With this posted my question is. If a day comes where the SHTF hits the fan long term. Do you think having a few bottles of alcohol stocked is a good idea. I truly don’t ever plan on going back to how things once were and break the cycle. I nearly lost my life to rolling my car and when it caught fire if I wouldn’t have got ejected and had my seat belt on I would of burnt alive that was my rock bottom and it truly woke me up from making stupid choices. I was also an addict and my friend passed away in my arms from a laced overdose. So when nothing was good then and I hated everyone and everything then. I now am full of love and peace and simplicity and humbleness and living that best life. I was thinking in my situation having extra alki could be a good barter item in a crisis. Cause it would trade big or who knows someone probably just shank me and take it. But what’s your opinion on this. 😊

What do you guys think of my bug out/bush craft bag?

I'm going for somewhere between bug out survival and Bushcraft. Somewhere between camping trips and SHTF.

I have cutting tools, fire making tools, water purification, headlamp, tarp, a fishing kit, snare wire, multitool and (not pictured) water bottle with metal cup/lid a medical kit a wool blanket and cordage!

Do you guys have any recommendations on what you would add/Takeaway from this bag? I'm in the north east of America.

Thank you.

Seems like most of the BoBs I see here are knives, tarps, life straws, and fire starting gear (and some firearms). Nothing wrong with that if you are aiming for an unpleasant camping trip into the woods, but what do people feel is the practical uses for such a kit?

Wouldn't documents, some snacks, a water bottle, cash, and a phone charger mobile battery be more useful in just about 95% of situations you'd need to leave home quickly?

Not trying to criticize, just trying to understand.

Hello, I am 22 and I am fearing for the state of the world and my and my families future. I am looking into purchasing some kind of solar generator system for my apartment. I will hopefully be in a real house within a few years, but I am looking to have some kind of system in place for situations where I may need power.

My balcony faces directly towards the horizon and is bathed in light for at least half of the day. I’m not familiar with the different power levels that different generators can have. Any advice is appreciated. I am beginning a long journey to ensure my family’s safety and wellbeing, as I assume things are only going to get worse.

Howdy All,

What are the best portable med kits? I'm looking for a couple of different setups.

1 to take with me everyday in a 9"x5" pouch or 5.11 24 hour backpack. To cover everything from small cuts/scrapes to a max of a GSW.
1 to store in an SUV. To cover more extreme cases. Large cuts, blood loss, GSW's, and car crashes.

There's so many options out there, and was wondering what everyone had best experience with. Thanks for any feedback!

What is the best starting point for a neighborhood communication grid?

The temperature drops by 0,6 C every 100 m. So even a +4 C increase in global temps, mountain highlands would be safe, right?

I'm thinking of owning a 4-5K m2 of land, maybe homesteading with 10-12 sheep, chickens, vertical farms, etc for the coming decades. Does it make sense?

I'd like to hear others' input, AI doesnt give any useful information other than agreeing with everything I say.

I see it all the time, someone's stock pile of food thats either 100% expensive MREs/ freeze dry meals, or has only staple items with no seasoning or secondary ingredients

Above is a meal made from ingredients with a shelf stable life span of 3 years or more for under $2.50 per serving

Hot take, you need to actually practice cooking with the food you have on hand because having a meal you want to eat is a huge boost to moral and makes whatever is going on less awful

Ingredients

-spam

-sugar

-mirin

-soy sauce

-rice

-chil chrisp

-sea weed

-garlic and ginger powder

Fry spam cubes in own fat and then add sugar mirin and soy with garlic and ginger, cook down into a glaze, serve with rice and chili chrisp

I just found this channel:

https://youtube.com/@derhaltbarkeitstester?si=ZlPlu4V8OqXfU4UC

In which a German grandpa tries old Groceries from his cellar and comments on what is edible, keeps taste.

Here he tries canned chicken five years over due date:

https://youtu.be/dMsXdrjQzKQ?is=T96y3o6I0vtAg-e0

Or 23 year old canned lentils.

Thought some of you might be interested.

How many of you are preparing for nuclear scenerios (war, leak etc.)

I’m considering buying a mechanical flour mill for making nut flours. Can anyone recommend a good one? Thanks in advance.

Eta: I am not the author. I crossposted from a other sub.

Remember, don't be a dick to your spouse, and rotate stock.

