Skill Guides

The manual and addenda tell you what to have and what to practice. These guides are the actual how-to: step-by-step instructions for the physical skills behind each topic, sourced to the same agencies and standards bodies (CDC, EPA, WHO, NSF) cited throughout the rest of this site.

77 guides in all: 15 core guides, one per topic, covering the foundational hands-on layer any household can learn from a page. The other 62 go deeper, into specific sub-skills that are genuinely teachable in text even though the addenda's own fuller mastery-level content is a real-world commitment (a certification, a growing season, a multi-day course) no page can substitute for. Most topics only need a handful of those narrow, single-technique additions; Water & Food is the outlier, its water-sourcing, storage, and growing-your-own-food guides add up to real breadth, which is why that section alone gets its own subheadings below. Three more, grouped as General, cover ground that spans every topic instead of belonging to one: packing a go-bag, using an AI assistant to plan, and finding real community organizations. None of this covers what to actually do during or right after an emergency, that's a separate companion manual, The Act of Surviving. Each guide has its own PDF download, or grab a combined one:

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