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FOR SALE: 1979 IFA W50, orig paint, stereo, int. Engine swap. Will trade.
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.
Now, suppose a large majority of mankind were to be suddenly 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. And then there's the need for gasoline. Heck, unleaded gasoline for that matter. And oil, and tires, and antifreeze and batteries, and... well you get the idea. And even if someone does know how to make those key components, all that knowledge is little more than useless trivia if the infrastructure of society has been disrupted to the point that the raw materials can no longer be supplied. It would quickly be forgotten as humanity focused on more important things, like finding enough food to keep from starving.
These knowledge "holes" would tend to grow larger as generations went by. Society would have to rely on scavenging workable machinery without the knowledge of how it was made or the basic principles it works on, eventually resulting in Low Culture, High Tech.
This is the basis of a Scavenger World, and if enough of the cogs are lost you end up with Lost Technology.
Moreover, the physical cogs don't last forever; a Scavenger World that goes on long enough usually has to invoke Ragnarok Proofing to explain why anything still works at all.
In terms of combat, expect most people to be kitted out in Improvised Armour and wielding Improvised Weapons.
An elaboration of Schizo Tech. Possession Implies Mastery is always averted here. After the End examples of the Scavenger World often overlap with Crapsack World, though Scavenger Worlds no better or worse than the modern have occured in fiction here and there.
Compare Cosy Catastrophe. See also Disaster Scavengers. If you ask a scavenger about where this stuff came from, they'll say it was all made in The Beforetimes. May also involve an Archaeological Arms Race. When technology is rebuilt from scavenged trash it's Scavenged Punk.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- The Big O — The technology itself is untouched, but people's memory of how to use and maintain it vanished.
- Not really a straight example, more of a subversion here: most people remembered how to use and maintain technology, which is how the city continued to exist. What was lost in The Event were people's memories of who they were and who those around them were.
- Gunnm — Rather justified by the trash of (and occasional exiles from) the apparently utopian sky city being dumped into the middle to town.
- 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.
- Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. 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. In the manga, characters are always concerned to salvage the engines from downed aircraft, and the Valley of the Wind maintains its independence from two large empires by virtue of owning a two-seat pre-collapse gunship.
- 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.
- After War Gundam X has an entire class of people called "Vultures" dedicated to scavanging technology, their After the End was a pretty bad one too. 10-Billion casualty mass colony drop. It's lucky any humans survived!
- Casshern Sins: metal parts that aren't corroded by The Ruin are very valued and coveted by both humans and cyborgs.
- Earth in Suisei no Gargantia. After an apocalyptic event, the entire surface of the planet is covered by ocean. People live on floating cities and scavenge the ruins under the ocean. Good scavengers seem to be respected.
Comic Books
- The 2000 AD 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 its feet with the aid of men turning capstans etc.
- Wasteland, a comic series by Oni Press, takes place in a scavenger world thanks to "the big wet".
Film
- Mad Max 2 (The Road Warrior) was successful and influential in bringing the Scavenger World trope to the big screen. The tone and visuals inspired many subsequent works.
- A Boy and His Dog: Despite the Talking Animal angle, definitely Not For Kids.
- 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.
- Threads: The legendarily bleak British Docudrama is indirectly based on this trope, the title threads being those that hold society together - the food we produce, the goods we make. Following a nuclear war, we follow an increasingly desperate struggle for survival in a grim world where deputised traffic wardens shoot looters on sight, a pregnant woman is forced to eat raw sheep and mill her own grain after stealing it from a government depot and the only remaining form of powered agriculture is an antique traction engine. Not to mention the horrific parody of school played on a barely functional VCR.
- The middle section of the 1930s movie Things To Come shows a scavenger society slowly breaking down.
- 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.
- Sky Blue: The Diggers' society works much like this; some, such as Shua and Moe, know how to assemble machines, but they mostly have to steal the parts from Ecoban.
- Hardware superimposes a Scavenger World with a functioning military-industrial complex going to hell in a handbasket. Scavenging is central to the plot: the story kicks off in war-blasted desert when a wandering scavenger finds a dismembered robot buried in the sand, and takes the pieces back to the City to sell.
