Organ Drops



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 unsavoury—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? And don't even get us started with Video Game Stealing before you kill them.

Vegetables aren't even always safe from this... some veggies could come from apparently sapient, or at least mobile, plant life... something that must be extra queasifying for vegetarians.

Note that not all of these items are intended for food, in some case it is for bounties, Item Crafting, or Vendor Trash purposes. It doesn't stop it from being icky, though. Or perhaps delicious?

If these Organ Drops are edible as food items to the player, may cross into I'm a Humanitarian.

Sister Trope to Money Spider and Essence Drop. This is usually how one gets Twenty Bear Asses.

Has nothing to do with changing the beat while playing a keyboard.

Tabletop Games

 * Dungeons and Dragons early editions had monsters with body parts that were useful in creating magic items, particularly potions.
 * Hackmaster took this to an extreme: a standard part of monster descriptions was the "yield", the body parts that had some use (medicinal, magical, etc.)
 * Rifts also 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...

Video Games
"Raz: See you in hell!"
 * 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 were... 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.
 * Just about all the item drops in Etrian Odyssey qualify.
 * In the MMORPG La Tale, 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.
 * 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.
 * Used to parody Money Spider in Kingdom of Loathing, 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. 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.
 * In Progress Quest, many item drops are parts of the slain animal... including genitalia.
 * Fallout 3 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.
 * Pretty much every killable animal in Fallout 3 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.
 * 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.
 * Fallout: New Vegas adds another perk to let you eat Ghouls and Super Mutants.
 * And another that allows you to take a gob of flesh from a dead human away with you to eat later.
 * And one more that causes any living creature that you kill to have a chance to contain "blood sausage" and/or "red paste"; they don't have any nutritional value but are very potent healing items.
 * And in Fallout: New Vegas, you can cook the dropped meat into tasty treats.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Roguelikes such as Nethack and 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.
 * "The kitten eats a hobbit corpse." "The kitten eats a human corpse." "The kitten eats a housecat corpse."
 * "Yum! That was real brain food!"
 * In 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 that is also a werewolf, you get to make a special potion using his heart as an ingredient.
 * Some insectile foes in World of Warcraft drop "mystery meat". 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. Oddly enough, there are quite a few actual butchers in this game, often the guys selling cooking supplies and/or recipes.
 * 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...
 * There's a rather desirable Unidentified Organ that drops from the horribly mutated body of Professor Putricide.
 * Depending on your skills, you can even expand this. Leatherworking lets you harvest hides from beasts, Mining lets you get gems from rock-monsters, Engineering lets you salvage materials from constructs, 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.
 * Psychonauts does this. Use Pyrokinesis on squirrels for a tasty Roast Squirrel Dinner.
 * As well as on Seagulls for a tasty Roast Bird.

""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!" "Ahhh, Khalim's Spleen...!""
 * A variation is found in The Legend of Zelda, at least the 3D entries. Chu-Chus seem to be composed of just gel and a useful item.
 * In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, game animals turn into meat when killed, which Link can pick up and cook with. Hostile monsters like Bokoblins or Octorocks leave things like horns, teeth, claws, and guts behind, which can be brewed into potions, sold for rupees, or traded to Kilton.
 * 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.
 * The Bitmap Brothers' RPG-ish game Cadaver has a turtle you have to kill with a cleaver to get a key. I was always uncomfortable doing that.
 * The hearts of the spider splicers from BioShock (series) can be harvested and used as medical supplies.
 * Japanese RPG Blue Dragon features a race of enemies that are effectively sentient animal poo. You can search the corpses.
 * 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.
 * In 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.
 * Minecraft originally had zombies drop feathers because nothing else did. Eventually, Notch got around to updating their loot and now their drop Rotten Flesh. Eating a zombie's flesh seems a bit ironic.
 * In Disgaea, there is one monster whose equipment is a brain, a body (muscle) and a . They don't drop, but you can steal them.
 * A , thank you very much!
 * 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.
 * Appears as side quests in STALKER - Shadow of Chernobyl 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?
 * The FPS Blood could have the people drop hearts which you could eat for health. You could kill the random sacrificial victims to do this.
 * 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 Half-Life 2: 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Before the trope came about, parts were valuable treasure in Planescape. There were skulls in abundance, sure, but the only organs you could harvest were...your own. Even from other people's bodies. You could 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.
 * Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning has all sorts of organs drop, the butchering profession allows some of them to be used to make potions.
 * In Castlevania games, "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 ambigious.
 * A quest in Diablo II involves collecting an eye, brain and heart, each of which is in an Inexplicable Treasure Chest.
 * Moreover, Deckard Cain always has a little narmy speech about how that particular bodypart will symbolically aid you in the fight against the Prime Evils.


