Thirsty Desert

"Dying for a drink, Graham?"

Sherif Ali: There is the railway. And that is the desert. From here until we reach the other side, no water but what we carry with us. For the camels, no water at all. If the camels die, we die. And in twenty days they will start to die.
T. E. Lawrence: There's no time to waste, then, is there?

— Lawrence of Arabia

You're in the desert, a parched barren wasteland stretching for miles in every direction, with the occasional Hollywood Mirage gleaming in the distance to provide a false sense of hope. If the maddening heat doesn't drive you into a Mushroom Samba or just kill you, then the freezing air of night, the lack of water, or one of the desert's many hostile inhabitants probably will. Expect Circling Vultures lurking ominously overhead in a sky as barren as the land, with not a single cloud in sight. The sun appears to fill the sky on its own and the camera will point at it just to make sure you know. A shot of the characters marching (or crawling) forward moaning "Water, water..." is a common element, especially in more humorous takes.

Compare Shifting Sand Land, which describes desert levels in video games; overlap is fairly common in cases where the environment itself is structured to be the player's enemy as much as or more than the actual foes. Desert Warfare involves fighting a war in one of these, and all the problems that apply here are now compounded by the presence of enemy soldiers. See also Crossing the Desert and Sea of Sand. The Sinister Southwest may be depicted as this trope as well.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The main setting for Desert Punk, as the name implies, is the "Great Desert of Kanto", set in a distant future after an apocalyptic event. Since water is scarce and precious, thirst and heat are a danger, though desperate bandits and outlaws substitute the fantastic fauna mentioned in the description.
• Doraemon: Nobita's Dorabian Nights has Doraemon and friends being lost in the Arabian desert after barely surviving a shipwreck. Unfortunately, Doraemon lose his Fourth-Dimensional Pocket, so they have to walk leading to Nobita nearly passing out and needing to be carried on Gian's back, but they later gets rescued by Sinbad the Sailor (yes, that Sinbad) and his magic flying genie.
• The Draw of Cambyess opens with the protagonist, a soldier in ancient Assyrian times, trying to cross one such desert which wiped out most of his platoon. In fact he was supposed to be his fellow squadmates' lunch.
• Invoked with the powers of Chotenkun from Hoshin Engi: his spatial paope "Kosajin" (Crinsom Sands Formation) brings the opponent into a Thirsty Desert where he can manipulate the sand and his position, and everything but him slowly dries and crumbles to dust. Yozen only manages to save himself by using his half-demon form to transform into the sand itself and expand untill the paope's limits are broken.
• Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic, being based on Arabian Nights, has massive deserts to cross early on, usually though they're traveled by caravans. Still, Aladdin makes his debut in a desertic ruin infested with bandits, half-dead for the heat and thirst. Other than bandits, the series has sand-dwelling monsters, usually carnivorous plants, venomous birds and tigers and even gigantic spiders.
• The Alabasta arc in One Piece has the Straw Hats venturing in Alabasta, on Sandy Island. A trek made difficult by the heat, fauna and the lack of water, which is a plot point as Sir Crocodile is using a device to keep rainclouds away from the island (both to fuel the ongoing rebellion and to keep people from exploiting his weakness to water).
• The Sand Garden from Toriko is the biggest desert in the Human World, about four times the size of the Sahara Desert. Not only it's gigantic and scorching hot, but is also populated by poisonous cacti and dangerous sand-dwelling beasts (though some of them can be consumed for their meat or blood). This being Toriko, a few areas of the desert are composed of unusual materials as gold dust, diamond, sugar and caviar.
• Again a futuristic example, the setting of Trigun is a gigantic, desertic planet, dangerous to cross both because the scarcity of water, daily heat and occasional dangers as bandits and colossal worms.
• In Yaiba, the group at one point has to cross the "Tottori Sand Dune", Japan's only desert, while on their way to Ganryuujima. Both them and Onimaru's three Oni suffer from the terrible thirst, to the point that when they encounter a Djinn, Gerozaemon and Yaiba waste the first two wishes on fresh water.

Comedy

• The setting of The Longest Joke in the World, and discussed at some length:
  While crawling, if his throat weren't so dry, he'd laugh. He's finally gotten to the hackneyed image of a man lost in the desert - crawling through the sand on his hands and knees.

