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.