Сначала безопасность

Что происходит прямо сейчас?

Выберите то, что уже видите. Откроется одна команда — выполните её до чтения остального гайда.

Start hereStart here

Choose a biomeChoose a biome

Universal — in case you did not find it in your own biome

Not sure which biome you are inNot sure which biome you are in

Find yourself on the mapFind yourself on the map

Hover over the map to see the biome and how hard it is.

The map shows broad ecological zones based on FAO and NASA MODIS classifications; it is not a topographic or seasonal map. The tundra boundary follows the tree line. Across northern Russia it is mainly a coastal belt, widening on the large peninsulas, with forest-tundra and taiga farther south. Coast and mountains overlay the latitude-based biome. In a city, open City first. Blue lines show major rivers.

Verify the biome on site: identify continuous tree cover first, then elevation and relief, proximity to the sea, fresh water and the current season. Latitude alone is insufficient: forest, steppe, mountains and coast can share one parallel.

Where it is easier, where it is harderWhere it is easier, where it is harder

Biomes at a glanceBiome comparison

Green means this biome is easier, red means harder. In the "technology" column, green means more is available here than elsewhere. Tap a row to open the chapter.

Biome	Water	Food	Shelter	Technology	Danger	Infections
Forest	medium	medium	easy	high	medium	medium
Taiga	medium	med-hard	medium	high	med-high	medium
Desert	very hard	hard	medium	medium	easy	easy
Steppe	hard	medium	med-hard	high	medium	high
Mountains	medium	hard	med-hard	low	med-high	easy
Tropics	easy	easy/risk	medium	high	hard	very hard
Coast	medium	easy	medium	high	easy	medium
Arctic	medium	very hard	medium	low	high	easy
City	medium	medium	easy	high	very hard	med-high

Field guide · works with no internetField guide · works with no internet

What to do if help is not comingWhat to do when no help is coming

Nine biomes, from the first hour to permanent shelter. Written for someone with no experience: every action is set out step by step and shown in a drawing. Save the page — it opens with no network.Nine biomes, from the first hour to a permanent shelter. Written for someone with no experience: every action is broken into steps and drawn. Save this page — it opens with no network.

9biomesbiomes

72hours decide ithours decide

0internet neededinternet needed

Right now

What makes a danger urgent

Порядок один для любого биома и любой причины. Это чек-лист, а не закон: при травме, пожаре, радиации или экстремальной жаре приоритет меняется. Слева указана срочность, а не обещание точного времени.

сразуImmediate dangerуйти с линии угрозы: огонь, обвал, вода, движение транспорта или агрессивный человек
сразуInjuryсильное кровотечение останавливают раньше всего остального
часыCold or heatуйти от ветра и солнца, стать сухим, сделать укрытие; огонь нужен не в каждом сценарии
часы–дниDehydrationнайти безопасный источник и обработать воду; в жару действовать немедленно
hours–daysYour mindpanic and apathy. Cured by a routine and a job for your hands
дни–неделиHungerобычно менее срочен, чем травма, температура и вода; неизвестная еда может быть опаснее голода
dependsBeing foundif you are being looked for, be visible. If you are being hunted, the opposite

Если непосредственной угрозы нет — остановитесь на минуту. Оцените травмы, погоду, время до темноты, связь, воду и ближайшее укрытие. Запишите три следующих действия и выполняйте их по одному.

Для человека без полевого опыта

Первые 60 минут: один маршрут для любого места

Не пытайтесь сразу строить дом, добывать еду или разводить сложный костёр. Сначала выполните шесть действий по порядку. Если один пункт уже решён, переходите к следующему.

Уберите немедленную угрозуОтойдите от огня, воды, осыпи, дороги, проводов или агрессивного человека. При связи вызовите помощь и передайте координаты.

Остановите кровотечениеПрижмите рану чистой тканью. Сильное кровотечение важнее укрытия, воды и еды.

Станьте сухим и уйдите от ветраСнимите мокрый слой, выжмите его, наденьте обратно только если сухого нет. Изолируйте тело от земли, снега или камня.

Соберите простое укрытиеТент, автомобиль, навес, снежная траншея или сухая естественная ниша. Сначала крыша и подстилка, затем удобство.

Решите вопрос водыПрозрачная вода тоже может быть заражена. Кипятите или фильтруйте и обеззараживайте. Воду с химическим запахом не использовать.

Только теперь решайте вопрос огняОгонь нужен не всегда. При запрете, сильном ветре, сухой траве, торфе или отсутствии воды для тушения выбирайте укрытие и горелку снаружи.

Походную горелку, мангал, угли, свечу и самодельную печь не используют в палатке, под закрытым тентом, в снежной пещере, автомобиле или помещении. Открытый клапан, окно или вход не делают такое использование безопасным. В здании допустим только исправный стационарный прибор, установленный по нормам и подключённый к штатному дымоходу. При головной боли, тошноте, слабости или сонливости у нескольких людей одновременно — немедленно на свежий воздух и вызывайте помощь.

Безопасная стоянка с костромвид сверху · ветер · пять метров · вода для тушения

1 Проверьте запрет. При ограничении на огонь используйте только разрешённую горелку и только снаружи.
2 Очистите площадку. Уберите сухую траву, хвою и ветки до минеральной почвы; над огнём не должно быть ветвей.
3 Поставьте укрытие наветреннее. Между огнём и палаткой, тентом или снаряжением — не менее 5 м.
4 Подготовьте тушение до поджига. Вода и лопата лежат рядом, костёр всё время под присмотром.
5 Уходите только от холодной золы. Залить, перемешать, снова залить и потрогать тыльной стороной руки рядом с углями. Горячо — уходить нельзя.

Два понятных костра вместо десятка экзотическихснеговая платформа · верховой костёр длительного горения

1 На снегу. Утрамбуйте площадку, положите крест-накрест два слоя толстых сырых жердей или жёсткую металлическую основу. Огонь остаётся снаружи укрытия.
2 В безлесной тундре. Не режьте живой кустарник и не разжигайте огонь на торфе. Предпочтительна горелка на твёрдом негорючем основании, снаружи и под присмотром.
3 Для долгого горения. Толстые поленья снизу, затем два слоя всё меньшего размера, растопка сверху. Огонь постепенно идёт вниз и требует меньше подкладываний.
! Ни один костёр не оставляют на ночь без дежурного. «Долго горит» означает меньше обслуживания, а не безопасный сон рядом с пламенем.

Ещё два экономных костразвезда для малого расхода · длинный костёр для группы с дежурным

1 Звезда. Три–пять толстых поленьев лежат концами в малом центре. По мере прогорания их подвигают внутрь. Подходит, когда топлива мало и рядом всё время бодрствует человек.
2 Длинный костёр. Два сырых или медленно горящих бревна ограничивают длинную полосу небольшого огня. Люди располагаются сбоку, а не у торцов, куда могут вылетать искры. Нужен очищенный участок и дежурный.
3 Не копайте огневую яму в торфе, корнях и сухой органической почве. Подземное тление может уйти за пределы видимой площадки. На сухой земле используйте готовое кострище или горелку.
! «Экономный» не означает безопасный для сна. Перед сменой дежурного проверяют площадку, направление ветра и запас воды; без дежурного огонь гасят.

Тент-домик: укрытие за шесть действийсначала место · затем конёк · после этого крыша и подстилка

1 Место. Не русло, не дно оврага, не сухое дерево, не лавинный или камнепадный склон.
2 Конёк. Натяните верёвку между двумя надёжными опорами примерно на высоте груди.
3 Крыша. Перекиньте тент через верёвку; длинная сторона идёт вдоль ветра, а не поперёк него.
4 Растяжки. Закрепите четыре угла низко и туго. Край со стороны ветра прижмите ближе к земле.
5 Подстилка. Рюкзак, коврик, сухая трава, лапник или картон отделяют тело от холодного основания.
6 Вентиляция. Оставьте щель сверху и у входа. Дышать в герметичный объём и сушить там вещи опасно.

Какой огонь выбирать в каждом биоме

Место	Предпочтительный вариант	Главная ошибка
Лес	Малый верховой костёр в готовом кострище; при сырости — сухая растопка под навесом для дров, не над пламенем.	Огонь на корнях, хвое или торфе.
Тайга и глубокий снег	Платформа из сырых жердей; отражатель только негорючий и устойчивый, огонь не ближе 5 м от навеса.	Костёр прямо на снегу или под свисающими ветвями.
Тундра и Арктика	Горелка на жёстком основании снаружи; костёр только при доступном сухом плавнике и возможности полностью потушить.	Лампа, горелка или угли в снежном укрытии.
Степь	Горелка; если разрешён огонь — очень малый очаг на голой минеральной почве с широкой очисткой вокруг.	Пламя в сухой траве и на сильном ветру.
Пустыня	Горелка за низким негорючим ветрозащитным экраном; костёр только из чистого сухого топлива.	Замкнуть экран вокруг баллона или греть мокрые камни.
Горы	Горелка на устойчивой площадке; ниже леса — малый костёр вдали от склона и сухой травы.	Огонь под скальным навесом или в кулуаре.
Тропики	Малый огонь на минеральной или жёсткой приподнятой основе, с сухой растопкой, сохранённой под одеждой.	Огонь на торфе, корнях или под низкой крышей.
Побережье	Горелка или малый огонь выше линии прилива, за естественным негорючим экраном.	Пластик, окрашенное дерево, мокрые камни и горячие угли под песком.
Город	Штатная плита при исправной системе; при аварии — холодная еда или горелка только на открытом воздухе вдали от окон.	Мангал, горелка, свечи или самодельная печь в квартире.

Вода, еда и инфекция: минимум, который нельзя пропускать

ВодаЧистую на вид воду доведите до активного кипения на 1 минуту; выше 2000 м — на 3 минуты. Если кипячение невозможно, сначала фильтр, затем обеззараживание строго по инструкции средства.

Химическое загрязнениеТопливо, растворитель, неизвестный запах, радужная плёнка или промышленный сток не устраняются кипячением и походным фильтром. Ищите другой источник.

РаныВымойте руки, промойте небольшую рану чистой водой с мылом и закройте чистой сухой повязкой. Покраснение, нарастающая боль, отёк, гной или температура требуют медицинской помощи.

ЕдаНе ешьте неизвестные грибы, растения и туши погибших животных. Варка не обезвреживает многие грибные токсины. Несколько дней без еды безопаснее отравления вдали от врача.

Редакционная основа: CDC по воде, ранам, холоду, жаре и угарному газу; National Park Service по потерявшимся людям, кострам, молнии и пожарам; NOAA по береговым угрозам; Army Techniques Publication 3-50.21 по устройству костров. CDC — вода · CDC — угарный газ · CDC — жара · NPS — если потерялись · NPS — костры · NPS — молния · NOAA — цунами.

Universal

The tech tree: from bare hands to a settled camp

Each level unlocks the next. The only thing that changes is the raw material to hand in a given biome — the principle is the same.

Level 0 — hour 1

Сначала перечислите всё, что уже есть: одежда, телефон, аптечка, зажигалка, спички, горелка, тент, шнурки, металлическая ёмкость и режущий инструмент. Не изготавливайте примитивную замену тому, что лежит в кармане. Первый час — связь, травма, место, укрытие и вода.

Level 1 — days 1–2

Минимальный набор: укрытие, изоляция от земли, безопасная вода, верёвка и режущий инструмент. Огонь разводят готовым источником зажигания. Лучковый метод ниже — резервный навык для сухого дерева и тренированного человека; в сырость, мороз и без практики он может не дать огня вообще.

Не тратьте последние свет и силы на огонь трением. Если за 20–30 минут не получается устойчивый уголёк, возвращайтесь к укрытию, сухой одежде, сигналу спасателям и сохранению тепла.

Fire by friction: the bow drillfour parts · assembly · notch · ember

1 The board. A dry flat piece of softwood 2 cm (¾ in) thick — willow, lime, aspen, poplar. Test: a fingernail leaves a dent.
2 The drill. A straight stick of the same wood, as thick as your thumb and as long as your forearm. Round off the bottom, sharpen the top.
3 The bow. A curved branch as long as your arm, with the cord tied loosely — the drill is twisted into it under tension.
4 The bearing block. A stone with a hollow in it, or a piece of hardwood. It holds the drill from above and saves your palm.
5 The notch. A cut running from the socket to the edge of the board — the hot dust falls out through it. Without it no ember will gather.
6 The ember. A black smoking heap. It is not fire yet: move it into a bundle of dry grass and birch bark and blow it up.

A debris hut of branches and leavesfour steps · the inside must be cramped

Why it keeps you warm. Not the "roof" but the thickness: leaves hold air still, and it is air that warms you. A thin hut of bare poles gives no warmth at all.
Check 1. From inside you should not be able to see a single chink of sky.
Check 2. It is cramped inside — you barely fit lying down. A roomy hut will never warm up.
No time? Build a single sloping wall open towards the fire. It goes up in 45 minutes and keeps off rain and wind almost as well.

Level 2 — week 1

Containers (bark and wood, later clay), boiling with hot stones, simple snares, a shelter meant to last.

The figure-4 deadfallthree sticks hold the rock · the animal touches the bait · it falls

A The pointed top of the post goes into the first notch of the lever — the lever rests on the post the way a see-saw rests on its pivot.
B The lever's second notch catches the notch of the bait stick — the bait stick runs down at an angle.
C The lower end of the bait stick presses against the notch on the side of the post. The three pieces hold each other purely by the tension from the weight of the rock.
The rock. Flat and heavy — at least five kilograms (11 lb) for small game. It rests on the top end of the lever.
How it fires. The animal pulls the bait from the far end of the bait stick. Notch C slips off, the structure folds, and the rock comes down.
Where to set it. On an animal trail or by a burrow, not at random. Set several — only a small fraction ever fire.
Careful. Set the trigger standing to the side, not under the rock. The trap is designed to kill by weight.

→ THE "WORKBENCH" MARK: shelter + fire + a cutting tool + protection from the biome's main threat + water and food stable. From here it is not a rush but settling in.

Level 3 — weeks 2–4

Quality of life instead of surviving on the edge. Bow and arrows, tanning hides, smoking, soap from ash and fat. And two steps that unlock everything after them: firing clay and charcoal.

Fired clay — this is the first vessel you can stand straight on the fire: the end of boiling with hot stones, the beginning of storage. Charcoal — a fuel that burns twice as hot as wood and almost without smoke. Without it there is no brick, no lime and no metal: an ordinary campfire physically cannot reach the heat needed.

Level 4 — a month and beyond: building

Permanent housing, a vegetable plot, plant medicine. And the level a person on their own genuinely reaches, given clay and time.

Brick. The same clay as for pots, only formed into blocks and fired in the same kiln (roughly 900–1000 °C / 1650–1830 °F). Unlike adobe, brick does not soften in the rain, and out of it you build a kiln that holds a higher temperature than a fire in a pit.

Lime — the most underrated step. Limestone or shells, calcined at roughly 900 °C (1650 °F), crumble to a powder; mixed with water and sand that powder gives a mortar that sets and does not soften in water. This is the step from "stacked stones" to real masonry, to watertight vessels and to a cistern for water. Limestone and shell rock occur far more often than ore, which makes lime a more realistic goal for one person than metal.

A documented modern example: an experimenter who worked alone for years using only primitive means produced a working substitute for cement out of re-fired wood ash mixed with crushed fired clay — the mix set in three days and did not soften in water.

Level 5 — a year and beyond: metal, and where it runs out

Here the guide stops being an instruction and becomes an honest assessment. What comes next is very nearly unreachable on your own — and it matters more to say that plainly than to draw a handsome staircase up to electricity.

Bloomery iron. The technology is real and ancient: bog ore, charcoal, a clay furnace and a constant blast at 1100–1300 °C (2010–2370 °F). The metal never melts — what comes out is a spongy lump, a bloom, which is then forged. Experimental archaeology gives the scale: from 20–50 kg of ore and charcoal comes a bloom of 2–5 kg, an iron yield of 20–40%, and a single smelt means 6–8 hours of work by a team of 3–4 peoplewho pump air and feed in charcoal without a break.

Here is the limit. What one person lacks is not the knowledge but hands and calories. The blast cannot stop for a minute, charcoal has to be fed in, ore has to be crushed — and before any of that, a week spent burning charcoal and months of saving food to afford that week. The best-known modern soloist, who spent years reproducing ancient technology in the tropics, got as far in iron as grains about a millimetre across — and said himself that what he had shown was not metal but the fact that the furnace reaches temperature. That is the realistic ceiling: a furnace, yes; grains of iron, yes; an axe, no.

What that means in practice. If you are on your own, do not build plans around metallurgy. Your real limit is clay, fired brick, lime, charcoal, wood, stone, hide and fibre. That is enough for a warm house, a stove, cookware, a cistern and a food store — that is, enough for a life rather than for survival. Metal appears only where there is a group, and that is one more argument for the "People" chapter: a forge is not a technology but a form of social organisation.

Beyond that: glass, mechanical power, electricity

Mechanical power is the most reachable of the "unreachable". A water wheel on a stream (see "Improvised gear") needs no metal: the axle, the paddles and the millstones are made of wood and stone. It frees up exactly what a lone person is shortest of — time and muscle: it grinds grain, pumps water, drives bellows. If you are going to set one ambitious goal, set this one rather than a forge.

Glass needs around 1300–1500 °C (2370–2730 °F) and an additive to lower the melting point of sand (soda, or potash from ash). A furnace of that class is already beyond what one person can build, but within reach of a settlement.

Electricity, honestly. A coil of wire and a spinning magnet really do produce current. But wire means copper, which has to be found, smelted and drawn out, and a magnet means either natural magnetite or magnetised steel, which you do not have. The chain "ore → copper → wire → insulation → magnet" is longer than the chain to iron, and you never got as far as iron.

So in this guide electricity is not a level of technology but something you find: a car alternator, an electric motor out of an appliance, a loudspeaker, a solar panel off a roof. All of it is lying ready in the ruins of a city (see the "City" chapter). You cannot rebuild civilisation on your own — you can pick up its pieces and make them work.

Universal

Finding your way without instruments

By day, the simple way: the sun rises roughly in the east, sets roughly in the west, and sits in the south in the middle of the day. No calculation needed.

By day, more precisely — the shadow stick: push a stick into the ground, mark the tip of its shadow with a stone, wait 15–20 minutes, then mark the new position with a second stone. The first stone is west, the second is east. Stand between them, left foot on the first and right foot on the second, and you are facing north.

At night: without practice the stars are unreliable — it is safer to mark your spot and wait for dawn than to wander in the dark.

A river: going downstream almost always brings you out to people — if that is what you want.

A myth: "moss only grows on the north side" does not work on its own — moss likes damp and shade, and those can be on any side.

Universal

What you do depends on why you left

The techniques are the same everywhere (see the biomes and the tech tree) — what changes is your priorities and how careful you are.

Nuclear threat: the first minutes decide everything. Time, distance, shielding: the thicker and denser the mass between you and the source, the better. When you get into shelter, take off your outer clothing and leave it outside — that removes up to 90% of the contamination. Stay in shelter for at least 24 hours: fallout peaks in the first 24–48 hours. Closed water sources are safer than open ones for the first few weeks.

Epidemic: the same survival core, plus boiling water without exception and isolating anyone who falls ill.

Being chased, hunted, conscripted, dispossessed (it all comes down to one thing — not being found): a fire with no smoke, or at hours when it shows least, leave no paths and no tracks, and camp out of sight of roads.

"Fantastical" scenarios (zombies, invasion, AI): the logic is "a hostile opponent who will not talk" — the same principles as above.

Universal

People: when to make contact, and how to protect yourself

Before the "workbench" milestone, contact with other survivors is almost pure risk: you have nothing to offer and both sides are at their limit. After the workbench you have something to trade — and then contact can be worth it.

The ladder of contact

1. Avoidance → 2. Watching from a distance → 3. "Silent trade" — a historical way of exchanging goods between sides that do not trust each other, recorded from Carthage to South-East Asia: you leave your goods at an agreed spot, give a signal and walk away; the other side puts theirs down and also walks away; you either take theirs, which closes the deal, or walk off again, meaning it is not enough — with no meeting and no words at all → 4. Talking at a distance, empty hands visible → 5. Direct exchange of small items on neutral ground → 6. A temporary alliance, sharing watches and information → 7. Merging the groups — the greatest gain and the greatest risk, and only after trust has been confirmed many times over.

Move up the ladder one step at a time, and never start from the middle.

Protection means being noticed early and avoided, not weapons

An alarm line: thin cord 30–40 cm off the ground across the path to your camp, tied to tins with pebbles in them — the noise warns you before anyone arrives, and often scares them off by itself. Your camp: one approach you can watch, your back to an obstacle such as water or rock. Talking your way out is almost always better than winning a fight — an injury with no medicine can cost more than the confrontation would. Never tell an outsider exactly where your camp and your stores are.

Safety hold

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Applies everywhere · decides everything else

Seasons: what the time of year decides

Every timeline in the biome chapters is written as if it all began today. But the day you found yourself alone shapes your task more than the biome does. The same forest in May and in November is two different guides: in May you are setting up a routine, in November you are counting the days to the frosts.

The year as a circleeach season has one main task

Spring — the most deceptive season

It looks easy: warmth, greenery, water everywhere. In truth spring is more dangerous than autumn.

What it givesThe first greens: nettle, dandelion, young shoots. Birch sap from a cut in the bark — once the sap starts running, before the leaves appear. Birds' eggs. Fish spawning.

What makes it dangerousSpring flooding — rivers rise within hours, and a camp on the floodplain is washed away. Thin ice — spring ice looks deceptively solid. Ticks — its most active period. Night frosts after a warm day.

The main taskGet through to settled warmth without losing your feet and without getting wet. Last year's stores are finished and this year's have not grown yet — this is the hungriest time of the year, not winter.

What not to doDo not camp right beside the water. Do not cross rivers or ice. Do not count on greenery before it has actually appeared.

Summer — the time to build, not to rest

What it givesMaximum light: 16–18 working hours a day. Warmth in which a mistake does not cost your life. Food becomes predictable.

What makes it dangerousHeat and dehydration. Insects — mosquitoes and midges wear you down more than you would expect. Thunderstorms. Forest and grass fires. Meat and fish spoil within hours.

The main taskEverything permanent gets built now: shelter, stove, traps, containers, tools. In summer you are buying your winter — and that is the only currency you have.

What not to doDo not live day to day. "There is plenty of food" in summer is not a measure but a trap: it is in a well-fed summer that February's hunger is decided.

Autumn — the season that decides everything

If this guide had to name one month it was all written for, it would be September. In autumn nature hands over a whole year's harvest, and then closes down for six months.

FoodNuts, acorns (they must be leached or boiled — otherwise they are bitter and harmful), roots, late berries. Animals have put on fat, and this is the best time to hunt.

PreservingDrying, smoking, salting. A cold pit or a cellar in the shade of a north-facing slope. Everything you put by has to be dry and hung up — otherwise the mice and the mould get it.

FirewoodLaid in during autumn, not in winter. The rule of thumb is three times more than seems necessary, and next to the shelter, not half an hour's walk away through snow.

InsulatingGaps, bedding, a second wall, a stock of conifer boughs. The jobs that look optional in summer turn out in December to have been the only ones that mattered.

The autumn rule. Assume that after the first settled frosts you will gather nothing and build nothing — you will only spend. Anything not done before that day does not get done in winter. That is exactly why "Weeks 2–4" in the biome chapters look unhurried: they are unhurried only if you have a summer ahead of you.

Winter — not a season of gathering but of spending

What it givesAnimal trails show in the snow and are predictable, so traps work better than in summer. Meat does not spoil. Water is plentiful. There are no insects and no snakes.

What makes it dangerousFive to seven hours of daylight. Every job costs twice as much in strength and in food. Wet clothing becomes lethal. There is no plant food at all.

The main taskNot to spend more than you stored, and not to get wet. In winter it is not the active one who wins but the sparing one: an extra journey, an extra trip out, extra sweat — all of it a straight loss.

RhythmWork in daylight, sleep long. A long sleep in winter is not laziness but a way of burning fewer calories. This is the one case where doing nothing is useful.

If it all began in late autumn or in winter

The honest scenario, and it is a hard one: there is nothing to store and no time to store it, and warmth is months away. The order of priorities changes.

What to do if you started at the wrong end of the year

Warmth and shelter instead of everything else. Not traps, not containers, not tools — a warm place and a stock of firewood. All the rest waits until February.
Move while you still can. If there is any chance at all of reaching people or moving to a gentler biome, winter is the case where "stay put" stops being automatically best. Decide in the first few days, while you still have the strength.
Protein and fat. There will be no plant food. Set traps on the trails, look for fish under the ice, and do not throw away fat or bone marrow.
Count the daylight. Anything that has to be done is done before dark. Working in the dark in winter means sweat, injuries and lost belongings.
No heroics. In winter the price of a single mistake is not discomfort but frostbite. Slowly, in several goes, with rests.

Where there are not four seasons

The tropics: instead of winter and summer there is a dry season and a wet one. The wet season (the monsoon) means daily downpours, risen rivers, no way to dry out and a surge in disease; the dry season is the time to build, dry and store. The logic is the same as with autumn: everything permanent is done in the dry season.

The desert: here the season is the day itself. By day you hide, by night you work and travel. On the other hand the desert turns milder in winter, and the nights become genuinely cold, down to frost.

The Arctic: polar day and polar night replace the seasons entirely. Through the polar day people work almost round the clock; through the polar night they keep to an artificial routine (see "Your mind").

The southern hemisphere: everything is shifted by six months — January there is high summer, July is winter. If you are looking at the map on the front page and planning a move across the equator, keep that in mind.

Reference · what you keep coming back to

Appendix: knots, tracks, what is edible

Three things that are not tied to any biome and that you have to keep coming back to. Keep this chapter open until you know it by heart.

1. Six knots that cover everything

There are hundreds of knots, but on your own you need six. They have to be learned with your hands, until they are automatic: a knot you have to remember will not tie itself in the dark and in the cold.

The running noose

The snare knot. Make a small fixed ring in the cord and pass the long end through it — that gives a large loop which tightens when the end is pulled. Check: pull it, and the loop should shrink smoothly, with no jerking or snagging.

The bowline

A loop that does not tighten under load and unties easily afterwards. 1 — make a small ring, the "hole", in the rope. 2 — the end comes up out of the hole, round behind the standing part. 3 — and back down into the hole. Pull it tight. You tie it round yourself with this, and use it for guy lines.

The clove hitch

For tying a rope to a pole, a stake or a tree. Two turns round the pole, the second crossing the first, and the end tucked under the second turn. It ties in seconds with one hand. This is the main knot for the frame of a hut or a lean-to — it holds as long as there is tension on it.

The reef knot

For joining two ropes of the same thickness: each is folded into a loop and passed through the other's loop. Simple and quick, but it creeps under a varying load — always lock the ends with stopper knots. It is not fit for holding a person.

The sheet bend

For joining ropes of different thickness — which happens constantly once you are laying your own cord. The thick one is folded into a loop, the thin one goes through it, round both sides of the loop from behind, and tucks under itself. It holds where a reef knot creeps.

The square lashing

For joining two poles at right angles — a shelter frame, a ladder, a stretcher, a tripod. First 3–4 turns round both poles, then 2–3 turns between them, pulling the wrapping tight across. Without those tightening turns the lashing falls apart — that is the commonest mistake.

About cord you have laid yourself. It is several times weaker than shop-bought and it breaks from a snatchrather than from weight. Anything that holds a person, double it, and test it with a load while standing to the siderather than underneath. Wet plant cord shrinks as it dries and bursts the knots — retighten them the next day.

2. Tracks: who walks here

Tracks are for two things: putting a snare where animals actually go, and knowing who you share the ground with. Reading them is easier than it sounds — six types is enough.

Bear

Five toes and long claws ahead of the pads. The hind foot resembles a bare human foot, only broader. Nothing else looks like it. A fresh track and a torn-open anthill nearby — go the other way.

Wolf and dog

Four toes, claws showing, the print elongated. What marks a wolf: it walks in a straight line, print into print, with an even stride. A dog wanders and runs in circles. A line of tracks laid out "as if by a ruler" is nearly always a wolf.

Hoofed animals

Two heart-shaped halves. Elk (moose) — large, the size of your palm, pointed; wild boar — shorter and wider, with two side prints showing behind; red deer and roe deer — smaller and neater. A hoofed animals' trail leads to water — the best place for a snare and for watching.

Hare

Two long hind feet in front, two short forefeet behind — a hare swings its hind legs forward as it jumps. That reversed pattern is unmistakable. Hare paths in winter are trodden and permanent — the main target for snares.

Fox

Like a dog's, but smaller and neater, and the prints run almost in a single line. A fox works along wood edges and field margins. A raided snare with the remains of the catch in it is usually its doing.

Bird

Three toes forward, one back. Game birds (grouse, ptarmigan) leave a line of prints along the ground — set nooses on their trails in the snow. Birds of prey circling over one spot mean carrion or someone else's kill.

How to read a track rather than just recognise it

Freshness. Sharp, damp edges mean a fresh track. Crumbled edges, cobwebs, debris blown in, a crust of ice mean an old one. In snow a fresh track is loose at the edge, an old one slumped and hard.
Direction. Earth is pushed out backwards: the ridge and the lump are always on the side the animal came from. If the toe is pressed in deeper, the animal was walking, not standing.
Size. Measure with your own hand and remember it. Absolute centimetres are useless in the field; a comparison with your palm is not.
What is nearby. Droppings, hair on branches, gnawed bark, lying-up places, dug earth. The track says "who"; the signs of living say "how many and how often".
Set the snare where the trail narrows — between bushes, under a fallen trunk, in a gap in a fence. In an open spot the animal will simply walk round the noose.

3. Еда: только то, что вы знали до аварии

Эта галерея не определитель растений. Одной картинки, цвета ягоды или одного признака недостаточно для безопасного распознавания. Используйте раздел только как напоминание о виде, который вы уже уверенно определяли в этом регионе до аварии. Если такого опыта нет — не пробуйте растение.

Справочная галерея знакомых видов

Даже у знакомого вида проверяйте несколько признаков, место произрастания и сезон. Повреждённые, заплесневелые, загрязнённые и растущие у дорог или промышленных стоков растения не используют.

Nettle

The leaves sit strictly in pairs opposite each other, and it stings. That is the check. Boil it 5–10 minutes and the sting goes.

Dandelion

A rosette of leaves straight from the ground, the stem hollow, and where it breaks white milky sap, the flower yellow. Boiling takes the bitterness out.

Cattail

Take it only when the brown seed head is visible. Before that, cattail cannot be told from iris, and iris is poisonous. The rootstock is boiled, the young shoots eaten.

Lingonberry, bilberry, cloudberry

They grow on a low woody dwarf shrub, not on a soft green stem. The feature is the growth form, not the colour of the berry.

Pine nuts

Needles in bunches of five . Pine has them in twos, spruce singly. The nuts out of the cone are eaten as they are.

Acorns

A leaf with rounded lobes, the fruit in a "cap". They must be soaked for 2–3 days with the water changed, or boiled — otherwise they are bitter and harmful.

Lime (linden)

A leaf the size of your palm, heart-shaped, with a lopsided base — the two halves start at different heights. Young leaves are eaten raw, the flowers made into tea.

Seaweed

Take it live and attached to the rocks, not the rotting stuff washed up. Rinse and boil. There is essentially no deadly poisonous seaweed.

Prickly pear

The fruit and the young pads. Scorch them over a fire and scrape them — the danger is not the big spines but the fine hairs, which cannot be got out of the skin.

Bamboo shoots

Thick conical shoots in tight scales, with the bamboo itself alongside. Boiled only, and change the water twice.

Fruit you already know

Coconut, banana, papaya, mango, citrus — the things you recognise from a shop. In the tropics that is the only reliable rule.

Forbidden always, with no exceptions

The carrot and parsley family

An umbrella of small white flowers, a smooth hollow stem, often with purple blotches. Poison hemlock and water hemlock are among the most poisonous plants there are. Edible members of the family exist too, but no non-specialist can tell them apart.

Mushrooms

The edibility test does not workon them: the deadly species do not taste bitter and act a day later, when nothing can be done. They grow beside edible ones and in the same places.

Dark berries on a soft green stem

Herb paris, mezereon, nightshade. Go by the growth form, not the colour: the edible berries of the north grow on a low woody shrub, not on a juicy green stem.

Незнакомое растение

Цвет сока не доказывает ни ядовитость, ни съедобность: у одуванчика млечный сок, у ряда опасных растений его нет. Практическое правило одно — незнакомый вид не пробуют.

Правило, которое важнее таблицы: не узнаёте вид с уверенностью по прежнему личному опыту — не ешьте. Рыба, насекомые и мелкая дичь также требуют правильного определения, законной добычи, свежести и полной термической обработки; они не являются автоматически безопасными.

Region	Reliable, and by what feature	Forbidden
Temperate zone forest, taiga, steppe, mountains	Nettle — leaves strictly in pairs, and it stings. Dandelion — rosette from the ground, white milky sap, hollow stem. Cattail — only with a brown seed head, by water. Berries on a low woody shrub — lingonberry, bilberry, cloudberry. Pine nuts — needles in bunches of five. Acorns — soak or boil with changes of water. Lime (linden) — young leaves, with a lopsided leaf base.	The whole carrot and parsley family (an umbrella of small white flowers) — poison hemlock and water hemlock are among them. All mushrooms — the edibility test does not work on them. Dark berries on a soft green stem — herb paris, mezereon, nightshade. Anything smelling of almonds.
Dry and hot desert, salt flats	Prickly pear fruit — once the spines and hairs have been burned off completely. Yucca — flowers and young fruit, boiled. Dates and palm fruit in oases. Grass seed — ground and boiled.	Любое незнакомое растение, даже без запаха, горечи или яркой окраски. Растения у загрязнённых и солёных водоёмов. Сок кактусов и лиан, который вы раньше не употребляли.
Tropics	The things you know from a shop — coconut, banana, papaya, mango, citrus. Bamboo shoots — boiled only, with the water changed twice. Coconut water from a green nut.	Anything unfamiliar — the tropics have the largest number of poisonous species. White sticky sap from vines and fruit. Bright unfamiliar fruit and seeds. Mushrooms.
Coast and Arctic	Seaweed — live, attached to rocks, boiled. Fish, shellfish, crustaceans — the basis of the diet. Tundra berries on a low woody shrub. Scurvy grass — against scurvy, grows along the shore.	Моллюски при предупреждении о токсинах и любые найденные мёртвыми — часть морских токсинов не убирается варкой или заморозкой. Печень белого медведя и неизвестных морских млекопитающих — риск опасного избытка витамина A. Rotting weed washed up on the shore.

Почему здесь нет «универсального теста съедобности»

Контакт с кожей, вкус, отсутствие горечи и несколько часов без симптомов не доказывают безопасность. Часть токсинов действует поздно, а некоторые повреждают печень или почки до появления очевидных признаков. Не вызывайте рвоту самостоятельно после отравления: сохраните образец, свяжитесь с экстренной службой или токсикологическим центром и выполняйте их указания.

Applies everywhere · does not remove the need for self-sufficiency

Salvage: what to look for and where to put it

The world does not disappear in a day. Asphalt, metal, glass and plastic will outlast us by decades, and some of it by centuries. Nothing in this section replaces the skills in the biome chapters; it shortens the timescale. What used to take weeks, one find does in an hour. You still have to know how to lay a cord — but if a car seat-belt strap is lying at your feet, there is no reason to lay one today.

The frame you cannot read this section without. While the law works and things have owners, other people's property stays other people's, and this section is not about that. It is about what has been abandoned: things that belong to nobody any more and are falling apart on their own. And even then three rules apply: take what you need, not everything; do not break what could still serve someone; and never go into somewhere people are living. In a small world your reputation is worth more than any find — see the "People" chapter.

Six rules of searching that are worth more than anything you find

Ten minutes outside. Before you go in, look and listen. Fresh tracks, smoke, light, sound, dogs. An occupied place shows from outside.
Not alone, and not silently. Someone has to know where you went and when you are due back.
Look at the ceiling and at the floor. Cracks in load-bearing walls, sagging floors, water in the basement, a smell of rot — turn around. Someone under rubble does not get to use what they found.
No flame until you have checked for gas. Do not flick a switch, do not strike a match, do not turn a torch on inside until the place has been aired.
Hard-soled boots and gloves. A rusty nail through the foot with no doctor costs more than any find.
Take only as much as you can carry at a run. A loaded person cannot run and cannot defend themselves. Two trips beat one that turns out to be the last.

Where to look, and what makes it dangerous

Place	What is valuable there	What makes it dangerous
Petrol station	Канистры, воронки, шланги, ветошь, инструмент, карты, бумага на розжиг. Топливо и масло — только по штатному назначению	Пары топлива, статика, подземные резервуары. Не курить, не искрить, не переливать топливо без навыка и исправной тары
Roads and cars	The richest place of all. Battery, wiring (copper), mirrors (signalling), seat belts (webbing), seats (foam, fabric, leather), jack, tools, first-aid kit, extinguisher, glass, tyres, petrol from the tank	Petrol, battery acid, airbags that have not gone off. Do not open up the steering column
Building site	Nails, timber, sheeting, insulation, buckets, spades, a barrow, wire, sacks	Collapses, open drops, protruding rebar
Allotments and farms	Seeds — the only find that multiplies. Tools, glass jars, greenhouses, wells, firewood, polythene	Dogs, neighbours, derelict outbuildings, old wells
Shops and warehouses	The obvious (tins, salt, matches, soap) plus the non-obvious: stretch wrap, tape, pallets, sacks, trolleys, shelving	The first place everyone goes. The danger is not the shelves, it is the people
Pharmacy	Bandages, antiseptic, saline, syringes, plasters, a thermometer	People. And one rule: never take or swallow a medicine you cannot identify
Offices and banks	Paper (tinder, hygiene, insulation), furniture as timber, water coolers (19-litre containers), extinguishers, cable, first-aid kits	Glass, and false hopes: there is no money there, but the paper is worth having
School, laboratory	Magnifying glasses (fire!), atlases and maps, sports kit, ropes, spirit burners, glassware	Unlabelled chemicals — do not touch them at all
Pipelines, substations	Metal, cable, valves, insulators	May still be under pressure and live even on a "dead" grid. The worst risk-to-reward ratio in this table
Landfill	Metal, glass, fabric, tyres, containers. Safer than a shop and it draws no competition	Cuts, infection, methane deeper down
Railway	Spikes and fishplates are good steel, and tools can be made from them	Sleepers are soaked in creosote: do not burn them indoors and do not build a house out of them

A tin can is the most underrated find there is

Из всего, что можно найти, металлическая банка особенно универсальна: это посуда, корпус для простого инструмента, отражатель сигнала и сухая ёмкость для мелочей. Перед нагревом убедитесь, что в ней не было топлива, химии или неизвестного вещества; внутреннее покрытие и краска не должны гореть.

A wood-gas stove from a canholes · draw · stand

1 The lower holes. Four to six of them in a ring right at the base — air comes in through these. Without them the can smoulders instead of burning.
2 The upper holes. The same ring just under the top rim: hot gas leaves, and that creates the draw. The difference between "it smokes" and "it roars" is only these holes.
3 The stand. A second can or three stones: the stove must not sit straight on the ground, air has to reach it from below.
! Do not cook in a lacquer-lined can the first time you use it — fire it empty on a strong flame for 10 minutes so the coating burns off, and only then boil food in it.

Cookware and stovePot, mug, wood-gas stove. A lid with the edge turned up is a frying pan.

A signalling mirrorThe base, polished with ash or sand, is visible from the air for miles (see "Signalling").

ToolsFrom the lid: a knife, a scraper, arrowheads, fishing spinners. The metal is soft — it sharpens on stone and bends by hand.

Сухое хранениеБанка с крышкой защищает спички, трут, лекарства и мелкий инструмент от воды.

An alarmSeveral cans with pebbles in them on a line across the approach — against animals and against people alike.

A trapA can sunk flush with the ground catches beetles and small rodents while you sleep.

A plastic bottle is the second most useful thing

Three uses for a bottlefilter · sunlight · trap

1 The filter. The same layered filter as in the "Improvised gear" chapter, but the body already exists: cut the base off, turn it neck down, pack in the layers. It does not disinfect — boil the water afterwards.
2 Disinfecting with sunlight. A clear bottle of clear water, laid on its side on a pale surface: 6 hours of bright sun, or 2 days under cloud, kill most pathogens. The method is known as SODIS and is recommended by the World Health Organization for places with no fuel. Cloudy water will not do — filter it first.
3 A trap for small fish. Cut the neck off and push it back in as a funnel. Bait inside, and the bottle into the water with a stone. It catches fry and crayfish, which make a soup.
+ What else: a bottle of water works as a burning lens (you need bright sun and very dry tinder); cut into a spiral it gives a strong cord; set into a hole in a roof and filled with water it lights the room like a bulb by day; buried, it is a drip-feed waterer.

Other things worth picking up

A car batteryWeeks of light from a bulb. Fire lighting: short it with a wire through a wad of steel wool or a thin strand — spark and heat instantly. The acid burns, and charging gives off hydrogen — outdoors only, with no flame nearby.

Copper wireThe best material for snares: a stiff loop holds its shape by itself, which cord cannot do. Plus hooks, repairs and lashings.

Seat beltsReady-made webbing rated to hold a person. One of the most valuable finds in a car.

A tyreПодошва для обуви, разрезанная — корыто и грядка. Не сжигать: дым токсичен, огонь трудно контролировать. Для сигнала используйте яркую ткань, зеркало, фонарь или разрешённый небольшой костёр.

Glass and lensesLong-sighted people's spectacles, a magnifier, the base of a bottle — fire from the sun in seconds. A shard is a cutting edge sharper than any stone.

SeatsFoam for insulation and bedding, upholstery for fabric, leather for cuffs, hinges and mending boots.

