Counter-intuitively, a common reason that players are afraid to waste consumable items is that the items are too weak – not too strong. Devs often reduce the impact of consumables so players will be less afraid to waste them, or out of game balance concerns so they can ensure players can overcome all of a game’s obstacles even when all out of consumables. This quickly becomes counter-productive.

Let’s look at combat items (buffs, bombs, special arrows, etc). In most scenarios, players only want to spend a consumable item in combat if they’re highly confident it will turn a defeat into a victory… And the cost of the defeat is greater than the cost of the item.

After all, if they use the item and still lose, they wasted it. If they use the item and were going to win anyway, they still wasted it. If the cost of losing this battle is less than the cost of the item (forgiving respawn/checkpoint/save system) then completely rational players will recognize the item is not worth using for their goals.

This is why a speedrunner with different goals will use the items for the time-save, but most players aren’t speed-running. They’re focused on more significant outcomes that they care about.

Think in terms of Triggered Behaviors/Actions. When talking about players, an action trigger is the situation that gets the player to take a specific action. Because we feel the pain of losses about twice as intensely as equivalent gains (thanks ‘loss aversion’), and people will often prefer a chance of a bigger loss to a smaller, guarunteed loss as well; player sneed to be highly confident that using the item will turn the loss into a victory in order to trigger the “use consumable” action.

Weak consumables provide few situations where they can reliably make the difference between a victory and a defeat.

Weak consumables might not feel as bad to waste, but why waste them at all?

This is why most players use their Masterball in Pokemon. It has an excellent action trigger. A legendary pokemon is obviously special and much higher value compared to normal pokemon. They also tend to have very frustrating catch rates with standard catching methods. A Masterball exists to instantly-catch a pokemon, this is a special pokemon, it saves a huge amount of time and frustration otherwise, so the action trigger is powerful. People throw the Masterball.

Bypassing RNG or “Miss Chance” is a strong pattern for consumable use. If you are playing a tactical game with miss chances tied to attacks, like Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, a consumable item that deals guarunteed damage is often enough to create a strong action trigger. If you know an enemy has 5 health left, and you can either accept a % chance of dealing any damage at all… Or a guarunteed way to deal 5 damage and defeat the foe before it gets another turn, that is a high certainty situation.

High damage, instant-hit (or accuracy boosting consumables in general) provide the high confidence you need in the action’s outcome to form a viable action trigger.

Games based on real-time reactions such as a Soulslike are more challenging – as players have significant performance variance fight to fight. The less you can predict your performance, and how much this item will impact it, the more powerful the item needs to be to make the player confident it’s worth using. It has to confidently cover the range of peaks and valleys. Espescially if players can keep re-attempting the fight until they hit one of their peaks at relatively low cost.

A good pattern is to take advantage of players’ tendency to prefer permanent upgrades. Players will often trade any amount of temporary power for even a small amount of permanent power. This is why roguelites are often casual-friendly, even casual players happily trade all their in-run progression for a little meta-prgoression. The Masterball works on this principle too: you trade a consumable item for a permanent legendary pokemon.

Try including optional bosses in your non-linear games that guard powerful permanent upgrades, and treat powerful consumable battle items as a form of “key”. Clever players can use these items to defeat these foes early, exchanging temporary items for permanent ones. It’s exciting to get an “arrow of ultimate ice” and realize you can use it to slay a fire dragon you’ve seen flying around that is very weak to ice, and you know that dragon is guarding a legendary bow.

However – Engaging in that kind of value assessment requires knowledge of the dragon’s weaknesses, the difficulty of the foe relative to the item’s increase in performance, and the value of the reward for doing so. Most games fail to provide the information needed to make these decisions with confidence, and so their action triggers never materialize.

These kinds of opportunities offer excellent replay value and social knowledge-sharing value, precisely because they’ll be invisible to the average player on their first playthrough. If you want the typical player to engage with these opportunities, you’ll need to find ways to communicate this information in the normal course of play.

Another angle is to increase the cost of losing. Games with heavy costs for losing, such as a roguelike where you lose all your progression each time you die, will find players far more willing to spend consumable items in the hope they’ll stay alive.

There’s many other techniques for managing the tendency to hoard consumable items, such as resource caps, only losing consumable items on a loss when you respawn, or replenshing spent consumables at regular checkpoints so you get into a “use it or lose it” mindset, or other factors that obviously reduce the value of a consumable the longer you avoid using them (such as an item that will boost a character to a set level – boosting a character to level 10 gets less valuable the longer you delay using it because they start approaching or passing level 10 on their own).

However, these solutions reduce the feel-bad that you might “waste” the item and need it later. They don’t increase the value of actually using it. Start there.

If you want players to care about consumable items, make them strong enough that they have meaningful action triggers, large ranges of situations where they can turn a loss into a win. Otherwise, they will ironically feel “too weak to waste”, because there will rarely be situations where they will matter enough to be worth using.