Automoderated users, Autopatrolled users, Bureaucrats, Comment administrators, Confirmed users, Moderators, Rollbackers, Administrators
213,897
edits
prefix>Import Bot (Import from TV Tropes TVT:Main.Cap 2012-07-01, editor history TVTH:Main.Cap, CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported license) |
No edit summary |
||
(30 intermediate revisions by 9 users not shown) | |||
Line 1:
{{trope}}
[[File:
No, not the [[Nice Hat|stylish headgear]] favored by baseball players nor the [[Captain America (comics)|dashing nazi-buster]]. Nor the shorthand for "capture". A "cap" is the maximum number of instances of something a game's engine can process. Once you've hit the cap for that thing, any other factors which would increase it beyond the cap may as well not have happened.
'''This has a variety of uses in game design, but the gamer is concerned with caps in only a handful of instances:'''
# '''Damage caps'''. Many [[
# '''Statistic caps'''. The point at which a character's statistics can go no higher. In some games, characters' stats cap only at unfeasibly high levels, but in others (notably the ''[[Fire Emblem]]'' series) the caps are reachable at normal levels and thus are a big deal. Levels themselves often have a cap as well, which may or may not come before reaching other stat caps.
# '''Inventory caps'''. The maximum amount of a single item you're allowed to carry. Combined with the [[Hyperspace Arsenal]], this can create weird situations, such as the ability to carry 99 Potions and 99 Hi-Potions, but not 100 Potions and 0 Hi-Potions. Also applies to [[
#* Another variant, common for [[Grid Inventory]], lets each slot hold limited amount of objects, and the number of slots is limited, but you are allowed to have multiple slots with the same kind of item.
#* Yet another variant is '''carrying capacity''', where you may have a maximum weight/size of items you can carry, and items have different weight/size. See [[Inventory Management Puzzle]] for details.
# '''Time caps'''. In games or situations in which you are being timed, the time usually has some upper limit at which it stops counting. The ''[[Paper Mario (franchise)|Paper Mario]]'' games stop counting your time at ninety-nine hours, fifty-nine minutes, fifty-nine seconds, for example. Usually has no effect on gameplay, unless the programmers royally screwed up (think the Berry Glitch from early versions of ''[[Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire]]'').
# '''Score caps'''. In older games that kept score, it's often possible to amass a score higher than the game can track. This is especially possible in games from the Atari 2600 generation, since they can go on without end if one is a good enough player. Reaching the maximum score in a given game was a point of honor among gamers. Among fans of [[Shoot'Em Up|Shmups]], this is known as a "counter stop," or "kansuto" in Japanese.
# '''Combo caps'''. Many fighting games which count the number of hits in a combo will stop counting at some point, 99 being a popular limit.
# '''Unit caps'''. The maximum amount of units, either of a specific kind or all together, that you can have on the field at once in a [[Real Time Strategy|Real Time]] or [[Turn
There are three kinds of caps:
Line 17 ⟶ 19:
* '''Designer Imposed Cap:''' A cap deliberately set by the designers, usually to keep play balanced. For example, you might be limited to carrying 15 bombs so you can't plow through the entire game throwing bombs at everything.
* '''Hardware Imposed Cap:''' In computer games, caps are sometimes imposed by the hardware. Computers generally store variables (a "variable" is anything that can change) in a given location of a fixed size. That size determines the range of the variable. Such caps are [[Powers of Two Minus One|typically a power of two (or very close to a power of two)]], since computers store everything in binary. Typical manifestations include '''127''', '''255''', '''32767''', '''65535''', '''2147483647''' and '''4294967295'''. These corresponding to common formats for integers: Signed and unsigned, 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit. (Computers count from zero, not one, which is why 2<sup>8</sup>=256 yields a cap of 255: 0 to 255 is 256 possible values.)
* '''Interface Induced Caps ("all nines"):''' These are caps of '''9''', '''99''', '''999''', '''9999''', and so on. This is very rarely a hardware limitation (see Hardware Imposed Caps above)
Games are sometimes not even programmed to cap such counters when they should. They will dutifully add one to a value that can't properly go any higher, resulting in an "overflow" malfunction. This is especially common with old games, because putting in a test for a maximum value would use memory and CPU cycles they didn't have to spare. An overflow might manifest as:
Line 23 ⟶ 25:
* The counter rolls over to a very negative number, like -32768. (The "carry over" digit was written to the bit used for sign representation.)
* The display gets messed up as digits for the overflowed counter "run into" some other information on the display.
* Some of the digits become 'nonsense' characters. (This primarily occurs with right-justified displays.
* The game locks up, crashes, or starts to act really weird. (Due to the overflow clobbering memory used for something else entirely, or just because the game wasn't written to handle things like a negative counter.)
* The game aborts with an error. (Rare except on modern platforms that do automatic range checking for the programmer.)
When a game or display error is caused by the level number (or something directly affected by the level number), and makes it impossible to continue, it's a [[Kill Screen]].
Line 32 ⟶ 34:
See also [[Arbitrary Headcount Limit]], [[Scratch Damage]], and [[Pinball Scoring]]. Overflows can easily be [[Good Bad Bugs]].
Not to be confused with a [[Nice Hat]], or a certain [[Captain America|hero from World War II who's still around thanks to a good icing]].
{{examples}}
== [[Live-Action TV]] ==
* Many [[Game Show]]s put limits on how much contestants can win and/or how long they can stay champion before retiring. See [[Game Show Winnings Cap]].
* ''[[Wheel of Fortune]]'' ran into this when they got a contestant who won more than $100 000 (this was when winners got to come back). Only the last 5 digits fit on the electronic board, prompting the production team to draw a "1" on a piece of paper and hand it to Sajak so he could hold it up next to the other digits.
* ''[[Press Your Luck]]'' gives a similar example that may qualify as an [[Averted Trope|aversion]]. The score displays for the contestants could only fit six characters: one for the dollar sign and five for the digits. When Michael Larson broke the $100,000 barrier in his infamous performance, the score display just showed the number without the dollar sign, i.e., "110237" instead of "$110237".
* ''[[The Price Is Right]]'' also had a cap on the display board for the one bid games. There was only enough room for a dollar sign and 4 digits, which wasn't a problem until some contestants wanted to gain attention by making bids in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions. When the display boards were upgraded to run with more current technology, contestants that make ridiculous bids can have their bids fit on the board.
== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* The [[Tabletop Game]] RPG based off of the ''[[Final Fantasy]]'' series even has a damage cap (of 999), simulating the cap of the console games.
* ''[[Dungeons & Dragons]]''
** The Rules Cyclopedia caps the damage that high level magic-users can deal with their attack spells at twenty dice.
** The same cap is used for fall damage, 1d6 per 3m fallen to a maximum of 20d6. This gets hilarious around level 10, when characters could fall from any height and live with a strict rule interpretation.
