Scavenger

Description

Scavenger was a profession that revolved around generating resources.

Investing more character build into Scavenger let you find more and more rare components.

Scavengers could also find new locations to search, albeit with greater danger. It was the only profession you could get seriously injured doing on a regular basis, in theory. In practice I don't know of many people who got injured in their scavenger bgas.

There was no high tech version of a scavenger.

Inventions

Scavenger Inventions were better termed "discoveries". You could spend a BGA going out into the wasteland and looking for some kind of specific type of stash of resources like Salt or Fuel. This would usually get you an option to visit the cache in later BGA sessions to further loot it for a guaranteed supply of some component.

History

Maps and compasses made Scavenging pretty safe and very profitable. It was a popular second profession because of the difficulty most professions had in generating enough resources to actually use their time effectively. At the same time, there were very few high end scavengers.

The most successful scavengers sat on huge stacks of resources. It took some time to build up enough of any one type of component to have significant trading power, primarily because the other professions typically needed a high volume of similar components, whereas scavengers collected random components and were unlikely to have stacks of like components until they had been doing it a while.

Early on in the game there was a lot of incentive to hoard in order to control the prices of various commodities, but toward the last 2 years after several narrative changes this shifted and sharing became a dominant strategy.

Player Scavengers

NPC Scavengers