There was a reality tv series in 2009 that took a bunch of randos and made them survive in an apocalypse setting, complete with bandit raids and everything.
Obviously reality tv is very manipulated but it was interesting to watch how they tackled the problem of gathering fresh water, processing food, and building amenities using essentially scrap.
Season 1 was in a warehouse in downtown LA. This one had heavy interactions with "bandits" that would shove their way in and steal food/supplies and just mess things up. My favorite was a pair that came in late and claimed they owned the warehouse and basically talked their way into the group but they were really production moles sent to cause as much problem as possible (i.e. one of them used up ALL their stored water by taking a stupid long shower, the other one would constantly eat food above their rations etc.) Interesting in this one is that they had to build a bus for their extraction and they built a vehicle that ran on wood gas. They primarily used solar power augmented by wood gas for their power supply.
Season 2 was in a part of Louisiana that was ravaged and abandoned after Katrina. This one was about a pandemic situation so participants would have to occasionally quarantine themselves. Interesting of note is they built a giant windmill and hooked it up to transformers as a power generator. They had to build a boat to escape. Not as much fun as season 1 but much more rural so had hunting & gathering options available.
Season 3 was rumored to have halted mid-production when a "bandit" raider was accidentally killed but again, that is just rumors.
https://go.discovery.com/tv-shows/the-colony/
edit: The conclusion I drew from this show is that it would be really hard to go back to a Mad Max style civilization. There is just so much basic knowledge that we have stored in a million different sources and once you get access to electricity and fabrication it almost impossible to hold back an industrial revolution.
They would be all primitive and survivor-esque up until they got solar/wind/gas running and then suddenly they were manufacturing weapons and armor and even making working engines using scrap. While there are HUGE efficiency losses in these make shift crude constructions the key take away is just knowledge alone is such a huge step up. Even without modern supplies and manufacturing just our current understanding of things like medicine, physics, agriculture etc. that we take for granted is game changing to primitive societies and unless we REALLY bomb ourselves into extinction it would be almost impossible for society not to spring back without a complete disruption of knowledge between generations.
This message was last edited by the user at 17:43, Tue 17 Nov 2020.