Organ Drops

It's an acquired taste.

Video games have a tendency to confuse hunters with butchers, something that would save a lot of time in reality if it could be done in such a way. Thing is, most gamers live a modern sedentary lifestyle, not one where they have to hunt and kill small animals to survive. This may make some a bit squicked when they get meat from killing a monster or dangerous animal in a game. This is a common drop in many games and is understandable when your character or party is partaking in a long adventure (although occasionally unsavory — zombies that drop sausages? Ew.)

However, some instances have higher squick potential than others... if the monster in question was possibly sapient or a transformed human, for example. Or if it is simply from animals which most people wouldn't see as all that tasty... such as giant spiders or cockroaches. Also, sometimes one wonders how you got pork from a wolf... did you rummage its stomach after cutting it apart? Or an egg from a hawk, did you rip that out of her? Combined with Video Game Stealing, it may create some Fridge Logic inducing events like stealing duplicates of parts it should only have one of, or inexplicably only having a chance to drop something they all appear to have.

The most common version of this involves taking flesh, organs, hide or bones from animals or animal-like beings, but variants of this trope occur for other sorts of enemies. Plant-based enemies may yield parts of their own vegetal anatomies, robots or other automata may drop assortments of gears, springs, wires and other such paraphernalia as their equivalent of organ drops, and Blob Monsters may just drop lumps of their slime.

Note that not all of these items are intended for food. It's common for them to be used for bounties, and additionally monster bits, parts and organs are often used in Item Crafting and as Eye of Newt for spells and potions. Sometimes they're simply Shop Fodder as well.

If these Organ Drops are edible as food items to the player, may cross into I'm a Humanitarian. Will often involve a Loot Command to get, but not always.

Sister Trope to Money Spider and Essence Drop. Contrast Impossible Item Drop. This is usually how one gets 20 Bear Asses, this trope also serves as the cornerstone of a Dungeon-Based Economy.

See Also: Demanding Their Head, which is occasionally a setup for sidequests in games to target a specific enemy or monster and return with their severed head.

Not to Be Confused with Piano Drop, which is about a keyboard instrument similar to that other organ falling overhead.

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Examples:

Action-Adventure

• Cadaver has a turtle you have to kill with a cleaver to get a key.
• Castlevania: "Rotten Meat" is a fairly common item drop from undead Zombie enemies. In some games, the item description says it comes from a recognizable farm animal. In others, it is somewhat more ambiguous.
• Cave Story: "Jellyfish Juice" is an item that you need to find to advance the plot. Sure enough, you get it by killing a particular jellyfish enemy. Oddly enough, you find the juice inside a jar, inside a treasure chest that the jellyfish drops when you kill it.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • A variation is found in most 3D entries. ChuChus tend to drops lumps of the gel that makes them up. Some games also have them drop a useful item, which is visible floating inside them while they're alive. In Breath of the Wild, their elemental variants drop jelly charged with their specific element, as will regular ones killed with an elemental weapon.
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds: Monster Tails, Monster Horns, and Monster Guts are used to make Blue, Yellow, and Purple Potions respectively. Lampshaded by one NPC who is understandably squicked out by the Purple Potion, and advises Link not to buy it.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
    • All the monsters drop parts unique to each species, including "[monster name] Guts" and assorted fangs, horns, claws, tails, eyeballs and the like. Non-organ drops are much rarer, and mostly consist of bundles of arrows dropped by archers and fish dropped by Octoroks (with the implication being that these are the creature's last, undigested meal). They're used for elixirs or upgrading armor with the Great Fairies, and can also be exchanged with Kilton for "Mon" currency at his shop. The skeletal stal- variants of some enemies only drop horns and fangs and lack the fleshy drops of their living counterparts.
    • The Talus and Pebblit Rock Monsters drop no organs, but instead scatterings of minerals.
    • In a variant, Guardians — Magitek robots — drop parts of their internal machinery such as screws, springs, gears, wheel shafts and power cores. These can be used for the same purposes as other monster parts (minus making elixirs) or turned into high-tech weaponry at Robbie's lab.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom adds a handful of other unusual cases. Constructs drop their horns and power cores. Like-likes drop a stomach stone and a bundle of arrows, in this case due to due to their habit of eating weapons. Evermeans, enemies resembling animated trees, drop a log and an assortment of leaves, branches, lizards and beetles. The Fuse mechanic adds an additional use for monster parts, in that you can attach horns, claws, or fangs to weapons or arrows to increase their attack power or add other effects, like elementally-charged parts adding an elemental effect to attacks, eyes adding a homing effect to arrows, or wings increasing the range of arrows.
    • Animals only drop meat, with rarer and stronger kinds dropping higher-quality cuts. Birds drop increasingly large portions of meat — drumsticks, followed by bird thighs, followed by whole plucked birds. Eldin ostriches, the largest birds in the game, are notable for tending to drop either a whole bird plus an additional thigh or two (despite the whole bird model showing both legs in place) or just two whole birds.
• Ōkami: The horns of slain demons can be collected and used as currency in certain stores. In the sequel Ōkamiden, this is changed to the bones, skin, and livers of the demons, which are used to upgrade your weapons.
• Psychonauts does this. Use Pyrokinesis on squirrels for a tasty Roast Squirrel Dinner. As well as on Seagulls for a tasty Roast Bird.
  Raz: See you in hell!

