: Your ship's reactor can output only a certain amount of power, which must be spread out between all your ship's systems. During battles, you need to decide how to best divide your reactor output among all the systems that need power. For example, if none of your crew are wounded you might turn off power to the medbay in order to bring an additional weapon online, or divert power from shields to engines to dodge an incoming shield-piercing missile. On a more strategic level, you also need to ration Missiles, Drone Parts, and Scrap. Missiles are used for Missile and Bomb weapons, which ignore shields, but using them recklessly would cause you to run out just when you don't have time to bring down shields with your energy weapons. Drone Parts are used the Drone Control and Hacking systems, which can create a wide variety of effects that range from Attack Drones to repairing your ship to powering down your opponent's weapons, but much like Missiles they will run out if you don't use them wisely. Scrap is used for both upgrading your ship and purchasing equipment and repairs from shops, and a major part of general strategy is knowing when you need to get upgrades to survive the certain sector, and when you can hold onto it to buy things from stores.
- Homeworld could easily turn into a game of resource management, especially early on. Unlike most RTS games you carried your units and remaining resources from one mission to the next, and you didn't always have the luxury of vast resources available to replenish your forces on every map. Suffering too many loses or being forced to abandon parts of your fleet in a hasty retreat could easily lead to an Unwinnable situation. Using cheap workers to capture powerful enemy ships quickly became a go-to favorite for veteran players.
- Hyperspeed is a game of fuel economy. You are exploring a distant galaxy, and once you travel out of range of your home base, the only ways to replenish fuel are to barter it from aliens (unreliable, costly, and often requires entangling yourself in byzantine alien politics) or through destroying alien starbases (of which there are a limited supply, and is guaranteed to make the offended species and its allies declare war on you.) Becoming stranded between stars is a constant peril; if you do become stranded, the only recourse is to bail out and lose all progress you made on your starship, effectively beginning over at level 1.
- Kingdom (2015) and its various updates put you in the role of a king or queen who must begin their kingdom from the ground up, budgeting your gold wisely between recruiting peasants, assigning them tools to perform tasks, and developing fortifications to protect them from the Greed.
- LEGO Rock Raiders: Many caverns in the game have a limited supply of breathable air, which your Rock Raiders will use up as they work. The Support Station building is critical for these missions, as it is able to generate enough fresh air to support up to ten Rock Raiders at a time. "A Breath of Fresh Air", the first mission to use this mechanic, has building the Support Station as the victory condition.
- Manic Miners: The Fan Remake of LEGO Rock Raiders retains the fresh air limitation on many missions, and the use of the Support Station to mitigate it. In this version, the air meter has a timer on it to show the player the Exact Time to Failure.
- In MechCommander, salvage is everything. The credits you're paid for each mission don't cover all the repairs and upgrades you need, and some items can't be bought in stores, so you'll have to constantly gather salvage to upgrade your mechs. Also, on each mission, you're given very limited supplies of SupportPowers, such as artillery and sensor probes.
- Nintendo Wars: Survival mode in Advance Wars: Dual Strike tasks you with completing several maps in a row with a limited amount of money, turns, or time. The goal is not merely to win, but to win as quickly and efficiently as possible so that you don't run out of that resource later.
- Pharaoh: While resources are infinite, the rate of collection is not, and depends on many factors (building placement, workforce, distance from the raw materials, availability of raw materials if imported, having enough storage space, the weather for floodplain farming...). And if maintaining a suitable balance between having enough of a particular product both to export and satisfy your citizens' needs wasn't enough, you often get demands for ridiculous quantities that almost require you to set up dedicated storage facilities. Juggling them all is the defining aspect of the game, even with the considerable Acceptable Breaks from Reality and Anti-Frustration Features.
- Spore has the Staff of Life, which can only be obtained once and only used 42 times.
- Stars! (1995) requires careful management of your resources from people to minerals. Of note, there is a finite supply of minerals available on the planets for the most part, so the end-game of the larger games involves finding ways to do more with less because the minerals just don't exist.
- Sieges in Stronghold require you to make effective use of the troops, traps and structures you're given throughout the whole scenario. You can't replenish your forces, so a mistake early on can make things very difficult later.
- S.W.I.N.E.'s campaigns have this trope, despite the game being a tactical RTS. This is because everything is limited - you only earn Strategic Points at the start of every mission, which you use to field your units, upgrade them and keep them supplied with fuel, ammunition and armor repairs. The number of units you can field is finite, and all three kinds of supplies are finite - in longer missions the supply trailers used to replenish your combat units will themselves run dry. Hence the conservation of the supplies you have, or Points with which to airlift more in, becomes and important strategic factor.