Engine oilТолько техническая смазка и защита металла от ржавчины. Не сжигать в жилье, не наносить на кожу, не пить и не использовать при готовке.

PaperTinder, hygiene, insulation (crumpled paper in wall cavities works as insulation), notes and counting the days.

Stretch wrap and tapeNot shelter but sealing: sealing windows and doors against a chemical or radiation threat, a cloche for seedlings, wrapping stores against damp, splinting a fracture. In direct sun ordinary film breaks down in about a month, and it burns readily — keep fire away from it.

What never to take. Unidentified chemicals and unlabelled medicines. Tins that are swollen or rusty inside. Antifreeze and coolant — they taste sweet and they are lethal; this is one of the commonest household poisonings there is. Screen wash — often methanol, which kills and blinds. Old asbestos sheeting — do not cut it and do not burn it. Sleepers and poles soaked in creosote — do not build shelter from them and do not burn them in a stove. The general rule: if in doubt, leave it. Poisoning with no doctor is not "a day lying down".

How finds change the tech tree

They do not raise your level, they shorten your timescales. Finding a pot saves you a week of making cookware, but you still have to know how to make one yourself for when the pot burns through.
The one exception is metal. Ready-made steel tools are a jump over a whole level: what the "Taiga" chapter needs bog ore, charcoal, a furnace and six hours of blast for is already sitting in a car boot.
Finds run out, skills do not. The city and the roads are a finite warehouse; a forest grows back. Build a way of living that survives the finds running out.

Applies everywhere · after Level 2

Improvised gear: building from what is around

Everything in this section is put together from what you already have after Level 2: poles, cord, stone, clay, hide. The general drawing shows what the thing is; the step-by-step build is hidden behind the "How to build it" button — open it when you get to the job itself.

The order people actually build these in. First the things that give you water and food every day: the well sweep and the filter. Then the things that save hours: charcoal, the pump, the wheel. And only then the bow and the bellows — they take weeks and dry wood, and you want to eat today.

The well sweep (shaduf) — lifting water almost without tiring

The simplest machine in the guide and one of the oldest: known from ancient Egypt, more than three thousand years old, and still in use in Africa and Asia. It is a see-saw: a bucket on one end, a stone on the other. The stone does nearly all the work — you only steer it. One movement lifts 15–20 litres (3–4 gallons) from a depth of up to 5–6 metres (16–20 ft).

A well sweep for waterpost · beam · bucket · counterweight

1 The post. Two stakes driven in crosswise, or the fork of a tree. Height: about one and a half times your own.
2 The beam. A long pole laid across the post. The pivot is not in the middle: the short arm goes to the counterweight, the long one to the water.
3 The bucket. A leather bag, a birch-bark box or a hollowed billet on a rope.
4 The counterweight. A stone or a sack of earth. Choose it so that it lifts the empty bucket on its own, while you push the full one down with light pressure.

How to build a well sweep

Choose a spot right by the water. The ground under the post has to be firm — on sand the whole thing works loose within a day.
Drive two stakes in crosswise to a depth of at least half a metre (20 in) and lash them together at the top. That gives you a fork. If there is a tree nearby with a suitable fork, use it — that is sturdier.
Find a straight pole 3–4 metres (10–13 ft) long. Lay it in the fork so that one third is on the counterweight side and two thirds on the water side.
Tie the pole to the post not rigidly but with a loose loop: it has to swing, but not slide sideways.
Hang the bucket on a rope from the long end. The rope should be long enough for the bucket to reach the water when the pole is down.
Tie the stone to the short end. Set the weight by trial: let go, and the empty bucket should rise on its own, but not with a snap.
Test the whole thing under load while standing to the side: if something lets go, the counterweight comes down hard.

Why it is worth it. Carrying water in buckets is the most exhausting daily job in a camp. A well sweep turns it into a few movements and pays for itself on the first day.

The layered filter — water stops being cloudy

Этот самодельный фильтр только уменьшает муть. Он не имеет проверенной микробиологической эффективности и не делает воду питьевой. Мутную воду сначала отстаивают и пропускают через чистую ткань или слои для осветления, затем доводят до активного кипения: не менее 1 минуты, а выше примерно 2000 м — 3 минуты. Химические, топливные, солевые и радиоактивные загрязнения таким способом не удаляются.

The layered filterbody · six layers · outlet

1 Coarse gravel. Pebbles the size of a fingernail. It holds back leaves, twigs and large debris.
2 Fine gravel. Pea-sized. From here the particles get finer and finer — that is the whole point of the layers.
3 Coarse sand. Washed, from a river, with no clay in it.
4 Fine sand. The main working layer: this is what takes the cloudiness out.
5 Charcoal. Толчёный чистый уголь из своего костра — not ash. Может уменьшить часть запаха и привкуса, но не равен заводскому активированному углю и не гарантирует удаления химикатов.
6 Cloth. It holds the charcoal and sand in so they do not wash into the clean water.
! Самодельный фильтр не обеззараживает. После осветления воду кипятят или обрабатывают проверенным средством по инструкции. Вода с химическим запахом, масляной плёнкой, солью или известным промышленным загрязнением непригодна даже после кипячения.

How to build the layered filter

The body. A plastic bottle with the base cut off (neck down) will do, or a birch-bark cone, a hollowed billet, or a trouser leg packed tightly with the layers. The shape is a funnel: wide at the top, narrow at the bottom.
Charcoal. Take burnt-through black coals from the fire, let them cool, and crush them with a stone to grains the size of buckwheat. White ash is no good — it makes the water alkaline and soapy to taste.
Wash the sand and gravel in several changes of water, until the water you pour off stops going cloudy. Unwashed sand will dirty the water more than it cleans it.
Lay the layers from the bottom up: cloth → charcoal → fine sand → coarse sand → fine gravel → coarse gravel. Each layer two or three palms thick, the charcoal can be thinner.
Put another piece of cloth or a handful of grass on top: otherwise the stream of water punches a crater in the top layer and the dirt goes straight through.
Pour slowly. The water should come through in drops and a thin trickle. If it runs in a stream, the filter is not working, it is just passing water through itself.
Pour the first half-litre away: it comes out with charcoal dust and sand. After that the water runs clear.

When to renew it. Если поток замедлился, появилась муть или запах, материал перебирают и промывают, уголь заменяют. Фиксированного безопасного срока нет: это предфильтр, а не сертифицированная система.

Быстрая версия: несколько слоёв чистой ткани помогают убрать крупную муть перед кипячением. Не добавляйте найденную грязную ткань, песок или уголь, если их невозможно промыть: они сами могут загрязнить воду.

The piston pump — the water comes up by itself

A bucket on a rope has to be hauled up by hand every time. A pump does the same job with a lever, and it can lift water not only out of a well but along a pipe into camp. The design is simple: a tube, a piston and two valves — little doors that open one way only. The whole trick is in them.

The piston pumptwo strokes of the lever · two valves

1 The body. A hollowed log, a length of pipe, thick bamboo. Inside it needs an even, smooth bore, otherwise the piston will let water slip past it.
2 The piston. A wooden disc slightly smaller than the bore, with a leather cup underneath: a circle of leather nailed through its centre, edges turned up. Pressed against the wall, that is what makes the seal.
3 The valve in the piston. A hole covered from above by a flap of leather. It lets water through upwards only.
4 The lower valve. The same thing right at the bottom of the tube. It holds the raised water and stops it running back when the piston goes down.
5 The lever. A pole on a post, as on the well sweep. It gives you force and a comfortable long stroke.
6 The spout. A hole in the wall above the piston's top position.
! The suction lift is no more than 7 metres (23 ft), and that is a law of nature rather than a matter of build quality: no pump of this type will raise water higher. In practice, with home-made valves, 4–5 metres (13–16 ft).

How to build the piston pump

The body. Split a straight log lengthways, hollow a groove in both halves, put it back together and bind it tightly with cord or raw hide — as it dries, the hide pulls everything solid. Seal the joint with pitch or clay. Easiest of all if you have thick bamboo: the bore is already there, you only have to knock out the node walls.
The piston. Cut a disc a finger's width smaller than the bore. In the centre, a hole through it a finger thick.
The cup. Cut a circle of soft leather slightly larger than the bore and nail or tie it to the underside of the piston at the centre only. The edges must turn up freely and slide along the wall. No leather? Several layers of tight cloth rubbed with fat will do.
The valves. Both are the same: a hole with a flap of leather over it, fixed on one side like a door on a hinge. Test each by hand: a finger from below opens it, from above it presses shut and holds.
Fit the lower valve into the bottom of the tube and secure it. The tube goes into the water so that the lower end stays submerged at all times: once it takes a gulp of air, the pump stops drawing.
Connect the piston to a rod, and the rod to the lever on its post.
Pour a mug of water in from the top before the first stroke. Dry leather valves do not hold air and the pump will not start. Wetted, they work. This is the one non-obvious detail that most often makes people decide "it did not work".

Test it by ear. A working pump makes a dull smacking sound from the valves. A whistle or a hiss means air is being drawn in somewhere: usually the joint in the body, or a cup that is not sitting against the wall.

The water wheel — work that goes on without you

This is the first machine in the guide that works while you sleep. The river turns the wheel, and through an axle the wheel turns or pounds whatever you like: grain into flour, bark into tanning grit, ore into powder. The point is not "electricity" but that the most exhausting handwork stops being handwork.

An overshot wheel with a cam shaftovershot · axle · cams · pestles

1 The launder. A split log or bamboo bringing water to the top of the wheel. Overshot is four times as strong as undershot: it is the weight of the water in the buckets that works, not the force of the current.
2 The buckets. Boxes around the rim, open in the direction of rotation. They fill at the top and empty at the bottom. The deeper the bucket, the longer it carries water.
3 The axle. A straight log through the centre. The ends are turned down and sit in bearing hollows of hardwood or stone; grease them with fat or soapy clay.
4 The cams. Pegs sticking out of the axle. Once per turn each of them picks up a lever and drops it — that is how rotation becomes a blow.
5 Pestle and mortar. The falling weight pounds grain, bark, charcoal, ore. This is the most useful work of all for someone alone: grinding by hand is what eats the most hours.
! Put the wheel away from the main channel — in a dug leat with a sluice gate. The first flood will carry off anything standing in the river itself, and a gate lets you stop the machine without taking it apart.

How to build the water wheel

Find a drop. You do not need a big river, you need a fall of water at least the height of a person: a small weir, a stream off a slope, a dug leat. A wide flat river with no drop is worse than a narrow fast stream.
Dig a leat off the channel upstream, and put a gate at the head of it — a board in grooves. That is how you switch the machine on and off.
The axle. Take a straight dry log as thick as your arm. Trim the ends into even cylinders. The bearings are forked posts with hollows, ideally lined with flat stone: wood on wood wears through in weeks.
The rim. Build two circles from bent withies or from joined arcs, mount them on the axle with spokes, and check that the wheel turns without wobble — otherwise it will destroy its own bearings.
The buckets. Nail or lash boxes of board or lengths of bamboo around the rim, all tilted the same way. Eight to twelve of them; more is not needed.
The launder should be set so the jet falls into a bucket just past the top point, not onto it. A jet landing squarely on the crown slows the wheel.
The cams. Drill or burn holes in the axle and drive stout pegs into them at different points around the circumference — then the pestles fall one after another rather than all together, and the wheel does not judder.
Let the water in a little at a time, raising the gate gradually. The wheel should start smoothly.

What breaks first. The axle bearings, from friction, and the buckets, from soaking. Check the hollows once a week and grease them, and replace a cracked bucket at once: an unbalanced wheel destroys itself.

In winter the leat and the wheel are drained, or the ice will burst the buckets and the rim. Taking it apart is easier than building it again.

The bow — a weapon you do not get to straight away

A bow is made not in the first weekbut after the workbench: it takes time, dry wood and a skill that takes months to build. Traps and snares feed you more reliably. A bow is for where the game is large and does not follow trails — the steppe, the mountains, the forest in winter.

A simple bow and arrowback · belly · nocks · fletching

1 The back is the outer side of the limb, the one that was nearest the bark. It is never touched at all: a cut fibre on the back is a crack, and the bow breaks on the first draw.
2 The belly is the inner side, the one facing you. Wood is taken off from here only, a little at a time, until the bend is even.
3 The nocks for the string. Angled cuts at both ends, on the belly side and the edges only — never cut into the back.
4 The grip. The middle does not bend: leave it thicker and wrap it with leather or cord.
5 The string. Sinew, nettle or lime fibre, or salvaged cord. The length should let a fist with the thumb stuck up pass between string and grip.
6 The arrow. A straight shaft, a head of bone, stone or fire-hardened wood, fletching of three feathers, a nock for the string. Straightness matters more than anything else.
! Never loose the string without an arrow on it. All the energy goes into the limb itself and the bow breaks — the commonest way to destroy several weeks of work.

How to make a bow

The wood. Best are yew and ash; elm, maple, acacia, juniper and hazel all work well. You need a straight piece with no knots, as long as your own height to the chin and as thick as your wrist.
Seasoning. Green wood bends and does not spring back. A split stave is seasoned one to two months in the shade, with the ends sealed in clay or fat so it does not check. That is precisely why a bow is not made in the first week. A bow from dry deadfall of a good species comes quicker, but it also breaks more often.
Rough shaping. Mark out the grip in the middle (a palm's length) and taper the limbs towards the tips, taking wood off the belly only. Do not touch the back at all.
Checking the bend is the most important stage. Hang the bow by its grip and pull the string down a little at a time, stepping back to look at the curve. Both halves must bend equally and along their whole length. Wherever a spot bends less than the rest, shave there, a hair's thickness at a time, and look again.
Work it up like that until you can draw to your chin. Haste here means a broken bow: nine bows out of ten break because someone drew harder than the bend allowed.
The string is tied with a loop at one end and a knot at the other, so the bow can be unstrung after shooting. A bow must not be left strung for days — it "tires" and loses power.
Arrows. Straight shoots a finger thick, dried and straightened over steam or warm coals. Fletching: three feathers split lengthways and bound on with thread. You need at least ten arrows: half are lost on the very first day.

An honest word about the result. Shooting a home-made bow at live game is a skill of months, not of a weekend. At first a bow brings in less food than ten snares set in an hour. Make it as a job for the future, not as an answer to today's hunger.

Bellows without leather: the bow fan

A fire gives no more than 600–700 °C (1100–1300 °F), while firing lime needs about 900 and smelting ore 1100–1300. The difference comes not from the fuel but from air: a blast raises the temperature of charcoal several times over. Classic bellows need tanned leather, meaning a successful hunt and weeks of work. The way round it is the same bow mechanism as for making fire, only with a blade on the spindle instead of a drill.

The bow fanbow · spindle · blade · pipe to the hearth

1 The bow. The same one as for fire-making: a curved branch with a loosely tied cord. A plain stick with a loop will do.
2 The axle. A straight stick with the string wrapped once around it. The upper end sits in a bearing hollow so the spindle does not wander.
3 The blade. A plate of bark, thin board or split bamboo mounted on the spindle. It works in both directions: air moves on the forward stroke and on the back stroke alike.
4 The pipe. A clay or stone tube leading the air to the very bottom of the furnace. Coat the tip thickly with clay — inside the furnace it is the first thing to burn away.
5 The furnace. A clay shaft packed with charcoal. The blast goes in at the bottom: the air has to pass through the whole bed of charcoal, not over it.
! Firewood will not do here. It has to be charcoal: it burns without smoke and gives three times the heat for the same blast.

How to build the bow fan

Nail or weave a box housing the size of a shoebox, open on one side with a hole for the pipe on the other. The housing is essential: without it the blade simply pushes air around the room.
Pass the spindle through the side walls. Make the holes slightly loose — a precise fit is unnecessary and actually harmful.
Mount the blade on the spindle — a plain flat plate the size of your palm. No aerofoil and no fan blades: those are good only when rotation is one way, and here it alternates.
Wrap the string once around the spindle and work the bow back and forth. Test: a hand held to the pipe feels a steady flow.
Join the pipe to the furnace at the level of the lower third of the charcoal bed and seal the joint with clay.
Work steadily and for a long time. A smelt means 6–8 hours of unbroken blast, and on your own that is the real problem, not the design of the bellows.

Once you have leather, make proper bellows: two wooden discs with a concertina of hide between them, and a flap valve in the lower one. They give twice the air for half the effort. The bow fan is the answer for someone who has no leather yet.

Charcoal — the fuel without which nothing above a campfire works

You need charcoal twice over: in the filter for water and in the furnace for any heat above a campfire — lime, pottery, glass, metal. It is made from firewood by taking the smoke and moisture out of it: the wood smoulders with no air reaching it, everything volatile leaves, and what remains is almost pure carbon that burns hot, steady and without flame.

A charcoal burnsection · vents · four days

1 The pipe. A well of logs, or the stake pulled out of the centre once the stack is built. The pile is lit down it from above and the smoke leaves through it.
2 The wood. Stacked upright, tightly, the big pieces in the middle and the small ones outside. Dry: green wood gives half the charcoal and a lot of trouble.
3 The covering. First a layer of leaves, grass or moss, and over that earth or clay a palm's thickness. The earth must not fall between the logs, which is what the layer of leaves is for.
4 The vents. Several holes right at the base. You control the burn with them: flame breaking through — close them; smoke stopped — open them a little.
5 Lighting it. Burning coals are dropped down the central pipe from above. The pile has to smoulder, not burn.
6 Smouldering. About a day for a pile the height of a person. You watch it the whole time, patching breakthroughs with earth.
7 Closing it. Every hole is sealed solid and the pile stands closed for 1–2 days, until it is completely cold.
! Do not open a hot pile. Let air into red-hot charcoal and you burn four days of work in minutes. It has to be cold to the touch: a hand on the covering feels no warmth.

How to burn charcoal

The site. Level ground on bare earth, away from dry grass and overhanging branches, downwind of camp — the smoke will run for a day.
The wood. Split logs all the same thickness, about an arm's width, knee length. The best charcoal comes from hardwood: birch, oak, maple. Softwood works but crumbles.
Stacking. Set a stake in the centre and pack logs around it upright and leaning slightly inwards, the large ones first and a second course of smaller ones. That gives a dome. Fill the gaps with kindling: the tighter it is, the greater the yield.
The covering. Cover it all with leaves or grass, and over that earth or clay a palm's thickness, leaving the central pipe and several vents at ground level open.
Lighting it. Drop burning coals and kindling down the pipe. When thick smoke starts coming out of it, plug the pipe as well, leaving only a small opening.
Watch the smoke — it is the only instrument you have. Thick and white means water leaving and everything going right. Bluish, thin, almost transparent means the wood has given up everything and the process is done. If flame appears, seal that spot with earth immediately.
Seal everything solid and leave it alone for 1–2 days. Only break the pile open when it is completely cold.
Finished charcoal is black, light, rings when tapped and blackens your hands, and the grain of the wood shows at a break. Put underburnt brown pieces aside for the next burn.

How much you get. A pile of firewood yields roughly a fifth by weight and about a third by volume. That is normal and it is the same for everybody: the rest was water and smoke. Plan your stock in advance — one smelt eats more charcoal than you would think.

A danger of its own. A smouldering pile gives off carbon monoxide, with no colour and no smell. Do not sleep downwind of it and do not check the pile by leaning down to the vents.

Generators, honestly

A coil of wire and a spinning magnet do technically make current, and a water wheel could turn them. But wire and magnets cannot be made from what is around you in the wild: copper wire has to be drawn, and a magnet has to be magnetised. Realistically, electricity is something you find: motors, loudspeakers and generators out of city ruins, a car alternator with a belt onto the wheel's axle. As a craft from nothing — no, and promising otherwise would be a lie.

While the shops are still open

What to buy while you still can

This whole guide is about managing without equipment. But honestly: five items make everything described here several times easier. They have one thing in common — in the wild they are all but impossible to make from scratch, whereas everything else is.

In English this set is known as the "five Cs" — all five words begin with the same letter. The list is well established among survival instructors and is built on exactly the principle our tech tree uses: first the things you cannot make yourself.

1

Cutting tool

A knife with a fixed blade, not a folding one. A folding knife breaks at the hinge — that is its weakest point. Blade 10–12 cm (4–5 in) long, spine 3–4 mm thick, plain carbon steel, which is easy to sharpen on a stone.

You can make a stone flake, but it goes blunt after ten minutes of work and it will not chop. A knife opens up absolutely everything: shelter, cordage, fire-lighting, butchering.

2

Combustion

A ferro rod (a ferrocerium rod) plus a lighter plus matches in a sealed bag. A ferro rod works wet and in a hard frost, gives thousands of lightings, and does not run out the way gas does.

The bow-drill method in this guide does work — but for a beginner it takes an hour or more and does not always come off. A ferro rod turns that hour into ten seconds.

3

Cover

A tarp 3×3 m (10×10 ft) and an emergency blanket. The tarp replaces two to four hours of building a shelter. The blanket weighs 50 grams and reflects your heat back at you.

Keeping your body temperature is threat number 3 by how fast it acts, around three hours, and in a temperate climate it is the one that kills most often.

4

Container

A metal bottle or pot — metal without exception, so you can boil straight on the fire. Plastic is no good for this.

Boiling with red-hot stones works, but it is half an hour of fuss per litre. A metal container removes almost all of the risk that comes with water.

5

Cordage

Paracord, 15–30 metres (50–100 ft). Inside it there are several thin strands — you pull those out and use them as fishing line, bowstring and thread.

Cordage from lime inner bark means several days of soaking. Ready-made cord saves all of that and unlocks traps, shelter and fire-lighting straight away.

What to add beyond the five

In descending order of usefulness per gram of weight: a head torch with spare batteries (hands free matters more than brightness), a first-aid kit with a tourniquet and dressings, a water filter with hollow-fibre membrane, a compass (it never runs flat, unlike a phone), a needle and thread, duct tape, a whistle — it carries further than a shout and does not wreck your voice.

The one rule for putting it together: a kit sitting in a cupboard at home is useless. It has to be in one bag you can pick up without thinking. Check it every six months: batteries leak, rubber dries out, medicines expire.

Water and food at home

The civil-defence standard is a store for 72 hours— the same three days this whole guide is built around: 4 litres (1 gallon) of water per person per day for drinking and minimal washing, plus food that needs no cooking and no fridge.

If the mains water stops, there is already water in your home that people forget about: the hot water tank (usually 100–300 litres — drain it from the bottom tap, having first set a gas heater to "pilot" and never running the element in an empty tank), the toilet cistern (the tank, not the bowl) provided nobody puts cleaning tablets in it, ice from the freezer, and the liquid from tinned vegetables.

Перед выходом проверьте набор руками. Фонарь включается, батарейки не потекли, фильтр не замёрз и не просрочен, аптечка укомплектована, нож и огниво доступны без разгрузки всего рюкзака. Конкретная марка менее важна, чем исправность и навык применения.

Safety hold

Chapter temporarily unavailable in English

Do not use the unfinished English draft for an emergency.

This chapter is being rechecked and still contains untranslated material. Use the current Russian chapter or follow local emergency-service instructions.

Open the current Russian chapter

Safety hold

Chapter temporarily unavailable in English

Do not use the unfinished English draft for an emergency.

This chapter is being rechecked and still contains untranslated material. Use the current Russian chapter or follow local emergency-service instructions.

Open the current Russian chapter

Biome · sample of the new structure

Temperate forest

watermedium

foodmedium

sheltereasy

techmedium-high

dangermedium

infectionmedium (ticks)

Migrate if things go wrong → taiga (colder, but more fuel and cover), steppe (if the forest is too dense/dangerous, open ground is easier to control).

Terrain: a flat stretch of slow-moving river (easier to fish, safer to drink after boiling) beats a fast mountain stream in the same forest (colder, harder to fish, but cleaner).

Если вы потерялись в лесу

Остановитесь. Сделайте несколько медленных выдохов. Если можете безопасно вернуться по собственным следам к точно известной точке — вернитесь. Если нет — не блуждайте: сообщите координаты и оставайтесь заметным.
Проверьте тело и время. Кровотечение, боль, промокшая одежда, заряд телефона, связь, погода и остаток света важнее поисков еды.
Выберите сухое место. Выше поймы, не в овраге, не под сухими или зависшими ветвями, не на корнях и торфе. Отметьте путь до воды, чтобы вернуться.
Сначала кров и подстилка. Тент или навес уменьшает ветер и дождь; толстый сухой слой под телом важнее красивых стен. Костёр нужен только там, где его можно контролировать и полностью потушить.
Подайте сигнал и подготовьте воду. Свисток, яркая ткань, сообщение с координатами. Прозрачная вода всё равно может быть заражена: кипятите или обеззараживайте.
Не уходите «наугад» перед темнотой. Перемещайтесь только от непосредственной угрозы: пожар, паводок, падающие деревья или разрушение укрытия.

До темнотыУкрытие, изоляция от земли, вода, сигнал и сухое топливо.

НочьюОгонь — только под присмотром. Без дежурного его гасят до холодного состояния.

Стоп-сигналСпутанность речи, шаткость, прекращение дрожи при холоде, сильная боль или кровотечение — вызывайте помощь.

Day 1, hours 1–2 — scouting

⏱ 30–60 minutes, no more — this is scouting, not work

A hollow, a ravine, or dense vegetation gives away water. Camp on dry, raised ground — not on a floodplain, not under standing deadwood. The main danger here is losing your bearings and the panic that follows, not an animal.

Day 1, rest of the day — cordage, fire, shelter

⏱ cordage ~30–60 min · fire 30–45 min (double that for a beginner) · lean-to 2–4 hours — usually the whole day's daylight

Three things, in this order. Cordage comes first because without it you cannot build a fire-bow, a shelter frame, or a snare. Each step is broken down below.

Linden

1. Cordage from linden inner bark

How to tell a linden: a leaf the size of your palm, heart-shaped, with an uneven base — one half starts lower than the other. That's the key sign; other trees with heart-shaped leaves have a symmetrical base. The leaf edge is finely toothed, and young trees have smooth grey bark.

Find a fallen or already-cut linden, or a thick branch. Never strip bark all the way around a live tree — it will kill it.
With a knife or a sharp flake, cut the bark lengthwise and peel off a strip about a palm wide and a metre to a metre and a half long.
Put the strips in water — a stream, a puddle, any container — for several days. The bark will soften and start to separate into layers. This is called "retting," and without it the fibre will be brittle.
Pull the softened bark apart into layers: discard the outer crust, you need the inner layer — the inner bark, which is soft and fibrous. Tear it into finger-wide strips.
Twist two strands in opposite directions: twist each strand away from you, then twist the two together toward you. Once released, the strands wind around each other and hold. Splice in new fibre by overlapping as you go.

No linden, or no time for retting — use thin spruce roots instead: dig up a pencil-thick root near the surface by the trunk, pull it out, clean it, and use it as is. It bends, ties, and holds. Faster still — strips of fresh willow bark.

Cordage by handhow to spot linden · bark layers · twisting · substitutes

1 Linden. The one sign that never fails is the uneven leaf base. Check that, not the heart shape — many trees have heart-shaped leaves.
2 Inner bark. The middle layer between the outer crust and the wood. Soft, fibrous, pulls off in strips. Brittle unmoistened, works after soaking.
3 Twisting. Each strand unwinds one way, then the two wind together the other way — that's what locks them and stops them coming apart. No knot involved.
4 Substitutes. Spruce roots and willow withies need neither retting nor twisting — use them when you need cordage today.

Bow drill

2. Fire by bow drill

The name sounds scary, the device is simple: a cord on a bow spins a stick, the stick rubs against a board, the friction sheds hot dust, the dust turns into an ember, and you blow the ember into flame. You need four parts.

Board — a dry flat piece of softwood 2 cm thick: willow, linden, aspen, poplar. Test: your fingernail leaves a dent — it will do.
Spindle — a straight stick of the same wood, thumb-thick, forearm-long. Blunt one end (for the board), point the other (for the handhold).
Bow — a curved branch as long as your arm, with your cord tied loosely to it. The cord should be slack: the spindle goes into it with a loop under tension.
Handhold — a stone with a dimple, or a piece of hardwood, that you press down on the spindle so it doesn't burn your palm.

Assembly and technique: make a small dimple in the board, and next to it cut a wedge-shaped notch reaching the board's edge — hot dust will fall through it. Put a dry leaf or piece of bark under the notch. Wrap the cord once around the spindle, set it in the dimple, press down with the handhold, and move the bow back and forth its full length, slowly at first, then fast and with pressure. When smoke appears, keep going for another dozen strokes.

An ember is not a flame. A black, smoking pile will collect in the notch. Carefully transfer it into a "nest" of dry grass, birch bark, or cattail fluff, and blow long and steady, holding the nest in your hands. It will burst into flame all at once — feed it straight into a small teepee of thin twigs you've built beforehand.

The bow drill, part by partfour parts · how the spindle goes in · where the ember is born

1 The notch is the part that matters most. A wedge cut from the dimple out to the edge of the board, about an eighth of the way round the dimple. Without it the hot dust stays under the spindle and never gathers into an ember — this is the number one reason people say it "doesn't work".
2 One turn of the string. The spindle goes into the loop so the string wraps it exactly once. Two turns and the string saws through itself; none and the spindle slips.
3 Keep the string loose. A tight string will not let you fit the spindle and snaps. The tension appears by itself once the spindle is in.
4 Grease the socket. A green leaf, a little fat, resin or earth in the dimple of the socket — so the top of the spindle slides instead of heating up. Only the bottom is supposed to get hot.
! Prepare the nest for the ember beforehand. An ember lives for minutes. While you go looking for dry grass it will die, and you will have to do the whole job again.

Birch bark

What to light it with: tinder

A birch is impossible to mistake for anything else: white bark with short black horizontal dashes, peeling off in thin ribbons.

Birch bark is the best tinder of the temperate forest: it burns even wet, because it is soaked in resinous substances. Take only the outer ribbons that have already lifted, and never cut a ring around a living tree. Scrape it into a fluff with your knife — like that it catches a spark instantly.

What else works: dry grass rubbed into a "bird's nest"; cattail down; combed-out fibres of the same lime inner bark; crumbly rot from a dry rotten stump. All of it has to be dry and fluffy — an ember will not take to dense material.

Debris hut

3. Shelter: a debris hut of branches and leaf litter

What works is not the "roof" but the thick layer of leaf litter: it traps air, and air is the insulation. A thin hut of bare poles gives no warmth at all.

Find a log or a fork at waist height. Lay on it the ridgepole — a straight pole a little longer than you are tall. The other end rests on the ground.
Lean the ribs against the ridgepole from both sides — branches at an angle, close together, like a fir tree. You get a frame you can barely fit into lying down.
Throw fine brushwood across the ribs — a lattice, so the leaf litter does not fall through inside.
Pile on top leaves, needles, grass, moss — a layer from 30 cm, better up to your elbow. The test: from inside you should not see a single gap of sky.
Stuff dry leaves inside underneath you at least 20 cm thick. The ground pulls heat out of you harder than the wind does.
Block the entrance with your pack or an armful of branches. The tighter it is inside, the warmer.

Not going to finish before dark? Build a lean-to: one sloping wall of poles and leaf litter, open towards the fire. It goes up in 45 minutes and saves you from rain and wind almost as well. You can finish the hut in the morning.

Level 1 · unlocked

🌙 Night 1

The hardest night — physically, because the shelter is still unfinished, and mentally, because fear and cold on the first night are normal and it does get easier; it is not a sign that you are failing. If the hut is not finished, do not finish it in the dark — sit by a small fire under whatever you already have, the lean-to or the frame, keep the fire going constantly but small. Do not leave camp in the dark for anything.

Days 2–3 — still the critical window

⏱ This is the famous "72 hours" — the FEMA and Red Cross standard: almost everything is decided in this window, and after it things get easier

The hut is brought up to a full layer of leaf litter. Water becomes a system rather than a one-off, using hot stones to boil. Snares go out, but the first catch is not guaranteed — that is normal, hunger is not the priority yet (see Part 1, the order of threats).

Level 2 · unlocked

If people are looking for you (you are lost, not hiding): in US national parks 85% of lost people are found in the first 12 hours and 97% within the first day, if the person stays put. For the first 2–3 days, staying near your starting point and signalling (the "Signals" tab) is almost always better than trying to walk out. If your situation is the opposite one and you need not to be found, the logic of the "Why you left" chapter applies, not this.

🌙 Nights 2–3

Шалаш уже уменьшает ветер, но проверьте щели и добавьте сухую листву или лапник снаружи. Дрова заготавливают засветло, чтобы не работать режущим инструментом ночью. Если нет бодрствующего дежурного, костёр перед сном полностью гасят: проливают водой, перемешивают, снова проливают и проверяют, что угли холодные на ощупь.

→ END OF THE 72 HOURS: if you have got this far, statistically the most dangerous window is behind you. From here it is Level 2 and the "workbench" milestone, without the same hurry.

Week 1 — stability

⏱ The rest of the week

Water and food are sorted (in detail in the "Food and water" tab). Snares get checked every 12 hours — that is background, not a separate job.

🌙 Night, week 1

A real routine appears: in the evening, boil water for the morning, check the snares, stack firewood, then sleep a full cycle (the fear of the first nights has usually died down by now). Still do not let the fire go out entirely — it is warmth, and it keeps curious animals off (see the "Threats" tab).

→ WORKBENCH: shelter, fire, knife, water and food are stable — you can slow down. From here the day splits honestly: half for building, half for rest, instead of nonstop work.

Weeks 2–4 — building up

⏱ No hurry

A bow of ash or yew. Tanning with oak or willow bark. Smoking meat over several days in indirect smoke. Firing clay where clay comes to the surface near water.

Level 3 · unlocked

🌙 Night, weeks 2–4

With a tanned hide and a stock of smoked meat, the night turns into a question of comfort rather than survival. The main task is not to let routine dull your attention: the same fire, the same check around the camp before sleep.

A month and beyond — settling in

⏱ Ongoing

A log cabin or a dugout for good. A garden once you are settled. Plant medicine — with the same caution as food.

Level 4 · unlocked

Animals

Bear (brown)caution

Make noise as you move — a bear sees poorly and hates being caught by surprise. If you see one, do not run and do not climb a tree, it climbs faster. Back away slowly, talking in a calm voice. If it makes contact: drop face down, hands locked behind your neck, legs apart, and lie still until the animal leaves. What to do: Do not run and do not climb a tree. Back away slowly, talk calmly, hold your jacket open to look bigger. If it makes contact — drop face down, hands locked behind your neck, and lie still until the animal leaves.

Wild boarcaution

Not dangerous in itself, but a wounded one, or a sow with piglets, will attack. Do not approach; give way. What to do: Give way and put a tree between you: a boar runs in a straight line and turns badly. Never get between a sow and her piglets.

Tickscaution

They carry encephalitis and Lyme disease — check your whole body after the forest and remove them within a day. What to do: Trousers tucked into socks, a full body check every evening. Pull an attached tick out with tweezers or a loop of thread, twisting as you go — do not smother it in oil. Watch the spot on your skin and your temperature for two weeks.

Adderavoid

Тяжесть укуса заранее не определить. Не трогайте и не пытайтесь поймать или убить змею. При укусе: вызовите помощь, оставайтесь неподвижным, снимите кольца и часы, держите конечность в удобном нейтральном положении и накройте место чистой сухой повязкой. Не резать, не отсасывать, не прикладывать лёд и не накладывать жгут.

At night: animals are more active but avoid noise and light — a fire keeps them at a distance all by itself.

Water

Where to get it: streams at the riffles, where the water tumbles over stones — it is cleaner there than in a still pool; dew off the grass in the morning, which you wipe up with a cloth and wring out; in spring, birch sap from a cut in the bark. Standing puddles and bog water come last.

Boiling with stones

How to boil without a pot

A birch-bark or wooden container will burn on a fire. So you bring the fire to the water, not the other way round.

Fold a box out of birch bark, pinching the seams with a split twig, or hollow a dip in a log. Pour in the water.
Heat fist-sized stones in the fire until they glow. Use stones that are dry, not out of the stream: a stone soaked with water can burst and scatter the coals.
Move the stones into the water one at a time with tongs made from a forked stick. The water will hiss and boil.
Keep it boiling for at least a minute, adding fresh stones. Take the cooled ones out and heat them again.

Boiling is required even for clear stream water: the organisms get in from animals upstream, and that does not change how the water looks.

Food: protein first, plants second

Meat, fish and insects are safer than plants for one reason: they cannot be confused with a deadly lookalike. Getting a plant wrong costs your life; getting your catching method wrong only costs time.

Snare

The snare is the most productive trap for a beginner

Find an animal trail: a narrow beaten path through grass or undergrowth, often with droppings and hair caught on branches. Setting one at random in the middle of the forest is pointless.
Make a sliding loop out of cord — a free knot that tightens when pulled.
Hang the loop over the trail: a fist across, with the bottom edge a palm's width off the ground. Tie it off to a peg or a bent branch.
Narrow the gap at the sides with twigs, so the animal goes through the loop and not past it.
Set a dozen loopsrather than one: only a small share of them fire. Check twice a day.

Your hands smell. Hold the loop in the smoke of your fire or rub it with earth — a human smell frightens animals off.

Even simpler than a snare: fishing, with a hook of hawthorn thorn or bone and a line from the same cord, and insects — grubs in rotten stumps, grasshoppers, ant eggs. Unpleasant but safe and nourishing. Cook them.

Plants you can eat without taking a risk

The list is deliberately short. It only includes what an inexperienced person can identify by one or two obvious features. Everything that takes experience has been left out of this guide — not because it is inedible, but because the price of a mistake is out of all proportion.

Nettle

The leaves sit strictly in pairs opposite each other, the edge is coarsely toothed, and stem and leaf are covered in stinging hairs. It stings when you touch it — and that sting is your proof you have the right plant. Boil 5–10 minutes and the sting is gone. Young tops are best.

Dandelion

The leaves lie in a rosette straight off the ground, the stem is hollow and carries no leaves, a broken stem gives white milky sap, and the flower is yellow. You eat the leaves, whose bitterness goes with boiling, and the root.

Cattail

Take it only when you can see the brown cigar-shaped head on top — then there is nothing to confuse it with. The rootstock and the white bases of the young stems are edible. It grows at the water's edge.

Acorn

A leaf with rounded lobes and a nut in a "cap" — recognisable at once. Raw, it is poisonous because of the tannins. Shell it, crush it, soak and boil it through several changes of wateruntil the water stops turning brown.

Dangerous lookalikes — the things that kill people

Two cases where the edible and the deadly grow side by side and look alike. Look at the difference, not at the general resemblance.

safe

Cattail with a head

If the brown head is there, there is no doubt. The leaf is flat and soft, with no sharp ridge.

never

Iris (flag)

The young spring shoots look like cattail. It never has a head; it has a large flower instead, and the rootstock is poisonous. The rule: no brown head — we do not touch it.

safe

Nettle

It stings, leaves in pairs, no umbrella of white flowers.

deadly

Poison hemlock and the whole carrot and parsley family

An umbrella of many small white flowers, the stem smooth, hollow and blotched with purple, with an unpleasant mousy smell. Deadly in a small dose. Edible members of this family exist, but only a specialist can tell them apart — which is why this guide bans the whole carrot and parsley family outright, with no exceptions.

Mushrooms are not in this guide at all. Опасные виды легко спутать со съедобными, симптомы некоторых отравлений появляются с задержкой, а готовка не обезвреживает многие токсины. «Тест на съедобность» для грибов, ягод и растений не существует. Ешьте только тот вид, который уверенно знали до происшествия.

Не проверяйте незнакомую ягоду на коже или во рту. Отсутствие жжения не подтверждает съедобность, а малая проба не гарантирует безопасной дозы. Если кто-то уже съел неизвестный вид, сохраните образец или фотографию и как можно быстрее свяжитесь с экстренной службой или токсикологическим центром; не вызывайте рвоту без указания специалиста.

What the biome gives you: wood (soft — willow and lime for fire-lighting and cordage; hard — oak and ash for a bow), bark for tanning and containers, birch bark, clay near the water, stone for flaking, bones and hides from what you catch, and charcoal from your own fire.

0Scoutingnothing built yet

nothing — just scouting

1Level 1 · survive todaycordage, fire, shelter

twisted cordage · stone flake knife · bow-drill set · debris hut or lean-to

Drawings and instructions

2Level 2 · workbenchwater, containers and food become a system

bark and wood containers · snares · figure-4 deadfall · bone hook

Drawings and instructions

3Level 3 · crafthide, pottery, putting food by

bow and arrows · tanned hide · clay pots · smokehouse

Drawings and instructions

4Level 4 · house and machinespermanent shelter and things that work for you

log cabin or dugout · garden

Drawings and instructions

You do not build a house because you are tired of the hut, but when the hut has stopped being the bottleneck. While you still spend every day on water, firewood and food, building will eat all of that and leave you weaker than you were. There is one sign you are ready: you have half a day free and nothing to spend it on. Until then — keep improving the lean-to.

Tech level3 — you need cordage, containers, fire, fired clay and some kind of chopping tool

SeasonStart in May or June. Clay will not dry in the rain and cracks in frost

Time on your ownA wattle-and-daub hut: 3–6 weeks. A log cabin with a real axe: a whole summer

ToolsA stone axe and a digging stick are enough for wattle and daub. A log cabin needs a steel axe

Size2×3 metres (7×10 ft) per person. Bigger is not warmer — it is colder and slower

Where to put it: six checks

You choose the spot once and it is expensive to change. Walk the site and check in this order:

Dry and higher up. A slight rise, not a hollow. The test: dig a spade's depth — if water appears in the hole within an hour, the spot is no good.
Water within five minutes' walk, but no closer than twenty paces to the bank: flooding, damp and mosquitoes.
Look up. Dead trees, cracked branches, leaning trunks within one and a half tree-heights — clear them or move. A falling branch breaks a roof, and a person.
Where the wind comes from. The blank wall faces the prevailing wind, the entrance faces away from it. Easy to work out: look at which side the trees have broken limbs and leaning crowns.
Sun. The entrance and the single window face south (in the northern hemisphere). That is free heating for half the day.
Materials to hand. Clay, stone, poles and water all need to be within a hundred paces. Every extra metre is one you will walk hundreds of times.

