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In a modern society, everything is so interconnected that any product is the result of that entire society.

People who put products together, people who got the materials the products are made of, people who run the machines that generate the power required for those things... et cetera. Even the things people tend to forget or disassociate with the production of a product: people who write the manuals, people who act as "gofers" for all the other people, middle-management, etc.

Then consider all the people behind the construction of the tools required to do each of those things, and then who make the tools required to make those, and so on, and so on.

Suppose a majority of mankind and its infrastructure were to be wiped out? There would be huge holes in the knowledge of how to produce things. Sure, someone might know how to fix the engine of a car, but if there's no one who knows how to make spark plugs, one is forced to hope they can find workable ones in the debris left After The End.

As generations go by, these knowledge "holes" would grow larger. Society would have to rely on scavenging workable machinery without the knowledge of how to make them. This is a Scavenger World, and if enough of the cogs are lost you end up with Lost Technology.

An elaboration of Schizo Tech. Possession Implies Mastery is always averted here. Compare Cosy Catastrophe

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Examples:

• Avenger
• Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou
• Gunnm — Rather justified by the trash of (and occasional exiles from) the apparently utopian sky city being dumped into the middle to town.
• The Big O — The technology itself is untouched, but people's memory of how to use and maintain it vanished.
• In Trigun, most of the human population of the planet "Gunsmoke" has settled near the broken remains of the spaceships that brought them there. Very few people survive who know how to fix and repair the surviving ship "plants", and the current tech level of society has apparently decayed quite a bit from the level it once had just to make the trip.
• The colony world (or far-future Earth, depending on your interpretation) on which Mai-Otome is set seems to be in the beginning stages of this. Certain technologies — like the Otome nanites — are only available in specific cities, and there generally isn't sufficient scientific skill elsewhere to reproduce them. This is, in fact, a major plot point.
• Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind is another example; very few people know how to make or repair most of the machines in the film, and the weapons that caused this After The End scenario are hoped to remain Lost Technology.
• Waterworld. Scavenged anti-aircraft machinegun used as a terrestrial (well, aquatic) attack weapon? Check. Small town/islands made of scavenged sheetmetal and random equipment? Check. Scavenged oil tanker, moved with oars? Check.
  • It should be noted that they could actually run the engines on the tanker and other motor vehicles, but they row the tanker to save fuel, because clearly it's more resource efficient to have thousands of slaves to manually row it. (There is a logical problem in the implication that they used the oil in the tanker to fuel it and their other vehicles, however they didn't actually have a way to refine it into gasoline)
    • This troper had the feeling that the tanker wasn't, and hadn't been in a while, able to move itself. What working engines are around power vehicles in far better shape than the tanker. Besides, it's far easier to repair and service jet-ski engines than the monsters that make tankers go...
    • Actually, oil tankers don't run on the contents of the hold; they run on cheaper, far lower-grade oil produced as a byproduct of distillation. The rowing is an exercise in leadership, if they REALLY wanted to make it move, they could rig up a big sail.
• Mad Max
  • This trope doesn't really kick in until Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior: In the first film, the greater society (in Australia at least) is still scraping along.
• Battletech made it important to scavenge the wreckage of a defeated enemy to get otherwise irreplaceable spare parts for your Humongous Mecha.
• In Warhammer 40,000, much of the Imperium of Man's technology is ancient and only kept running by a specialized religious priesthood performing maintenance by ritual. It gets a bit ridiculous, to the point where they worship tanks. Big, impressive, Titan-killing tanks, but tanks nonetheless.
  • Actually, it's more like they think that the tank is alive, and needs to be placated so that it will bring ruin upon the enemy, instead of turning on its creators.
    • You're both wrong. The Techpriests don't worship the tanks, and they don't think the tanks are alive, they worship the Machine Spirit, sort of an all-encompassing overmind for machinery. They bless the tanks to make them fit for inhabitation. Then again, basically all fluff in W H40k is told by an Unreliable Narrator so there's no telling what the higher ups think.
    • It has been established that the higher-ups know very well what they are doing, all the ritual is to make them seem spooky and mysterious and to make it easier to teach new Techpriests. Also, many large machines do have a Machine Spirit, or better said AI's that needs to be placated, such as Titans and warships. Why exactly they build them with those is a different question. Also, if they didn't know what they were doing, the Imperium would have descended into barbarism a long time ago.
    • The implication this troper followed, is that somehow, somewhere along the line, this kind of happened for real, and machine spirits came to inhabit absolutely every piece of machinery in the Imperium - there are stories kicking about all through the fluff of things like simple water pumps not working until they're simply blessed, and so on. And given the sheer amount of psychic power floating about the setting, 'Clap Your Hands If You Believe' has already been a pretty viable explanation for large-scale beliefs becoming real already ( though the Orcs just run on that trope ). However, further implication is that while some tanks, like Landraiders, have something that might be an AI rather than a sentient machine spirit, given their behaviour and ability to operate on their own on occasion, the truly massive, semi-sentient machines like titans apparently aquire their awareness not through AI, but as a byproduct of their sheer hypercomplexity and age.