Comic Books

• Dungeon Twilight: The Always Day area is a desert where, as the name suggest, it's always day. The Great Khan punishes failure by dropping disgraced soldiers there to die of exhaustion, and they are crippled beforehand.
• Lady Mechanika and Winifred find themselves stranded in the middle of the Sahara Desert after their zeppelin crashes in Lady Mechanika: The Tablet of Destinies.
• Tintin: The Crab With the Golden Claws: As befitting Captain Haddock's first appearance as an alcoholic washout, he and Tintin wander through the Sahara. On learning where they are, the captain gets stuck on "The land of thirst! The land of thirst!" for a while.
• The Dayside of the planet Taldain in White Sand is a single continent, most of which is a giant desert. When Khriss and her company attempt to cross it, their guide bails on them with most of their water, leaving them stranded and with little to drink until they find a native, Kenton, who reveals to them that water is actually easy to come by on Dayside - splashing even a little bit of it on the sand brings out water vines, which store a lot of the precious liquid.
• Wonder Woman (1987): Part of what keeps the slaves from fleeing the mining camp on the Sangtee Empire planet, nicknamed Hope's End, is that it appears to be a desert planet, and the slaves are reliant on the brutal slave drivers providing them enough water to live.

Comic Strips

• Numerous The Far Side strips use this setting for gags. A typical example has a guy crawling through the desert and coming across an enormous billboard advertising a brand of canteen: "Lost in the desert? Dying of thirst? Next time bring along a Jones Bros canteen!"

Films — Animation

• Melody Time: In Pecos Bill, Bill and his horse fall into this predicament during their song and come up with a creative solution.
  Pecos lost his way while travelin' through the desert
  It was ninety miles across the burnin' sand
  He knew he'd never reach the border if he didn't get some water
  So he got a stick and dug the Rio Grande

