History ApocalypseHow / Class2

* ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaBreathoftheWild'', set a century after a catastrophe named the "Great Calamity" (which some in the Zelda fan community have compared to a nuclear apocalypse) that has destroyed the Hyrulean government and almost completely destroyed Hylian culture, but the Great Calamity either did not affect other cultures at all, or the effect on other races was relatively minimal at best.

* The UrExample is the various Great Flood myths that appear in various cultures. Western tropers are probably most familiar with the Judeo-Christian version in the [[Literature/TheBible Book of Genesis]], but ''Literature/TheEpicOfGilgamesh'' was earlier, making this OlderThanDirt.

* Wherever the Phyrexians turn up in ''TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering'' , this is sure to follow. Whenever [[TheVirus Glistening Oil]] comes in contact with metal or flesh, the Phyrexian life cycle begins anew. Meaning that Phyrexia will never be vanquishes [[FromASingleCell as long as even one drop of Glistening Oil remains]]. Their current kill count on the level of cultures or above is:

** The invasion was ultimately unsuccessful. Phyrexia and its oil was purged from Dominaria, and nine Planeswalkers we're eventually able to destroy Yawgmoth, the Machine-God of Phyrexia. The plane itself collapsed some time later after being too long without a master. So Phyrexia itself was Phyrexia's third apocalypse.
** However, the collapse didn't happen before the Planeswalker Karn stopped to see the ruined throne of his old nemesis, Yawgmoth, getting himself infected with Glistening Oil in the process. Unwittingly, Karn spread it to several other world. His own creation, Mirrodin, took the spot line over the ''Scars of Mirrodin'' block, ending in ''New Phyrexia.''

Planetary-scale Societal Collapse. This takes an entire planet back to at least a pre-industrial age -- and pre-agricultural at worst. Recovery may or may not be possible.

** Come''VideoGame/DoomEternal'', and [[HellOnEarth the demons have found their way to Earth]], with most of humanity slaughtered, the world's cities reduced to rubble, and the remnants of humanity struggling to fight back. It would've become a ApocalypseHow/Class3A had the [[PlayerCharacter Doom Slayer]] not showed up in time.

* The demons of ''VideoGame/Doom2016'' want nothing more than to destroy our world and ruin our humanity. Too bad their one major obstacle happens to have [[TheDreaded already started doing that to Hell]] [[OneManArmy and is their one obstacle]].

* The world got nuked from hell to back in ''Manga/FistOfTheNorthStar'', and it's basically become the world in the Mad Max films. Humanity may one day recover, but for the time it's stuck in a "might makes right" world filled with mohawk-wearing motorcycle gangs and power-mad martial artist warlords.

* ''LightNovel/TheAsteriskWar'': In the wake of an extinction-level event known as Invertia, the entire world has turned into a {{Dystopia}} led by a MegaCorp. Entire countries have been forced back to a system of monarchic rule or even reduced to slums, because it would be profittable for said MegaCorp. The only place that isn't a [[CrapsackWorld Crapsack Location]] is the Asterisk city, used primarily as a stage for very dangerous martial arts duels and tournaments among superhuman teenagers.

* Although the {{canon}} information is so vague as to be useless, it can be inferred that this was the result of the fall of the Silver Millennium in the {{Backstory}} of ''Franchise/SailorMoon'' -- humanity died out completely everywhere in the Solar System other than Earth, and on Earth the fall was so JustForFun/{{egregious}} that the Silver Millennium and its interplanetary civilization were both completely forgotten. Exactly when this happened is uncertain, although the "thousand years ago" figure frequently bandied about is both historically improbable ''and'' the invention of the Creator/DiC [[CutAndPasteTranslation North American dub]].

* Wherever
the Phyrexians turn up in ''TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering'' , this is sure to follow. Whenever [[TheVirus Glistening Oil]] comes in contact with metal or flesh, the Phyrexian life cycle begins anew. Meaning that Phyrexia will never be vanquishes [[FromASingleCell as long as even one drop of Glistening Oil remains]]. Their current kill count on the level of cultures or above is:

* By the end of ''VideoGame/EndlingExtinctionIsForever'', [spoiler:the region has devolved into a bit of a planetary scale societal collapse in a barren wasteland. At least most of humanity has learned from their mistakes and decided to protect nature from further destruction and help some species to reproduce and survive.]]

