Death World

Never a dull moment around here.

"We've run into scorpions the size of battle tanks, three men died from Eyerot last week, I've sweated enough to fill a lake, my boots just got sucked into a sink-swamp and the trees are so thick in places, you can't squeeze between them. Emperor help me, I love this place! It's just like home!"

— Captain Rock of Catachan, Warhammer 40,000

A Death World is a highly dangerous place, where simply going there is considered taking your life into your own hands. It could be from hazardous environmental conditions, such as an acidic swamp or poisonous fog, or from powerful native predators (Here there be Dragons, or worse, something that eats them), dangerous flora, or even all of the above. It's like the entire place is deliberately hostile to human life. (Of course, if it's also a Genius Loci, it just might be!)

Very few people would ever choose to live there, but since anyone who does is almost always a badass, expect any populated Death World to be a World of Badass by default. Sometimes, The Mentor may hide out here. Alternately, it may be Mordor, and/or home for an exceptionally tough and ferocious race. Some actually take advantage of this as a way of training their Super Soldiers on a planetary scale. Sure, half of the population might not survive through adolescence, but those who do should make good soldiers. Sometimes they are genetically engineered. Those who live on such a world may be an example of Had to Be Sharp.

In real life, every planet outside Earth that we know of to a reasonable degree, is dangerous, because we have yet to verify that any other planet out there can support human life. In fiction, Death worlds generally have relatively breathable atmospheres (for native life, at least), have compelling reasons for characters to get out and walk around, and have varieties of dangerous flora and fauna. A planet that cannot host life for any amount of time is just "uninhabitable", not this.

For more details, the various Video Game Settings actually do a decent job of describing the various kinds of dangers you might find in different ecosystems, as a result of Everything Trying to Kill You. The Dark World is often a magical variant. Don't be too surprised if there are More Predators Than Prey.

The Trope Namer is Harry Harrison's novel from 1960, Deathworld, in which the entire flora and fauna of a planet treat the human colonizers as enemies and do their best to kill them.

Compare to Gaia's Vengeance where a world can become like this as a response to some threat. For examples of entire Death Universes, see Crapsack World.

Not to be confused with a Place Worse Than Death, which refers to Real Life locations with bad publicity.

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Example subpages

• Literature
• Video Games

Other examples:

Anime and Manga

• The entire world of 7 Seeds by the time our characters awaken in it. Evolution has begun to repeat itself and is filled with rodents, insects, dinosaurs and even flesh-eating plants that are trying to kill the humans, but also each other. It's a survival-driven world.
• Every Earth-like planet, save one, in 2001 Nights is a Death World that eventually overwhelms the efforts of humans to colonize them: mind-altering spores, periodically being engulfed in firestorms, wasting diseases, and run-of-the-mill hazardous planets and animals. As a few characters occasionally point out, and as humanity learns to great ruin, a few decades is not enough time to fully understand the biosphere of an alien planet. And the one basically Earthlike exception to the mix was actually terraformed at hideous expense, and even then said terraforming will degrade and collapse in a few centuries, rendering the planet uninhabitable. Oh, and even it has a few giant man-killing monsters.
• After God: Areas populated by IPO become completely uninhabitable. They've initially landed around the world and ruined so much territory before moving to Japan, World War III over resources and potential use of soil as bioweapon became popular predictions.
• The world of Berserk is this — and this was even before it became a Hell on Earth. Life was so harsh that humanity subconsciously willed a God of Evil into existence just to give their suffering some semblance of meaning.
• The Megastructure in Blame! consists of thousands upon thousands of post-apocalyptic wastelands stacked on top of one another and compartmentalized.
• Earth becomes a death world in Blue Gender. The only safety and civilization is in orbiting colonies, and only remains safe for those willing to train to die on the planet.
• Dragon Ball Super: Broly introduces Planetoid Vampa, where Broly grew up. The planet seems to be completely barren and devoid of vegetation, with seemingly the only life forms being absolutely gigantic furry monsters who prey on a species of giant spider-ticks, and the spider-ticks in turn suck blood from the monsters—and based on the trouble Paragus seemed to have with them when Broly wasn't around, they're all stronger than Nappa was when he destroyed entire cities by moving his fingers. It's eventually revealed that there isn't even any water on Vampa: Broly and his father had to get their moisture from the bodily fluids of the animals they hunted.
• Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters:
  • Tau Ceti e — the planet the humans were hoping to settle — turns out to be completely inhospitable. It is covered in massive hurricanes, and the shuttle carrying the elderly colonists was torn to shreds the moment it entered the atmosphere.
  • Due to Godzilla's Hostile Terraforming over the centuries since his victory, the Earth has become a Death World to humanity when they return after 20,000 years. The air itself is unbreathable. The plants — which are offshoots of Godzilla — have become hard enough to break a knife and with razor sharp leaves, and release metallic pollen that messes with radio communication and long-range sensors. That's not even getting into Flying-Type Servum — dragon-like creatures that are offshoots of Godzilla and can shred armored vehicles with their claws — let alone Godzilla himself. The planet has literally evolved to kill humans.
• There are many places in the Hunter × Hunter world that are extremely dangerous to humans. Those regions are closed off to everyone except full-fledged Hunters — because Hunters are the only ones who have even a snowball's chance in hell of surviving a visit.
  • The Swindler's Swamp is an exceptionally dangerous area, even to Hunters. The Swamp's entire ecosystem has evolved around deceiving and eating humans, with such friendly wildlife as "man-faced apes" which go out to masquerade as humans and lure them back to the swamp. Swindler's Swamp is used as staging ground of the second phase of the Hunter Exam that Gon and company take. The goal is simply to reach the other side. Everyone who reached this phase is a 1-in-10,000 badass. Out of a group of a few hundred, only 150 make it out alive. The rest became lunch or were killed by Hisoka.
  • Then there's Dark Continent. It's so dangerous and uninhabitable it makes the Berserk-verse looks tame in comparison. It also covers most of the planet, with the world inhabited by humans being only islands in the middle of Lake Mobius within the Dark Continent.
• The enormous cave system from Made in Abyss. As a person descends through its seven known Layers, the dangers faced become progressively more extreme. Predators become larger, more aggressive, and eventually capable of seeing likely future possible moves of their potential victims. From the Second Layer on, the scenery turns beautiful but horrific, with violent air currents in the Inverted Forest toward the bottom of the Second Layer, a sheer drop on the Third Layer, massive acid-filled plants on the Fourth, and then the Sea of Corpses, Capital of the Unreturned, and Final Maelstrom in the deeper levels. All of this pales in comparison to the dangers of leaving, though. The Force that gives the horrors of the Abyss their strength and pervades most of its area causes progressively severe effects on ascension, eventually resulting in madness, death, or worse.
• Near the end of Naruto, Kaguya Ōtsutsuki possesses several personal dimensions that she can hide in or weaponize; among them are a lava world, a blizzard world, a desert world, an ocean of acid, and an extreme gravity field.
• The Sea of Corruption in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The very air is full of poisons that kill any humans that breathe them in, and giant insects that can shrug off modern day weapons.
• One Piece:
  • The New World could be considered one, as anyone who has been there then on refers to the first half of the Grand Line as "Paradise". Mind you, the first half is crawling with dangerous pirates, many of which have some pretty badass superpowers, Sea Kings, unknown and unpredictable weather phenomena, and of course, islands that are somewhat few and far between, and is thus itself considered a Death World by just about everyone who hasn't been there or the New World. And even by Oda's standards, it screws with physics! Islands that are consumed by perpetual fire, or plagued with storms where lightning strikes like a downpour, or a giant, floating one are some of the highlights from what we have seen thus far.
  • Shiki the Golden Lion's floating islands have become this thanks to him and his crew using a rare plant that only grows there to create a Mutagenic Goo that transforms the wildlife into hyper-aggressive giant monsters, planning to unleash them on East Blue as a statement to the World Government. He does not care that this has left the original populace of the islands trapped in their village, living in terror of the rampaging beasts around them.
• Outlaw Star gives us a Penal Colony on a planet with gravity that greatly varies from one place to another. It barely even needs the security it has since wondering into the wrong place can lead to a person getting crushed to death.
• The Seven Deadly Sins has Purgatory. Any soul crazy enough to get drawn in is subject to deadly heat and cold simultaneously, plus the air itself is unbreathable by normal standards. Normal senses don't work there, either; unless you have magical sense, you're helpless. And even if one has the physical or spiritual constitution to be able to endure that much, the sheer chaos of the place tends to drain all the hope out of a soul until it succumbs and gets transformed into an Eldritch Abomination. Few names can be said to have survived there. One was only there in spirit, another had the advantage of Immortality, one was actually a native creature of the place, and the last was the Demon King.
• The world of Toriko, as it is filled to the brim with animals that are strong enough to level cities (creatures are given capture levels, and monster with a Capture Level 5 or higher can topple tanks singlehanded), the worst place being the Gourmet World, a region which basically encompasses 2/3 of the planet, and was originally thought to be a paradise since no one who went there ever returned, until someone actually did return, and revealed that it was in reality a hell that would kill a normal person almost instantly and even trained professionals who are considered superhuman can't survive without considerable training. Chapter 259 reveals that Gourmet World was created when a Gourmet Cell infused meteorite struck Earth. The Gourmet Cells absorbed energy from Earth's mantle and grew additional landmass. "Human World", the safest part of the world, is the original Earth. The reason Gourmet World is such a hostile and alien environment is because it was spawned by something from the depths of space. And apparently, this alien being did this on purpose. It's fattening the world for dinner.
  • As of Chapter 263, we see the creatures that can survive such an environment. The Four Beast that nearly killed the human world is revealed to be nothing more then an ant in the grand scheme of these creatures. This included a massive Stronghold Rhino, a powerful humanoid multi-armed Thunderous Devil that makes volcanoes seem only as big as anthills underneath its feet, itself dwarfed and nearly stomped on by an even bigger Ficasdaltonphant, with a flying dragon like creature overhead that's stronger than that, only for that to run away from a fully-grown Battle Wolf. To put this in perspective, the Four Beast had a Capture Level that maxed out at 350. The beasts just mentioned range from 972 to 6,090. And this is all before we even get started on the titanic beasts that rule these inhospitable lands. Put simply, the Measuring Tongs weren't even made to read them properly.
  • That would be the Eight Kings. Each one has a Capture Level over 6,000. They include a 22-kilometer horse that can create vacuums and send columns of air straight through the aforementioned massive planet by breathing, a monkey that plays by throwing mountains around the world, a whale with a literal black hole in its stomach, a deer the size of a continent, a snake as long as the circumference of the world, a crow that can kill anything by casting its shadow on it, the aforementioned Battle Wolf (actually one way stronger than the level 6090 one), and a huge dragon that can fire planet-busting beams.
• Trigun is set on planet Gunsmoke, an endless desert with sparse animal representation — including sandworms — and seemingly no natural flora. Its population are refugees from a fleet of Generation Ships, who would have bypassed the planet had not the Big Bad forced them to crash-land. In the 100-odd years they've been eking out a living on the harsh surface, human population figures have been in gradual decline and the people have become harsher and more violent as they've adapted to the environment.
• The Earth of Vandread. Turns out the planet got so polluted it's barely habitable, with such things as the moon being driven out its orbit.