Films — Live-Action

• Following the mutiny in Adventure in Sahara, the legionnaires turn Savatt and the few men remaining loyal to him loose in the Arab-haunted desert with only a fraction of the water and food needed to get back to civilization. Savatt is the only one to survive.
• In Blackthorn, Blackthorn and Eduardo set out across the Uyuni salt flats, hoping to reach the coast where Blackthorn can find a boat to take him home. Halfway across, the posse catches up to them.
• In The Deserter, Captain Kaleb takes The Squad into the desert and forces them to train naked and without water beneath the blazing sun to accustom them to what they will encounter when going up against the Apache. The training is severe, and results in some deaths.
• Most of the plot of 1929 silent film Desert Nights. Steve and Diana, a pair of jewel thieves, rob a diamond mine, kidnap Hugh the mine foreman, and escape into the desert. But it's a thirsty desert and the thieves run out of water and start getting desperate, with Diana in particular offering to give Hugh all the diamonds if he'll lead them to water, then offering herself up as a Sex Slave if only he'll lead them to water.
• In Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two, what makes Arrakis more alien in this adaptations is how the three other worlds in the movies all have abundant amounts of water (Caladan has vast oceans and lust vegetation, Salusa Secundus is hit with heavy rain, Geidi Prime has constant humidity leaking everywhere), Arrakis has none of those things. The planet is very, extremely dry, and water is valued as more precious than gold. People extract water from corpses and slain foes. Spitting in considered respectful due to deliberately sacrificing fluids. And water is treated with reverence above all other things to the Fremen, even the spice.
• In the Clint Eastwood movie The Eiger Sanction, his character gets revenge on an old enemy by driving him out into the desert and abandoning him◊ to die of thirst.
  "Jonathan, you're not going to leave me out here? Oh, Jonathan, for chrissakes, kill me but don't leave me here!"
• Mad Max
  • In Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, Max finds himself trapped in a thirsty desert when he is exiled from Bartertown on the back of a horse with his hands bound and his head covered by a bulky mascot helmet. The horse perishes and is swallowed up in a sinkhole, and Max would've succumbed to the same fate had Savannah Nix not found him.
  • In Mad Max: Fury Road, Immortan Joe maintains his iron grip over the people of the wasteland by enforcing this: he lives in a complex with plentiful purified water, but only ever rations out measly amounts of water to his serfs, not unlike a drug dealer giving out samples of narcotics.
  "Do not, my friends, become addicted to water! It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!"
• A Far Off Place: The trio of teens are able to access water when Xhabbo extracts a root he finds, but that only takes them so far. The kids eventually collapse from thirst and Nonnie starts seeing mirages.
• The former Trope Namer is the Mojave Desert as portrayed in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
• Exploited by Blondie in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly when he abandoned Tuco in the desert. He managed to survive the ordeal and then found Blondie to give him A Taste of Their Own Medicine.
• Death Valley serves as this in the silent classic Greed.
• A thirsty Micky Dolenz beats up an empty Coke machine in the middle of the desert during a memorable scene from The Monkees' movie Head.
• Hidalgo's plot revolves around a race across the desert. At least a few of the racers are forced to put down their horses, and Hopkins and Hildalgo themselves must live off of locusts from time to time.
• The Arabian and Sinai deserts in Lawrence of Arabia. In particular, the desert known as Al-Nefud, which T. E. Lawrence's forces must cross to reach Aqaba in the first half of the film. The dialogue between Sherif Ali and Lawrence about this desert provides the page quote. (They do manage to get everyone through to the other side, but it's close, especially when one guy gets separated from the group — and his camel.)
• Lust in the Dust. Rosie's canteen falls and spills out its contents, causing her to exclaim, "My gin!"
• In Passion in the Desert, Augustin and Venture become separated from their regiment in the Sahara Desert and are unable to find them again. Augustin is enraged to discover that Venture, an artist, used the last of the water to mix paints. Venture eventually becomes desperate enough to drink his paints.
• At the end of Quantum of Solace, Bond leaves Greene stranded in the Atacama Desert with only a can of engine oil. Later, M tells Bond that Greene was found dead in the middle of the desert, shot twice and with engine oil in his stomach.
• In the Australian horror film Razorback (1984), Carl Winters suffers hallucinations from dehydration while staggering through the desert. His ordeal ends when he stumbles in on Sarah Cameron having an outdoor shower.
• A comedic version appears in the Crosby/Hope film Road to Morocco, complete with an unfriendly camel and mirage of Dorothy Lamour.
• In Sands of the Kalahari, a disparate and desperate group of plane crash survivors are thrust into a desolate mountainous desert region somewhere within present-day Namibia. While they locate a source of water in the mountains, they cannot carry enough water with them to cross the seemingly endless sandy desert that surrounds them.
• The Badlands in Six Reasons Why. The Entrepreneur and The Sherpa are not prepared for the hardship of crossing The Badlands and nearly die of thirst, while The Criminal is reduced to drinking his own urine. The only obvious source of water is contaminated with toxic chemicals, but thanks to his years of wandering the wastes, The Nomad knows just where to shoot the ground to secure fresh water.
• Spaceballs:
  Lone Starr: Water! Water!
  Dot Matrix: Oil! Oil!
  Princess Vespa: Room service! Room service!
• Due to its use of single biome planets, Star Wars has multiple planets that fit the bill. Example include Geonosis, Tatooine, Abafar, Seelos, and Jakku.
• Crossed by Moses in The Ten Commandments (1956) after being exiled from Egypt. He's given a little bag of food and a little bag of water. He's half-dead by the time he reaches a well, but fortunately not too far gone to fight off a band of marauders.
• ¡Three Amigos! was filmed in the Sonoran Desert near Tucson, Arizona and contains a thirsty desert crossing scene where each Amigo stops to drink from his canteen. Lucky turns over his canteen to one remaining drop of water. Ned's canteen fills his mouth full on with sand. Dusty drinks from his canteen, splashes some water on his face, and throws the rest aside, while the others watch delirious. Dusty offers them lip balm.
• 3 Godfathers: The three godfathers flee into the desert after they rob a bank. Their ordeal starts bad when their water flask is shot through, gets worse when their first watering hole is staked out by the sheriff's men, and gets a lot worse when their second watering hole turns out to have been accidentally destroyed. Then they have to cross a wide salt flat to get to New Jerusalem. (Unlike most John Ford films, which were shot in Monument Valley, he filmed this one in Death Valley.)
• In Tumbleweed, Jim has to cross the alkali flats, only to discover that the springs on the other side he was counting on have dried up.
• In Walkabout a teenage girl and her little brother are stranded in the Australian outback. They are on the verge of death by dehydration when an Aborigine boy saves them.
• In The Way Back (2010), the Main Characters are crossing the Gobi desert. Two of them die of heat stroke and dehydration.

