Scavenger World / Video Games

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• Arizona Sunrise is set in a Zombie Apocalypse. You'll need to grab whatever you can find to help you survive.
• Arknights: This is the state of many of the cities in the country of Iberia, after a disastrous event that left many coastal cities crippled and depopulated. In order to survive, many of the people in these cities have resorted to forming a Lottery of Doom with the Seaborn where one person sacrifices themselves to the sea so food will be given to the remainder, in a Whole-Plot Reference to The Shadow Over Innsmouth.
• Endless Sky has a variation thereof. The Remnant are decendants of your regular spacefaring sci-fi humans, who once fled from war through a wormhole and found themselves stranded in an isolated region of space amidst the ruins of Higher-Tech Species. Since then they are attempting to salvage and reverse-engineer whatever they can, including the invading Korath Raider ships which you'll help them hunt down.
• Fallout:
  • The 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 getting better. It's also only a partial example, as there's still groups like the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave who have the ability to manufacture energy weapons, fusion cells and other Old World technology.
  • Fallout 3 takes place on the opposite coast of America, and is much closer to this trope. Megaton for instance is a town with houses, furniture and outer walls made out of scrap metal from an old airport. It also affects gameplay too, as buildings that you've picked through for supplies stay empty. The armor used by Raiders and Super Mutants are made from scavenged materials, such as car parts and old tires. One piece of concept art for the Super Mutant Behemoth depicted it wielding a car engine attached to a chain as a makeshift flail.
  • Fallout: New Vegas is less of a scavenger world, as it carries on from the endings of 1 and 2.
    • While scavenging is still a good way of finding weapons and cheap items to sell, and the Mojave has plenty of old vaults and bases to scavenge in, the New California Republic and other groups have reached the point where they manufacture most of their own equipment and supplies, up to and including energy weapons. In one quest, you're asked to shut down one such factory. Why? It's making bottle caps, the universally accepted currency in the Wasteland, and making more would cause inflation and crash the market!
    • Caesar's Legion employs blacksmiths (and presumably gunsmiths, though we don't see any) for their weapons, but their armor is largely scavenged from Pre-War sports equipment.
    • This is played brutally straight in the Dead Money DLC. You're left off in a Death World, filled with traps and extremely dangerous enemies. All you have is rags and a clunky holorifle, so you'll have to scrape together everything you find; weapons, food, tools and medicine if you want to survive for another five minutes.
  • Fallout 4 goes further with actual scavenging with the scrap mechanic. All that heavy, cheap Shop Fodder you found everywhere in Fallout 3? Now you can break it down for parts and build your own weapons, tools, and buildings!
    • The Game Mod Sim Settlements 2 implies that even before the bombs fell, America had started to become one. The ASAM sensors were designed to allow ordinary citizens to build homes, farms, and utilities out of whatever local materials they could "legally" gather. Of course, that's even more useful post-apocalypse, as the ASAMs let anyone build homes and farms, even uneducated savages.
• Flotsam: In the Flooded Future World, the only naturally-replenishing resources left are fish and seaweed; everything else is derived from scavenging resources from before the apocalypse. Wood and plastic can be found drifting around on the waves, while heavy materials like metal and fragile materials like books can only be found by searching ruins on the few remaining islands.
• In the spirit of post-apocalyptic worlds like Fallout, old CRPGs like "Visions of Aftermath: The Boomtown" and "Scavengers of the Mutant World" are good examples of old survival/scavenging games from the old PC era.
• Atom RPG: The nuclear post-war society of the Soviet "Wastelands" is based on the recovery, recycling and salvaging of pre-conflict atomic technologies, as all Soviet factories, industries and infrastructures ended up destroyed and devastated after the nuclear war, depriving the society of a production or industrial base. Guns and weapons are either military firearms of the Soviet Army or the Warsaw Pact, old, rusted and worn out; weapons of the Russian civil war, looted by museums after the atomic conflict; old Soviet weapons of World War II, or rudimentary and artisan weapons, made of wood and metal pipes and pneumatic systems. Houses and dwellings are made of shacks and sheets, while as a means of transport, wagons drawn by oxen are widespread and rusted or "recycled" motor vehicles are used for other purposes, though there are elements like radios.