Comic Books

• Planet Earth in both Marvel and DC comics qualify. Every city seems to be one step away from a demon invasion every week, city-destroying battles happen at least once a day, and an untold number of demons and monsters exist all of which prey on humanity. Lasting a week on either Earth deserves an award.
  • Plus the alternate Earths tend to be even worse. Take Marvel's Ruins, a setting in which no superheroes exist due to a lack of Required Secondary Powers to keep them from being a danger to themselves and others. Body Horror & Nightmare Fuel abounds.
• DC: An artificial planet created by Devilance, a New God from Apokolips, is a death world, with automated defenses based upon the strength of the intruders and killer midgets, among various monsters. Seen in 52, the third-generation Blue Beetle, and Salvation Run. Apokolips itself is also something of a death world.
• Marvel Universe:
  • Ego the Living Planet is a sapient (and, Depending on the Writer, psychotic) planet with absolute control over every aspect of its physical being, Ego's arsenal of deadly tricks includes conjuring extreme weather from nowhere, causing Man Eating Plants to spring up out of nowhere, triggering earthquakes and tidal waves, spawning Elemental Embodiments, or just sucking you through the ground into a giant internal ocean of acid that serves him as a stomach. The worst part is that because Ego's terrain is under its conscious control, it can play the part of a paradise world until decides it's hungry. Over the years, Ego's devoured entire species that made the mistake of landing on its surface. The icing on the cake is that Ego has often managed to gain mobility, allowing it to traverse the universe, often with a goal of wiping out all other sapient life besides itself.
  • Poppup is a planet described as a world teeming with dangerous properties. Its sapient life — the Poppupians — had to evolve at an accelerated rate to the point where they developed an Adaptive Ability so advanced that it gives them Toon-like Voluntary Shapeshifting abilities, recurring Fantastic Four frenemy Impossible Man being a Poppupian. When Galactus tries to eat the planet, it gave him indigestion so bad that part of his essence was permanently deconstructed.
• The original Rom: Spaceknight Marvel series has the Dark Nebula, a galaxy that operates on sorcerous principles rather than scientific ones that lies on the opposite side of a black hole. Described by Rom in issue #16 as a "seething system of negative suns, shadowed planets, and cold, forbidding ice-worlds", the most dangerous place in the Dark Nebula is undoubtedly Wraithworld, the home of the Dire Wraiths. For starters, there's the black sun it orbits, which is alive, hungry, and able to split off portions of itself as Deathwings, which are giant dragon-like masses of living darkness that devour souls. Wraithworld itself has skies choked with an all-concealing blanket of blackest ash that pours down constant acidic rain, which feeds the rivers of molten metal that run madly across its surface... and it's also alive and hungry for outside life. The Space Knights couldn't destroy it, only tear down the Dire Wraith cities and exile them from it. When Rom lures Galactus to try eating the Dark Nebula in issue #27, Galactus himself admits to having never seen anything like Wraithworld in his travels. His Energy Converter liquifies almost as soon as he erects it, then the acid starts melting the armor of Galactus himself, before the planet attempts to shake Galactus into space with a mega-earthquake. When Galactus tries to blast the world with antimatter beams to consume the resultant energy, he finds his own life sapped instead. Finally, Galactus attempts to eat the Black Sun in hopes of taming Wraithworld, only to find himself attacked by over a dozen Mother Deathwings. Ultimately, he flees to his ship, mangled and heavily wounded, and admits defeat — the Dark Nebula is a sector of space that even Galactus can't stomach.
• The Mighty Thor: In his own words after Heimdall gave him the play by play run down of how the last incursion was playing out between earths during "Time Runs Out". Odin nonchalantly coins how "Midgard is — as ever — a roiling sea of chaos and madness". Often true given the Marvel Earth's penchant for Armageddon causing/defying events which leaves the planet a wasteland then does a hard reset that usually has (often negative) after effects on the universe as a whole.
• Superman:
  • In Supergirl story The Supergirl from Krypton (2004), Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Big Barda travel to Apokolips, a hellish planet ruled by Darkseid, The DCU's God of Tyranny.
    Wonder Woman: Smells like death.
    Barda: There's no place like home.
    Batman: (narrating) The concept of Apokolips is, at best, difficult to explain. A blazing inferno of misery, the planet exists in another universe. The gates of Hell can only be opened via Boom Tube.
  • Krypton's deadliness plays a part in the backstory of Doomsday. In Superman/Doomsday: Hunter/Prey, a Mad Scientist dumped a baby onto the surface, where it died instantly. He then cloned the few surviving cells. Repeat ad infinitum until you get a Nigh-Invulnerable monster that has evolved enough to survive.
• X-Men: The goal of Apocalypse is to create one of these via taking over the world, destroying civilization and culling billions of people he considers to be "weak" (and not necessarily in that order). In Age of Apocalypse he achieves this by triggering World War III and turning North America and much of the planet into a radioactive wasteland where he rules with an iron fist, while Europe exists as a continent-sized refugee camp in a state of total war with him and his empire. Other versions include the Bad Future his Arch-Enemy Cable hails from, an After the End dystopia where he rules the entire world. Apocalypse is the ultimate Social Darwinist so he wants to make a world so hellish and hard that only the toughest and meanest will be able to survive in it.
• Alien series Aliens: Nightmare Asylum takes the characters to the Xenomorphs' homeworld, which is naturally crawling with them and predators nasty enough to keep them in check.
• 2000 AD:
  • Judge Dredd:
    • The Cursed Earth, the nuke-blasted wastelands outside of the few surviving Mega-Cities, is inhabited only by mutants, criminals and exiled lawmen. Many areas are so contaminated that human habitation is simply impossible, and there are many nasty critters that love snacking on unfortunate wanderers. At the end of their career a judge can choose to take "The Long Walk" to bring law to this region as their final mission.
    • Even worse is Deadworld, the home dimension of Judge Death. All life is illegal. After Death destroyed it, it's nothing but a ruinous wasteland filled with piles of bones and deserted buildings. Venture there, and the undead custodians will prosecute you to the full extent that their law allows.
  • Rogue Trooper has Nu Earth. Both of them. Due to chemical warfare, the very air and water are poisonous, and the slightest rip in a soldier's isolation suit guarantees death. Only the Genetic Infantrymen (GIs) can survive unaided.
  • Shakara: There's a sentient planet that is used as a killing ground by The Hierarchy, as it fights off every intruder by warping the environment to produce things like lighting strikes and earthquakes.
  • Zombo: In the outer rims of explored space are Death Worlds, which are sentient planets that kill any humans who go near them. The flora, the fauna, even the air is a death trap. There are several different classes, with the worst being zombie-infested worlds.
  • D.R. & Quinch once featured the antiheros being conscripted to fight in a war on a planet where "The saliva trees digest you alive and even the hideous diseases have hideous diseases".
• Bizarrely enough, the homeworld of Marvel Comics' happy-go-lucky Impossible Man was apparently one of these, with his species developing their Voluntary Shapeshifting as a survival mechanism. (When Galactus ate the planet, he got indigestion.)
• The Blister in Six-Gun Gorilla is an alternate dimension that's basically a giant desert inhabited by all sorts of hostile native life, where the high-noon sun (known as "the Blaze") literally disintegrates anything that goes out unprotected. On top of that, combustion doesn't work in the Blister, so the locals are reliant on Clock Punk. The only reason people colonized the Blister in the first place was because the soil was surprisingly well-suited for growing crops. And then it turns out the place is alive, in a manner of speaking.
• The reformed Earth in Xenozoic Tales (briefly adapted in the 90's as Cadillacs and Dinosaurs) is crawling with once-extinct life forms by the time the humans emerge from their bomb shelters. This includes carnivorous dinosaurs and giant man-eating invertebrates. Naturally, this proves to be a challenge to adapt to, which is the main focus of series protagonists Jack Tenrec and Hannah Dundee.
• In Deep Gravity, the planet Poseidon is technically habitable by humans, but only for short periods (due to toxicity and radiation) and with great care (due to large, dangerous, hostile lifeforms).
  Flores: [D]on't worry about logistics for the time being. Do worry about Poseidon. Never forget — it is not your home. Poseidon doesn't like you. We're not built to live there. [...] Look, I know how it is with scientists, but we can't have any absent-minded-professor shit down there. If you miss the next ship and stay six years, Poseidon will be your last home.
• In Warhammer 40,000 comic Bloodquest shows in detail what an Daemon World is like: Eidolon is a planet trapped inside the Eye of Terror that is a massive battleground between the Forces of Chaos fighting for dominance. Nearly the entire population is made up of Daemons or insane humans that follow Chaos constantly trying to kill each other. Couple with the fact the corrupting nature of the Warp would drive lesser minds to madness just from being there and even the austere Space Marines aren't immune to it (one of their main protagonists falls to Chaos and the another is being gradually corrupted very visibly).
• Terrenos from Birthright is a magical realm described by many who escaped to Earth as "a living hell". The land itself is filled with predators that are far more deadly than anything encountered on Earth and they are nothing next to beings such as Lore's demonic legions or diviners spirits. Terrenos has also been devastated by an ongoing war between Lore and its many residents that lasted for untold years.
• The first ever Star Trek comic book had the Enterprise encountering one of these, populated by carnivorous plants and spores that would transform other lifeforms into more of them. They considered the planet such a threat that they decided to wipe out the entire biosphere to prevent it from infecting other worlds.
• Paperinik New Adventures has "The Well" from the PK continuity. It's a small planetoid that, due to being in the middle of a very strange solar system, has one day of sunlight every Earth year. The local fauna and flora sleeps in hibernation except on that day — when everything wakes up and tries to kill everything else. The Evronians use it as a testing ground for mutant soldiers: if a model can survive on that one day, it's good enough to be mass-produced.
• Justice League of America: Justice League (2018) describes in one issue a category of planets known as ∅-worlds. These are worlds spontaneously created and destroyed just as variably where life is born fully evolved to be as predatory as possible. Starro was born on such a world, and they were born an apex predator.
• Star Wars: Invasion: Dibrook's atmosphere is toxic, as is its rain. Nothing can survive there without heavy protective equipment or being specially bioengineered to breathe its air.
• Wonder Woman (1987): Even outside of the Sangtee Empire turning it into a prison planet where the inmates are worked to death "Hope's End" is not a safe place for humans to be. The air has barely enough oxygen, the days are extremely hot, the nights are freezing, water is exceedingly rare, the only native thing palatable to humans are tiny fast moving "lizards" and there are giant scavenger worms dotting the landscape waiting to eat the unwary.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes: Plenty of planets that Spaceman Spiff visits. Hostile fauna, scorching suns, and alkaline lakes are common features.
  Spiff: But aside from that, it's not much like Earth.

