Scrap Mechanic

Players begin at the site of a crashed spaceship, with very few items. Inside the crashed spaceship the player must find a Master Battery—which is located in a ruin nearby—and place it into the Master Battery Socket located in the crashed spaceship, by doing this, the player activates the Mini Craftbot, and the Ship Terminal. The Mini Craftbot is a more simple and smaller version of the Craftbot with limited functionality, primarily focused on allowing players to build a basic vehicle to begin exploring the world. The Ship Terminal allows players to receive the Logbook which indicates the time of day, the day they're on, the dialogs that players receive via a phone located at the mechanic station, current and completed quests and a list of creations that the player made in the garage. Players must search for supplies and food in order to survive.

The Mechanic Station is the location where the various crafting stations can be made. This includes the Craftbot, the Dressbot, made for making clothing, the Refinebot for refining raw materials, and the Cookbot, for combining raw foods into recipes. In addition, a Resource Collector can crafted which is used for collecting and storing various resources and transferring them to Refinebot.

The survival backstory depicts the setting of the game. It portrays a robot maintenance mechanic that has been sent to an agricultural planet which supplies food to the metropolitan planets. The crew has been tasked to maintain fully autonomous farming robots which overrun the planet. However, as the spacecraft comes in for a landing it loses control and crashes.

The mechanic survives the impact, however becoming stranded and finds out that the robots working in the fields have become hostile and start attacking the mechanics. The goal is now to survive on the planet, using the mechanics quick thinking, creativity and environment as an advantage to stay alive from the savage robots.

Scrap Mechanic formerly used the OGRE rendering engine, which stands for Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine. It was used alongside a custom plugin named Bullet, which is an external physics engine responsible for all of the physics calculations.

However, the engine was changed with the first major update. The new in-house rendering engine had been in development since August and was made to fix numerous bugs, mostly related to certain integrated Intel cards, which some players had issues with.

Angus Morrison of PC Gamer compared the game to Minecraft, noting that in the context of the latter's lack of mechanical building conditions, the game might be attractive to players who like to build mechanics.

Nathan Grayson of Kotaku said that the game "struck him as a game intrepid builders won't tire of anytime soon," and claimed that he was looking forward to seeing what comes of it, Curtis Pyke of MGN called the game "a farming simulator meets tower defense game".