Action RPG

• Diablo II:
  • A quest involves collecting an eye, brain and heart, each of which is in an Inexplicable Treasure Chest.
  • Deckard Cain always has a little narmy speech about how that particular bodypart will symbolically aid you in the fight against the Prime Evils.
    "This is most fortunate... Khalim's Brain knows Mephisto's weakness."
    "You have found Khalim's Heart, and it still bears the courage to face Mephisto."
    "Ah... Khalim's Eye... only it can reveal the true path to Mephisto."
  • The Barbarian's Find Potion skill, according to the lore, is actually mixing that potion out of an enemy's innards. Bottoms up!
• Divinity: Original Sin II: A few sidequests involve obtaining a target's head as a unique Organ Drop:
  • The player character can accept a quest to collect Bishop Alexandar's head for the Sallow Man. It serves a purpose beyond killing an enemy; the Sallow Man eats the head to absorb Alexandar's knowledge.
  • The bounty on the Psycho for Hire Mummie Dearest is collected by hunting her down and delivering her head to Paladin Hardwin.
• Dungeon Master includes such tasty meals as screamer slices (chunks of mobile mushroom) and worm rounds (pieces of large purple worm).
• Gothic plays this fairly realistically — many wild animals can be killed and harvested for chunks of raw meat, but the player needs to find an instructor in order to learn how to skin them and remove claws and teeth, which can then be sold to vendors.
• Grim Dawn: Some Monster Infrequent items, which can only drop from certain monsters, take the form of body parts. This ranges from a basilisk's fangs used as jewelry, to a Dermapteran's claw used as a sword, to the heart of Theoden Marcell put on a stick and used as a scepter.
• Monster Hunter:
  • The whole point of the game is to kill monsters for their gooey bits (scales, bones, and even organs) to make better weapons and armor to kill even stronger monsters for their gooey bits. Certain monsters will drop parts if you hit them hard enough or deal enough damage to certain parts of their bodies. Also, there are a couple that can be carved for parts while they're still alive. Even when you capture them alive with traps and tranq bombs, you're still rewarded with their gooey bits, and they're alive and well, contently sleeping in Astera despite having just lost their organs.
  • Gobul from Monster Hunter 3 (Tri) seems to be savvy about this, and leaves his whiskers out as a Schmuck Bait (not to say Gobul Whiskers aren't valuable). Anyone who incautiously tries to gather from them ends up getting spiked or bitten.
• In Odin Sphere, most vegetables are mobile and thus, must be killed to be eaten, while most fruits just fall off a plant. And then there's the sheep. The sheep are fruits that similarly fall off a plant, and you have to hunt them down and kill them to get their meat. The chicken is a similarly squicky example for those who did not grow up on a farm: you hatch an egg and feed it seeds to get chicken meat. Or you could continue feeding it seeds to get more eggs.
• Path of Exile: the Metamorph league added an encounter where certain monsters on the map drop an eye, brain, lung, heart, or liver (even if they logically shouldn't have one) and you take them to Tane Octavius to cook up a Metamorph in his vat, a monster which has moves of the enemy the organ parts came from and you kill for loot.
  • In Act 4, you need to gather Malachai's lungs, heart, and entrails from his three lieutenants, parts he left behind to shed his mortality. In Act 5, you take a pair of a templar's eyes to gain access to the Templar Courts.
• In Toukiden, oni drop tongues, abdomens, etc. when they're killed. Large oni are fought by destroying their body parts one at a time and may drop limbs, horns, and more exotic substances.