• The Fallout series is set in a post-apocalyptic Scavenger World in which getting an old car to run is a major quest. However, it's a world that's on its way to fill the holes: in the good endings of both Fallout and Fallout 2 new cities are created, new governments established and it's implied that things are going better. It should be noted that the scarcity that seems to have hit the automotive industry has apparently left the weaponry one untouched, at least judging by the ludicrous amounts of energy blasters, miniguns and assault rifles scattered all over the place. They did manage a Hand Wave with one character late in the game, a blacksmith who produces his own gunpowder and loads it into recycled shells to make new bullets for sale.
  • Actually, there's an excellent reason cars are so rare and guns are not. The reason the series takes place After the End is that the US and China began battling over oil, and cars were dismantled about two years before the nukes fell in order to preserve gas. Two hundred years and a bunch of explosions later, there ain't many cars left- but the guns used to fight that war were much more common and a hell of a lot easier to replicate.
    • Granted, but seriously, if one just wants to move and doesn't much care about safety features and comfort, all it takes to hack together a buggy made of metal pipes and sheetmetal are scrap materials (abundant in the world of Fallout), a welding torch, a source of power (the world of Fallout seems to run on energy cells) and some ingenuity. And you want to tell me there is just the one working road vehicle in the whole of Fallout 2's world? Hell, the whole place should be crawling with Mad Max-like contraptions.
    • Word of God says that there are more working vehicles than show in-game, specially in the New California Republic. Van Buren was to have many vehicles (I remember about a police car, a motobyke and a truck). Bethesda's Fallout 3 is not going to have any working vehicle except Enclave's vertibirds, or so it seems. On the matter of guns, there are many groups that are capable of making their own guns and ammo in the Fallout universe: New California Republic, Brotherhood of Steel, the Shi and the Enclave, if I remember right.
    • It should be noted that creating a working engine that runs on nuclear fusion cells is far, far more difficult than making an internal combustion engine; Fallout 3 also shows us that most of the car wrecks are radioactive due to leakage, making them quite dangerous to dismantle.
    • On the other hand, the Enclave and Brotherhood don't seem to have many problems getting reactors for their nuclear-powered Power Armors...
• The 2000AD comic strip Nemesis the Warlock features a warlike human culture, Termight, who are at war with everyone else in the universe despite the fact that culturally and technologically, they are regressing. They fight with medieval weapons, their Humongous Mecha are recycled, one of them can only move it's feet with the aid of men turning capstans etc.
• The tabletop RPG Deadlands: Hell on Earth takes place After the End, and has hosts of broken machinery that not many people know how to use. (Then again, unless it helps keep your head out of an irradiated zombie's mouth, most people don't care.) Enter the Junkers, "techno-shamans" who duct-tape together odd amalgams of old tech and enchant it back into working order. A player character can even be a Junker, and Junkers are known for (re-)creating odd bits of technology that seem at odds with the rest of the world's current level of knowledge.
• The Kinetic Novel Planetarian ~the reverie of a little planet~ also takes place After the End and involves Junkers, with one critical difference: instead of restoring technology, the Junkers pilfer it (as well as other valuables) from the ruins for fun and profit. Well, as fun as dodging autonomous killer robots can be, anyway.
• The middle section of the 30s movie Things To Come shows a scavenger society slowly breaking down - despite what the Chief thinks!
• Shannara as a whole, with the Druid order being the only people with any knowledge of technology left. Specifically, the most recent Genesis of Shannara trilogy, which aside from the usual scavenging for supplies includes sports stadiums as the last organized holdouts of civilization.
• The British dystopian sci-fi movie Doomsday plays with this trope: The walled-off Scotland looks like something from a Mad Max sequel with no or few gunpowder weapons in use, very limited electricity and really ramshackle cars kitbashed together from old wrecks; the rest of Britain still bears a passing resemblance to what it's like today but seems to be turning slowly into this, as we see its authorities treat tanks as Lost Technology.
• The webcomic Post-Nuke takes place on what remains of Earth after a nuclear war. The main character wanders around with his dog, and can't trust anybody. Everybody is trying to get what little there's left, and so it's hard to make friends. Some are even continuing the war...
• Definitely Truthin Television, in poor nations without native industrial capacity, especially where high-tech imports are scarce.
• Probably part of the inspiration behind Junkyard Wars - two teams comprised of three engineers go into a junkyard and build anything ranging from buggys to firetrucks, and they always end up looking like something from a Scavenger World.
  • You mean Scrapheap Challenge.
• The novel "Earth Abides" by George Rippey Stewart deals with the consequence of most of the human population being wiped out by some plague. The protagonist sees mankind's technological advances undone, because the scattered survivors do not have the cohesion, nor the education or even the motivation to keep the technological marvels (electricity, indoor plumbing, metalworking etc.) running. Humanity reverts to a hunter-gatherer society.
• Russia in Babylon AD.
• The parts of The Dark Tower set in Mid-World have this flavor. It tends to become both more prominent and more dangerous as the series goes on: in the first couple of books Roland's six-guns are rare and precious artifacts, but by the fifth we've seen working robots, giant cyborg bears, weaponized Harry Potter props, and a supersonic maglev train with a yen for riddles, all of which are decaying and homicidal.

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