@rezay As much as I'd love to accept the agriculture thing, having livestock and workable agricultural lands which can grow all these crops would put you miiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiles ahead of everyone else. The ruins that NJ lives in can hardly sustain any sort of farmland - few places outside of the Haven biome can.
For example, where did the seeds for these crops come from? Ruin biomes are leftovers of megacities and wouldn't have natural plains of wheat, corn and potatoes that hadn't already been snatched by mutants or roaches. What forests there are there wouldn't necessarily have fruit trees, and whatever animals live in these forests would have to be tamed and domesticated. Have they kept animals inside the bunker with them all these years? How have they not died from inbreeding, starvation or the Jerichians eating them all?
It's nice that you're motivated to write all this lore for your civ, but keep in mind that they only just recently came out of a bunker into a world that is virtually Mad Max/Fallout/Chernobyl/Megacity 1 mixed into one. Resources of all kinds, especially food and water, are rare as all hell and coveted by literally everyone.
Well, the thing is that NJ isn't located
inside the ruins biome. They set up directly outside of it, on account that it's very hazardous terrain and all. The bunkers which would have seen them through the apocalypse weren't located inside the city, but in close proximity to it.
Animals are from whatever's left roaming around. As stated in the post, everything they have *(theoretically) was found wild— again, not to impose more than is necessary, but what type of livestock would be around, if not what the old world had?
If you'd rather NJ be inside the ruins, that's fine, but I would have to rewrite a lot.
I didn't know what might have survived the apocalypse, this why I left it up there for you to look over.
*Let me clarify, even with the RNJ NJ was only located partially into the ruins. Before I was sure of pop, I had it as a sort of shantytown hat expanded from the southern half of Old Jericho. But it was never fully in that biome
Also, I'd really appreciate an approximate sort of timescale for when things have happened, it seems like that's a point of confusion. If things are really that recent. then when did this big plague thing happen? It's supposed to be something which occurred at the least two or three decades ago, lasted for at least somewhere around a decade, and growth which had occurred before it took place in about half a century. At least in my mind. It's not like they're exactly new there, they've been around close to a century and just got set back reeaallly hard, at least as the story currently stands.
My impression was that crops grown by humans didn't immediately die out in the apocalypse. I mean, if they all did, then how is anything able to be grown? I'd hate to induce extra work, but if normal crops can't be grown because they aren't around anymore, then what is grown in their place?