A house of wattle and daubsection · stone · frame · daub · roof

1 A stone footing. A course of flat stones round the perimeter, set a palm's depth into the ground. A post driven straight into the soil rots in 2–3 years; on stone it stands for decades — wood and clay must not touch the ground. Dick Proenneke started the same way in Alaska — he laid a gravel footing for his cabin from stone lifted off the lake bed.
2 Posts. Uprights an arm thick, dug in or standing on stones, every 1–1.5 metres. This is the skeleton; everything else hangs on it.
3 The wattle. Flexible rods — willow, hazel, birch — are woven horizontally between the posts. You get a lattice for the clay to hold on to. Weave from the bottom up, each rod passing in front of one post and behind the next.
4 The daub. Clay mixed with straw or dry grass and water is pressed into the wattle from both sides, a palm thick. The straw stops the clay cracking — and that is the entire secret of a thousand-year-old technology.
5 The roof. A pitch of at least 45° — on a shallow roof the water sits and finds its way inside. Covering: straw, reed, shingles, bark, conifer boughs — laid overlapping from the bottom up.
6 Hearth and chimney. Stonework laid in clay. A chimney is not optional, and not a "gap in the roof" but a flue: carbon monoxide has no smell and kills you in your sleep.
7 Floor. Beaten clay, or a deck of poles raised a palm above the soil. Bare earth pulls out heat and pulls in damp.
! You do not daub in rain or frost. Wet daub slides off, frozen daub cracks across the whole wall. Work in dry warm weather, and put the roof up before the daub, so the walls dry under cover.

How to build a wattle-and-daub house

Mark out a rectangle 2×3 m per person, with pegs and string. To check the corners are square without any instrument: the diagonals must be equal. Measure them with the string and move the pegs until they match.
Lay the stones round the perimeter: strip the turf, level it, set flat stones edge to edge. Check level with water in a dish, or a string and a weight.
Set the corner postsfirst, then the ones between, every 1–1.5 m. Tie them together along the top with a horizontal plate — this is the most important part: without it the frame folds like a house of cards.
Weave the walls with rods. Do not rush — dense wattle holds the clay, sparse wattle drops it. Leave openings for a door and one small window.
Put the roof up before you daub. Ridge, rafters every 60–80 cm, battens across them. The overhang is at least half a metre past the wall: it protects the daub from rain, and it decides how many years the daub will last.
Mix the clay with water and straw — with your feet in a pit, like dough. Mixed right, a lump holds together in your hand without crumbling and without running.
Daub the walls from both sides, pressing the clay into the wattle. Let it dry for 1–2 weeks, then fill the cracks with a second thin coat. Cracks will definitely appear; that is normal.
Build the hearth of stone laid in clay, and take the flue up above the ridge. The first fire is small and long: the stove is drying itself out, and a big fire straight away will tear it apart.
Floor, door, sleeping bench. The door is a woven frame daubed with clay, or a nailed-together panel; hang it on leather or wooden hinges.

The check before winter. Light the fire and walk along the walls with your hand out: wherever it draws, add clay on the outside. Build an earth berm — a bank of soil along the walls, knee high. It closes off the coldest place in the house, the joint between wall and ground, and costs one day's work.

If you have a real axe — then instead of wattle and daub you cut a log cabin, and that is better in every way except how long it takes. The logs in each course are laid butt-end alternating, the corner notches cut downwards so water does not run in, and moss goes between the courses. In 1968 Dick Proenneke put up a cabin like that alone in Alaska in a single summer, with hand tools, and lived in it for over thirty years.

Insulation: where the heat actually goes

Floor and the bottom of the wallsMore than half the loss. An earth berm outside, a thick bed or decking inside, and a sleeping bench at knee height rather than on the floor.

GapsIt will draw wherever there is a joint: door, window, ridge, corners. Caulk them with moss, nettle fibre, clay. Check with a candle flame or a burning splinter on a windy day.

CeilingWarm air goes up. Pile dry leaves, moss or earth two palms deep on the ceiling deck.

VolumeA small house heats far more easily than a big one. Make the ceiling lower than you are with your hand raised — that is not cramped, that is firewood saved.

Smoke, air and the door

There have to be two openings, not one. A stove or hearth with a flue and no air coming in will not draw: the fire pulls air out of the room, the pressure drops, and the smoke comes back into the house. This is the commonest mistake in home-made shelter, and it looks like "a bad chimney" when the chimney has nothing to do with it.

Air inAn opening the size of your palm down at floor level, next to the firebox, or a gap under the door, or a separate duct from outside running straight under the hearth. That last one is best: the air for burning comes from outdoors instead of out of your room.

The flueAbove the ridge, a fist across per person, with a straight run. A bent flue will not draw. You need a damper, but it only closes when there is not a single blue flame left in the coals.

Testing the drawHold a burning splinter up to the air inlet: the smoke should be pulled inwards. At the flue it should go up. If it draws the wrong way, there is too little air coming in, or the flue is cold — warm it with a twist of paper or birch bark.

Carbon monoxideNo colour, no smell. The signs are headache, nausea and drowsiness in everyone at once. If that happens: outside immediately, door and vent wide open. The vent in a dwelling stays open always, even in a hard frost.

Door

Opens inwardsOvernight, snow drifts against it outside, leaves pile up and branches come down. A door that opens outwards will one day not open at all.

Rebate and thresholdThe door should sit into a rebate or against cover strips, not simply cover the opening. A threshold a palm high cuts off the cold along the floor, water, and everything that crawls.

Hinges and barHinges — strips of leather, a wooden pin in loops, or a strap from salvage. For the lock — a bar on the inside dropped into two brackets: it holds incomparably better than any hook.

Keep the opening smallThe smaller the door, the less heat blows out and the harder it is for an uninvited visitor to get in. A low narrow entry is not an inconvenience, it is the design.

Against animals in the forest. Bears and boar do not come to the door, they come to the smell. Food, fat, hides and offal are not kept in the house: they hang in a raised cache — a box on posts 4 metres up and away from where you sleep, with the posts sheathed in something smooth. The door is solid and barred; the window is small and high. Boar are dangerous at night in the garden — put a ditch and poles around the beds. A line with tins on it across the approach buys you a minute, and that is usually enough for the animal to leave on its own because of the noise.

The general rule for any disaster: get off the line of the blow first, and only then think about your things. People die going back for a rucksack, documents and supplies. Things can be replaced; you cannot. The second rule: a disaster rarely comes alone. An earthquake is followed by aftershocks, a fire by collapses, a hurricane by flooding.

Forest firedeadly

The main threat of this biome. Fire runs uphill and downwind, and across dry grass faster than a person can run.
Signs in advance: a smell of burning that is not your fire, ash or flakes of soot out of the sky, animals and birds all moving the same way, a red glow at night.
What to do: не исследовать пожар и не пытаться тушить его самостоятельно. Сообщить координаты экстренным службам, выполнить указание об эвакуации и уходить по известному пути к дороге, воде, каменистой площадке или другой зоне без растительности. Направление огня меняется с ветром и рельефом, поэтому универсальной команды «вниз» или «поперёк ветра» нет.
Если отрезаны: немедленно сообщить точку, уйти от травы, кустов и деревьев на максимально большой негорючий участок и защищать дыхание от дыма. Канава в растительности не является надёжным укрытием.

Windthrow and falling treesdeadly

In a storm the forest becomes more dangerous than open ground. You do not stay in the forest in a strong wind. Get out to a clearing, a felled patch, an open low bank, and lie down. The dangerous ones are: standing dead wood, trees with a broken top, leaning trunks, branches hung up overhead. Survey the camp for these in advance, on a calm day — once the wind has started it is too late to be walking among trees. What to do: In a strong wind, get out of the forest into the open and lie down. Clear the camp of dead wood and hung-up branches in advance.

Thunderstormdeadly

Count the seconds between the flash and the thunder and divide by three — that gives you the distance in kilometres. Under 30 seconds and you are in the strike zone.
What to do: безопасного положения снаружи нет. Не останавливаться ради «позы от молнии», а двигаться к капитальному зданию или закрытому автомобилю. Если они недоступны, снизить риск: уйти с гребня и открытого поля, держаться подальше от воды, металла, скал и одиноких высоких объектов; в группе разойтись. Ждать в безопасном укрытии 30 minutes after the last thunder.

Flooding and rising watercaution

A river rises in hours, and in a narrow valley in minutes, from rain falling upstream that you cannot see. Put the camp above the line of old debris and grass caught in the bushes: that line is the mark of the last flood. Do not cross a flow deeper than your knee — at that depth the water already knocks you off your feet, and in muddy water you cannot see holes and snags. What to do: Camp above the line of old debris in the bushes. If the water clouds or gets loud, go straight up the slope, not along the channel.

Earthquakecaution

In the forest it is barely dangerous in itself — what is dangerous is what falls. Move away from big trees and rock outcrops, sit down in the open and wait it out. Afterwards: check whether cracks have opened in the ground and whether a landslip has undercut trees above the camp; expect aftershocks in the hours and days that follow, and they can be stronger than the first one. What to do: Get out into the open away from trees, rocks and buildings, sit down and wait it out. Afterwards, expect aftershocks and check the slope above your camp.

Tornadorare, but fast

The sign: a dark funnel from a low cloud, a roar, a sudden stillness and a drop in pressure. Move at right angles to the way it is going, rather than running straight ahead of it. Shelter is any dip in the ground: a ditch, a gully, a hole. Lie face down and cover your head with your hands. A car, or a building of light materials, is not shelter. What to do: Move at right angles to the way the funnel is going, lie face down in a ditch, cover your head with your hands.

Ground collapse and old workingscaution

There can be voids under a forest: limestone caves, abandoned mine tunnels and cellars, filled-in wells, old trenches and dugouts. A collapse opens instantly, and often under someone who has simply walked past it a hundred times.
Signs: round dips with steep edges, fresh cracks in a ring, turf sinking, trees leaning in all directions like a fan ("drunken forest"), a stream that goes underground and does not come back out. What to do: go around it and do not approach the edge — it collapses in pieces. Test a spot before you build on it: walk it, tapping the ground with a stick, and watch for sinking after rain. Never climb down into a hole you have found: carbon dioxide collects in enclosed voids, a person loses consciousness in minutes, and there is nobody to come and get you.

Nuclearinvisible, settles as dust

Chemicalhas a smell, flows downhill

Biologicalarrives with people

What makes a man-made disaster different from a natural one: you cannot see it. A fire and a storm can be seen and heard, but contaminated air, water and soil look perfectly ordinary. So what decides things here is not reaction and speed but knowing in advance what to do, and being willing to believe the disaster has already happened when everything around you looks the same as ever.

Three words that work for all three kinds of contamination

Time. The less time you spend there, the less you have taken in. Leave straight away, not after packing.
Distance. Every step away from the source cuts the dose, and cuts it fast.
Shielding. Any mass between you and the source: earth, logs, a wall, water. Dense beats thick, thick beats thin.

Nuclear — what the forest does

The forest both helps and hinders. It helps: a dense canopy catches some of the fallout, which settles on the crowns instead of on you. It hinders: those same crowns then shake it all down in rain and wind, and forest floor and moss hold contamination for years — which is exactly why forest mushrooms and berries stay dangerous longer than anything else after an accident.

The first minutes: get under cover — a dugout, a cellar, a gully, a pit roofed with logs and earth. Half a metre of earth cuts the radiation several times over.
Take off your outer clothing and shoes and leave them outside — that removes up to 90% of what you carried in on yourself. Wash your hair without combing the dust through it.
Sit tight for at least a day, better two or three: the most dangerous fallout is the first 24–48 hours, after which the level drops fast.
Water: closed and deep is safer than open. A spring, a covered well, a deep borehole — yes. Rainwater, puddles, a stream after fallout — no. A filter takes out some particles along with the silt, but it does not make the water clean of what is dissolved in it.
Food: tins and anything that was sealed are safe — wipe the outside. Later: avoid mushrooms, forest berries, moss, lichen and the meat of animals that feed on them — contamination builds up most of all along that chain.

Chemical

An industrial accident, a spill, a cloud on the wind. The signs: an unfamiliar sharp smell, watering eyes, a tickle in the throat, a metallic taste, dead birds and insects, dead fish in the water.

The key difference from radiation: almost all dangerous gases are heavier than air and flow downhill. So the behaviour is the opposite — go uphill and across the wind, onto high ground, not into a gully and not into a dugout. In a chemical cloud, a hollow, a cellar and a pit are the most dangerous places there are.

Breathe through folded damp cloth and close your eyes if you can. Once you are out of the cloud — undress, leave the clothes, wash with water and soap or ash, working from the top down. Do not rub your skin: that works it in deeper.

Biological: an illness that came from people

You will not be able to tell a deliberate release from an ordinary epidemic, and it does not matter — what you do is the same. In this sense the forest is the best place you could be: it is passed on by people, and there are no people around.

Distance instead of everything else. Do not go near people, do not go into settlements, do not take things from abandoned camps.
Water is boiled without exception, hands are washed before eating, and the latrine goes far from the water and from where you sleep.
Anyone who falls ill is isolated at once: a separate shelter, separate dishes, a separate towel, and one person looking after them rather than everybody taking turns.
Do not touch dead animals and do not eat carrion you find — not at any level of hunger.

General rule for this whole section: if you do not know what has happened, act on the worst case that explains what you can see. Erring on the side of caution costs you one lost day. Erring the other way costs you everything.

Two equally real paths, and they are not about "worse and better". Path A is what humanity went through for ten thousand years, and got through successfully. Path B is faster at the start and more dangerous over the distance: salvage runs out, skills do not. The clever choice is to live by path A while making use of path B.

Path A — with bare hands

You know everything humanity knows, but you have nothing except your hands and what grows around you.

The first year

Fire, cordage, a hut, snares — by the end of the first week.
Birch-bark and clay vessels, smoking, tanned hide — by autumn.
A house of wattle and daub — by the end of the first summer, if you started in spring.
Wintering with a store of nuts, acorns, smoked meat and firewood.

Three years

A garden of wild plants transplanted next to the house: sorrel, nettle, root vegetables.
Bow, arrows, steady hunting. Dried herbs, honey from wild bees.
Pottery firing, lime, brick — everything that is done at 900 °C (1,650 °F).
A hand mill, a water wheel on the stream, a shadoof.

The ceiling, and an honest limit

Achievable: a warm dry house, steady food, pottery, leather, nettle cloth, simple machines.
Not achievable alone: metal. There is no bog iron in a temperate forest, and without it there is nothing to start the bloomery process with.
Never: glass, electricity, precision mechanics. That is the work of a community of dozens, not one person.

The bottleneck of this biome

Not food and not cold, but solitude and injury. The forest forgives almost anything except a broken leg two days' walk from camp. Everything a lone person plans is built around not getting hurt.

Path B — on what is left

The same place, but within a day's walk there is something people abandoned. That does not cancel self-reliance — it only speeds it up.

What to look for here specifically

Summer houses and allotment associations — the great prize of the forest: seeds, tools, glass jars, greenhouses, wells.
Forestry stations and towers: saws, axes, cable, jerrycans.
Forest roads and abandoned machinery: metal, wire, belts, batteries.
Hunting cabins and ranger posts: stoves, cookware, salt.

What that unlocks

A steel axe and a saw compress the house from a summer to a month. This is the biggest single jump available.
A glass jar means preserving: winter stops being hungry.
Seeds of cultivated plants are the only find that reproduces itself.
Nails, wire, strapping — strength where cordage gives out.

The trap on this path

Summer houses and depots attract everyone — and it is the one place in the forest where you will meet people. Second: what you find makes you soft. Someone who lives a year out of tins can do nothing by the time they run out.

The ceiling by year

Timescale	With bare hands	On salvage
Year 1	House, fire, food for winter, pottery	The same in a month + preserving in jars
Year 3	Garden, bow, leather, lime, simple machines	Real tools, a greenhouse, a store of salt and seed
Year 10	A homestead for 2–4 people, everything up to 900 °C	The same plus metal — but only until it runs out

Protecting yourself and your family

On path A. The forest protects you by itself: you cannot be seen. Put the camp out of sight of paths and roads, keep the fire smokeless and at hours when it will not be seen. A trip line with tins around the perimeter. One approach you can watch, your back to water or rock. With children: agree in advance on a meeting place and on the word that sends everyone there without a sound.

On path B. Now there is something worth coming for: tools, food, seed. Do not show your stores and do not keep everything in one place — the main cache goes away from where you live. Coming back with finds, do not walk straight home and do not use the same path twice. Trade only by the "ladder of contact" from the "People" chapter, and never at your own home.

Children in the forest. Give them real work — brushwood, water, counting the days by the fire. Teach them two things before anything else: do not go out of earshot, and what to do if you do get separated (stop, make noise, stay put). Those are the same rules by which rescuers find 97% of lost people within a day.

Biome · the cold sets the clock

Taiga

watermedium

foodmed-hard

sheltermedium

technologyhigh

dangermed-high

infectionsmedium

Move on if things go wrong → forest further south (warmer and more plant food), the coast (if the river brings you to the sea — food is more reliable there). Going north is not an option under any circumstances.

The main difference from the forest: here the order of threats from Part 1 compresses. Everything goes into not getting cold — and that is what dictates what you do first, second and third. At the same time there is more material here than anywhere: firewood, bark, conifer boughs, resin.

Если вы оказались в холодной тайге

Не допускайте пота. Закройте голову, шею и кисти, но снимите лишний слой до тяжёлой работы. Влажную одежду защищайте от ветра и меняйте на сухую.
Остановитесь в защите от ветра. Не под сухостоем, снежными навесами и перегруженными ветвями. Сообщите координаты; если путь назад неизвестен — оставайтесь на месте.
Изолируйтесь от снега. Рюкзак, коврик, лапник, сухие ветви и одежда под телом. Не садитесь и не ложитесь прямо на снег или промёрзшее бревно.
Сделайте малое укрытие. Сначала подстилка и защита от ветра, затем безопасный огонь. На глубоком снегу костёр ставят на толстую платформу из сырых жердей, иначе он провалится и погаснет.
Получите воду без переохлаждения. Топите чистый снег с небольшим количеством жидкой воды; не ешьте снег. Горелка и костёр работают снаружи, не в закрытом укрытии.
Если человек путается, падает, говорит невнятно или перестал дрожать — это не усталость. Прекратите работу, утеплите центр тела, вызовите помощь и не оставляйте его одного.

До темнотыСухая одежда, толстая подстилка, укрытие, вода и запас топлива.

НочьюБез дежурного костёр полностью гасят; тепло удерживают слоями и малым объёмом укрытия.

Каждые 30 минутПроверяйте речь, координацию, пальцы, нос, уши и влажность одежды друг у друга.

The rule everything else starts from: do not sweat. The army's cold-weather reminder is "COLD": clothing Clean, do not Overheat, Loose and in layers, Dry. Sweat turns damp clothing into a conductor of cold, and it starts killing you instead of keeping you warm. When you work, take a layer off in advance, before you get hot, not after.

Day 1, hours 1–2 — scouting and one decision

⏱ 30–40 minutes. In winter you may have 5–6 hours of daylight left — count them straight away

You are not looking for water (there is plenty — snow, ice, streams) but for shelter from the wind and plenty of standing dead wood. Camp: the leeward side of a slope, dense spruce, but not under branches loaded with snow and not under a dead tree. The one decision of this hour is that you will not be sleeping on snow. Snow takes heat away several times faster than air; a bed of conifer boughs — cut spruce branches with the needles on — at least 20–30 cm thick matters more than walls.

Day 1, the rest — boughs, fire, reflector

⏱ bedding 40–60 min · fire 30–45 min (double that for a beginner) · lean-to with reflector 1.5–2.5 hours

The order is the reverse of the forest: bedding and fire first, shelter afterwards. Cordage: thin spruce roots, or the soft fibrous layer under the bark, known as the inner bark. Fire: the bow drill; for tinder, birch bark (it burns even damp) and runs of resin. Shelter: a single-slope lean-to with the open side to the fire, and behind the fire a reflector wall of logs or snow, which sends the heat back at you. A closed hut with no fire will not save you in the taiga in winter.

Lay in three times more firewood than you think you need, and lay it in while it is light. This is the commonest mistake: a stack that "looks like enough for the night" runs out around midnight, and the person goes out to cut in the dark, sweating and getting wet.

Level 1 · unlocked

Bedding

1. Bedding — the thing you build before walls

"Conifer boughs" simply means cut spruce branches with the needles still on. Take the lower branches of spruce or fir: they snap off by hand and it does the tree no harm. The needles have to be alive and green — dry ones shed overnight and stop working.

The point of the bedding is not softness. Air is held between the needles, and air is the insulation. Snow under you pulls heat away faster than any wind, and someone who falls asleep straight on it freezes at a perfectly survivable temperature.

Clear a patch a little longer than you are and tread the snow down — loose snow will settle under you and the bedding will end up on ice.
The first layer is thick branches laid across, like a grid. They stop everything else sinking through.
Then pile on the boughs curve upwards, needles all one way — that way the layers spring and do not mat down.
Keep laying until the layer is knee deep. It will compress under you by about two thirds — leaving exactly the 20–30 cm you need.
The test: lie down. If you feel cold through your back at even one point, add more there rather than putting up with it.

No spruce nearby? Anything that holds air will do: dry grass, moss, reeds, a heap of thin branches, cardboard, even a jacket stuffed with leaves under the small of your back. The only bad options are bare snow and bare logs.

Spruce

2. Cordage in ten minutes — spruce roots

How to recognise a spruce: the needles are short, stiff and sharp, and they grow singly out of the branch — not in bunches and not in pairs. The cones hang downwards like earrings. Pine needles are long and sit in twos; Siberian pine has them in fives.

In the forest you make cordage from lime, but that needs days of soaking. In the taiga in winter you do not have them. Spruce roots work immediately, with no preparation at all.

Step 1–2 paces away from the spruce trunk and rake back the top layer of moss and needles. The roots lie right at the surface; there is no need to dig deep.
Find a root as thick as a pencil and pull along it — it comes out as a long whip a metre or two long.
Strip the skin off it: draw it between your thumb and your knife (or just between two fingers and a stick).
A thick root can be split lengthways in two — it becomes more flexible and gives you twice the length.
Tie with it as it is. It dries and shrinks, so tighten the knots again a day later.

Thin pine and larch roots do the same. Faster still are fresh willow rods: you simply twist them until the fibres fray apart, and you have a withy.

Birch bark

What to light it with in damp and frost

A birch is impossible to mistake for anything else: white bark with short black horizontal dashes, peeling off in thin ribbons.

Birch bark is the best tinder of the north: it burns even wet, because it is soaked in resinous substances. Take only the outer ribbons that have already lifted, and never cut a ring around a living tree. Scrape a ribbon into a fluff with your knife — like that it catches a spark instantly.

What else works in winter: runs of resin on spruce and pine trunks — they burn like a candle; dry little twigs still on the trunk, which stay dry under the snow; crumbly rot from a rotten stump; dry moss from under the snow.

Prepare your kindling in the daytime and keep it inside your coat. Frost and damp take away your chance on the first spark, whereas warm dry tinder catches it at once.

Lean-to and wall

3. Lean-to with a reflector — why not a closed hut

A closed hut is warmed only by your own body heat. In a forest in summer that is enough; in the taiga in winter it is not. So here you build the open half of a house: one sloping wall, the fire in front of it, and a second wall behind the fire that throws the heat back at you. It works like a radiator with a reflector.

Tie a crossbar between two trees at waist height. Or lay it on two forked stakes.
Lean branches from the crossbar back down to the ground — that gives you a single-slope roof at about 45°. The open side faces away from the wind.
Fill the slope with conifer boughs from the bottom up, overlapping like tiles: each row covers the fixing of the one below. That way water and snow run off outwards instead of inwards.
Close the sides in as well — only the front, facing the fire, stays open.
The fire goes a pace and a half to two paces from the edge of the lean-to. Closer and sparks land on the needles; further and the heat does not reach.
Behind the fire, build a wall of logs as high as a seated person: two stakes each side with logs piled between them. No logs — a wall of packed snow or stones.

The check that you have got it right: sitting inside with your back to the slope, you feel warmth both in front and on your face from the wall. If the warmth comes from one side only, the reflector is too low or too far away.

The danger people forget: conifer boughs heated overhead dry out and flare up from a single spark. Do not run the slope directly over the fire, and glance upwards once an evening.

🌙 Night 1 — the longest night in this guide

At taiga latitudes a winter night runs 14–18 hours. This is not "sleeping through till morning" but a shift you have to stand: the fire is kept going all night, and sleep comes in snatches between feeding it. That is normal and it is meant to be that way — do not take it as a sign you have failed at something.

Fear and cold on the first night are an ordinary reaction and they pass. Practically: lie on your side facing the fire, turning over from time to time; do not put your feet right up to it (footwear dries out and cracks, and you will not feel a frostbitten foot in time). Footwear and insoles go under you or in the sleeping bag, not beside it: frozen boots cannot be put on in the morning.

Days 2–3 — the critical window

⏱ The famous "72 hours" of the FEMA standard. In the taiga in winter they are harsher: what decides it is not hunger or thirst but warmth

The lean-to is brought up to warm: gaps are packed with boughs and snow, and the outside of the walls is banked with snow (snow is a good insulator when it is outsiderather than under you). Water — melt snow in a container by the fire, do not eat snow: your body spends heat warming eaten snow, and heat is exactly what you are short of. Snares go out, but no catch is expected this early.

Level 2 · unlocked

If people are looking for you: the search statistics are unambiguous — someone who stays put is found several times faster. In US national parks 85% of lost people are found within 12 hours and 97% within a day, if the person does not move. In winter that matters even more: moving through deep snow means sweat, which means wet clothing. Stay where you are and signal (the "Signals" tab). If on the contrary you need not to be found, the "Why you left" chapter applies.

🌙 Nights 2–3

The watch at the fire continues, but a rhythm appears. Check three things before you sleep: firewood within reach, not ten paces away; socks and insoles dry; no snow on the bedding. Bank the fire — cover the big coals with ash and blow them up in the morning. If you have a companion, take turns on watch; that is the first reason it is worth being two.

→ END OF THE 72 HOURS: warmth has become something you control rather than something that happens. From here you can look further ahead than tonight.

Week 1 — from a lean-to to somewhere to live

⏱ The rest of the week

The lean-to turns into a half-closed structure or a dugout in the snow, with the entrance below the sleeping place (cold air flows down and drains away). A line of snares goes out on animal trails — in winter these are trodden into the snow and predictable, and that is the taiga's main advantage over a summer forest. Birch-bark containers appear, and boiling with red-hot stones.

🌙 Night, week 1

For the first time you can sleep rather than stand watch: a closed shelter with a reflector holds heat by itself. The evening routine is melting snow for the morning, checking snares, firewood, and drying socks over the coals (not in the fire). Smoke in a shelter is no small thing: always leave a vent open, because carbon monoxide has no smell.

→ WORKBENCH: warmth, fire, knife, water and food are stable. From here it is not a rush but settling in.

Weeks 2–4 — building up

⏱ No hurry

Dressing a hide with the brain of the animal you took (boil it, work it soft, rub it into the hide, smoke it over coals) — here that suits better than bark: conifer bark has little tanning substance, which is plentiful in oak and willow bark but almost absent in spruce and pine. Smoking meat. Firing clay. Skis or snowshoes from bent rods — in the taiga that is not a luxury but the difference between "got there" and "exhausted after a kilometre".

Snowshoes

Snowshoes: without them you get nowhere in winter

In loose snow a person sinks in to the knee and spends as much effort on one kilometre as on ten in summer. A snowshoe spreads your weight over a large area — and you walk on top.

Take two flexible rods a finger thick and as long as you are tall — willow, bird cherry, birch. Fresh ones bend; dry ones break.
Bend each into a long teardrop an elbow long and two palms wide, and lash the ends where they overlap.
Inside the frame stretch a lattice of cord or thin rods: lengthways and crossways, with a mesh about two fingers across.
Leave room in the middle for your foot. The binding is a loop over the toe and a strap round the heel, and the heel must be free to lift: otherwise you are not walking, you are dragging.
Test it: step on — the snowshoe should sink a palm's depth and no more. Sinking deeper means make them wider.

You will have to learn to walk on them. A wider stride and a slight roll, keeping your feet apart. The first half hour feels odd, after that it becomes natural.

Level 3 · unlocked

🌙 Night, weeks 2–4

With a hide and a store of smoked food, the night stops being a trial. The danger changes: routine dulls your attention. The same three checks before sleep, the same vent, the same stack of firewood.

A month and beyond — the only real metalworking there is

⏱ Ongoing

A log cabin or a dugout. And bog iron ore — rusty-brown lumps in boggy hollows, genuinely found in the taiga. Smelting it in a clay furnace with charcoal at 1100–1300 °C (2,000–2,400 °F) gives a spongy lump of iron with impurities, called a bloom, and that lump is then hammered for a long time to drive the slag out. This is how it was done for centuries in Scandinavia and in Rus. This is the only biome in the guide where Level 4 metalworking is achievable outside theory (see "Improvised gear" — charcoal and a bow-driven fan instead of leather bellows).

Level 4 · unlocked

The main threat of the taiga is not an animal but the cold and your own sweat. All the animals below put together will do you less harm than one wet night out. See "First aid" — hypothermia and frostbite.

Animals

Elk (moose)dangerous

It injures more people than bears do — large herbivores are underrated. Stay more than 25 m away, especially from a cow with a calf. Signs of aggression: ears back, hackles up, licking its lips. If it comes at you — unlike with a bear, you can and should run, putting a tree between you: an elk does not chase for long. Knocked down — curl up, cover your head with your hands, and do not move until it goes. What to do: Stay more than 25 metres away. If it comes at you, run — putting a tree between you. Knocked down — curl up, cover your head, do not move.

Bear (brown)caution

The same logic as in the forest: make noise as you move, do not run, do not climb a tree, back away slowly and talk calmly. If it makes contact — drop face down, hands locked behind your neck, legs apart, lie still. Note: for a polar bear (the Arctic) this rule is the opposite, and following it there is lethal. What to do: Do not run and do not climb a tree. Back away slowly, talk calmly, hold your jacket open to look bigger. If it makes contact — drop face down, hands locked behind your neck, and lie still until the animal leaves.

Wolfavoid

Обычно избегает людей. What to do: не убегать и не поворачиваться спиной; собраться группой, держать детей рядом, выглядеть крупнее, говорить громко и медленно отступать. Еду и отходы хранить отдельно от места сна. Костёр не оставлять без дежурного только ради отпугивания.

Wolverineavoid

It does not attack people, but it wrecks stores and takes catch out of snares — it is strong out of all proportion to its size. Hang your stores high and away from camp. What to do: Do not try to take a kill off it. Hang stores high and away from where you sleep.

Tickscaution

Warm season: carriers of encephalitis and Lyme disease. Check your whole body daily and remove them within a day. Inactive in winter — the one thing winter makes easier. What to do: Trousers tucked into socks, a full body check every evening. Pull an attached tick out with tweezers or a loop of thread, twisting as you go — do not smother it in oil. Watch the spot on your skin and your temperature for two weeks.

Water: the easiest of all the biomes — snow and ice everywhere. Two rules. Do not eat snow directly — melt it by the fire in a container. And ice is better value than snow: a given volume of snow yields about a tenth of that volume in water, whereas ice yields almost all of it. Running water under the ice of a stream beats standing water. Boil it anyway.

Melting snow

How to get water from snow without losing heat doing it

Snow you have eaten takes as much heat from your body as you will then have to put back with firewood and food. In winter that is a straight loss, and with hypothermia a dangerous one. Snow is always melted, however thirsty you are.

Put a little water in the bottom of the container — even a mouthful. Without it the snow at the bottom scorches and the water tastes of burning.
Add snow in small amounts and stir it in. A container packed full takes three times as long to melt.
If the container is birch bark or wood, heat it with stones from the fire (as in the "Forest" chapter) rather than over the flame.
Take ice if there is any: a potful of snow gives you about a finger's depth of water, a potful of ice almost a full pot. That is a tenfold difference in volume.
Boil it. Melted snow is clean of dirt but not of what blew into it, and river ice is simply frozen river water with everything that was in it.

Saving time: melt water in the evening for the morning and keep the container beside you inside the shelter. Water left outside will be ice by morning, and you will do the whole job again on an empty stomach in the dark.

Protein is the basis of the diet; there is little plant food here and almost none in winter. Snares on hare and ptarmigan trails in the snow; fishing through the ice; birds. Fat matters, not just calories — on lean meat alone a person weakens, a well-known affliction of northern expeditions.

Snare

A snare on a snow trail is winter's main provider

In winter the taiga feeds you better than a summer forest for one reason: animals tread trails in the snow and use them day after day. In summer you have to find the animal; in winter you simply set a loop where it already goes.

Find a beaten path in the snow — a narrow groove with clear tracks. A hare trail looks like a trodden channel between bushes.
Make a sliding loop from wire if you have it, or from thin cord. Wire is better: a stiff loop holds its shape by itself.
Hang the loop over the trail: a fistacross, with the bottom edge a palm's width off the snow. Tie it off to a bush or a stick pushed in.
Narrow the gap at the sides with twigs, so the animal goes through the loop rather than past it.
Set a dozen loops, not one. Only a small share fire. Check twice a day — otherwise a wolverine or a fox takes the catch.

Your hands smell. Hold the loop in the smoke of your fire, or rub it with snow and needles. And do not tramp about by the trail: a fresh human track next to the loop puts animals off more reliably than the smell.

What you can eat without risk of a mistake

The safe list in the taiga is short, but it contains no deadly lookalikes:

Lingonberry, bilberry, cloudberry

They grow on a low woody dwarf shrub, not on a soft green stem. That is the identifying feature: the growth form, not the colour of the berry.

Nettle

The leaves sit strictly in pairs opposite each other, and it stings when you touch it — that sting is the check. Boil 5–10 minutes.

Pine nuts

Siberian pine is recognised by its needles: they grow in bunches of five. Ordinary pine has them in twos, spruce singly. The nuts from the cone are eaten as they are, with no preparation, and there is nothing to confuse them with.

— the edibility test does not work on them, and deadly species grow next to edible ones in the same places. Any dark berries on a soft green stem, rather than on a low woody shrub, may be nightshades: herb Paris, mezereon. Go by the growth form, not the colour of the berry.

What the biome gives you: spruce and pine (boughs, resin, roots for cordage), birch (bark for containers and tinder, burns damp), larch (do not be alarmed — it drops its needles for winter, it is not a dead tree), Siberian pine (needles in fives rather than twos — it gives nuts with no preparation at all), charcoal from your own fire, bog iron in the hollows, bones and hides from what you catch.

0Scoutingnothing built yet

scouting · working out the daylight

1Level 1 · survive todaycordage, fire, shelter

bed of conifer boughs · fire on birch bark · lean-to with reflector · cordage from spruce roots

Drawings and instructions

2Level 2 · workbenchwater, containers and food become a system

birch-bark containers · melting snow · snares on trails · a hole through the ice · bone hook

Drawings and instructions

3Level 3 · crafthide, pottery, putting food by

brain-tanning a hide · smoking · skis and snowshoes · clay pots

Drawings and instructions

4Level 4 · house and machinespermanent shelter and things that work for you

log cabin or dugout · bog iron → iron

Drawings and instructions

In the taiga a house is not a luxury but a shelf life. A lean-to with a reflector lasts one winter if you stand watch at the fire every night. A house lets you sleep. The difference between them is not comfort but how much firewood and how much sleep — which in the end means how strong you are by spring.

Tech level3 — cordage, containers, fire, stonework. A real axe changes everything

SeasonStart in June. Building has to finish before October: you cannot dig frozen ground, and you cannot caulk with moss in a frost

Time on your ownA dugout: 2–4 weeks. A log cabin with a hand axe: the whole summer

What decides itNot the walls, but a stove with stone mass in it and the depth of earth over the ceiling

SizeThe smaller the warmer. 2×2.5 m per person, ceiling lower than your raised hand

Where to put it

A slope facing the sun, partway up it. Not on the top (it gets blown) and not at the bottom of a gully (cold air drains there and water stands).
Not under crowns loaded with snow, and not under dead standing trees. A winter spruce drops hundreds of kilograms of snow off a branch at once.
Not in a spruce stand on boggy ground. The signs: soft whitish moss your foot sinks into, low stunted trees, and water welling into your bootprint. You cannot build a footing or dig a pit there.
Water and firewood within a hundred paces. In winter you walk every metre of that through snow, and that is a different price.
Check the ground to depth. Dig down half a metre: sand and sandy loam are good, clay is tolerable, rock or water means look elsewhere.

A half-dugout with a stone stovesection · depth · courses · log ceiling · turf

1 The pit. Sunk to waist depth, no deeper. Earth below half a metre barely freezes and stays around zero all year — that is free heating. Digging deeper is pointless: cold air will drain down and sit there.
2 The courses. Logs laid round the perimeter of the pit one on another and tied at the corners. Between them, mosspacked into the joint. In the taiga moss replaces every building chemical there is: it does not rot, it stops draughts, and it takes up moisture by itself.
3 The log ceiling. A ceiling of logs laid tight across. It carries the weight of the earth, so take thicker logs than seems necessary.
4 Turf and earth. Two palms deep over the ceiling, grass side up. This is the main insulation of the house: more heat goes out upwards than through all the walls.
5 The stone stove. Dry stonework laid in clay, with the flue above the ridge. Stone takes up heat over the evening and gives it back all night — with one, you stop getting up to feed the fire.
6 Sleeping bench. A platform at knee height, not the floor. The coldest air is at the bottom, the warm air on top.
7 Porch. The entrance below floor level, with two curtains. It works like a plug: the cold stays in the pit at the entrance and does not get inside.
! A vent is required at all times, even with a stove and a flue. Carbon monoxide has no smell. The stove damper is closed only when there is not a single blue flame left in the firebox.

How to build a half-dugout

Dig in June or July, when the ground has thawed all the way down. Mark out a rectangle, lift the turf in slabs and put it in the shade — you will need it for the roof and it must not dry out.
Take the soil out to waist depth. Do not scatter it: heap it in a bank around the pit — you will add it to the roof and the walls later.
Tamp the floor and walls of the pit. Cut a channel along the floor sloping outwards and take it out downhill — that is drainage, and without it you get a swimming pool in spring.
Round the perimeter of the pit lay the first course on stones, not on soil. Then course on course, notched or lashed at the corners, with moss between the courses.
The ceiling: logs tight across, then a layer of bark or conifer boughs on top (so the earth does not sift through), then earth and turf, grass side up.
Build the stove before the roof, while you still have access from above. The base is flat stones in clay, the vault built by stepping the stones inwards. The flue goes above the ridge or it will not draw.
Dry the stove for a week with a small fire. A big fire on damp clay tears the stonework apart — the most galling mistake there is, because it does not show straight away.
The porch and the door come last. The door is low: the smaller the opening, the less blows out.
Before the snow bank the outside of the walls with earth and conifer boughs, and through the winter heap snow against them. Snow on the outside is excellent insulation, and it is the one building material that arrives by itself.

The quality check known to everyone who has lived like this: light the stove and walk round the house outside in a frost. Wherever bare patches have thawed in the turf or the snow, heat is escaping. Add earth exactly there.

Honestly, about a log cabin. A proper cut cabin beats a dugout in every way — lighter, drier, longer-lasting. But it needs a steel axe, the skill to cut a corner notch, and months of work. Dick Proenneke built one alone in Alaska in 1968 in a single summer — with good tools and thirty years of practice. There is no shame in starting with a dugout: that is how most of the first winter camps in Siberia were built.

The stove: the whole point of the exercise

An open fire gives no more than a tenth of its heat to the room; the rest goes up the flue. A stove with stone or clay mass stores the heat and gives it back over hours. In practical terms: instead of feeding the fire six times a night, one firing in the evening— and you sleep instead of standing watch.

Mass is what mattersThe more stone and clay in the stove, the longer it heats and the slower it warms up. For one person, stonework about the size of a large rucksack.

The flueAbove the ridge, a fist across, with a straight run. A bent flue will not draw, and the smoke will come into the house.

Fire it morning and eveningTwice for an hour is better than once for a long time: stone does not like sharp swings and cracks.

Never close the damper earlyWhile there are blue flames in the coals, carbon monoxide is being produced. This is the commonest fatal mistake in a house with a stove.

Smoke, air and the door

There have to be two openings, not one. A stove or hearth with a flue and no air coming in will not draw: the fire pulls air out of the room, the pressure drops, and the smoke comes back into the house. This is the commonest mistake in home-made shelter, and it looks like "a bad chimney" when the chimney has nothing to do with it.

Air inAn opening the size of your palm down at floor level, next to the firebox, or a gap under the door, or a separate duct from outside running straight under the hearth. That last one is best: the air for burning comes from outdoors instead of out of your room.

The flueAbove the ridge, a fist across per person, with a straight run. A bent flue will not draw. You need a damper, but it only closes when there is not a single blue flame left in the coals.

Testing the drawHold a burning splinter up to the air inlet: the smoke should be pulled inwards. At the flue it should go up. If it draws the wrong way, there is too little air coming in, or the flue is cold — warm it with a twist of paper or birch bark.

Carbon monoxideNo colour, no smell. The signs are headache, nausea and drowsiness in everyone at once. If that happens: outside immediately, door and vent wide open. The vent in a dwelling stays open always, even in a hard frost.

Door

Opens inwardsOvernight, snow drifts against it outside, leaves pile up and branches come down. A door that opens outwards will one day not open at all.

Rebate and thresholdThe door should sit into a rebate or against cover strips, not simply cover the opening. A threshold a palm high cuts off the cold along the floor, water, and everything that crawls.

