Useless items in games

A lot of games contain items or pickups which can be found or purchased within the game world (for example: weapons, potions, spells, and so on). The idea behind these items is that they give a boost to the player (sometimes they'll give a positive and a negative effect, but the idea is that a skilled player will be able to work around the negatives and take advantage of the positives). Unfortunately, in many games, a few of these items will end up being completely useless (with some possible niche exceptions) - and, for the most part, players will actively try to avoid picking them up. Sometimes, their positive effect offers no meaningful benefit whatsoever; other times, their negative effect outweighs the positive effects; and other times, they might be too expensive to be worth the cost.

One example from FTL: Faster than Light is the Repair Arm. This repairs one or two points of hull damage every time you collect Scrap - but at the cost of reducing your Scrap income by 15% each time. On the face of it, this sounds good: it saves you from having to repair at stores (which costs 2-4 Scrap per point of hull damage). Unfortunately, it isn't worth it at all: by the end of the game, you'll be making 60-80 Scrap per battle, meaning the Repair Arm will use up 9-12 Scrap to repair only one or two points of hull damage. It used to be even worse than this, because the 15% income reduction would apply even when your ship was fully repaired, but fortunately, that was later patched out. Even so, the best way to use the Repair Arm is to sell it (for 25 Scrap), and then use the income from the sale to repair your ship .

So, are there any more useless items that you'd like to bring up?

Some of the yno games have effects that seem useless to me cos I don’t know how to use them.