*** Hence ''[[Spelljammer]]'' rule on reentry - after that, every round of falling adds 1d4 ''heat'' damage, doubling each next round, and the maximum-force impact itself falls under "massive damage" rule (save or die).
*** What's really fun is the epic spell ''Nailed to the Sky'' (from a much later edition), which puts the target in orbit.
** Though there is technically no cap on level in D&D, the rules balance tends to erode after level 20. The [[Epic Level Handbook]] extends this to about level 40.
*** And all of this is ''highly'' dependent on the edition you're playing and, in some editions, your character class and race as well. (Feats did not exist until 3rd Edition, the "colored box" version capped level at 36 for humans and somewhere around 10 for demihumans, etc.)
*** 4th Edition caps the levels at 30. ''Sort of.'' The mathematics in 4e is linear, so you can actually extend it all indefinitely and everything remains relatively well balanced, there are even enemies that are over level 30, although they're all gods or god-like beings. PCs who hit 30 get to finish whatever it is they are doing and then are consumed by their Epic Destiny which, more often than not, results in ascension to godhood.
**** They do, however, run out of powers and such. Insert auto-power generation programs!
* There were periods where the Camarilla, White Wolf Publishing's official fan-club for ''[[Old World of Darkness|World of Darkness]]'' live-action games, put damage caps on PCs in sanctioned [[LARP]]s. This was one of many fixes attempted to make the tabletop rules work in live-action, although in practice mid-powered characters hit cap very easily and high-powered characters were basically unaffected by any penalties.
== [[Video Games]] ==
=== Action-Adventure Games ===
* The later ''Zelda'' games tie your money cap to the size of your wallet. Collecting a bigger one will allow you to carry more money...[[Money for Nothing|not that you'll need it]], generally.
** Well, there are some useful items that are actually sold for more than your standard wallet can hold. The rupees themselves are still worthless, but you need the bigger wallet just to buy it.
** ''[[The Legend of Zelda (
** In ''[[The Legend of Zelda:
* The DS ''[[Castlevania]]'' games have hard modes that will let you set a cap on how high your max level will reach.
* ''[[
=== Action Games ===
* ''[[The Guardian Legend]]'' has an extreme example of this. The game will '''crash''' if you max out the score. This is especially bad, since the game gives you [[Every Ten Thousand Points|life-increase bonuses when you reach certain plateaus.]]
* ''[[Bloodline Champions]]'' has a maximum amount of health that a bloodline can regenerate from healing abilities. If their health goes below that, it cannot be regained aside from using the impractical-near-opponents [[Heal Thyself|Bloodline Medallion]].
=== Beat Em Ups ===
* The arcade ''[[Bad Dudes]]'' capped your score at 999,990.
** As did nearly every other Data East game of that era; it was just really easy with Bad Dudes (pretty much guaranteed if you played all the way through 1-player). It was possible in Sly Spy if you were willing to spend some time blowing up respawning mines.
* The arcade ''[[Ninja Gaiden]]'' (a.k.a. Shadow Warriors) capped at 999,900. However, because the score reset when you continued, this was only possible if you...er, found some method of not running out of time, then killed tons of river monsters (the only respawning enemies in the game).
=== Driving Games ===
* It might seem counterintuitive for a racing game, but going slowly in a ''[[Mario Kart 64]]'' [[Time Trial]] will result in you hitting the time cap. The game's engine will not count any higher than ninety-nine minutes, fifty-nine-point-ninety-nine seconds (although subsequent lap times are still counted).
** ''[[Super Mario Kart]]'' capped your time at 10 minutes and stopped moving after that.
*** ''[[Mario Kart]] Wii'' loops the timer after a while, allowing you to get insane times by waiting a few days with your Wii on and crossing the line finish ''just'' as it passes 0.
* ''[[F-Zero]] GX'' has a record time cap: if you get a low enough time on a course, it will not have an internet ranking password for it; i.e., Big Blue Ordeal won't give you a password if your time is under 1'20". How are such times possible? You [[Game Breaker|exploit hidden checkpoints to trick the game you're going all the way around the course when in fact you're just going circles around the finish line.]]
* ''[[Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune]] 2'' has you collect a star for every opponent for defeat in versus mode. The stars cap out at 3,999. Interestingly, once you're over 2,000 stars, a fourth-place finish in a four-player battle will ''remove'' a star.
* ''[[Tokyo Xtreme Racer]] Zero'' caps your speed at 263
* ''[[
** More a [[Bragging Rights Reward]] than anything, since you only needed 900,000 points for full tune. And of course, since the requisite is beating the first 10 levels of Bunta Challenge, it's safe to say that a lot of players ended up spending ''more'' money than they would've reaching full tune honestly.
* In ''[[Gran Turismo]] 3'', there's a glitch where if you do a wheelie with a tuned-up Escudo, the speedometer jumps to 2147483647 and locks up the game.
** Then there's ''
** In a similar way, in ''[[Gran Turismo]] 2'' you can't have more than 100 cars, which ruins the ''[[Gotta Catch Em All]]'' self-imposed challenge.
=== Fighting Games ===
* The ''[[Super Smash Bros.]]''. series sets the damage cap at 999%. If you haven't already gone flying offscreen by ''that'' point, you certainly will now.
** That said, the game calculates the knockback caused by an attack before it sets your damage back to 999%. So you can have more than 999% damage, if only for a sixtieth of a second.
** The Super Scope in Melee can be abused to generate [http://www.ssbwiki.com/Infinite_Super_Scope_Glitch an infinite amount of ammo], which is most likely due to an overflow.
* ''[[Mortal Kombat]]'' always had some way of capping off a combo after a certain amount of hits, usually by knocking the player back as the last viable hit lands. It wasn't perfect, though, as only certain attacks would trigger it, and only if done almost immediately after the last one landed, meaning if one timed it right, they can get into some crazy infinite combos. ''[[
* ''[[
=== First-Person Shooter ===
* ''[[Descent]]'' allows you a maximum of 5 Mega Missiles (10 in ''Descent II''), but you can only retrieve 3 after you die.
* In ''[[
=== Hack and Slash ===
* ''[[The King of Dragons]]'' for the SNES has a lives cheat which gets one 99 lives by taking advantage of the combined life pool. A single player would use up the standard allotment until only one life remained. While the continue counted down, a second player would join, using the remaining life credit. The first player would then choose to continue, causing the life credits to wraparound from 0 to 99.
=== Light Gun Games ===
* In ''[[Time Crisis]] 2'', your combo is capped at 99 hits. ''Time Crisis 3'' lets you get into the triple digits, and it is possible in ''Time Crisis 4'''s Stage 1 Area 2 to have 999 hits.
=== Maze Games ===
* The ''[[Pac-Man]]'' arcade machine had a maximum number of levels of 255, imposing an unintended score cap of 3,333,360. On level 256 a variable overflow causes a final glitched level which cannot be beaten as almost half of the dots needed to complete the level are missing. Getting the max score entails eating every ghost with every power pellet (until the ghosts stop turning blue), and eating every fruit for each level. Then you need to have 5 lives (another cap) going into level 256, and collect all 9 dots on the right side with each life (unlike non-glitched dots, these ones regenerate each time Pac-Man dies).
