Scraps introduces several new mechanics to make survival more challenging, to bring purpose to unappreciated items, and to help level the playing field between new and OP players.

Scraps introduces a new mechanic called 'Temperature', which currently only occurs in the Snowy Taiga biome. Players and hostile mobs can both take cold damage. When the player suffers from coldness, it becomes more difficult to move. If the coldness is severe enough, the player will slowly begin to take damage, in a fashion similar to the vanilla poison effect. Like the vanilla poison effect, coldness will not kill the player, but will keep inflicting damage until they have only half a heart remaining.

Coldness occurs when the player is exposed to a sky-light value greater than 10 while in a cold biome. Cold will only inflict damage on the player when they are outside during the nighttime, or are in a snowstorm (or both). These conditions will also increase the severity value of the coldness the player experiences. The damage inflicted by cold can be determined with the following simplified code excerpt (Java):

Cold-resistance is a hidden metric based on the kind and amount of armor a player is wearing. Some equippable items, like player/mob heads and pumpkins will have no effect on cold resistance. However, regular armor items will have an effect on the player's cold-resistance. A positive value means the overall cold-resistance is increased, whereas a negative value means the overall cold-resistance is reduced. If a player's overall cold-resistance falls negative, they may take frost damage even during the daytime.

Players will get hungry in Scraps about twice as fast as in Vanilla hard mode. Finding enough food to stay alive is a significant challenge of the early-game in Scraps. However, to mitigate the severe hunger, players can craft certain more advanced food with much higher saturation values than vanilla food.