- Hell Comes To Frogtown is another work inspired by Mad Max.
- The former Soviet Union in Babylon AD.
- Post J-Day The Terminator.
- Warlords of the 21st Century, a.k.a. Battletruck.
Live Action Television
- Aftermath: The episode "World Without Oil" explores the hypothetical scenario of what would happen if the earth's oil reservoirs suddenly disappeared. It involves society's slippage into one of these as people scavenge the dumpsters for electronics from which they can extract precious metals as well as plastic products that they can reuse.
- Babylon 5: Implied in "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars". Far in Earth's future, a "great burn-out" has pushed humanity back into the medieval age. The Rangers try to slowly reintroduce technology, but have to rely on extraterrestrial help to come by supplies like gasoline
- The Colony: This show is a simulation of life in a world where most of the population has been killed by a virus. The objective is for a group of strangers to build a working society using stuff left behind in a (mostly) empty city.
- Falling Skies: Takes place in a world six months after an Alien Invasion has destroyed most major cities and wiped out a large majority of humanity. The survivors first priority (as well as making sure to avoid the aliens) is raiding stores and warehouses for remaining food and weapons. In the pilot, the protagonist is captured by a gang of outlaws. The leader offers him a beer, which the protagonist is surprised to learn is cold. Apparently, the outlaws managed to salvage a working generator and a fridge. The survivors also have to extract fuel from cars to use in their own vehicles (all pre-microchip, as the aliens used EMP on a massive scale).
- Jericho: Follows the immediate aftermath of an apocalypse, but there is a bit of this: improvised or scavenged sources of electricity, scavenged weapons, no food outside of what can be grown locally, etc.
- Revolution: Set fifteen years after the electricity goes off all over the world. The Monroe Republic is able to make their own black powder muskets but have to scavenge for more advanced technology and cannot manufacture ammunition for their pre-Blackout weapons. They have a functioning railway but their steam engine was salvaged from a museum. In contrast the Georgia Federation is much more advanced and is building new steam engines and seagoing ships.
- Scrapheap Challenge or, as it was known in the US, Junkyard Wars: Probably part of the inspiration behind this show. Two teams comprised of three engineers go into a junkyard and build anything ranging from buggies to firetrucks, and they always end up looking like something from a Scavenger World.
- The Tribe: Deals with a world After the End, where a virus wiped out every person beyond the age of 18. The remaining kids and children, of course, struggle with exactly this trope.
- The Walking Dead: As a result of Zombie Apocalypse.
Tabletop Games
- BattleTech started out this way, with the destruction of almost all the infrastructure to build the instellar starships (FTL warship shipyards were all lost), and most of the factories to produce advanced technology were destroyed or abandoned, causing mechs and tanks to be pilfered for spare parts. Things eventually got better with the discovery of a data disc containing schematics for the destroyed factories and the underlying science for some equipment. Battlefield Salvage is still a critical component of most games.
- The 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.
- In Warhammer 40000, 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.
- The Adeptus Mechanicus don't worship tanks directly, but rather the "machine spirit" (but only as an alternate manifestation of the Emperor, because it would be heresy otherwise). The Imperium falls somewhere between Scavenger World and Lost Technology; because they're not actually scavenging existing technology for the most part (except for a few ancient and notable pieces of equipment); but rather are dependent upon use of ancient "templates" used by their automated manufacturing plants. The technological caste functions more as archeologists than researchers; and any "advances" are not due to modification of existing designs, but re-discovery of lost templates. Scavenger World applies best to the really big weapons systems like Titans and superheavy combat vehicles; where there are no templates left, and thus no ability to manufacture more.
- And then there's the Orks, a technological spacefaring race... with no heavy industry and no understanding of physics. Their spaceships are salvaged hulks with jerry-rigged engines, and all their weapons and ground vehicles (apart from the ones they manage to steal intact) are cobbled together from mismatched bits of battlefield salvage by a bunch of idiot savants. And somehow it all manages to work.
