For me, it's easily the emptying of the inventory after trudging back to town, especially if there isn't one vendor who will buy everything you throw on her counter.

After that, it's sorting the inventory in whatever storage the game gives you, so you can find the armor of ice protection just in case you know you're going to encounter a yeti, frost giant, frost dragon, cold-based psionic, etc.

Edit: and yet I like games with loot.

Edit 2: Hi, Fairfox. Good to see you back.

Hitting the pick up goods button 250 times.

Airing out books in Shenmue II



Most of Stardew Valley and similar games are all about mundane tasks, but that's the point of those games. But maybe they are not actually mundane because I've never had a farm, nor a barn, and I've certainly never had to build myself both of those things.

Another one is from most post-minecraft survival games. Punching trees and rocks to get twigs and pebbles? boring as hell.

Delivery quests also suck balls. The destination is usually on the other side of town, do that yourself NPC guy.
The only time I would find these quests acceptable/realistic, was if I played a game as a UPS driver, but at that point I'd probably just kick packages at people.

I second HereForTheBeer on this one, inventory management is such a pain, especially for games you don't quite understand/ playing for the first time as you're never sure what you need to keep and watch you can ditch.

Anyone else keep a full inventory of notes in Baldur's Gate on their first playthrough thinking you might have to show them to someone later in the game?

I'm playing Darkwood right now and trying to pick up everything was completely slowing my progress down. Now that I know roughly how many resourses I'm going to use per night, it's easier to know what to pick up and what to leave, what I can use right away an what I can ditch. I mean, I had 6 stacks of stones in Chapter 1 thinking I might need em...... Then I find out I can't take all my crap with me to Chapter 2 so essentially, I was wasting time trying to keep everything I was picking up.

In TES Oblivion, having to "read" a book or journal to get the next quest stage. The quest descriptions 99% of the time told you exactly what to do next, so the actual reading of the literature item was rendered a mundane task.
If it was so necessary to read it, make the quest more ambiguous and actually make the player read the writing to determine what to do next!

Ultima 7: Having to manually feed your characters. Feeding your characters requires you to find the food item in your inventory (in a game with a bad inventory system), then use it on the character who is hungry. If you don't feed your characters, they will take starvation damage, so you can't just avoid the mechanic. It's really a shame that they decided to do this, particularly since Ultima 6 handled things better; you only need to eat when you rest, and the food is automatically taken from your inventory (not to mention Ultima 6's inventory, while not perfect, is better than Ultima 7's).

This is one of the many reasons I see Ultima 7 as being overrated and not really that good (the terrible battle system being another big one).

On the other hand, Dragon Warrior has a mundane task I actually don't mind: In order to progress, you need to get stronger. The primary means of doing so is to walk around in circles, killing the enemies that you encounter and getting experience points. If you are playing the original version of the game, this task takes hours; just take a look at a no-manipulation speedrun to see what I mean. (RNG manipulation is a thing in this game, and such runs are much shorter due to being able to skip all the time spend farming XP and Gold.) Note that the remakes of this game significantly increased the XP and GP yield of enemies, making the game much shorter as a result.

In Dragon Warrior 2, endgame leveling doesn't feel as mundane, as the enemies in the best place to get XP are not at all easy. There's enemies that can attack twice and use powerful magic, an enemy that can critically hit, an enemy that can cast Defeat (multi-target instant death), and even an enemy that can cast Sacrifice (if this happens, your entire party is dead). Combined with the fact that you revive in the shrine after a party wipe, losing only half your gold (at a point in the game where you don't need any), this actually makes this task quite fun. (If it weren't for the revive after party wipe, you could imagine how frustrating this would be (unless it appeared in a game that let you save after every battle).

In the Book of Eschalon series, even the act of walking is a mundane task, due the the lethargically slow pace in which the character chooses to navigate.

In the games based on the Cæsar engine, road management is a mundane task you have to deal with, as otherwise you'll go insane as the market girl goes to give grain in the vast plains, far away from any house.

In Colonization, you have to assign every single person to a role in your towns, rather than the game assigning them automatically upon arrival. This means you can have an entire horde of carpenters waiting outside town, doing nothing while your lumber piles up.

A lot of the Factiorio early game is mundane tasks, and I resent the opening gameplay loop for it.

In vanilla Starbound, in order to access the story missions, you get the mundane task of scanning items for lore. Even if you hail from the race the mission is from or worse, have already scanned them. This isn't exciting or daunting. You click on things with a special cursor equipped.

In Myst you can only carry one page at a time. So the mundane task is going back and forth in order to get the other pages, if you want to see the Crazy Bros in full hammy glory.

Due to Octodad being Octodad, a lot of the tasks that would be mundane are in fact, adventures of their own.

Weapon loadoats in the original XCom quickly became mundane, because if memory servers you had to do it all over again for each mission. Thankfully OpenXCom remembers loadoats, among the plethora of other improvements and tweaks.

- collect x amount of random hidden item to unlock useless achievement
- finding the one useful item in a shit load of worthless loot
- press key / click button several time to achieve something

You could build a whole system around mundane tasks and get people to rent it, oh wait MMOs already exist.

That, and X-Com had very unforgiving item limits, not only for missions, but also in storage.

The delivery quests in Assassin's Creed Odyssey are hilarious.
"Can you please bring this wine to my husband, he needs it badly!"
"Alright, I'll do it"
The game adds the marker and it's 200 meters away. Brilliant.