• BattleTanx: Nominally what the world is supposed to be. Yet somehow EVERYONE seems to be effective enough scavengers to all have tanks...
• The Blastia in Tales of Vesperia. It's stated that there is no known way to create the Barrier Blastia used to keep monsters away from cities, along with most other Blastia. This is because excessive blastia use in the past created a planet-eating Eldritch Abomination, so the knowledge was destroyed and the surviving blastia were all given to one family so that they could be regulated.
• This happened in EVE Online's backstory: When the wormhole connecting the New Eden and Earth collapsed, most of the colonies died off or regressed back to pre-industrial status due to the lack of self-sufficient infrastructure. It got better, but there's still plenty of Lost Technology to be found.
• This trope is invoked constantly in Xenogears. Lesser technology, including Gears, is scavenged by previous civilizations that died out. More advanced technology is scavenged from the ship and cargo that originally crash-landed and brought humanity to this planet 10,000 years prior, as seen in the intro movie.
• Played with in Borderlands: Pandora very much looks and feels like a post-apocalyptic world where the only way to survive is by pillaging and salvaging gear and tech. However, it's actually not a post-apocalyptic world; it's more like a stark Death World where settling is just impossible, and any attempt at settling there has resulted in mining outposts and research camps that were quickly abandoned after the megacorporations behind them realized it was an absolutely terrible idea. Starting with Borderlands 3, it becomes clear that the rest of the universe is way better off.... technically, since the rest of the galaxy is ruled by various megacorporations who care very little for the average human.
• The main protagonist of Septerra Core grew up on a world shell where the most common way to make a living was by scavenging scraps dropped from the higher, more affluent world shells.
• Mass Effect: The Krogan homeworld of Tuchanka is this — essentially a planet-sized postapocalyptic junkheap whose inhabitants no longer care about making things but instead concern themselves with fighting over the few remaining scraps of technology. And the Krogan like it this way, because it apparently proves how tough they are.
• Phantasy Star Zero has a LOT of this. The world's gone to pot, and pretty much everything remotely advanced has been scavenged from the ruins. Scavenging ruins for relics (whether usable or reverse-engineerable) is a full-time profession, often as a civil service. In fact, one of the major storyline quests involves scavenging a suitable CAST body for an ally from a ruined city.
• Phantom Dust has technology that looks like it was jumbled together from all sorts of tech. They seem to be set for equipment, though, so the few scavenging missions you go on usually has food, recipes, or medication as the goal.
• In Chrono Trigger, there is a sidequest early on which involves locating food for a group of survivors in the Bad Future. Unfortunately, by the time you do find it, it's all spoiled because no one was left to run the refrigeration (or it simply didn't work). Also, it's worth noting that the reason you're doing this is because the survivors have been heretofore relying upon a machine that replenished their health instantly, but as the party notes, it could break down at any time, and no one knows anything about fixing it.
• Breath of Fire III has intensive use of machines built from scrap parts from an unknown origin and people don't have the knowledge to reproduce them.
  • Likewise does Mega Man Legends from the same publisher, which has a scavenger world that looks and feels quite similar to BoF3. Legends 1 even thanks the "BoF3 Rescue Team" in its credits.
• The settings of Planetarian. The viewpoint character's job is raiding depopulated ruins of cities to find MREs, or just anything that is potentially valuable. It's not an easy job because the competition is cutthroat, and the ruins are patrolled by autonomous death-machines that are supposed to defend the cities, even if they are pointless because the cities are no longer inhabited After the End.
• I Am Alive is the most scavenger-y of them all. How many bullets do you usually find at a time? ONE.
• The Facebook game Wasteland Empires is all over this like white on rice, at least for the first four tiers, after that it appears you start a steep learning curve with recovering the old technology.
