Game Theory - The Bolts in Ratchet and Clank are WORTHLESS

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

Join Game Theory Host Tom as he exposes the TRUTH about the blots from Ratchet and Clank

The bolts in Ratchet and Clank are worthless. These shining floating pieces of metal may look like they're worth a pretty penny, but in reality, their value is cratering with each installment, and our heroes are the ones to blame. Hello, internet. Welcome to Game Theory, the show that's always throwing an Omni Rensh into the works. And today is a very special episode for me, friends.

Here on Game Theory, we love to ruin your childhood. It's literally our tagline. But for this episode, I'm going back and ruining my own. childhood. While I was always a fan of Nintendo titles like Mario, Zelda and Pokemon, I actually started my gaming life as a Sony kid, playing games like Crash Bandicoot, Spy the Dragon, and Tie the Tasmanian Tiger. But one of my absolute favorites from that era, and one of the few Sony mascots that's still going today was Ratchet and Clank. This series is what you get when you mix a 3D platformer with a third-person shooter,

and it was so much fun. The story is primarily about this alien-feel character named Ratchet and his very polite robot sidekick, Plank. Together, they become heroes of the galaxy, with people seeking out their assistance in future titles. I used to play these games over and over again, and yet for some reason, my dad could never remember the name, and so just called it, Plinket and Plunk It, which 8-year-old me thought was just as hilarious as the in-game dialogue. Look, Plumbers crack. What did you just say?

I said, look, the Plummer's back. Though it wasn't just the dialogue that was punny. Even the titles of the games lent into this slightly risky humour with Going Commando and Up Your Arsenal. Fun fact, the European versions were just named two and three because of how risky those names were considered. Won't someone think of the children? However, for me, the best part about Ratchet and Clank, without a doubt, has to be the weapons that could unleash mass destruction and comedy on the many enemies in your path. Funny weapons like the Groovetron, which make your enemies dance, the Sheepenator, which turns out of the sheepenator, which turns out of comedy, everything into sheep and the most iconic weapon of all, the Rip You a New One.

What did you just say to me? No, no, no, no, that's what it's called. The R-Y-N-O, or Rhino. It's basically the ultimate weapon of this series. But the craziest thing is, in the first game, you are offered this insanely strong weapon on just the seventh planet. Out of 19, by this point in the game, you're only buying weapons that cost 7,500 volts. But the Rhino costs 150,000.

50,000 bolts. So for the rest of the game, you're left wondering, do you just forget about it and move on? Or do you never buy another weapon and save up for it? It's a pretty tough decision, but what little nerdy me always wondered was how much would I actually have to save to afford such an insane tool of destruction? In fact, how much are bolts worth in general? Are they just one to one with the US dollar? Or has this guy been scatming me since 2002?

Well, now that I'm the host of game theory, I think it's finally time I answer 8-year-old question. What is the value of a Ratchet and Clank Bolt? Grab your gloves of Doom and negotiators theorists, because we're about to open fire on the Ratchet and Clank economy. Let's start with the bolts themselves because how the games use them to represent different values has changed a number of times over the years. From the 2016 remake onwards, bulk values are represented by their colour, bronze, silver, gold or platinum. Whereas in the first four games, the values are represented by what kind of shape they are. Are they a hexnut, a spring, a gear, that kind of thing?

What, you thought just because they were called bolts that they'd only be bolt shaped? This is a series about interdimensional time space travel. It was never gonna be that simple. But as confusing as it might be, for the purposes of today's episode, we're actually going to focus on those original values, because the Rhino actually isn't purchasable in later games. Instead, you get it by collecting special items that are found in each world, which I guess stopped people from farming bolts. and getting it too early.

Stop telling me how to play my game insom the act. In the original Ratchet and Clank, there were only four bolt shapes. A standard bolts, a hex nut, a star nut, and a gear. These are worth 1, 5, 20 and 50 bolts, respectively. More varieties were then introduced in going commando, like springs, three-way cross-fittings and six-way cross-fittings, which were valued at 100, 500 and 1,000 bolts each. And then, up your arsenal, added the acorn nuts, wing nuts,

and double-capped bolts at 3, 10,000, and 3,000. 30,000 bolts each. And we are going to figure out the worth of each and every one of them, starting with the humble, single bolt. To figure out what this is worth, we first need to figure out what material is used to make it. In the first game, bolts usually have a greyish silver appearance, which, as you might expect, is the colour of most metals. So not narrowing down the search much with that one.

Instead, I started looking at how the items act in the game. And the biggest thing that stood out to me is that we can use tools like the bolt grabber or the metal detector to draw bolts towards us from far away and even underground. Kind of like how Sonic can draw in rings with his lightning shield. Whatever these bolts are made out of, it has to be a magnetic material. That immediately rules out obvious silver metals like, well, silver. And leaves us with just a few options. Iron, nickel, cobalt, steel, gadolinium and dysprosium.

But in order to crown a winner, there is one other fact we need to consider. What this currency actually is. Bolts. Bolts are used for building machines, robots, and all the gadgets we encounter within the game. Plus, these things fly all over the place after getting smashed out of boxes or bursting out of robots that have been blown to smithereens. And yet, they don't lose any of their original shape. Therefore, the metal used for these bolts needs to be strong and durable. Immediately that puts metals like gadolinium and dysprosium out of the picture.

