Biome · the day is turned upside down
Desert
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.
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 daysReconnaissance 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.
Dusk of day 1 — reconnaissance and water
⏱ The first 1.5–2 hours after the heat dropsNow 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 markDaytime: 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.
🌙 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.
Week 1 — water as a system
⏱ The rest of the weekПоявляются 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.
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.
🌙 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").
Weeks 2–4 — adobe
⏱ No hurryHousing: 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.
A month and beyond — drying meat
⏱ OngoingThe 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.
Animals
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
shade · up off the ground · reconnaissance only at dusk
yucca cord · fire (tinder: dry grass and bark) · a covered trench
закрываемая тара · сбор дождя · тень · сигнальная площадка
sun-dried meat · leather · clay vessels
adobe — walls 25–30 cm, no firing and no fuel
↳ The layered filter and the shaduf↳ How the levels work in general
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.
- 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
↳ The well sweep: water for brick and for living↳ Seasons: in the desert the season is the day
Smoke, air and the door
Door
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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
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.