First Person Shooter

• The hearts of the spider splicers from BioShock can be harvested and used as medical supplies.
• Blood had the people drop hearts which you could eat for health. You could kill the random sacrificial victims to do this.
• Cruelty Squad features random organ drops from enemies, with the slight wrinkle that 1: they come from human enemies (and humanoid abominations) and 2: they're meant to be sold off in their own special section of the stock market. Most of the organs you find have hilariously concerning descriptions, such as replacement livers being in high demand among executives, or the appendix being described as "the primitive seat of the soul"
• In Half-Life 2 the antlion guardian in "Sandtraps" drops pheropods: pheromone containing sacs. You are advised to stand back while the vortigaunt opens the body since the "... process is not entirely hygenic."
  • In SMOD, an over-the-top mod for Half-Life 2, after killing enemies you can gib them to bloody bits and then eat the gibs for health. Awesome. Or gross.
  • In Half-Life 2: Episode Two, you can squish antlion grubs. Doing so will cause a yellow chunk of guts to pop out that you can eat for health. Seeing how they appear in three levels back to back (To the White Forest, This Vortal Coil and Freeman Pontifex) with the middle one being a very long level with a bunch of angry antlions and few healing items, you'll want to kill them (if not for Get Some Grub).
• System Shock 2 has alien organs for you to research as well. Doing so will grant you a permanent damage buff towards those creatures from that point onward.

Idle Game

• In Progress Quest, many item drops are parts of the slain animal... including genitalia.

MMORPGs

• Ace Online loves this trope for its story quests: "Chill" of Sedium (being the organ that produces the supercooling liquid the Sediums spit as an attack), Rock Feathers (Rocks being a native species of predatory bird in the Ace Online world), Egg of Titanmoth, and so on. At least it also does this semi-logically with parts drops from mechanical enemies, like CPU of Watcher and Black Box of Downed Gear. Hilarity Ensues when the player tries to read the mission briefings for such bounties with a straight face.
• Anarchy Online has a specific drop called "Monster Parts". It looks like what it sounds like. The icon is a mishmash of organs in a bloody ball.
• Final Fantasy XI actually has you go after literal organs for a quest. One such organ is a brain. Qutrubs seem to have no preference for them, however.
  • Not just for quests—lots of monsters drop blood and/or various organs, but most of them are nonsentient. And none of them are human.
• Kingdom of Loathing: Used to parody Money Spider, and also used for regular drops. It is also somewhat disturbingly and confusingly due to the fact that one can pickpocket such things as a skeleton's skull, the entire body of a bat, someone's sword, the skin and fur of certain animals, bat guano (uh, that wasn't a pocket...) or the creature's own corpse, and it doesn't have any effect on the fight. In fact, almost everything in Kingdom of Loathing drops meat (the game's currency), apart from monsters who logically wouldn't have meat to drop (plants, skeletons, automatons, ghosts, constellations, constructs that exist only in your mind as a result of a mushroom trip, etc). Considering that there are some interesting descriptions of how you get it (e.g. pushing two people into a crocodile's mouth and grabbing what it spits out)...
  • It's also possible to create such delicious food items as a rat appendix chow mein from the various body parts dropped by enemies. Yum.
  • Parodied by Word of God, in fact: When questioned about the issue about pickpocketing vital organs, skin, or the entirety of the monster from monsters, the game's designers always simply state that the monster just happened to be carrying that item from some other monster at the time you stole it. Which brings up an entirely new set of disturbing questions which are dutifully ignored.
• La Tale has some enemies drop dolls of themselves. This is later explained by an NPC that it's the player that has been making dolls out of enemy parts.... Squick.
• Ragnarok Online: Monsters typically drop a piece of themselves as Shop Fodder. This was actually a nod to the original manhwa: early on Chaos and Iris Irene needed proof to collect a bounty on a monster they were hunting, so they chopped off a piece of it.
• RuneScape:
  • The reward for a special survival horror themed quest is the "Asylum Doctor's Ring" which causes various specific enemies to drop "Undercooked Mystery Meat". The enemies? Humans.
  • Less grossly, virtually every enemy drops bones of some kind.
  • Most types of demons, Edimmu, and Lava Strykewyrms, drop ashes instead of bones when killed because they combust when they die.
  • A few enemies in the game, mainly bosses, have a chance of dropping body parts that can be used for making weapons and armor, or upgrading existing ones. For example, Noxious weapons are made from parts of the Giant Spider boss Arraxi.
  • Several kinds of dragons, and also cows and some snakes drop hides which can be used for making leather armor. Vyrewatch, most kinds of shades, and Eddimu drop remains that have to be cremated to get a reward.
  • A few enemies like cows and giant rats drop meat, and birds drop feathers.
  • Pigs drop uncooked bacon and pig teeth.
• Tree of Savior follows RO's example in that the most common loot from monsters will be some sort of organ or body part. However, unlike RO, most of these drops are usable in Item Crafting.
• Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning has all sorts of organs drop; the butchering profession allows some of them to be used to make potions.
• World of Warcraft
  • Mystery Meat is something dropped by many foes, including reptilian, bird-like, and bug-like ones. It is possible to make it into character-usable food, but most just feed it to their pets. In addition to this, World of Warcraft has, among other things, livers, giblets, jaws, rotting carcasses, and for certain bounties, heads. The strange part is, Azeroth does have actual butchers, usually the guys selling Cooking supplies, who given their equipment, do it the traditional way.
  • Not to mention the "pound of flesh" dropped by certain undead monsters. I decided not to touch it.
  • Also shows up in pickpocketing certain creatures; a common drop from pickpocketable canines (they do exist) is a 'Chew Toy'. The icon is of an eyeball...
  • Depending on your skills, you can expand even expand this. Leatherworking lets you harvest hides, Mining lets you get gems from rock-monsters, and Herbalism lets you get herbs from plant-monsters.
  • A goblin in Tanaris has invented a mechanical butcher in order to reduce waste and increase efficiency in gathering these drops. Guess who gets to test it? Like most of the stuff they build, it's clearly not ready for the open market; it's not nearly as clean as the regular way, and it seems to love its job a little too much, gleefully singing as it tears the carcass apart.
  • There's a rather desirable Unidentified Organ that drops from the horribly mutated body of Professor Putricide.
• Among the many lovely drops you can get in zOMG! are eyes, bladders, teeth, and tentacles.
  • Many of your enemies are animated objects, so this could also apply to other loot items; presumably that piece of suede you picked up was taken from the body of that purse you just smacked down.