=== MMORPGs ===
* About 18 months after the game was first released, ''[[City of Heroes]]'' capped the number of enemies you could "aggro" (hold the attention of) at once. Although this seems purely beneficial, the cap was still well above what the [[Fragile Speedster|more delicate]] [[An Adventurer Is You|character types]] could withstand, so the actual purpose was to keep the [[Mighty Glacier|tankers]] from being able to lure obscene amounts of critters into a confined space for easy disposal.
** Speaking of ''City of...'', while the individual characters
** There
** There
* The online game ''[[Kingdom of Loathing]]'' had an infamous example where the problem of poorly capped [[Global Currency]] resulted in the massive bug known as Black Sunday. An item called the meat vortex could steal meat (your currency in this game) from enemies in combat, but it lowered the amount of meat you had if used any other time. If you had 0 meat, using a meat vortex from your inventory caused the value to roll under, thus placing you at the maximum possible integer amount of meat, which at the time was 2^64-1, or 18,446,744,073,709,551,615. This hosed the game's economy for several months, but was eventually mostly fixed through currency sinks. The cap itself has also been lowered to 2^32-1, or 4,294,967,295.
* A German ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' player recently reached the cap of 214,748 gold, that is, 2,147,483,646 copper coins (that's 2^31-2). ''Cataclysm'' raises the cap to 999,999 gold; larger amounts can be stored using multiple characters.
** This number is faster achieved through the Statistics system. Basically, if you buy an item for 1000 and resell it for 1200 you've earned 200, but the system records 1200 "obtained" gold. When the limit is achieved, the number loops to negative and grows back to positive.
** There are many other caps as well, the most obvious being the level cap. Honor points (which are currency for [[
** Also notable are the character stats, most of which have their cap defined as the point where getting the stat higher is entirely pointless. You can't have more than a 100% chance to hit, after all (although excess can still be useful if the character is affected by a status effect lowing hit chance). Similarly, no matter how much haste you stack, you can't reduce the global cooldown below one second, and many stats (like dodge and parry) have a "soft cap" or diminishing returns beyond which they become less effective.
** The damage cap, which has only been reached by exploiting glitches, is 2^29.
* ''[[Guild Wars]]'' has a system called "Favor of the Gods," which is tied to [[Bragging Rights Reward|several maxed titles]]. A recent weekend event that made it easy to max out two of those titles pushed the amount of favor well beyond the cap, presumed to be 2^31 milliseconds (about 35,791 minutes). (To put into perspective how much favor was accumulated that weekend: it nearly reached the cap AGAIN.)
** And then there is the wallet cap of 100.000 gold on your character. Trading large quantities of expensive items requires multiple trips to the storage chests for both parties (luckily you can trade standing next to said chests) . Trading for a single item worth more than 100.000 gold is usually done by using a rare crafting material as currency, or the buying party giving the seller his rare customized armor (which the seller can't use or sell for much, but would be very expensive for the buyer to replace) while he pays the amount in several increments, with the armor returned with the last payment.
* ''[[Anarchy Online]]'' has a number of different caps, most related to damage.
** The first cap is in relation to damage done, unless the attack is a Full Auto attack from a ranged weapon, all damage caps at 13,000 points of damage done (though it's been theorized that Agents can hit for about 1 million points of damage without this cap), regardless of whether it's a normal attack or a special attack. Full Auto attacks cap at 15,000 damage (though skilled Soldiers could probably throw out 200k Full Autos without the cap)
** The second cap applied is to pvp damage, of which there are 2 caps: The first cap cuts all damage by 50% incoming for pvp, so hitting another player for 1000 points of damage requires having dealt out 2000 damage before hand...
Line 104 ⟶ 136:
** Another cap comes into play when it comes to gaining experience points: You can only gain experience up to a maximum of one-tenth of the amount you need to level, and with the release of Lost Eden, this also applies to the experience put into research. This makes for interesting strategies applied by players to avoid experience loss as much as possible, since all xp beyond the cap is lost.
* In ''[[Ultima Online]]'', getting your weight over 65535 will result in it rolling over to 0 again. Just allowing you to move absolutely massive piles of materials. Though realistically only a huge pile of ore could so encumber a player. Also stacks of items over 65535 had the same bug, including gold. In a game where the average person could earn 10000 gold an hour.
* For Free-to-Play players of ''[[
* ''[[
=== Party ===
* ''[[Mario Party]]'' games cap the number of coins a character (or team later) can hold at 999. It's easy to reach this in Mario Party 3 with [[Betting Minigame|Game Guy mini-games]] which can give you up to 64 times what you wagered, but even if you win thousands of coins you can only keep 999.
* ''Pac-Man Fever'' has a few games where it's possible to score higher than 999, most notably Vend-A-Fruit. Interestingly enough, while the game can recognize scores higher than 999 (and will place them accordingly), they'll all show as 999 on the high score table.
* In ''[[
=== Pinball ===
* Pinball machines from when score reels were introduced in the 1950s used backlights. The machine could not display more than the highest-valued one.
* Any game that uses score reels will usually just loop back to 0 points (sometimes going to its maximum possible value before that) if the score became more than they could display. Some games between the jump from 5 digits to 6 would have a "100,000" light to indicate that the player looped the score counter.
Line 118 ⟶ 152:
* Games that use [[DM Ds]] usually can only display 10 digits before rolling over. Some games that the programmers knew use extreme [[Pinball Scoring]] can display [[Up to Eleven]] digits.
* The TurboGrafx pinball game ''Alien Crush'' has a score cap of 999,999,900 points. If you manage to max it out, the entire table explodes and you are given the message [[A Winner Is You|"Congratulations !! You are the greatest player"]]. After that, the game immediately takes you to the high score list for you to enter your initials.
* ''Street Fighter 2'' was the first (and possibly only) machine to not roll over after reaching the maximum possible score, 9,999,999,990. This is actually easier than you might expect due to the "Double Your Score!" reward (which is [[Exactly What It Says
* ''Attack From Mars'' rolls around at [[Pinball Scoring|100 billion]] points. If you go over that, your score will be displayed with leading zeroes, as if the hundred billions digit is cut off (i.e. 100 billion would be 00,000,000,000) but your score will display fully on the high score table and the game will keep track of scores supposedly up to 1 trillion minus ten. It also caps the bonus multiplier at 250x.
=== Platformers ===
* The 2-D ''[[Super Mario Bros.]]'' games cap the number of extra lives you can have at 99. You might collect a hundred thousand [[1-Up|One Ups]] beyond that (easily, in ''Super Mario World''), but the moment you die, you're back to 98.