Fan Works

• Age of Strife: The planet of Dandriss is covered in nearly indestructible trees that can consume metal and incorporate it into their bark. The flora of Dandriss has evolved terrifying mechanisms for clearing space for their offspring, ranging from gales of biodiamond leaf blades and grenade fruits to continent wide firestorms and fission detonations. The wildlife of the planet isn't particularly dangerous, but the plant life on it's own is enough to keep humanity hiding in Adamantium cities most of the time.
• Child of the Storm:
  • Asgard. It's stunningly beautiful and advanced, but it is infested with giant monsters and Everything Is Trying to Kill You. It's actually because of this that Asgardians developed into their current state (though their godhood was a product of the creation of the Nine Realms, the nature of the planet might also have been a side-effect — perhaps to sharpen them up). Considering how powerful they are, and that the Asgardian mentality can broadly be summed up as "Apocalypse? Great! Fun day out for all the family!", no one's overly bothered about it.
  • The sequel, when discussing the side-effects of 'Red Sky Day', when Chthon tried to break through and set reality to randomise, touches on Australia, already a real life example. Except with added dragons (the Antipodean Opal Eye, specifically). Specifically, Loki explains that while most of the damage from Chthon's attack was repaired, time and space got a bit flexible. Consequently, Australia "now has its formerly extinct range of horrifying giant creatures to add to its current range of horrifying small to medium sized creatures. The locals are, of course, delighted and celebrating by trying to find out how such formerly extinct creatures taste when barbecued." An Australian reviewer chipped in to say that yeah, this is pretty much how Aussies would react under such circumstances.
• End of Days is a fanfic set after an asteroid impact where the Loud and Santiago-Casagrande families struggle for survival in a post-impact wasteland, where resources are scarce, temperatures are bitterly cold as a result of the impact winter, and starving carnivorous animals (such as escaped zoo tigers) and gangs of raiders pick off survivors.
• Fallout: Equestria: The Equestrian Wasteland. Think of the Wasteland as a typical Fallout Wasteland on steroids. In Fallout, few creatures have energy-based attacks, Super Mutants don't have the ability to generate extremely sturdy protective shields or fly, and Deathclaws aren't adapted enough to qualify as a faction on their own, with enough wit to reverse-engineer firearms for their own uses, plus being able to dig fast enough for it to be a viable combat tactic. Guess what you can find in the now devastated Equestria. There's more, like the almost permanently cloudy weather due to the Enclave, the incurable Taint along with the "vanilla" magical radiation, and much more. And then there's Canterlot. On the other hand, the deadliness of the Equestrian Wasteland is (at least somewhat) offset by the fact that the heroes have access to magic, healing potions, Flight and such. Also, despite the ruined world Littlepip and her allies rarely find themselves struggling for basic resources like food or water.
• Hellsister Trilogy: The anti-matter universe of Qward. Every atom can hurt you or even kill you. Not even Kryptonians are safe.
• Light's Song: Despite the canon Boiling Isles being this from the perspective of Earthlings, the fact that this is the Earth from Supernatural means that it's more dangerous by comparison with all the monsters running around, particularly for Luz Noceda due to her Winchester blood, as most if not all monsters cannot cross over to the Demon Realm, thus rendering most of the threats her Doom Magnet status can throw at her incapable of reaching her.
• Nine Days Down: In Tartarus, almost every intelligent being is either actively evil or a ruthless opportunist, every animal is a monster, and many plants are dangerous. Food is scarce, shelter scarcer, and the geography has a tendency to shift when you're not looking. Topping it all off, the dimension itself is aware, in full control of its shape and contents, and enjoys nothing more than trapping creatures and making them fear and despair forever. Ancient Equestria used to be something similar, although less extreme, as it teemed with predators, monsters, hostile races and powerful evil beings; Celestia, Luna, and their ancient companions were responsible for driving most of the nastiness into Tartarus, turning Equestria into the Sugar Bowl of the modern day.
• Nobody Dies: Australia is mentioned to be this post-Second Impact. Nobody Dies: Six AIs, One Continent takes place almost entirely there, and reveals why: the wildlife has severely mutated, so that even the sheep are enormous, carnivorous monsters (don't even ask about the platypi), the spiders and scorpions have become gigantic and sapient, the few humans left are either freakishly mutated or savages (or both). The sky is permanently covered in dark clouds that never rain, but constantly flash lightning. And there's a dormant Angel underneath the continent, which became the source of all this nastiness after Second Impact spread some of ADAM's body to the area. The Reego (AI spawn of Rei Ayanami with a great love of violence) are sent to make the place safe again... namely, by depopulating it.
• Poké Wars : The Pokéverse becomes thisafter the Pokémon's power dampeners are removed. Forests, bodies of water, caves and even cities become deathtraps for the practically helpless humans that live there.
• XSGCOM: Parodied. The birthplace of the First Prime of the Tau'ri is a desolate land, where the winds can strip the flesh from a man's bones, where water only falls in the form of snow, and the forests are filled with beasts, consisting of only teeth and claws and anger. This place? Canada.
• KOTOR: The Prodigy of Revan: Knight's and Bishop's quips imply that the planet Tharsis is very much like this. And on purpose, this is where the Spartan Union sends their Raider recruits to train. Terrain features include "dense forests, frozen tundras and jagged mountains crawling with beasts out of ancient myth, jungles teaming with ferocious predators and torturous diseases. And then there's the... er... 'food.'"
• The World of the Creatures takes place in the author/protagonist's mind. Since the author is obssessed with zoology, paleontology, and speculative biology, the world just happens to be filled with more vicious, deadly creatures than you can stick a sonic screwdriver, wooden stake, or batarang at.
• Sonic X: Dark Chaos pretty much takes place in an entire death galaxy in general, but special mention goes to worlds that lose their Planet Eggs (which lose their power to sustain life and become barren rocks) or get infested with Shroud parasites (which are the very definition of Body Horror and Fate Worse than Death rolled into one). Combined with the insane robot armies, demons, and Lovecraftian horrors everywhere, its amazing there's life in the Milky Way at all. And by the end, there isn't very much. A more straight example is Hell, the Demon homeworld, which is basically Mustafar on steroids... and the Angel homeworld Heaven, which is basically Jupiter on steroids.
• Star Wars Paranormalities Trilogy: In addition to some pre-established death worlds from both canon and Legends, the setting features a few original to it.
  • Unlike most volcanic worlds, Kratzar — which is actually just a planet in its primordial state and not suffering from a cataclysm — is entirely covered in lava, save for a few islands. These islands are used as mining sites by both Mustafarian colonists and Valkoran forces, but are often infested with giant lava snakes that sometimes pop out of the mining siphons.
  • Krantisi was once home to some really large creatures, whose skeletons are now part of the environment. It's still infested with a lot of dangerous creatures, including giant spiky lizards, sentient cacti that drain their prey's body fluids until they're a brittle husk and sand sharks among others.
  • Guaymar is a planet perpetually shrouded in darkness. Its native sentient species are cannibalistic savages that worship a god of death and one of the only forests on the planet is also home to a deceptive, sedentary Planimal that is disguised among the trees. The massive, crashed starship is also haunted with four ghost-like Starfish Aliens (in actuality, the psychic extensions of an Eldritch Abomination) that, if they don't kill you by sucking out your blood, will cause you to die in four days from a death curse triggered from just having their prey seen all four of them. It also goes through a global Zombie Apocalypse every few years (and the summoning of Stythanyx, also the aforementioned Guaymaran god of death, could create a longer lasting one).
  • Krishar has trees that fire Force lightning randomly (and these trees are otherwise like any other) and is home to an insane Eldritch Abomination that has driven its native sentient race into varying degrees of insanity just from being there (with them being Cloud Cuckoolanders at best, or at worst in the case of the same abomination, a barely-functional vicious idiot unable to think). Because of the lightning trees, the Krishari developed the ability to regenerate lost tissue incredibly quickly.
  • Chilades is so cold that humans require devices that artificially raise their own body temperature in addition to heavy clothing just to keep warm, has toxic lakes and is inhabited by mutated animals, either native or immigrated and all carnivorous (and it's suggested that any herbivores have either Ascended to Carnivorism out of necessity or went extinct due to lack of plantlife and carnivore dominance). And the planet was even more dangerous when Facadma was trapped there in the distant past, as she could use the Force to feed on the wildlife's lifeforce with little effort and only didn't kill everything on the planet to keep the ecosystem in check and maintain a steady food supply.
• The New Adventures of Invader Zim presents Planet Meekrob as this, being primarily composed of barren wastelands, inhabited by deadly super-predators. Though since the Meekrob themselves are Energy Beings, it doesn't bother them.
• The Palaververse: The island-nation of Saddle Arabia. It’s a barren desert wasteland battered by horrifying magical storms that regularly sow the land with chaotic magic, with the sun burning away any moisture they leave behind. The chaos magic and harsh climate have worked together to populate it with a parade of horrors — packs of mobile vampiric cacti, mountain-sized roc birds made of stone, enormous wind scorpions that surprise prey and evade pursuit by turning into wind, parasitic life-eating flecks that inhabit eyeballs and spread by eye contact...
• RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse has the changeling homeworld of Protea. Once, this world was rich and vibrant, supporting numerous sapient races (and countless changeling hives). But many centuries ago a terrible war broke out, one that spread to encompass the entirety of Protea. The weapons unleashed in that war poisoned the earth and dried up the seas, filled the sky with clouds, broke the twin moons and caused the very stars to fall from heaven. By this point the changelings of the Last Hive are the only surviving sapients, and only a handful of mutant monsters and some particularly hardy plants have survived of Protea's non-sapient life.
• In The Vampire of Steel, Kara takes M'Nagaleh to the anti-matter Earth of the universe of Qward. M'Nagaleh bursts into flames right away and Supergirl has to leave as soon as possible because not even she can survive there for longer than a few seconds.
  In a move The Flash had taught her and Superman long ago, they began to lose the vibrational pitch that attuned them to Earth-One, and to slip into another plane of existence. The deadliest one she knew of.
  <STOP,> thought M’nagaleh, and, indeed, she had to fight the impulse to stop right then and there. But she didn’t.
  Within seconds, she saw a similar but different Earth below her, and a different solar system and set of stars about her. She felt the bee-stinging of contramatter particles against her body, and knew if she remained more than a few seconds here, she would be in more danger, perhaps, than M’nagaleh could offer.
  Below her was the anti-matter Earth of the universe of Qward.
  <YOU ARE FOOD,> thought M’nagaleh, his bulk coursing towards her. <YOU WILL BECOME ME.>
  <You will become toast,> said Supergirl, and thrust the towers away with all her strength. A tentacle reached out for her face, brushed it, missed.
  The mass of metal and monster hurtled towards the rotating globe below. In seconds it was within the outer atmosphere, and small bursts of flaming explosion were seen. By the time it got to slightly denser atmosphere, the anti-matter fully reacted with the positive matter of the towers and what was on them.
  It exploded, greatly.
• The planet of Moat Cailin in Let the Galaxy Burn. Just approaching the planet is risky as hell, because there is a dense asteroid field in front of the main approach to the planet that has multiple Stark fortresses, and there's only one safe path through. Trying to place ships in orbit around the planet is impossible because there are ancient machines in the planet that pull them into the planet, so, if you want to take the planet, you have to land troops. And that's the easy part. It is completely covered by swamp, with just a few points that are solid enough to hold fortresses manned by crannogmen, who are absolute masters at fighting in the swamp. The rest of the planet is inhabited by millions of vicious crocodiles, alligators, lizard-lions, a massive number of different types of extremely venomous snakes, tons of plants that release pollen that is lethal to breathe in and more diseases that you can even conceive. Per Wyman Manderly's words, if you picked a dictionary, the words "death world" could be defined with just "Moat Cailin".
  • An example of Moat Cailin's lethality: 2000 years before Aegon's Conquest, King Theon Stark goaded the Faith to launch a crusade against the North, which they did through Moat Cailin, landing close to a quarter of a million men on the planet. Within a month, that number was reduced to a few hundreds of starved, deathly ill survivors of animal, plant and futile attacks on the fortresses. That was when the Starks attacked them.
• Ranma ½ and Sailor Moon story All The Small Things explains why Nemesis is such a nasty fighter. Setsuna explains that of the ten native lifeforms of the planet Nemesis, "Only nine of them want to kill and eat you, the tenth just wants to kill you." Queen Serenity had ruled the planet interdicted because every attempt to colonize the planet had failed horribly, and only a Mad Scientist in her court with a case of perfectionism managed to bypass the interdiction in order to create a Senshi that was suitable to the planet. He succeeded with Ranma's past life.
• In the Dresden Files/Stargate SG-1 Fusion Fic series Endless Pantheon, the Goa'uld consider Earth to be this. From their perspective the planet is positively brimming with fae, vampires, and any number of other supernatural baddies, many of which were explicitly created to kill Goa'uld. Even the mundane wildlife is considered unusually dangerous, having far more alpha predator species than any other planet; Australia was so bad that even the Goa'uld couldn't establish a foothold.
• Kaiju Revolution: Skull Island is hidden by a massive perpetual storm but that's nothing compared to the island itself. It has a massive amount of radioactive materials on it which has resulted in its biosphere adapting to feed on it. This has resulted in a large population of dangerous perhistoric monsters who have abilites that defy everything we know about biology, deadly Hypervores who's Horror Hunger drive them to mindless aggression, literal Kaiju and areas of intense radiation that humans can't survive in. It's so bad that the native Iwi tribe has adapted so much to survive in it that they aren't even fully human anymore. It's also gotten even worse in the aftermath of King Ghidorah's attack as before then the Island's ecology was kept in check by Kong and the Gorosaurus pack but now, half the pack is dead and Kong is MIA, the island is destabilizing and if it gets bad enough it could end up spilling over to the mainland.
• Infinity Train: Boiling Point has the Boiling Underworld, which is the stomach of the Titan's corpse. The very atmosphere of the place is so strong that only the strongest get to survive staying in there for long; those who are either "Weak" or "Nothing" don't get past childhood before the atmosphere melts and kills them.
• Becoming a True Invader: Fefa has ridiculously destructive weather, like giant ceiling fans flying around to slice everything in their path and raining beetle larvae that make people's heads explode. Hence why the natives have evolved such highly effective Healing Factors and an inability to feel pain.

Film — Animation

• The world portrayed in The Croods is so dangerous that the Croods only dare to leave their cave once every three days or so to look for food. Gigantic man-eating cats, snakes that could swallow entire families whole, swarms of carnivorous birds that can strip a land-whale to the bone in seconds, and then it gets worse when the fissures start opening into chasms of lava.
• Trolls: Setting foot outside the Trolls' warren is basically signing your own death warrant. The forests are filled with bizarre predators constantly devouring each other, the plant life is poisonous (and predatory), and the weather can change from mild to blizzard to boiling at the drop of a hat. And everything is painted in cheerful pastel colors.