Because while they're super magnetic, they are way too soft and malleable to keep their shape after an explosion. Cobalt has a similar issue, but rather than being soft, it's brittle. Even when combined with a stronger metal like steel, cobalt drill bits are famously brittle and will shatter if not used correctly. And I don't think we can call whatever this is correct use. Nickel is a little stronger, but it has a different issue. It has been shown to cause allergic reactions in some people after prolonged exposure, which isn't ideal for your galactic currency,

something that everyone is going to be holding. That leaves us with just two remaining options, iron and steel. And the winner ended up being steel for one simple reason. It cheated. Iron is a very strong metal, but steel is even stronger because it isn't a pure metal. It's actually an alloy of iron and carbon mixed together. This not only increases its strength, which is why it's the primary metal we use for nuts and bolts, but the process of adding carbon turns the metal from a dirty grey to a metallic,

silver, the same color we see from the bolts. And the cherry on top of all of this is while I said most of the bolts are silver, not all of them are silver, exactly. Some have slightly red or bluish tints to them. And if you heat steel to certain temperatures, you can actually temper the metal to change its color from yellow to purple to yes, reds and blue. So the bolts from Ratchet and Glink 1 are made out of steel. Great, now we've just got to figure out the cost.

At the time of writing, steel costs around 74 cents per kilogram, which compared to some of the other metals we looked at is pretty inexpensive. So good job to the Solana Galactic government for choosing a cost-effective metal, I guess. But therefore, we need to find out how much these bolts weigh, which means it's time for the really fun stuff, the math. Calculating the weight is actually pretty straightforward. We've used this equation plenty of times before. Weight equals density times volume. Density is easy, as steel has a set density of 7.85 grams. grams per cubic centimeter, or 4.537 ounces per cubic inch.

The tricky part is figuring out the volume. You see, bolts don't have the most conventional shape. If it were a sphere, a cube, or even a ring, it would be pretty easy to calculate. But a bolt is a bunch of different shapes all smushed together and has all these edges and grooves going on. So pixel measurements weren't going to cut it this time. Fortunately, just like my favorite Pokemon Evie, we theorists have evolved a little over the years. We are no longer bound by the techniques of old and have learned to use the holy tool known as Blender. With this, we can just take the 3D models from the game and accurately measure each bolt's volume with zero uncertainty.

This reveals that the standard bolt has a volume of 0.054 cubic meters or 0.898 cubic feet. So we just plug that into our equation and that gives us a weight of 199.4 kilograms or 439939.4 kilograms or 439.3,000. £19.58 pounds. That's the weight of a BMW 650 G.S. motorcycle. And as someone who has owned that bike, let me tell you, those things are hard to pick up when they've fallen over, let alone carrying thousands of them in your pockets. With our original cost of 74 cents per kilogram, that would make a single bolt worth $147.55.

Making a single ammo refill for the bomb glove worth $738. The glove of Doom would cost you $1,106,625. And the Rhino, the most expensive item in the game. The item you spend hours grinding for bolts in order to get would cost you, get this, $22,000,500. I don't have that kind of cash. I have a hard time buying something that's a few hundred dollars. This is just a completely unobtainable item. And it only gets more expensive from here, friends.

In the next two games, they decided to change the bulk color from various shades of silver to gold. Maybe they just couldn't be bothered to keep heating the metal to different temperatures to get that color change and just said, stuff it, everyone likes gold. It wouldn't be a bad time-saving measure, but it does mean we have to find a new material. Although this didn't take me as long as you might think, because we already found the only tough, magnetic and golden material in our video about the value of Sonic's golden rings. It's called neodymium. And with that legwork saved, we can just do our weight calculations again using neodymium's 7 grams per cubic centimeter density. From there, we can see that a single bolt weighs in at 177.8 kilograms, or 391.98 pounds. So it's actually a good bit lighter than our steel bolts, which might make you think that it's worth less.

But oh no, friends, neodymium is worth way more than steel. In fact, it's worth 125 times more coming in at $92.51.51 per kilogram, making the real world value of a single bolt in ratchet and clank two and three, $16,448.28. The ammo for one of most basic weapons, the gravity bomb, in this game, would cost you $822,414. If you had the desire to turn your friends into ducks with the quack array, you would need to have three billion, 289,6,656,000 in the bank. And the Rhino, well, there's two rhinos, one for each game. The Rhino 2 would cost you $16,448,280,000. And the Rhino 3, or Rai Threino, I guess, comes in with the enormous price tag, or $49,343,840,000. That's Jeff Bezos level of money.