Hinges and barHinges — strips of leather, a wooden pin in loops, or a strap from salvage. For the lock — a bar on the inside dropped into two brackets: it holds incomparably better than any hook.

Keep the opening smallThe smaller the door, the less heat blows out and the harder it is for an uninvited visitor to get in. A low narrow entry is not an inconvenience, it is the design.

Raised cache

A raised cache: stores away from where you live

Bears and wolverines do not come to the door, they come to the smell. As long as food, fat and hides are in the house, the house is the bait. A raised cache settles the question completely.

Choose two or three trunks standing close together away from where you live, fifty paces or so, and downwind of you rather than upwind.
Lash a platform at a height of about four metres — higher than a bear can reach standing up.
On each post fix a skirt: an upturned disc of sheet metal, bark or flat stone. An animal cannot get round it.
The trunks below the platform should be shaved smooth or sheathed in metal — nothing for claws to grip.
On top, a sloped cover of bark or poles to keep the rain off.

Butcher your catch away from the house too. Carry the offal and blood further than the cache and off to one side — the smell holds for weeks and brings animals in a straight line.

Against animals in the taiga. Bears and wolverines: the second is no danger to a person but wrecks stores, and does it regularly. A raised cache is essential, with the posts sheathed in metal or shaved smooth. The door is a thick slab barred from the inside. In autumn bears are putting on fat and come closer — keep a fire and leave nothing that smells against the walls. In winter the danger is a bear that has not denned: it is awake because it is hungry, and it is not afraid of people.

In the taiga a disaster rarely kills you with the blow — it kills you by taking away your shelter and your fire before a cold night. So here you judge any disaster by a single question: will I still have warmth by this evening. If not, that is the emergency, whatever it was that happened.

Crown firedeadly

A conifer forest burns differently from a broadleaf one: the resinous crown goes up whole, and the front runs along the treetops faster than along the ground, jumping firebreaks and small rivers.
Signs: a smell of burning, falling ash, a roar, animals and birds all going one way, a red sky at night.
What to do: go at once to large water — a river, a lake, a wide bog. Not a stream: it will not stop a crown fire. Go downhill and across the wind. In the water, stay near the bank, wet cloth over your face, breathe just above the surface — smoke is heavier and lies low, but the heat comes from above.
Do not try to outrun a crown fire through the forest. It is only outrun along a river or across ground that has already burnt.

Snow-broken branches and snow falling from crownsdangerous

After wet snowfall or freezing rain, branches carry hundreds of kilograms. Whole tops break off, and they fall silently.
What to do: do not camp under loaded crowns, do not light a fire under them (the warmth melts the snow and drops it on the fire and on you), and after a snowfall walk round the camp and bring down whatever is hanging with a stick. On days like that, move through the forest only across open ground.

Freezing raindangerous

A rare but extremely severe event: rain at below-freezing temperature ices up instantly on everything. Clothing becomes armour, firewood becomes glass, and the forest breaks apart in front of you.
What to do: get under a roof and stay there. Bring firewood, water and kindling inside beforehand. Afterwards, do not walk in the forest for a day: falling iced-up treetops are more dangerous than any animal.

Spring flood and ice break-upcaution

In spring taiga rivers rise by metres in a day, and the ice comes down like a wall, shearing off banks and trees. In spring, camp above the line of old debris in the bushes , and not on an island or a spit. Do not walk on spring ice at all — it is rotten inside while looking perfectly sound. What to do: In spring do not camp on the floodplain, on an island or on a spit. Do not walk on spring ice at all.

Storm and windthrowcaution

In a storm you leave the forest for open ground — a clear-cut, a glade, a frozen lake — and wait it out lying down. Assess the camp in advance: dead standing timber, leaning trunks and hung-up branches within one and a half tree-heights get cleared, or you move the camp. What to do: Get out of the forest into the open and lie down. Weigh down or bury anything light.

Earthquakerare

The shaking itself is almost harmless in the taiga. The consequences are dangerous: landslips on slopes, rivers dammed by debris (water builds up behind the blockage, then breaks through all at once), collapses in the permafrost. After the shocks, get off the slope and away from the channel, and expect aftershocks. What to do: Get out into the open away from trees, rocks and buildings, sit down and wait it out. Afterwards, expect aftershocks and check the slope above your camp.

Collapses in thawing permafrostcaution

Thawing permafrost sinks unevenly: pits appear, saucer-shaped lakes, and whole collapses. It is a slow process, but the edge can give way instantly.
Signs: "drunken forest" — trees leaning in all directions; mounds with a crack along the top; freshly collapsed stream banks; water standing where there was none before. What to do: do not build a house or dig a dugout on leaning forest or on mounds with cracks — over a summer the structure will be torn apart. In spring and in a thaw, go round fresh subsidence, and do not walk along the edge of stream banks. Separately: things the permafrost has kept for decades come out of animal carcasses as they thaw — do not touch them (see the "Contamination" tab).

Nuclearinvisible, settles as dust

Chemicalhas a smell, flows downhill

Biologicalarrives with people

A man-made disaster neither smells nor looks like a disaster. Air, water and snow look perfectly ordinary after contamination. What works here is not reaction but a decision taken in advance to act on the worst case if something does not add up.

Three words common to every kind of contamination

Time — leave straight away, not after packing.
Distance — every step away from the source cuts the dose.
Shielding — any mass between you and the source: earth, logs, snow, water.

Nuclear: why the taiga is not the worst place to be

The taiga has a rare advantage: you already know how to build a dugout, and half a metre of earth overhead cuts the radiation several times over. A half-dugout with a log ceiling and turf is a ready-made fallout shelter, and it is built from exactly what you were building it from anyway.

Snow is shielding too, though weaker than earth: a drift or a snow bank around the shelter adds noticeably. Fresh snow over old, conversely, covers what has fallen and cuts the dust.
Take off outer clothing and footwear at the entrance — that removes up to 90% of what you carried in. Do not bring them inside.
At least a day inside, better two or three: fallout peaks in the first 24–48 hours.
Water: melt deep snow from under the top layer, not the fresh surface snow, and take water from under the ice rather than off the surface. A spring beats a stream.
Food: the taiga's main danger is accumulation. Mushrooms, berries, moss and lichen take up contamination most of all, and reindeer and elk feed on reindeer moss and build it up in their meat. After the Chernobyl accident it was precisely forest mushrooms and berries that stayed unusable longest of all. Switch to fish from running water and to tinned food if you have any.

Chemical

Signs: a sharp unfamiliar smell, watering eyes, a tickle in the throat, a metallic taste, dead birds, fish floating belly-up.

Here everything is the other way round compared with radiation. Most dangerous gases are heavier than air and flow down into hollows. Which means a dugout, a cellar, a gully and a hollow are the most dangerous places, and safety is uphill and across the wind. In winter this is especially treacherous: cold air already sits in the low ground, and the cloud lingers there longer.

Breathe through damp cloth, eyes closed. Once out — undress, leave the clothing outside, wash with water and ash from the top down, without rubbing the skin.

Biological

The taiga protects you better than any shelter — simply because there is nobody here. Contamination is carried by people, so distance is the whole of the tactics.

Do not go near people or dwellings, and do not take things from abandoned camps and winter cabins.
Boil water without exception, wash your hands, and put the latrine far from the water.
Anyone who falls ill goes into a separate shelter, with separate dishes, and one person looking after them.
Do not touch dead animals. The taiga has its own animal-borne diseases quite apart from any war: anthrax survives in old cattle burial grounds and in thawing permafrost for decades.

If you do not know what has happened, act on the worst explanation. An extra day in shelter costs you a day. A mistake the other way cannot be undone.

The taiga is the only biome in this guide where path A reaches metal. Bog iron, charcoal and wood lie here together, and that changes the ceiling: what is marked unachievable in the other chapters is possible here — at the price of years and with a very high chance of failure.

Path A — with bare hands

You know everything humanity knows, but you have nothing except your hands and what grows around you.

The first year

Bedding, reflector, fire on birch bark — the first day.
Birch-bark containers, snares on snow trails, fishing through the ice — the first month.
A half-dugout with a stone stove — before the first hard frosts, if you started in summer.
Brain-tanning a hide, smoking, skis. Wintering not as an ordeal but as a routine.

Three years

A log cabin, if you have got hold of a real axe; otherwise a dugout brought up to dry and warm.
Putting food by as a system: smoking, drying, an ice store in the permafrost.
Firing clay, lime, charcoal in heaps.
First attempts at smelting bog iron. The first five fail; that is normal.

The ceiling, and an honest limit

Achievable: warm shelter, steady protein and fat, leather and fur clothing, pottery.
Achievable with a caveat: iron. From 20–50 kg of ore you get 2–5 kg of that lump, the smelt runs 6–8 hours and needs continuous air. A lone experimenter has spent years on this and ended up with grains a millimetre across.
Honestly: on your own, metal is years of work for one knife. With a partner it is realistic.

The bottleneck of this biome

Daylight and fuel. In winter you have 5–6 working hours, and anything not laid in during the autumn will not appear in winter. The taiga is generous with material and mean with time.

Path B — on what is left

The same place, but within a day's walk there is something people abandoned. That does not cancel self-reliance — it only speeds it up.

What to look for here specifically

Abandoned logging settlements and winter cabins — stoves, flue pipe, saws, cable, nails, glass.
Machinery on the cutting sites: metal, diesel, batteries, track links.
Geological survey bases: maps, tools, paraffin, drums.
Winter roads and abandoned lorries: belts, wire, jerrycans.

What that unlocks

A ready-made stove pipe and a sheet of iron cancel half the problems of wintering.
A saw changes the scale: a log cabin becomes a matter of weeks rather than a summer.
A drum = a smokehouse, a water butt, a stove.
Metal you do not have to smelt yourself is years of saved life.

The trap on this path

Distances. In the taiga the nearest abandoned settlement can be three days away through snow, and the journey in winter costs more than the find. Judge it not by "what is there" but by "will I get back with a load".

The ceiling by year

Timescale	With bare hands	On salvage
Year 1	A dugout with a stove, food and firewood for winter	The same in a month + an iron stove and flue
Year 3	A log cabin or a warm dugout, leather, pottery, charcoal	Saw and axe: cabin, bathhouse, ice store
Year 10	Possibly the first iron made with your own hands	A workshop built on found metal

Protecting yourself and your family

On path A. The taiga hides you better than any biome. The main protection is not being found: camp away from rivers and winter roads (people travel those), smoke only at dawn and dusk, and do not wear a path to your door. In winter your tracks are an open book: come back along your own trail and loop about before you turn in towards home.

On path B. Abandoned settlements are places where people with the same idea are waiting. Go in during the morning, look them over from outside, and do not stay the night. Tracks in the snow give away both you and them — read them, and leave if they are fresh. Keep your main store somewhere other than the house.

Children in the taiga. Cold gives no second chance, so the rules are simple and repeated: do not sweat, do not go off without an adult, do not eat snow, dry your socks every evening. Give a child their own job at the fire — it occupies them, it teaches them, and it keeps them in sight.

Biome · the day is turned upside down

Desert

watervery hard

foodhard

sheltermedium

technologymedium

dangereasy to medium

infectionseasy

Move on if things go wrong → down a dry watercourse towards any greenery; the coast, if it is less than a day away. Going deeper into the sand is not an option under any circumstances.

This is the one biome where the order set out in Part 1 is rewritten: water moves from fourth place to first and overtakes even shelter — because here shelter is the way you avoid losing water.

Если вы оказались в пустыне

Прекратите движение в жару. Перейдите в доступную тень, снимите рюкзак, ослабьте лишнюю одежду, но закройте кожу и голову от солнца. Не расходуйте воду на самодельный солнечный опреснитель.
Сообщите точку. Передайте координаты, направление маршрута, состояние людей и запас воды. Оставайтесь у автомобиля или другой заметной точки, если рядом нет непосредственной угрозы.
Охлаждайтесь до поиска воды. Тень, покой, движение воздуха, влажная ткань на кожу. Пейте небольшими регулярными глотками; не откладывайте питьё только ради сохранения запаса.
Подготовьте ночь. Укрытие от ветра и холодной земли, заметный сигнал, обувь и фонарь рядом. Перемещение — только по известному маршруту, на рассвете или после спада жары.
Еду отложите. Не ешьте солёное и тяжёлое без достаточной воды. Не пробуйте неизвестные кактусы, соки и растения: голод в первые дни не является главной угрозой.
Спутанность сознания, невнятная речь, судороги или потеря сознания означают тепловой удар. Срочно вызывайте помощь и активно охлаждайте человека; пить бессознательному нельзя.

ДнёмТень, покой, связь и охлаждение. Не искать выход по миражу.

НочьюЗащита от ветра и холода; маршрут не начинать без направления и запаса воды.

КонтрольМочеиспускание, головная боль, тошнота, речь и координация — признаки ухудшения.

Two rules that matter more than everything else in this chapter.
First: do not ration water — ration sweat. A common and dangerous myth is to stretch your supply out in small sips. A dehydrated brain makes bad decisions, and water in a bottle has never saved anyone. If you are thirsty, drink. What you have to save is sweat: shade, staying still by day, keeping your clothes on (they slow evaporation and shield you from the sun). Shade during the hot hours can halve your daily water requirement.
Second: do not move by day, work by night. Everything that in other biomes is done in daylight moves here to dusk and darkness.

Hour 1 — shade, and nothing but shade

⏱ Immediately. Here it is hours that count, not days

Reconnaissance can wait. The first thing to do is get out of direct sun: a rock overhang, a gully, a bush, or at worst a stretched piece of cloth. Get yourself up off the ground by at least 20–30 cm (8–12 in) — stones, branches, a rucksack: baking sand heats you from below more than the air does from above. If you have got out of a vehicle, stay with the vehicle: it is visible from the air, it gives shade, and it is a large landmark for anyone searching.

Level 1 · unlocked

Dusk of day 1 — reconnaissance and water

⏱ The first 1.5–2 hours after the heat drops

Now you can move. Look for water in order of likelihood: dry watercourses (dig on the outside of a bend, where the current used to undercut the bank — moisture holds there longest), converging animal trails, a patch of thicker or greener vegetation, the foot of rocks and dunes. At the same time, pick out a camp site: not in the bed of a watercourse — the risk of a flood from rain that fell tens of kilometres away is rare but real.

🌙 Night 1 — this is a working shift, not a rest

The swing between day and night temperature in a desert reaches 20 °C (36 °F) or more, and the night is unexpectedly cold — many people are not ready for it. That is why night is the profitable time to work: dig, build, walk. Moving keeps you warm, and your water loss is a fraction of what it would be by day.

Shelter here solves two problems at once: shade by day, warmth by night. The practical form is a trench: a hollow dug into the ground with a cover over it. By day it gives shade and the coolness of the earth; by night it shields you from wind and gives back the heat it stored.

Days 2–3 — the critical window, but counted differently

⏱ The "72 hours" mean something else here: without water, people usually do not reach that mark

Daytime: lie in the shade and move as little as possible. Dusk and night: work — enlarge the shelter, check the watercourses, set traps by burrows and at the watering place. If you find a source, drink your fill on the spotbefore you fill any containers: a person carries more water inside themselves than in any improvised vessel.

If people are looking for you: stay where you are and make yourself visible — in a desert this works better than anywhere: the view is enormous, and any man-made outline on a flat background shows from far off. Lay out a sign at least 3 metres (10 ft) across in stones or branches, and keep a mirror ready (see "Signalling"). Setting off on foot hoping to "walk out" is the commonest cause of death in a desert.

🌙 Nights 2–3

Working at night settles into a rhythm: gathering fuel (dry stems, scrub, dung), deepening the trench, collecting condensation. A fire is needed less for warmth than for cooking and signalling — fuel is scarce, so burn it sparingly. Shake out your boots and belongings in the evening and put them away closed: scorpions and snakes go looking for warmth and cover at night, and they find both in your boots.

→ END OF THE 72 HOURS: you have a repeatable source of water and a shelter that works in both halves of the day. From here the desert becomes predictable.

Week 1 — water as a system

⏱ The rest of the week

Появляются верёвка, закрываемая тара и понятная система сигналов. Режим окончательно устоялся: активность в прохладные часы, день — в тени. Самодельный солнечный конденсатор не включайте в расчёт воды.

Yucca

Cordage from yucca leaves

How to recognise yucca: stiff narrow leaves like daggers, growing in a bunch straight from the ground — no trunk, spreading in every direction. Each leaf ends in a hard sharp spine that pricks easily. Do not confuse it with aloe: an aloe leaf is thick and fleshy, and if you break it there is clear gel inside. Or with agave: that grows in the same kind of bunch, but the leaves are broader and thicker, with widely spaced large teeth along the edge. Yucca leaves have a smooth edge and are flat and thin.

Inside the leaf are strong fibres — rather like the tough strings that pull out of a celery stalk, only stronger. The whole job is scraping the green pulp off them.

Cut one or two outer leaves right at the base — they are older and give more fibre. Keep your hands well away from the spine at the tip. Cut off the spine and the dry tip straight away.
Lay the leaf on a stone and go along its whole length several times with another stone or a stick, beating it. The pulp inside cracks and comes away more easily after that.
Lay the beaten leaf on a flat stone. With the blunt edge of another stone or a broken stick, scrape from one end to the other with pressure — the way you peel with a knife. Turn it over and repeat on the other side.
When almost no green is left, you are holding a bundle of pale fibres. Rinse it in water and squeeze it out.
Lay the fibres out to dry in the shade for an hour or two. In direct sun they over-dry and become brittle. Slightly damp fibres twist more easily than dry ones.

How fibres become cord. Divide the fibres into two strands the thickness of a pencil. Twist each strand separately the same way — away from you, say. Then lay the two side by side and twist them around each other the opposite way — towards you. Let go now and the strands will lay themselves into a spiral and hold without any knot. That is your cord. When a strand runs out, overlap a new bundle by a palm's width and keep twisting — that is how you make any length you like.

Test it: before you trust the cord with anything important, tie an offcut to a branch and hang your whole weight on it. It should hold without pulling apart into separate fibres. Time (roughly): one leaf takes 15–30 minutes including drying, and a metre of cord needs about 3–5 leaves.

Level 2 · unlocked

🌙 Night, week 1

Night becomes the main part of the day. Navigating by the stars is more reliable here than in a forest: the sky is open and the horizon clear. But remember the other side of all that openness — at night you are visible from far away too, if that matters (see "Why you left").

→ WORKBENCH: water is stable, the shelter handles both temperatures, and you have a cutting tool and fire.

Weeks 2–4 — adobe

⏱ No hurry

Housing: adobe: clay, straw and water in a wooden mould, dried in the sun (a few days flat, then 2–4 weeks on edge). It needs neither firing nor fuel — which is exactly why people have built with it in dry regions for centuries. Walls 25–30 cm (10–12 in) thick give you what no awning can: they warm so slowly that the day's heat only reaches the inside by night, when it is already cold outside.

Level 3 · unlocked

A month and beyond — drying meat

⏱ Ongoing

The one biome in this guide where sun-drying is faster and more reliable than smoking: thin strips of meat (under 3 mm, with the fat trimmed off because it goes rancid) on a rack in dry hot air are dry in 6–16 hours. The drawback is dust and insects, so a little smoke from coals nearby is safer than pure sun.

Level 4 · unlocked

The main threat is the sun and dehydration, not animals. Heatstroke develops within hours and it kills; see "First aid". The sign after which it becomes a matter of minutes is confusion.

Animals

Scorpionscaution

Прячутся в обуви, одежде, спальнике, под камнями. Вытряхивайте вещи перед использованием и не кладите руку в невидимую щель. При ужалении: промойте место водой с мылом, приложите прохладный компресс через ткань и свяжитесь с экстренной службой или токсикологическим центром. Нарушение дыхания, судороги, выраженная слабость или ужаление ребёнка требуют срочной помощи.

Snakescaution

Смотрите, куда ставите ногу и кладёте руку; не пытайтесь поймать или убить змею. При укусе: вызовите помощь, оставайтесь неподвижным, снимите кольца и часы, держите конечность в удобном нейтральном положении и накройте место чистой сухой повязкой. Не резать, не отсасывать, не прикладывать лёд и не накладывать жгут.

Camel spiders (solifuges)avoid

They look frightening and they run after people — but they are running into your shadow, not at you, and they have no venom. Do not panic, just step aside. What to do: Not venomous, but they bite painfully and chase your shadow rather than you. Wave them off with a stick, sleep under a net.

Water is the whole chapter. In descending order of reliability: dry watercourses (dig on the outside of a bend until the sand is damp), the foot of rocks and shaded clefts, converging animal trails, dew on stone and metal before dawn, rainwater in rock basins after a rare downpour.

Солнечный конденсатор не является аварийным источником воды для новичка. Выход зависит от грунта, влажности, плёнки и солнца, а копание в жару увеличивает потери жидкости. Не расходуйте на него последние силы и воду; приоритет — тень, связь, заметная точка и известный источник.

Food comes second. Until water is sorted, food is not a priority at all — digestion uses water. More practical than plants: insects, lizards, traps by burrows and at watering places.

Desert plants are deliberately not listed in this guide. The flora of dry regions differs radically from the Sahara to the Sonoran to the Gobi, and many edible species have poisonous local look-alikes. Without a field guide to your particular desert you cannot identify a plant reliably, so we give no list for you to rely on. Protein is safer.

Cacti, separately and honestly: "cut open a cactus and drink" is a myth from films. The flesh of most large cacti contains acids and alkaloids that cause vomiting and diarrhoea — that is, it speeds dehydration up. Do not treat a cactus as a source of water.

What the biome gives you: yucca and other stiff-leaved plants (fibre for cord), dry stems and scrub (fuel, burns away fast), herbivore dung (fuel), clay in watercourses, stone, sand, hides and sinew from animals you take. There is almost no wood — anything that needs large timber is out of reach here.

0Scoutingnothing built yet

shade · up off the ground · reconnaissance only at dusk

1Level 1 · survive todaycordage, fire, shelter

yucca cord · fire (tinder: dry grass and bark) · a covered trench

Drawings and instructions

2Level 2 · workbenchwater, containers and food become a system

закрываемая тара · сбор дождя · тень · сигнальная площадка

Drawings and instructions

3Level 3 · crafthide, pottery, putting food by

sun-dried meat · leather · clay vessels

Drawings and instructions

4Level 4 · house and machinespermanent shelter and things that work for you

adobe — walls 25–30 cm, no firing and no fuel

Drawings and instructions

In a desert a house is built against the sun, not against the cold — and it is the one thing that really solves the biome's problem. Shade from cloth stops the rays but not the heat: the air under it stays baking. A thick clay wall works differently — it lags: the day's heat only reaches the inside by night, when it is already cold outside. Every house from the Sahara to Central Asia is built on that principle.

Tech level3 — water in quantity (brick needs a lot of it), containers, straw or dry grass

SeasonDry the bricks in the dry season. Build outside the worst heat: work only morning and evening

Time on your own4–8 weeks, half of it waiting for brick to dry

What decides itWall thickness and small windows. A wall thinner than 40 cm is pointless

The limitYou need clay and water nearby. Without them, build dry-stone and bank sand against it

Where to put it

Next to water — that matters more here than any other consideration. An oasis, a well, a watercourse with water below the surface.
Not in the watercourse. A dry bed is not a convenient flat site, it is a road for water: once every few years a wall of it comes down after rain that fell beyond the horizon.
The north side of a dune or a rock face (in the northern hemisphere): the sun barely reaches there.
Not on a crest and not in a hollow. A crest is scoured and buried by turns; a hollow collects cold at night and stands full of hot air by day.
Check where the sand is going. The windward face of a dune is gentle, the leeward one steep — and the dune is creeping. Building in its path means being buried.

A house of mud bricksection · thick wall · flat roof · draught

1 A stone footing. A course of stone or rubble a palm high. Mud brick fears only one thing — water from below; the rare rain washes a wall out exactly at ground level.
2 The wall. Mud brick: clay + sand + chopped straw, dried in the sun. Thickness 40–60 cm (16–24 in) — this is not about strength, it is a reserve of mass. A thin wall heats right through in a day and gives that heat back inwards at night, which is to say it works against you.
3 A flat roof. Beams, reeds or branches across them, and on top 20–30 cm of rammed clay with straw. A slight fall to one edge and a gutter: when the rare rain comes you have to get the water off, or it will find its way inside.
4 Windows small and high. You want light, not sun. An opening the size of your head, right up at the ceiling, on the shaded wall. Shutters or a mat over it by day.
5 An outlet. A hole in the roof or a short pipe above the warmest spot. Hot air leaves upwards and pulls cool air in low from the entrance — the draught works by itself, with no wind at all.
6 A floor below ground level by half a step, if the ground can be dug. Sinking it gives you what a thick wall gives, for nothing.
! Mud brick must not be built in the rainy season and must never be left without a roof. An unprotected wall dissolves in literally one downpour. The roof and the overhangs are not decoration, they are the condition of the house existing at all.

How to make the brick and build the house

Test the clay. Roll damp earth into a sausage a finger thick and bend it into a ring: if it crumbles there is too little clay, so add richer soil; if it sticks and cracks as it dries there is too much clay, so add sand.
The mix: roughly two parts sand to one part clay, plus a handful of chopped straw or dry grass per brick. Tread it in a pit until it is an even dough.
The mould: a nailed or lashed frame with no bottom, about 30×15×10 cm (12×6×4 in). Wet it or dust it with sand, pack it with clay, lift it off — the brick stays on the ground.
Drying: 2–3 days flat, then stood on edge for another 1–2 weeks. Dry in shade or under cover — in direct sun the brick cracks. A finished one does not crumble when struck and does not mark your hand.
Lay them on mortar of the same clay, breaking the joints: each brick spans the joint of the course below. Check the vertical with a plumb — a pebble on a thread.
Openings are spanned with a beam or by corbelling the brick out in steps. Do not attempt an arch without experience: it is beautiful and it falls down.
The roof: beams every 60–80 cm, reeds or branches across them in a dense layer, clay with straw on top, rammed down. A fall towards the outlet.
Render with the same clay inside and out, renewed every year. A limewash, if you have lime, reflects the sun and cools the house noticeably — that is not cosmetic.

If there is no clay. Build in stone, laid dry — stones on top of one another with no mortar, flat faces inwards, a wall two stones thick with rubble packed between. Bank sand against the outside. It works worse than mud brick, but it needs neither water nor waiting.

If there is nothing to build with and nothing to build from , use what already exists: a niche under a rock face, a gully in a bank, a hollow on the north side of a dune. Screen the entrance with a mat and put a double awning with a gap above it: two layers of cloth with air between them are nearly ten degrees cooler than one.

How this house differs from every other one in the guide

It does not hold heat, it delays itA thick wall does not insulate — it conducts slowly. By day it takes the heat in; by night it gives it back, outwards and inwards. The night's coolness becomes the day's.

Air it at night, close it by dayThe opposite of what feels natural. At night open everything and let the house cool; in the morning close it and do not open it again until sunset.

White beats darkA limewash or pale clay reflects, and drops the wall's heating by several degrees for nothing.

Water is part of the coolingWet cloth in an opening and wet sand on the floor cool by evaporation. It only works in dry air — which is to say, exactly here.

Smoke, air and the door

There have to be two openings, not one. A stove or hearth with a flue and no air coming in will not draw: the fire pulls air out of the room, the pressure drops, and the smoke comes back into the house. This is the commonest mistake in home-made shelter, and it looks like "a bad chimney" when the chimney has nothing to do with it.

Air inAn opening the size of your palm down at floor level, next to the firebox, or a gap under the door, or a separate duct from outside running straight under the hearth. That last one is best: the air for burning comes from outdoors instead of out of your room.

The flueAbove the ridge, a fist across per person, with a straight run. A bent flue will not draw. You need a damper, but it only closes when there is not a single blue flame left in the coals.

Testing the drawHold a burning splinter up to the air inlet: the smoke should be pulled inwards. At the flue it should go up. If it draws the wrong way, there is too little air coming in, or the flue is cold — warm it with a twist of paper or birch bark.

Carbon monoxideNo colour, no smell. The signs are headache, nausea and drowsiness in everyone at once. If that happens: outside immediately, door and vent wide open. The vent in a dwelling stays open always, even in a hard frost.

Door

Opens inwardsOvernight, snow drifts against it outside, leaves pile up and branches come down. A door that opens outwards will one day not open at all.

Rebate and thresholdThe door should sit into a rebate or against cover strips, not simply cover the opening. A threshold a palm high cuts off the cold along the floor, water, and everything that crawls.

Hinges and barHinges — strips of leather, a wooden pin in loops, or a strap from salvage. For the lock — a bar on the inside dropped into two brackets: it holds incomparably better than any hook.

Keep the opening smallThe smaller the door, the less heat blows out and the harder it is for an uninvited visitor to get in. A low narrow entry is not an inconvenience, it is the design.

About visitors in the desert. There are almost no large predators here — the dangerous things are snakes, scorpions and rodents. A threshold a palm high and a tight-closing door shut out nearly all of it. Leave nothing on the floor, shake out boots in the morning, get your bed up off the floor. By day the door is also shut against the heat: the house is aired at night and closed for the day.

In a desert every misfortune has one consequence — you lose water or you lose shade. Judge any event by that: how much water have I got left, and where will I hide from tomorrow's sun. Everything else is secondary.

Sandstormdeadly

A wall of dust to the sky, visibility down to arm's length, sand packing your eyes, nose and lungs. It lasts from half an hour to a day.
Signs: a brown or yellow band on the horizon, sharp gusting wind, sudden closeness, electrical discharges and crackling.
What to do: do not try to walk through it — a storm is the easiest place there is to get lost, and your rate of water loss doubles while walking. Sit with your back to the wind against any cover — a rock, the windward side of a dune, a bush. Wrap your face, breathe through cloth, keep your eyes shut. Mark your direction beforehand with stones or a planted stick: after a storm the ground looks different and landmarks are gone. If you have a vehicle, stay with it — it will be found sooner than you will.
After: dig your things out at once, before they are buried deeper; check that your water containers are still sealed.

A flash flood in a dry watercoursedeadly

The most underrated threat in the desert: people drown in deserts. Rain falls tens of kilometres away in the hills, the water gathers into the channel and comes down the dry sand as a wall, under a clear sky.
Signs: a thunderstorm or dark cloud on the horizon towards high ground, a rising roar, water that has suddenly gone muddy.
What to do: never camp or sleep in a watercourse, however convenient and level it looks. If you hear the roar, up the slope immediately, not along the channel. Do not cross the flow: half a metre of fast water knocks a person over.

Heatwavedeadly

Several days when even the night gives no respite. Your water use doubles and shade stops being enough.
What to do: switch entirely to living by night and do not move at all by day. Go deeper: a pit half a metre down in shade holds noticeably cooler air. Wet your clothes if water allows — evaporation works better than any fan. Do not ration water, ration sweat: your body needs the water now, not in the flask.

Night cold and frostcaution

The swing between day and night in a desert reaches 30–40 degrees, and on a winter night there can be frost. People who prepared for heat and not for cold get hypothermia precisely here. Always keep a warm layer with you, even if it is impossible to wear by day, and do not sleep on bare sand — it loses its heat instantly. What to do: Always keep a warm layer to hand, even if it is unbearable by day. Sleep on a mat, not on bare sand.

Dust devilrare

A whirlwind tens of metres high that lifts sand. Usually harmless, but it can carry things off and knock you down. Step aside out of its path, weight down anything light, turn away. What to do: Step aside out of its path, weight down anything light, turn away and cover your face.

Earthquakerare

On open sand it is barely felt and not dangerous. The risk is only near rock faces and buildings: rockfall, collapsing mud walls. Move into the open, wait it out, and expect aftershocks. What to do: Get out into the open away from trees, rocks and buildings, sit down and wait it out. Afterwards, expect aftershocks and check the slope above your camp.

Sinkholes and undercut channelscaution

In a desert, cavities come from gypsum and limestone — and from people: old underground aqueducts, wells and shafts buried in sand. The bank of a dry channel is undercut from below and held up by a crust that breaks under weight.
Signs: round craters, a hollow sound underfoot, sand trickling away into a crack, an overhanging lip of bank with nothing under it. What to do: walk not along the very edge of a channel but well back from it; test doubtful ground with a stick ahead of you. Do not go downinto shafts and wells you find: there is no air down there and nobody to pull you out.

Nuclearinvisible, settles as dust

Chemicalhas a smell, flows downhill

Biologicalarrives with people

The desert is bad in that everything here is carried by wind and dust, and good in that there is almost no water, almost nobody about, and almost no food chains for an infection to travel along.

Three words common to every kind of contamination

Time — leave straight away, not after packing.
Distance — every step away from the source cuts the dose.
Shielding — any mass between you and the source: sand, stone, a wall, water.

Nuclear: here the carrier is dust

In a desert the particles that fall are not bound down by grass and soil; they are lifted by the wind again and again. Contamination here does not "settle and stay", it wanders for weeks. That is precisely why every historical nuclear test range was sited in a desert — and precisely why breathing dust is the worst thing you can do here.

Shelter: a pit roofed with whatever you have and covered with sand. Sand works just as well as earth: half a metre of it cuts the dose several times over. A mud-brick house with a thick wall is a ready-made shelter.
Sealing matters more than thickness. Stuff the gaps with cloth: the main route in is not radiation but the dust you will breathe.
Face always covered when you go out. Damp cloth in several layers.
Brush yourself down and undress outside — that is especially effective here: dry dust shakes off almost completely, unlike mud in a wet climate.
Water: a closed well and a deep borehole, yes. Open pools and water collected by a still or from dew, no: they collect exactly what settled out of the air.

Chemical

Heavy gases flow downwards, and a desert is full of pits, channels and basins where they sit for a long time — there is no wind down there. Go uphill and across the wind, to a ridge, not into a shelter.

A peculiarity of this biome: a desert has its own dangerous places without any accident at all — salt flats, soda and alkaline lakes, sulphurous springs. Water that tastes soapy, that stings your lips, or that is ringed with white crust with no life around it: do not drink it, however badly you want to. No insects and no animal tracks at water in a desert is the surest sign that it cannot be drunk.

Biological

Being far from people protects you better than anything. But the desert has its own standing threat that behaves like a biological one: carrion and rodents. Do not touch dead animals, do not butcher rodents, do not go near places where there are many of them and they show no fear.

Boil all water without exception, even from a well.
Do not enter abandoned buildings and do not sleep in them: rodents and their droppings collect there, and with them diseases carried through the air in dust.
Isolate anyone who falls ill, one person cares for them, separate dishes.

If you do not know what has happened, assume the worst version. In a desert the price of a mistake comes due sooner than anywhere: water and shade run out within a day.

In the desert the gap between the two paths is wider than anywhere. With bare hands you achieve very little here and very slowly — everything comes back to water. One container found, or one sheet of polythene, changes things more than a month of labour.

Path A — with bare hands

You know everything humanity knows, but you have nothing except your hands and what grows around you.

The first year

Shade, a nocturnal routine, water from a spring or well — the first week.
Yucca cord, containers, doubled shade — the first month.
A house of mud brick — by the end of the first dry season, if there is clay and water.
Dried meat — it comes easier here than in any other biome.

Three years

A well, deepened and lined with stone, with a sweep over it.
A little irrigation and the first sowings by the water — oasis farming.
Fired pottery and lime: the heat helps the drying, but fuel is scarce.
Salt from a salt flat, and trade in it — historically the desert's main commodity.

The ceiling, and an honest limit

Achievable: a cool house, water as a system, dried stores, pottery.
Out of reach: anything needing a lot of fuel. There is no firewood and nothing to burn into charcoal — metal and glass are out entirely.
The main limit: numbers. A desert feeds one person where a forest feeds ten.

The bottleneck of this biome

Water, and only water. Everything else follows from it. A desert still gives 0.25–1 litre a day and cannot be the main plan.

Path B — on what is left

The same place, but within a day's walk there is something people abandoned. That does not cancel self-reliance — it only speeds it up.

What to look for here specifically

Highways and filling stations — here roads run through emptiness, and an abandoned vehicle is visible for miles.
Jerrycans, drums, hoses (a siphon out of the tank), plastic containers — here containers are worth more than food.
Polythene and tarpaulin: shade, a still, waterproofing for a well.
Pipes and casing from abandoned boreholes: sometimes there is water in them.

What that unlocks

A container equals your radius of life. With a twenty-litre can you can live a day's travel from a source; without one, only at the water.
Tarpaulin and sheeting give you shade instantly and portably.
A borehole or well that you find solves a problem you cannot solve with bare hands at all.

The trap on this path

In a desert the finds lie along the roads, and roads are the one place people go. And the walk back carrying water in the heat is the most dangerous thing you can undertake.

The ceiling by year

Timescale	With bare hands	On salvage
Year 1	Shade, water, a mud-brick house, dried stores	The same in weeks + containers and mobility
Year 3	A well, a sweep, sowings by the water, salt	A borehole or a large container: your radius of life grows
Year 10	A small oasis household of 1–3 people	The same plus tools; fuel still does not appear

Protecting yourself and your family

On path A. In a desert you are visible from far off, and that cuts both ways. Camp in a fold of ground, not on a crest; keep the fire in a pit and at night, when it shows least; do not wear a path to the water. The one resource people come for is water: do not show where your source is, and do not approach it along the same line every time.

On path B. The roads are both a warehouse and other people's route. Look a road over from a distance and in daylight, work fast, and do not leave a vehicle "opened up" — that is a marker that someone was here. Split your water store between two places: losing all of it at once in a desert is not an inconvenience, it is a day of your life.

Children in the desert. Dehydration comes on faster in a child and shows noticeably later. The rule is simple: drink to a schedule, not to thirst; no moving by day; always in shade and with the head covered. Check the urine rather than the complaints: dark means it is already late, you should have acted sooner.

Biome · wind and an empty horizon

Steppe

waterhard

foodmedium

sheltermed-hard

technologymed-high

dangermedium

infectionshigh

Move on if things go wrong → along the river to the floodplain (timber, water and cover all appear there at once), or into forest if it is within a day's march. A river floodplain in the steppe is a small separate biome of its own, and you need it more than you need open ground.

The steppe punishes you not with cold and not with heat but with absence: no timber, no shade, no shelter from the wind, no landmarks. Everything that comes to hand in a forest has to be carried in here, or found in the floodplain.

Если вы оказались в степи

Остановитесь и проверьте ветер. Отметьте направление, видимые дороги, линии электропередачи, строения и дым. Не бегите к далёкому объекту без расчёта времени и воды.
Уберите себя из экспозиции. Днём нужна тень, в холод и ветер — низкий ветрозащитный экран. Не ложитесь в русло, балку или сухой овраг: их быстро заполняет вода.
Сохраните воду и ноги. Закройте кожу, осмотрите обувь, лечите потёртости сразу. Пейте регулярно; источник проверяйте и обеззараживайте.
Сделайте заметный лагерь. Яркая ткань, свисток, координаты. Укрытие должно быть низким и хорошо закреплённым: ветер срывает высокий тент.
Огонь — последнее решение. При сухой траве, сильном ветре или запрете используйте холодную еду либо горелку на очищенном негорючем участке; открытый костёр не разводите.
Дым, запах гари или быстро приближающийся фронт огня — команда уходить сразу. Двигайтесь к уже выгоревшему или негорючему участку, дороге, воде; не прячьтесь в сухой траве.

До темнотыЗакреплённый тент, вода, обувь, сигнал и путь к безопасной точке.

НочьюТемпература резко падает; утеплите тело снизу и приготовьте слой одежды заранее.

ГрозаПонижение уменьшает часть рисков, но безопасного места снаружи нет; уходите с открытого возвышения заранее.

Wind here is what cold is in the taiga and the sun is in the desert. It does not kill on its own, but it pulls heat and water out of you around the clock, puts your fire out, takes your shelter away and wears you down. All planning starts with the question "which way is it blowing".

Day 1, hours 1–2 — find a fold in the ground

⏱ 40–60 minutes. You are looking for a dip, not for water

Flat steppe only looks flat: there are gullies, washouts, ravines and old channels everywhere. Your camp goes in a dip, not on high ground, contrary to the forest rule. A dip also tends to lead you to water. Straight away take a bearing on a visible landmark — a lone tree, a burial mound, a post: it is easier to lose your direction in the steppe than in a forest, because there is nothing to look at.

Day 1, the rest — fuel and digging in

⏱ gathering fuel 1–2 hours · digging and a cover 2–3 hours

Cordage: twisted dry grass (a rope of it, plaited like a braid) or sinew from an animal you have taken. Fuel: dry grass burns away instantly, so you need three times the stock you think; more reliable is dried herbivore dung, for centuries the main fuel of steppe nomads: it burns long and evenly, almost without flame, and it lies right on the surface.

Shelter is built downwards, not upwards. A hollow dug into the ground with a wall of the cut turf on the windward side beats any structure built above ground: the wind passes over the top. Turf cut into slabs is the main building material here, in place of logs.

Grass rope

1. Grass cord — the only cord the steppe offers

There are no trees, so there is no lime bark and no spruce root. But there is grass everywhere, and twisted up it holds quite well enough to lash a frame, set a snare and tie down a load.

Take dry grass from last year, long and without leaves — it has already given up its moisture and will not rot. Green grass will do too, but it has to wilt for a day, or it shrinks and weakens.
Lightly crush the bundle in your handsso the stems soften and stop snapping.
Divide the bundle into two strands and take hold of the middle.
Twist each strand away from you, and twist them around each other towards you. Released, the strands wind together on their own and do not come undone — that is the whole trick, and knots have nothing to do with it.
When a strand runs out, work a new bundle in overlapping by a palm's width, not end to end. Extend the strands one at a time, not both at once, or you get a weak spot there.

How much it holds. A rope the thickness of your little finger will hold a person's weight on a static hang, but breaks under a snatch. For anything that matters, twist it three times as thick or lay three finished ropes into one. Sinew from an animal you have taken is stronger than any grass — dry it, split it into threads and soak it before use.