- It's actually the opposite for Orkz. All Orkz have knowledge of basic physics and mechanics literally encoded into their genes, thus every Ork can smelt metal to make their choppa & scrounge enough junk together to make a functioning shoota. Some Orkz, the Mekz, have an even greater instinctive understanding of these principles, and can make teleporters, laser & plasma weaponry, massive walkers & even spaceships (with assistance of course). The problem is, the Ork doing the building doesn't really understand what he's doing, because its mostly subconscious, which is why Ork technology looks so ramshackle & generally isnt standardized.
- There is also the fact that Ork technology is at least partially powered by the gestalt psychic field which connects all of the Orks, and allows them to compensate for mechanical deficiencies in their machines. For example, an Ork can cobble together a gun from spare parts and an ammo magazine, and it will work reasonably well; it will also work for a non-Ork, but not nearly as well. It also means that certain mechanical principles which shouldn't actually work do so because the Orks really believe they should, the most notable examples being "The red ones go faster" (painting a vehicle red makes it go faster) and the instance when an Ork raiding party successfully stole and flew to their base a human ship that had been drifting in space because it was out of fuel.
- d20 Apocalypse (an expansion for d20 Modern) specializes in the post-apocalyptic setting, and features rules on scavenging supplies and bartering with them.
- Gamma World Scrounging stuff from pre-apocalyptic ruins was the game's usual equivalent of dungeon-crawling.
- In Exalted, the River Province of Creation is more widely known as the Scavenger Lands, because it's the only place with a fairly large stock of half functioning First Age tech (much of which has not yet been recovered) available in societally usable quantities.
Toys
- The planet of Bara Magna in BIONICLE.
- The original minicomics packaged with the Masters of the Universe figures had Eternia as such a world, devastated by "the Great Wars" (however, the Wind Raider was still a recent creation of Man-At-Arms). This is absent from later minicomics and other media.
Web Comics
- A Moment Of Peace is a Lighter and Softer version of a post-apocalyptic scavenger world.
- 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...
- The world of Aurora Danse Macabre, thanks to a yet unexplained apocalypse.
- In the world of Glorianna, old-time tech is generally used only in the crudest fashion (e.g., a tribe living in the hollowed-out remains of an old cargo plane), and only the small, fanatical cult of Syons actively tries to get ancient devices working again.
Other
- These pieces of concept art by Keith Thompson.
- Leslie Fish's song "The Discards", from Firestorm: Songs of the Third World War, describes a post-apocalyptic encounter between super-sophisticated transports, "sleek and bossy, all stuffed with high-tech gear", and scavenged vehicles composed mainly of "armor, wheels, and gun".
- In fact, several songs from that album fall into the Scavenger World category: notably "Black Powder and Alcohol", "Blue Bread Mold", and "Hello! Remember Us?"
Real Life
- Definitely Truth in Television in poor nations without native industrial capacity, especially where high-tech imports are scarce. Especially in Cuba, due to laws banning all technology after their revolution. And North Korea, with its crumbling infrastructure and isolationist policies.
- Some poorer parts of the developing world (e. g. in Africa or India) can afford little new technology or replacement parts to speak of, forcing them to weld metal using old car batteries or welders with transformers made out of cardboard.
- Many second and third-world countries buy planes off the first-world's airlines. This isn't so bad at first because many first-world airlines replace planes every five years or so. But then these second-hand buyers sell on those planes to a lower-class airline, who will sell those planes on and further on... and then the planes get cannibalized until it gets to the point where some third-world airlines own planes that are a combination of third, fourth and fifth-hand planes.
- In India many poor people will pore over rubbish dumps and tips for anything useful/worth selling to recycling companies. It has been described as one of the most efficient recycling methods ever. Unfortunately, India (like many poor countries) is a dumping ground for vast quantities of toxic waste that First-Worlders don't want to bother recycling, like electronics. The scavengers picking through these things are unknowingly exposed to all kinds of lovely toxins such as PCB, lead, cadmium, mercury, poisonous solvents, and carcinogens.
- Many areas that are hit with war or major natural disaster become this.
- Became quite common during the Great Depression as hardly anyone could afford to buy anything. One of the best examples is the Hoover Wagon a common site which was a car rigged to a harness and pulled by a horse or donkey, as the owner couldn't afford gas.
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