Gamebooks

• The Fighting Fantasy gamebook Temple of Terror involves journeying through the Desert of Skulls to find the titular temple. You risk losing some of your health due to desert heat if you don't have a magic spell that can create water!
• La Saga du Prêtre Jean: In The Desert of Death, you have to venture forth into the Desert of Gobi, looking for three ancient evils and recover their keys to the city of Agartha. You must get ahold of a camel and a reserve of water before you start, which you slowly deplete in certain paragraphs. If you fail to find all the demons in three days, the sun, endless wasteland and hopelessness drive you mad into a Non-Standard Game Over.

Literature

• Behind the Sandrat Hoax: The Kalahell Desert is devoid of water. Being lost in it is considered a death sentence before the discovery that eating sandrats wards off dehydration.
• City of Bones by Martha Wells: The Waste, created in some supernatural catastrophe that ended The Beforetimes, is an extremely hostile desert. Heatstroke, dehydration, choking dust, deadly ghosts, and venomous animals are all immediate, pressing concerns. Even the City of Charisat on the fringe of the Waste has some of the same hazards to a lesser extent.
• In Robert E. Howard's "The Slithering Sands", Conan the Barbarian knows that the desert will kill him within a day, and strongly considers a Mercy Kill for the girl with him.
• Played with in the Discworld novel The Last Continent: Rincewind may be being driven mad by the heat and the flies in the Disc's counterpart of the Great Australian Desert, but every night, he accidentally falls into a waterhole. The fact he's just about surviving despite zero desert survival skills baffles everyone, even the trickster god who's trying to keep him alive, but is probably down to the Lady.
• Arrakis of the Dune universe is one of the driest deserts in fiction and is home to Sand Worms that can eat large vehicles in one bite. Liet being left to die there without a stillsuit (protective sweat-recycling gear) was particularly brutal.
• Claims the life of Arvid in The Emigrants tetralogy.
• The Main Characters end up stuck in the middle of one in Five Weeks in a Balloon. They end up borderline insane or catatonic and nearly dying, until they're saved at the last minute by a sandstorm which allows them to fly their balloon to greener pastures.
• The children's novel Holes is set in one. Camp Greenlake, a juvenile detention center located in the middle of the Texas desert, boasts minimal security because anyone setting out from camp on foot would die of thirst long before reaching civilization. Naturally, the main characters are forced to run away, and they nearly die in the desert before finding an overturned rowboat full of jars of canned peaches.
• In Desert And Wilderness has one as the final obstacle for the Main Characters to overcome.
• Crops up from time to time in the works of Karl May. The most iconic 'Western' example here is probably the (really existing) Llano Estacado, described as this in the stories and usually coming complete with at least some miscreants planning to lead travelers astray explicitly so they can die of thirst and never be heard from again.
• The Lies of the Ajungo: The City of Lies is a drought-stricken place just barely able to survive on its carefully controlled provisions of water. The Forever Desert beyond its boundaries is even worse; Tutu spends weeks traversing the seemingly endless dunes in search of water to no avail as his rations gradually run out, and he is only able to find paltry sources of water and start making progress toward his greater goals once he gets help from three women who have spent much longer than him exploring the desert.
• The Lord of the Rings: Middle Earth has several deserts that are only mentioned, but Frodo and Sam spend three chapters crossing the worst of them - northern Mordor. At one point they both try not to think about water and fail.
• Shock Point is set mostly at Peaceful Cove, an abusive reform school on the coast of Mexico that's surrounded by miles and miles of desert. The last kid who tried to escape was later found dead from dehydration. Cassie escapes with half a gallon of water. She makes a Run for the Border that takes about three days, during which she drinks all her water and becomes very dehydrated.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • The Illustrated Star Wars Universe'': Tatooine, already known to be so dry that water has to be farmed from moisture and condensation, is found to be even more arid than the films depict. Water is so valuable that there's even a Prospector culture hunting for underground wells in the same way that prospectors in The Wild West would hunt for gold. In the Dune Sea and the Judland Wastes, native wildlife has adapted to survive on little water or preserve as much as possible within themselves, and with oases so vanishingly rare, Jawas and Tuskens survive by foraging for water-bearing plants. Needless to say, nobody dares cross the desert on foot... so when Senior Anthropologist Hoole manages the job alone, on foot, with only his Shi'ido shapeshifting powers to protect him, it's a sign that he's much more of a Badass Bookworm than he lets on.
  • Hoole and the Arranda siblings visit Tatooine twice in Galaxy of Fear... though both times the major danger is less in the desert, more in the cooler, damper respite from the suns where they spend their time: the palace of Jabba the Hutt.
  • Han and Leia visit Tatooine in Tatooine Ghost. Han gets lost twice and has to have IV fluids so he doesn't die of dehydration after. The Tusken Raiders are a constant menace, as are the imperials who are still fighting the rebels.
• The mesas of New Mexico in Tyrannosaur Canyon fit this quite nicely. The environment challenges several characters who hike through it with potential dehydration and heatstroke.
• The Aiel Wastes in Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series is one of the most hostile environments on the main continent. The only ones that are worse have been heavily tainted by the Dark One.