 * 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.
 * The Elder Scrolls uses this to full effect. From Daggerfall to Morrowind to Oblivion you can typically pick apart the coprse 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.
 * Oblivion also 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).
 * In the Mehrunes Razor plug-in, one way to get the eponymous artifact is to eat the beating heart of its guardian.
 * The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind has the Squicky corprus meat hunk. Corprus is a disease that infects people and turns them into deformed, mindless zombies; the meat hunk is gotten off one of these monstrosities.
 * Want more squick?  Think about it for a bit.
 * Elizabeth's Requests in Persona 3 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.
 * In the Monster Hunter franchise, certain monsters will drop organs (like spines or even hearts) with certain events. Also, there are a couple that can be carved for parts WHILE THEY'RE STILL ALIVE.
 * The whole point of the game is to kill more and more powerful monsters for their rarer and rarer gooey bits, to make better and better Elemental Armor.
 * Gobul seems to be Genre Savvy about this, and leaves his whiskers out as a Schmuck Bait (not to say Gobul Whiskers aren't valuable). Anyone who carves them ends up getting spiked the next second.
 * Dead deer in Ultima VII yield five legs of venison.
 * And in Ultima VI it's somehow possible to pickpocket meat from the beasts.
 * Your only way to survive in Baroque is to eat the monster's meat and hearts, which is already squicky in itself...and then you learn that they are actually
 * Dungeon Master includes such tasty meals as screamer slices (chunks of mobile mushroom) and worm rounds (pieces of large purple worm).
 * 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.
 * The products derived from butchering an animal in Dwarf Fortress includes pretty much 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 and hair, and those planned to be able to be made into fiber.
 * In Adventurer mode, you can slake your thirst with the blood of dragons. That has got to be the most Badass beverage EVER.
 * 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 hydra's used to only give 1 skull instead of 7.
 * 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.
 * In Okami, the horns of slain demons can be collected and used as currency in certain stores. In the sequel Okamiden, this is changed to the bones, skin, and livers of the demons, which are used to upgrade your weapons.
 * In 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...
 * Deconstructed in 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. Still, once you do skin and slaughter it, you just have to stuff the meat and hide in your inventory, something that would change...
 * ...because the sequel Defies the Trope, and might actually show players why an Acceptable Break from Reality in a video game isn’t such a bad thing. Hunting is very realistic in Red Dead Redemption 2. First off, despite what environmentalists would have you believe, shooting at a deer or moose isn’t as easy as shooting at a human. Sure, they don’t shoot back, but they tend to bolt if they catch whiff of human-scent. To avoid this, you need to buy cover-scent lotion from the general store. Then, you need to use a bow, a knife, or a low-caliber gun to bring the game down, or you’ll damage the pelt. Even then, even if your Survival skill is very high, the animal’s pelt may be poor quality to begin with (maybe it has mange or something) and be worthless. Then you actually have to skin it, where it's much like the first game, but not done off-camera, so unless you’ve actually had experience with hunting in reality, it's downright disgusting to watch. Once you have the pelt, you can sell the carcass to a butcher (usually for about $3.00, which barely covers the cost of the aforementioned lotion) or donate it to your camp, so long as you have a horse that can carry it back to town without it falling off or rotting during the trip (forget about more than one carcass at a time) and once you manage to do that, both you and the horse are covered with blood and attracting predators; don't forget, this is 1907, a time where a hotel room that includes a hot bath isn’t cheap. All in all, the realistic approach isn't as pleasant.
 * Monster Girl Quest Paradox has this despite every single enemy being sapient and defeated non-lethally. The organs (which include things like tails) can also be stolen or given freely by enemies. Apparently, these organs are shed naturally, which allows them to be obtained without inflicting significant-and-probably-lethal trauma.
 * Boss monsters in Godville usually leave behind at least one artifact which came from their bodies, ranging from skins to fillets. As of late 2022, wanted monsters also leave behind their hides as proof the adventurer defeated them.
 * In Don't Starve there is practically no monster that cannot be hunted for meat this way - seeing as the whole idea is, well, not to starve. The catch is figuring out how to prepare it.
 * In the (now defunct) Augmented Reality Game Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, among other potions ingredients the player could find scattered about the game world, there were frog brains, dragon livers, and newt spleens, as well as bodily fluids like armadillo bile and re'em blood.

Web Comics

 * Penny Arcade wonders how a modern-warfare RPG would look like here. Terrorist Haunches.
 * A genuine passage from the Neverwinter Nights Builder's Guide prompted this VG Cats strip. Think you're unlucky having to collect bear spleens?
 * Kevin and Kell. The predator species feeds on the prey species...both species are sentient. Kell has to hunt far from home so she won't horribly kill her husband's relatives.