Film — Live-Action

• 65 has Late Cretaceous Earth, depicted as a bleak hellscape with acidic geysers and lethal quicksand, and inhabited by poisonous flora, parasitic bugs, and hyper-aggressive reptiles.
• After Earth has Will and Jaden Smith's characters crash-landing on a "class one quarantine planet" where everything has evolved to kill humans. Which turns out to be Earth.
• A Home Too Far: The forests of Southern China in the first movie are depicted in this manner, where poisonous gases left behind from the war lingers in the air, the plants are lethal and can kill with a scratch, the water is completely unsafe for drinking, and most of the refugees trying to cross the forest end up dying en masse.
• Alien: LV-426. Ash reads off all of the unpleasant gases in the atmosphere and comments that it's "primordial." Come the sequel, terraforming by colonists has made the atmosphere breathable.
• The Angry Red Planet. Space explorers land on Mars but instead of finding intelligent life, they're constantly attacked by monsters. When the survivors leave, they get a message from actual Martians, telling them never to return (possibly implying that the attacks were foisted on them on purpose).
• The asteroid in Armageddon (1998) is not only airless, it's covered in big, jagged, evil-looking spikes and regularly spews forth masses of gas and rock designed specifically to kill intrepid astronauts.
• Pandora in Avatar. Except for the resident sentient humanoid species (who themselves are twice as tall as humans and Made of Iron to boot), the jungle-covered moon is teeming with megafauna, many of which can withstand automatic weapons fire from the BFGs seen in the film. There's at least two shown elephant-sized species and two Giant Flyer species, but you can still survive by avoiding them. But if the planet itself decides that you've gotta go and the local fauna start evicting you en masse, then you're really in trouble. On top everything else, humans can't even breathe the air — it has too much carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide.
• Nearly every world seen in The Chronicles of Riddick, save Helion Prime, is a planetary-scale deathtrap. Perhaps justified, since most of the planets seen were uninhabited, but the protagonists were forced to survive there for various reasons.
  • Pitch Black: The planet is an arid waste bathed in sunlight 24/7, except for one day every 23 years where there is a total eclipse and the surface is covered with light-sensitive predators. The protagonists only came here because mechanical problems with their ship forced an emergency landing.
  • The Chronicles of Riddick (2004): First we see a desolate ice planet, where Riddick had been trying to hide until bounty hunters eventually tracked him down. Later is Crematoria, a volcanic planet with a sun so hot that being on the "day" side more than a few seconds will cause one to burst into flames. In this case, people actually took advantage of this trope to build an inescapable underground prison.
  • Riddick: "Not-Furya" is arid and seemingly only inhabited by large hyena/dog creatures that can apparently be domesticated and giant scorpion creatures that live in mud puddles. And there's a storm coming that will wake all the scorpions from dormancy. Though Riddick does spot a lush valley off in the distance. Riddick only comes to this planet because he was lured by a treacherous underling who wanted to kill him.
• Don't Look Up ends with the Sleeper Starship carrying Earth's elites reaching an Earth-like world in a distant system, only for it to turn out to be one of these. Between the hostile alien wildlife and the fact that the colonists are all completely naked and were selected because they were rich rather than their survival skills, it's implied that they are not long for this new world.
• Enemy Mine: The two main characters find themselves stranded on a desolate planet after an aerial battle. The planet is prone to regular showers of meteorites and riddled with monsters hiding beneath the surface. The only food available is a turtle-like alien race, and the sole occasional visitors to the planet are members of a brutal mining cartel.
• Everest (2015): Rob explains to his clients that once they climb above 8000 metres on Everest, they will be in the "Death Zone", and their body will begin to shut down. The climbers are constantly reminded during their summit attempt that they must keep moving or risk death.
• Morganthus in Roger Corman's Galaxy of Terror. The only thing that could be called "civilization" anywhere in its deserted surface is the gigantic pyramid full of killer aliens and Mind Rape.
• Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019):
  • The entire surface of the Earth is effectively turned into a somewhat mild case when Ghidorah takes over as Alpha and commands the other Titans to begin destroying all other life on the planet, with Titans rampaging all around the globe and actively unleashing extinction-level natural disasters. The novelization notes that pretty much nowhere on the planet short of a reinforced shelter is truly safe for human life at this point, and that the global conditions are forcing Monarch and the military forces to be selective with finding safe places to regroup or refuel. Fortunately, it gets undone once Ghidorah is killed and the Titans submit to Godzilla.
  • Godzilla's temple in an air pocket in the Hollow Earth is so highly radioactive that even protective gear isn't enough to protect one from radiation poisoning, never mind the deathly-high volcanic heat. This poses a problem when Monarch head to the temple looking to revive Godzilla, forcing one of them to make a Heroic Suicide.
• The jungle inside the board game in Jumanji, down to the plants.
• The dinosaur-filled islands in the Jurassic Park movies (and books) which are even known to Costa Rican locals as "Las Cinco Muertes" (the five deaths). We only get to see Isla Nublar and Isla Sorna though. From Jurassic Park III:
  Alan Grant: That's just great. Here we are on the most dangerous island on the planet and we're not even getting paid.
• In the various King Kong films, Skull Island is presented as this:
  • King Kong (2005): Featuring the Invertebrates of Utterly Horrific Dimensions, prehistoric terrors, and the most grotesque (and dangerous) imaginable evolutionary offshoots — often multiple representatives of them — in virtually every scene. The tie-in book The World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island details it further, explaining that Skull Island's geology is literally tearing the island apart, making it smaller and smaller until it will eventually sink back into the sea. Because of the shrinking environment, competition between species has accelerated in a struggle for life and death unprecedented in the modern natural world. Skull Island and its creatures are the result of the brutality of natural selection at its worst.
  • The Kong: Skull Island explicitly stated that if it were not for Kong protecting them, the humans living on the island would be massacred (as they were before his kind arrived).
• Outworld in Mortal Kombat: The Movie certainly applies.
  Johnny Cage: "I'm in a hostile environment. I'm totally unprepared. And I'm surrounded by a bunch of guys who probably want to kick my ass... it's like being back in high school."
• The 'game preserve' in Predators is a jungle Death World full of lethal imported flora and fauna. And then, of course, there's the Predators themselves.
• The Fire Swamp in the book and film The Princess Bride, featuring spontaneous bursts of fire, Lightning Sand, and the R.O.U.S.
  Westley: It's not that bad.
  [Buttercup gives him a look]
  Westley: (defensively) Well, I'm not saying I'd like to set up a summer home here, but the trees are actually quite lovely.
• Prospect takes place on a moon where the local flora has saturated the air with poisonous dust, which is frequently visible floating in the atmosphere. Humans wandering its verdant rain forests need to wear full-body suits and breathe through filters.
• Screamers: The colony world Sirius B has become a wasteland due to an apocalyptic war between two different factions who completely destroyed each other. Near the end they release armies of self-evolving killer robots which kill indiscriminately, making the entire planet uninhabitable. Even venturing outside the few remaining bunkers is viewed as a Suicide Mission.
• Something often brought up by fans of the movie Signs is that Earth is a death world from the perspective of the aliens visiting it. Water has an acidic effect on them, and the planet has water covering most of its surface, water vapor in the atmosphere, water falling from the sky at regular intervals, and water making up most of the bio-mass of every native life form. Theories abound as to why in the hell they would ever come here, especially with no protective gear or armor, with popular ones being ignorance, stupidity, or desperation.
• Soldier takes place on a desolate world with extreme weather that is so inhospitable that it's used as a dumping ground.
• Star Trek:
  • In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan the planet Ceti Alpha V - where Captain Kirk had left Khan Noonien Singh and his fellow Augments - had originally been a class M world before Ceti Alpha VI exploded six months after the Augments were left there. The explosion caused a shift in V's orbit, causing it to become a windswept desert world incapable of supporting human life.
  • The Genesis Planet in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock starts off pleasant and apparently habitable enough even though there are some odd weather patterns, but quickly degenerates into a death world due to Genesis Device creator David Marcus having used protomatter in the device.^note In the TNG "The Genesis Wave" novels Federation scientists had found if the device had been used as intended on a dead world instead of a nebula full of highly charged particles the planet would have remained a stable Class-M world. They concluded due to the nature of detonation Genesis not only had to build a planet from scratch, but an entire solar system as well. As a result it ran out energy to complete the Genesis Planet, leaving it unstable with a life expentency of a few months.
  • The "Planet of Galactic Peace" Nimbus III in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is also a harsh desert world where settlers eke out meager existences trying to farm the planet for the small amount of water that remains. The novelization states that at one time the planet had been more habitable but due to environmental damage caused by settlers had become a desert world.
  • In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Capt. Kirk and Dr. McCoy get convicted for Klingon Chancellor Gorkon's assassination and are sent to the Klingon penal colony Rura Penthe, an ice planetoid where prisoners mine for dilithium. According to Chekov, it's "known throughout the galaxy as 'the alien's graveyard'.".
• Star Wars:
  • Yoda's chosen refuge of Dagobah is nobody's idea of a vacation destination (at least nobody who isn't a Jedi Master), being a desolate swamp world devoid of sentient life, but hosting such delights as predatory dragonsnakes, giant pythons that can consume prey fifteen times their body weight, and a very noticeable Dark Side presence.
  • Tatooine is a barren desert home to vicious barbarian aliens, giant desert dragons, and precious little civilization, all of which is run by criminals such as the Pyke Syndicate and the Hutts, although the desert climate is what makes things most difficult.
  • Hoth is like Tatooine, except cold and worse. If the subarctic temperatures and howling blizzards won't do you in, the wampa ice beasts will.
  • Mustafar is blisteringly hot and covered in many areas by molten lava. But the Separatists managed to build a base there anyway. The reason it's so ludicrously volatile? It used to be a pleasant place, but then it got caught in a gravitational tug-of-war between two gas giants, and the tidal forces have turned Mustafar into a volcanic hellhole as it is very slowly torn apart.
  • Jakku too, considering that, despite having only one sun instead of two, it’s an Expy planet of Tatooine.
  • Exegol is a desertic tundra constantly ravaged by lightning storms and mostly devoid of natural resources. The only known native lifeforms are the human Sith cultists who were born there.
• Subverted and parodied in the movie version of Tank Girl.
• Thor: The Frost Giant world of Jotunheim. A war-ravaged, frozen wasteland with a collapsing civilization inhabited by giant, aggressive beasts and ruled by a race of giants that can create ice weapons and physically strong and tough enough to fight physical gods.
• Tremors 7: Shrieker Island is set on a private island in the Pacific where genetically enhanced graboids are bred for the purposes of big game hunting. To put that into perspective: this place is more dangerous than Isla Sorna. Then they escape to the neighbouring islands...

Live-Action TV

• In The 100, the Ark station is surprised that Earth seemingly isn't a Death World, since the radiation from the nuclear wars was supposed to take another hundred years to subside. In the second season, it's revealed that the Earth's surface actually is lethally radioactive; Ark people and Grounders have just adapted to high radiation levels over the last century. The Mountain Men, who have not gone through this adaptation, become covered in radiation burns after just a few seconds spent outside their bunker.
• Alien Nation: In the TV movie Dark Horizon, the Overseers out in the galaxy come to consider Earth a Death World after a scout they sent there returns dying of a disease and claiming that all the escaped Tenctonese slaves from the ship Gruza all died of that disease. On the other hand, seawater is like sulfuric acid to them, so much of the planet really is deadly to them. And most of them live in Los Angeles.
• Babylon 5:
  • "If you go to Z'Ha'Dum you will die." Even the Shadows and their servants live in domed cities there, implying at the very least an unbreathable atmosphere. Anyone who lands there and doesn't already serve the Shadows has to deal with the Shadows themselves as well.
  • After the Vorlons left the galaxy along with the Shadows and other First Ones their homeworld was left abandoned but with automated defense systems that made short work of anyone trying to land in order to salvage Vorlon technology.
• Chernobyl has the destroyed reactor building itself, which makes up for small-scale in sheer nastiness. Prior to containment (and it has to be contained as it can't be destroyed), its mere existence is a threat to all of Eastern Europe, and just being near it for extended time ruins your health to the point where Legasov predicts that he and Scherbina will be dead in 5 years. And then there's the roofs scattered with radioactive debris, with one being so bad that they have to clear it with humans (who can only work there for 90 seconds apiece) because it fries robots. And all of that is small potatoes compared to the destroyed core itself, which is treated as something of an Eldritch Location and cannot be approached or even examined without the radiation killing whoever dared try.
• In Defiance, Earth has become a Death World. Fragments of the Votan Arks in orbit periodically fall to the surface, raining razor-sharp metal fragments and big pieces that leave craters, or malfunctioning Terraforming equipment that spawns hybrid monstrosities such as Hellbugs.
• Doctor Who:
  • The planet Skaro — a delightful wasteland which experienced a nice long NBC campaign by two opposing sides, leaving it essentially a polluted, radioactive stone quarry and hideous monsters living in the lakes. Also, there are the surviving inhabitants....
  • The planet Marinus (also from the mind of Dalek creator Terry Nation) from "The Keys of Marinus". Glass beaches lapped by acid seas. Jungles full of hostile plants and deadly mechanical traps. Frozen wastelands patrolled by packs of man-eating wolves. Bodiless, telepathic slavers. Then there's the war....
  • The jungle planet Kembel from "The Daleks' Master Plan" is apparently the most dangerous planet in the Universe. We don't see much of this, though it is seen after the Daleks get there and start using Varga plants. Of course, the Daleks could have cleared away a lot of the danger.
  • Spiridon in "Planet of the Daleks" is a good example. Plants that spurt quick-hardening glue that can trap you or close off your airways. Plants that shoot spores that, if they touch you, start growing in your skin and spread fast. Tons and tons of carnivorous beasts. Hostile, invisible natives. Honestly, when the army of insane alien killing machines is the least of your worries, things are bad.
  • Any planet where the Krynoid gets established.
    The Doctor: On a planet where the Krynoid gets established, the plants eat the animals.
  • The misleadingly named planet in "Nightmare of Eden" is occupied by a variety of hostile and carnivorous life forms. Even the plants aren't safe to linger near.
  • The Death Zone on Gallifrey, a site where the most dangerous monsters in the universe (the Daleks and Cybermen are banned, but that doesn't stop them from appearing anyway) pit battle with one another in the Game of Rassilon.
  • The planet of Androzani Minor from "The Caves of Androzani" features regular semi-volcanic mud bursts, is inhabited by a (admittedly rather unconvincing) carnivorous creature and is the native environment of a mineral which, in its raw state, will kill you within a few days if you so much as touch it. Not to mention you can get shot for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, as there's a rather brutal war going on.
  • The eponymous planet from "Midnight" is seemingly made entirely of precious gems, and as such has a stake as a high-class vacation planet... as long as you stay inside, as the reason the planet's soil has turned to gems is because it's constantly exposed to a form of radiation that will incinerate anything living in two seconds flat. Except for a nasty little body surfer...
  • "The Ghost Monument": The planet known as Desolation, which lives up to its name. It's mostly a desert, its atmosphere is described as poisonous, and the water is dangerous to touch as it's packed with flesh-eating bacteria. It's also dangerous to stay outside at night due to the Remnants, killer ribbon weapons mostly immune to anything other than a flamethrower. It wasn't always like this, though: it used to be populated with much more life before the Stenza conquered it and forced its scientists to create WMDs for them, ravaging the place in the process.
  • "Orphan 55": The titular planet is a hostile Death World that, like all "orphan planets", isn't supposed to be inhabited at all. The oxygen level is too thin for humans to breathe without assistance, the mist is toxic, and the sunlight causes lethal blistering after 10 minutes' exposure. It's a potential future Earth after a mixture of climate catastrophe and nuclear war.
  • From the audio drama "Death's Deal", the title planet, a giant reef inhabited by various monsters.
• Several worlds in Firefly are Death Worlds, due to toxic interaction between Terraforming and the local environment to try to make them Earth-like. These worlds are generally referred to as "black rocks".
• JAG: A non-science fiction example; several episodes in the later half of the 7th season depicts Afghanistan as one.
• The Mandalorian: While Mandalore wasn't exactly a paradise before (contrary to what Din has been told about it by the Children of the Watch; see Star Wars: The Clone Wars under Western Animation for more details) the planet became even more inhospitable after the Empire ravaged the planet's surface, turning it from a war-torn desert to a ball of glass. While the air is still breathable (contrary to initial reports), the upper atmosphere is wracked with electromagnetic storm clouds, the Empire's fusion bombs destabilized the planet's magnetic field (making communication outside the atmosphere impossible), and various hostile beings of varying sapience have moved into the ruins of Sundari, including some bio-mechanical creature of unknown origin that has kidnapped and harvested the blood of several Mandalorians.
• Primeval: Pretty much everything from the past and the future is trying to kill you for one reason or another, and the worlds they come from don't tend to be favorable to supporting human life. The Cretaceous is full of carnivorous beasts and dinosaurs in the land, sea and sky, the Precambrian's atmosphere is sulfurous gas in place of oxygen and it's filled with carnivorous giant worms, the Silurian is barren desert filled with giant scorpions, and even mold in the future can kill you.
• The plateau on which the explorers are trapped in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. A Lost World filled with dinosaurs, Cannibal Tribes, Lizard Folk, giant bees...
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Original Series had a couple of examples:
    • The planet Gamma Trianguli VI in "The Apple", including plants that throw poisonous thorns, rocks that act like anti-personnel mines and directed lightning strikes.
    • The planet Eden in "The Way to Eden" looks beautiful, but beware of differing chemistry; the fruit is poisonous and the grass has acid for blood.
    • Vulcan itself is pretty harsh by human standards, being extremely hot, dry and rugged, subject to intense electrically charged sandstorms, and home to man-eating plants and giant, venomous cat-like carnivores (which are freaking adorable and are kept as pets by the Vulcans).
      Spock: Not precisely, Doctor. On Vulcan, the teddy bears are alive, and they have six-inch fangs.
  • The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Enemy" has Galorndon Core, a geologically unstable planet with constant electromagnetic storms and a strong magnetic field that damages the nervous system of anyone foolish enough to spend too long on the surface.
  • Star Trek: Voyager's "Demon" (Y-class) of planet probably qualifies, although the Federation has armored space suits sufficient to let humanoids brave the crushing gravity, poisonous atmosphere, and intense heat. The shapeshifting "silver blood" native to it was a bit more problematic.
  • Star Trek: Discovery features another class Y planet, Theta Zeta, a dilithium-rich hellscape of a planet inside a radioactive nebula. In addition to theta, delta, electromagnetic, and subspace radiation, radiation readings list two undiscovered types of radiation. Simply approaching the planet risks severe radiation poisoning, never mind actually being on it, and anti-radiation meds only buy rescuers time to get to you, assuming the advanced holoprogram active on the KSF Khi'eth designed to stop Su'Kal from fearing rescuers doesn't mask them^note Adira has to take their dose before beaming down and hide the away team's doses in their mouth to avoid this happening. Su'Kal is the only individual to survive a significant amount of time on the planet, having mutated in utero after the KSF Khi'eth crashed and also adapted to the dilithium on the planet, resulting in the Burn when the poor kid saw his mother die of radiation poisoning.
• On Stranger Things the Upsidedown is a Death World. Note the absence of scrabbling heirarchies of primal fauna or roiling volcanoes and lightning islands. The plants growing everywhere is sickly and dessicated, the Infected Humanoids are few and far between, and the air is made of mysterious floating ash.