A fire in a pit

2. Fire without wood: dung and a pit

This is not a last resort. The dried dung of grazing animals — cattle, horses, sheep, saiga — was the main fuel of the steppe peoples for thousands of years. It barely smells, burns long and evenly, and lies right on the surface: it is easier to gather than deadfall in a forest.

Take only fully dried cakes — they are light and grey and break with a dry crack. Fresh, damp ones smoke and will not catch.
Dig a pit a palm deep and as wide as a washbasin. In the steppe the fire always goes in a pit: above ground the wind carries off both the heat and the fire itself.
On the windward side put a stone, a lump of turf or the earth you dug out — a screen half a forearm high.
Light it with dry grass and fine splinters, but grass burns away instantly — keep three times more of it to hand than seems necessary, and add dung the moment the flame catches.
After that the fire settles into an even heat with almost no flame. Cooking on it is easier than on wood: the embers hold their temperature for hours.

Before lighting, pull the grass up for two paces around the pit. A steppe fire starts from a single spark and travels faster than a person can run.

Sunk

3. A shelter built downwards

In a forest you hide from wind behind a wall. In the steppe there is nothing to build a wall from, and if you did build one it would blow away. So here you go below the level of the wind: it runs over the ground and over you.

"Turf" is the top layer of earth with the grass and roots in it. The roots hold it together like reinforcement, and it cuts into dense slabs that stack like bricks. In the steppe it is the one building material available without limit.

Find a natural dip — a gully, a washout, an old channel. Digging a dip deeper is always easier than digging from scratch.
Dig a pit your own length and waist deep. No deeper: cold air sinks at night and settles on the bottom.
Cut the turf you take out into slabs about the size of a shoebox and stack them grass side down as a wall along the windward edge of the pit.
Roof the pit with poles, the bones of a large animal, or anything long — and turf on top, grass side up. Leave the entrance on the lee side.
On the floor, dry grass two palms deep. Bare earth will pull the heat out of you overnight.

The rain test: dig a shallow channel round the pit draining away downslope. Without it the first downpour turns your shelter into a bath — the commonest mistake when digging in.

Level 1 · unlocked

🌙 Night 1

The wind usually picks up at night, and an open sky means heavy heat loss — even in summer a steppe night is noticeably colder than a forest night at the same latitude. Build the fire in a pit and screened on the windward side: in the open it burns through twice the fuel and barely warms you.

The advantage of an open horizon: the stars are fully visible, and if you need to find the compass points, night here is the best time of day. The drawback: your fire is also visible for tens of kilometres (see "Why you left").

Days 2–3 — water and the floodplain

⏱ The critical window. The main job is to turn occasional water into permanent water

Water in the steppe collects in dips and floodplains. Move downhill, along converging animal trails, towards a band of taller, greener vegetation — that is almost always a river or an oxbow. Find the floodplain and you get everything at once: water, willow and birch (timber for a frame and for cordage), thickets for shelter, and game coming down to drink.

If people are looking for you: the steppe is the second-best biome for being found, after the desert: you are visible from a long way off and from the air. Stay where you are, lay out a sign in stones or dark earth on the pale grass, and keep a smoke fire ready (green grass gives thick white smoke). Walking off "somewhere" across open ground with no landmarks is a sure way to go in circles.

🌙 Nights 2–3

A stock of fuel for the whole night, gathered in daylight, becomes part of the routine. Fire in a pit; belongings weighted down — a sudden night squall carries off anything loose. If there is tall dry grass nearby, remember that a steppe fire travels faster than a person can run. Burn off the ground around your fire in advance, or build it on bare earth.

→ END OF THE 72 HOURS: you are either in the floodplain or at permanent water, and your shelter keeps the wind off. From here the steppe is generous.

Week 1 — the steppe starts feeding you

⏱ The rest of the week

Open ground and an abundance of grazing animals make the steppe richer than forest for hunting, if you have anything to hunt with. Snares on the trails down to water, traps at burrows (except marmot burrows — see "Threats"), birds. Containers appear, and boiling, and smoking over a dung fire.

Level 2 · unlocked

🌙 Night, week 1

A dug-in shelter roofed with poles and turf holds its own heat. The routine: fuel for tomorrow, check the snares, weight down anything that could fly away. The fire is kept at night partly because it keeps wolves off — in open country there is less cover, for you and for them.

→ WORKBENCH: water, fuel, a dug-in shelter and hunting are all stable.

Weeks 2–4 — the composite bow

⏱ Weeks, not days

The crowning achievement of Level 3 in this particular biome: horn on the inner face works in compression, sinew on the outer face in tension, with a wooden core between them, all held with glue from hide and bone. Such a bow is more powerful and noticeably shorter than a simple one — which is everything when shooting from horseback or from cover in the grass. The Scythians and the Mongols made them this way. It is not a quick solution: one gluing and drying of the layers takes weeks.

Level 3 · unlocked

A month and beyond — a felt dwelling

⏱ Ongoing

The wind problem is finally solved not by digging in but by shape: a round demountable frame of springy poles (willow and birch from the floodplain) under felt or sewn hides. Wind flows around a dome from any direction instead of hitting a flat wall. The Scythians lived this way — Herodotus already describes their wagon-dwellings — and later the Mongols. It goes up and comes down in 1–3 hours, which is worth it if you are following the game rather than staying in one camp.

Level 4 · unlocked

A critical exception that exists in no other biome: marmots and ground squirrels. They look like perfect game — large, numerous, living in colonies, and they do not run far. And they carry plague (Yersinia pestis). Infection comes through cuts while butchering and skinning, not only through the meat, so "cook it thoroughly" does not save you. Deaths have been documented in Mongolia in recent years, in people who took and butchered a marmot. Do not hunt marmots or ground squirrels at all, no matter how hungry you are. The risk is out of all proportion to any gain.

Animals

Marmots, ground squirrelsdo not touch

See above. Do not take them, do not butcher them, do not touch ones found dead — a dead animal is more dangerous than a live one. Their burrows are still useful as a marker: there is usually water nearby. What to do: Do not take them, do not butcher them, do not touch ones found dead — however hungry you are. Do not sleep on a colony.

Wolfavoid

Обычно избегает людей, но зимой риск выше. What to do: не убегать и не поворачиваться спиной; собраться группой, держать детей рядом, выглядеть крупнее, говорить громко и медленно отступать. Еду и отходы убрать от жилья. Не оставлять огонь без дежурного.

Степные ядовитые змеиcaution

В высокой траве смотрите под ноги, носите закрытую обувь и не пытайтесь поймать змею. При укусе: вызовите помощь, оставайтесь неподвижным, снимите кольца и часы, держите конечность в удобном нейтральном положении и накройте место чистой сухой повязкой. Не резать, не отсасывать, не прикладывать лёд и не накладывать жгут.

Tickscaution

There are no fewer of them here than in a forest, and tall grass is the perfect place to meet one. Check your whole body every day. What to do: Trousers tucked into socks, a full body check every evening. Pull an attached tick out with tweezers or a loop of thread, twisting as you go — do not smother it in oil. Watch the spot on your skin and your temperature for two weeks.

Steppe fire. Dry grass burns faster than a person can run, and the wind drives the front. If it catches: move across the wind, not away from the fire; safety is ground that has already burned, water, a ploughed strip, a road.

Water: dips, gullies, oxbows, river floodplains. Dig at the lowest point of a gully, where the vegetation is greener and thicker than the rest. Converging animal trails lead to a watering place — the most reliable indicator there is in the steppe. Boiling is not optional: watering places are far more contaminated by livestock and wild animals than forest streams.

Protein is the basis. The steppe is rich in grazing animals and birds. Snares on the trails to water, traps, birds' nests in spring. Marmots and ground squirrels aside, hunting is easier here than in a forest: you can see game from far off, and the trails are predictable.

What you can eat without risk of a mistake

As in the other chapters, doubtful plants are left out. The reliable species are the same as in a forest, and they grow in the floodplain and along the gullies:

Nettle

The leaves sit strictly in pairs opposite each other, and it stings when you touch it — that sting is the check. Boil 5–10 minutes.

Dandelion

A rosette of leaves straight from the ground, a hollow stem, white milky sap where it breaks, a yellow flower.

Cattail

Only when you can see the brown seed head. It grows at the water's edge — in the steppe that means the floodplain and the oxbows.

Never touch: the carrot and parsley family — plants with an umbrella of small white flowers. Both poison hemlock and water hemlock grow in the steppe and its gullies; they are among the most poisonous plants there are, and no non-specialist can tell them from the edible members of the family. Mushrooms are out too: steppe species are no safer than forest ones.

What the biome gives you: grass (cord, fuel, roofing), turf (the main building material in place of logs), herbivore dung (the best fuel), clay in the gullies, stone in outcrops and burial mounds, bone, horn, sinew and hide from animals you take, and willow and birch — in the floodplain only. There is no large timber on the open steppe.

0Scoutingnothing built yet

find a dip · take a bearing on a landmark

1Level 1 · survive todaycordage, fire, shelter

cord from twisted grass · a dung fire · a dug-in shelter with a turf wall

Drawings and instructions

2Level 2 · workbenchwater, containers and food become a system

containers · snares on the trails to water · smoking

Drawings and instructions

3Level 3 · crafthide, pottery, putting food by

the composite bow (horn + sinew + wood) · tanned hide · felt

Drawings and instructions

4Level 4 · house and machinespermanent shelter and things that work for you

a demountable felt dwelling · following the game

Drawings and instructions

In the steppe the whole question of a house is what to build it from. There is no forest, and often no stone either. But there is something that exists nowhere else in such quantity: turf — the top layer of earth stitched together by grass roots. You cut blocks from it and lay walls as if from brick. The first settlers on the American prairies built this way, and so did people on our own steppes: a turf house goes up without a single nail and with almost no timber.

Tech level2–3 — all you need is a cutting tool and time. This is the most achievable house in the guide

SeasonMay–June: turf cuts when the ground is damp and the roots hold the slab together

Time on your own2–4 weeks. Timber is needed only for the roof, and it is carried in from the floodplain

What decides itDigging in, and shape: the wind must flow round rather than hit a wall

Weak pointRain and rodents. The roof and the drainage matter more than the walls themselves

Where to put it

In a fold of the ground — a gully, a washout, an old channel. Not on a crest: that is where all the wind is, and all the snow in winter.
But not at the bottom of a gully: water goes there after every downpour and cold air sinks into it at night. The ideal is halfway up the slope.
Next to the floodplain, if there is one: it gives you water, timber for the roof, willow for wattle, and shelter from the wind.
The turf underfoot has to be dense: thick old grass with a felt of roots. Young sparse grass gives a slab that falls apart.
Not on a marmot colony. The burrows undermine the foundation, and the animals themselves are dangerous (see "Threats").

A turf housesection · dug in · blocks · roof · drainage

1 Dug in to waist height. Half the house is already built by nature: earth below half a metre holds an even temperature all year.
2 Turf blocks. Slabs about 40×20×10 cm (16×8×4 in), laid grass side down, breaking the joints like brick. The roots grow into each other, and within a year the wall becomes a single mass.
3 The roof. Poles from the floodplain, reeds or grass across them, turf on top grass side up. A shallow fall, but a fall there must be.
4 Drainage. A channel round the house falling away downslope. Without it the first downpour floods the dug-out — the main reason such houses get abandoned.
5 A sleeping bench above the floor, at knee height, with a thick bedding of dry grass.
6 A dung hearth with a flue. In the steppe you burn dung cakes, and a stove for them is built with a large firebox and a gentle draw: it burns slowly and evenly.
! Turf is heavy. A wet turf roof weighs enough to break undersized poles. Take beams twice as thick as seems necessary and set them closer together.

How to build a turf house

Cut turf while it is damp. After rain or early in the morning the slab holds together; in dry weather it crumbles. Score the ground into strips with a knife, a spade or a sharpened bone, and undercut from below.
Dig a pit waist deep, and heap the spoil into a bank on the windward side.
Lay the blocks grass side down, breaking the joints: the joint of the upper course falls in the middle of the one below. Every 3–4 courses, wet them and tread them down — the wall settles and compacts.
Leave a narrow entrance on the lee side and one small window. Span the openings with a pole.
The roof: beams every 50–60 cm, a dense layer of reed or grass across them, turf on top grass side up. An overhang past the wall is essential, or the rain washes the courses out.
Dig a channel round the house and lead it away downslope. Check it in the first rain and correct it.
Render the walls with clay inside, if you have any: it stops the crumbling, the insects, and the rodents that otherwise live in the wall itself.
The stove and flue — of stone and clay, a firebox for dung cakes, the flue above the ridge.

Honestly about the drawbacks. A turf house crumbles, insects and mice live in it, and in heavy rain it can leak. The prairie settlers put up with all of that for years — because the alternative was the wind. Clay rendering inside and a good roof remove three quarters of the problems.

The nomadic version. If you are following the game you do not need a house — you need a demountable frame of bent floodplain withies under hides or felt. The round shape sheds wind from any direction, and it goes up in 1–3 hours. The Scythians and Mongols lived this way, and it is not a primitive substitute for a house but a different engineering answer to the same problem.

The wind: what this house is fighting

Shape matters more than thicknessRounded corners and a low profile let the wind flow past. A tall flat wall takes the blow and works loose.

The entrance always downwindWork out the prevailing direction from the lean of the grass and from where the snow drifts in winter.

A windbreak wallAn extra bank of turf three paces out on the windward side breaks the flow before it reaches the house.

In winter snow is a friendLet the snow drift up around the house and do not clear it: it insulates better than any rendering.

Smoke, air and the door

There have to be two openings, not one. A stove or hearth with a flue and no air coming in will not draw: the fire pulls air out of the room, the pressure drops, and the smoke comes back into the house. This is the commonest mistake in home-made shelter, and it looks like "a bad chimney" when the chimney has nothing to do with it.

Air inAn opening the size of your palm down at floor level, next to the firebox, or a gap under the door, or a separate duct from outside running straight under the hearth. That last one is best: the air for burning comes from outdoors instead of out of your room.

The flueAbove the ridge, a fist across per person, with a straight run. A bent flue will not draw. You need a damper, but it only closes when there is not a single blue flame left in the coals.

Testing the drawHold a burning splinter up to the air inlet: the smoke should be pulled inwards. At the flue it should go up. If it draws the wrong way, there is too little air coming in, or the flue is cold — warm it with a twist of paper or birch bark.

Carbon monoxideNo colour, no smell. The signs are headache, nausea and drowsiness in everyone at once. If that happens: outside immediately, door and vent wide open. The vent in a dwelling stays open always, even in a hard frost.

Door

Opens inwardsOvernight, snow drifts against it outside, leaves pile up and branches come down. A door that opens outwards will one day not open at all.

Rebate and thresholdThe door should sit into a rebate or against cover strips, not simply cover the opening. A threshold a palm high cuts off the cold along the floor, water, and everything that crawls.

Hinges and barHinges — strips of leather, a wooden pin in loops, or a strap from salvage. For the lock — a bar on the inside dropped into two brackets: it holds incomparably better than any hook.

Keep the opening smallThe smaller the door, the less heat blows out and the harder it is for an uninvited visitor to get in. A low narrow entry is not an inconvenience, it is the design.

About animals in the steppe. Волк может приблизиться зимой при бескормице. Дверь закрывается на брус, еда и отходы хранятся отдельно от места сна, группа не разделяется. Огонь ночью допустим только при бодрствующем дежурном; иначе его полностью гасят. Не устраивайте жильё на колонии нор: грунт там нестабилен, а контакт с дикими грызунами и их блохами повышает риск инфекции.

In the steppe there is nowhere to hide, and that determines everything. Any misfortune here sees you from far off — and you see it too. The advantage of open ground is that you notice a threat tens of minutes before it arrives. Use that: look at the horizon every single time you come out of your shelter.

Steppe firedeadly

Dry grass burns faster than a person can run, and the wind drives the front at the speed of a car. There is little smoke and the flame is low — which is exactly why it gets underestimated.
What to do: go across the wind, never downwind and never uphill. Safety is where there is nothing left to burn: water, a salt flat, a ploughed strip, a road, a rock outcrop, ground that has already burned.
A backfire is a steppe-dweller's trick and a last resort: if the front is close and there is nowhere to run, set the grass alight in front of you on the lee side, let a patch burn out and step onto it. This can only be done with time in hand and in the open, or you simply set yourself alight from the other side.
Prevention: burn or trample a clear patch around camp in advance.

Squall and galedangerous

Wind in the steppe builds up with nothing to stop it. A squall carries off anything loose, flattens awnings, puts out fires and can knock a person over.
What to do: get into the dug-out and weight everything light down with stones or bury it. Do not try to hold an awning down by hand: torn cloth can be mended, a dislocated shoulder cannot.

Tornadodeadly

The steppe and the prairie are the classic place for tornadoes. The signs: a dark funnel, a roar, a green sky, large hail, a sudden stillness.
What to do: move at right angles to the funnel's track. The only shelter is a dip: a ditch, a washout, a ravine, a road cutting. Lie face down, cover your head, hold on to something rooted. Do not shelter under a lone tree and do not stay in a light structure.

Thunderstorm in the opendeadly

Безопасного положения снаружи нет. При первых признаках грозы двигайтесь к капитальному зданию или закрытому автомобилю. Если они недоступны, уйдите с возвышения и открытого поля, не приближайтесь к одиноким деревьям, столбам, воде и металлу; группа расходится, чтобы один удар не поразил всех. Не полагайтесь на приседание как на защиту. Возвращайтесь наружу через 30 минут после последнего грома.

Hailcaution

Steppe hail can be large and it arrives with no cover about. Shield your head with a rucksack or anything else, and get into the dug-out. Hail often comes before a tornado — afterwards, watch the sky rather than relaxing. What to do: Take cover in a dip, shield your head with a rucksack. After hail, watch the sky: a tornado often follows.

Blizzarddeadly

The winter steppe is more dangerous than the summer one. In a blizzard visibility is nil, there are no landmarks, and people walk in circles two hundred metres from camp.
What to do: do not go out. If it catches you, do not walk — dig in: a hole in the snow, back to the wind, roofed with whatever you have. From camp to the water and to your stores, run a guide rope in advance: in a blizzard it is the only way back.

Sinkholes, washouts and old pitscaution

The steppe looks level, but under the turf there are washouts, collapsed gully roofs, abandoned wells, silage pits and slurry pits. The last are particularly dangerous: they are covered by rotten boarding and there is no air inside.
Signs: round depressions, a patch of grass a different colour and height, a hollow sound, a gully edge with an overhanging lip. What to do: go round patches and dips, and do not walk along the very edge of a gully bank. Do not put your dwelling on a marmot colony — the burrows undermine the foundation, and the animals themselves are dangerous. Never go down into any pit you find.

Nuclearinvisible, settles as dust

Chemicalhas a smell, flows downhill

Biologicalarrives with people

The steppe carries everything away on the wind and holds nothing. Bad: a cloud covers a large area and arrives quickly. Good: it clears just as quickly, and open ground lets you see trouble coming and choose which way to go.

Three words common to every kind of contamination

Time — leave straight away, not after packing.
Distance — every step away from the source cuts the dose.
Shielding — any mass between you and the source: earth, stone, water, a wall.

Nuclear

Your main protection here is the very pit you are digging for a dwelling anyway. Half a metre of earth cuts the radiation several times over, and a dug-in shelter with a turf roof is a ready-made fallout shelter.

Dust is the main carrier. Dry steppe raises dust, and the wind lifts what has settled all over again. Face covered, gaps stuffed, the entrance curtained with damp cloth.
Leave outer clothing and boots outside — that is up to 90% of what you carried in.
A day at minimum, better two or three.
Water: a well and a spring, yes; open ponds, oxbows and puddles, no.
Food: milk and meat from grazing animals are dangerous — they concentrate the contamination from all the grass they have eaten. That is the steppe's main food chain and its main route of contamination.

Chemical

Heavy gases run down into gullies, washouts and into your pit. Here everything is reversed: go up, onto a ridge, and across the wind. The steppe is the one biome where climbing to high ground is the right move.

Breathe through damp cloth, keep your eyes shut, and once out, undress and wash from the top down without scrubbing the skin.

Biological

There are few people, and that protects you. But the steppe has a standing threat of its own that behaves like a biological weapon: marmots and ground squirrels carry plague, and infection comes through cuts while butchering. Never take them and never touch ones found dead — however hungry you are.

Do not approach herds or people, and do not go into sheepfolds or abandoned farms.
Boil water without exception: steppe watering places are more contaminated by livestock than forest streams.
Isolate anyone who falls ill, separate dishes, one person caring for them.

If you do not know what has happened, act on the worst explanation. Erring on the side of caution costs you a lost day. Erring the other way cannot be undone.

The steppe is the biome where path A historically led not to a house but to movement. Someone settled and alone runs up against the lack of timber and against the wind; a nomadic way of life solves both at once. Finds, meanwhile, give the steppe exactly what it lacks: wood, metal and cloth.

Path A — with bare hands

You know everything humanity knows, but you have nothing except your hands and what grows around you.

The first year

Grass rope, a dung fire, digging in — the first week.
Snares on the trails to water, containers, smoking — the first month.
A turf house — in 2–4 weeks; this is the fastest house in the guide.
Reaching the floodplain: timber, willow, water, game — that is where people settle.

Three years

Tanned hide, felt from wool — the steppe gives that better than anywhere.
The composite bow of horn, sinew and wood — the summit of the local craft.
A demountable round dwelling: wind flows round the dome from any direction.
Firing clay from the gullies; sowing in the floodplain.

The ceiling, and an honest limit

Achievable: a warm dwelling, steady hunting, hide and felt, a bow, pottery.
Out of reach: anything needing timber in quantity — a log cabin, large machines, sustained heat for metal.
A peculiarity: the steppe's ceiling is higher for a nomad than for a settler. It is the one biome where "a house" may turn out to be a mistake.

The bottleneck of this biome

Timber and fuel. Everything that comes to hand in a forest has to be carried in from the floodplain here, or replaced by turf, bone and dung.

Path B — on what is left

The same place, but within a day's walk there is something people abandoned. That does not cancel self-reliance — it only speeds it up.

What to look for here specifically

Abandoned farms, sheepfolds, grain yards — boards, roofing sheet, pipe, wire, containers, sometimes grain.
Farm machinery in the fields: metal, belts, cable, bearings, hydraulics.
Power-line poles and shelter belts — almost the only timber in the steppe.
Roads and grain elevators: sacks, drums, tarpaulin.

What that unlocks

Timber and sheet iron remove the biome's main limitation. The roof of a turf house stops being its weak point.
Wire makes ideal snares for steppe game.
Grain you find is seed, not just food. The steppe is the best arable land of all nine biomes.
Containers solve the water problem in the dry season.

The trap on this path

Farms stand in plain sight and on roads. Plus the steppe risk: marmots and ground squirrels around the buildings — do not touch them (plague), and do not sleep where there are many of them.

The ceiling by year

Timescale	With bare hands	On salvage
Year 1	A turf house, hunting, a store for winter	The same in two weeks + a proper roof
Year 3	Hide, felt, a bow, pottery, sowing in the floodplain	A plough from salvage, grain, containers — the move to farming
Year 10	A nomadic or semi-settled household for a family	A small holding with arable land — a ceiling above the forest's

Protecting yourself and your family

On path A. In the steppe you are visible for kilometres, and that is the main problem. Camp only in a fold of the ground; fire in a pit and screened; nothing shiny in view. On the other hand you see everyone too: get into the habit of scanning the horizon every time you go out. A trip line round the perimeter works against a wolf and against a person alike.

On path B. Farms and roads are meeting places. Go early in the morning, watch from a distance for half an hour, do not enter buildings with only one way out. Do not bring everything you find straight home: keep a staging cache off to one side.

Children in the steppe. The main risks are getting lost (there are no landmarks) and fire. Teach them: from camp, only as far as a visible landmark and back; if you see smoke or flame, run across the wind to water or bare ground, not to camp. Agree a meeting point that can be seen from everywhere.

Biome · altitude decides everything

Mountains

watermedium

foodhard

sheltermed-hard

technologylow to medium

dangermed-high

infectionseasy

Move on if things go wrong → down. Always down. Losing 500–1000 m (1600–3300 ft) gives you more warmth, more oxygen, more firewood, more food and gets you closer to people. This is not "an option", it is the standard answer to almost any mountain problem.

The one biome where the ground itself changes your conditions within hours, with no change in the weather: the temperature falls by about 6 °C per 1000 m (3.5 °F per 1000 ft) of climb in dry weather, half that when it is raining or snowing. Clothing that was enough at the foot of the slope may not save you higher up the same route by evening.

Если вы оказались в горах

Остановитесь на устойчивой площадке. Не под нависающими камнями, не в кулуаре, русле, у края обрыва или на лавинном склоне. Зафиксируйте координаты и высоту.
Не спускайтесь наугад. Возврат допустим только по точно известному безопасному пути и засветло. В темноте оставайтесь на месте, если нет камнепада, воды, пожара или другой непосредственной угрозы.
Уйдите с гребня до грозы. Палатка не защищает от молнии. Лучшее действие — заранее добраться до капитального здания или закрытого автомобиля; если их нет, избегайте гребней, воды, одиноких деревьев и металла.
Проверьте высотные симптомы. Головная боль вместе с тошнотой, слабостью или головокружением — прекратить подъём. Спутанность, шаткость или одышка в покое — немедленно ниже и за помощью.
Устройте малый лагерь. Ветрозащита, изоляция от камня, вода и сигнал важнее костра. Не разводите огонь под скальным навесом и не нагревайте мокрые камни.
Нарастающая шаткость, спутанность, одышка в покое, боль в груди, тяжёлая травма или внезапный подъём воды требуют эвакуации. Не оставляйте пострадавшего одного.

До темнотыКоординаты, прогноз, устойчивое место, слой под телом и вода.

НочьюНе ходить по осыпи и краям. Обувь, свет, одежду и аварийный выход держать рядом.

После громаНе возвращаться на открытый рельеф минимум 30 минут после последнего грома.

Первое решение — оценить безопасный спуск. Ниже обычно теплее, больше топлива, воды и шансов встретить людей, но движение оправдано только по известному маршруту, засветло и при сохранной координации. Не спускайтесь в лавиноопасный кулуар, ущелье с паводком или при травме, когда движение опаснее ожидания.

Hour 1 — assess altitude, weather and time until dark

⏱ 20–30 minutes, and it is the only reconnaissance worth doing up high

Three questions: how much daylight is left, which way the weather is coming from, and where the nearest descent is that is not a couloir. Darkness comes suddenly in mountains — the sun goes behind the ridge long before actual sunset, and you lose the hour and a half you were counting on. Assume dark will arrive sooner than it does.

Day 1 — descend below the tree line

⏱ All the daylight you have left

The aim for the day is to get below the tree line. Everything that does not exist higher up appears there at once: firewood, plant fibre for cord, conifer boughs for bedding, shelter from wind. If you cannot make it, do not walk over scree and rock in the dark — that is the main cause of injuries. Camp where the dark catches you, but be sure to get off the ridge and out of the couloir: a ridge is scoured by wind, and a couloir is the route rocks and avalanches take.

Cordage below the tree line, as in a forest. Above it there is no plant fibre at all, only sinew from animals you take. If you are up high and plan to stay, gather material in advance while it is still available.

Choosing a route

1. How to choose where to go down

Looking up a slope deceives you, and looking down deceives you more: the slope looks even right up to the point where it drops away. There is one rule and it is simple.

Descend on ribs, not in gullies. A "rib" is a convex line on the slope — a spur, a small ridge. A "gully" is concave: a stream bed, a washout, a narrow cleft between rocks. From a rib you can see what is ahead and you can step sideways off it. In a gully you see nothing, there is nowhere to go, and everything falling from the slope above comes down exactly there.

Do not follow a stream bed down. A mountain stream turns into a waterfall sooner or later, and you will discover this standing at the top of a drop, from which going back is now harder than going on was.
Descend diagonally, in zigzags, rather than straight down. A straight descent is quicker right up to the first slip.
On loose ground put your foot down heel first, side-on to the slope, slightly crouched. Fine scree slides with you and that is normal — what is dangerous is head-sized rocks sitting unstably.
If you are not alone, do not go one directly below the otherbut staggered. A stone dislodged by the person above goes straight into the head of the person below.
When it gets dark, stop. Most mountain injuries happen on descent at dusk, to people who had "hardly any way left to go".

A dead end is no disgrace. If the route runs into a drop, go back up and take a different rib. Trying to "somehow get through" on tired legs is the moment after which rescuers are looking not for a missing person but for a casualty.

Shelter against rock

2. A night by the rock: stone warms you and stone drains you

In mountains you do not build — you finish off what is there. A rock overhang, a niche under a boulder, a hollow behind a block already give you three walls out of four, and far quicker than any hut.

Having picked a niche, look up. Fresh chips of stone underfoot, cracks and overhanging blocks above mean things have fallen here and will fall again. Move on.
Make sure you are not in the bed of a dry watercourse: smooth rounded stones and a strip with no vegetation mean water runs through here.
Close the open side with dry-stone walling — stones on top of one another with no mortar, flat faces inwards, each course spanning the joint of the one below. The height of a seated person is enough.
Get yourself off the stone. Rock is colder than earth and draws heat out of you all night. Conifer boughs, dry grass, moss, a rucksack — anything at least a palm thick.
Put the fire right at the entrance, your back to the rock. The stone behind the fire heats up and gives that heat back until morning, which a wooden wall cannot do.

Do not camp on the floor of a hollow. At night cold air sinks and settles in dips: the bottom can be 5–8 °C colder than the slope twenty paces higher. That is exactly the opposite of what instinct suggests.

Level 1 · unlocked

🌙 Night 1

A natural shelter beats a home-made one: a rock overhang, a niche under a boulder, a hollow behind a block. But check that nothing above you can fall, and that you are not in the bed of a dry watercourse.

Get yourself off the stone. Rock draws heat as well as snow does — conifer boughs, dry grass, a rucksack, anything between you and the ground. At night cold air sinks and collects in basins, so sleeping on the floor of a hollow is colder than on its side, which is the opposite of what seems logical.

Days 2–3 — the critical window

⏱ Keep losing height, or settle in below the tree line

Water is rarely a problem in mountains: streams, snow patches, meltwater. It still has to be boiled, especially below grazing land. Food is the biome's weak point: there is almost nothing to gather, game is shy and mobile, and taking it on a slope is hard work. Hunger comes on sooner here than in a forest, so save your strength rather than looking for food at any cost.

If people are looking for you: staying put is the better choice, but pick a place that can be seen — an open shelf, the crest of a spur, a clearing, rather than the floor of a gorge where you can neither be seen nor heard from the air or from the opposite slope. Three signals in a row is the international distress sign, and it suits mountains particularly well: sound and light travel a long way (see "Signalling").

🌙 Nights 2–3

Below the tree line the night becomes an ordinary forest night: fire, a reflector of stones, bedding. A stone wall behind the fire works better than a wooden one — stone gives its stored heat back all night. That is exactly why a mountain camp against rock is warmer than one on an open slope.

→ END OF THE 72 HOURS: you are below the tree line, by water, with fire. The most dangerous things in mountains — altitude and darkness — are behind you.

Week 1 — settling into the valley

⏱ The rest of the week

Camp goes in the valley, but above its floor: a flood in a mountain gorge rises within minutes from rain falling somewhere higher that you cannot even see. Snares on animal trails — they are particularly clear in mountains, because animals also follow the easy lines of the ground. Containers appear, and boiling, and a permanent shelter.

Level 2 · unlocked

🌙 Night, week 1

The routine is as in a forest, with one correction: the day-to-night temperature swing in mountains is twice what it is on the plain. In the evening prepare more fuel for the night than the daytime warmth suggests.

→ WORKBENCH: water, fire, shelter and a minimum of hunting are all stable.

Weeks 2–4 and beyond — stone

⏱ No hurry

Where there is little timber, the main material becomes stone: dry-stone walling holds for centuries, and a built wall combined with a rock face gives you a ready dwelling with almost no wood. A stone stove and a hearth with stone mass store heat and give it back at night. This is the one biome where Level 4 is built neither of wood nor of clay.

Levels 3–4 · unlocked

Altitude sickness is a threat that does not exist in the other biomes. Above roughly 2500 m (8200 ft) come headache, nausea, weakness, dizziness and sleeplessness. In itself that is not yet a catastrophe. But if you add an unsteady walk or confusion (swelling of the brain), or breathlessness at rest and a cough with pink frothy sputum (fluid in the lungs), then it is a matter of hours. There is one treatment: descend 300–1000 metres immediately, until the symptoms go. Not "rest and see how it looks in the morning" — the condition worsens at night. Descending cures it; everything else only buys time.

Ground and weather

Rockfalldangerous

Most often by day, when the sun melts the ice binding the rock together, and after rain. Do not walk or camp in couloirs — they are natural chutes for stones. If you hear noise above, press against the rock under an overhang rather than running down the slope. What to do: Press to the rock under a projection, or step sideways out of the gully, and look up. Cross dangerous places quickly, one at a time, early in the morning while it is cold.

Avalanchesdangerous

Slopes of 30–45° are the dangerous ones, especially after fresh snowfall and during a thaw. Keep to ridges and convex ground, and avoid cutting across a slope. Forest on a slope usually means regular avalanches do not happen there. What to do: Keep off open slopes of 25–45° for a day or two after snowfall; go along ridges and through open woodland. If caught: shout at once, then stay silent, shed anything loose, cover your face with your hands.

Flood in a gorgedangerous

Water rises within minutes from rain higher up the valley, which you may not even be getting. Never camp on the floor of a narrow gorge or on a gravel bar. What to do: If you hear a roar or the water goes muddy, get up the side of the valley immediately, not along the channel.

Temperature swingcaution

Over a day the difference can exceed 25 °C (45 °F). Dress in layers and take a layer off before you sweat — wet clothing at altitude is more dangerous than it is lower down. What to do: Always carry a warm layer; towards evening lay in more fuel than the daytime warmth suggests.

Animals

Marmotsdo not touch

Alpine and Himalayan marmots are the same genus and the same plague risk as in the steppe. Infection comes through cuts while butchering. Do not hunt them at all, however hungry you are. What to do: Do not take them and do not butcher them, however hungry you are. The burrows are useful only as a sign that water is close.

Big catsavoid

Snow leopard, puma and the like very rarely attack first and avoid people. Do not approach a predator's kill. On blind bends of a narrow path, announce yourself with your voice — the worst thing is catching an animal by surprise. What to do: Do not crouch and do not turn your back; look it in the eye, make yourself look bigger, back away slowly. If it attacks, fight, aiming at the face and eyes.

Water is the biome's strength: streams, snow patches, meltwater, dew. Above grazing land the water is cleaner; below it, contaminated by livestock. Boil it either way. Melted snow and ice, as in the taiga: melt it, do not eat it.

Food is the weak point. Растительной пищи мало, выше границы леса почти нет вовсе. Погоня по склону и подъём к гнёздам создают риск падения, который несоразмерен добыче. В первые дни экономия сил, укрытие и вода важнее рискованного поиска еды.

What you can eat without risk of a mistake

Below the tree line the list from the "Forest" chapter applies. Above it there are effectively no reliable plants, and we give no list that could not be trusted.

Lingonberry, bilberry, cloudberry

They grow on a low woody dwarf shrub, not on a soft green stem. That is the identifying feature: the growth form, not the colour of the berry.

Nettle

The leaves sit strictly in pairs opposite each other, and it stings when you touch it — that sting is the check. Boil 5–10 minutes.

The carrot and parsley family — never

An umbrella of small white flowers, a smooth hollow stem with purple blotches. Lethal. Forbidden entirely.

Never touch: the carrot and parsley family (umbrellas of small white flowers) and mushrooms, for the same reasons as everywhere in this guide. And separately: gentians, rhododendron and laurel — beautiful, conspicuous, growing precisely on mountain slopes, and poisonous. The rule is simple: an unfamiliar flower or berry at altitude is not food.

What the biome gives you: stone in unlimited quantity (walling, hearth, reflector, tools); below the tree line, wood, bark and conifer boughs as in a forest; above it, only sinew and hides from animals you take, plus bone and lichen. Clay is found in the valleys near water.

0Scoutingnothing built yet

assess the altitude and the weather · decide to descend

1Level 1 · survive todaycordage, fire, shelter

a natural shelter · get off the stone · fire · cord (only below the tree line)

Drawings and instructions

2Level 2 · workbenchwater, containers and food become a system

containers · snares on trails · a stone reflector by the fire

Drawings and instructions

3Level 3 · crafthide, pottery, putting food by

tanned hide · smoking · a bow (below the tree line)

Drawings and instructions

4Level 4 · house and machinespermanent shelter and things that work for you

dry-stone walling · a stone hearth with thermal mass

Drawings and instructions

In mountains you build in stone, and this is the one biome in the guide where a house needs neither timber nor clay. Dry-stone walling — stones laid on one another with no mortar at all — holds for centuries; in the Alps, the Caucasus and the Andes such structures have stood since the Bronze Age. In return, stone demands patience: choosing and fitting a stone takes longer than felling a tree.

Tech level2 — all you need is hands, a lever and an eye. The lowest barrier to entry of any house in the guide

SeasonAny season but winter. Spring and autumn are the comfortable ones: in summer sun the stone gets too hot to handle

Time on your own3–8 weeks. It all depends on how far the stone has to be carried

PlaceBelow the tree line, against a rock face, halfway up the slope. The roof will still need timber

What decides itNot the walls but what they are built against: the rock already gives you a third of the house

Where to put it: here a mistake costs more than anywhere

Not in a couloir and not in a channel. A gully on a slope is a road for rocks, avalanches and mudflows. The signs: a strip with no vegetation, rounded stones, fresh chips of rock.
Look up at the whole slope, not just at what is directly above you. Overhanging blocks, cracks, "live" stones on scree — move on.
Not on the valley floor. A flood in a mountain gorge rises within minutes from rain you cannot see. Build at least two of your own heights above the floor.
Not on a ridge — that is where the wind is, and the lightning, and no shelter at all.
The ideal is a rock ledge or shelf halfway up the slope, back to the rock, facing the sun, below the tree line.
Picture it in winter: where will the snow come down from the slope above you, and where will it drift.

A dry-stone house against rocksection · bonding · rubble fill · roof

1 The rock face. Build against it. One ready-made wall is a third of the work, a third of the warmth, and all your shelter from wind on that side.
2 Dry-stone walling. The stones are laid flat faces horizontal, long side into the wall, and bonded: every stone spans the joint between two below it. No mortar is needed — weight and friction hold it.
3 Rubble fill. The wall is built double: two courses of large stones with small stuff and rubble between them. Such a wall is twice as warm as a solid one and three times as stable.
4 The roof. The one thing you will have to carry up: beams from the forest, branches across them, turf or overlapping stone slabs on top. The fall runs away from the rock face.
5 A hearth against the wall. The mass of stone behind the fire takes up the heat and gives it back all night. This works better in mountains than in any other biome — there is as much stone around as you like.
6 A sleeping platform and bedding. Essential: stone is colder than earth and pulls heat away faster. You cannot sleep straight on a stone floor even in summer.
! Do not use round stones. River cobbles roll and the wall will slide. You need broken stone with flat faces — take it from scree, not from a stream bed.

How to build a stone house without mortar

Gather the stone in advance and sort it: large flat ones for the footing and the corners, medium for the wall, small stuff for the fill and for wedges. Carrying it takes longer than laying it.
The footing: strip the soil down to firm ground and lay the largest flat stones. How level the footing is decides the fate of the whole wall.
There is one rule and it is the main one: one stone on two, two stones on one. Vertical joints must never run one above the other — that is the line the wall will crack along.
Lay it leaning inwards: the wall should tilt very slightly towards the centre of the house, and then it holds itself.
Every few courses put in a "through-stone" — a long stone crossing the whole wall and tying both faces together. Without through-stones a double wall spreads apart.
Wedges. Wedge every rocking stone with a small one until it is completely still. If one is loose, in time the whole wall moves.
Openings are spanned with a long stone slab or a wooden beam. Build the corners of an opening out of the largest and most regular stones.
Point the gaps from the inside with clay, moss or turf — dry-stone walling carries weight but the wind goes straight through it. This is a required step, not a finish.
The roof: beams running from the rock face outwards with a fall, poles across them, and overlapping stone slabs on top (laid from the bottom up, like tiles) or turf.

The check. A finished wall must not move when you lean a shoulder on it. If it does, take the top courses down and lay them again. A stone wall does not forgive "I will fix that later".

The quick version for the first winter: close off the open side of a rock overhang with dry-stone walling, roof it with poles and turf, and put thick bedding inside. Three days' work instead of three weeks, and it is already proper winter housing.

Warmth in a stone house

Stone is not insulationIt stores heat, but it also carries it away. The inside faces need clay, moss, turf, hides — anything that holds air still.

The floor matters more than the wallsMost of your heat goes out through a stone floor. A platform on joists, with conifer boughs and hides on top.

Mass behind the hearthThe more stone you have warmed, the more even the night. A stone reflector wall works like a radiator.

Keep the volume smallA low ceiling and a small house. In mountains firewood is carried up from below, and every extra cubic metre of air is another trip.

Smoke, air and the door

There have to be two openings, not one. A stove or hearth with a flue and no air coming in will not draw: the fire pulls air out of the room, the pressure drops, and the smoke comes back into the house. This is the commonest mistake in home-made shelter, and it looks like "a bad chimney" when the chimney has nothing to do with it.

Air inAn opening the size of your palm down at floor level, next to the firebox, or a gap under the door, or a separate duct from outside running straight under the hearth. That last one is best: the air for burning comes from outdoors instead of out of your room.

The flueAbove the ridge, a fist across per person, with a straight run. A bent flue will not draw. You need a damper, but it only closes when there is not a single blue flame left in the coals.

