Trinket

A trinket (or shiny trinket) is a round shiny collectible item in VVVVVV. There are 20 in total in the main game, and collecting all of them will unlock the Secret Lab. Trinkets also unlock songs in the ship's jukebox.

Trinkets are usable in custom levels; before 2.3, only 20 were able to be placed at a time, with undefined behavior occurring when additional trinkets were placed. Starting with 2.3, up to 100 trinkets may be placed at a time. In custom levels, scripts can check the player's trinket count and jump to another script accordingly, thus allowing for progression based on amount of trinkets collected.

Placement
In Dimension VVVVVV, the trinkets are evenly spread out through the map, with 2 in Space Station 1, 5 in Space Station 2, 4 in The Laboratory, 1 in The Warp Zone, 2 in The Tower, 1 in The Final Level, and the rest spread out in the overworld. The overworld trinkets do not usually require much skill to acquire, most of them lying at the ends of long caves. The trinkets in each of the other zones usually do not require any backtracking to get back to the main path, but they do require a little more skill to obtain.