Music

• The land described in the Dream Evil song "Kingdom of the Damned"
• In The New Albion Guide To Analogue Consciousness, Elysium (paradise for the souls of the dead) turns out to be this for the living when an expedition team tries to set up a city there.

Podcast

• Earth has become this in the Twilight Histories mini-episode “Frozen Earth.” Earth got knocked out of its orbit and now it is as far out as Neptune. The atmosphere is a sea of liquid gas, which, along with the extreme cold, means it isn’t possible to walk on the surface with a specialized spacesuit. As a result, most humans have long since retreated underground.
  • The world of “Project Gliese” also counts due to all of the killer robots running around. In fact, before departure you are advised to seek shelter as soon as you arrive on the world.

Radio

• Subverted in Earthsearch when the Angel computers try to convince the protagonists that Paradise is unsuitable for colonisation. Isn't almost seven-tenths of its surface covered by undrinkable water? Doesn't it have an axial tilt causing severe temperature changes that would inhibit the growth of crops? Isn't most of the land in the Northern hemisphere, where it can be affected by ice ages which have threatened global extinction several times? It's obvious from the description that this is Earth All Along, and the 'Earth' that the protagonists are searching for was just a previous homeworld of humanity with the same name.

Roleplay

• In There is no GATE; we did not fight there, man murdering monsters can be found in most corners of the setting. Most notably are the Hardy Beasts powerful enough to massacre entire provinces, such as the Tyrant.
• From Embers in the Dusk:
  • Avernus itself is a Deathworld where over a million soldiers a year are killed by the native flora and fauna. On a good year. It was created by the Old Ones to breed anti-Chaos weapons, and in all the millions of years since, had never let itself get rusty.
  • Muspelheim is a different kind of Deathworld, where the terrain itself is the danger rather than what lives there.