Testing the drawHold a burning splinter up to the air inlet: the smoke should be pulled inwards. At the flue it should go up. If it draws the wrong way, there is too little air coming in, or the flue is cold — warm it with a twist of paper or birch bark.

Carbon monoxideNo colour, no smell. The signs are headache, nausea and drowsiness in everyone at once. If that happens: outside immediately, door and vent wide open. The vent in a dwelling stays open always, even in a hard frost.

Door

Opens inwardsOvernight, snow drifts against it outside, leaves pile up and branches come down. A door that opens outwards will one day not open at all.

Rebate and thresholdThe door should sit into a rebate or against cover strips, not simply cover the opening. A threshold a palm high cuts off the cold along the floor, water, and everything that crawls.

Hinges and barHinges — strips of leather, a wooden pin in loops, or a strap from salvage. For the lock — a bar on the inside dropped into two brackets: it holds incomparably better than any hook.

Keep the opening smallThe smaller the door, the less heat blows out and the harder it is for an uninvited visitor to get in. A low narrow entry is not an inconvenience, it is the design.

In mountains the danger is not animals but the slope. Above the door you must have a canopy of stone or logs: it takes whatever comes down from above. The door goes on the side the gully does not run down. As for living things, fox and marten come for your stores — a tight-fitting door and hanging your containers is enough. Once a season, look over the slope above the house after rain and after tremors.

In mountains almost every disaster turns into the same thing: something above you comes down on you. Stone, snow, water, mud. So all the rules of this biome come down to two: do not be in a gully and look at the slope above you, not at your feet.

Rockfalldeadly

Most often morning and evening, when ice in the cracks thaws and freezes, and after rain.
Signs: fresh chips of rock, dust on the slope, clattering, a strip with no vegetation.
What to do: if you hear "Rock!" or a clatter, do not run downhill— press to the rock under a projection, or step sideways out of the gully. Look up rather than searching the ground for the stone. A rucksack on your head will stand in for a helmet.
Prevention: cross dangerous ground quickly, one at a time, early in the morning while it is cold.

Avalanchedeadly

The most dangerous slopes are 25–45° — that is to say, exactly the ones that are comfortable to walk on. After heavy snowfall the risk lasts 1–2 days.
Signs: recent heavy snow, a "whumph" and the snow settling underfoot, cracks opening, cornices on the ridge, traces of past slides.
What to do: go round by the ridges and through open woodland rather than across open gullies. If you are caught, shout at once and then keep silent, throw off anything loose, "swim" towards the edge of the flow, and as it stops cover your face with your hands and make a space in front of your mouth, taking a breath.
Put the house and the camp not under an open slope but behind a rock buttress or in the trees.

Mudflow and flood in a gorgedeadly

The rain falls somewhere higher, and a wall of mud and stones reaches you down the narrow valley within minutes.
Signs: the water suddenly goes muddy, or conversely disappears; a rising roar; a smell of wet earth.
What to do: immediately up the side of the valley, not along the channel. You need to gain tens of metres in height, not move tens of metres sideways.

Thunderstorm at altitudedeadly

In mountains you are often inside the cloud. The sign of an imminent strike: a humming, crackling, hair standing on end, a tingling in metal — those are the last few seconds.
What to do: немедленно уйти с гребня и продолжать движение к капитальному зданию или закрытому автомобилю, если путь безопасен. Не останавливаться под одиноким выступом, в нише, у мокрой стены, воды или металла. Если безопасного укрытия нет, избегать самых высоких и открытых точек и разойтись группой.

A sudden change in the weatherdangerous

The commonest cause of death in mountains is not a rockfall but weather that changed within an hour. Warm and clear becomes wet snow and wind, and the clothing was chosen for "how it was".
What to do: assume the weather is worse than it looks, always carry a warm and windproof layer, and go down at the first signs. Down is the universal answer to almost any mountain problem.

Earthquakedangerous

In mountains the shaking is not the danger; what it sets off is: rockfalls, landslides, and dammed lakes that later burst.
What to do: get into the open, well away from slopes and cliffs, and wait. Do not go under overhangs or into caves until the aftershocks have finished. Afterwards, do not walk up gorges: water may be building up behind a new blockage.

Sinkholes, crevasses and old mine workingsdangerous

Besides rockfall, mountains have things that do not fall on you but open under you: karst cavities, crevasses under a snow bridge, abandoned adits and prospecting shafts.
Signs: craters with no outflow, snow bridges that sag, spoil heaps and suspiciously level platforms — the mark of an old working. What to do: on snow-covered ground, walk with a pole, probing the crust ahead. Never go into mine workings, whatever the weather: the timbering has rotted and carbon dioxide collects in the dead ends — the best-looking and worst-in-fact place to spend a night in the mountains.

Nuclearinvisible, settles as dust

Chemicalhas a smell, flows downhill

Biologicalarrives with people

Mountains divide air and water into channels. Everything that falls higher up comes to you with the water and with the wind down the valley. On the other hand the ground lets you step sideways out of the flow — which neither the steppe nor the plain allows.

Three words common to every kind of contamination

Time — leave straight away, not after packing.
Distance — every step away from the source cuts the dose.
Shielding — any mass between you and the source: earth, stone, water, a wall.

Nuclear

A stone house with a thick wall and rock at your back is good protection in itself. A cave, a niche or an adit gives you mass you would otherwise have to pile up.

Get out of the valley onto its side: water runs along the floor, and everything it carries runs with it.
Outer clothing and boots stay outside. A day indoors at minimum.
Water: a spring straight out of the rock beats a stream, and a stream above a snow patch beats surface meltwater. Melted snow and glacier ice are the worst option: they have been storing what fell for months and release it all at once as they melt.
Food: avoid moss, lichen and the meat of animals that feed on them. That chain works the same in mountains as in the tundra.

Chemical

Heavy gases run down the slope into the valley and settle on the floor. Go up, and across. In mountains this rule agrees with the biome's general logic, only the direction is the opposite of the usual "always down".

Separately: mountains have natural gas seeps — carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide, in caves, near volcanoes, in deep pits. The sign is dead animals and insects at the bottom with no marks of violence on them. Never go down into such places.

Biological

There are few people and the risk is low. The main thing is water: a mountain stream below grazing land or a camp is no cleaner than one on the plain.

Boil all water, including "the purest glacier meltwater".
Do not go into shepherds' huts and folds, and do not take things from them.
Isolate anyone who falls ill; at altitude illness is harder to bear because of the lack of oxygen.

If you do not know what has happened, act on the worst explanation. Erring on the side of caution costs you a lost day. Erring the other way cannot be undone.

Mountains are the meanest biome for food and the most generous for material. With bare hands you can build a stone house that will outlive you, but feeding yourself in it is hard. Finds are rare in mountains, but one abandoned refuge changes everything.

Path A — with bare hands

You know everything humanity knows, but you have nothing except your hands and what grows around you.

The first year

Descending below the tree line — day one, and it is the decision that matters.
Shelter against rock, fire, water — the first week.
A dry-stone house — 3–8 weeks, the lowest barrier to entry in the guide.
Snares on mountain trails: animals follow the easy lines of the ground just as you do.

Three years

Dry-stone walling grows into a holding: house, pen, retaining walls, terraces.
Terraces — the mountain technology of farming: a level platform on a slope held by a stone wall.
A stone stove with mass, fired clay, lime.
Making hay and drying meat — altitude and dry air help.

The ceiling, and an honest limit

Achievable: a dwelling that lasts, terraced farming, pottery, lime, a water wheel on a stream — the fall of water here is free.
Out of reach: steady hunting as a basis. Game is shy, the slope takes your strength, and you burn more calories in mountains.
A peculiarity: mountains reward patience and punish haste more than any other biome.

The bottleneck of this biome

Food and altitude. There is almost nothing to gather, and every journey costs double. Plan around "spend less" rather than "get more".

Path B — on what is left

The same place, but within a day's walk there is something people abandoned. That does not cancel self-reliance — it only speeds it up.

What to look for here specifically

Shepherds' huts, refuges, weather stations — stoves, cookware, salt, tools, sometimes supplies.
Mountain roads and hairpins: abandoned vehicles, cable, jerrycans.
Adits and mines: rail, timbering, tools. Do not go inside — collapses and gas.
Cableways and power lines: steel cable is the best find in the mountains.

What that unlocks

Cable and rope are worth more than food here: they turn an impassable slope into a road.
A stove and a flue solve the heating problem in a stone house, which is cold on its own.
Salt and flour from a shepherd's camp cover the biome's weakest point — food.

The trap on this path

Mountain finds lie in places that are dangerous to reach: scree, hairpin roads, adits. Half the risk of path B in mountains is the journey to the find itself.

The ceiling by year

Timescale	With bare hands	On salvage
Year 1	A stone house, fire, water; food only just enough	The same + a stove and salt from a refuge
Year 3	Terraces, sowing, pottery, lime	Cable and tools: access to the slopes, and water on a wheel
Year 10	A small mountain holding, housing that lasts for generations	The same, but sooner and with fewer losses

Protecting yourself and your family

On path A. Mountains hide you by themselves: one approach you can see along, your back to the rock, the house invisible from below. The main threat here is not people but the ground, so "defence" in mountains means first of all: do not sleep in a couloir, do not build under a slope, and know your escape route up from the channel.

On path B. Refuges and shepherds' huts are the points everyone who ends up here heads for. Look them over from above and from a distance, go in by day, and do not stay the night in someone else's. Give adits a wide berth: they are the best trap and the worst shelter.

Children in the mountains. Three rules, said out loud: do not walk in a gully; do not go down in the dark; if you fall behind, sit down and make noise rather than looking for the way. A harness and a short rope on difficult ground are not over-caution, they are normal practice.

Biome · everything in abundance, dangers included

Tropics / jungle

watereasy

foodeasy, but risky

sheltermedium

technologyhigh

dangerhard

infectionsvery hard

Move on if things go wrong → downstream along the creek to the river, and along the river to people: in the tropics dwellings almost always stand by water. The coast, if it is nearer. Going "straight through the forest" is pointless — you can see 10–20 metres, and you will walk in circles.

The exact opposite of the desert: water and food in abundance, and that is precisely why people underrate this biome. What kills here is not scarcity but damp and small things — a scratch that turned septic, wet feet, water you did not boil, an unfamiliar fruit you ate.

Если вы оказались во влажных тропиках

Остановитесь и закройте кожу. Не прорубайте путь в панике. Осмотрите ноги, руки и лицо; наденьте обувь, длинные рукава и защиту от насекомых.
Выберите сухое высокое место. Выше следов паводка, не под мёртвыми ветвями и плодами, не у стоячей воды и не на звериной тропе.
Сначала крыша и место для сна. Тент с большим уклоном и поднятая либо толстая сухая подстилка. Сырость, насекомые и раны опаснее ночного голода.
Обработайте воду. Отстойте и профильтруйте муть, затем кипятите или обеззараживайте. Чистый вид ручья не означает безопасность.
Вымойте и закройте каждую рану. Ежедневно сушите стопы, меняйте носки, лечите потёртости. Не ходите босиком и не входите с раной в мутную или солоноватую воду.
Лихорадка, нарастающая слабость, спутанность, красные полосы от раны, гной или быстрое распространение отёка требуют медицинской помощи. Не «пережидайте» инфекцию.

До темнотыКрыша, сухая постель, вода, закрытая кожа и проверенные раны.

НочьюНе спать на земле и у воды; обувь вытряхнуть перед надеванием.

ЕдаТолько достоверно знакомая. Не проверять растения и грибы на вкус.

The main rule of the tropics: dry feet and treated scratches. В сыром тепле потёртость или рана быстро ухудшается, а постоянно мокрые стопы теряют защитный слой кожи. Ежедневный осмотр, мытьё чистой водой, сухие носки и закрытая повязка важнее поисков еды.

Day 1, hours 1–2 — water and height off the ground

⏱ 30–40 minutes. Dark comes early in the tropics and almost instantly — around 18:00, with no dusk

You do not have to look for water, it is everywhere — what you have to find is running water, not standing. Camp site: high ground, not a hollow (at night cold damp air flows down into hollows, and everything that crawls goes with it), not under a palm carrying fruit and not under dead branches — "a falling coconut" is not a joke but a real cause of injury. Plan from the start for daylight to end abruptly.

Day 1, the rest — a platform, not a lean-to

⏱ platform or hammock 2–3 hours · a cover against the downpour is mandatory

Cordage: vines — the rare case where the material is ready to use straight away, with no splitting down and no twisting: a thin flexible vine ties as it is. Shelter: raised off the ground — a platform or a hammock between trunks, with a sloping roof of big leaves. There are two reasons: the crawling things, and flooding, because a downpour turns the ground into a stream within minutes.

Fire comes harder here than anywhere: everything is wet. Look for the dry inside — the heart of standing deadwood, trunks split open from within, resinous pieces. Fire in the tropics is not for warmth but for boiling, drying and smoke against insects.

Platform

1. Sleep above the ground, not on it

In temperate forest the ground is merely cold. In the tropics it is wet and alive: water runs over it after every downpour, and everything that bites and stings walks over it. So the only right shelter here is a raised one, and it gets built before the roof.

Pick a level spot on high ground, but not under a palm carrying fruit and not under dead branches. A coconut the weight of a brick falls from fifteen metres.
Drive in four stakes or use four closely spaced trunks. The deck goes knee height, 40–60 cm. Lower and it floods, higher and it is awkward to climb onto and it wobbles.
Lash four poles around the perimeter — that is the frame. The easiest thing to lash with is a thin vine exactly as it is: it needs no soaking and no twisting, a rare luxury of the tropics.
Lay poles or bamboo split lengthways across the frame, tightly. On top of that a thick layer of leaves, so it does not press into your ribs.
Over the deck stretch a sloping roof of big leaves, laying them bottom upward and overlapping, stems up, like tiles. Make the pitch steep: tropical rain goes straight through a shallow roof.
Under the platform light a small smoky fire. The smoke goes up through the deck and keeps mosquitoes off all night.

Quick substitute: a hammock of cloth, netting or bark slung between two trunks, plus a separate cover over it. It goes up in half an hour and solves the same problem. The one thing that matters is that the cover is mandatory: sleeping under open sky in the tropics means waking up in water.

Level 1 · unlocked

🌙 Night 1

The night is warm but damp, and that wears you down differently from cold. The main task of the night is to get dry. Take off your boots and socks, dry your feet by the fire, sleep with bare feet. Eight dry hours out of twenty-four is what separates healthy feet from feet that cannot walk.

A tropical night is very noisy — insects, frogs, monkeys, birds. That is normal and does not mean danger. Fire smoke keeps mosquitoes off better than any repellent, and mosquitoes here are more dangerous than every large predator of the biome put together.

Days 2–3 — the critical window

⏱ What is decided here is not hunger but infection and the state of your feet

Water — boil it with no exception whatsoever: the microbial load here is higher than in a temperate climate, and a "clean-looking stream" means nothing. Daily check: feet, between the toes, every scratch and bite. Wash any wound with boiled water and keep it dry. Traps go on narrow game trails — dense vegetation makes trails more predictable than in the forest.

Feet

Your feet are what you will walk out of here on

What happens to a wet foot. Skin that does not dry for more than 10–12 hours macerates and turns white, circulation in the foot fails, numbness comes, then pain, then cracks that infection gets into at once. After a few days a person simply cannot walk. That is how armies lost more men than they lost in battle — in the trenches of the First World War and in Vietnam.

Eight dry hours out of twenty-four. That is the standard, not a wish. Usually it is the night: boots off, feet washed, wiped dry, sleep barefoot.
Dry your socks by the fire, not in it — on a stick off to the side of the flame. Boots dried too hard crack, a scorched sock tears on the first march.
Keep a second pair of socks dry at any cost: in a closed bag, inside your shirt, anywhere. Change them at a halt, hang the wet pair to dry as you walk.
Every evening check between your toes — that is where it all starts: chafing, fungus, rubbed spots.
Wash any scratch with cooled boiled water and keep it dry. In the tropics, what would have healed by itself at home turns septic within a day.

The sign that means stop and dry out immediately: the foot has gone pale, swollen and wrinkled, as after a long bath, and you have stopped feeling it. From there it is treated only by staying still and by dry warmth, and you will not be able to walk any more.

If people are looking for you: the tropics are the worst biome to be searched in — the canopy hides everything, you cannot be seen from the air even from twenty metres. So here is the exception to the general "stay put" rule: if you are not injured, head for water and downstream — rivers in the tropics are roads, and people live along them. If you stay — find a natural clearing, a sandbar or a bank and signal from there, not from under the canopy.

🌙 Nights 2–3

A ritual appears that will stay with you for good: in the evening, drying feet and boots, checking your body, treating scratches, boiling water for the morning. A smoky fire under the platform. Everything that must stay dry goes off the ground and under a roof.

→ END OF 72 HOURS: water is boiled, feet are dry, wounds are clean, the shelter is off the ground. In the tropics that is what victory is.

Week 1 — protein and bamboo

⏱ The rest of the week

Fishing and traps give you reliable food with no risk of misidentifying a species. If there is bamboo — you have got the best material in this guide: ready-made vessels in the hollow internodes, a light strong frame for shelter, split trunks as gravity-fed water channels, sharp splinters as a cutting edge.

Water from plants

Water straight from bamboo and vine

The tropics are the only place where drinking water is sometimes inside the plant, already filtered by the plant itself. It is no substitute for a stream, but it saves you on the move.

Bamboo: tap the stem between the nodes. A dull sound instead of a ringing one means the section is full of water. Tip the stem over, cut into the upper node — the water will pour out.
Vine: take a thick one, arm-thick, and not thorny. First cut it at the top, then cut off a metre-long piece at the bottom and put your mouth or a vessel under it. If you cut the bottom first, the liquid is drawn upward and will not come out.
Wait: a metre-long piece gives half a cup to a cup over a few minutes.

The check, required every single time. The sap has to be clear or slightly cloudy, and tasteless. If it is white, milky, sticky, bitter or burns your lips — spit it out and do not drink: milky sap in tropical plants is almost always poisonous. Put a drop on your skin first and wait — burning or a rash is an answer of "no" as well.

That same bamboo gives you all the camp's vessels: a section with one closed end is a ready cup or pot, and you can boil in it right on the fire until the wall burns through. A trunk split lengthways is a channel that brings water into camp by gravity.

Level 2 · unlocked

🌙 Night, week 1

The roof already holds off the downpour, the platform is raised, the smoke keeps the insects away. The night becomes quiet, and the main risk is relaxing and skipping the foot check or not boiling the water properly. In the tropics it is precisely the routine that saves you.

→ WORKBENCH: water, fire, dry raised shelter and steady protein.

Weeks 2–4 — the blowgun

⏱ No hurry

The hunting weapon of the tropics is not the bow but the blowgun. The reason is purely practical: in dense vegetation a bowstring catches on branches, and you can hear it being drawn. A blowgun made from a single bamboo stem is silent and accurate on small game and birds at 10–20 metres — and that is exactly what the game here is. In the rainforests of Asia and of the Amazon people arrived at this solution independently of each other, because the conditions are the same.

Level 3 · unlocked

A month and beyond

⏱ Ongoing

A stilt house on a bamboo frame, water piped in split trunks, smoking (in the damp it is needed more than anywhere else — otherwise meat spoils within hours), a garden: the tropics are the only biome where things grow all year round.

Level 4 · unlocked

The order of real danger in the tropics is the reverse of what you expect. The most dangerous thing is infections and insects (mosquitoes carry malaria and dengue fever), then damp (sepsis, trench foot), then snakes, and only at the very end large predators, which you will most likely never even see.

Animals

Mosquitoesthe main threat

They carry malaria, dengue and other diseases. Protection: fire smoke, covered clothing at dusk, mud or ash on exposed skin, sleeping under a net of any cloth. A mosquito here is more dangerous than a jaguar by several orders of magnitude. What to do: A smoky fire, a net or netting, covered clothing at dusk. Get rid of any standing water near camp.

Snakeshigh risk

Смотрите, куда ставите ногу и кладёте руку; не переступайте через бревно, не увидев землю за ним, и не шарьте руками в листве или дуплах. При укусе: вызовите помощь, оставайтесь неподвижным, снимите кольца и часы, держите конечность в удобном нейтральном положении и накройте место чистой сухой повязкой. Не резать, не отсасывать, не прикладывать лёд и не накладывать жгут.

Insects and spiderscaution

Check and shake out your boots and clothes every time. Sleep raised off the ground. Ticks, leeches, larvae under the skin — check your body daily. What to do: A net over your sleeping place, boots shaken out, nothing edible in the dwelling. Wash every bite and keep it dry.

Big catsavoid

Jaguar, leopard and tiger avoid people almost always. Do not go near a fresh kill — the owner may be nearby. What to do: Do not crouch and do not turn your back; look it in the eye, make yourself look bigger, back away slowly. If it attacks, fight, aiming at the face and eyes.

Water: currents and wildlifecaution

Do not ford rivers without probing the bottom, do not swim in murky water in regions with crocodiles and caimans. A downpour upstream raises the river without warning. What to do: Do not go into the water alone and do not touch anything brightly coloured. If the current takes you, swim along the bank, not against the flow.

Boiling, with no exceptions. This is the one biome where we allow no "if the water looks clean". The microbial load of tropical water is several times the temperate one, and dehydration from diarrhoea comes fast in a hot climate.

Water: running streams, rainwater (the cleanest — collect it straight off leaves and the roof), water from the hollow internodes of bamboo, cut vines of certain species. Standing water comes last.

Protein is safer than plants, and that is the key choice of this biome. Fishing, traps on narrow trails, insects, larvae in rotten wood. None of it calls for botanical identification, which means none of it can poison you by mistake.

The plants of the tropics are deliberately not listed in this guide — and that is a decision, not an omission. What was an exception in temperate forest ("do not touch the umbellifers") becomes the rule here for almost any unfamiliar species: the diversity is enormous, there are many poisonous look-alikes, and the marks by which edible plants are told apart in temperate country do not work here. An untrained person cannot reliably identify a tropical plant from a description. Eat what you have caught, not what you have picked.

The only exception is what you recognise beyond doubt, because you have seen it in a shop: coconut, banana, papaya, mango, pineapple. If you are not a hundred per cent certain that this is what is in front of you, it is not food.

Coconut, banana, papaya, mango

The only exception for the tropics: what you recognise beyond doubt, because you have seen it in a shop. Everything else — no.

Young bamboo shoots

Thick cone-shaped shoots coming out of the ground, in tight scales. You recognise them by the bamboo standing next to them. Boiled only, and change the water twice — raw shoots hold a bitterness that goes with boiling.

What the biome gives you: bamboo (if you have it, the best material in the guide), vines (ready-made cordage), big leaves (roofing, vessels, wrapping), hardwoods, clay by the rivers, shells and bone. There is one shortage and it is a serious one: dry fuel.

0Scoutingnothing built yet

running water · high ground · allow for early dusk

1Level 1 · survive todaycordage, fire, shelter

cordage from vines · a raised platform or hammock · a roof of leaves · fire from dry heartwood

Drawings and instructions

2Level 2 · workbenchwater, containers and food become a system

bamboo containers · traps on trails · boiling · a smoky fire against insects

Drawings and instructions

3Level 3 · crafthide, pottery, putting food by

blowgun · smoking · water piped in split bamboo

Drawings and instructions

4Level 4 · house and machinespermanent shelter and things that work for you

a stilt house on a bamboo frame · a year-round garden

Drawings and instructions

In the tropics you build a house not against the cold but against water, rot and everything that crawls. So the only right answer here is to raise the house off the ground. Stilt houses stand from South-East Asia to the Amazon not out of tradition but because everything else rots and floods.

Tech level2 — cordage (a vine is ready to work with straight away) and a cutting tool. Bamboo removes half the tasks

SeasonBuild in the dry season. In the monsoon nothing dries and no daub holds

Time on your own2–4 weeks if you have bamboo, twice that without it

What decides itHeight off the ground, roof pitch and how well it is ventilated. There is nothing to insulate here

Enemy no. 1Termites and rot. Any wood in the ground is wood for one season

Where to put it

On high ground and on a slope, not in a hollow: water runs down there and everything alive slides down with it.
Not under a palm carrying fruit and not under dead branches. A coconut the weight of a brick from fifteen metres up is a real cause of deaths.
By running water, but two heights of a man above its bank. A tropical river rises within hours.
In a spot the wind blows through. A draught is not the enemy here but a tool: it dries, keeps mosquitoes off and makes the heat bearable.
Check for termites: earth tunnels up the trunks, cones of termite mounds nearby. There is no point putting a house on their territory.

Stilt housesection · stilts · rat guards · roof · ventilation

1 A stone under the stilt. A stilt driven straight into the ground rots within a season and gets eaten by termites. A flat stone or a butt end charred in the fire pushes that back by years.
2 Stilts. The deck goes half a metre to a metre up. Lower and it floods, higher and it is awkward and unsteady.
3 Rat guards. Upturned discs of stone, bark or tin on every stilt below the deck. Rats, snakes and ants cannot get past them — a trick known to every stilt-building culture.
4 The deck. Bamboo split lengthways, or poles with gaps: water and debris fall through, air passes from below.
5 Walls are a lattice, not a wall. Wattle with wide gaps, or mats that you drop in a downpour and raise in the heat. A solid wall in the tropics means stuffiness and mould.
6 The roof: the main element of the house. A pitch of no less than 45°, with big overhangs — down to the ground at the sides. Thatch with leaves bottom upward and overlapping, stems up, each row covering the fastening of the one below.
7 A smoky fire under the deck. The smoke goes up through the floor, keeps insects off and dries the structure out. Keep the fire small and off to the side of the stilts.
! Do not build on the ground "just for now". A floor on the soil in the tropics means damp, fungus on your feet, ants in your bed and rot within a month. A small platform is better than a big hut on the ground.

How to build a stilt house

Mark out a rectangle and check the diagonals with a cord — they must be equal.
Prepare the stilts: the hardest trunks; char the butt end in the fire to a black crust — the simplest protection against rot and termites, known for thousands of years.
Stand the stilts on stones, rather than burying them, if the ground allows. If you do bury them — the same charred wood, and gravel in the hole for drainage.
The tie beams: lash the tops of the stilts with beams around the perimeter and across. Lash with vine exactly as it is — it needs neither soaking nor twisting. Tighten the knots again a day later: vine dries and shrinks.
The deck from split bamboo or poles with a finger's gap between them.
The roof frame before the walls. In the tropics the roof comes first: you can work under it in any downpour.
Thatching: palm leaves are folded in half over a pole and threaded on tightly, rows going bottom upward with a two-thirds overlap. The ridge gets its own separate folded row.
Walls and mats come last. Leave one side open, on the lee side.
Check it in the first downpour and weave over the places where it drips. The roof will have to be renewed every season — that is normal, not a defect.

Bamboo is the best building material in the guide. Ready-made pipes for water, vessels in the internodes, light strong poles, split it and you have a board, a splinter and you have a cutting edge. It has to be cut right at the ground and in the dry season: cut in the rains, it is quickly eaten by beetles.

A hammock is not laziness but engineering. If you are short of material, start with a hammock under a cover: it solves the same problem of getting off the ground in half a day instead of three weeks.

What kills a house in the tropics

RotEverything that is damp and not ventilated. The cure is gaps, overhangs and smoke from below.

TermitesThey eat wood from the inside, and nothing shows on the outside. Char the butt ends, a stone under each stilt, regular checks: earth trails up a post mean alarm.

DownpourIt goes through a shallow roof and undermines the ground. A steep pitch, big overhangs, a ditch around the house.

MouldOn your things, on your clothes, on you. The only cure is a draught and sun: once a week take everything out to dry.

Smoke, air and the door

There have to be two openings, not one. A stove or hearth with a flue and no air coming in will not draw: the fire pulls air out of the room, the pressure drops, and the smoke comes back into the house. This is the commonest mistake in home-made shelter, and it looks like "a bad chimney" when the chimney has nothing to do with it.

Air inAn opening the size of your palm down at floor level, next to the firebox, or a gap under the door, or a separate duct from outside running straight under the hearth. That last one is best: the air for burning comes from outdoors instead of out of your room.

The flueAbove the ridge, a fist across per person, with a straight run. A bent flue will not draw. You need a damper, but it only closes when there is not a single blue flame left in the coals.

Testing the drawHold a burning splinter up to the air inlet: the smoke should be pulled inwards. At the flue it should go up. If it draws the wrong way, there is too little air coming in, or the flue is cold — warm it with a twist of paper or birch bark.

Carbon monoxideNo colour, no smell. The signs are headache, nausea and drowsiness in everyone at once. If that happens: outside immediately, door and vent wide open. The vent in a dwelling stays open always, even in a hard frost.

Door

Opens inwardsOvernight, snow drifts against it outside, leaves pile up and branches come down. A door that opens outwards will one day not open at all.

Rebate and thresholdThe door should sit into a rebate or against cover strips, not simply cover the opening. A threshold a palm high cuts off the cold along the floor, water, and everything that crawls.

Hinges and barHinges — strips of leather, a wooden pin in loops, or a strap from salvage. For the lock — a bar on the inside dropped into two brackets: it holds incomparably better than any hook.

Keep the opening smallThe smaller the door, the less heat blows out and the harder it is for an uninvited visitor to get in. A low narrow entry is not an inconvenience, it is the design.

In the tropics you defend yourself not against a big animal but against small ones. Snakes, rats, ants, scorpions. Three things work: rat guards on the stilts (upturned discs that cannot be got round), a high threshold, and a complete absence of food in the house — everything edible is hung outside in closed containers. A mat for a door is enough, but the opening has to be above the deck, not level with it.

In the tropics a catastrophe almost always has to do with water. Downpour, flood, landslide, storm. The second thing that hits differently here: after any catastrophe the risk of disease rises sharply — standing water, washed-out sewage, mosquitoes. Half the consequences arrive a week later, not in the first hour.

Flash flooddeadly

A tropical downpour delivers in an hour as much water as falls in a month in a temperate climate. A creek becomes a river within minutes.
What to do: camp always two heights of a man above the bank, and not on an island and not on a spit. If you hear a roar or see the water turn muddy — up the slope immediately, not along the channel. Do not cross a flow deeper than your knee: in muddy water you can see neither the bottom nor the snags.

Typhoon and tropical stormdeadly

The wind fells trees and tears roofs off, and behind it comes a wall of rain.
Signs: a sharp drop in pressure (your ears block), a long swell on the water, an unusually bright sunset, birds moving inland.
What to do: get away from the shore and from tall trees, tie everything down. The calm in the middle is the eye of the storm, not the end of it. In 20–60 minutes the wind comes back from the opposite side, and that is what kills the people who went out to tidy up.

Landslidedeadly

After long rains a water-saturated slope slides off whole, often at night.
Signs: new cracks in the ground, trees and posts leaning over, streams that were clear turning muddy, a dull rumble.
What to do: do not put your house under a steep slope or at the foot of a gully. At the first signs — move sideways off the slope, not down it.

Thunderstormdangerous

Безопасного положения снаружи нет. Уходите к капитальному зданию или закрытому автомобилю; не стойте под одинокой пальмой, у воды, на открытом месте или рядом с металлом. Если укрытия нет, продолжайте уходить от самых высоких объектов и разойдитесь группой. Возвращайтесь наружу через 30 минут после последнего грома.

Volcanic eruptiondeadly

Many tropical islands are volcanic.
What to do: go across the wind and sideways out of the valleys — flows and mudslides come down the valleys. Ash: cover your face with wet cloth, protect your eyes, do not run (ash clogs the lungs when you breathe fast), sweep it off the roof or the weight will bring the roof down. Ash plus rain turns into cement.
Water after an ashfall is acid and unusable — use closed supplies.

Tsunamideadly

Relevant on coasts and islands.
The sign that is worth more than any warning: the water has suddenly gone out from the shore, leaving the bottom bare. You have minutes.
What to do: upward immediately — to high ground or at least to the upper floors of a solid building, at a run, not back for your things. There is more than one wave: the later ones are often higher than the first, and you have to wait for hours.

Sinkholes in karst and voids under rootscaution

Wet limestone erodes fast, and the tropics are rich in caves and sinkholes covered over by vegetation. Voids under a mat of roots are a danger of their own: a green carpet on top, nothing under it.
Signs: rounded depressions, water disappearing underground, a hollow sound, vegetation that sags under your foot. What to do: in unfamiliar thickets walk probing the ground with a stick, especially after a downpour. Do not go down into caves and sinkholes: there is water, slippery rock and no air there, and they are inhabited as well.

Nuclearinvisible, settles as dust

Chemicalhas a smell, flows downhill

Biologicalarrives with people

In the tropics a man-made disaster quickly turns biological. Heat and moisture speed everything up: decomposition, the multiplying of microbes, spread through water. Putting a decision off is especially dangerous here.

Three words common to every kind of contamination

Time — leave straight away, not after packing.
Distance — every step away from the source cuts the dose.
Shielding — any mass between you and the source: earth, stone, water, a wall.

Nuclear

The forest canopy holds back part of what falls, but then shakes it off with the very first downpour. You cannot dig a dugout here — water. Which means shelter is mass around you: a rock niche, a thick wall, the basement of a solid building if there is one.

The downpour is your ally: it washes what has fallen off the foliage and the soil faster than in any other biome. After a few heavy rains the surface becomes noticeably cleaner.
Do not collect rainwater in the first days — it carries everything that was in the air and on the roof.
Leave clothes and boots outside, wash in running water.
Food: wash and peel fruit from trees, root vegetables are safer than leaves, fish from running water are safer than fish from standing water.

Chemical

Heavy gases run down into hollows and linger in unventilated thickets. Go upward, onto an open slope, across the wind. Damp air holds many substances longer than dry air does — reckon on the cloud lasting several times as long as it would in the desert.

Breathe through wet cloth, and once you are out, undress and wash. Tropical heat makes you want to take your protection off — do not, until you are out of the zone.

Biological

This is the main danger of the biome, with no weapon involved at all. Even in quiet times the tropics give you fevers, gut infections and parasites; when daily life breaks down, an outbreak starts within days.

Boil all water, always. No exceptions — that is the rule of the tropics generally.
The latrine far from water and from the dwelling, and bury what goes into it. After a downpour, everything lying on the surface ends up in the stream.
Standing water near camp — get rid of it. Any puddle, any vessel with water in it, means mosquitoes, and mosquitoes in the tropics are more dangerous than all the big animals put together.
Isolate anyone who falls ill, one person looks after them, separate dishes and towel.
Do not eat carrion and do not touch dead animals.

If you do not know what has happened, act on the worst explanation. Erring on the side of caution costs you a lost day. Erring the other way cannot be undone.

The tropics give you the most raw material and the most disease. With bare hands you can build and grow more here than anywhere — if you do not die of infection and do not rot along with your house. Finds in the tropics spoil faster than anywhere else, but metal here is twice as valuable.

Path A — with bare hands

You know everything humanity knows, but you have nothing except your hands and what grows around you.

The first year

A platform off the ground, a roof against the downpour, smoke against the mosquitoes — the first day.
Water from bamboo, boiling with no exceptions, foot care — from day one and for good.
Stilt house — 2–4 weeks if you have bamboo.
Traps, fishing, fruit. Hunger comes later here than infection does.

Three years

A bamboo economy: gravity-fed water pipe, vessels, furniture, ladders, fences.
A garden all year round — the only biome with no dead season.
Smoking as a necessity: without it meat spoils within hours.
A blowgun, pit traps, fish traps on the river.

The ceiling, and an honest limit

Achievable: roomy dry housing, food all year round, pottery, cloth, a dugout boat.
Out of reach: everything that has to be stored. Damp and mould eat your supplies, termites eat your buildings.
The main limit is not technology but health: one neglected scratch wipes out a year of work.

The bottleneck of this biome

Rot and infection. The tropics do not kill you with hunger — they kill you by the fact that everything spoils: food, wood, cloth, leather and your feet.

Path B — on what is left

The same place, but within a day's walk there is something people abandoned. That does not cancel self-reliance — it only speeds it up.

What to look for here specifically

Plantations and villages — machetes, pots, nets, jerricans, salt.
Rivers are the roads of the tropics: abandoned boats, motors and cable lie by the water.
Metal of any kind: it rusts faster here than anywhere, so take it and grease it straight away.
A mosquito net and a tarpaulin are a find on a par with food.

What that unlocks

A machete is the most useful object in the tropics. On its own it replaces half of a stone toolkit.
A mosquito net cuts the biome's main risk directly.
A pot = boiling with no contrivances, which means no gut infections.

The trap on this path

In the tropics finds do not just lie there — they fall apart. Metal rusts, cloth rots, electronics are dead within a season. Plan path B as a one-off boost, not as a reserve.

The ceiling by year

Timescale	With bare hands	On salvage
Year 1	A stilt house, water, traps; health above all	The same in a week + a machete and a net
Year 3	A bamboo economy, a garden, smoking, a boat	Tools and nets: fishing and building at another level
Year 10	A stable way of life for a family — a ceiling higher than the forest's	The same; by then the metal has mostly corroded away

Protecting yourself and your family

On path A. The tropics hide you better than anywhere: the canopy conceals both the camp and the smoke. The danger is water: people travel the rivers. Put the camp away from the bank and do not wear a path down to the water. The perimeter is not a fence but a cleared strip: tracks show on it and nobody can come up silently.

On path B. Plantations and villages are the only open places, and everyone meets there. Go in the dry season, in daylight, with one pack. Check food you find especially strictly: in the heat it goes off without showing it.

Children in the tropics. A daily check — feet, between the toes, every scratch. Anything that bit or scratched gets treated at once. Sleep only under a net or under smoke. And the water rule: drink only what has been boiled, always, with no exceptions — here it saves more often than anything else.

Biome · the tide sets your clock

Coast / islands

watermedium

foodeasy to medium

sheltermedium

technologymed-high

dangereasy to medium

infectionsmedium

Move on if things go wrong → inland to fresh water, along the shore to a river mouth. A river mouth is the best place on any coast: fresh water, fish and a way out to people all come together there.

The coast is not so much a separate biome as a layer on top of any other one: behind your back there is forest, taiga, desert or tropics, and that chapter is yours too. The sea adds three things: plenty of food, no drinking water at all, and a clock of its own — the tide.

Если вы оказались на побережье

Сначала уйдите из зоны воды. Поднимитесь выше свежего мусора, водорослей и следов прибоя; не ставьте лагерь в устье, сухом русле или под обрывом.
Знайте сигнал цунами. Сильное или долгое землетрясение, внезапный уход моря либо громкий рёв — немедленно на возвышенность или дальше вглубь, не ждите сообщения и не идите смотреть.
Найдите пресную воду. Морскую воду пить нельзя. Собирайте дождь, используйте известный пресный источник и обеззараживайте; кипячение не удаляет соль.
Сделайте укрытие от ветра и солнца. Закрепите тент низко, утеплитесь от мокрого песка и приготовьте путь отхода выше при росте воды.
Берегите раны и еду. Промывайте раны чистой пресной водой и закрывайте. Моллюсков и рыбу употребляйте только свежими и полностью приготовленными; при предупреждении о токсинах не собирайте.
Вода быстро отступила, земля дрожала, уровень растёт или слышен рёв — бросьте вещи и уходите вверх. Первая волна может быть не самой большой.

До темнотыЛиния прилива, путь выше, пресная вода, закреплённый тент и сигнал.

ОгоньСнаружи, на очищенном месте; не жгите пластик, крашеное или пропитанное дерево.

В водеНе входите в прибой без необходимости; течение и волна сильнее визуальной оценки новичка.

Морскую воду пить нельзя ни при какой жажде. It holds more salt than the kidneys can get rid of, and the body spends more воды, чем получил. Морская вода не утоляет обезвоживание, а ускоряет его. Кипячение не удаляет соль.

Day 1, hours 1–2 — the tide line and fresh water

⏱ 30–60 minutes. The first thing to establish is how far the water comes up

Find the highest tide line: the band of weed, foam, debris and driftwood on the beach. Everything below it goes under water twice a day — you cannot sleep there, leave things there or light a fire there. Camp goes above that line with a margin.

Fresh water: streams from the landward side, a lens of fresh water at the foot of the dunes — a hole dug in the sand behind the first dune often gives brackish but usable water (fresh water is lighter than salt and floats on top of it). Rain catchment is the cleanest source of all.

Distillation

How to make fresh water out of sea water

При исправной перегонке соль остаётся в исходной ёмкости, а пар конденсируется отдельно. Но самодельная система легко загрязняет сборник брызгами, опрокидывается и расходует много топлива. Это резервный способ только при подходящей металлической посуде, устойчивой конструкции и постоянном присмотре.

Pour sea water into a vessel and put it on the fire. Fill it no more than half full — otherwise spray with salt in it flies into the place the steam is collecting.
Cover the vessel so that the lid is sloping: a piece of tin, a broad leaf, a flat stone or an upturned bowl will do.
The steam settles as drops on the underside of the lid and runs down the slope to its lowest edge. Put a second vessel there.
It helps to cool the lid — put a wet rag or a cold stone on top of it. The colder the lid, the more drops you get.
Taste the water you get: it should have no salty taste at all. If it is brackish, spray is reaching it — turn the fire down.

Count the cost honestly. Выход зависит от посуды, герметичности и охлаждения, а всё время нужны топливо и присмотр. Поэтому дождь и проверенный пресный источник остаются приоритетом; перегонка — резерв, а не обещанный суточный объём.

Do not "dilute" fresh water with sea water to make it go further. This is a common and dangerous piece of advice: either way more salt comes in than the kidneys will get rid of.

Day 1, the rest — driftwood settles everything

⏱ shelter 2–3 hours · collecting driftwood as you go

Driftwood — the main gift of the coast: ready-made dry boards and beams, sometimes rope, netting and plastic containers. It is the only biome where building material and fuel lie there finished and all you have to do is gather them. The shelter goes up with its back to the wind off the sea, behind a dune or a rock.