** The original ''[[Super Mario Bros.]]'' had a maximum of 127 lives, due to the fact that the life counter was a signed byte. Going over 127 lives resulted in actually having ''negative'' lives, and thus getting game over the next time you died. Making matters worse is the fact that the life counter was only designed to display up to 20 lives, and getting any more than that causes your life count to be represented by random letters, punctuation symbols, and/or graphical tiles. Normally this isn't such a problem, considering you'd never get so many lives through normal gameplay, except through abusing glitches. However, collecting as many lives as possible becomes pretty much mandatory in ''The Lost Levels'', because you're going to need every single one, and the first level in the game has a great opportunity for abusing the extra life trick.
** The original ''Super Mario Bros. 2'' capped at 254 ("FE"). This was actually pretty easy to get if you were at least decent with the slot machine (and ridiculously easy if you also used the unlimited coins glitch).
*** "''[[Platform Hell|Thank god I got, like, w blue sky lives there!]]''"
*** It also didn't help that the lives counter was only displayed between stages or just after losing a life, so anyone using an infinite lives trick had to track the lives gained independently of the game interface anyway.
** The ''[[Donkey Kong Country]]'' series, by contrast, only caps the amount of lives ''displayed'' at 99. Collecting more will result in your lives counter remaining at 99, but the extras will still count. Presumably there's a "true" cap on lives, but it's hard to say what it is.
* In an example of poor design, ''[[Aladdin (Virgin Games
* ''[[
** The cap on Scarabs (the currency) that increases three times over the course of the game, from 10, to 50, to 100, to 200.
** Tricky has 5 GrubTubs' worth of energy, and Fox can carry up to 15 around with him to feed Tricky as needed, for a total of... 19 (because even though it only consumes one GrubTub of energy for him to perform a skill, he needs at least two within him to perform.
** Fox can carry up to 7 Bomb Spores.
** He may only carry 1 BaFomDad (read: [[
* In the [[Sonic the Hedgehog]] games, the time is capped at 9 minutes and 59 seconds, with the added caveat that you die if you reach that time.
** In the first act of ''[[Sonic 3 and Knuckles
** In ''[[Sonic 3D:
** [[
* The original arcade version of ''[[Donkey Kong]]'' is notable for having a score cap of 1 million that is almost, but not quite, impossible to reach, due to both the high difficulty of the game and the kill screen which ends the game at level 22. Only three such scores are recorded on Twin Galaxies.
* ''[[Kirby]]'s Dreamland 2'' had a score cap of 9,999,990, which is possible to reach within a week or so of playing (because the score is kept unless you game over). Once you reach the cap though, anything that would add points would simply convert into one-ups, with the sound. As cool as this may seem, as you'll never worry about dying, the sound will get old after five minutes.
* [[Rainbow Islands]] has a cap of 9,999,990 points, unless you enter a code at the title screen which increases this cap to 99,999,990 points.
* In ''[[Knuckles Chaotix]]'', the most rings you can get in a level is 255. Anything beyond that gives you 4,000 points a ring. Also, the most rings you can take into a special stage is 200.
* ''[[
* ''[[New Super Mario Bros
* ''[[
* ''[[
=== Puzzle Games ===
* The ''[[Tetris the Grand Master]]'' series has a unique kind of level cap. You gain 1 level every time you drop a piece or clear a line, but once you are one level below a multiple of 100 or level 999 (the last level), your level stops increasing until you clear a line. This seems useful at first, but causes you to waste time if you're going for a time-sensitive rank, or if the mode you're in has a ''torikan'' (a checkpoint that, if reached too slowly, yields a [[Nonstandard Game Over]]).
* The ''Panel De Pon''/''Tetris Attack''/''Puzzle League'' games allow you to actually ''set'' the cap, at either 99999 or 999999 points.
** The original only had the 99999-point cap. Hitting it in Endless mode gave you different music on the results screen.
*** There is also a sort of cap on chains in the first game; chains are handled properly up to x13, but after that, additional hits are displayed as x? and don't award points. Similarly, combos are only displayed properly up to 30, with larger combos simply displayed as 30.
** In the GameBoy version, this is a hidden option for some reason, which defaults to 99999.
* ''[[Tetris]] Friends'' in Arena Mode caps players' ratings at 19,999. The reason for this strange number seems to stem from the game's ratings-based ranks. A new rank is awarded every 1,000 points (so players with a 0-999 rating are "Newbies", 1,000-1,999 are "Novices", etc.), and it appears they simply ran out of rank names. Of course, the ratings are moot anyways since the entire Top 100 leaderboard is tied at 19,999, due to the ability to prevent ratings decreases entirely via [[Bribing Your Way to Victory]].
* The [[NES]] and [[Game Boy]] versions of ''Tetris'' cap score at 999,999 points. The former has no caps on anything else, really. If you clear 1,000 lines, it will be displayed as A00, then B00, etc. Past "Z99" lines will make the game start using random symbols for the hundreds digit. Same goes with the counters for each piece. These counters will loop back around to 000 after clearing 25,600 lines or getting that many of a piece. The level counter will start to cycle through a pseudo-random sequences of two hexadecimal digits after level 30. The game also starts to break pretty horribly after that, requiring you to pause and resume to keep the game going. The level counter will go back to 00 after 256 levels.
** ''Tetris DX'' (the GBC version) caps score at 9,999,999 points.
* ''Tetris DS'' can display a maximum of 99,999,999 points. If you exceed this amount, it will display that maximum, but your score won't be saved.
** The line and level counters will cap at 999; you'll reach the cap on those a very long time before you reach the score cap.
* A man has essentially ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20130213180229/http://www.joystiq.com/2010/04/30/man-beats-bejeweled-2-after-playing-for-3-years
=== Real-Time Strategy ===
* The second ''[[Warcraft]]'' game had a unit editor. The maximum damage dealt by a unit and hit points possessed by a unit were 255 and 65535, respectively.
* [[Populous: The Beginning]]: Had a tribe size limit of 200 (or more often 199) pushing it to far above this (using an the hypnotism spell exploit) would make the game unstable.
* [[Oregon Trail|The Oregon Trail]], a wretched Apple II game of the 80s, let you go hunting in the wilds to replenish your wagon's food. However, you could only carry 100 pounds of meat back to the wagon. So there was never a good reason to shoot more than one buffalo, or, in fact, anything except buffalo and large animals - why waste the bullets? Also, the total limit of all food was about 2000 pounds.
** There are caps on any item in your inventory. 20 oxen, 50 sets of clothing, 1980 bullets (99 boxes of 20), 3 of each spare wagon part, and 2000 pounds of food.
* In ''[[RHDE]]'', no matter how many missile silos are placed on each side, only 12 can be fired from. Usually this isn't much of an issue unless you're spending all your money on silos.
=== Roguelike ===
* A lot of the strategy in ''[[Angband]]'' involves managing inventory slots, which are capped at a paltry 22. Late in the game, players usually stop collecting loot from the dungeon (unique items excepted) so that they can have a full "kit" of items that provide resistances to various attacks, and the means to deal damage to a variety of enemies.