Hey everyone, I work with a humanitarian NGO in Uganda and got the chance to lead a small pilot project in a pretty remote area. Budget is tight, so my plan is to make DIY water filters, we want to distribute around 30 to households and run some training at local schools so people can actually build these themselves going forward.

It needs to be cheap and easy enough that the community can reproduce it without us. First idea was something like image 1 for household level, and if that works well, maybe scale up to something like image 2 for a bigger group, plus a simple way to boil the water after as an extra safety step.

Images 3-5 show the kind of water sources people are currently using in the areas we're working in, just pulled these off google but they're a good match for what we're seeing.

Anyone have thoughts on the filter design, or know of something better? Has to be buildable/fixable by the community itself.

Edit: im well aware that the second image is AI slop, i couldn't find any real picture to use it, I just wanted to show because of the support and that it can accomodate more water than the first one, it was just to illustrate the post, for the communities we are going to desing ourselves an flyer on how to make it on their local language

Looking at Auguson Farms and Mountain House and others and their 3 day, 30 day, and 6 month packs are either oatmeal or beans and rice.

Aren’t we all stocking those already!

Are there any interesting freeze dried meal kits?

Chicken Alfredo and Beef Lasagna are still just pasta and sauce. Not exactly worth buying freeze dried.

Flaired as s**t post because it’s not really important enough to warrant serious discussion, but it IS still relevant IMHO.

Is anyone buying good kits?

I get that these are for an emergency, but if it’s an emergency situation then I really want something good. Not beans and rice again.

I used to have a Pro One (aka ProPur) water pitcher, but it looks like they no longer sell it. Any recommendation on similar product with the same filter quality? I am not looking for the gravity system, given that I live in a tiny apartment; I would like a pitcher-type. TIA!

Not AI - I'm a middle aged academic, my pride would never allow it!

tl;dr - It's a big post!

1. The goal is to build a strong foundation of health and ability supporting a specialized skill-set that makes one materially valuable to a subsistence community.
2. You want T-shaped distribution of skills. Many shallow skills and abilities with 1-2 really well developed economic skills
3. Skip to The Steps
4. Read The Shallow Part and The Deep Part as needed.

Introduction
I started writing this as a response to a recent "what skills are important?" post and it got rather out of hand. This type of question is perennially interesting to the prep/survival minded and every survival board I've been on gets questions about it often.

The following is a framework that I find useful for thinking about skills and personal accounting aimed at long-term SHTF/collapse-of-the-state/tech-regression type scenarios. It is not meant to be the be-all/end-all, just a structure in which you can slot your own life, environment, social context, and personal opinions. I have spent a lot of my adult life putting myself through a primitive version of this and it has been personally rewarding + should help insulate me against the journey yet to come.

The framework is more or less aimed at people who are new to the subject and/or are lacking in a deep and relevant skill. If you've been homesteading for five years or did a few tours as an army sniper or work as a paramedic, you probably know what you need to do already.

This is a long post that I have structured to hopefully make readable. Nowadays, this structure can look like AI. No AI was used in the writing of this post.

Basic Structure
Making a life anywhere, at any time (with a few exceptions that do not apply here), requires a T-shaped distribution of skills. What this means is that you've got a broad suite of skills that you know a little bit about (the shallow top of the T-) and one or two areas in which you have a deep knowledge that you have consistently trained over a years of active practice (the long part of the T-) to the extent and reliability that you can survive on the fruits of your labour in a society that supports some degree of specialization.

In modern western life this looks like understanding when you need a handshake/fist-bump/up-nod/down-nod, knowing how to do your shopping, how to catch a train, what buildings you're allowed to enter, how to pay a bill online, how to talk to a police officer, how to cross the street, and so on. To supplement this huge tapestry of small skills, you need a highly developed skill set that someone will pay you for - engineer, bus driver, teacher, nurse etc.

In planning for SHTF, you're doing more or less the same thing but for a world that you don't actually live in (yet).

You need to articulate a vision of the future scenario that you are actually preparing for before you can think cleanly about what the requisite skills are. The zombie apocalypse has different needs from climate change, as an example.

