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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.