• The Lost Colony◊ in X: Rebirth has an old Split Python (a destroyer from the X3 trilogy) stripped for supplies, with power lines leading from the ship to a nearby installation. The shutdown of the jumpgate network at the end of the Terran Conflict set off a dark age for many small colony worlds; DeVries, a cut-off Terran colony, suffered greatly at the end of the Terran Conflict, as it wasn't self-sufficient - tens of thousands starved, and many went insane and started looting other stations. When it's reconnected to the shattered remains of the gate network thirty years later, most of its ships are cobbled together from old United Space Command hulls, and the majority of the population live in the wrecked hulks of old Terran mining stations.
• Metro 2033 is a Post Apocalyptic Crapsack World taking place in the subway tunnels of Moscow After the End, when a nuclear strike irradiates the surface almost beyond survivability and plunges everything into a nuclear winter. The few creatures and people who survived above-ground have become horrific mutants of some form or fashion. Most of the equipment found or seen is put together from bits and pieces of pre-war technology or repurposed altogether.
  • This is most evident in the weaponry: while guns are obviously a necessity in the game's setting to hold off bandits or the occasional monstrosity that approaches a population center, the weapons that are there, while generally made well and with care, are visibly cobbled together from pipes, plywood, and parts of proper guns. The game's basic double barreled shotgun and SMG equivalents are the guns that are most obviously built from scavenged pieces, as they are visibly and obviously constructed from pieces of old plumbing with receivers and stocks welded on. The sequel adds even more scavenged weapons, like a bolt-action rifle that's visibly built up from parts of two different guns, a flare gun modified to fire shotgun shells, and a general purpose machine gun retrofitted to fire 12 gauge.
  • The housing situation in both games is no better, with the denizens of most stations living in either shabby huts made out of plywood and sheet metal, or ersatz "apartments" built from empty subway cars. The only exception seems to be Polis.
  • The "Developer Pack" DLC in Metro: Last Light features the Bigun, a multi-barelled shotgun built with nothing but scavenged bicycle parts. The stock is the seat and the bell rings when you fire it.
• Played with in Warzone 2100; salvaging pre-Collapse military technology is a key game mechanic and indirectly kicks off the plot, but when you find it, you have your engineers reverse-engineer it and put it back into production.
• The iOS game Rebuild involves survivors of a Zombie Apocalypse trying to rebuild human civilization while fending off attacks by zombies and raiders, finding more survivors and convincing them to join you, reclaiming zombie-infested areas, sending people out to find food and supplies (which you can't build yourself), etc. You can even reclaim labs and research new techniques in them, including the zombie virus cure (one of the ways to win). Some equipment can also be purchased from or sold to a visiting merchant for food. The equipment includes weapons (anything from a chainsaw to an assault rifle), dogs (which the game treats as equipable weapons), tools (and yes, some tools, like sledgehammers, double as weapons), leadership items (e.g. a megaphone to talk to survivors or a hat) and scientific equipment. Each survivor has stats associated with various skills (killing, scavenging, leadership, research, construction), which improve with successful use or equipment. The game never has you run out of ammo, though.
• Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare applies this to the original game's setting. Nobody's selling any goods now. You've got a horse on call, but that's it. If you're lucky, you'll get back enough bullets after a fight to replace what you spent on the fight. Bait? Bombs? Any other tools? Make them yourself.
• The setting of Rapture in the BioShock series, where security bots are made from boat parts, turrets are chairs with guns and motors to move them all duct-taped on, and the Grenade Launcher fires homemade grenades with tin cans for outer shells; it's even loaded by a box of canned goods.
• This War of Mine: Set in an eastern-European city in the midst of a civil war (loosely based on the Bosnian War and the Siege of Sarajevo), you must lead several characters to improve their shelter to make it more livable while sending someone out scavenging every night for food and supplies.
• Primordia (2012) is set in a world where an apocalyptic war destroyed humanity thousands of years ago. The world is now inhabited largely by the robots humanity left behind and it's been so long that humans are thought of by robots as mythological gods. The only way robots survive in this world is scavenging relics and power sources left over from the ancient times before humanity "ascended".
• Project Zomboid: The player is alone in a zombie-infested land. There is a storyline, but the main part of the game is just to gather food, drink and equipment to stay alive.