Maybe that's why he's so fixated on space. The price of these things is astronomical. Ratchet and Clank must be worth an absolute mint by the end of the series. What would they? I'm sure some of you already calling this out. We've only calculated the values of the regular single bolts. But at the start of all this, I mentioned that bolts are actually a bunch of different shapes. Well, if you try to calculate their values, this whole economy starts to become,

more shaky than Ratchet and Clank Spacetime Continuum. In the first game, based on their 3D assets, a hex nut is actually worth $156.84. Just $9 more than the single bolt, rather than the full five times the game suggests. By contrast, the Star Nut is only worth $7 more at $154.52. Despite being worth 20 times more. And the gear, which should be worth 50 times more than the single bolt,

is only three and a half times more, worth just $525.71 cents. It gets even worse in the sequels. With the Hexnut now being worth $17,484.39, a gear is now worth $58,605.9. A three-way cross-fitting is $58,734 and 60 cents, and the double-capped bolt, the highest valued bolt in the game, is worth just $95,516. $0.58. Which sounds like a lot, but it's not 30,000 times the value of a single bolt. This would mean that to pay for the Rhino 3,000 single bolts,

or just 516,610 double-capped bolts. The whole system would be broken in minutes. Plus, their actual physical value doesn't align with the order of their value in the game. The acorn nut is actually the most expensive by weight, at $136,702.3 cents. And yet wingnuts are considered three times more valuable, even though in reality they are only half the value by weight. The math just ain't math it.

And there's one very specific reason for that, the type of currency. See, the way we've been measuring the value of these bolts is similar to how we used to use what was called the gold standard. Basically, the worth of a country's currency was tied into how much gold the country itself had. more gold equals higher value currency. It's just that rather than gold, we've been using steel and neodymium. But if a certain screw, nut or bolt has been assigned an arbitrary value with no

correlation to what it's actually worth like we're seeing, then Ratchet and Clank's universe is more likely using a system more reflective of what we use today. And that's known as a fiat currency. A fiat currency is something that represents a monetary value rather than being worth anything itself. We use pieces of paper to denote what it's worth. A piece of paper with a the one on it is worth $1. But the paper itself is actually only worth about three cents. The benefit of this in the economy is that the item itself holds no intrinsic value. And so can only be used for purchasing goods and giving a representation of how much money

we possess and have to use. That's why a spring, which is much lighter than a gear, can have a higher value at vendors. They are simply representing a value rather than being based on their actual worth. However, there is one flaw in treating bolts as a Fiat currency. They can be used for more than just currency. Muts and bolts can be used to construct spaceships, cool gadgets, happy sidekicks. That would make this less of a Fiat currency and more of what is called a commodity currency, the exchanging of resources or services rather than pure hard cash.

This can also work with assigned values as a spring may be more useful for construction than a bolt. We humans have used commodity currencies in the past, but there are reasons we stopped doing it. The first issue that Ratchet and Clank would likely begin to face is that because bolts have a real-world use, people may hold onto their bolts in case they need to, I don't know, build a robot that can do their laundry, or because you never know when you're going to need to repair that hoverboard. This is known as hoarding, holding onto a resource and not spending it in case of emergency, and it can create artificial shortages in the market, which then drives up the prices of goods. that use that resource, i.e. inflation. On the other hand, if all the nuts and bolts are tied up

being used commercially to make products like buildings and gadgets, that can lead to a decrease in the supply of currency because it's being used for other things. And that leads to what is known in economic terms as supply shocks. This would cause the value of the bolt to constantly fluctuate depending on how much of the currency is actually in circulation as currency at any given time and tracking that across an entire galaxy is going to be hard. And that circulation problem gets even worse when you consider that bolts can be found all over the galaxy. In robot enemies you smash up, in hidden stashes, but also on planets that have been uninhabited

for years like the abandoned mining planet of Tabora and Fastoon. At any point someone, and by someone I absolutely mean, we could stumble upon a huge amount of scrap metal and bam! We have a bunch of current source. This would suddenly increase the amount of currency in circulation, and we saw firsthand what happens when this occurs during the California gold rush. There was a huge discovery of gold in that area and a huge influx of gold, but that more people had more to spend, which effectively reduced the dollar's purchasing power, and that forced the prices of goods to increase by an average of 30% in order to keep up. We can actually see this forced inflation taking effect in the games.

Take a look at the prices for the standard rocket launcher in each game, the Devastator, the mini rocket tube and the annihilator. They all do the same basic thing, fire rockets that auto-aim, but the prices of them have skyrocketed, pun absolutely intended. But the biggest issue is that the bolts themselves won't last forever. While steel and neodymium are very durable metals, they do still corrode and degrade over time. Steel contains iron and when it comes into contact with water or oxygen,

it oxidizes producing rust. Neodymium also oxidizes, which is what gives it, that golden color. But that also means that over time, it will become weaker and weaker, making it completely unfit for use as either a physical bolt or as a piece of currency, just like the steel bolts. This is especially true on planets like Quantos or the dank swamps of Usla that have super high humidity that will speed up the oxidization process. If these bolts deteriorate, that's once again less currency and circulation, which again leads to a limited supply, which once again lowers the value of the bolt. All the ones,

while prices are going through the roof. So really, Ratchet and Clank's biggest threat isn't Dr. Nefarious. It's not the dimensions intersecting. It isn't even Captain Quark stabbing us in the back for the borgilliant time. It's themselves, smashing everything in their path, destroying the economy just so they can rip you a new one. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory!

Thanks for watching.