- Transport Tycoon and its successor Locomotion have you mostly building and managing land, water and aerial based public transport, but resource management does come into play. Your available finances allow you to build infrastructure, vehicles and manage budgets and PR, your popularity standing in a particular community affects if you can build there, and you even (indirectly) manage actual industrial resources based on how you interconnect various industries present in the game world (e.g. sending coal to powerplants, iron ore to steel mills, agricultural resources to food-processing companies, etc.). Even commuting passengers become a resource of sorts, as the more you improve the passenger and cargo transport infrastructure, the more towns and cities can grow in size, population and further develop.
- VGA Planets is another FourX space-empire game where you have to manage your limited supply of the four minerals needed to build spaceships and starbases, and the fuel/fighters/torpedoes for said ships. You can construct ships that produce minerals and fuel using Supplies, but then you need factories churning out those Supplies. And so almost inevitably you have to scrounge and economize.
- Wargame: European Escalation and its sequels AirLand Battle and Red Dragon are tactical-level Real-Time Strategy games which, unusually, force the player to be concerned about logistics for each individual unit. Vehicles that run out of fuel will grind to a halt, vehicles and infantry that run out of ammo will be unable to do anything to the enemy, and any unit that is damaged will be less effective in one way or another until it is repaired. Aircraft have a limited loiter time over the battlefield and will evacuate the area once low on fuel or out of ammo. Ammunition, fuel, and "repairs" (either repair parts for vehicles, or replacement soldiers for infantry) must be delivered to your units by truck, helicopter, or landing craft, or those vehicles must return to a Forward Operating Base for refuel, repair, and rearmament. No exceptions. Protecting your supply lines is a key part of gameplay.
- ''Zeus: Master of Olympus is also by the developers of Caesar and Pharaoh, and shares many of their resource-management elements. Of particular importance is having to manage imports and exports of raw versus manufactured materials between colonies in order to maintain a healthy economy.
Other
- Astroneer: The player will die after running out of oxygen, but bases and vehicles contain an infinite supply that extends to the range of a tether network. All base modules and vehicles require both a variety of materials to be built, and a steady supply of power or fuel to operate. (There are modules that can be used to more easily obtain or replace materials not easily available.)
- Awaria: The core gameplay is to fix generators with various pieces of tech spread around the levels while murderous ghosts pursue the protagonist. Giving a second level of complexity is some of the pieces of tech need to be made with simpler tech, meaning with a constant countdown until the generators explode, managing your time is equally important as dodging ghosts.
- In Crying Suns, your battleship starts with 5 units of fuel (or Neo-N) and uses up one each time it moves from planet to planet or jumps from one system to another. There are three ways to get more: buy it from shops, which have limited stock; find it on expeditions, which are risky and unpredictable; or scavenge it from hypercubes, which can only be done once per system. Run out, and you’ll be forced to wait for a passing ship to refuel you... and there’s a good chance the passing ship will be a hostile pirate looking to plunder you.
- Cultist Simulator requires you to ensure a constant supply of money, so as to pay for both ongoing survival, recovering from injuries and a string of sinister tomes. Running out of money is a surefire way to end up dead: even if you're on the cusp of transcending your frail human body into something immortal, if you run out of money first, then it's game over.
- In Detritus, unless you've chosen the easy mode, you need to keep track of Jean's hunger, thirst and oxygen. As you can't fill oxygen bottles, they have to be scavenged in the spaceship wreckage.
- Everdell: The game has a very tight amount of actions to be made, and building things requires resources, which have to be first gathered by either your (very limited) workers, or cards you've played.
- Immortal Soul: Black Survival revolves around this mechanic. You have six inventory slots which you have to use over the course of the game to create Armor, Weapons, and Food from a limited amount of resources scattered around the map. You have to manage all of these slots over the course of the game, and if you make improper choices or don't leave enough space to pick up items that you need you will quickly fall behind everyone else.
- The first two Iron Grip games are a blend of first person shooter and tower defence. In Iron Grip Warlord, your primary resources are "Power" (basically finance, used for building defensive structures) and "Morale" (self-explanatory; the game's progress and outcome depends on lowering the attacking enemy's morale to zero, while keeping your defenders' morale high).