Live-Action TV

• The 100: The desert area where parts of New England used to be is bad enough about this that it's actually called "the Dead Zone".
• The Aquabats! Super Show!: In "Cowboy Android!", the Aquabats trudge through one after the Battletram runs out of gas.
• Branded: In "Survival", McCord is traveling through the desert when he comes upon a dead horse. He follows the trail of footprints and comes across a tired, thirsty man. His name is Colbee and he and McCord strike out together to make the next town before their water runs out. Colbee is a family man with a wife and daughter and his fear of not seeing them again forces him to steal the horse and water and leave McCord in the desert.
• The F.B.I.: In "A Mouthful of Dust", Erskine and the local law enforcement have to pursue an escaped prisoner across a desert in New Mexico where all of the usual water sources have dried up. In a moment of madness, the prisoner attempts to drink a mouthful of sand just before he passes out from dehydration.
• Game of Thrones: Dorne's otherwise inhospitable geography played a key role in its maintaining a measure of autonomy.
• Invoked on Good Eats in the episode about beef jerky, in a discussion about food dehydrators. Alton is wandering the desert, and happens upon a tent that belongs to W. She explains that the problem with wandering around in the desert is that you won't so much dry out as cook...and that most food dehydrators on the market at the time used low heat, leading to the same thing happening to whatever food was placed inside them. She then shows Alton that the key is cool air...and leaves him in the high Andes.
• One appears in Once Upon a Time, that two slaves, newly escaped and desperate for water, are crossing. One grabs the Holy Grail, drinks from it, and dies. The second asks permission from the gods, and reverently takes a few small sips. Instead of dying, he is blessed with magic (and Immortality, though he doesn't yet realize), enough to make the wasteland into beautiful green countryside. His name? Merlin.
• The Prisoner (2009) had the desert surrounding the Village, filmed in Namibia.
• The Return of Sherlock Holmes, a made-for-TV movie in 1987, features a cryogenically frozen Holmes who reawakens in the modern day. While driving through the Arizona desert on a case, his car breaks down, so he is forced to cross the desert on foot. Believing himself to be hallucinating or dead, he comes across London Bridge with a British telephone booth and calls his assistant. "No, that's not heaven," she tells him. "That's Lake Havasu."
• Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In: One sketch featured a man crawling along the desert looking for water. He then sees a sign pointing toward Lake Erie, and he starts crawling backward (at the time, Lake Erie was considered an ecological hellhole).
• Despite having started by marooning an expedition on a desert planet, the Stargate franchise manages to avoid this trope all the way to its third live-action series, Stargate Universe, in the episode "Air, Part 3."
• Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Final Mission" has Captain Picard, Wesley Crusher and a shuttle captain named Dirgo stranded on Lambda Paz, a desert moon of Pentarus III with an average temperature of 55°C (131°F), after Dirgo's shuttle crashlands on the moon.
• Throughout the franchise, Mr. Spock's homeworld of Vulcan is described like this. Star Trek: Enterprise really leans into this trope in "The Forge", complete with sandstorms, hostile desert wildlife, and persecuted religious fanatics who turn out to be Good All Along.
• The Twilight Zone (1959):
  • The Libyan desert in episode "King Nine Will Not Return".
  • An (unnamed) American desert in "The Rip Van Winkle Caper".

Music

• Eddie Money: "Give Me Some Water", about an outlaw fleeing through presumably desert country (either the US Southwest or Northern Mexico) after shooting a man on the Mexican border.
  Smack that horse in the ass; with my last dying gasp my brother could hear me say
  Give me some water 'cause I shot a man on the Mexican border
  Cool, cool water
  Give me some water
• "Cool Water", the song written by Bob Nolan, and covered by Hank Williams and a host of others.
  All day I've faced / a barren waste / Without the taste / of water
  Cool water
  Old Dan and I / with throats burned dry / And souls that cry / for water
  Cool, clear, water

Mythology and Religion

• In the Book of Genesis, after having been kicked out by Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael are wandering in the desert, and suffering from thirst. (Especially Ishmael, who is implied to be still a young child.) Hagar places him under a bush so he can get some shade, and slumps down a few feet away by herself, sobbing, because she doesn't want to watch her son die. An angel appears to her to tell her that everything is going to be okay, that Ishmael will live to see adulthood, and to point her in the direction of a well. They aren't seen or heard from again after this incident, although (just as foretold), Ishmael becomes the Hero of Another Story, and an important patriarch to Muslims, just as his half-brother Isaac is to Jews and Christians.