Multi-User Dungeon (MUD)

• HellMOO lets players butcher various parts from other players, NPCs, and creatures. Virtually any part can be removed by someone with a knife and sufficient skill to avoid hacking it into a bloody mess, making it disturbingly common for newbies to hack off the boobs of rabid preteen orphans after brutally murdering them for money and XP....and then eating said boobs.
• In Lost Souls (MUD), organs can be cut from corpses. Players, apparently all channeling their inner 13-year-old boy, cannot seem to get over their amusement at one of said organs being the anus.

Platformer

• Jak and Daxter: Metal Heads drop skull gems upon death, which are exactly what they sound like: large yellow gems embedded in their skulls. In Jak II: Renegade they can be collected and traded in to unlock Dark abilities; in Jak 3 they can be used to unlock sidequests.
• Prehistorik: Enemies aren't killed, but rather turned into meat drops temporarily (they're still animated and start walking again after a few seconds). By walking over the body, you EAT THEM ALIVE, producing a giant bone (that rise into the air with points written on it). In the last level, your enemies are other cavemen. (Also, everything seems to just contain one big bone... including cookies and ice cream... which can be found underwater... in a game taking place in the stone age.)

Puzzle Game

• Scribblenauts: Animals turn into steaks when they die. And not just cows, every animal turns into a functionally identical steak. The steak Tastes Like Chicken. Probably.

Roguelike

• Roguelikes such as NetHack and Dungeon Crawl often require the player to eat foes' corpses to survive, leading to amusing but disturbing messages like, "This chunk of giant cockroach flesh tastes terrible." In most such games there's only a chance of a corpse being dropped, which can be frustrating if the player character is hungry or starving. Also leads to unnerving messages like: "The kitten eats a hobbit corpse", "The kitten eats a human corpse", "The kitten eats a housecat corpse" and "Yum! That was real brain food!"
  
  In most Roguelikes where players have to eat corpses you can just eat the corpse whole, but in Dungeon Crawl you have to first butcher the corpse into chunks, meaning that not only do you have to have an appropriate tool like a dagger, you also have to at least one hand free in order to use the tool. One hand stuck to a cursed shield and the other to a cursed sword? No butchering (or eating corpses) for you until you get one of them uncursed.
• Baroque: Your only way to survive is to eat the monster's meat and hearts, which is already squicky in itself...and then you learn that they are actually humans deformed by their delusions...
• Cataclysm lets you butcher the corpses of your dead enemies for materials such as bones, fur and leather (which need to be prepared before you can use them for crating), and, of course, meat. The game doesn't distinguish between different types of meat (except for monster and human flesh), so eating dog, turkey, or mutated cockroach meat has the exact same effect. If you have a blood draw kit, you can also get some blood.
• Elona: Monsters will sometimes drop organs, which serve as Shop Fodder. They show up more often the higher the player's anatomy skill.