Tabletop Games

• This is the official term used by the Imperium of Man in Warhammer 40,000 to designate Single Biome Planets of this description. They're depressingly common, but any native populations are automatically prime recruiting stock for the Imperial Guard or Space Marines — indeed, several such planets were colonized specifically to provide badass soldiers for the Imperium's armies^note On Death Worlds, the main export (and frequently, the only export) is soldiers. . Rogue Trader characters who hail from a Death World get some serious stat bonuses, because even the biggest wimp from that planet still survived to adulthood on a world seemingly crafted to kill them. Some examples are:
  • Catachan, a jungle world where nearly every animal there is said to be a carnivore, and so are the plants, the majority of the microbes, fungi, and viruses. Wildlife includes the Catachan Barking Toad (a "jumpy" critter that detonates into a cloud of toxins that kills everything within a kilometer radius if you startle it) and the Catachan Devil (a cross between a scorpion and centipede the size of a train, thought to be related to the Tyranids). Also note the needle-shooting plants that turn any of their victims into more such plants. Every settlement fights a daily battle to keep its structures from being reclaimed by the vegetation, feral Orks breed in the deepest parts of the jungle, and on top of everything else the planet's gravity is slightly higher than normal. Living past the age of ten on such a planet is considered an achievement akin to graduating from boot camp, making the Catachan Jungle Fighters legendary among the regiments of the Imperial Guard (that each of them is equal parts Rambo and the cast of Predator doesn't hurt). And finally, it's possible the planet is sentient, and hates humanity. It's bad enough that when cultists brought Daemons onto Catachan soil, the planet ate the Daemons alive.
  • Fenris, a world that is exclusively Grim Up North. Its elliptical orbit takes twice as long as Terran standard and means that its long winters freeze almost the entire planet, while its summers bring lava flows and tidal waves as the world passes close to its sun. The land is constantly changing, making permanent settlement impossible, and its resources are so meager that its population must war amongst itself to survive. Other claims to fame include kraken (likely another regressed Tyranid offshoot), dragons, and wolves the size of tanks. The Space Wolves wouldn't have their homeworld any other way.
  • The Blood Angels hail from Baal, an irradiated, mutant-infested, post-apocalyptic hellhole. They seek out similar worlds for training and recruitment purposes, such as an asteroid field orbiting a black hole where quakes can send mountains falling into the void, all sorts of evil nightmares lurk about, and it's a thousand miles to the nearest neighboring asteroid. This make the recruits' transformations into the most angelic of Space Marines all the more miraculous, and may help explain the chapter's preference for shock assaults.
  • Nocturne, homeworld of the Salamanders. Already a rugged place of volcanoes, ash deserts and earthquakes, its climate is driven to extremes every 15 years during the Time of Trials, when its moon Prometheus swings extremely close. The gravity shifts ramp the planet's tectonic activity to insane levels, followed by a long and bitter winter that covers the world in a frozen tundra. The good thing is that once things calm down, the upheavals usually expose veins of minerals and metals that the population can mine, making Prometheus a very wealthy planet and giving the Salamanders the respect for preservation of human life they are known for.
  • The world of Urisarach was a storm-wracked planet covered in dense, hair-like forests, home to a nigh-extinct race of huge, armored arachnids dumped there because the monsters were just that unpleasant. It earned its nickname (Murder) after a failed incursion that nearly wiped out an entire expeditionary fleet of Space Marines who managed to send this transmission: "This. World. Is. Murder."
  • Krieg and Tallarn are both post-nuclear wastelands. Tallarns are great at mechanized warfare, because the only way to get anywhere on the surface is by using an armored vehicle and Krieg supplies the Imperium with brainwashed clones that are overly zealous and really good at siege warfare.
  • These are relatively mundane locales compared to Daemon Worlds, planets utterly corrupted by the warping influence of Chaos, where reality is reforged on the whims of daemons and the laws of physics are guidelines at best, the results looking something like a collaboration between H. R. Giger, Heironymous Bosch, and M.C. Escher. Despite being the home turf of the Legions of Hell and the fact that some planets may be literally trying to kill you, a few foolhardy explorers brave the Eye of Terror and search these worlds for ancient relics, for many are former Eldar homeworlds lost in the warpstorms of the race's calamitous Fall. The ones that survive probably wish they hadn't.
  • Also, Valhalla. The planet was a really nice place until a comet hit the surface and changed its orbit, making it an ice world. ^note A really cold Ice World. Imagine a place where Space Wolves would freeze to death at night. Fenris compensates with freaky seismic activity, sentient superstrong wolves and Eldritch Abominations straight from Viking tales. The same comet also brought an Ork incursion. As a result, Valhallans are WWII Red Army expies that are great at holding defense in face of unbeatable odds, drowning opponents in bodies and being unsurpassed combatants in arctic environments.
  • Mordia is unique in being classified as both Death World and Hive World. Its generally not as bad as most examples, the only thing they have are violent gangs, the whole planet population being conscripted, regular chaos incursions and half the planet living in perpetual freezing night, while the other half is uninhabitable desert.
  • The Necrontyr homeworld lacked an ozone capable of protecting the Necrontyr from the worst of the radiation emitted by its sun. Radiation sickness, cancer, and brief lifespans plagued the Necrontyr. This led to the birth of a culture obsessed with death, an obsession that lingered even after they achieved immortality of a sort as the robotic Necrons. One major reason the Necrontyr waged war against the Old Ones (and eventually all life) was because they envied the Old Ones' power and immortality and resented them for not sharing their secrets.
  • Double subverted by Cadia, which is (or was) a quite temperate Earthlike world... with a colossal Negative Space Wedgie called the Eye of Terror a distressingly short distance away, which shits out eldritch horrors from the depths of the Warp on a regular basis and is frequently used as an invasion corridor by Black Crusades. Cadia is naturally one of the most highly militarised planets in the Imperium, and one of the few to have a Planetary Defence Force that's the equal of any Imperial Guard force of comparable size.
• Warhammer:
  • The jungles of Lustria are everything nasty about the Amazon heavily exaggerated and with more man-eating dinosaurs and carnivorous plants, with the added benefit of Lizardmen whose Mayincatec culture is fine with human sacrifice.
  • The Dark Elves' homeland of Naggaroth is a shadowy, bleak continent whose native wildlife includes hydras, manticores and cold ones (flesh eating dinosaur-like creatures), and with sparse resources that force its cruel inhabitants to turn to piracy to survive.
  • As of the Storm of Magic, the entire Warhammer has become this due to the huge infusion of raw arcane energy. Now it's anyone's guess whether that forest consists of normal trees or EVIL DEATH-TENTACLE TREES OF HORRIBLE TOXIC DOOM. You don't want to know what some of the other terrain pieces are like.
  • The Northern regions of the Old World in general. The Northern Wastes where the Chaos Hordes reside are a bitterly cold, harsh wasteland full of horribly mutated monsters more than capable of tearing a heavily armed, experienced warrior limb from limb — provided you're not first killed by the local Chaos-worshipping tribes or by Chaos Daemons. Then there's the Troll Country which not only has tons of trolls but predatory animals such as wolves and bears that are thrice larger than regular beasts. This is all in general due to these lands being very close to the mutating influence of Chaos, as the north pole is covered by a gaping hole in reality that leads straight to hell.
• Dungeons & Dragons settings:
  • The Forgotten Realms has one of these in the form of the Underdark, a massive underground realm full of all sorts of things that want to kill you. If it's nasty and it's murderous, it probably lives here — indeed, half the reason Drow are so tough is because they spend half their time fighting some of the nastiest things D&D has to offer, and the other half fighting the other inhabitants of the Underdark.
  • Also native to the Realm is the Island-Continent of Chult. It's a jungle filled with disease, undeads, dinosaurs, and undead dinosaurs.
  • Eberron has a lot. First there's Khyber, its underdark stand-in. Then there are certain planes of existence (Xoriat, the plane of madness, Shavarrath the Battlefield, Mabar, the plane of death, etc...) and some evocatively named regions of the mortal world: the Shadow Marshes, the Mournland, Frostfell, the jungle continent of Xen'drik and the Demon Wastes.
  • Dark Sun's Athas, a world rendered barren by overuse of magic, which in D&D 2nd Ed. has you starting at level 3 so you weren't killed the first time you stepped outside. As Yamara put it—
    Our scans show that Hard Fun has only about five weeks left.
    Before its biosphere collapses?
    No, before its entire planetary mass is eaten by inhabitants.
  • In basic D&D cosmology, there's the various Elemental, Quasi-Elemental, Para-Elemental and Energy Planes. Most blatantly, there's the Negative Energy plane, which starts draining your life energy the minute you step in. Then there's the Positive Energy plane, which fills you with so much life energy you soon explode. The elemental plane of Fire is entirely made of fire and the Elemental Plane of Earth is solid earth, with only a very few habitable air pockets. This trope is actually part of the reason why the controversial 4th edition cosmology got rid of the old Elemental Planes setup^note The resulting Planes were absurdly lethal and, even if you could survive there, tended to be boring, since they consisted of nothing but their specific element in all directions, with some token aspects of other elements mixed in. and instead created the Feywild and Shadowfell and the Elemental Chaos... which aren't much less lethal. The Feywild is a place where even the darkest fairy tales come to life and hideously powerful, evil fey, like hags and fomorians, run rampant. The Shadowfell is the land of the dead, meaning it's crawling with undead monsters, can literally steal the emotions from anyone who lives there too long, is full of things like patches of pure entropy, and even the non-undead inhabitants tend to be insane, evil or both. The Elemental Chaos, meanwhile, is an incredibly bizarre, chaotic environment, home to things like floating islands of razor-sharp metal, seas of liquid flame or ice, and storms of pure chaotic energy, all of it swarming with beings of living elemental energy or matter that do not like having squishy flesh creatures running around their homes.^note It says something when one of the safest races to deal with in the Elemental Chaos are the efreeti, a race of incredibly arrogant fiery genies who want to enslave all other races.
  • The Lower Planes. Besides the infestation of devils, demons, and other nasty things, 3.5 makes them quite literal death worlds. In several senses. The Abyss' colloquial description is "too horrible for conventional wisdom to comprehend" (one of the random things you can encounter on its infinite layers is an ocean of insects, for example), and the Nine Hells of Baator are all actively trying to kill you in some way shape or form:
    Avernus: Giant fireballs from the sky. Dodge them and you just have to avoid the endless Blood War campaigns that'd love to have some cannon fodder.
    Dis: Superheated environment meets government that makes 1984 look like happy flower hippies.
    Minauros: Acid swamp perpetually absorbing the structures built on it, largely a wilderness in which giant things lurk which the devils are afraid of.
    Phlegethos: Fire-dominant environment. The landscape is made of volcanoes and magma. The entire landscape.
    Stygia: Cold-dominant environment. The entire landscape is glaciers and stop-your-heart-in-seconds water. That also rips out your memories.
    Malbolge: Before Glasya, a land made entirely of hills suffering perpetual landslides from mountain-sized boulders. Now, the entire landscape is alive, and guess what it wants to do to you?
    Maladomini: A morass of sludge and filth that makes anyone who visits lose all motivation. And the air is acidic.
    Cania: Major cold-dominant. Breathing kills you, or you freeze to death first.
    Nessus: One big flat plane, with some canyons. You have nowhere to hide from all the forces of the heart of Hell. No, the canyons are worse.
  • As of fourth edition, Baator is now a planet◊. The one thing that won't kill you? Falling from the upper atmosphere, which is where most people who come here arrive. Why? Because the place isn't merciful enough to kill you that quickly.
  • In 1st and 2nd Ed and Planescape, there's still the various elemental planes (such as Fire, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin) along with deadly variants such as Vacuum, Ooze, Dust and Ash, as well as the seven lower planes. The settings were at least 2/3s Death World and 3/2 Crapsack World.
  • In Planescape, no layer of the Abyss was considered "safe". However, the Fraternity of Order tried to catalogue the layers, and if they labeled one of them "interdicted", it meant "avoid at all costs if you value your life". Layers that got this label tend to have environmental hazards that are lethal to humans, and the descriptions of each such layer often come from the sole survivor of the expedition team that discovered it.
  • Of the domains of Ravenloft, Necropolis is the most extreme Death World, draining the lifeforce from any living creature. Bluetspur, Saragoss, Timor, the Wildlands and Keening are likewise hostile to human life, and the Shadow Rift can make you vanish from existence if you enter it the wrong way. The Mists themselves can be a Death World too, depending on what you encounter there.
  • Limbo, the dimension of utter chaos. While most of it is just boiling "nothing specific" that only takes form when subjected to conscious will, there is a large island of stable land floating there too. It is a jungle and an extremely deadly one — since chaos-infused creatures acquire Healing Factor by default, any predator living there has to be all the more deadly. And the constant mutation gives evolution more chances to get the "ultimate predator" right than seems believable. Not that the local plants are any better...
  • And, putting all the rest of the examples to pitiful shame, you have the Far Realm. Try to imagine a place where Lovecraft's monsters would not only originate from, but would be the most basic form of life. Now remove everything even remotely resembling the laws of physics, in any possible way. Now make it a billion times worse than that. You're not there yet, but you're starting to get the basic concept.
  • For that matter, your average D&D world, including nearly all settings published to date is a horrible death world, crawling with extremely dangerous creatures even at the bottom of its ecosystem (things like three meter-long centipedes that spit acid are treated with as much seriousness as we treat something like raccoons), with sapient kaiju, physical gods, evil uberwizards, reality-warping artifacts and other apocalyptic threats pretty much at every corner. The places described above are notable for giving pause even to superhuman heroes who keep "normal" D&D worlds anywhere near habitable for normal humanoids.
• ‘’Infinity’’: The planet Paradiso is a jungle planet so hostile and brutal it has been dubbed “the Meat Grinder”.
• Pathfinder's setting details all the worlds in its solar system, each with their own hazards, but some are more hostile than others.
  • Golarion, the default world, somehow manages to be the worst of the lot despite being an Earth analogue. Monsters are everywhere, from spiders the size of horses and flying undead heads to titanic dragons and mind-dominating worms. Politically, most of the outright good nations are in decline while empires of devil worshipers and necrocratic monsters vie for power. And on top of all of that, the planet itself is a prison for a god of destruction more powerful than any single deity in existence, a god who occasionally manages to find chinks in his cell to loose monstrous spawn on the world to slaughter all they can.
  • Eox is a world of the dead after a superweapon tore it open to the core. The atmosphere was ripped away as radiation and sorcerous energies ravaged the surface. The native race transformed themselves into undead in an attempt to weather the cataclysm, while every other lifeform either died out or was warped into something new and horrible.
  • Apostae seems like a barren world without an atmosphere until you find the gigantic hatches set into the ground. Managing to enter them reveals a network of tunnels absolutely filling the planet, as well as clues that the planet is actually a giant ship. Unfortunately, the tunnels are filled with malformed creatures resulting from malfunctioning cloning banks, ranging from vaguely curious to murderously hostile.
  • Aucturn is alive. Want more details? You don't, but here you go. The entire atmosphere is a noxious mix of toxins that causes hallucinations, while simultaneously making it nearly impossible to see more than a few feet. Notable locations include the just-as-squicky-as-it-sounds Loving Place, a mountain that is actually the gestating child of the planet itself, and a titanic pyramid that houses a cult to the gods of the Dark Tapestry. The planet is inhabited only by its native monsters, eldritch beasts drawn to its power, and crazed cultists. The planet is hypothesized to be the egg of an Outer God, and worst of all? It's getting closer to Golarion.
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • Phyrexia is a techno-organic hell, complete with nine spheres, each with its own charmingly bloodthirsty hazards. The Other Wiki has a pretty detailed description.
  • New Phyrexia may not be mono-black like old Phyrexia, but that just means it now has five different flavors of horrible death. If you're lucky, you'll be killed by something horrible in short order. If you're not, you're likely to get captured by the Phyrexians themselves, Strapped to an Operating Table, and have all sorts of nightmarish, painful procedures done on you as you're transformed into a new Phyrexian.
  • Grixis and Jund, from Shards of Alara. Grixis is similar to Old Phyrexia: cut off from green and white mana, the sources of life, it's a dying world infested with armies of the living dead, which fight furiously over the limited (and dwindling) supplies of life force, and even that apparently tastes like stale water or air. Jund is a world cut off from blue and white mana, the sources of order, and is a wild, volcanically active jungle filled with canyons, with dragons and similar beasties on the top of the food chain, and everything trying to kill you on the way up or down. On the bright side, the life magic is strong enough and the food chain is so horrifyingly efficient that there are no undead.
    • Naya, the green-centred shard, also qualifies. At first glance it may seem less threatening than Grixis or Jund, assuming your first glance happened to miss the 50 foot tall monsters walking around the place. Fortunately, they're prone to missing you, too — just don't get stepped on. And don't offend the natives, who worship them. And also watch out for the plants, who have to fend off the herbivorous behemoths. And keep an eye out for the regular carnivores. And...
  • The plane Zendikar is this. Zendikar is a world where D&D-style adventuring isn't the path to wealth and glory, but survival. Full of ancient ruins filled with booby traps, with variable gravity, a land that is itself alive and cranky, and a chaotic force called the Roil ripping through and randomizing the landscape... well, let's put it this way — the largest center of civilization on the whole plane is a city of vampires.
    "Granted, the world of Zendikar itself has done its best to kill you. A geopede bit clean through your leather climbing harness two miles up a sheer face of Mount Valakut, plunging you into a ravine — which fortunately bore water, but unfortunately also bore some rapids-loving breed of piranha. The same second you managed to get your hands on one of those strange stone hedrons in Turntimber, you crashed headlong into a crude earthen pit, facing a baloth who looked like it had just heard the dinner bell. You had almost arrived at the misty Jwar Isle, with your maps and guides intact, when the sea decided to take your journey personally, coalescing into an enormous, briny maw and swallowing your galleon whole, washing away all of your cargo and most of your resolve...you've seen more than your fair share of trail guides perish under rolling balls of lava, snatched up by hungry-tentacled gomazoa, or shriveled up skin-to-bone by a fierce case of mire blight, but that's the open trail for you."
    • And then the Eldrazi returned. Which isn't necessarily a catastrophe, as long as you've lived a fulfilling and complete life without regrets. It turns out that Zendikar is even a Death World for the Eldrazi, with the entire plane actively fighting against them and eventually winning.
  • The plane of Rath, an artificial plane created by Yawgmoth (yes, that's the same guy who runs Phyrexia) as a forward base for attacking the plane of Dominaria. The entire plane is made of "flowstone", a semi-intelligent rocklike material that can be commanded to take any shape or form. It contains such lovely locations as the Death Pits of Rath, the Furnace of Rath, and the City of Traitors. It is also (probably) the original home of the slivers, a species of vicious, predatory, vaguely insectoid creatures with a hive mind that not only allows them to share thoughts, but also physical traits. Any sliver born with a new mutation quickly passes that trait onto the rest of the hive, and this rapid adaptability makes them a deadly menace to most other forms of life. When the invasion came, the plane of Rath "overlaid" itself on the central plane of Dominaria, ceasing to be a distinct plane and unleashing its myriad horrors on Dominaria. (The stronghold, however, overlaid on a volcano; the slivers, in the bowels of the fortress, were cooked alive. As it turned out, though, extinction only delayed their threat.)
  • Dominaria itself spent some time as a Death World during the Time Spiral block. The multiple disasters and near-apocalypses the plane had experienced (including, among other things, the Rathi overlay) had destabilized the fabric of reality itself in this plane. Numerous "rifts" appeared, creating highly unpredictable magical phenomena, bringing in strange creatures from other times (and even other timelines), and draining mana from the plane, ultimately threatening to destroy it — and, since Dominaria is the central plane of the Multiverse, all other planes as well.
  • Things really went to pot for humanity in Innistrad — a plane that embodies Hammer Horror — when their guardian angel Avacyn went missing. The werewolves, vampires, demons, zombies, and other supernatural nasties pushed humans to the brink of extinction. Things got better once Avacyn returned. As in humans actually have a fighting chance of not going extinct in a generation or two. Then it got worse when Avacyn decided humans needed to die. Then it got even worse after Avacyn died, paving the way for Emrakul, the last and strongest of the Eldrazi Titans. Emrakul promptly got started on turning Innistrad's entire population into Mix-and-Match Critters by forcibly merging them with whatever happened to be near them. This essentially turned Innistrad into a Fate Worse than Death World. Fortunately, Emrakul was eventually sealed into the moon. Unfortunately, this was only possible because she let herself be sealed
  • Sarpadia from the Fallen Empires set became a Death Continent for anything that wasn't a Thrull or a Thallid after those two races turned against their masters and conquered the whole damn continent. Even the Phyrexians couldn't handle the place. They fled the continent after the Thrulls curbstomped them and dreaded the possibility of Thrulls somehow invading the greater Multiverse.
  • Amonkhet. From the first time we see it in the lore, the entire plane is a massive desert full of ravenous beasts, zombies, and ravenous zombie beasts because of the plane's unique property of raising anyone dead in the deserts as zombies. Then we find out that there's only one city left in the entire plane that is protected from the horrors of the deserts. And the people in town are more interested in getting themselves killed for the glory of their God Pharaoh (Nicol Bolas, by the way) than surviving in the last bastion of civilization in the plane. Then said God Pharaoh shows up, rips apart the city's protections, kills (directly or not) all but one of the actual gods who protect the city after harvesting the dead populace as zombie armies. Essentially what is left in Amonkhet now is massive expanse of deserts traversed by what essentially is a group of nomads.
• Banshee, the planet where most of the action is in Deadlands: Lost Colony, is a place where evolution got dialed to 11 a long time ago; even the tamest places on Banshee occasionally have to deal with a humongous lizard-like creature called a "Rex" by the locals. There are worse places. Banshee doesn't like it that way, either.
• Legend of the Five Rings gives us the Shadowlands, which are a bit of Hell on Earth... literally. Not only is it home to such jovial creatures as tribes of murderous goblins, gigantic man-eating Oni (i.e. demons), and not only is the landscape full of every devious trap regular Nature can devise (tar pits, deserts, poisoned rivers...), but the geography itself changes dynamically so that the traveller will get hopelessly lost. Oh, and the longer you stay there, the more you'll catch the Taint, an uncurable and disfiguring disease that eventually turns you into a zombie or Oni. All in all, not a very tourist-friendly place.
• This trope is partially averted in the Star*Drive campaign setting. Though there are a number of death worlds throughout known space, human technology is generally capable of overcoming the worst effects. For instance, one former death world is now the capital planet of a major stellar nation.
• Niflheim, the moon of the planet Mjolnir in Traveller. It is covered by a vast slimy blanket of creatures that are either microbes or nanobots left by Precursors. No one is sure as no probe has even lasted long enough to say; every one gets devoured in a few hours. Not only that, observers aren't even sure the whatevers will be polite enough not to leave the world.
  • The detailed world and creature generation rules make it very easy to make your very own Death World, with all kinds of possibilities.
• Even the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game has this, in the form of the Field Spell card, "Venom Swamp," which slowly kills everything except the native Venom monsters. There's also "Zombie World," (a world where everything is a zombie!)
• The tabletop miniature game War Zone has a supplement describing the flora and fauna of the colonized Venus as basically consisting of giant carnivorous plants, dinosaur-like lizards, deadly bacteria infesting the waterways and quicksand pits every inch you dare to tread. And that doesn't even include the Dark Legion's nightmarish troops lurking in the jungles.
• Earth itself in Eclipse Phase, which could be loosely described as a burned-out, ecologically wasted hell zone occupied almost exclusively by carnivorous nanobots, death traps, Exsurgent strains, and killing machines that exist solely to rip off heads and upload the ego contained therein for unknown reasons. A few others have been found through the Pandora gates, not counting the many with unbreatheable atmospheres they include:
  • Droplet: Has enough six-meter alien crabs that the colonists carry weapons at all times.
  • Echo IV: Known for its aggressive megafauna.
  • Nott: Frozen ice ball, in addition there is something out there killing people, possibly living possibly not.
  • Solemn: has a bacteria that eats metal, major problem considering how many transhumans are partially or fully synthetic.
  • Tanaka: inhabited by ambulatory pseudo-fungi that attack anyone who comes through the gate.
• Strike Legion features the possibility of this trope with planets created for missions, with the options leaving it only limited by the player's imagination.
• Dragonstar has Arangorn, homeworld of the red dragons (and therefore one of the most important worlds in the setting) and a tectonically active hellscape way too hot to support most lifeforms even briefly.
• Rocket Age: Of the terrestrial planets, Venus and Io stand out. Venus is a hot jungle planet full of dinosaurs and giant insects. Only the highlands are accessible; The valleys are full of fog so thick a diving bell is needed to penetrate them. Io is a blasted wasteland full of mutagens, radiation and disease. The gas giants are even worse but thankfully less frequented by humans.
• Star Realms: One of the cards is called this. It certainly looks the part — a scarred world breaking up. And it is the base of hostile aliens.
• Godforsaken: Korak-Mar is by far the most hostile of the Godforsaken Lands. Its white dwarf sun gives off little light, but bathes the planet in radiation that sickens and harms human visitors. It is washed by acid rains that eat away at cloth, leather and flesh, its geological instability fills it with active volcanoes and vents of boiling water, and for good measure it is home to seemingly endless swarms of biting insects.