Roleplay

• In The Gamer's Alliance, the Tronin Desert in Southern Libaterra which also doubles as The Savage South. It's the home of the Sarquil and the Sirithai, and recently the Northern Horde has conquered it.

Tabletop Games

• Attempts to employ this trope in Dungeons & Dragons are difficult, since the healing-oriented classes tend to get a create water spell at 1st level and employ it whenever there seems to be a hazard of thirst. However, the Desert of Desolation series (I3-I5) focuses on this trope.
  • This is a large part of the Dark Sun setting, where the climate is so torturous that it's possible for even lawful good characters to straight up murder an innocent NPC for a drink of water.
• Forbidden Desert takes place in one of these. The players must work together to excavate the parts they need to repair an airship and escape, before they die of thirst or are buried by sandstorms. Winning is fairly challenging even on the lowest difficulties; higher levels fall firmly into Nintendo Hard territory.
• The interior of Vrita, the Titan of Drought, is this in Scion taken to the extent it's basically an entire world comprised of this. And there genuinely is no water of any sort to be found. Indeed, it's so thirsty that those unfortunate enough to enter it have the very real feeling that their blood is being sucked out through their skin. Which is probably because it is.
• The desert world of Tallarn in Warhammer 40,000. Strangely enough, it isn't a Death World: its entire surface is desert but there are great underground cities, with their armies all Lawrence of Arabia clones.
• In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the Malfean abode of the Nameless Angel of Despair is a barren desert with a huge black sun overhead.