Role-Playing Game

• Albion has the Varniaks and Krondirr drop various body parts (a sphere shaped object in the venom gland for the former, a crystalline formation embedded in the forehead and a piece of meat for the later) that can be sold. Krondirr meat is also useful for feeding man-eating plants so they don't kill you when you step on them (which is necessary in order to make it through one of the dungeons).
• Baldurs Gate 3: Animal corpses can be looted to extract cuts of meat for later consumption. Monsters do not provide meat, but can instead be looted for ears, fangs, and other materials.
• Blue Dragon features a race of enemies that are effectively sentient animal poo. You can search the corpses.
• Contact: There are five kinds of base "meat," and almost every kind of organic enemy will drop one of the five (especially if you use the eviscerating skill Gut on it, which highly ups the chance of Organ Drops). All friendly animals drop generic Meat, all enemy animals drop generic Wild Game, all flying animals drop Chicken, bugs drop Mystery Meat, and undead things drop Rotten Meat. Some enemies will drop Eggs if they're Gutted, which has its own weird implications. And then it's possible to use Gut on inorganic enemies...
• Dragon Age: Origins has several variations of organs found on dead enemies like Demonic Ichor and "corpse gall" from the undead which is part of a quest provided by the local church. It also possible to collect wolf skins from said animals, including werewolves who you can hold conversations with just before you kill them. One of the earliest quests has you and your fellow Gray Warden wannabes collecting vials of darkspawn blood to use in the Joining Ritual... to drink. This is the most Badass beverage ever as it carries a death sentence of a few decades with it — if it doesn't kill you outright — so the Grey Wardens can sense darkspawn and stop Blights.
• Even more disgusting variant: in Dragon Quest VIII, some bull-shaped creatures drop cowpats, and dragons drop dragon dung. Both can be used to craft useful items (dragon dung in particular is a component for a particular kind of cheese) but still, ew.
• Drakensang: In both games, you can obtain certain body parts from killed enemies if your "fauna" skill was high enough. Some of the stuff you can get can be sold for money (Spider fangs, Scorpion's Tails, Silk Glands, Wolves paws) while certain parts can be used for ingredients to craft equipment or potions (like Harpy's Feathers, Crab's Pincers and Bear's Teeth).
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Starting with Daggerfall, you can typically pick apart the corpse of fallen monsters for certain alchemy-ready body parts common to that creature, from meat to skin to ectoplasm to (Deadra) hearts. And in latter cases these parts are edible. In a particularly squicky example, you can harvest flesh from zombies and eat it if one chooses. Mmmm—cannibalism and rotting flesh.
  • Morrowind:
    • Morrowind adds the Squicky Corprus meat chunks. Corprus is a disease (created by the Big Bad using power drawn from the heart of a dead god) that turns the infected into deformed, mindless, Autocannibalistic monstrosities; the meat hunk is taken off one of these monstrosities.
    • Dreugh, a semi-intelligent race of aquatic humanoid octopi, are prized by hunters for their leathery hides (which can be fashioned into quality weapons and armor) and for a waxy substance they produce which is incredibly valuable in alchemy. While their ancient civilization fell for other reasons, over-hunting has had further detrimental effects on their species, including a de-evolution of their intelligence and a transformation of their very souls from "black" sapient souls to "white" creature souls.
  • Oblivion:
    • Has a sidequest in which you have to kill the target and bring his heart back for proof (the target has also killed another Argonian assassin before you get there, and offers a deal in which you take his heart instead).
    • Minotaurs and Ogres are considered semi-intelligent sapient species, but several of their body parts have a high value to alchemists. This leads to a Sapient Fur Trade in Minotaur Horns and Ogre Teeth, with hunters ignoring their sapience in killing them for their valuable parts.
    • In the Mehrunes Razor plug-in, one way to get the eponymous artifact is to eat the beating heart of its guardian. After extracting it.
    • Averted with human hearts and skin, which are some of the rarest items in the game and are never dropped by humans, despite their... obvious abundance.
    • The Shivering Isles expansion requires that you collect a specific woman's eye as a magic ingredient for enchanting a powerful relic, because it's the only eye left that's witnessed the End of an Age.
  • Skyrim:
    • One can occasionally find human hearts and flesh, usually in wooden bowls near corpse found in world not found as a pick up from defeated enemies, these are both Alchemy ingredients and can thus be eaten.
    • And dragons drop dragon bones, scales, and if Kahvozein's fang is equipped heartscales, in addition to the soul you absorb automatically.
    • Also after completing the quest Taste of Death and obtaining the Ring of Namira, one can actually eat defeated enemies for boosted health and regeneration.
    • Forsworn Briarhearts are semi-zombie soldiers animated by the briar heart embedded in their chest, hence the name. A skilled player can pickpocket the heart for an instant kill.
    • Several body parts of Giants are said to be quite valuable alchemically. In-game, one can only take their toes, but in the lore, their teeth and thumbs also have alchemical properties.

