I broke my mouse and Drop Questing!

I was on a discord call with friends late one night and I was fiddling with my mouse. There was cat hair in the scroll-wheel and a paper clip in my desk. I got most of the cat hair out and some of the unit's functionality.
Now I can't scroll up unless I middle click and do the fun little scroll icon thing.
There will be a new mouse coming tomorrow. Yay. 

The lesson here is: Cats don't always kill their pray, but they do tend to mangle them and walk away. If you are going to clean something use proper tools in good lighting conditions!

RPG Maker MZ does not care if you have a fully working mouse. All you need to do to MAKE a game is be able to point and click.
One thing the RMs  do care about is numbers. That probably seems pretty obvious, seeing how its a computer game making engine and all, but understanding this is super important next to the fact that humans don't care about numbers. At least humans don't care in the same way.

RMs name things with numbers, we don't.  I could make item 56 and 57 both named Bob's lunch and the player wouldn't notice anything other than he or she might have two different 'Bob's lunch' in his or her inventory. The engine doesn't care at all they are both named 'bob's lunch and ONLY sees the numbers.
You can exploit this in a battle quest system. I know because I did.

When you create enemies to fight you can assign them items to drop and the frequency. What you can't do in the creation system is set up a counter to see how many drops you have gotten. This seems odd since you can count so many other aspects of the battle, like escapes and victories. The XP you get from enemies is vital to the game it's self. But tracking and counting drops is no where to be found. 

When you check items in the character's inventory you can't check how many there are, only if there is one or not.
Like this:

If you have an NPC quest that asks for multiple drop items things get tricky.  I looked for a solution and of course the answer the internet game me was "TrY tHiS PluGIn!!!!ONE111!!!"
No.
I'm not 12. I knew I could figure this problem out without plugins. I got up for water and almost instantly an idea came to me... and it worked!
Can you guess what I did using the knowledge about numbers vs names?
Here's what my solution looks like:


This is a parallel, map dependent event with a little processor 'mercy wait' tossed in. The items look identical but one is 87:Cheese Sandwich and the other is 88: Cheese Sandwich. If you just swapped out 87:Cheese Sandwich and replaced with another 87:Cheese Sandwich the program wouldn't know wen to stop swapping and thus it would never stop counting the swaps.
By swapping it out for a completely different item the program only counts until the original item, the dropped enemy item, has been depleted from the player's inventory. The variable only counts how many drops you had. <-- This keeps track of the counting part of the quest.
If you need to hunt down 20 sandwiches from sandwich thieves you have them all neatly counted this way. Np plugin needed.
The NPC event can then take the 88:Cheese Sandwich items instead of the 87:Cheese Sandwich items. The player will never see the difference.

 I feel like I'm learning.
I feel like I'm starting to get the fundamentals of the engine's internal logic.
I still don't feel like I understand numbers at all. Not outside of very basic addition and subtraction. But I feel like the more I understand the engine the less I need to have an in-depth understanding of numbers and the more I need a basic understanding of human psychology.
Fake it as you make it!
Just don't shove paperclips into your mouse at 1:30 in the morning when you are so tied you can hardly see straight.

Questions for this week:
Outside of aesthetics reasons are there ANY plugins you think I might like? Because I'm starting to doubt anyone needs them for anything out side of aesthetics!
So... uh... how did you break your mouse? Or keyboard or other interface tool. I know you broke something. Fess up!