Video Games

• Breath of Fire III features a trackless desert towards the end of the game. Travel is only feasible at night, as you're navigating by the stars, but you can travel during the day if you don't mind expending more water and getting disoriented (i.e. don't travel during the day). You start with enough water to just barely reach your destination, but you can escape back to the entrance without any problems, even if you've been traveling for days.
• Dragon Age: Inquisition: The Forbidden Oasis and the Western Approach are two desert regions available to visit and rather notably are located within Fantasy Counterpart Culture France. The latter in particular is currently this way because it's the site where the Second Blight erupted and it was infested with darkspawn for 90 years. It has been centuries since that event happened and the area is still an inhospitable and hostile hell-hole that hasn't recovered yet.
• Earthlock: The Burning Desert region is so intensely hot that your character will pass out and die if they remain in direct sunlight for too long (roughly 15 to 25 seconds, depending on the character). The ruins of a technologically advanced civilization dot the area, and you need to strategically reactivate their machinery to create a path in the shade.
• Fallout: New Vegas: The Mojave Desert becomes this with the Survival mode active. The fact that the water you need to survive also irradiates you is just insult to injury.
• Golden Sun: Lamakan Desert. It's so hot there's a thermometer that appears during the entire trip with the PCs complaining about the heat at regular intervals, and letting it max out causes damage to everyone. Fortunately, there are oases hidden by mirages that reset the thermometer to zero, unfortunately most of them contain an Antlion Monster. Strangely enough, it's located in Weyard's equivalent of Asia (and thus the equivalent of the Taklamakan Desert), while the Suhalla desert in Weyard-Africa (Sahara) has no such issues.
• Hyrule Warriors: The Gerudo Desert, found when the heroes play through it towards the end of the main campaign. The overheating can be combated by entering special keeps marked as an Oasis. The villains earlier, had no ill effects from the desert heat.
• Jak and Daxter has the Wasteland. In Jak 3: Wastelander Jak, Daxter and Pecker nearly die of thirst and heat when they are banished there.
• Kingdom of Loathing: The Arid Extra-Dry Desert inflicts severe penalties on any player who tries to adventure there without getting the 'Ultrahydrated' effect from the oasis.
• King's Quest III and King's Quest V: In the first game, it's essentially a barrier to prevent you from going too far the wrong way. It's an insidious maze in the latter. Lampshaded in King's Quest VII. Valanice meets the ghost of an adventurer who died in the desert, and who is tormented by eternal thirst for fresh water.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: The Gerudo Desert, which comprises the southwestern corner of Hyrule. During the day, the environment becomes very hot, requiring you to prepare accordingly (whether via heat-reducing elixirs or equipment) or steadily lose health. At night, however, the temperature drops dramatically and equally dangerously, requiring you to account for that if you're taking long treks through the wastelands. At any time, sandstorms can flare up and disable the Sheikah Slate's map function, potentially stranding Link in the deep desert until he can stumble his way into clear air.
• Lost Home: In the fifth level of the desert world, it's so hot that there is a limit to how much time the player can spend in the sunlight, shown by a bar at the bottom of the screen that gradually fills up. If the bar fills up completely, the characters die. The player thus needs to find occasional shade from a tree or cave to cool down. Additionally, some spots have very strong sunlight that causes the bar to fill extremely quickly while in them.
• Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy: Torrido is a town located in one of these. It has a Wild West theme and feel to it, and standing in for the usual "criminal cowboy" lurking around is a large, leonine specimen called Old Red that is actually revealed to be gentle (it is said to be looking for a girl Layton and company meet early on, but it turns out it's looking for that girl's grandmother, who looked identical to her back during her youth and had befriended the creature back then).
• Quest for Glory II: The player will literally die of thirst if you don't have enough water, and multiple foes ranging from vicious brigands to giant scorpions to rampaging mini T. rexes to ghouls will try to kill you.
• Rimworld: Setting up a colony in the scorching and dry desert presents a lot of challenges, chiefly the potential for heatstroke and the lack of flora; hardy potatoes grown in the rare gravel patches will have do until hydroponics is researched, and any wood will have to be imported.
• RuneScape: The desert south of Al Kharid will drain your health if you don't stay hydrated (using waterskins, an enchanted water tiara, etc). The rate at which you go through water/health depends on your equipment - melee armour makes you thirsty more often, whereas desert robes (and similar things) let you stay hydrated more easily.
• Secret of Evermore: The Desert of Death saps your HP just walking on it and you are under constant attack by poisonous spiders, winged skulls and crushing tumbleweeds. You must travel oasis to oasis to survive the trek.
• Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter and its VGA remake have this when you crashland on Kerona after escaping the Arcada. Fortunately, you have an infinite supply of "dehydrated" water (don't ask) and the game gives you ample warning when you need to take a drink of it.
• Spec Ops: The Line reminds us that Dubai, despite being a paradise of opulence, is set in a desert. A massive sandstorm causes the total collapse of infrastructure, water distribution more than anything, and it only goes From Bad to Worse from there.
• Tales of Vesperia has a desert area where you have to find cacti that contain water for your party to fill their canteens with. When they run out of water, they start to take damage.
• Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception: The Rub-al-Khali desert serves as this after Drake crash-lands into the middle of it. It serves as a non-combat sequence showing Nate's deterioration over several days and nights, going in circles, and so-on.
• The Wandering Village: The Onbu's path periodically brings it and the village on its back into desert biomes. Hazards found there include patches of scorching hot sand that can harm the beast when walked over and areas of intense heat that harm crop production. Additionally, the absolute lack of air humidity means that no water can be gathered through the air wells, which can grind farming to a halt unless you've set up cactus farms to get water that way. On the other hand, the harsh and arid conditions mean that the fungal plague can't grow there either, which means that no poisoned forests or spore clouds are found here and that this is the only biome with no air toxicity.

Visual Novels

• The Price of Flesh: In Derek's route, you're taken to the middle of the desert, in which not only will you have his gang to worry about, but you'll also need to battle the searing heat of the desert, plus, there's very limited food and water.

Web Comics

• In Champions of Far'aus, a good part of the country of Gar'el is this.

Web Videos

• Roy and Valerie ride a camel across a cartoon desert at one point in Journey of the Cartoon Man.