* ''Nethack'''s [[The Dev Team Thinks of Everything|Devteam]] missed one - the score caps out at 2^31-1 (=2,147,483,647 - lousy four-byte signed integers). That score's been achieved a couple of times, as has an overflow score of -2,145,868,906.
=== Role-Playing Games ===
* As noted above, [[RPG]]s frequently cap the amount of damage you can deal with a single strike. Often this number is 9999, as in the ''[[Final Fantasy]]'' series.
* One of the key contributing factors to the notorious difficulty of ''[[The 7th Saga]]'' was the cap of 9 for any item in your inventory. It made [[Heal Thyself|healing thyself]] rather difficult, mind-boggling so in a game that also gave you an infinite-use health restoration item.
* In the original ''[[The
* The caps in ''[[
** The most terrifying attacks are actually the ones that do a set proportion of your HP, rather than an actual number. Enemies early on in the Black Omen can still annoy you by taking half your HP long after they stop being a serious risk to your characters through ordinary attacks, and the ONLY way Queen Zeal will be a real threat is if you aren't prepared for her attack to take everyone down to 1 HP, which is essentially unblockable. Hopefully, you're fast enough to heal before she kills you through [[Cherry Tapping]].
** Which is funny, when you consider that the final boss of the game's [[Slap
*** Even more so when certain attacks can actually BREAK THE DAMAGE LIMIT, doing more then the 9999 Damage it looks. Try using a fully powered Frog Flare against Queen Zeal's First Form (12000 HP) and see what I mean...
*** Or a full powered "Grand Dream," the strongest attack in the game.
Line 188 ⟶ 229:
** The level cap is 25 for the main game, and 35 for Awakening, although you'd have to do pretty much every quest to get that high of a level.
** [[Dragon Age II]] has a level cap of 50, but if you do everything, [[Absurdly High Level Cap|you'd be somewhere around halfway there.]] It's possible that future DLC will offer opportunities for higher levels.
* The level cap for the original ''[[
* Each game in the ''[[
** ''[[
** ''[[
*** [[Big Bad|Frank Horrigan]] from ''[[Fallout]] 2'' has 999 hit points... but if you kill him, [[Half the Man He Used To Be|his upper body]] will get up. It has 1
** Getting Crap Past the Cap
** ''[[
** ''[[Fallout: New Vegas]]'': The level cap is 30 in the base game (plus an extra 5 levels with each of the four DLC, for a new cap of 50), skills cap at 100, and radiation and poison resistances cap at 85%.
* Many ''[[Final Fantasy]]'' games have "back door" methods of exceeding the damage cap by hitting twice or more in one turn. In some games it's as simple as [[Dual
** ''[[
*** Max HP is 9999, and max MP is 999. The levels for magic spells and weapon proficiencies max at 16. Strangely, you can fill the progress bar again at level 16, but the level won't increase anymore, and there isn't any notable difference between level 16 with an empty bar and level 16 with a full bar.
** Interestingly, ''[[
** ''[[
*** The [[Updated Rerelease|DS remake]] has an augment called Limit Break (not to be confused with the more common type of [[Limit Break]]) that increases a character's damage cap from 9999 to 99999.
** If a character in ''[[
*** It was also possible for certain stats to go past 255 and wrap around to 0. This makes a character that was previously unhittable into one that cannot be missed by a monster.
*** A glitch involving the Mantra blitz hit the 9999 cap handily... by doling out ''1 divided by zero'' damage (which works out to 65535 on the SNES ALU).
*** The damage cap is the main reason why the Genji Gloves is usually always considered better than the Gauntlets. The Genji Gloves allows the character to use [[Dual
** A couple of ''[[
** Technically breaking the cap, in ''[[
*** Although there was another materia, called Shield, that rendered you invulnerable for a couple turns. It was normally exorbitantly expensive to cast, but with the HP <-> MP materia, well...
*** Also, the MP ''cost'' of spells was capped to 255, as seen with the Turbo MP materia.
*** ''[[
** Likewise, ''[[
** ''[[
*** Impressive as that is, the king here is Zell. By repeatedly putting in the weakest commands of his Duel techniques, you can get in a long string of rapid hits. Since each of these is 2 buttons long, it's possible to put in each command in 0.10 seconds according to the game's timer which ranges from giving 2 to 12 seconds. With Zell's ultimate weapon and everything else normal, he would probably come right around or right under Squall. With an enemy under the effects of Meltdown (Defense reduced to 0), Zell at 255 for his strength stat and twelve seconds on the clock, he has to potential to hit in the lower 700,000s. Give or take 200,000 to account for the possible critical hits. This has the appropriate nick name ''Armaggedon Fist''. [http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Duel Source.]
** ''[[
*** You can also customize normal weapons to do this, but it requires insane amounts of rare materials, and the ultimate weapons are better anyway since the user's HP boosts the damage they deal. However, you can also customize armor to break the HP/MP limits, bringing them up to 99,999 and 9999 respectively. The optional bosses practically necessitated the HP boost.
**** The [[Bonus Boss]] Neslug goes beyond the second damage limit with the Regen-like status it gains while it's in its shell, healing a ''six-digit amount of HP'' on some turns. [[That One Boss|AAAAAARGH!!]]
**** And finally, if the summon animations are turned off, Anima can do 7 digit damage with her [[Limit Break|Overdrive]] in the [[Regional Bonus|International]] version of the game.
**** Stats max out at 255; however, using Cheer on a character with maxed-out Strength or Defense will ''still raise those stats.''
**** And even with breaking the damage cap, Penance is still a [[Marathon Boss]] of legendary proportions. 99999 damage against its 12 ''million'' HP is a drop in the bucket.
*** In an inverse example, in [[That One Sidequest|the chocobo race sidequest]] to get the sigil for Tidus' ultimate weapon, the lowest time that is shown is capped at 0.0 seconds. This has confused and frustrated some players in that you need a time of ''less'' than zero; getting a time of exactly zero won't get you the Sun Sigil, but both are displayed as 0.0 seconds on the results screen. You could always just do the math yourself, though.
** ''[[
** ''[[
*** The [[Final Fantasy XIII-2
** ''[[
** ''[[Final Fantasy Tactics
* ''[[SaGa|Final Fantasy Legend]]'' characters had a visible cap of 999 on HP. However, human characters didn't get HP from levels or other internal stats; they got them from buying HP-increasing items. The items themselves were at least partially capped in their effectiveness (use enough and even the most powerful would only add
** In the second game, Humans and Mutants have a chance of their stats increasing at the end of battle, with that chance going up if they happened to use that particular stat in that battle (casting spells for Magic or taking damage for HP, for instance). They can't gain attributes past the cap of 999 HP or 99 Strength, Agility, Magic, or Defense, but a naked Human or Mutant could level to the cap and then put on armor or use rare stat-boosting items to break it. Robots don't level up permanently but can also break the displayed stat cap by wearing multiple copies of powerful equipment {{spoiler|or by utilizing a [[Good Bad Bug]] to give them potentially infinite amounts of agility}}.