Theatre

• Les Luthiers: in Añoralgias, a nostalgic zamba about the composer's hometown. The final verses translate to "Hungry wolves howl in anguish while they're bitten by fierce mosquitos, you can't sleep from the cries of thousands of vultures that blacken the sky, there's always an occasional earthquake, and at dusk it rains meteorites". And that's not taking into account stuff like the yearly 10-month droughts (which are interrupted by catastrophic floods), unbearable heat, and the near-constant eruptions of the local volcano.

Web Animation

• 50 Ways to Die in Minecraft: In the Minecraft world where this series is set, almost anything can kill players. Passive mobs have caused deaths, deserts will frequently hide sand-covered ravines to drop players to their demise, denying the existence of something will make it appear and attack, and other people frequently kill over slights.
• RWBY: Outside of four heavily protected Kingdoms and a number of smaller locations blessed with strong natural barriers, Remnant is a world where Humans and Faunus struggle to survive against the dominance of the Creatures of Grimm. As monstrous beings that are attracted to negative emotion, Grimm appear to be consumed by the need to destroy people and their creations. Trained by elite Academies, only Huntsmen possess the combat skills, enhanced Aura and trained Semblances to fight back, so it's their job to protect humanity and Faunus from the Grimm. If people can't defend themselves, they hire those that can, and all transport — from ocean ships to airships — are armed with guns. Even those who survive the Grimm will have bandits to contend with, whose raids inevitably create heightened spikes of negativty that attract even more Grimm.
• In Super Mario Bros. Z, Sonic's home of Mobius becomes one after Mecha Sonic plunges the Death Egg into the planet. The impact causes the planet's atmosphere to be shrouded in thick black clouds, where Mecha Sonic goes on a genocidal rampage.

Webcomics

• Beyond the End: The Deadwoods are a "zone" within Purgatory, or rather the lack of one. Everything within them has died, including the plants. The only things that live within the Deadwoods are the Shrouds, creatures that feed on souls and memories. They use mimicry from people's memories to lure them in and kill them. Anyone who has wandered into the Deadwoods when the zones start to shift is likely to be killed as a zone will fill the empty slot.
• Drive (Dave Kellett): Astheet, the Rhynn homeworld, is populated by a great variety of predators, and the Rhynn themselves are firmly at the bottom of the food chain. They live in Treetop Towns to avoid the worst of it, but are still vulnerable to flying and climbing hunters, and especially to skyshrouds — floating, transparent, odorless jellyfish-like creatures, that float through the skies and send questing tentacles through trees, cover and houses to find their prey. The Rhynn live in a constant state of alert, listening for the screams of lookouts to warn them before deadly feelers come through their windows to snatch them.
  Skitter: Well. Home sounds great.
  Genn: Congratulations! We're not there!
• Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger: Near the galactic core lies the homeworld of the Kvrk-Chrk. In addition to having extremes of temperature, gravity, pressure, radioactivity, etc. that would be immediately lethal for most other lifeforms, it has a biosphere so aggressive that the natives have to eat their food still alive and kicking in order to ingest it before necrotic parasites do. Then there are the Kvrk-Chrk themselves, who consider awake and screaming a FLAVOR, have carapaces that would put a tank to shame, and can rip any other species to shreds effortlessly. The aforementioned extremes on their planet makes them essentially immune to all but the most extreme forms of weaponry (and even the most extreme might only annoy them briefly). Among their other quaint customs is, when visiting a neighbor, ripping off one of their own limbs to offer as a snack. They also consider all other intelligent lifeforms "chatty food". They once declared war by taking a defenseless colony ship and brutally butchering the crew, then broadcasting recordings of the slaughter on all channels, promising that this would be the fate of every other species in the galaxy. The only reason they didn't wipe out the competing empires is because they found out the hard way that being unparalleled engines of annihilation on the ground doesn't help too well when the guys you're fighting against can annihilate entire systems with a single shot from a stellar lance several lightyears away.
• Almost entire Earth turned into Death World in Stand Still, Stay Silent. Lands that were not Cleansed are full of trolls, beasts and giants. Seas are full of transformed whales, aptly called leviathans. For somebody not immune contact with any of those means transforming into a troll, and all monsters attack humans on sight. Moreover, after 90 years of isolation, nobody from the Known World know what's really out there.
• Although it practically qualifies as a literature example, "A Christmas Eve in the Future" has a Shell Shocked Spess Mehren visit a brothel, and the prostitute he hires asks him "What's up?" He proceeds to tell her a confessional story of his experiences in a psychic Death World which will Mind Rape you in your sleep. Enjoy!
• Homestuck:
  • Alternia, the home planet of the troll race. This is a world whose inhabitants are nocturnal because zombies wander around during the day and the sun is so bright that it will permanently blind anyone outside during the day. This is a world where the fauna are so vicious, 13-year-old children are expected to be combat-capable. This is a world where the only significantly large body of water is inhabited by a very large thing that must constantly be sacrificed to to prevent it from using its psychic powers on the whole populace. This is a world that serves as the training ground for a Proud Warrior Race that practices The Spartan Way. Thankfully, the protagonists from Alternia are sufficiently badass.
    • Let's elaborate a bit, shall we? At daytime, the sun is scorching enough to kill any troll except for rainbow drinkers (who are extremely rare, by the way). At night, you are at constant risk of attack from lethal fauna and flora, seadwellers, bandits, pirates, trigger-happy FLARPers, eldritch horrors lurking in the sea, and, if you are a mutant or cripple, Imperial Drones, Subjugglators and Legislacerators. And that's not to mention trollish society, which is ruled by a gleefully murderous, sociopathic Empress, and a cabal of monstrous, psychotic juggalos who will kill you if you're not funny enough and who worship Lord English . Welp.
  • And then there's Eridan's planet, which is even worse. Between all of his consorts going on a homicidal frenzy, and Eridan shooting anything that moves, even the most hardened badass trolls were afraid to set foot on the Land of Wrath and Angels for more than a few moments.
  • Also to note is Post-Reckoning Earth. After The Reckoning, an event that involved the entire planet getting thoroughly showered in meteors, including ones several times the size of the one that caused the Cretaceous extinction, as well as a World-Wrecking Wave of First Guardian power, our planet has been rendered a schorched wasteland only inhabited by a few Exiles barely scraping by. Oh, and Earth is now a Single-Biome Planet, because the oceans evaporated.
  • Then there's Post-Scratch Earth. It starts out pretty much like "our" Earth, then the troll Empress invades the planet in secret, and starts corrupting the populace through Subliminal Seduction. Then she publicly reveals herself, gets the Insane Clown Posse put in place as Dual Presidents of the United States, whose actions then cause the deaths of 5 billion people worldwide. Then the Empress starts to experiment on the remaining population, trying to bring back the now-extinct troll race. This results in natural reproduction being banned and replaced with an artificial way, the populace's biology being radically altered, robotized versions of the aforementioned Imperial Drones upkeeping an iron-fisted Police State (the originals were Organic Technology), and an attempt to institutionalize Raised by Wolves (It Makes Sense in Context). The result is a massive biological catastrophe as both the locals and the planet's biosphere fails to adapt, after which the Empress says "fuck it" and floods the entire planet. Sweet Troll Jegus.
• Invoked and/or Downplayed in TwoKinds. One character's homeland is an (presumably volcanic) island chain so brimming with toxins that his people are immune to most known poisons and diseases.
• In The Silver Eye, the continent is split down the middle by the Deadlands, which are Exactly What It Says on the Tin. They are inhabited by dragons known as weavers that kill all who choose to enter (or who are thrown into them as an execution, as they do in the eastern half of the continent.) The surrounding ocean is inhabited by sea-dwelling weavers who destroy any ships that sail past the continental shelf, and is known as the Deadwaters.
• The Girl Genius version of Europa. There's a reason anything outside of a town is referred to simply as "Wastelands." Wild monsters and abandoned experiments roam the countryside, with massive clanks still seeking to follow the orders of long-dead empires. Mad science has run rampant for so long that Baron Wulfenbach requires his officers carry "phenomenon logs" to document any time the laws of physics seem to have broken. And that's all not counting the Sparks who are still alive, sending new creations of mad science at each other for no other reason than they can.
• The habitat of Eina-Afa in Schlock Mercenary could be considered this to some degree — a large dragon-like creature gets eaten by a whale, of all things, but the enormous technological advantage and available firepower of the visitors makes it a non-issue. Until the local Warden AI takes notice.
• Freefall: Earth, by Sam Starfall's standards. Given his people have not experienced any extinction events, they are particularly simple lifeforms and as such can be easily digested even by creatures not normally considered predators. Sam himself is terrified of horses, cows and ducks, and only vaguely knows that there are more frightening animals. Earlier, he commented ants would be a greater apocalyptic threat to his race than nukes.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: Earth, for Kryptonians. They sent overpowered babies to worlds in order to take over those worlds, but later they had a culture shift. In each and every world they went to (trying to atone by taking their children back), their descendants had all been tyrants of that world... except Earth. Earth have so many supervillians that Superman was just too busy keeping Earth intact.
• In Yokoka's Quest, Yokoka and Mao's original home had toxic air, which has given them an immunity to poison through long exposure.
• Aurora (2019): The caverns beneath the surface are full of winding paths and tunnels, some of which are flooded, full of magma or molten metal, or saturated with poisonous air. The habitable parts are full of monsters and even if you manage to avoid them then the energy surrounding the place will eventually corrupt you and turn you into one of them.

Web Original

• Tech Infantry has both Fieras VI, a fairly unpleasant world in terms of climate, terrain, and biosphere. But then there's the aptly-named Soul Eaters, alien life forms that possess humans, grant them Body Horror-based supernatural powers, and eventually totally take over their minds and convert them into new Soul Eaters. On top of that, the planet has a screwy magnetic field that interferes with electronics, especially targeting systems, so you can't even nuke the planet from orbit. There's also the prison planet in the R45 system, whose landmasses are mostly swamps overrun with poisonous plants, nasty predators, carnivorous plants, and stranded alien bugs driven insane by the planet's natural anti-magic field. A planet that drives BUGS insane is not a nice place to serve out a life sentence, however brief that may be.
• The Orion's Arm Hazard Scale has four full levels of this. 7) Planetary warzone; 8) Everything Trying to Kill You; 9) Unavoidable death in ~10 seconds; 10) Unavoidable death within nanoseconds.
• In Felarya (NSFW), everything is trying to eat you, kill you, or both. Not even leaving the dimension is safe, as some creatures can attack you while in Subspace or Hyperspace. The ones on the low end of the world's hazard scale aren't safe, they just need to be near you to kill you as opposed to, say, creating a wind tunnel to suck you up from over a hundred yards away. Even the monsters themselves are subject to Always a Bigger Fish and are defenceless against bigger monsters.
• Little Lenny Penguin And The Great Red Flood's land of the eldritches, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, a land chock full of Eldritch Abominations. As an added perk, they can turn you into one of them. (And the experience is quite unpleasant.)
• The native life of Green Antarctica is just plain nasty. There are the Gugs, murderous, raping gorillas, there are ants that shoot fire, giant platypus that have evolved convergently similar to crocodilians, a kind of small mammal who's bite sends humans into comas, and then eats them alive, and countless other disturbing animals.
• Planetcopia averts this hard. Every world shown has some form of life, and all but 1 have areas where humans could live.
• Spec World: The setting is an alternate Earth.
  • Giant killer dinosaurs still live. There are many dinosaurs that are almost overly dangerous with Names to Run Away from Really Fast like the Ninja (black raptor that often rips peoples' heads off for no reason), the imperial sabre Tyrant (tyrannosaur with sabre-teeth), or the black beast (Africa's largest and meanest predator).
  • There are a lot of dangerous not-dinosaurs like the Terrorsaurs (no points for whoever guesses those evolved from), the large variety of crocodilians (cruncher-crocs, croclions, croc-tigers, jagators, cuttercrocs etc.), the mosasaurs (carnivorous aquatic-lizards such as the leviathans, the mosarks and the lizardwhales), ultravipers or featherboas (both incredibly venomous large snakes), or gobblers (it's version of terror birds) that really want to kill people.
  • Even the soft and fuzzy mammals of the Mesozoic have been abandoned for vicious and dangerous new ones such as the baskerville (glowing canine-like member of the possum-hounds), Digga-dumdums (large burrowing animals that can use their claws to rip up the face of even tyrannosaurs), the powerpus (large bulky platypus with fangs), Moby Duck (multi-ton marine platypus relative), the unrats (primitive mammals with venom so potent not even the hungriest gobbler would eat them), or the tree foxes (primates with sharp fangs and retractable-claws).
• Earth, if the SCP Foundation is to be believed. According to the Foundation, Earth is filled with anomalies: people, other living things, objects (inanimate and otherwise), places, even concepts, which violate our understanding of the laws of the universe. Many of these are dangerous to humans, with more than a few capable of wiping out all humans if left unchecked. Fortunately, the Foundation is around to keep them contained and unable to harm humanity — except they haven't found all of them yet (and, since new anomalies keep appearing, it's unlikely they ever will) and many anomalies are impossible to contain.
• Ktrit in Junction Point. Its surface gravity is five times that of Earth, and it's a tidally locked planet, meaning that one side is wracked by a perpetual storm that often affects the other depending on the season. Temperatures run from tropical to water-boiling.
• Excerpt of the Journal of Archibald Hannity from The Wanderer's Library.
• The Sporewiki Fiction Universe has quite a few: Nova Thei, the Zi-Jittoram Homeworld, Mahanaya, Vollix, Macronormus and Forda are the kind of planets where the local lifeforms easily have the means to crush you and swallow you up. Paclernos and Mahanaya are planets where the planet itself may as well be a death wish (Mahanaya has been twisted by relics of the Ayrai'Shikua and Paclernos' environemnt is toxic to anything that's mostly water and doesn't have a natural pH of 2). Aside from Macronormus and Nova Thei all of them happen to be the homeworlds of the most fearsome Proud Warrior Race Guy species in the First Gigaquadrant. Then we have Occasus, an abandoned City Planet that is primarily used as the site for the final exam for the Agency of the Kicath Empire; essentially The Hunger Games only using 14,000 3-3/4 tall cyborg'd up reptillian supersoldiers, no publicity and passing involves surviving for an entire year. To put its lethality into perspective, city blocks have been known to be destroyed during the exams and almost every qualified agent would rather forget about their time there. Let that sink in...
• Voice in "Second Chance" by Mahu. While there are many other worlds with savage creatures and environments, the homeworld of the Biluan Mind is still the deadliest one in the whole galaxy. Voice is a flat planet without any mountains, hills or rivers, not even any visible infrastructure. All its surface is covered by a strange, biological skin from which attack drones spawn to kill and devour invaders, adding their biomass to that of the planet. And it is always hungry for more.
• Starsnatcher: Good luck surviving in any habitat infested by the Plague if you don't have a singularity stone or someone wielding one with you. The Plague is highly infective and almost always results in Body Horror. Those infected by it turn into highly durable zombies who kill anything on sight, including each other. It is later revealed that the Plague destroyed a galaxy-spanning alien civilization, infecting even their infrastructure, and thus rendered large parts of the galaxy uninhabitable.
• An untitled short story recounts how one particular alien species developed a ravenous insect designed to destroy ecosystems and commonly used it to extort other alien species by threatening to release them on their home planets. When they come to Earth, they transmit the data on their insect to humanity with the intention of intimidating them. The humans, meanwhile, mistake the communication as some form of data exchange and send back a catalogue of every bug and insect living on Earth. Suffice to say, the extorting aliens immediately leave and never come back.
• Staple trope of HFY genre, Earth is more often then not considered a death world.