* Mankind was kicked back to the stone age 3000 years before the beginning of ''VideoGame/ArcTheLad'', [[spoiler: Arc 2 ends with ''merely'' a Class 1 extinction.]] [[PlayerPunch You can hate the writters for this]]

* Humanity got back on its feet in the ''LightNovel/VampireHunterD'' movies, albeit with some difficulty. Computers and energy weapons still exist, but the largest settlements humans could rebuild are large towns. From what we can gather watching the two movies, there are no more sprawling metropolises in the vein of Tokyo or New York City. In the original novels, there's one such metropolis, though the humans didn't actually build it.

* The most likely result of a full-scale nuclear war, which is to say the detonation of the current stockpiles of all nuclear armed nations. Despite disarmament treaties and the like, the amount of nuclear weapons still available for use could quite easily wipe human civilization out.[[note]]However, this is debatable, since a great deal of those nuclear weapons are not in good enough care and maintenance to actually be ready to retaliate at a moments notice.[[/note]] However, it could result in something [[ApocalypseHow/Class3A far worse]] depending on which predictions are right.

* ''FanFic/{{Embers}}'': Part of [[spoiler: Koh the Face-Stealer's EvilPlan is this via supervolcano. The goal is a Class3a.]]

** "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS29E13LastOfTheTimeLords Last of the Time Lords]]": The Master and the Toclafane's AlienInvasion has apparently caused this within a year. After the AlienInvasion exterminated 10% of the Earth's population, the Master is now the unquestioned Lord and Master of the entire Earth and the remaining humans are effectively his and the Toclafane's slave labor. TV no longer works and technological regress has occurred, the Master has carved monuments to himself all around the world, and the Toclafane have converted the entire south coast of England into a spaceship-constructing shipyard. Later, we hear about the ruins of New York, the fusion mills of China, the radiation pits of Europe, and the entirety of the ''islands of Japan'' being burned with everyone on them. Thankfully, the whole apocalypse suffers a ResetButton by the episode's end.

** ''When the Tripods Came'' was published some thirty years after the first three, in 2000, and is an extremely moving book, for all its simplicity.

* ''Literature/RiddleyWalker'': It's two thousand years -- we think -- after a nuclear war blasted everyone back to Iron Age technology. In the two millennia since the war, mankind has been getting by in a sort of neo-tribal existence, by digging up old rusting metal out of the earth to salvage the scrap metal. All history is orally related via Punch-and-Judy puppet shows and half-remembered accounts of the war are woven together with scraps of the legend of St. Eustace. And the English language is mind-blowingly different.

* ''VideoGame/{{Rage}}'' takes place over a hundred years after the asteroid 99942 Apophis collided with Earth and wiped out human civilization. Lots of people (including the protagonist) were preserved in underground Arks with the hope that they could rebuild. Seeing as how the game takes place in a DesertPunk wasteland, that rebuilding didn't go as well as planned.

* ''TabletopGame/{{GURPS}} Dragons'' includes an apocalyptic scenario where a StandardFantasySetting finds itself overrun with dragons for unknown reasons -- possibilities given in the book include dragons deliberately ramping up their fertility to deal with an increase in dragonslayers, the eradication of a predator that normally thins out populations of newborn dragons and a mass summoning spell, as well as combinations thereof. Regardless of the reasons, the world finds itself overrun with dragons rampaging where they wish and destroying anything in their way, leading to a widespread collapse of civilization.

* ''VideoGame/NieR'' has an interesting twist on this. After the "WCS Disaster" killed a massive amount of the world's population, society is now at a medieval level. The twist is that [[spoiler:humanity became Shades in order to escape the disaster, and the people in the world are clones that the Shades intend to inhabit - the world is medieval because the clones developed sentience, and their civilization has only reached medieval level so far]].

* In ''Webcomic/CthulhuSlippers'' The return of [[EldritchAbomination The Great Old Ones]] has caused one of these.

* In ''Literature/FineStructure'', the ''heroes'' induce this scenario ''repeatedly'' to prevent another near-Class 3 event.
* AudioPlay/TheCartographersHandbook depicts a world where most of the human population has been wiped out by a zombie-like plague.