• Fallout:
  • Fallout 3:
    • Every killable animal drops some kind of meat that can be eaten for HP, with the usual downside of increased radiation. Deathclaws drop Deathclaw Hands, which are used to make weapons. Each Deathclaw only drops one hand, perhaps because the player character can only use the right hand. The game also features "Radroach Meat", which you find on dead roaches even if you have reduced them to a glowing pile of dust with your plasma rifle.
    • With the Cannibal perk, the player can also consume the corpses of their human enemies, for a penalty of lowered karma. And if an ally or neutral NPC sees you doing it, they're likely to start shooting you. In Fallout: New Vegas, eating twenty-five corpses gives you the challenge perk "Dine and Dash", letting you scavenge chunks off the freshly dead before you dig in. Yum.
  • Fallout: New Vegas:
    • The game adds another perk called "Ghastly Scavenger", which lets you eat Feral Ghouls and Super Mutants. Old World Blues adds the perks "Them's Good Eatin'" and "Mile in Their Shoes". The former gives you a 50/50 change of each living creature to have one to three thin red paste or blood sausages on their corpses when killed, allowing you to eat them as is or cook thick red paste and black blood sausages for extra health and caps. ^note With this perk, all other food items can be ignored, but to get the perk you have to be at least level 20 and have 55 survival points. The latter, gives you bonuses ^note +1 Perception, +5 Poison Resistance and +5 Sneak for 4 minutes after consuming when you eat Nightstalker squeezin's, though you have to find/make Nightstalker squeezin's yourself.
    • An NCR Major named Dhatri offers a bounty on three leaders of the Fiends, a gang of drugged up raiders. He asks for the heads as proof. If the player damages the heads too much in their efforts at collecting them, such as going for Boom, Headshot!, they will get a smaller reward.
  • In earlier Fallout titles, Radscorpion tails are the only organ drops. Certain NPCs can use them to make antidotes, though poison is not especially dangerous and the tails are rather heavy.
  • There's also the bounty hunting quest (Three Card Bounty) where you have to retrieve the intact heads of three Fiends, which means no headshots if you want the full price of the bounty. While you can get 1st Recon to aid you in killing Driver Nephi, it's generally not recommended as they will aim for Nephi and get a head shot.
• Final Fantasy XII: Some enemies also drop pieces of meat after being defeated. Including zombies. You cannot eat it, however, it's used to make items in the bazaar.
  • What's more, you'll be seeking out zombies' Festering Flesh and Maggoty Flesh—undead drops usually have the best cash-to-time-and-effort-expended ratio in the game.
  • This gets a little creepy when you use the Steal command to get extra loot. Not only can you skin an animal of its pelt during battle, when it dies it has a chance of dropping a second pelt.
  • The game has a system where killing the same variety of enemy repeatedly, without killing any other variety in-between, increases the drop rate of items. Get the kill chain high enough, and each kill will result in multiple drops — it's not clear just how many pelts a wolf might have or how many shells a turtle might have, but you can get three or four from each kill even before stealing shenanigans are included.
• Horizon Zero Dawn:
  • A mechanical variant — Aloy can rummage through defeated robots to scavenge mechanical odds, ends, and tidbits such as lenses, springs, heating coils, power cores, and sundry robotic components. By virtue of half-feral machines making up most of the setting's "wildlife", an at least passable knowledge of mechanics and the ability to efficiently salvage technology from wrecks is an important part of being a hunter.
  • Wild animals can be looted for assorted cuts of meat, hides, and bones.
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords: On Dxun, the moon of planet Onderon, you are tasked by a local Mandalarian to make yourself useful by hunting down Cannocks that have eaten parts of the thing he's trying to repair. Once you're done, your player character is understandably disgusted.
• The Last Remnant: You can get body parts from defeated monsters, useful for upgrading your gear and that of your companions. You can also occasionally take a defeated monsters alive, at which point you get to decide to sell them whole to various merchants for a high price or carve them up for parts right then and there. Butchering captured monsters is far more likely to net you rarer organ drops, so it's a choice between useful parts or good money.
• Persona 3: Elizabeth's Requests often involve hunting specific Shadows in Tartarus and returning with bits of their bodies. The squick factor drops somewhat since the parts she wants are often inorganic... as are, for that matter, the Shadows you're hunting. You can't get the drops without having that quest active; reasonable, since you wouldn't know that part could be removed otherwise.
• Planescape: Torment: Parts are valuable treasure. There are skulls in abundance, sure, but the only organs you can harvest are... your own. Even from other people's bodies. You can get a shot of your own eyeball down at the local pub. And if you're not too squicked and wondering "What the hell am I doing with this?" you might be struck with the crazy idea to eat it. But surprisingly you're rewarded with some of the best benefits for doing this.
• Planet Alcatraz is surprisingly reserved with drops from non-human enemies. Gerbils drop gerbil skins, Dogs drop dog fur, and Pig-bulls drop meat; the baboons and gorilloid sometimes drop necklaces (presumably taken from their victims).
• Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey: Many of the enemy drops are either items carried by the demon (as shown in the artwork) or Organ Drops, such as feathers, angel hearts and wings, tails and scales, etcetera. Shin Megami Tensei IV has some demons even drop certain edible items. On the whole, though, while present, the trope is downplayed there. One of the earliest quests from SMT IV is about a drunkard from Mikado wanting livers from the Tangata Manu demon. To help with his hangover. Try to think about how that could work...
• Super Snail from QCplay Limited has some enemies, Xiahou Dun drop an organ like his remaining eye, when slain. Other sources are "organ chests" which are treasure chests with random organs inside and these are earned or found randomly on the game board. Also there's a weekly event where you go to a hotpot feast with a random spinner, the top prizes from that spinner are organs from Gaia herself such as Gaia's cochlea. All these organs may then be implanted to Super Snail if he has the requisite number of mutagenic goo.
• Tales of Symphonia: Getting Juicy Meat from the Sasquatch in the Meltokio Coliseum... ew. As well as getting meat and eggs from giant spiders. Another oddity is moving and, for all we know, sapient bell pepper trees providing you with bell peppers.
  • Early games are... weirder. In Tales of Phantasia, every mammal dropped beef (later games also added pork — seriously, bear pork!), every bird dropped chicken, plants dropped lettuce or some such, and so on. And it was even worse in the first incarnation where there were a hundred food items and a nebulous "food bag".
  • Similarly, inTales of the Abyss, you can get beef from the decidedly porcine Armaboar enemies.
  • This sort of thing underlies a lot of the Item Crafting in Vesperia and Hearts.
• Ultima VII: Dead deer yield five legs of venison.
• The Witcher: You need to collect body parts of monsters in order to complete various quests. They are also necessary as ingredients for alchemical potions. The body parts include wolf livers, tongues, blood and fangs from various undead monsters, and even tendons from the sentient Vodyanoi (basically fish-men), but never regular human body parts. If you elect to kill the watch captain that is also a werewolf, you get to make a special potion using his heart as an ingredient.