Web Videos

• The Nostalgia Critic's version of General Zod plays up Krypton's canonical deathworldiness. Apparently, apart from anything else, the acid rain melts heads. And the beverage of choice is uranium slurry.

Western Animation

• Amphibia: The titular world is absolutely teeming with all sorts of monstrous creatures that regularly prey on its amphibious inhabitants. Even the plants want to eat them. It's so bad that everyone is universally inured to the prospect of suddenly dying one day, even babies like Polly. This is played for all of the Black Comedy it is worth.
• The planet Anur Vladias in Ben 10 was once home to a race of vampire-like aliens known as the Vladats until their war with the Transylians rendered it uninhabitable. Not only is the planet now completely unable to support life, it actively drains it from any living thing. Not even the Celestialsapiens (Alien X) are able to survive there, despite being for all intents and purposes Physical Gods capable of outliving and recreating the universe itself.
• Buzz Lightyear of Star Command:
  • The planet Karn. It's a nature preserve and Single-Biome Planet — the biome in question is a vicious jungle in which everything can and will eat you.
  • The original movie-length pilot episode opened on an unnamed planetoid. The atmosphere isn't thick enough for humans to breathe. It's also infested with Crater Vipers.
• The Realm in the old Dungeons & Dragons (1983) TV series. Not EVERYTHING was trying to kill the heroes, but most things were, including at least two beings operating on the deity level (one would attack them incidentally, the other was actively seeking to harm them). Most people with significant power were hostile or so totally preoccupied with their own problems that they couldn't help.
• In one episode of Fantastic Four: The Animated Series, Terrax tricked Galactus into devouring a world so awful that it poisoned Galactus.
• Parodied in Futurama; there's a sector of inhabited space called the "Death Zone", but it's just a name, like the Forbidden Zone, or the Zone of No Return. All the zones have names like that in the Galaxy of Terror.
• Invader Zim:
  • One of the Irken leaders makes an offhand reference to such a place:
    Almighty Purple: Zim again. We really should have sent him on a mission to a sun, or a planet of broken glass.
    Almighty Red: Or one of those exploding head planets.
  • There's also Hobo 13, the military training planet. It is a barren wasteland inhabited by deadly predators and covered by all sorts of other hazards. The Tallest send Zim there to get rid of him and immediately open a betting pool on how long he will survive.
• Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: The surface is practically a death trap. Even those who lived on the surface (Mute and surface human) have to stay on their toes.
• In The Legend of Korra, during the time before the Avatar Cycle, the whole world was shown to be like this, except for the lion turtle cities. The lion turtles had to temporarily grant humans the power of the elements whenever they ventured outside, and even with that they often didn't return.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
  • In "The Cutie Remark - Part 2", the Season 5 finale, the various Bad Futures triggered by Starlight Glimmer's interruption of the Sonic Rainboom see Equestria become this, including conquest by the Crystal Empire or Changelings, The Night That Never Ends courtesy of Nightmare Moon, Discord ruling a World of Chaos with the Princesses as his clowns, and finally a completely lifeless wasteland with no explanation.
  • Even before that, the show is littered with examples of dangerous locations. The series premiere had the characters go into a forest that utterly terrified them, where they encountered two mythical monsters and a collapsing cliff. We later get to see a hydra and dragons on two seperate occasions, which the ponies just run from, a house-sized baby starbear, a race of goblin-like canines who attempt to enslave a main character, a cockatrice that petrifies a heroine and is implied to be fully willing to do so to children, and an Explosive Breeder Extreme Omnivore that literally destroyed the town. This is all in season one. Later seasons sport regular encounters with strange monsters outside civilized borders, establish that the Big Good of the series personally fought and imprisoned four separate villains that the heroes later had to deal with, reveal the existence of a hive of G-rated succubi, and explain their Christmas equivalent is based on the fact that the country was founded when the ponies were driven out of their original home by hate-eating ice spirits causing an eternal winter. Basically, the only reason Equestria isn't a death world now is, quite literally, because of the Power of Friendship.
  • Showing this trope is comparative, it's exaggerated with the Breezies: small fairy-like creatures so small, helpless, and delicate that all it takes to nearly kill them is a leaf caught in the wind. Making matters worse for the poor buggers is they're tasked with flying across Equestria to spread pollen each year: it's really no surprise they'd rather say "pooch the pollen" and just hang out in Fluttershy's cottage.
• The Owl House: The Boiling Isles are described as a "cesspool of despair", and between the boiling rain, despotic tyrant emperor, demons and other monsters who have no problem killing kids, and the Social Darwinist attitude of nearly every resident, they live up to the reputation. Hell, the Isles are built on the bones of a fallen god!
• Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero: Penn Zero's parents get trapped in a place like this. It is literally called The Most Dangerous World Imaginable, so you should have seen it coming.
• The Pirates of Dark Water: The Planet Mir has Middle Ages level of civilization in a few island kingdoms. But everywhere else is filled with vicious pirates and bizarre beasts, with occasional savage tribesmen or fiendish swindlers to boot. And, large areas of the planet are getting eaten away by a substance of pure evil called Dark Water.
• Primal (2019): The setting is a primordial world full of Prehistoric Monsters (both Mesozoic and Cenozoic, ranging from dinosaurs and giant snakes to demonic bats and savage ape-men) where primitive humans (such as the protagonist Spear) face deadly situations on a daily basis.
• Rainbow Brite: Rainbow Land is this before Wisp saves it. Giant monsters are everywhere including the rivers. There are constant earthquakes resulting in rock slides and lava flows. Oh and if you try to get close to the Evil One's castle? Lightning strikes you and turns you into an ice/crystal statue.
• Rick and Morty: As shown in episode "Unmortricken", the part of infinity we're shown outside of the Central Finite Curve is a hellscape of shattered planets, horrifying monsters, and countless people discovering portal technology and the risks of using them.
• Robotomy: Insanus is a grimy brown planet with robot destruction everywhere you look. The planet has frequently been destroyed.
• Scavengers' Reign takes place on the planet Vesta, where nearly all of the native life is predatory and sometimes in unpredictable ways, such as a plant that injects unwary prey with a fatal venom, gestates a clone of its victim, and then has it infiltrate their local community to explode and kill them all with its acidic expulsions, turning them into fertilizer for new plants. Some of the flora and fauna have adapted to prey on humans specifically.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
  • The Rishi moon, home to a Republic listening post, in "Rookies" faces threats from meteor showers and is inhabited by giant man-eating eels living in the cliffs. The staff is told not to go outside the installation for a very good reason.
  • Geonosis is expanded upon in the second season. In addition to sandstorms, Geonosis is also home to brain parasites that can reanimate dead Geonosians in addition to mind-controlling members of other species.
  • Thanks to centuries of senseless warfare, Mandalore has been turned into a barren desert outside of several artificial bio-domes. This also resulted in the Mandalorians temporarily turning into a pacifistic culture (aside from a cult of violent fanatics of the old ways).
  • Lola Sayu from the Citadel arc is a Shattered World that went through an unknown cataclysm yet is still habitable enough to maintain a well-fortified prison. Outside the titular Citadel, there are lots of jagged rocks, strong winds unsuited for jetpacks and sulfur-stenched lava.
  • Umbara is perpetually shrouded in darkness, which can lower visibility. The known fauna on the planet includes giant airborne carrion feeders that aren't above preying on the living and tentacled passive predators that can blend into the scenery (they also happen to be in the same family of animals as the sarlacc and the rathtar). The native sapient species is also one of the most duplicitous and technologically-advanced races in the galaxy, both in utility and military use.
  • Quarzite has a high-pressure atmosphere that would crush most starships upon entering and is only habitable underground. This necessitates the use of a Space Elevator for off-worlders.
  • Lotho Minor is mostly a Landfill Beyond the Stars, but is inhabited by savage cyborg scavengers, giant fire-breathing furnace droids that don't acknowledge the existence of smaller beings and has acid rain. Darth Maul also made residence here after being cut in half in The Phantom Menace, having gone insane and killing (and implicitly eating) almost anyone Morley tries to bring to him.
  • Abafar is an even more remote desert world than Tatooine whose only attractive feature is a reserve of an otherwise rare fuel. The majority of the planet is a featureless expanse called the Void, and due to the atmosphere's unusual light-bending properties, it is impossible to track the sun, for shadows to be cast and for tracks to be left in the sand. This makes it easy to get lost and die of dehydration, which is more likely if you came to the planet by accident. And one of the few settlements on the planet is a Wretched Hive.
• Star Wars Rebels:
  • Aside from the various spires and cliff faces, Shantipole from "Wings of the Master" is mostly survivable on the surface. However, it's a one-way trip for most starship pilots, as electromagnetic storms in the planet's upper atmosphere short out all of the ship's systems upon entry, making landing a case of hoping you crash on top of something flat and not into one of the spires, and there are plenty of ships to find embedded in those spires. This planet was also where the B-Wing prototype was developed, as not only did the planet make it easier for Quarrie to operate under the Empire's radar, he reasoned that if a ship could fly on Shantipole, it could fly anywhere.
  • Bahryn, one of Geonosis' moons, can reach temperatures below freezing, the exact opposite of the world it orbits. One creature that has adapted to the moon's climate is a giant, carnivorous lizard called a bonzami. Oh, and they're immune to blaster fire unless you happen to be lucky enough to shoot them in the mouth.
  • Atollon is a desert world with large coral formations and inhabited by giant, amazingly-durable man-eating spiders that can produce webs strong enough to hold down starships, are very difficult to connect to with the Force and react very strongly to negative emotions such as fear (which is not exactly any easy thing to suppress considering that krykna are giant spiders).
• Third Earth, on ThunderCats, has such charming locales as the Phosphorus Desert (where the sand can burn the flesh from your bones with a mere touch), the Crumbling Cliffs of Vertigo, the Field of Daggers, and the Cave of Time (a deadly place with a curse that causes Rapid Aging to anyone who enters). There's theories it may be humanity's Earth in the far future — if so, no wonder there don't seem to be many humans left. And there's the wildlife, from the black widow shark to earthquake-causing caterpillars. The resident races are interesting, as well: giant stone golems, crab-clawed men, giantors... and those are the low-risk ones. More dangerous ones include giant robots without any real explained origin that do nothing but rampage around. There are a few friendly races around, and they seem to have adapted and toughened themselves pretty well; Tigra commented that the Berbels helped them build the entire Cat's Lair in the time it would have normally taken them to just finish the foundation.
• Transformers:
  • Unicron would be an example of the Genius Loci variant. His outside is mainly devoted to consuming other worlds, and most of his inside is devoted to killing anything that made it in alive with tentacle, spikes, vats of acid, etcetera.
  • There are even some continuities where Cybertron is depicted as being hazardous enough in itself. The IDW comics make a point that their war had caused the planet to become completely uninhabitable for centuries (And when we say "uninhabitable", we're talking for a race of Humongous Mecha). When they finally are able to make a temporary base there, the planet is overrun by monstrous Insecticons that tear apart and devour any Cybertronians they come across.
    • In some continuities, Cybertron's pre-apocalyptic war environment was pretty damn lethal as well. The exact features are never covered in detail and vary between continuities, but include nameless seas of mercury, acid and liquid helium, the Rust Sea (a sea-like area of "unstable planetary matter and molecular flux" that emits corrosive gasses), the Toxic Sludge Swamps, the Acid Wastes (an area so inundated with neutronic fallout that the frequent earthquakes, acid rain storms and other freak weather conditions are the least of your worries), the Devastator Winds (equatorial windstorms so fierce they can rip Cybertronians apart), and the Rust Spot (an area laced with every kind of hazard Cybertronians can imagine; nuclear winds, toxic sludge swamps, a hyper-corrosive hallucinogenic mist, vicious native predators, deranged cannibalistic tribal Cybertronians, etc)
  • There's there's one comic (based on an alternate future to the live-action movies) where Unicron makes Cybertron itself his new body.
  • In Transformers: Prime, Cybertron has officially become inhospitable to Cybertronian life, forcing the Autobots to stay on Earth. And then its untold millions of fallen Cybertronians get animated as cybernetic zombies by Dark Energon. And to further complicate things — it turns out Earth itself is basically Unicron's body. This leads to a complicated issue: Does this make Earth a Death world? It has a highly corrosive atmosphere and is full of dangerous beings, including poisonous plants, ravenous animals and parasitic fungi, plus deadly microbes, and an intelligent species which somehow dominates all of them.

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