*** Worth noting is that stats will loop around to 0 if they go over 255. And for whatever strange reason, some calculations involving agility only use the last two digits of it, so a character with 100 agility is slow as molasses.
*** Also worth noting is that ''damage'' caps are completely absent here; you can do five-digit damage long before it was possible in most [[Role
** [[SaGa 3]] just does away with trying to cap your HP (displayed as 999 if exceeded) and core stats (which still actually cap at 255 but only display as 99 if you have more). You can see someone's actual max HP if you revive them in battle; the amount of HP recovery will be displayed in full. A level 99 human or mutant will have max HP in the 2000s. Robots can just go nuts; they get stronger in the same way humans did in the first game.
*** The DS remake (which completely overhauls the level system with a [[Stat Grinding]] system like the other [[SaGa]] games) uses your base stats as a human as the standard with a cap of 1999 HP and 99 for other stats, and other classes' stats are calculated as percentages of your human stats. For example, Beasts have 120% the HP of humans, so their HP can go up to 2399. They have 90% strength, so their max strength would be 89. These are only the base stat caps; they can be exceeded with equipment bonuses.
* The various ''Infinity Engine'' games, excepting ''Icewind Dale II'', kept to a number of caps based on the Advanced ''[[Dungeons
** The first ''[[
* The Egg Dragon, a [[Bonus Boss]] in ''[[Lufia]] 2'', has the largest amount of HP the game allows for. However, the developers obviously thought nobody would be silly enough to use a healing item on it, so they did not ensure that its HP could not exceed that number. As a result, you can easily defeat this boss by using a low-level healing item on it, thereby causing its HP to wrap around, then attacking it once. A pretty spectacular blunder in a game where killing bosses within a certain number of rounds would yield a nice item reward...
* The first ''[[Phantasy Star]]'', being an 8-bit [[Sega Master System|Master System]] game, had some classic ones.
** Meseta (money) capped at 65535, easy enough to achieve late in the game when there is [[Money for Nothing|nothing left to buy]] except some occasional healing.
** Levels capped at 30, which can be achieved with some [[Level Grinding]] as a normal playthrough already takes you to 26-28 (Noah needs to be level 24 to reach the end game, due to the required 'Open' spell.)
** Also, no monster had more than 255 HP, the final battle is actually implemented as [[Actually Four Mooks|two monsters]] but their HP isn't shown.
* ''[[Phantasy Star IV]]'' had a glitch that served as a rather brutal Level Cap: Any levels gained past 99 actually ''decreased'' your stats.
* This is, incidentally, why hunting for the [[Infinity
* [[Level
** On the subject of Dark Cloud 2: Item caps range from 999 (Georama materials, Crystals, fishing bait), to 20 (Repair Powder, healing items, most attack items), to as little as 3 (Resurrection Powder). The HP cap is 255 for both characters, although there aren't enough [[Rare Candy|Fruits of Eden]] in the game to get both of them to 255. Each weapon can only have so many points in the 10 different attributes, but their [[Infinity
* ''[[Mass Effect 1]]''
* ''[[
* The ''[[
** In the first-generation games, the gameplay time capped at 255 hours and 59 minutes, while in the later games it is 999 hours and 59 minutes.
** Hacking the game reveals that (at least in the third generation), the stats can safely be at 65535. This makes sense because 999 would require at least 10 bits, but data is stored in bytes. So this would be two bytes minimum (16-bits). So even if you had a 999 Attack Marowak, unless the programmers deliberately checked for it, you'd end up with a 1998 Attack Marowak.
Line 251 ⟶ 292:
*** Hacking a Pokémon to have the maximum values possible for each stat as well as other enhancements (items, critical hit, super effective, etc.), the cap is well over 471,000,000 points of damage. Talk about [[There Is No Kill Like Overkill|extreme overkill]].
** In Generations I-IV, the money cap was 999,999 Poké Dollars. It was raised to 7 digits in ''Black'' and ''White''.
*** In [[Pokémon Red and Blue
*** Similarly, in [[Pokémon Gold and Silver
** The first three Generations allow you to carry 99 of each item. Generation IV and onward allow up to 999 of each item.
** In ''[[
* [[Resonance of Fate]] has an item cap of 999, and a level cap of 300. There are three categories of weapons (handguns, machineguns, and throwing weapons), each with a level cap of 100; a character's total level is the sum of the levels of each weapon type.
* ''[[
* ''[[Secret of Evermore]]'' had a cap of 65000-someodd on it's stats. How do we know this? Because a glitch in the programming which makes the game save buffs but not the effects thereof could be exploited to make your stats wrap under and flip around so that you're nigh-unstoppable so long as you don't level up much.
* ''[[Star Wars:
** The same thing occurred in ''[[Tales of Symphonia
** The Damage dealt by attacks has a funky
* In ''[[
* In the ''[[Willow]]'' [[Licensed Game]] for the NES, the level cap was 16.
* ''[[
** Everything else however, is capped. 100 levels, 100 attack and defence, 9 of any given item, 99 of any given mastered pin, 200 unmastered pins (although you can hold more until you actually go look at them), 999 bravery, and 9999 HP.
** The game also [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshades]] this in the wallet descriptions, such as "Holds up to 999,999 yen, and not one jot more!" and "Can hold exactly 9,999,999 yen. What are the odds!?"
* In the original [[PC
* The ''[[
=== Shoot Em Ups ===
* On some versions of ''[[Star Fox (series)|Star FOX]] 64'', the highest score you can get on one stage is 511. The easiest stage to do this on is Area 6 in Expert mode, where you can exceed the medal score by the time you hit the checkpoint.
** In other versions, using a cheating device to get a continuously increasing kill count could cause the numbers of the counter to start ''spinning''. It will register as 999 at the end of the stage, however.
* The highest composite score obtainable on ''[[Geometry Wars]] Galaxies'' is 26,843,545,
* ''[[Touhou]]'' games usually have a cap of 9 lives and 8 bombs. If a tenth life is earned, it's turned into an extra bomb instead; if a ninth bomb is earned, it's simply lost. (Some exceptions below.) Earlier games also capped shot power at 128 and later games had a different cap; any further power items were immediately converted to a different type of item, usually worth bonus points.
** ''Phantasmagoria of Flower View'''s Extra Mode somewhat averted this by simply making it impossible to earn a tenth life - the player has to start with one life, and no extra lives were awarded after the 8th one.
Line 281 ⟶ 323:
*** ''Imperishable Night'' also hits the bullet cap on rare occasions, most notably during the Last Word [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTHcUCt4fQc Saigyouji Flawless Nirvana].