Simulation Game

• Dwarf Fortress The products derived from butchering an animal include everything the animal would actually have; you can make food from their muscle and organs (including things like brains, hearts and eyes), tan their skin into leather, carve their bones, hooves, horns, and so forth into crafts, render their fat into tallow... the only unusable body parts are nervous tissue.
  • Necromancers and evil biomes can reanimate body parts, which include untanned hides, hair which hasn't been spun into thread, and even clam shells. Players who set up a fortress in evil biomes never butcher animals, since the hide and hair which isn't processed immediately is likely to rise up and kill people.
  • In Adventurer mode, you can slake your thirst with the blood of dragons.
  • The game's still-slightly-spotty values of things like space, mass and culture also occasionally ends up with things like traders bringing you a barrel full of monarch butterfly ichor.
  • There are some humorous discrepancies between what parts a creature has when alive and gives when butchered. For instance, butchering mountain goats suddenly makes their eyeballs disappear, and hydras used to only give one skull instead of seven. And you get the exact same amount of leather out of a newborn kitten and an adult elephant.
  • Certain bones are much more valuable than others. This led to the infamous "Mermaid Farming" incident^note whatever you're imagining, the reality is almost certainly worse, which is famous for being probably the only time in the game's history when Toady One has implemented a change in the next release specifically to kill a piece of Emergent Gameplay. He needn't have bothered, though; turns out even DF players have standards.