Western Animation

• Brumpo Tungus Magic Beans In episode four, "The Origin of the Beans," Brumpo learns that the magic beans originated in the Dusty Doom Desert, and the episode details a sort of flashback showing the beans being discovered by a group of travelers dying of thirst and using them to get water.
• Chaotic: The Mipedian Desert is a massive one that takes up a significant chunk of the Overworld; as the name suggests, it's the home turf of the Mipedian Tribe. It actually used to be a massive tropical rainforest, before the Danians burrowed underneath it to drain all the water into the Underworld. Now all that's left of those days is the Al Mipedim Oasis, where the Mipedian Royal family rules from (and guard with their lives).
• Family Guy: In "Bango Was His Name-Oh", Brian and Stewie walk through the desert while traveling to find the man who could possibly be Stewie's father.
• Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law: Parodied in "Back to the Present", when the Jetsons travel back in time into Harvey's office and discover they have to walk instead of stand on a conveyer belt. It takes them all night just to get to his desk; by morning, they're worn and ragged, Judy has been abducted by wolves, and Astro is dead from exhaustion and being picked at by vultures.
• Looney Tunes: In Aqua Duck, a thirsty Daffy Duck is lost in the desert, and a pack rat offers him a cup in exchange for the gold nugget which Daffy found. Daffy, of course, doesn't want to give it up, but he ends up relenting and getting his water... only for it to start raining.
  Daffy: One thing you gotta admit: when I buy water, I sure get my money's worth.
• On Rocko's Modern Life, after disposing of a troublesome anthropomorphic food processor, said food processor wanders the desert. He passes by a cow skull, gets his ass kicked by the sun (literally), a vulture eyes him, and passes by a coyote roasting a roadrunner. He sees a mirage of other food processors in a pool...which turns out to be a cactus patch. Enraged, he charges at a cactus, only to find that he can now get water from it. Meanwhile, Rocko feels bad about leaving him in the desert to die, and goes back, only to find that the food processor is happy now: he's earned a fortune selling cactus water to thirsty travelers, and even opened up a casino.
• The Simpsons: In "The Greatest Story Ever D'ohed", Homer gets lost in the Israeli desert and grows thirsty, and he eventually finds an ocean to drink from. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the Dead Sea.
• Steven Universe has fun with this trope in "Steven's Lion". Steven crawls along pitifully as the Crystal Gems travel a desert, despite them not being there that long, explaining to the other Gems "This is how you're supposed to act in the desert."
• Wakfu:
  • In Season 1, after losing control of Rubilax and breaking Eva's bow, Sadlygrove wanders into the desert, suffering from the heat and thirst, ending up perpetually tanned for the rest of the show. Also, Yugo has to cross a scorching rocky desert in order to find Grougal's Dofus.
  • In Season 2, one episode starts with the Brotherhood of Tofu crossing a scalding desert (we see a scorpion being fried alive just for walking into a sunlit zone), desperate for water.

Real Life

• Generally averted in Real Life, since desert biomes are often teeming with life despite the harsh climate. Death Valley has its name for a reason, though. It is officially one of the hottest places on Earth, with summer highs of up to 134 F/57 C, and next to no rainfall.
• Hundreds of bodies of people who died from thirst or "exposure" are found every year in the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona. Most are from Mexico traveling illegally to the United States. Many are from other parts of South and Central America, notably Guatemala and El Salvador.
• Parts of the Atacama Desert in South America haven't received rainfall in hundreds, possibly thousands, of years. Some areas receive moisture from coastal fog, other areas are as dead and barren as Mars. In its most desolate regions, the Atacama is allegedly sterile, as not even bacteria can survive there. When the Top Gear boys crossed the Atacama on a road trip, Jeremy Clarkson mentioned this — primarily to illustrate that co-host Richard Hammond was currently the smallest organism within a hundred miles.
• The Rub' Al Khali^note The Empty Quarter desert on the southern Arabian peninsula is one of the largest sand deserts in the world, taking up about 250,000 square miles of area. While it's not completely inhospitable (there is some life), it's close: water sources are extremely few and far between. On the flip side, though, it's geologically rich, with mineral and oil deposits estimated to be worth billions^note So much so that some geologists call it the Rub' Al Ghali, meaning the Valuable Quarter, according to The Other Wiki.
• There are parts of the Sahara where the current climate is so inhospitable that maps mark individual trees, which are spaced more than a hundred kilometers apart and mark places where groundwater is close enough to the surface for wells.
• The Taklamakan Desert in Central Asia is often considered the world's worst desert to attempt to cross. A (probably apocryphal) legend claims that the name originally came from an old phrase meaning "Go in and you won’t come back out". More likely etymologies are not much better; including "place to leave alone" and "place of ruins". Antarctica is actually far bleaker to cross, but it's not a Thirsty Desert (after all, lack of water is definitely not a problem in Antarctica).

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