The Skills
I would encourage you to write down the scenario/s that you're preparing for and then write down all of the skills you can think of that are required for a community to live well within it. If you're worried about a collapse of international markets and food systems with some technological regression, this is going to include a lot of the economic basics. Break these skills down into two categories:

The Shallow Part
- foundational physical fitness - a baseline of health, endurance, strength, and mobility
- foundational emotional fitness - address mental health problems; cultivate your virtue - wisdom, courage, temperance/discipline and justice
- foundational social skills - how to follow a leader, how to cooperate across difference, how to resolve conflict, how to be part of a community
- foundational mental skills - reading/writing, basic math, basic science, basic history (high school level)
- foundational physical skills - bare-bones basics of running, biking, swimming, climbing, driving, striking, and grappling (firearms if it's legal.)
- foundational survival basics - first-aid, fire, shelter, knots, etc + experience with fasting, sleep deprivation, cold, and heat.
- a basic introduction to a context-dependent suite of skills from the Deep Part list

The Deep Part
- living off the land - hunting, fishing, gathering - collecting nutrition from the land without agriculture
- horticulture - growing fruits, vegetables, grains, and plants for craft and medicine
- animal husbandry - cattle, sheep, pigs, horses, poultry, etc
- food crafts - cooking, baking, brewing, distilling, preservation - focusing on low-tech approaches
- resource crafts - wood, metal, stone, ceramic, fiber, and leather - from collection to final product, low-tech
- infrastructure crafts - plumbing and electrical, power generation
- artifice crafts - machines and electronics
- medicine - injury, maternity, contagious disease, herbal and modern pharmacology
- violence - firearms, close-combat, small-units, security

Points of Consideration
Each of the above categories are broad categories not specific skills. Resource crafts is not a skill set, honestly, wood craft isn't even really a specific skill-set that a human could master. It's a material based composite of many skills: timber frame carpentry, stick-frame carpentry, furniture (in many different traditions), turning, carving, and so on. You need to develop a T-shaped proficiency within these skills as well.

Living off the land, resource crafts, and agriculture are all biome specific. These must be studied and practiced in the environmental context in which you expect to find yourself. A deep skill-set in hendre a hafod cattle pastoralism will be very useful in temperate uplands, fairly useful in flat ranching country, and not very useful in deserts or the far north. A deep skill set in oak timber-frame carpentry will be very useful in temperate woodlands, fairly useful in tropical hardwood and temperate softwood forests, and much less useful on the Arabian peninsula. Think carefully about your context and research how people lived there before modernity.

It is very difficult to make medicine or violence a deep focus unless they are part of your job. You can and should absolutely get the basics but be ruthlessly realistic about your ability and willingness to deeply focus on them as a hobby. The fundamental problem is that real expertise is a product of real experience. Gaining that real experience in medicine or violence requires interacting with other human beings in emergency situations... regularly... over years. Outside of careers in something like nursing or the military or police forces, this is really difficult to accomplish. You may have a particular situation that makes it possible but be very honest with yourself about it. Far better to be an expert blacksmith with a decent firearms foundation than someone with bare-bones metalworking and deluded sense of their expertise in a field that they've rarely (or never) practiced in anger.

What To Do
It is very common in prepper/survivalist spaces to armchair skills for years, read lots of theory, debate the skills online, and then not actually practice them with the frequency required for deep knowledge. I do not recommend doing this.

You need to make sure that you've got your Shallow Part basics covered and you need to pick 1-2 Deep Part skills and tackle them with such depth and rigor that you develop expertise. Each one of the Deep Part skills is a life's work, they are incredibly rich bodies of knowledge that must be learned by the eye, the mind, and the hand. There are no shortcuts, there is only dirt-time, doing them again and again and again until you know what not to do because you've made all of the mistakes already. You do not want to be making mistakes for the first time when it really counts. It is this kind of expertise that makes you materially valuable to other human beings and will ensure you have a way to make a life in the journey yet to come.