Turn-Based Strategy

• Disgaea: Hour of Darkness
  • There is one monster whose equipment is a brain, a body (muscle) and a horse wiener. They don't drop, but you can steal them.
  • You can also steal teeth, which make you go faster.
  • Some monster weapons also qualify, based on their descriptions as teeth, spines, claws, and the like.

Wide-Open Sandbox

• ARK: Survival Evolved: certain animals drop trophy items which are used to get access to the boss monsters. Many of them are bones, (such as sauropod vertebrae or meaglodon teeth) whole body parts, (such as tyrannosaurus arms or tusoteuthis tentacles) or substances produced by their bodies, (titanoboa and megalania poisons) but some of them really do drop organs, namely allosaur brains, alpha tusoteuthis eyes, giganotosaurus hearts, and yutrannus lungs. To a lesser extent, the player implicitly harvests basically all the "unimportant" organs of any animal as they butcher them for meat, hide, and other resources.
• Minecraft: All enemies and most animals drop body parts when slain, including various cuts of edible meat from animals, feathers from chickens, cow leather, rabbit hides, sheep wool, squid ink sacs, rotten zombie flesh, spider eyes, bones from skeleton archers, balls of slime from the slime monsters, heads from wither skeletons, and phantom wing membranes; iron golems, artificial metal constructs, drop chunks of iron. Weapons and armor are only dropped from enemies that are visibly carrying or wearing it, although skeleton archers may drop arrows. Creepers are an odd case — they drop gunpowder, but since they attack by exploding (and never drop gunpowder when they detonate themselves), this is implied to also be a part of their internal biology.
• Red Dead Redemption: You can harvest useful body parts from killed animals, like coyote skins, but only by whipping out your knife and messily (but blessedly offscreen) butchering the carcass. The value of the resulting trophy depends on your Survival skill, so it's worth more the better a butcher/skinner you are.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: In Shadow of Chernobyl, this occurs when a vendor asks you to recover the eye or foot of a particular monster. The drop only occurs if you have the quest, it's not possible to collect the items ahead of time along the way. These are very annoying as the organ drop is random despite you carrying a knife. How do you botch up cutting off a dead creature's foot ten times in a row?
• Terraria:
  • Slimes drop slime gel.
  • Eaters of Souls drop rotten chunks of meat.
  • Demon Eyes drop lenses.
  • Enemies in the Crimson drop Vertebrae.
  • The Brain of Cthulhu (and its minions) drop Tissue Samples.
  • Hornets drop their stingers.
  • Angry Bones drop bone fragments.
  • The Man-Eater plants in the Underground Jungle drop vines.
  • The Black Recluses in Hardmode drop their fangs.
  • All bosses have a chance of dropping a decorative trophy upon death, a wooden shield-shape with the boss' body part.
• Valheim: All enemies in the game drop at least one item (meat and skin for boars and deer, bones for skeletons, eyes for greydwarves, etc.), most of which find use in Item Crafting or cooking (disturbingly, the zombie-like draugr drop Entrails, hich are used to make sausages).
  • They exist in one- and two-star variants, which are tougher but yield two or three times the loot. Which leads to some odd moments when an elite greydwarf apparently has 3 eyes.
  • Enemies also have a small chance to drop a trophy (read: their head) independently of how many stars they have, some of which are used in Item Crafting.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons: Early editions have monsters with body parts that are useful in creating magic items, particularly potions.
• Hackmaster takes this to an extreme: a standard part of monster descriptions is the "yield", the body parts that have some use (medicinal, magical, etc.)
• Rifts tends to list a monster's useful body parts as well as how much you might be able to get for a whole live one. Mind you, this may also include species' or races that are acceptable as Player Characters...

Fan Works

• I Woke Up As a Dungeon, Now What?: Killing a dungeon's minions may cause them to randomly drop useful body parts, and people with the Harvesting ability can keep a minion's corpse from fading long enough to harvest additional bits. Taylor's initial refusal to let the inhabitants of Fort Aeresya kill her minions causes some tension, since it dramatically reduces the amount of loot they can harvest from her.

Webcomics

• A Beginner's Guide to the End of the Universe: Of a sort. Unlike void beasts, which turn into piles of void dust on death, the clockwork enemies collapse into their component gears and mechanisms, which serve as the primary loot the Everyman gains by killing them.
• Penny Arcade wonders how a modern-warfare RPG would look like here. Terrorist Haunches.
• VG Cats: A passage from the Neverwinter Nights Builder's Guide prompted this strip. Think you're unlucky having to collect bear spleens?

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