** The PC-98 games roll over very similarly to ''Battle Garegga'' below: With scores of 100,000,000 points or more, the ten millions digit will be replaced by letters: "A0,000,000" is 100 million points, "B0,000,000" is 110 million points, and so on.
** ''Highly Responsive to Prayers'' has a 7-digit score counter; if the player passes 10,000,000 the counter rolls over, but the full score is still stored and is displayed at the evaluation screen at the end of the game.
** ''Shoot the Bullet'' can only display individual picture score values up to 999,990. Higher values glitch up the display (although they're still added to the total correctly).
** ''Undefined Fantastic Object'' initially had a [[Game Breaking Bug]] where it would crash trying to display 10-digit scores. This was patched, but the score counter still displays incorrectly if your score is over 2,147,483,647 (2<sup>31</sup>-1), instead displaying your score minus 4,294,967,296 (2<sup>32</sup>) and replacing the negative sign with an "x". Scores do display correctly on the high scores leaderboards and replays menu after the patch, though.
** ''Ten Desires''
* The maximum score in the arcade version of ''[[
* ''[[Battle Garegga]]'' rolls over oddly: the score counter has 7 digits, and when you achieve what is supposed to be 10,000,000 points, instead of the score counter simply maxing out at 9,999,990, it instead continues rising... but now the millions digit is a letter instead of a number, so a score of 10,000,000 will read as "A,000,000," 11 million is "B,000,000," and so on. The world record is somewhere around "G" million points.
**
* [[Urban Legend of Zelda]] time: the early ''[[Asteroids]]'' arcade machine would apparently progressively slow down and grind to a halt if you collected enough lives, as the computer drew a little ship in the corner of the screen for each life you had, and would naturally take longer to draw more of them.
** Apparently there was also a limit of 30 asteroids on the screen at once ([[Powers of Two Minus One|32 objects]], minus one for the player ship, minus one for the enemy ship?), so if you started with enough and shot them in the right order, some of the larger ones would only leave one smaller one behind instead of the usual two.
* Even though [[Pinball Scoring|the scores can get ridiculous]] in ''[[Giga Wing]]'', the cap on score is in no danger of being hit (the world record of 291,252,468,839,040 points is still a far cry from the cap of 9,999,999,999,999,990 points). However, the cap on your score multiplier is 49,999,999, which can very well be reached by a skilled enough player.
* The original version of ''[[Do Don Pachi]] Daifukkatsu'' capped score at 99,999,999,999 points. This could be reached by many players on the first loop of a [[New Game
* ''Mushihime-sama Futari'' versions 1.01 and 1.5 have a score cap of 3,999,999,999 points. The Black Label version averts this. However, the Xbox360 port once again has one; it is possible to reach 9,999,999,999 points in Arrange Mode.
* ''[[Guwange]]'' has a score cap of 99,999,999 points, which has been reached.
** The Xbox 360 port [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCFw8hSQkpg
* ''[[Galaga]]'' can only display 6 digits for the first player, but can display 7 digits on the second player's side. Either will roll over when it exceeds its limit. For this reason, very skilled players will play on the 2P side so they don't have to keep track of the millions. Also, for whatever reason, [[Every Ten Thousand Points|extra lives]] stop being given after 1,000,000 points.
* ''[[Fantasy Zone]]'' caps score at 99,999,990 points, which can only be reached by looping the game ''many'' times. The stage counter also stops at 99, which can be reached on the 13th loop. However, the game's [[Nintendo Hard]]; not many gamers can clear the game even once.
* ''Battle Bakraid'' originally capped the score at 63,999,990. On the Unlimited Version, which removed this limit, expert players have scored nearly twice as many points.
=== Simulation Games ===
* In the SNES ''[[SimCity]]'' game, an error in the tax screen allowed a player's money to drop below zero, which instantly pushed it to the maximum value (like the ''[[Kingdom of Loathing]]'' bug), which was truncated to $999999.
** The[[Classic Cheat Code|"Million-dollar cheat code"]] works on this principle. First you spend all your money, including on something that generates expenditures. Next you reduce the tax rate and expenditures on the tax screen to 0%. For some reason, holding the L button prevents you from gaining/losing money from the fiscal budget at the end of the year; when you go back to the tax screen and increase the expenditure rates but keep the tax at 0%, you'll get a net loss. Once you release the L button after the calendar rolls over to January, you'll have a negative bank balance and the [[Good Bad Bugs|error mentioned above]] takes effect.
** The PC version of ''[[
** ''[[
*** The original ''[[Railroad Tycoon]]'' had this problem too; don't ever let your cash on hand go over [currency unit dependent on region] 30,000,000 or it'll go that far into the red.
** A more "game design"-y cap in the [[
* The original ''[[Escape Velocity]]'' game had a cap on the amount of ships in a star system; this meant that, if you filled that number up with your own escorts and fighters, you could then command tribute from planets - who, not being able to send out any of their defense fleet, were forced to surrender. All you had to do was ask twice.
** The sequels still had caps on the amount of ships that could be present in a star system, but fixed that exploit by mandating that a planet's defense fleet had to be ''destroyed'' for them to surrender. Of course, if you had enough escorts and fighters to almost hit the cap, the planet would send out waves of a ''single'' ship...
* ''[[
* ''Psycho Pinball'', in common with most pinball games, had the capacity for astronomical scores; unfortunately, the scoreboard only registered nine digits, so you had to track the number of billions manually. (I have reached three and a half billion a couple of times.)
* ''[[Trauma Center (
* One ridiculous example of this is Harvest Moon DS, which features several mines that go deeper and deeper. The second mine has 255 levels. The third has 999. The fourth ''has 64,535 levels.''
=== Stealth-Based Games ===
* In the Outer Ops [[Mini Game]] in ''[[Metal Gear]] [[Metal Gear Solid|Solid]]: [[Peace Walker]]'', damage has an [[RPG Elements|RPG-style]] cap of 9999. However, Metal Gear ZEKE is capable of breaking the damage limit, and can deal up to 99999.
* In all ''[[Tenchu]]'' games, there's a cap on the total number of items you can carry into any stage, as well as specific cap for each item that limits how many of a single item you can pack along for the ride.
=== Turn-Based Strategy ===
* Statistic caps in ''[[Fire Emblem]]'' are critical for working out the [[Character Tiers]]. The reason the Paladin class isn't unquestionably the best class in the game, for example, is that its caps, particularly strength, are relatively low. (It may still be the best class anyway, but that's neither here nor there.)
* Most [[Nippon Ichi]] games are notable for having nigh-unreachable damage caps (if you grind hard enough, you can eventually inflict millions, if not billions of points in damage. Eventually they can get so high that the game has to list them by K's rather than numerical digits), and rather high level caps, easily going into three and four digits. in fact, most [[Bonus Boss
** The rear of the strategy guide by [[Double Jump]], legendary for writing writeups on how to tweak [[Nippon Ichi]] games [[Refuge in Audacity|well past the breaking point]], has a screenshot of someone doing 35136040556 damage. That's 35 BILLION. The game's shorthand shows this as a floating "35136M" over the poor sap's head getting hit with that.