Cordage: fibre from shore grasses and palm leaves, and often real cord found on the beach.

Level 1 · unlocked

🌙 Night 1

The shore is colder at night than it seems: there is almost always a wind off the water, and damp air takes heat faster than dry air. A driftwood fire gives plenty of warmth and shows up well from the sea — on the coast that is more often a plus than a minus.

Check the tide before you sleep. The commonest beginner's mistake on a shore is to fall asleep by the water's edge at low tide and wake up in the water. Mark the current level with a stone or a stick and look again an hour later to see whether it is coming in or going out.

Days 2–3 — learning the rhythm of the tide

⏱ A full tidal cycle is about 12 h 25 min, which means two high waters a day

Low tide is your gathering time: the tidal zone comes clear, with shellfish, crabs, seaweed and fish caught in the pools. High tide is the time for fishing from the shore.

The rule of twelfths — how to know how much time you have

The water does not come in evenly: in the first hour after low water it rises about 1/12 of the whole range, in the second 2/12, in the third and fourth 3/12 each, in the fifth 2/12, in the sixth 1/12. The practical conclusion: the middle of the cycle is the fastest. A sandbar you walked across calmly an hour ago floods three times as fast in the third hour. That is exactly how people get cut off on spits and by rocks.

This is a rough estimate, not a timetable: wind, pressure and the shape of the shore shift the level. Always leave a margin, and never go out onto a sandbar without having your way back planned.

If people are looking for you: the coast is a very good biome to be found in. The shore can be seen from the air and from the water, and you can lay out a sign of any size on the sand. Keep a signal fire with green branches (white smoke) above the tide line, and do not go off inland.

🌙 Nights 2–3

A routine appears: in the evening, fresh water for tomorrow, the catch out to dry or into salt, firewood above the tide line (driftwood left below it will be carried off). Salt and damp air destroy everything: metal rusts within days, knots go stiff, clothing does not dry. Keep your tools and your fire as far from the spray as you can.

→ END OF 72 HOURS: camp above the tide, fresh water available and a clear rhythm of the tides. The coast feeds you more steadily than most biomes.

Week 1 — from gathering to fishing

⏱ The rest of the week

A hook of bone, thorn or wire from the shore; a stone weir trap in the tidal zone — laid out in a half-circle below the high-water level, so the fish stay in it when the tide goes out. It is one of the oldest fishing technologies there is, and it works with nobody watching it.

Stone weir

The stone weir — a trap you build once

The tide brings fish in to the shore, and the ebb takes the water back out. Put a low wall in the way of the retreating water and some of the fish stay in the pool behind it — and all you have to do is come and collect. Weirs like this served generations on the coasts of the Pacific.

Wait for full low tide and look over the bottom that has come clear: you want a gently sloping area with a natural dip in it, not a steep shore.
Lay the wall out in a half-circle or a horseshoe, with the horns towards the shore — along the line low water reaches.
Height — knee high, that is enough. Lay the stones tight, the large ones on the outside facing the waves, and pack the gaps with small ones: that is exactly where fish get out.
Work only at low tide and keep an eye on the water coming in. Building a weir waist-deep in water is precisely the case where people get cut off from the shore.
Come at every low tide. Collect what you have caught by hand or in a basket, and leave the small stuff — it is bait for next time.

Check it after every storm: the waves take the wall apart in a single night. The repair takes half an hour, but noticing the breach in good time is what matters, or you will spend a week walking to an empty trap.

Level 2 · unlocked

🌙 Night, week 1

The shelter holds off the wind, a store of fresh water is made, and the trap works by itself. The evening check: the tide level, whether the stores are safe from gulls and crabs, clothes drying. On an island you add watching the horizon — a ship or an aircraft goes past suddenly and does not stay long.

→ WORKBENCH: fresh water, fire, shelter and steady food.

Weeks 2–4 — salt

⏱ A few days per batch

Evaporating sea water in shallow hollows or stone basins in the sun gives you crystals within a few days. The only biome in this guide where the most valuable resource costs no crafting at all — all it takes is patience. Salt means fish preserved for months ahead and the best goods for trade: everybody needs it and it is produced nowhere but on a coast (see "People").

Level 3 · unlocked

A month and beyond — fish-skin leather

⏱ 1–2 weeks to work a hide

Where there are no large land animals and plenty of fish, leather was made for centuries out of fish skin — in Alaska, in Siberia, in Scandinavia and by the Ainu in Japan, independently of one another. Take the skin off, scrape away the scales and any remaining flesh, tan it for 1–2 weeks in a bark decoction (tannins) or in fermented urine (ammonia tans as well), then work it soft with your hands. The leather comes out thin but unexpectedly strong and almost waterproof — for footwear, bags and clothing.

Level 4 · unlocked

Bivalve shellfish are the most underrated danger in this guide. Mussels, oysters and other bivalves accumulate a paralytic toxin during algal blooms. That toxin is destroyed neither by cooking, nor by freezing, nor by drying, it has no taste and no smell, and the water does not always look as though it is blooming. The first sign is tingling and numbness of the lips and tongue anywhere from a few minutes to two hours after eating. If that appears, stop eating at once. The rule: shellfish are the last food source, not the first, and never in quantity at one sitting.

Sea and shore

A tide that cuts you offdangerous

A spit, a sandbar or a shelf under a rock that you walked to dry-shod floods in a time you will underestimate — see the rule of twelfths. Always plan a way back and watch the water, not your catch. What to do: Before going out onto a sandbar, plan the way back and the time. Remember: in the middle of the cycle the water comes in three times as fast.

Rip currentdangerous

A narrow flow that carries you away from the shore. Do not swim against it — swim along the shore, across the flow, and only turn for land once you are out of it. Trying to paddle straight for the beach exhausts you and drowns you. What to do: Do not swim against it. Swim along the shore, across the flow, and only when you are out of it — for land.

Jellyfishcaution

Do not touch the ones washed up on the beach: the stinging cells stay active in a dead jellyfish and in torn-off tentacles. What to do: Do not touch them even when they are washed up on the beach. If you are stung, rinse with sea water, lift the tentacles off with a stick, do not rub and do not pour fresh water on it.

Sharksavoid

The risk is greatly overrated. Specific things raise it: water at dawn and dusk, murky water, open wounds, shiny objects. Swimming in clear water in the daytime is not in itself a factor. What to do: Do not swim in murky water, at dawn or at dusk, or with an open wound. If one appears, come out calmly, without thrashing, facing it.

Sea urchins and rayscaution

People step on them, not the other way round. In shallow water walk shuffling, without lifting your feet — a ray moves away from the vibration, and you will feel an urchin before you put your full weight on it. What to do: In shallow water walk shuffling, not stepping. If you have stood on an urchin, take the spines out and hold the foot in hot water.

Морская вода — не питьевая. Не пить её и не разбавлять ею пресную воду; не пить кровь и мочу. В полевых условиях соль удаляет правильно собранный дистиллятор, но он требует топлива, исправной конструкции и даёт непредсказуемый объём. Сначала ищите дождевую и другие заведомо пресные источники.

Fresh water: запас, дождь, официально безопасный источник и ручьи со стороны суши. Воду из неизвестного источника обеззараживают; кипячение не удаляет соль или химикаты. Яма с плёнкой даёт непредсказуемо мало и не должна входить в аварийный расчёт.

Food is the strong side of this biome. In order of reliability: fish (hook, weir trap), crabs and shrimp in the tidal pools, seaweed (almost all sea algae are edible — a rare case where plant food is safe), birds' eggs on the cliffs in season.

Seaweed — the rare plant exception

Unlike on land, plant food here is relatively safe: there are practically no lethally poisonous sea algae. Take only the ones attached to the rocks and alive, not the rotting weed cast up on the shore. Rinse it and boil it.

Seaweed

There are practically no lethally poisonous sea algae. Take only what is live and attached to the rocks, not the rotting cast-up weed. Rinse it and boil it.

Do not eat: bivalve shellfish in quantity (see "Threats"), fish with spines and bright colouring in tropical waters, any fish found dead, the liver of large sea predators and of polar bears (a lethal dose of vitamin A).

What the biome gives you: driftwood (ready-made boards and fuel), sea water (salt), shells (a cutting edge, vessels, hooks), fish bone, fish skin, sand and shingle, shore grasses and palm leaves, seaweed, and — almost always — rubbish thrown up by the sea: rope, netting, plastic containers, metal. Do not turn your nose up at it, these are finished articles.

0Scoutingnothing built yet

the tide line · looking for fresh water · collecting driftwood

1Level 1 · survive todaycordage, fire, shelter

shelter behind a dune · a fire of driftwood · cordage from grasses or found

Drawings and instructions

2Level 2 · workbenchwater, containers and food become a system

закрываемая тара · сбор дождя · снасти · безопасная готовка снаружи

Drawings and instructions

3Level 3 · crafthide, pottery, putting food by

salt by evaporation · smoking and salting fish

Drawings and instructions

4Level 4 · house and machinespermanent shelter and things that work for you

fish-skin leather · permanent housing of driftwood

Drawings and instructions

The coast is the only biome where the sea brings you your building material. Driftwood is ready-made dry boards and beams, sometimes rope, netting and plastic. The task here is not "to get material" but to choose the right place: get the tide line wrong and it devalues anything you build.

Tech level2 — cordage and a cutting tool. Driftwood takes the place of all the timber work

SeasonAny, but before the storm season. Find out where the bad weather comes from

Time on your own1–3 weeks: half the work has been done by the sea already

What decides itHeight above the tide line and shelter from the wind off the water

The enemySalt and damp. Metal rusts within days, ropes go stiff, clothing does not dry

Where to put it

Above the highest tide line — and with a margin: the line of weed and debris marks the ordinary tide, and a storm adds metres. Build twice your own height above it.
Behind a dune, a rock or a ridge, not out on the open beach: there is almost always a wind off the water.
Near fresh water: a stream from the landward side, or a place where you can dig behind the first dune.
Not in a river mouth and not in a narrow bay — a storm drives water into those.
Not under a cliff: sea cliffs collapse regularly, that is their normal condition.
Check whether you can be seen from the sea. If you are being looked for, that is a plus and you camp in plain sight. If you are not, the opposite.

A driftwood house behind the dunesection · tide line · frame · cladding · ballast

1 The tide line. The band of weed, foam and debris. Everything below it is under water twice a day. A storm surge comes up metres higher again.
2 A stone footing. A row of stones or short piles: wood on wet sand rots fast, and the sand under a house washes out.
3 Driftwood cladding. Boards overlapping, bottom upward, like scales: that way the water runs off outside. Pack the gaps with moss, grass, rags, oakum from old rope.
4 A low roof with a big overhang. The lower the silhouette, the less wind it catches. Covering: boards, turf, tarpaulin from your finds, a thick layer of seaweed over the battens.
5 Ballast. Stones, or netting with stones in it, over the roof, tied down with ropes to stakes. On the coast it is the wind that takes a roof off, not the rain.
6 The hearth on the lee side and sheltered: the wind here does not let a fire stand still. Fuel is driftwood, but driftwood from the sea is salty: it gives acrid smoke and leaves a deposit on your cookware. Rinse it in fresh water and dry it.
! Test your site in a storm, not in a calm. The shore on a quiet day and the shore in a surge are two different shores. Until you have lived through the first storm, keep your things ready to move.

How to build a driftwood house

Collect the material in advance and stack it above the tide line: whatever you leave on the beach goes out with the very next tide. Sort it: long beams for the frame, boards for cladding, small stuff for firewood.
Dry the driftwood out and where you can, rinse whatever is going into the house with fresh water. Salty wood draws moisture out of the air and never dries out completely.
The footing: a row of stones, or short piles set on stones. On sand you must widen the bearing — a flat stone under every post, or the post will sink into the ground.
The frame: four corner posts, a tie beam around the top, rafters. Lash everything rather than nailing it: there are no nails, and there is usually rope from the beach.
Cladding with boards overlapping, bottom upward. Make the windward side solid and doubled.
The roof — low, sloping away from the wind, with a big overhang. Ballast on top: stones in netting, logs tied down to stakes.
The floor raised a hand's breadth off the sand: boards on joists, with air passing underneath.
The hearth of stones on the lee side, with a flue or an opening with a wind cowl over it.

Salt is the great destroyer. Everything iron from your finds has to be greased, or within a week it turns to dust. Ropes go stiff with salt and break — keep them dry and rinse them in fresh water.

If there is a boat or the remains of one — an upturned hull on props is a house already: that is what was done on every northern coast. It is the fastest route from a find to a home.

Fresh water: the thing that decides the site

Rain catchmentA roof plus a gutter plus a container. On the coast this is the main source, not the reserve one.

A hole behind the duneFresh water is lighter than salt and floats on top of it. Dig shallow and scoop off the top layer: dig deeper and you will hit salt water.

DewIn the morning off the grass, off the stones and off cloth stretched out overnight — there is plenty of it on a coast.

DistillationРезерв при исправной посуде и топливе; выход заранее не гарантируется (см. вкладку «Еда и вода»).

Smoke, air and the door

There have to be two openings, not one. A stove or hearth with a flue and no air coming in will not draw: the fire pulls air out of the room, the pressure drops, and the smoke comes back into the house. This is the commonest mistake in home-made shelter, and it looks like "a bad chimney" when the chimney has nothing to do with it.

Air inAn opening the size of your palm down at floor level, next to the firebox, or a gap under the door, or a separate duct from outside running straight under the hearth. That last one is best: the air for burning comes from outdoors instead of out of your room.

The flueAbove the ridge, a fist across per person, with a straight run. A bent flue will not draw. You need a damper, but it only closes when there is not a single blue flame left in the coals.

Testing the drawHold a burning splinter up to the air inlet: the smoke should be pulled inwards. At the flue it should go up. If it draws the wrong way, there is too little air coming in, or the flue is cold — warm it with a twist of paper or birch bark.

Carbon monoxideNo colour, no smell. The signs are headache, nausea and drowsiness in everyone at once. If that happens: outside immediately, door and vent wide open. The vent in a dwelling stays open always, even in a hard frost.

Door

Opens inwardsOvernight, snow drifts against it outside, leaves pile up and branches come down. A door that opens outwards will one day not open at all.

Rebate and thresholdThe door should sit into a rebate or against cover strips, not simply cover the opening. A threshold a palm high cuts off the cold along the floor, water, and everything that crawls.

Hinges and barHinges — strips of leather, a wooden pin in loops, or a strap from salvage. For the lock — a bar on the inside dropped into two brackets: it holds incomparably better than any hook.

Keep the opening smallThe smaller the door, the less heat blows out and the harder it is for an uninvited visitor to get in. A low narrow entry is not an inconvenience, it is the design.

On a coast it is not predators that steal from you but gulls, crabs and foxes. Everything edible goes into a container with a lid and under a weight. The door and the shutters are held mainly against the wind rather than against animals: they are pressed shut with a beam on the outside and tied down with rope to stakes. When you leave, shut the house up as though a storm were coming that night — one night it will.

On a coast everything comes from the sea, and it comes fast. The main rule of this biome: know where to run uphill, and know it in advance, before you need it. Plan your way out to high ground on the very first day and walk it — at night and in a panic you will take it without looking.

Tsunamideadly

The sign that matters more than any forecast: the water has suddenly gone out from the shore, leaving the bottom bare for tens and hundreds of metres. Or the opposite — the sea comes up with no wave at all. Another sign is a strong earthquake you felt on the shore: you have minutes.
What to do: run immediately uphill and inland, not back for your things and not to look. The target is high ground from 30 metres up, or the upper floors of a solidly built building.
There is more than one wave. The later ones are often higher than the first, and the interval runs from a few minutes to an hour. You can come down after several hours, not before.

Storm and storm surgedeadly

It is not the wave that kills but the surge — the whole sea rises by metres and comes inland.
Signs: a long low swell with no wind, a drop in pressure (your ears block), an unusually bright sunset, birds moving inland, the water going murky.
What to do: move higher and away from the river mouth, tie everything down or carry it off, pull the boat well up. Sit it out away from the shore, not "having a look at the waves". Watching the waves is exactly what most of the dead were doing.

A tide that cuts you offdeadly

The most underrated danger: people walk out at low tide onto a spit, a sandbar or a rock, and then there is no way back.
What to do: before any trip out onto a sandbar, plan the way back and the time. Remember the rule of twelfths: in the middle of the cycle the water comes in three times as fast as at the start.

Rip currentdeadly

A narrow flow that carries you away from the shore. You can see it as a strip of calmer, murkier water between the waves.
What to do: do not swim against it — nobody has the strength for that. Swim along the shore, across the flow, until you are out of it, and only then for land. If you cannot swim, stay afloat and do not panic: the current carries you out and then weakens.

A cliff collapsecaution

Sea cliffs are undercut constantly. Do not camp under a cliff or on the edge of one. Signs: a fresh cone of fallen material at the foot, cracks along the edge at the top. What to do: Do not camp under a cliff or on the edge of one.

Fogcaution

It comes in within minutes and takes away every landmark, the shoreline included. Do not go out to sea and do not go far. If it catches you, stay where you are and make a noise; you find the shore by the sound of the surf, keeping it on one and the same side of you. What to do: Stay where you are and make a noise. You find the shore by the sound of the surf, keeping it on one and the same side of you.

Holes in the dunes and undercut groundcaution

Besides a cliff collapse, the shore has two traps: voids in the dunes covered over by a crust, and quicksand in river mouths and on silty flats — waterlogged ground that will not hold your weight.
Signs: sand of a different shade and sheen, water coming up around your footprint, an even surface where there are ripples all round it. What to do: walk on the wet packed strip of the surf line, not on the smooth patch. If you start to sink, do not struggle and do not pull your foot out with a jerk: lie back on your back, spreading your weight, and roll out towards firm ground. To pull someone else out, only lie down and use a board or a rope.

Nuclearinvisible, settles as dust

Chemicalhas a smell, flows downhill

Biologicalarrives with people

The sea is an enormous diluter and at the same time an accumulator. What dissolves goes away quickly in that volume of water, but everything that gets into the food chain builds up in shellfish and fish and stays dangerous long after the water is clean again.

Three words common to every kind of contamination

Time — leave straight away, not after packing.
Distance — every step away from the source cuts the dose.
Shielding — any mass between you and the source: earth, stone, water, a wall.

Nuclear

An open shore is a bad place during fallout: there is neither mass nor cover. Get off the shore and inland, into the dunes, into a rock niche, into a basement.

A wind off the sea is usually your friend: it drives clean air in. A wind off the land in that situation is a signal to move along the shore, across it.
Water: do not collect rainwater for the first days. Holes behind the dune are safer than open pools.
Food is the special feature of the biome here. Filter-feeding shellfish (mussels, oysters) push tonnes of water through themselves and concentrate everything in it hundreds of times over. After any contamination of the sea, do not eat them for months. The same goes for the liver and innards of large fish — that is where most of it builds up.
Small fast-growing fish are safer than large old ones: they simply have not had time to accumulate anything.

Chemical

A spill of oil, fuel or chemicals from a ship is the commonest man-made event on a coast. Signs: a film on the water, rainbow streaks, a smell, dead fish and birds along the surf line.

What to do: get off the shore (the vapours lie low over the water and roll in with the surf), do not collect driftwood and do not burn it — burning contaminated wood releases exactly what you then breathe. Do not collect water, do not take shellfish. Wait several tidal cycles and watch whether life has come back to the tidal zone: birds and crabs on the shore are the best indicator.

Biological

A coast is the place where both people and what is left of them get washed up. The main risk is contact, and water.

Do not eat shellfish and fish found dead on the shore, however hungry you are. The toxin of algal blooms is removed neither by cooking nor by freezing.
A "red tide" — the water has turned rusty or green, there are many dead fish, and at night the water glows: take no shellfish for weeks.
Boil all fresh water. Do not take things from wrecked ships or from bodies.
Isolate anyone who falls ill, separate dishes.

If you do not know what has happened, act on the worst explanation. Erring on the side of caution costs you a lost day. Erring the other way cannot be undone.

The coast is the most generous biome in this guide, on both paths at once. With bare hands the sea feeds you more steadily than a forest does, and path B here is special: the sea brings the finds to your beach itself, and you do not have to go anywhere for them.

Path A — with bare hands

You know everything humanity knows, but you have nothing except your hands and what grows around you.

The first year

Camp above the tide line, a driftwood shelter, fire — the first day.
Gathering at low tide: shellfish, crabs, seaweed — food from the first hours.
A driftwood house — 1–3 weeks, half the work already done by the sea.
A stone weir: a trap that works without you.

Three years

Salt — by evaporation, with no crafting at all. Preservation, and the best goods for trade.
Hooks, lines, fish traps, nets of plant fibre.
Fish-skin leather — where there are no large animals.
A dugout boat or a raft: the sea becomes a road instead of a wall.

The ceiling, and an honest limit

Achievable: steady food all year round, salt, housing, a boat, trade with other groups.
Out of reach: sustained high heat — driftwood is enough for cooking but not for metalworking; salt and damp eat all your iron.
A peculiarity: the only biome where a surplus appears early and there is something to trade it for.

The bottleneck of this biome

Fresh water. The sea is all around and there is nothing to drink. Everything about where you camp is decided by where you get fresh water.

Path B — on what is left

The same place, but within a day's walk there is something people abandoned. That does not cancel self-reliance — it only speeds it up.

What to look for here specifically

The sea brings things itself: jerricans, buoys, nets, ropes, plastic, boards, crates. Walking the shore after every storm is what your "salvage trip" amounts to.
Harbours, jetties, boatyards: motors, cable, tools, fuel.
Wrecked ships and containers are the biggest prize and the most dangerous one.
Coastal villages and holiday camps: dishes, containers, tarpaulin.

What that unlocks

Net and line raise your catch several times over — that is the most valuable thing path B gives you on a coast.
Plastic containers solve the fresh-water problem: rain catchment becomes a system.
A boat or a motor turn the coast into a junction instead of a dead end.

The trap on this path

Salt destroys your finds faster than you can put them to use: metal rusts within days, ropes go stiff, electronics are dead at once. And the shore is the most travelled place there is: everybody walks along it.

The ceiling by year

Timescale	With bare hands	On salvage
Year 1	A driftwood house, a weir, salt, steady food	The same in days + a net and containers
Year 3	A boat, fish traps, fish skin, stores and trade	A motor or a sail: a radius of tens of kilometres
Year 10	A settlement of 5–15 people — the highest ceiling in the guide	The same, but by then the iron has been eaten by the salt

Protecting yourself and your family

On path A. The shore can be seen right through, and that is the main drawback. The house goes behind a dune or a ridge, not out on open sand; the fire in a pit and not on the shoreline. Tracks in sand are an open book: the tide washes them away, so walk on the wet strip. Surplus salt and food do not stay in the house.

On path B. Harbours and ships draw everyone in. Look them over from a distance, do not go aboard alone (lists, rot, traps), do not stay the night. Your salt is goods: it makes you interesting to strangers. Trade at a neutral point, by the "ladder of contact".

Children on the coast. Three rules: do not go out onto a sandbar without an adult (the tide cuts you off), do not swim against the current — swim along the shore, and go uphill if the water suddenly goes out from the shore. That last one is about tsunamis, and it has to be known by heart.

Biome · the cold never lets go

Arctic / tundra

watermedium

foodvery hard

sheltermedium

technologylow

dangerhigh

infectionseasy

Move on if things go wrong → south, to the tree line: there you immediately have firewood and plant fibre. The coast — if you can take sea mammals and fish. Deeper into the ice desert — never.

The harshest biome in this guide. Hypothermia here is not an episode but a constant background: the body loses heat continuously, and everything you do either slows that loss or speeds it up. There is no plant food at all, no wood, and almost everything has to be taken from an animal you have killed.

Если вы оказались в тундре или Арктике

Уйдите из ветра и не вспотейте. Закройте голову, шею, лицо и кисти; тяжёлую работу выполняйте медленно, снимая лишний слой заранее.
Отделите тело от снега. Рюкзак, коврик, верёвка, одежда, сухие ветви — всё под себя. Не стойте и не сидите без движения на голом снегу.
Стройте простое укрытие. Траншея или защищённая от ветра яма реалистичнее иглу для новичка. Вход ниже спального места, подстилка толстая, внутри лопата или палка.
Сделайте два отверстия для воздуха. Держите их открытыми. Никакого пламени, углей, горелки, свечи или жировой лампы внутри снежного укрытия.
Топите снег только снаружи. Жёсткая платформа, не менее 5 м от входа, подветренная сторона и постоянный присмотр. В ёмкость сначала добавьте немного жидкой воды.
Невнятная речь, шаткость, спутанность, сонливость или прекращение дрожи при продолжающемся холоде — тяжёлое переохлаждение. Утепляйте центр тела, вызывайте помощь, не растирайте обморожения.

До отдыхаСухие слои, подстилка, два отверстия, выход и инструмент внутри.

НочьюВоздух проверять регулярно; никакого горения внутри даже при открытом входе.

Проверка парыРечь, координация, дрожь, чувствительность пальцев, носа и ушей.

Sweat kills faster than frost. The army's cold-weather reminder is "COLD": clothing Clean, do not Overheat, Loose and in layers, Dry. Clothing soaked with sweat stops keeping you warm and starts taking heat away. So here you work slowly and take a layer off in advance, before you get hot. Tired and sweating is not "a good job done", it is an emergency.

Hour 1 — shelter, immediately

⏱ There is no scouting phase here. It is counted in minutes, not hours

The order of Part 1 collapses into one item: stop losing heat. Look not for water and not for food but for shelter from the wind: a sastruga, a drift behind a rock, a slope, any hollow. Wind takes heat away several times faster than still air at the same temperature.

Immediately: cover your face and neck, put the hood up, hands into your sleeves or armpits, put everything you have underneath you, such as your pack, rope or branches. Direct contact with snow takes heat faster than anything else.

Day 1 — a snow shelter

⏱ trench 30–60 min · quinzhee 2–4 hours with a compulsory pause

Snow is not the enemy but building material and insulation: inside a snow shelter it stays around zero even when it is minus thirty outside. That is the difference between life and death, and it is achieved without a single log.

The quick option is a snow trench: dig a trench your own length in firm snow, roof it over with blocks, skis, branches and snow. Half an hour of work.

The thorough option is a quinzhee: pile up a heap of snow about two metres high, let it stand for 1–2 hours — in that time the snow sinters and the dome becomes strong. You must not dig sooner: the dome will collapse. Then hollow it out from inside, leaving walls 30–45 cm thick.

Snow trench

1. The snow trench is the thing you actually need to be able to build

Forget the igloo. A real block-built dome house is built by someone who has done it dozens of times, and in the frost it takes half a day. A trench is the same warmth in half an hour, and it is the trench you build when time matters more than beauty.

Find firm, settled snow. The test: step on it — if your foot does not sink in and leaves a clear print with a sharp edge, the snow will do. In loose snow the walls crumble; there you need a different method.
Dig a trench your own length and a little wider than your shoulders, a little above waist deep. Dig with a shovel, a board, a pot lid, a snowshoe — anything flat.
One end of the trench goes half a step deeper — that will be the entrance and the "cold pit". The sleeping place stays higher: the cold air runs down, and the warm air stays under you.
Roof the trench over: skis, poles, boards, or, if the snow cuts, slabs of snow leaned together against each other. Cover the top with a hand's depth of loose snow.
On the floor — everything you have: branches, spruce boughs, your pack, rope, cardboard. Direct contact with snow is the fastest heat loss there is.
Punch a hole in the roof a finger thick and keep a stick beside you to clear it: your own breath frosts it closed.

Work slowly and with your clothing open. Sweating while building a shelter is the commonest fatal mistake in the Arctic: wet clothing stops keeping you warm at exactly the moment you lie down to rest. Better to dig ten minutes longer and stay dry.

Keep a shovel or a stick to hand inside. The entrance drifts over during the night, and you have to dig out from the inside.

Three rules of a snow shelter, every one of which saves a life:
1. The vent hole is compulsory, and it has to be checked regularly — it frosts closed. Carbon monoxide from any fire, and even a build-up of carbon dioxide from breathing, have no smell.
2. The entrance below the sleeping place. Cold air is heavier and runs down into the pit by the entrance, and the warm air stays with you.
3. Take a shovel or a stick inside, so you can dig out if the entrance gets buried.

Level 1 · unlocked

🌙 Night 1 — the polar night may not end

In winter, above the Arctic Circle, the sun does not rise for weeks. "Night" stops being a stretch of time and becomes a permanent condition, and with it the natural daily order disappears. Set up an artificial rhythm — сон, работа, еда и проверки укрытия по часам или по счёту: недосып и потеря режима ухудшают внимание и решения.

In practice: insulation from the snow matters more than anything else. Boots and wet things go into the sleeping bag or under you, otherwise by morning they will be ice. Do not sleep without ventilation. Do not fall asleep before you have warmed up: shivering at bedtime means you will not wake up warm.

Days 2–3 — the critical window

⏱ Only one thing is decided here: whether you are holding on to your heat

The shelter gets finished off: the walls are smoothed from inside (a smooth dome does not drip), a sleeping shelf is made above the entrance, the bedding is built up. Water — melt snow, never eat it: warming snow in your mouth costs the body heat it does not have. Ice is better than snow — the same volume gives you several times more water.

If people are looking for you: оставайтесь у переданной точки, если там нет непосредственной угрозы. На белом фоне используйте безопасный контраст: тёмную ткань, большой вытоптанный знак, фонарь или сигнальное зеркало. Не сжигайте резину, пластик, масло и неизвестные материалы ради дыма.

🌙 Nights 2–3

A routine appears. Before sleep: check the vent, dry or thaw your boots and insoles, put everything damp under you, get snow ready for the morning's water. Check your feet every day — frostbite starts without pain, and the first sign is not pain but loss of sensation.

→ END OF 72 HOURS: the snow shelter holds heat, water is being melted, a rhythm is set. In the Arctic that is already a big victory.

Week 1 — fat and protein

⏱ The rest of the week

Cordage — in practice only sinew from an animal you have killed: there is no plant fibre here. Ice fishing (a hole, a line, a bone hook), snares for hare and ptarmigan along snow trails — in winter the trails are trodden in and predictable.

Fats matter more than calories as such. On lean meat alone a person weakens and falls ill even when eating their fill — that is a well-known misfortune of polar expeditions. The diet of the northern peoples is built precisely on fat. Do not throw away fat and bone marrow: that is the most valuable part of the kill.

Level 2 · unlocked

🌙 Night, week 1

Ночь остаётся вопросом дисциплины: два свободных вентиляционных пути, сухая подстилка, утеплённая ёмкость с водой и проверка обуви. Никакого пламени, горелки, углей или жировой лампы внутри снежного укрытия. Отсутствие заметного дыма не означает отсутствие угарного газа.

Топка снега снаружи

Как греться и топить снег без огня внутри

Укрытие сохраняет тепло тела, а не производит его. Все операции с пламенем выполняются снаружи, на жёсткой платформе и под присмотром. Внутрь возвращаются уже с тёплой водой и сухими вещами.

Площадка: утрамбованный снег и два слоя толстых сырых жердей крест-накрест; при наличии — металлический лист или штатная подставка горелки.
Место: не менее 5 м от входа, подветреннее укрытия, без снежного карниза и нависающих ветвей.
Вода: сначала налейте в ёмкость немного жидкой воды, затем понемногу добавляйте снег. Полная кастрюля сухого снега легко пригорает и даёт мало воды.
Запас: нагрейте воду до безопасно тёплой, плотно закройте и заверните ёмкость в сухую ткань. Не кладите кипяток прямо к коже.
Сушка: мокрые носки и стельки сушите на расстоянии от пламени и только под наблюдением; синтетика плавится раньше, чем выглядит горячей.

Если топлива нет: делайте укрытие меньше, утолщайте подстилку, защищайте шею и голову, ешьте доступную высококалорийную пищу и оставайтесь сухим. Самодельная лампа внутри не является безопасной заменой костру.

→ ВЕРСТАК: снежное жильё, стабильная вода, добыча и безопасное место для нагрева снаружи.

Weeks 2–4 and beyond — brain tanning

⏱ No hurry

There are no plant tannins here at all, so hide is worked with the animal's own brain: boil it, mash it to a paste, rub it into the cleaned hide, dry it, work it soft with your hands, smoke it over coals for durability. Nature arranged it conveniently: most animals have exactly enough brain for their own hide. Clothing made of hide with the fur inward is the only thermal protection that really works in this biome.

Level 3 · unlocked

The main threat is cold, and it works round the clock. See "First aid": hypothermia and frostbite. The second most important risk is your own sweat. Everything else, the polar bear included, is statistically far behind.

Animals

Polar bearbehaves the opposite way to a brown bear

This is a fundamentally different animal, and here the rules for the brown bear are lethally dangerous. A polar bear sees a human as prey, not as a threat, and can stalk you deliberately.
You must not: drop face down and play dead (with a brown bear that saves you, here it is an invitation), or run (it will catch you easily).
You must: make noise and look bigger as it approaches, back away without turning your back, and if it attacks — fight with any object you have, aiming for the muzzle and nose. Camp: leave no smell of food, rig a trip line with cans on it. What to do: Do not drop face down — fight, hit the nose and eyes with anything you have. Do not keep food or a kill near your dwelling; run a cord with something rattling on it around the shelter.

Wolf, arctic foxavoid

They practically never attack a human, but they wreck your stores. The arctic fox is also often rabid — do not let it near and do not touch it, especially if the animal is oddly bold. What to do: Fire and noise at night, stores kept out of the dwelling. The arctic fox is not dangerous, but it will drag off everything not tied down.

Ice and weather

Thin icedangerous

Going through into the water at these temperatures gives you a few minutes of being able to act. Test the ice with a stick ahead of you, walk in someone else's tracks, go round river mouths, open leads and the stretches under snow near the bank. If you go through — do not thrash about, crawl out onto the ice on the side you came from, and change into dry clothes at once. What to do: Test with a stick ahead of you, go one at a time, pack on one shoulder. If you go through — turn to the edge you came from and crawl out rather than stand up.

Blizzard and whiteoutdangerous

In a whiteout the horizon, the shadows and any sense of distance disappear — a person loses their direction ten steps from the shelter. In a blizzard, do not go out at all, and if you must, only along a rope run from the shelter. What to do: Do not travel. Build a shelter at once, while you still have the strength; run a hand line to water and stores.

Do not eat snow, however thirsty you are. Warming it in your mouth costs the body heat you do not have to spare — that is a direct road to hypothermia. Melt it in a vessel by a fire, or with body heat in a closed flask under your clothes.

Water: ice is preferable to snow (the same volume gives several times more water). Fresh sea ice is multi-year ice: it is dark, rounded and almost unsalted, unlike young ice. Meltwater from under the snow by a stream. Boil it if you have the means.

Food is the weakest point of the biome. There is practically no plant food at all, and in summer there is not much more of it. The basis: ice fishing, snares for hare and ptarmigan along snow trails, sea mammals and birds on the coast.

Fat is the priority. Eat fat and bone marrow, not just meat: without fats the body does not take in enough energy, and a person weakens on a full stomach.

Plants of the tundra

In summer berries appear in the tundra, and they are the only plant food we include — they have no dangerous look-alikes among the tundra species:

Lingonberry

Red berries on a low shrub with tough glossy evergreen leaves. Sour, keeps extremely well.

Bilberry

Dark blue berries with a waxy bloom, on a low shrub. The juice stains your hands and tongue — a simple check.

Cloudberry

An orange-yellow berry made up of separate beads, like a raspberry. Grows on the boggy parts of the tundra.

the liver of polar bear and seal печень белого медведя содержит опасно высокую концентрацию витамина A; печень неизвестных морских млекопитающих также не используйте без местного проверенного знания. Не ешьте грибы и любые незнакомые растения.

What the biome gives you: snow and ice (the main building material), hides, sinew, bone and fat from the animals you kill, driftwood on the coast, occasionally dwarf willow and moss. There is practically no wood, no plant fibre and no clay — almost the whole tech tree here is built on animal material.

0Scoutingnothing built yet

getting out of the wind · insulation from the snow · face and hands covered

1Level 1 · survive todaycordage, fire, shelter

snow trench · quinzhee with ventilation · sinew cordage

Drawings and instructions

2Level 2 · workbenchwater, containers and food become a system

топка снега снаружи · подлёдная лунка · костяной крючок · силки на снежных тропах

Drawings and instructions

3Level 3 · crafthide, pottery, putting food by

brain tanning · одежда мехом внутрь · утеплённые ёмкости для воды

Drawings and instructions

4Level 4 · house and machinespermanent shelter and things that work for you

permanent snow or turf housing · a store of fat for the winter

Here there is no wood, no clay, no stone under the snow — and there is snow. Snow is what you build from. A snow house is not "better than nothing": inside it stays around zero when it is minus thirty outside, and that is achieved without a single log. A house in the Arctic is not the next step up from a shelter but the same shelter, done properly.

Tech level1–2 — all you need is a tool that cuts snow. This is the earliest house in the guide

SeasonWinter is the building season: in summer there is no snow, and then you build from turf, bone and hides

Time on your ownA trench takes an hour. A snow hut takes from 3–6 hours to a day, faster with practice

What decides itThe density of the snow, the thickness of the dome, the vent and an entrance below the floor

The limitIt holds as long as the frost holds. In a thaw the dome sags — keep an eye on it

Where to put it

Where the snow is firm and deep. The test: step on it — your foot does not sink in and leaves an even, clear print. Snow like that is in drifts behind obstacles, not out in an open windswept spot.
Not under a slope and not under a cornice: an avalanche or a snow drift buries the shelter and you with it.
Not on the ice of a lake or river, unless you are sure of the thickness, and not over a crack.
On the lee side of an obstacle — a sastruga, a ridge, a boulder. The wind then drifts snow onto you instead of blowing your shelter away.
Leave a marker. Stick in a pole with a rag on it: a shelter drifted over with snow looks no different from a snowdrift, and people have lost their own house after walking two hundred paces away.

Snow hutsection · blocks in a spiral · sleeping shelf · cold pit · vent

1 Blocks in a spiral. The snow bricks are laid not in rings but in a helix: each one a little higher and a little further in. The spiral is the only way to close a dome without formwork, and the whole secret is in it. Wall thickness 30–45 cm.
2 The vent. A hole in the dome a finger thick, always. Check it and clear it with a stick: frost from your breath closes it over during the night.
3 The sleeping shelf. Above the level of the entrance. Warm air gathers at the top; the difference between the shelf and the floor is up to ten degrees.
4 The cold pit and an entrance from below. The entrance below the shelf, with a bend in the crawlway. Cold air is heavier, it runs down into the pit and stays there. This works without any door at all.
5 Зона без огня. Внутри только подстилка, сухая одежда, закрытая тёплая вода и свет от батареи. Топить снег и сушить вещи над пламенем — снаружи.
! Пламя внутри запрещено. Отдушина не превращает снежный дом в безопасную топочную. Угарный газ не пахнет, а подтаявший свод теряет прочность. Держите внутри лопату: вход может замести.

How to build a snow hut

Find the right snow. A firm drift that cuts with a knife, a board or a pot lid. Loose snow will not do — from that you make a different structure with a dome (see below).
Cut blocks about the size of a large book and a hand's breadth thick. Take them from inside the future house — that way you are digging out the floor and making the wall at the same time.
The first ring in a circle 2–2.5 m across per person. Then cut it away at an angle from one block to the end of the circle — that gives you the start of the spiral.
Lay in a helix, each block tilted inward, trimming the lower and side faces with a knife so that the block rests on two neighbours. The block has to stand on its own, with nothing holding it.
Close the dome with a last wedge block at the top, fitted from inside and trimmed to place.
Fill the gaps with loose snow from the outside, rubbing it in with your palm.
Cut a crawlway on the lee side, below floor level, with a turn in it. Raise the shelf inside above the crawlway.
Punch a vent in the dome and put a stick beside it for clearing. Bring a shovel inside.
Point the dome up from inside with a knife and smooth it: a smooth dome runs the drips down the wall, an uneven one drips onto your sleeping bag.

If the snow is loose. Rake up a heap about two metres high, let it stand for 1–2 hours (the snow sinters and the dome becomes strong) and only then hollow it out from inside, leaving walls 30–45 cm. Digging sooner is not allowed — it will collapse. The method takes 2–4 hours, but it needs no skill at cutting blocks.

In the Arctic summer you build from turf, the bones of large animals and hides — on a frame of driftwood or ribs. It is the same semi-dugout dwelling as in the steppe, only the insulation is hide with the fur inward.

Rules, every one of which saves a life

Два пути воздухуВход и верхняя отдушина остаются свободными. Дыхание накапливает углекислый газ; пламени внутри быть не должно.

A shovel insideThe entrance drifts over during the night. You will have to dig out from within.

Do not sweat while buildingWork slowly and with your clothing open. Wet clothing kills more surely than the frost.

Insulation from the snowHides, spruce boughs, your pack, rope — anything at all between you and the floor. Direct contact with snow is the fastest heat loss there is.

Smoke, air and the door

Снежное укрытие — не помещение для горения. Не используйте внутри лампы, свечи, горелки, угли и самодельные печи. Верхняя отдушина нужна для дыхания и влаги, но не делает пламя безопасным.

ВходНе герметизировать наглухо. Он служит нижним путём воздуха и аварийным выходом.

Верхняя отдушинаПроверять палкой перед сном и после снегопада: иней и метель могут закрыть её.

КонденсатГладкий свод направляет капли по стенам. Мокрую подстилку заменять до сна.

Тревожные признакиГоловная боль, спутанность, необычная сонливость — выйти наружу, проветрить и искать медицинскую помощь.

Door

Opens inwardsOvernight, snow drifts against it outside, leaves pile up and branches come down. A door that opens outwards will one day not open at all.

Rebate and thresholdThe door should sit into a rebate or against cover strips, not simply cover the opening. A threshold a palm high cuts off the cold along the floor, water, and everything that crawls.