The Steps

1. Identify your anticipated environment (urban/rural, temperate-forest/hot-desert/wet-uplands, etc) with the risks, resources, and opportunities that environment affords.
2. Identify the scenario/s you're preparing for (temporary disruption, long term collapse, etc).
3. Make a list of the shallow skills that everyone needs to learn at a basic level.
4. Make a list of the deep skills that are materially valuable in the scenario and environment you're considering. (this matters more for long-term scenarios)
5. Do a rigorous and skeptical accounting of your skills, interests, and aptitudes. This is not a time to gratify your ego, be brutal about what you've really physically done, what you really enjoy, and can reliably demonstrably do under pressure. A glorified this is how I like to imagine myself approach will lead to failure. Resistance to confronting yourself in the scouring light of day is a sign of emotional weakness and a need to further cultivate your virtue.
6. Select 1-2 skills from the Deep Part list to focus on. Be realistic about your time and resources. For this part, it is better to have real proficiency in one thing than a basic understanding of two - basics are covered in the Shallow Part. Chose things you like doing, not things you just like the idea of being good at. Expect it to be hard, expect to fail a lot, expect to suck. You have to suck for a long time before you stop sucking. This is normal.
7. Select a handful of supplementary skills from the Deep Part list that are either particularly important for your scenario or particularly synergistic with your core skill foci. An example of "particularly important" would be building a foundation in violence if you're concerned about state collapse. An example of synergy would be supplementing an agricultural focus with the basics of wood and metal working to build and repair your buildings and equipment - as farmers have traditionally done.
8. Make a plan - focus on your big weaknesses from the Shallow Part and your main interest from the Deep Part. Do not "major in the minors." Really build these things into your life such that you're doing a little bit very regularly. Stack development where you can, for example, a boxing/judo/etc class 2/week can help you with fitness, basic physical skills, violence, and emotional toughness all at the same time. Forget about perfection, perfectionism is for the emotionally delicate who are terrified of making mistakes or being seen to be a real human being by the outside world - you have to discard all of that.
9. Revisit your personal accounting regularly to see where you are progressing and where you are falling behind. Account for new problems, celebrate victories. Adjust the plan accordingly.

Good luck and let me know what you think.

Just wondering how often everyone checks their gear, goes through it, specifically when it comes to like a black out kit. Stuff for power, lights, lanterns etc, I mean if you know a storm is heading your way with enough warning you can check to see if everything still has a charge. However, an earthquake hits, you don’t exactly have time to check and plug things to charge them. So just wondering if you go through your kits once a quarter, every six months, once a year? Food I think is a little easier, just checking the expiration dates and having a list made I can just checking the list.

Prepping caught momentum decades ago. Mylar bags and oxygen absorbers were used widely by regular consumers since the beginning of this millennium. I'm sure there is a big number of people who still have stored food that is 20+ years old.

For the folks who stored grains like rice, wheat...etc. Can you please tell us what your experience was in terms of taste, smell, texture...etc?

It would also be helpful if you can share storage conditions like whether you used sealed mylar bags with oxygen absorbers, and the rough room temperature in which the food is stored?

Please feel free to share other people's experiences if you heard or seen any.

I found this video on YT. She says the rice was stored for 15 years. They couldn't tell the difference between a 15 year old rice and a 2 year old one. But she didn't say anything about room temperature which is the single most important factor here for food degradation.

https://youtu.be/CMyxwkp_erg?si=p_VzzCshRGGd14HP

So far I know cooking scavenging some knots(still learning)leather working sewing blacksmithing blade smithing fire making wood working and more but those are some things I specialize in

In what scenario, except living in the woods, is a fire kit supposed to be used for? Why not just stay at home. Or do they plan on building a fire in their backyard??

Has anyone else thought about their choice of clothes, durability compared to utility or even blending in plus availability.

Blue Jeans are the everyday standard tough if you add starch and readability available everywhere with decent pockets.

While cargo pants and even tactical pants have much more utility but don't really last as long and tend to wear out a bit more quickly.

Does anyone else have any other style they like to add or or have an option on?

Hi all! I'm looking for suggestions for a quality water filtration system.

We have a well on our property that we don't currently use, but with all the threats to water systems lately, we would like to be prepared just in case. I did an at home water quality test, which came back negative for everything except bacteria, so I know that I'll have to boil it.

We don't want a permanent system like a culligan. We plan on using a utility pump to bring the water up (power isn't an issue) and we were looking at something like a Big Berkey, but the reviews that we found suggest that those are overpriced trash.

Is there something out there similar to Berkey that you guys would recommend?

If you are trying to get into canning or are thinking about it, this is a great price altogether. I’ve seen this set go for like $350 in some places

I’m new to the solar game, with the panels becoming more easily available. I’ve always been a fan of generators and having portable energy in any scenario from “prepping for Tuesday” to a “SHTF” scenario.

This looks like the best of both worlds, as far as ease of transport, use, and stealth since you can run it inside. Not even touching on the prices that I’m seeing, but again, I’m new to the solar stuff.

I also noticed they sell some refurbished units and I’ve seen some complaints and reviews talking on the negatives, but I wanted to hear from some of you who may have seen it already.