*** That's nothing. How do you like 3 ''[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iShBtnYm3B4 trillion]'' damage?
*** [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOqrRUcjDQ8
*** [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCfv37wwQaQ And Disgaea 4 has topped even that!! Over 180 QUADRILLION!!!]
** The damage cap in ''Disgaea 4'' appears to be (2<sup>64</sup>-1)/100 = 184,467,440,737,095,516.
Line 329 ⟶ 374:
** The ''[[Disgaea]]'' games limit the amount of [[Mana]] you can hold to 10,000,000. If you have exactly that much, the game displays it as [[The Dev Team Thinks of Everything|"Lots of Mana".]]
*** If you win 10 million or more HL (currency) from a battle, your winnings are displayed as "Super Bonus HL". You can sort of estimate the actual amount by how fast it counted up to "Super Bonus". By the time you're winning that much money though, [[Money for Nothing|there's nothing really useful to spend it on]].
**** ''[[
** ''[[Disgaea]]'' is also notable for averting the "usual caps" for exp. Most of the stored information about a character has 32-bit size (4294967295 cap), while exp cap is much higher (more than 17 times over in the second game), necessitating use of 64-bit size.
*** The stats in the first game are stored as a fixed point decimal, with the variable representing hundredths of a point, so the cap is the maximum value of a 32-bit signed integer divided by 100 (about 21.47 million). Get any more and this will become negative. The ports fix this and cap stats at an even 20 million. The sequel uses unsigned variables for the stats and the caps are raised to 40 million.
** The trailer for ''Disgaea 4'' makes it a point to advertise this fact ''blatantly'' as soon as possible.
{{quote|
* ''[[X-Com]]'' has a rather annoying one. Transports carry 80 items of equipment. It doesn't matter how big each piece is, they all count one - a pistol magazine takes up the same amount of space as an Auto cannon. It's much worse with the same cap in base defence missions, because a base tend to have ''lots'' of stuff in stores, and maybe not all of it is even usable, and there's ammunition and grenades, and you don't know what you'll get to use. ''OpenXCom'' fixes these roblems.
* ''[[UFO Alien Invasion]]'' has a cap on external installations (radar towers, SAM sites etc), which is raised by 3 for each new base with Command Center. Which is expensive, is one of the slowest to construct buildings and itself requires powerplant, of course (and is needed to use most base functionality beyond storage/barrack, too).
* ''[[Stars!]]'' gives each layer only 16 ship design slots — if you want a new design, time to scrap some old ship type. On a Huge map, ''after'' a victory was declared you'll probably still see small swarms of destroyers with second-lowest-tech components that belong to some AI players, too. Also, there are separate 16 slots for orbital bases, but those can be upgraded in place, so more than half is very rarely needed.
** Maximum of 512 fleets. Once the limit is reached, new ships are added to an existing fleet currently at the planet that built them or lost if there aren't any. Either case instead of normal "Your starbase at <Planet> has built a new <Ship>" generates a message blaming your imperial bureaucracy.
** [https://wiki.starsautohost.org/wiki/Remote_Mining Remote Mining] is capped in performance to 4000 mines equivalent (default 10 kt/y of each mineral per 10 mines… before concentration, so if a mineral is at 1% on this planet, 4000 mines will yield only 40kt of it). 15 largest mining ships with the best commonly available mining robots add up to 4050kt/y, slightly above that. The cap is per mining ''fleet'', but see the fleet cap above.
=== Vehicular Combat games ===
* ''[[Twisted Metal]]'' imposes a different cap on each weapon pickup, so the player can only store an specific amount of each different missile or weapon. These are all based on the weapon's strength (10 Fire missiles, 8 Homing, 5 Power, etc.).
=== Wide Open Sandbox ===
* ''[[Dwarf Fortress]]'' have adjustable caps, mostly on population, domestic animals and plant seeds - to limit the resource consumption of a running simulation.
* ''[[Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas]]'' has a 9 digit money counter. If you go one dollar past $99,999,999 (which typically involves doing Vigilante Missions past Level 200 or grinding at the casino), it rolls over and [[The Dev Team Thinks of Everything|adds another digit]]. No word on what happens if you try to go past $999,999,999.
* In ''[[Minecraft]]'' the majority of items/blocks have a maximum stack of 64. A few have a maximum stack of 16, and before the release of Beta 1.8, food had a max stack of 1. This is slightly different than most examples, as instead of being a maximum holding capacity for a particular item, you can carry as many stacks of the item as will fit into your inventory.
===
* In ''[[ZZT]]'', your health, score, gems, ammunition, and torches are all limited to 32767. Although the <code>#GIVE</code> and <code>#TAKE</code> commands correctly implement the limits, if you collect a gem which was placed directly on the board (collecting gems give you health too) when your health is already 32767, it is changed to -32768 and you instantly die; similar things with other items placed directly onto the board (although only gems can kill you in this way).
* ''[[OHRRPGCE]]'' has a bunch of built-in caps, although most of them can be decreased in the editor (although not increased). Inventory items are capped at 99 although it can be changed for individual items; if you collect more, they fill up another inventory slot if one is available.
== [[Web Comics]] ==
* ''[[
* In a weird case of parodying, ''[[
** The most interesting part: the latter's damage is achieved by a series of melee attacks (each hit goes to 15000 or something). Although he was flying and rocket boosted, this unnamed attack beats many attacks that were prepared for turns.
** Also, in an interesting metafictional example, the comic number reaches # 999 when the heroes reach the final boss and stays at that for the rest of the comic.
* Damage caps usually come into play in ''[[Captain SNES]]'' whenever characters enter into a world with a JRPG system, mainly because Alex is obsessive enough to have leveled his characters as far as they will go. In one particularly interesting example; a {{spoiler|Sorrow-possessed}} [[Chrono Trigger
** When she scans him after the lampshade, he's short of his maximum health by [[Shown Their Work|that exact amount]].
== [[Real Life]] ==
* Many laws of chemistry, physics, and biology define caps such as the speed of light ("Nothing can go faster than light"), terminal velocity ("A given object can't fall faster than this speed in a given substance at a given density"), and carrying capacity ("An ecosystem cannot support more than this number of organisms"). There are also things like the low limit of reaction speed (at some point kinetic effects define what's going on less than quantum effects) - which is the main reason why long-term [[Human Popsicle|cryogenic anabiosis]] is left to the realm of moderately-hard SF.
* 32-bit time variables on Unix-like systems will roll over in a few decades unless they are changed to 64-bit variables. They store the current date and time as seconds since January 1, 1970 at midnight. The number of seconds will go over [[Powers of Two Minus One|2^31-1]] on January 19, 2038.
{{reflist}}
[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:Acceptable Breaks From Reality]]
[[Category:Short Titles]]
|