Hinges and barHinges — strips of leather, a wooden pin in loops, or a strap from salvage. For the lock — a bar on the inside dropped into two brackets: it holds incomparably better than any hook.

Keep the opening smallThe smaller the door, the less heat blows out and the harder it is for an uninvited visitor to get in. A low narrow entry is not an inconvenience, it is the design.

The polar bear is the only animal that deliberately hunts humans. That changes the whole design of the entrance. The crawlway is made narrow, long and with a turn in it, and the sleeping place is set off to one side of it. Food and kills are not kept in the dwelling and not left beside it: anything that smells by the entrance is an invitation. A trip cord with something rattling on it around the shelter is compulsory, and so is a shovel inside. If you meet one, the rule is the opposite of the brown bear: do not drop face down, fight, hit the nose and eyes with anything you have.

In the Arctic a catastrophe is anything that deprives you of shelter or forces you to move. There is no "sitting it out in the open" here: every event is judged by one thing — will you be able to be warm an hour from now.

Blizzard and whiteoutdeadly

Wind with snow cuts visibility to nothing, and a whiteout — diffuse light with no shadows — takes away even the horizon: you cannot see where the snow ends and the sky begins, and you cannot make out a drop under your feet.
What to do: do not travel. Build a shelter immediately, while you still have the strength — a trench in the snow in half an hour. From the shelter to your stores and to water, run a guide rope: in a blizzard that is the only way back. Go out along it and nowhere else.

Going through the icedeadly

What to do if you go through: do not thrash about, turn round to the edge you came from (the ice held there), elbows onto the ice, push yourself out horizontally and crawl out rather than stand up, rolling to the side. Once out — do not run to camp; undress at once and wring out your clothes: wet cloth in a frost freezes within minutes.
Prevention: test the ice with a stick ahead of you, go one at a time with a gap between you, take your pack off one shoulder so you can shed it.

The fast ice breaking away, and ice movementdeadly

Shore ice is torn away by the wind and carries people out to sea. Signs: cracks along the shore, noise and cracking, an offshore wind, water in the cracks.
What to do: do not sleep on the fast ice, do not go out onto the ice in an offshore wind. If you are carried off — do not try to jump from floe to floe; stay on the largest one, put up a shelter and signal.

A sharp fall in temperaturedeadly

Minus twenty and minus fifty are different worlds: at fifty, equipment fails, metal breaks, and unprotected skin freezes within minutes.
What to do: inside, and do not go out. Bring in everything you need for a day beforehand. Face completely covered, nothing metal touched with a bare hand.

Avalanche and cornicedangerous

Relevant in mountain tundra and on coasts with cliffs. Do not put a shelter under a slope or under a cornice — a cornice collapses on its own, with nothing to set it off. What to do: Do not put a shelter under an open slope or under a snow cornice.

Thawcaution

It looks like a gift and is in fact the worst thing that happens: the snow house sags, clothing gets wet, the ice becomes unreliable, and when the frost comes back it turns everything wet into ice.
What to do: watch the dome, dry anything that got wet immediately, stay off the ice.

Thermokarst and crevassescaution

In summer the permafrost thaws and subsides; in winter ice and snow bridges hide the cracks. Both open up without warning.
Signs: sagging ground and saucer-shaped lakes, mounds with a crack along the top, thawed-out banks by streams; in winter, strips of smoother and paler snow across a slope. What to do: walk probing the crust with a stick, one at a time, with a gap between you. In summer do not camp on tilted ground or on mounds with cracks in them. Do not go near the edge of a thawed-out bank: it is held up by ice that is melting right now.

Nuclearinvisible, settles as dust

Chemicalhas a smell, flows downhill

Biologicalarrives with people

In the Arctic contamination behaves differently from everywhere else: the cold preserves it. What in a warm climate would have broken down in months lies here in the snow and ice for years and is released when it thaws. On the other hand there are no people at all, and that is the best protection there is against anything people carry.

Three words common to every kind of contamination

Time — leave straight away, not after packing.
Distance — every step away from the source cuts the dose.
Shielding — any mass between you and the source: earth, stone, water, a wall.

Nuclear

A snow shelter gives you protection in itself: snow is water, and water blocks radiation well. A metre of firm snow works about as well as half a metre of earth, and heaping it up is faster than digging frozen ground.

Bank the shelter up with snow and increase the thickness of the dome if you have anything to do it with.
Leave clothing and boots in the cold pit by the entrance. Dry dust in a frost shakes off almost completely.
Water: take snow from deep down, from below the layer that fell before the event, and ice from under the surface. Fresh top snow is exactly what caught what fell.
Food is the special feature of this biome. Reindeer lichen takes up fallout more than any other plant, the reindeer eats the lichen, the human eats the reindeer. After Chernobyl that short chain made Scandinavian reindeer meat unusable for years. Switch to sea fish and to whatever was under cover.

Chemical

Heavy gases run downward, and your shelter is precisely down there: a snow trench, a pit, a crawlway below the floor. Under a chemical threat all of that becomes a trap.

What to do: get up onto high ground, move across the wind, leave the shelter for the time being. In a frost the cloud lasts longer — cold air does not mix. Breathe through cloth, but watch that it does not ice up and cut off your breathing.

Biological

There are no people, so there is almost no risk. But there is one feature found nowhere else: thawing permafrost. It preserves pathogens from old animal and human burials; the anthrax outbreaks on Yamal began with exactly that — thawed-out carcasses.

Do not touch carcasses and bones that have thawed out and do not camp near them.
Do not butcher animals you have found dead, however hungry you are.
Boil water, meltwater included: what was frozen into it comes out as it melts.
Isolate anyone who falls ill; in the cold, illness is harder to bear.

If you do not know what has happened, act on the worst explanation. Erring on the side of caution costs you a lost day. Erring the other way cannot be undone.

The Arctic is the only biome where path A alone is all but impossible. The peoples of the North survived here for thousands of years, but in groups: hunting big game, sewing clothes, tending the lamp — all of it is work for several people. A person alone here does not build a civilisation, they hold on.

Path A — with bare hands

You know everything humanity knows, but you have nothing except your hands and what grows around you.

The first year

Снежное укрытие и изоляция от снега — первая задача.
Топка снега и нагрев только снаружи — первые сутки.
Ice fishing and snares for ptarmigan — the first weeks.
Clothing of hides with the fur inward — долгосрочная защита; до неё решают сухие слои и малое укрытие.

Three years

Brain tanning and sewing with sinew — the skill without which the North cannot be got through.
A sledge, a kayak or a skin boat; putting food by in the permafrost — a ready-made eternal refrigerator.
Summer housing of turf, bone and driftwood.
Dogs, if you have them — here they are not a luxury but transport and a guard.

The ceiling, and an honest limit

Achievable alone: sitting it out. A year or two on protein and fat, in a snow house, in fur clothing.
Not achievable alone: staying stable. One injury, one lost mitten, one hunt missed — and there is no margin left.
Honestly: in the Arctic the right strategy for a person alone is to head south, not to settle in. Every other biome forgives more.

The bottleneck of this biome

Fuel and fat. There is no firewood at all. All your warmth, light and water come from the fat of an animal you have killed — that is, from hunting, which may fail.

Path B — on what is left

The same place, but within a day's walk there is something people abandoned. That does not cancel self-reliance — it only speeds it up.

What to look for here specifically

Polar stations, drilling rigs, shift settlements, airfields — fuel, stoves, huts on runners, tinned food, sleeping bags.
Barrels of diesel — here that is months of warmth, which no amount of hunting will give you.
Abandoned machinery: batteries, metal, tracks, glass.
Fuel and food depots: the frost preserves everything, what you find here is still edible years later.

What that unlocks

Diesel and a stove change the whole scenario: with them the Arctic turns from "holding on" into living.
A sleeping bag and synthetic clothing save you months of work on hides.
The frost stores your supplies for free — food you find does not spoil.

The trap on this path

Distances and weather. The trip to a station can take weeks, and a blizzard does not ask permission. And your whole life ends up tied to a finite stock of fuel: when the barrels run out you will have to go back to path A, having already lost the skills.

The ceiling by year

Timescale	With bare hands	On salvage
Year 1	A snow house, hides, protein and fat — if the hunting went well	A stove and diesel: wintering instead of fighting
Year 3	A sledge, a kayak, food put by — only in a group	A hut on runners or a station as a base; supplies for years
Year 10	Alone — unlikely. In a group — yes	As long as the fuel lasts. After that, path A or south

Protecting yourself and your family

On path A. There are no people here, and the threat is not a human but an animal and the weather. The polar bear is the only one that deliberately hunts humans: if you meet one, do not drop face down, fight, aiming for the nose and eyes. Camp with a trip cord; keep food away from the dwelling and not inside it; check the vent and the shovel every evening.

On path B. Stations and settlements draw in the few people who are here. But the main risk of path B in the Arctic is not people but the journey itself: you cannot walk to a find in a blizzard, and the weather changes within an hour. Plan your route by shelters, not by distance.

Children in the Arctic. Обморожение может начинаться без боли, поэтому регулярно проверяйте лицо и руки, а ребёнка держите рядом и постоянно в поле зрения. В полярную ночь сохраняйте понятный распорядок сна, еды и коротких безопасных задач: он уменьшает тревогу и помогает взрослому замечать изменения поведения.

Not a tech tree — a timeline of collapse

A city in collapse

watermedium

foodmedium

sheltereasy at first

technologyhigh

dangervery hard

infectionsmed-high

Move on if things go wrong → out of the city into whichever wild biome surrounds you (check the map to see which one), but not in the first few days: that is exactly when the roads are jammed and at their most dangerous. Either sit out the first wave, or leave on foot and off the main roads.

The only chapter with no crafting progression. Everything here has already been made for you — water in the pipes, food in the shops, a roof overhead. What changes is something else: you do not gather a resource, you find it, and everyone else is looking for the same thing. So the clock here does not measure "how much can I build", it measures "how long until this turns dangerous".

Если в городе произошла авария

Определите непосредственную угрозу. Пожар, запах газа, обрушение, химическое облако, вода или официальная эвакуация меняют порядок действий. При угрозе жизни выходите, не собирая имущество.
Получите официальную информацию. Радио, экстренные уведомления и сообщения служб. Запишите время, источник и три ближайших действия, чтобы не принимать каждую пересланную запись за факт.
Если вода ещё безопасна — наполните чистую закрываемую тару. Сначала бутылки и кастрюли; ванна пригодна прежде всего как технический запас, если её нельзя герметично закрыть.
Отключите опасные системы только если умеете. При запахе газа не включайте свет, не зажигайте огонь, выйдите и вызовите аварийную службу. Повреждённые провода и вода рядом с ними — запретная зона.
Организуйте одну безопасную комнату. Вода, лекарства, фонарь, обувь, документы, аптечка, радио и санитарный набор. Генератор, мангал и походная горелка работают только снаружи вдали от окон.
Не оставайтесь ради запасов при пожаре, газе, видимом разрушении, быстром затоплении или официальном приказе об эвакуации. Жизнь важнее имущества.

Первый часУгрозы, официальная информация, связь, чистая вода и лекарства.

Первая ночьФонарь вместо свечи, обувь рядом, свободный выход и выключенные опасные приборы.

СанитарияПри неработающей канализации сразу выделите туалет и место мытья рук.

Главное отличие города от природного биома — зависимость от инфраструктуры. Сначала опасны пожар, газ, электричество, обрушение, загрязнение воды и неверная информация. Конфликт с людьми возможен, но не является автоматическим сценарием: спокойная связь, кооперация с соседями и выполнение официальных указаний часто безопаснее изоляции.

Hour 1 — fill up while the water is still running

⏱ The most valuable window in the chapter, and it is short

Если службы не сообщили о химическом или микробном загрязнении и вода ещё подаётся нормально, сначала наполняйте чистую закрываемую пищевую тару: бутылки, канистры, кастрюли с крышкой. Ванну можно использовать как технический запас либо с чистым герметичным вкладышем; открытая ванна быстро загрязняется и не должна считаться гарантированно питьевой.

At the same time, work out what has happened and whether staying is dangerous: fire, a gas leak, collapse, a radiation threat (in that case start with "Why you left"). If the building is sound, staying home is almost always the better choicethan going outside.

Hour 1 · done

Day 1 — the hidden water in your own flat

⏱ A few hours

An ordinary flat already holds a supply of water that almost nobody remembers:

The water heater tank — usually 100–300 litres (25–80 gallons) of clean drinking water. Drain it through the bottom tap. Set a gas heater to "pilot" beforehand, cut the power to an electric one, and never run the element in an empty tank.
The toilet cistern (the cistern, not the bowl) — if no cleaning tablets go into it, the water is usable.
Ice in the freezer и жидкость из консервированных овощей. Вода из отопления, радиаторов, пожарной системы и автомобильных контуров — техническая: присадки и металлы не удаляются кипячением.

Food: eat first whatever will spoil without a fridge, and save the tins for later. Light: a torch, not candles — an open flame in a building with no fire service is a risk of its own.

Hidden water

How to get the water out of the heater and the cistern

Once the supply is cut, an ordinary flat still holds between 50 and 300 litres (13 to 80 gallons) of clean drinking water. That is a week, even a month, of life — but you have to know how to take it without spoiling it.

The first move, before anything else: shut the stopcock where water enters the flat. Otherwise, when supply comes back, dirty water from the main will run into the pipes and mix with your clean water — and if there is a burst, the lot drains away.

The water heater. Electric — cut the power first, and set a gas one to "pilot" or switch it off. A heater left heating with no water inside fails within minutes, and a gas one is a fire as well.
Open the hot tap on any mixer — that lets air in, otherwise the water will not come out of the tank, the same way it will not pour from a bottle sealed at the top.
Put a container under the bottom drain tap of the tank and open it slowly. The first litres may come out rusty and full of sediment — that is scale from the bottom. Let the water stand, then pour it off the sediment.
The toilet cistern. The water in it is ordinary tap water and is fit to drink, but only if freshener tablets and cleaning blocks have never been put inside. Blue water: do not drink it and do not wash dishes in it. Water from the bowl itself is no use for anything.
What else there is in a flat: лёд и замороженные продукты в морозилке, жидкость из банок с консервированными овощами. Вода из отопления и радиаторов остаётся только технической — кипячение не удаляет присадки и растворённые металлы.

Boil it anyway. Water from the heater is clean, but it has been standing warm in a tank, which is ideal for bacteria. A minute at a rolling boil settles it.

🌙 Night 1 — darkness changes the city

The first night without power lays bare the main thing: light is visible from far off and says "there are supplies here". Cover the windows, use as little light as you can, do not step onto the balcony with a torch. Sound carries surprisingly far in a blacked-out city — a generator, music or a loud conversation is audible a block away.

The door: brace it from the inside, do not just lock it. A simple prop wedged into the floor under the handle holds better than a lock.

Days 2–3 — the window when the crowd starts moving

⏱ The famous "72 hours". Here they mean something different: that is roughly how long order holds

For the first day people expect it all to come back. By the end of the second or third, most have run out of water and food, and the city changes: queues, crushes, shops broken open. This is the worst time to go outside and the worst time to stock up. Everything that could be done should have been done in the first hours.

If you must go out: in daylight, not alone, with no rucksack on show, along back streets, carrying nothing openly in your hands. Watch how people around you are dressed and how they behave — and look the same.

The decision to stay or go is taken at this point, and it turns on one thing: whether you have water. If your supply is running out and there is no sign of recovery, you need to leave, and better before everyone else decides the same. Direction: away from the centre, towards water and towards your own wild biome (see the map on the front page).

🌙 Nights 2–3

Keep watch if there are several of you. An alarm on the approach: a tin of pebbles on a line by the door or on the stair landing — the same trick as against an animal in the forest, and it works just as well against a person. Do not open the door to a voice. Silence is a better strategy than talking through it.

→ END OF THE 72 HOURS: you have water, you have not drawn attention, and you have not ended up in a crowd. From here the question is no longer survival but how you live.

Week 1 — hygiene and the toilet decide more than food does

⏱ The rest of the week

The most underrated part of surviving in a city. With the sewers out of action, infection becomes the main killer — the record of every besieged city says so. Set up a toilet at once: a bucket with a tight lid, bags, a dry cover material (soil, ash, sawdust), emptied into one chosen place well away from where you live and from water.

Мыть руки — приоритет наравне с питьём: чистая вода с мылом либо спиртовой антисептик с содержанием спирта не менее 60%, если руки не видимо грязные. Зола не заменяет мытьё рук. Для заболевшего выделяют отдельные посуду и полотенце.

The toilet

A toilet without sewers — half an hour's work, months of use

Why this matters more than food. После отказа канализации загрязнение рук, воды и поверхностей быстро распространяет кишечные инфекции. Безопасный туалет, мытьё рук и разделение питьевой и технической воды нужно наладить раньше поиска дополнительной еды.

Do not flush a toilet that is not working and do not use it "while it still goes down". Without pressure the stack blocks, and the contents come back up — into your own flat or your neighbours' below.

Take a bucket with a tight lid — or the toilet itself, with the water bailed out of the bowl. Line it with a heavy bin bag, better two.
Next to it stand a container of dry cover material: ash, dry soil, sand, sawdust, cat litter, or shredded paper at a pinch.
Cover it every single time, burying it completely under a layer. That is the whole secret: the cover takes away the smell and shuts out flies, and flies are the main carrier.
Keep the two apart: urine separately, since it can be poured away more often and barely smells. Mixed contents smell and rot many times worse.
Tie the bag off and take it to one chosen place — well away from where you live, from where you take water, and from where you walk. If there is soil, bury it a spade's depth down.
Wash your hands every single time. Keep a separate bottle by the toilet with a narrow neck or a pierced cap — washing hands takes astonishingly little water if you pour it in a thin stream.

Bought in advance this costs pennies: a stock of heavy bin bags, a sack of cat litter and a bar of household soap — the cheapest purchase on the whole "What to buy in advance" list, and one of the most useful.

Week 1 · in place

🌙 Night, week 1

A routine appears: water, hygiene, watch, saving batteries. A battery radio is the only reliable source of news when the network is down; listen briefly and at set times to save the power.

→ WORKBENCH: water, sanitation, safe shelter and a picture of what is going on.

Weeks 2–4 — choosing a place, and finding people

⏱ No rush, but do not put it off

Choosing a building, if you have to move: mid-rise, one entrance, not the ground floor and not a shopfront, at least two ways out. Upper floors are safer from casual strangers but worse to retreat from; basements are the other way round. Steer clear of anything that draws other people: police stations, government offices, hospitals, pharmacies, gun shops, petrol stations.

A group. A small trusted group is safer than either being alone or joining a large crowd of strangers: watches, divided tasks, help when someone is ill. Better to put it together beforerather than after, out of people you already know. In detail — the "People" chapter.

Beyond · unlocked

A month and beyond — when what you found runs out

⏱ Ongoing

A city's stock is finite, and that is the great difference from the wild biomes: a forest grows back, a warehouse does not. From here on it is not the person who found the most who wins, but the person who can actually do something useful: purify water, treat injuries, mend, sew, grow. Balcony growing, rainwater collection and repair — that is what stands in for a tech tree in this chapter.

The order of threats in a city: people → infection from broken sanitation → fire (with nobody to put it out) → injury with no access to medicine → hunger. Note that hunger comes last here too.

People

Desperate people, not "bandits"the main risk

The greatest danger is ordinary people who have run out of water for their children. The practical conclusion: never show that you have supplies — not by how you look, not in conversation, not by the smell of cooking. Backing down is almost always better than a fight: even a fight you win means an injury with no medicine. What to do: Do not show your supplies, do not argue, walk away. Backing down is almost always cheaper than winning.

A crowddangerous

A crush kills with no ill intent behind it at all. Do not walk into a dense mass of people; at a hand-out or outside a shop stay at the edge and near the way out, and move diagonally towards the edge of the flow rather than against it. What to do: Do not fight the flow and do not stop: move along the edge and diagonally. If you fall, get up at once, covering your head with your arms.

Environment

Sanitationkills more quietly than anything

Dead sewers and rubbish bring outbreaks of gut infections. Dehydration from diarrhoea kills faster than hunger. Boil water, wash hands, and have a proper toilet, not an improvised one. What to do: Set up a covered bucket toilet on the very first day, wash your hands, boil your water. This saves more people than anything else.

Firedangerous

The fire service will not come, and in a block of flats fire climbs floor by floor. Open flame only under control and never in a room with a draught. Know two ways out of the building. What to do: Go down and stay low, cloth over your face. Before opening a door, test it with the back of your hand: if it is hot, do not open it.

Feral dogscaution

After a few weeks they form packs and lose their fear. Do not run, do not turn your back, back away holding something in your hands. A stout stick puts them off on its own. What to do: Do not run. Stop, face them, make noise, pick up a stick or a stone. A pack is more dangerous than a single dog — back towards cover.

Rats and micecaution

Where rubbish piles up they breed fast, ruin supplies and carry disease. Keep food in sealed containers and never leave waste indoors. What to do: Do not touch them, do not eat or sleep where there are many. Keep supplies in containers with lids, not in sacks.

Water

По убыванию надёжности для питья: заводская закрытая вода → чистая вода, заранее набранная в пищевую тару → бак водонагревателя после оценки и кипячения → чистый бачок без химических блоков → лёд и жидкость из консервов → дождь, собранный в чистую ёмкость → открытые водоёмы после фильтрации и обеззараживания. Батареи и трубы отопления в питьевой список не входят.

Boil everything that did not come from a bottle or the tank. In a city the usual load of microbes is joined by things a forest does not have: sewage, chemicals, whatever is standing in flooded basements. A layered filter (see "Improvised gear") takes out the cloudiness and some of the smell, but it does not replace boiling.

Food

The order to eat things in: first what is perishable in the fridge, then the freezer (a closed one holds the cold about a day), then grains and pasta; tins last, because they keep longest.

What people actually look for and find: tins, grains, sugar, salt, oil, baby food, pet food (edible for humans), spices. Do not take swollen tins or tins with a damaged lid — botulism with no medicine is fatal.

Later on: growing on the balcony and the windowsill — leaf greens and radishes crop in weeks, and potatoes and onions sprout from what is already in the house. This is the only way to get fresh food in a city.

Pigeons, ducks and city fish. Technically edible, and they fed people in every besieged city. But city animals accumulate whatever the city accumulates, and a fish from a city river lives in the run-off. Cook them right through; this is an option in real hunger, not a first choice.

In place of a tech tree, here is a list of what becomes valuableonce the power is off. Look for these and look after these, rather than whatever used to be expensive.

Category	What exactly
Water	any container with a lid · a filter · purification tablets · bleach
Fire and light	lighters · matches · candles · a head torch · batteries · a power bank
Health	medicines · bandages and a tourniquet · antiseptic · soap · something for diarrhoea
Tools	knife · multi-tool · duct tape · rope · pry bar · pliers
Communication	a battery radio — the only source of news without a network
Trade	salt · sugar · tobacco · batteries · medicines · a skill is worth more than a thing

The most valuable thing is not an object but an ability. Someone who can purify water, stitch a wound, mend something or grow something is always needed by a group, and unlike a stock of tins they do not get used up.

In a city you do not build a home — you choose one and reinforce it. The building is already standing; the question is which one and what to do with it. And here is the great difference from every other biome: here your home protects you from people, not from the weather, and every decision follows from that.

Tech level0 — the housing already exists. The work starts with assessment, not construction

TimingThe decision to move is made in the first few days, while the streets are still calm

What decides itOne entrance, a middle floor, two ways out, water and a toilet

Key resourceGoing unnoticed. A home that visibly holds supplies is a bad home

The limitA city is finite: its stocks do not renew. Here a home is a base, not a permanent place

Which building to choose

Mid-rise, the 2nd to 4th floor. The ground floor and a shopfront are a way in for anyone. Upper floors of a tower block are a trap: with no lift and no water it means hauling cans up every day, and in a fire there is only one route.
One entrance that you control, and at least two ways out — the second can be a window, a roof, a fire escape, or a loft crossing into the next stairwell.
Sound structure. Walk round and look: cracks in load-bearing walls, sagging floors, signs of fire — walk away. After an earthquake or an explosion this is the first thing to check.
Not next to what draws people: shops, pharmacies, warehouses, petrol stations, police stations, hospitals, gun shops. In the first days everyone heads there.
Water and sanitation. Is there anything to catch rain with (roof, balcony, downpipe), somewhere to take waste, somewhere to get non-drinking water.
Neighbours. One or two people you know are worth more than any amount of barred windows. Sharing a watch with someone means you get to sleep.

A reinforced flatperimeter · warm room · water · alarm · ways out

1 The warm room. One room where you live and sleep. Less volume means less to heat. Cover the windows: light shows from the street and says "there are supplies here". Mattresses and blankets on the floor in one place: together is warmer.
2 Water and sanitation. Stored water in the bath and in containers; a bucket toilet with a tight lid and cover material, away from where you cook. With the sewers dead, infection kills sooner than hunger.
3 The door. A lock gets forced, a prop does not. A wedge or a length of timber into the floor under the handle, a second prop against the wall opposite. Do not open the door to a voice: silence is safer than talking through it.
4 The alarm. A thin line at knee height across the approach, tied to tins with pebbles in them. The same trick as against an animal in the forest — against a person it works just as well, and often scares them off by itself.
5 The second way. A window onto a fire escape, a roof hatch, a crawl through the loft, the next stairwell. Check it physically rather than in theory, and keep it clear.
! Самодельная печь, мангал, генератор и походная горелка в квартире запрещены. Открытое окно и самодельная труба не обеспечивают безопасный отвод угарного газа. Используйте холодную пищу или готовьте только снаружи на открытом месте вдали от окон, дверей и вентиляционных заборов.

What to do in the first days

Water. Fill everything you have while the pressure holds, and shut the stopcock into the flat.
The toilet. Bucket, bags, cover material, a set place to empty it. Do this on day one, not when it becomes urgent.
The warm room. Pick the smallest one, ideally with a window that does not face the street. Hang blankets over the windows: warmth, and no light showing.
The door and the approaches. Prop to the floor, a line of tins on the landing. No need to tape over the spyhole from outside — the point is to look through it in silence.
Take stock. Lay out everything you have and count it in days. Eat the perishable first, put the tins aside.
The second way out — walk it yourself. Stack a minimum kit beside it: shoes, documents, water, knife, torch.
Information. A battery radio, listened to briefly and at set times.
Neighbours. Agree watches and a shared signal with the people you know. Tell nobody what you have or how much.

Heating without heating. Heat yourself, not the flat: layers of clothing, a hat indoors, a tent or a canopy of blankets inside the room — the space under the canopy is warmed by your own body. This works better than any home-made stove and costs nothing.

When to leave. The decision is made on water: if your supply is running out and no recovery is in sight, leave, and better before everyone else decides the same. Direction — away from the centre, towards water and towards your own wild biome (see the map on the front page).

What a city home is shortest of

WaterПотребность зависит от жары, нагрузки, возраста и здоровья. Сначала храните питьевую воду в закрытой пищевой таре; открытую ванну считайте техническим запасом.

WarmthA block of flats with no heating cools to street temperature in 2–3 days. What saves you is not a stove but a small space and layers.

SanitationТуалет с двойным пакетом и крышкой организуют в первый день; рядом — отдельное место для мыла и чистой воды.

Quiet and darknessLight, noise and the smell of cooking give you away a block off. That is what camouflage means in a city.

Smoke, air and the door

There have to be two openings, not one. A stove or hearth with a flue and no air coming in will not draw: the fire pulls air out of the room, the pressure drops, and the smoke comes back into the house. This is the commonest mistake in home-made shelter, and it looks like "a bad chimney" when the chimney has nothing to do with it.

Air inAn opening the size of your palm down at floor level, next to the firebox, or a gap under the door, or a separate duct from outside running straight under the hearth. That last one is best: the air for burning comes from outdoors instead of out of your room.

The flueAbove the ridge, a fist across per person, with a straight run. A bent flue will not draw. You need a damper, but it only closes when there is not a single blue flame left in the coals.

Testing the drawHold a burning splinter up to the air inlet: the smoke should be pulled inwards. At the flue it should go up. If it draws the wrong way, there is too little air coming in, or the flue is cold — warm it with a twist of paper or birch bark.

Carbon monoxideNo colour, no smell. The signs are headache, nausea and drowsiness in everyone at once. If that happens: outside immediately, door and vent wide open. The vent in a dwelling stays open always, even in a hard frost.

Door

Opens inwardsOvernight, snow drifts against it outside, leaves pile up and branches come down. A door that opens outwards will one day not open at all.

Rebate and thresholdThe door should sit into a rebate or against cover strips, not simply cover the opening. A threshold a palm high cuts off the cold along the floor, water, and everything that crawls.

Hinges and barHinges — strips of leather, a wooden pin in loops, or a strap from salvage. For the lock — a bar on the inside dropped into two brackets: it holds incomparably better than any hook.

Keep the opening smallThe smaller the door, the less heat blows out and the harder it is for an uninvited visitor to get in. A low narrow entry is not an inconvenience, it is the design.

In a city it is a person behind the door, not an animal. A lock gets forced, so it is not the lock that holds: a prop into the floor under the handle and a second prop against the wall opposite. If the hinges are on the outside, drive pins in so the door cannot be lifted off. The spyhole is for looking through in silence; do not open to a voice. A door is never your only protection: it buys minutes, and what decides things is the second way out that you have walked yourself. A dog and a line of tins on the stairs warn you before the door does.

In a city a natural disaster is dangerous less in itself than for what it does to infrastructure. Earthquakes kill by way of buildings, not by shaking; a hurricane by what it throws, not by the wind. And every event here has a second wave: with no water, no sewers and no medicine, the city becomes more dangerous than the event was.

Earthquakedeadly

During: indoors — get under a solid table or against an internal load-bearing wall, cover your head, hold on. Do not run for the exit and do not use the lift: most injuries come from falling objects and from stairwells full of people. Outdoors — into the open, away from walls, glass and cables.
After: expect aftershocks, which can be stronger. Check for a gas leak (hissing, a smell) — do not switch on a light and do not strike a match. Look at the load-bearing walls: diagonal cracks, a corner crumbled away, a sagging floor mean get out and do not go back. Do not enter damaged buildings to fetch belongings. What to do: Get out into the open away from trees, rocks and buildings, sit down and wait it out. Afterwards, expect aftershocks and check the slope above your camp.

Fire in a buildingdeadly

No fire service is coming, and that changes everything. Smoke kills, not flame: a few breaths on a floor where plastic is burning will knock you unconscious.
What to do: go down and stay low, the air is cleaner near the floor, cloth over your face. Before opening a door, touch it with the back of your hand: if it is hot, do not open it. If you are cut off, get into a room with a window, shut the door, stuff the gaps with wet cloth and make yourself visible at the window.
Prevention: no unattended open flame, a container of water and one of sand kept close, and a second way out that is known and clear.

Storm, tornado, haildangerous

In a city the danger is glass and whatever comes off the roofs. What to do: inside, into a room with no windows or an internal corridor, one floor lower. Tape the windows in a cross or curtain them — the shards fly inwards. Do not go near a window "to have a look". Afterwards, do not walk close to walls: cornices and the remains of glazing keep falling for another day.

Flood and rising waterdangerous

It rises, so you go up. But not into a loft with no way onto the roof: people have drowned by climbing into a dead end.
What to do: carry water, food and documents upstairs in advance. Do not walk through flooded streets: half a metre (knee-deep) of moving water knocks you off your feet, and under the surface are open manholes and downed cables. Water after a flood is sewage by definition, and any wound in it becomes infected.

Everything failing at oncedangerous

It does not look like a disaster, but by its consequences it is one. No power, water, sewers, phones, heating, payments or medicine, all together.
What to do: see the "Actions" tab — the first hour decides more than the following week. And keep the figure in mind: order usually holds for about 72 hours, and then the city changes.

Collapse and being trappedcaution

If you are trapped in rubble, do not shout continuously (it costs air and strength) — tap on a pipe or on concrete at intervals: sound travels through the structure much further than a voice. Cover your nose and mouth with cloth against the dust, do not disturb whatever is holding the rubble up, and spend your movements sparingly. What to do: Tap on a pipe or on concrete at intervalsrather than shouting. Cover nose and mouth with cloth, and do not disturb whatever is holding the rubble up.

Road collapses and open manholesdangerous

Once the utilities stop being maintained, the city starts collapsing on its own: a leaking pipe washes the ground out, the asphalt holds as a crust and gives way under weight. Add to that lifted manhole covers and flooded basements where nothing is visible below the surface.
Signs: sunken asphalt, water or steam coming from underground, cracks in a ring, paving that has dropped, a hollow sound. What to do: go round dips and wet patches, and along a flooded street do not walk at all — under the water are open manholes and holes. Do not go down into basements or service tunnels: gas collects there, and there is nobody to pull you out. At night, only walk where you walked by day.

Nuclearinvisible, settles as dust

Chemicalhas a smell, flows downhill

Biologicalarrives with people

A city is the place this section exists for. Everything that can spill, explode and burn is concentrated here, and so is the density of people that disease travels through. On the other hand, here there are basements, solid walls and supplies — none of which exist in open country.

Three words common to every kind of contamination

Time — leave straight away, not after packing.
Distance — every step away from the source cuts the dose.
Shielding — any mass between you and the source: earth, stone, water, a wall.

Nuclear

What shields you in a city, best first: the basement of a block of flats → central rooms on lower floors with no windows → the middle of the building on a middle floor → a flat with the windows covered. Bad: the top floor (fallout is lying on the roof) and the ground floor (contamination outside at window height).

The first minutes: inside, downwards, into the middle of the building. Close windows, doors and ventilation, tape and sheet over the gaps.
Take off outdoor clothes and shoes in the hallway or on the stairs — that is up to 90% of what you carried in. Tie the bag off and take it well away.
Wash, but do not comb your hair: dry dust in hair gets carried through the whole flat.
A day at minimum, better two or three. The peak is the first 24–48 hours.
Water: whatever is already poured and covered is safe. The heater, the cistern, the bath, all filled before the event. From the tap afterwards — only if there is no alternative, and filtered.
Food: anything that was packaged and in closed cupboards. Wipe the packaging with a damp cloth and take it off without touching the contents.

Chemical

In a city this is the likeliest scenario of the three: an accident at a plant, a tanker spill, a fire at a chemical store, burning plastic.

Heavy gases flow downwards — and that turns the whole logic on its head: in a chemical release a basement becomes a death trap, and safety is upstairs. Go to the upper floors, close windows and ventilation, tape the gaps, breathe through damp cloth.

How to tell chemical from radiation: there is a smell, your eyes sting, your throat catches, coughing starts immediately. Radiation does none of that. Getting the direction wrong — up or down — is the worst mistake you can make that day, so decide on the signs, not on habit.

Once out of the area: undress, leave the clothes, wash with soap from the top down without scrubbing the skin.

Biological

Here the risk is higher than in any other biome — the density of people and shared water. Everything that works is well known and dull.

Distance. Do not stand in queues or go into crowds, and do not enter places where people gather if you can avoid it.
Water is always boiled, even mains water: when pressure drops, groundwater and sewage get sucked into the pipes.
Sanitation decides more than medicine. With the sewers out, gut infections are the leading cause of death in besieged and flooded cities — not hunger and not violence.
Hands. Мыть водой с мылом перед едой и после туалета или отходов. Спиртовой антисептик не менее 60% — резерв, если руки не видимо грязные. Не наносить бытовую хлорку на кожу.
Isolate anyone who falls ill in a separate room, with one person caring for them, separate dishes and towel, and regular airing.
Do not take belongings from abandoned flats or from bodies.

If you do not know what has happened, act on the worst explanation. Erring on the side of caution costs you a lost day. Erring the other way cannot be undone.

In a city the two paths are two different times, not two choices. At first path B is unavoidable: there is a warehouse all around you, and it works. Then the warehouse runs out, and what is left is path A, which few people are ready for. This whole chapter is about not being caught out by that changeover.

Path A — with bare hands

You know everything humanity knows, but you have nothing except your hands and what grows around you.

The first year

With bare hands a city gives you almost nothing: no timber, no water, no soil, no fuel.
Realistic: collecting rainwater, boiling, sanitation, a garden on the balcony and in the yard.
Craft instead of gathering: mend, sew, purify, treat, grow — that is what stands in for a tech tree in a city.
After that it is either the land around the city, or leaving for your own wild biome.

Three years

Growing in the yard and on the balcony: soil, seeds, water, compost from your own waste.
Rainwater as a system: roof, gutter, containers, filter, boiling.
A stove burning offcuts and furniture; a warm room instead of a warm flat.
A community: watches, divided labour, traded skills — the only arrangement that lasts.

The ceiling, and an honest limit

Achievable: months living on what you find, and with a garden and water, years, provided there are not many of you.
Out of reach: self-sufficiency. A city produces neither food nor fuel nor water.
The honest conclusion: a city is a launch pad and a warehouse, not a place to live. The strategy: take the most you can from it and leave for water and land while that is still safe.

The bottleneck of this biome

Water and sanitation. Not hunger and not cold: with the sewers out of action, infection kills faster than anything else.

Path B — on what is left

The same place, but within a day's walk there is something people abandoned. That does not cancel self-reliance — it only speeds it up.

What to look for here specifically

Your own flat and stairwell — start here: heater, cistern, tins, first-aid kit, tools.
Cars in the yard: batteries, mirrors, belts, wire, cans, petrol.
Pharmacies, builders' merchants, garages, schools — in decreasing usefulness and increasing risk.
Shops and warehouses are the most obvious and the most dangerous: everyone goes there.

What that unlocks

Water, light, medicines, tools — all at once and within walking distance. No wild biome offers anything like it.
Glass jars, salt, matches — preserving and storage.
Seeds from shops and allotments — the thing that moves you from path B to path A.

The trap on this path

The main trap of this guide. What you find always looks like plenty, and so people do not start growing, mending and learning until it is too late. Count your stock out loud in days and start the changeover when half is left, not when it has run out.

The ceiling by year

Timescale	With bare hands	On salvage
Month 1	Water from the flat, sanitation, a warm room	The full set of what you found: food, light, medicines
Year 1	Rainwater, a garden in the yard, a stove, a community	The same plus supplies — but they are already running down
Year 10	Only if there is land and water around the city	The warehouses are gone. What is left is what you can do

Protecting yourself and your family

On path A. Going unnoticed matters more than being solid. Light kept behind curtains, quiet, no smell of cooking on the stairs. A prop against the door, a line of tins, a second way out you have walked yourself. A watch, if there are several of you. Backing down is almost always better than winning: an injury with no medicine costs more than any confrontation.

On path B. Every trip out is a risk. Go in daylight, not alone, with no rucksack on show, along back streets, carrying nothing openly. Look like a person with nothing worth taking. Bring what you find home in stages and not in a straight line. Your main store is not where you sleep.

A family in a city. Agree three things in advance: where to meet if you get separated; the word on which everyone quietly heads there; and that the door is not opened to anyone, not even a familiar voice. Give children real duties — water, counting the stores, watching from the window: a child with a job copes far better than a child being shielded.

Что происходит прямо сейчас?

Отойдите только до ближайшего безопасного места

Вызовите 112 на громкой связи и остановите то, что убивает сейчас

Прекратите нагрузку и уйдите от холода, ветра или солнца

Остановитесь в безопасном месте и не уходите наугад

Посмотрите на растительность, рельеф и главную угрозу погоды

Choose a biomeChoose a biome

Find yourself on the mapFind yourself on the map

Biomes at a glanceBiome comparison

What to do if help is not comingWhat to do when no help is coming

What makes a danger urgent

Первые 60 минут: один маршрут для любого места

Какой огонь выбирать в каждом биоме

Вода, еда и инфекция: минимум, который нельзя пропускать

The tech tree: from bare hands to a settled camp

Level 0 — hour 1

Level 1 — days 1–2

Level 2 — week 1

Level 3 — weeks 2–4

Level 4 — a month and beyond: building

Level 5 — a year and beyond: metal, and where it runs out

Beyond that: glass, mechanical power, electricity

Finding your way without instruments

What you do depends on why you left

People: when to make contact, and how to protect yourself

The ladder of contact

Protection means being noticed early and avoided, not weapons

Chapter temporarily unavailable in English

Seasons: what the time of year decides

Spring — the most deceptive season

Summer — the time to build, not to rest

Autumn — the season that decides everything

Winter — not a season of gathering but of spending

If it all began in late autumn or in winter

Where there are not four seasons

Appendix: knots, tracks, what is edible

1. Six knots that cover everything

2. Tracks: who walks here

3. Еда: только то, что вы знали до аварии

Справочная галерея знакомых видов

Forbidden always, with no exceptions

Salvage: what to look for and where to put it

Where to look, and what makes it dangerous

A tin can is the most underrated find there is

A plastic bottle is the second most useful thing

Other things worth picking up

Improvised gear: building from what is around

The well sweep (shaduf) — lifting water almost without tiring

The layered filter — water stops being cloudy

The piston pump — the water comes up by itself

The water wheel — work that goes on without you

The bow — a weapon you do not get to straight away

Bellows without leather: the bow fan

Charcoal — the fuel without which nothing above a campfire works

Generators, honestly

What to buy while you still can

Cutting tool

Combustion

Cover

Container

Cordage

What to add beyond the five

Water and food at home

Chapter temporarily unavailable in English

Chapter temporarily unavailable in English

Temperate forest

Если вы потерялись в лесу

Day 1, hours 1–2 — scouting

Day 1, rest of the day — cordage, fire, shelter

1. Cordage from linden inner bark

2. Fire by bow drill

What to light it with: tinder

3. Shelter: a debris hut of branches and leaf litter

🌙 Night 1

Days 2–3 — still the critical window

🌙 Nights 2–3

Week 1 — stability

🌙 Night, week 1

Weeks 2–4 — building up

🌙 Night, weeks 2–4