• NeoScavenger: Similar to Project Zomboid, a survival simulation game where the player must survive for as long as they can while braving through the post-apocalyptic world. Players survive by scavenging items to trade for food and supplies in towns, or follow the hunting-gathering route to live off the land.
• Mad Max: The Wasteland is naught but a blasted hellscape populated by raiders, lunatics and a handful of struggling hardasses in fortified strongholds. Note that this describes the entirety of the human race now: if you're not in service to one of the crazy and the strong or with the (relatively) sane living in a stronghold, you're dead. Everything is salvaged and cobbled-together from the long-lost remnants of our technology, and money has long-since been replaced by useful "scrap". Zigzagged in that while it's so bleak and merciless it almost seems like a Borderlands DLC instead of Earth, there are pristine "History Relics" that seem to indicate this collapse wasn't more than a generation or two ago.
• Due to the monster invasion in Evolve, the evacuation of Shear takes place in the early days of this. The hunters salvage equipment from ruined facilities to give them an edge and Abe mentions looting some of the demolished structures for supplies.
• Rimworld is set on a planet that appears to have been someone's Lost Colony. You can dig scrap metal and salvageable mechanical and electronic parts out of the ground, and there are usually at least a few abandoned buildings or lengths of wall still standing. Of course, if you manage to keep a settlement functional long enough to start researching new technologies then it eventually becomes a small-scale Apocalypse Not (even if, without mods, you'll never really reach the full extent of technological advancement the previous dwellers reached).
• Wasteland 2 is this with its Used Future. Everybody has to scavenge everything.
  • In the Ranger Citadel, your fellow Rangers have limited weapons, armour, currency, even ammo. Some will pay extra for weapon parts, medicine, and in the case of the explosives expert, animal faeces. Most of all the currency isn't 'dollars', it's 'scrap'.
  • Exactly as the trope describes, working vehicles are almost non-existant. Cars are more popular as barricades, and motor homes are just... homes. You sometimes see parts lying around but nobody can put them all together. Bicycles exist but functional ones are incredibly rare. But worryingly, somebody is finding the necessery materials to build shiny new robots...
• Red Ash, a pseudo-sequel to Mighty No. 9, is set in a world where people salvage parts from giant robots for a living.
• Laurentia from Nexus Clash was much more technologically advanced than modern Earth, but was bumped down to Urban Fantasy levels when the world ended and it was pulled into the Nexus. Too much of the really advanced Laurentian technology depended on human expertise that's no longer available After the End, and most of the functioning exceptions are Magitek created by interaction with the powers of the Nexus.
• Kenshi is basically what a super modern space-faring cyberpunk Japan would become if it suddenly collapsed due to a heavily implied A.I. Is a Crapshoot. The whole world is littered with huge structures resembling starship hulls (some of which can be mined for very high quality metal), jet engines the size of an entire town that have been slowly rusting away for millennia, even crashed satellites creating a permanent sandstorm around them, and one of the sentient races of that world is a robot species that is implied to be many millenia old; however, after not one but at least two complete collapses of civilization, the world has basically regressed to a Schizo Tech mockup of medieval Japan in a stark Death World where even the most gentle herbivore animals can kill you with just a couple strikes.
• MechWarrior, likes its originator BattleTech, makes use of this trope in most of the games. The reason given is the same, the Inner Sphere largely lost the ability to make new 'Mechs as a result of the Succession Wars and didn't regain that ability until after the discovery of lost schematic templates and the facilities to use them.
• The Union of Border Worlds in Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom falls under this. Their technology is based entirely around the scavenging and salvage of material that was considered obsolete twenty years ago by the standards of the Terran Confederation. Blair and the other heroes only gain access to current and cutting edge technology by stealing it.
• Halo Infinite: While the UNSC is officially stranded on the Ring, the Banished have been experiencing their own resource problems, forcing them to cannibalizing each other's gear for their own purposes. This has resulted in the ring being utterly littered with destroyed and hacked up materials ranging from crashed pelicans and abandoned warthogs to burnt-out Skiff husks and entire UNSC frigate wreckages. Many of the Banished outposts look unlevel, unstable and sloppily planned out, and there are numerous camps sites where individuals and entire squadrons tried to stay hidden.

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