- A key part in Lakeburg Legacies is managing the resources the villagers collect by working the various jobs. This ranges from requiring lumber to build new buildings and heating houses to crafting jewelry as a luxury for villagers. Lacking a resource can mean no new buildings or unhappy villagers, which lowers their life expectancy.
- Mercenary Force is a Shoot 'em Up but unlike others of its genre, it involves resource management via money. You have a limited supply of money to buy mercenaries at the start of the game and you must use that money to buy replacements between levels and Power-Up Food at shops to keep them high in hit points. Enemies do drop coins but they are not generous in dropping them when killed. Strategy involves not only getting money when you can but using it wisely and managing your own mercenaries by keeping them alive.
- Monster Rancher. Since monsters have a life-span ranging from 1 year to 11 years, you have to be very cautious of what you make your monster do, and when. In general, the money in this game could be considered as no Economy Management.
- As the year drags on in Papers, Please, you will be tasked with keeping track of more and more minute criteria for allowing people into Arstotzka, including multiple security features for passports, corroborating statements to check for forgery, checking the expiration dates on work permits, etc. If you want to do any of the side quests, you'll also have to make sure that you keep an eye out for specific people in the queue and be careful not to make too many mistakes or you'll start losing money. You even have to remember to take down anything you have hung up on the walls of your post when your supervisor comes by for inspection, or he'll dock your pay!
- A key part of Pixel Junk Nom Nom Galaxy is knowing when to gather resources and when to exploit them to ship as much Soup as possible. Building up sustainable ways of producing resources will help drastically in the long run, though waiting for ingredients to grow is sometimes not an option. You also need to know how to carefully manage resources that are significantly harder (if not impossible) to renew in order to make as much Soup and money from them as possible.
- Seaman starts the player off with a limited supply of food pellets to feed to their Seaman which cannot be replenished. To prevent the Seaman from starving, one must carefully ration the pellets until they unlock the insect cage, which also requires attention: the cage must be kept from drying out, and spiders need to be dealt with to keep them from killing your moths. When properly maintained, the insect cage can provide a self-sustaining source of food for your Seaman, while neglecting it will result in your food supplies running out and your Seaman eventually dying of starvation.
- Star Trek: Voyager - Across the Unknown requires that you maintain a constant supply of various and sundry resources. You need Deuterium to fuel the warp core. Running out means that Voyager will be on emergency power, shutting down all but the most essential systems. You likewise need to find and collect Duranium (for repairs and construction), Dilithium and Tritanium (for advanced construction and repair), and there's almost always more in the various sectors than you can hold in your very limited storage. Photon Torpedoes are your most powerful weapon in combat, but have to be constructed, which requires resources, crew members assigned to it, and time. Voyager also has limited space for new rooms, requiring you to prioritize placement. The most critical resource is Morale: if it falls too low, the crew will rebel against Janeway and the game is over. Maintaining morale requires using resources for things like powering the Holodeck, or collecting food to create meals instead of using unlimited by morale-cratering emergency rations. And on top of all this is a time limit: you must complete at least the story mission of each chapter in a timely fashion and move on, or the crew will get restless that they're not getting any closer to home and start taking penalties to morale until you finish the chapter, meaning you have to prioritize getting the resources you need in a timely fashion while also advancing the plot and (optionally) completing any sidequests.
- Sonic Riders: The first game's main gimmick is Air, an analogue to fuel in a conventional vehicle that gradually depletes over time. Players also burn Air to cast special moves, such as Boosting, Drifting, and dropping Tornadoes, and Air can only be recharged by dedicated refill stations placed along the track, random Item Box pickups, successfully performing tricks off launch pads, obtaining enough Rings to level up (which also boosts the size of the total Air gauge), utilizing the shortcuts for the three ability types, or stage gimmicks. A lot of the strategy in Riders revolves around efficiently managing your Air usage to maximize uptime and minimize downtime needed to refuel.
- The old Avalon Hill board game Third Reich takes place at the corps level and is quite abstract. Attacking is very expensive. A 2:1 attack succeeds about 97.5% of the time (3:1 always succeeds) and the die roll is used to determine the casualties. Defending ground units get terrain multipliers so 2:1 is usually closer to 4:1. Managing your resources and supply lines is a huge (and very boring) part of the game.
- Wick has candles to keep the Weaver children away. The candle slowly depletes through the night and need to be replaced. New candles can be lit with old candles. Matches can be used if the character runs out of candles, but once they run out, there is no opportunity for new light sources.