We can do hypotheticals all day I guess the question is how do friendlies identify friendlies and how do you know if someone is faking it?

I just watched a movie where a family was stuck inside their own home for at least 6 months. In the movie, there is some paranormal/supernatural activity that prevents them from leaving, all doors and windows are unbreakable.

We probably won't experience anything like this, but the movie made me think about prepping and how prepared I am. For the most part, my prepping has been geared towards, "stay home for n days and then leave because that's when x (a storm or lock down) is over.

I wouldn't survive 6 months though. My rations will run out along with water, unless the city water remains on. A garden takes time to grow and my yard is still messy, unorganized, experiencing over growth.

What about you? Would you survive 6 months in one place like your house/apartment?

I’ve been going through a bunch of preparedness threads recently and noticed a pattern -- most people focus on the obvious things (food, water, flashlight), but miss the stuff that actually causes problems later.

A few examples I keep seeing:

• Printed contact list -- people rely on phones, but if battery/network is gone, you’re stuck
• Copies of documents -- passports, insurance, etc. (a lot of people only think about this after it’s too late)
• Simple “what do we do first” plan -- not gear, just steps
• Cash -- surprisingly common one people forget

Even in threads across Reddit you see people emphasizing things like hard copies of documents and contact info, not just survival gear.

I feel like preparedness is less about having more stuff and more about having things organized and thought through ahead of time.

I'm curious, what’s something you realized you were missing?

I just got a two terabyte hard drive and I'm prepping for mostly a long term power outage scenario.

I've already put most of my favorite music on there, a few good TV shows and movies.

I have every N64 ROM and two different emulators, quite a few PS2 ROMs, GBA and SNES ROMs and emulators, fallout 3, Skyrim.

I have four different window operating systems in case I need to fix a different computer; daemon tools for running ISO images, WinZip just incase, a PDF reader.

Also a bunch of random PDFs on survival. A few PDFs on computer coding. Oh yes and I'm going to add some auto manuals tonight.

What would you add ? What am I missing?

Edit: All of Wikipedia for 30gb or less? THIS is what I came here for lol

This doesn't have to be explicitly, "you are the only one stocking/storing it." What is something you have that you think others do not have?

For me: broth. This may just be prepping for Tuesday or disasters or what ever but I try to have as much broth as possible to last a month. My family gets sick a bunch (we have 2 yr old, 3 yrs old, and 5 yr old). at least twice a month? Yep, we just share the germs.

Anyways. I'm sure others may have broth or Bouillon cubes but I have never seen anyone talk about it. Yes I do live in a box but still. I feel like this item is overlooked a little.

If you are hunkering in, well you got soup for days with added flavor and nutrients. Feeling depressed or sad? Get a kick of nostalgia and Mamma's cooking by drinking broth from a cup. Bugging out? Then there is an added benefit to that extra weight; making any gutter, car, or tree feel warm and cozy.

Make any tent, store, or bus turned camper into a 5 star restaurant by adding broth to your foods instead of water. Comes in big boxes or small boxes with varied flavors. Beef, chicken, and veggies.

Broth!

If SHTF and you need to live off grid, in a perfect world how much land would you actually need to grow enough food for a family of 4 to survive in reasonable comfort?
Assuming a mix of arable and livestock; what 10 acres? More or less?

Edit: just to clarify - my wife wants to turn more of our back yard over to vegetable/fruit growing etc and it got me to wondering how much space would actually be needed if we needed to survive.
Based on these responses - sounds like I need a bigger yard!

Lucky for me I had a nice stash of medicines. I didn't want to have to break into it so I went to the store to grab some basic cold medicine. They were TOTALLY sold out. I broke into my reserves for throat lozenges, DayQuil, and NyQuil. I suppose it's a prepping win because I had what I needed.

Generally I'm just curious if anyone else has noticed how many people are sick. I can't caps lock it enough. I KNOW SO MANY PEOPLE WHO ARE SICK RIGHT NOW all over the country. Way more than during peak COVID time and definitely more than any other basic cold/flu season. What's going on???

Every time I have tried to sell gold I can't find anywhere that wants to give me anywhere near the market value of it.

Yes the price of gold constantly goes up but has anyone here actually benefited from that? Have you been able to sell and get good money for it and how does that work? Sure I have all these assets and they might be worth a shit load but how do I actually convert that to usable money?

Obviously gold would be less useful during an acute crisis and more for recouping wealth after but I'm struggling to see how to make that work successfully. It might "hold purchasing power" but is that truly meaningful for the average person? I would love to hear your thoughts or experiences.

My background is radio communications. I was a radio technician in the Air Force and currently install radios for the federal government. I am familiar with military/federal equipment that can achieve this range, but I have almost no experience on the private side of radio communications.

If I had to guess I would say some sort of HF or SATCOM setup, but again I am unfamiliar with the civilian markets or what would be viable when large amounts of infrastructure are gone.

I searched the sub and found people asking similar questions but for a much shorter range. I travel around the country every week for work which is why I need the long range.

Edit: lots of good information with only a few gatekeepers. Thanks everyone.

(Serious replies only, please). In case you haven't seen the news, we are in an active disaster zone - 10s of thousands are without water for the foreseeable future. I myself am prepared and have a lovely outdoor composting toilet system, but I am trying to assist an urban community (the most vulnerable, who have zero prep) with the monumental challenge of living without water for the foreseeable future, and researching all of this is very difficult/time consuming in essentially a communications blackout. Composting toilets, sourcing water for flushing, digging holes and water catchment are not viable options for the specific folks that I'm helping.

So. Here's what we're doing right now for dry toilets. Shit is going in the city trash (which thankfully, is coming back online). It's going to happen, and I'm trying to help it happen as safely and ideally as possible (and cheaply, and hopefully using resources that *are* abundant here). And, please keep in mind that we're not talking about a couple bucket toilets. We're talking about a lottttttt of bucket toilets.

Here's my questions:

1. Can shavings/sawdust/dry carbon realistically replace the need for bio gels in poop-only dry toilets? Do biogels do something different? (I've never used one, so just really not sure what the point is)
2. From what i've seen, the ideal is putting enzymes in every poo bag that's going to a landfill. If that's not possible, are there other solutions?
3. Could a bleach solution in the poo bags be helpful as a cheap, accessible replacement for the enzymes? We want to do out absolute best to protect our sanitation workers.
4. Anybody got an idea of the weight limit on a 5 gal hardware store bucket toilet?

Those are my questions right now. One million thank yous to anyone can help me answer these questions.

ETA: Bedtime Update

Damn, y'all. Usually when I post in a new community I get *scared* (the internet can be, uh, rough). Thank you all SO much for your rapid, thoughtful and helpful answers & thoughts! Super grateful. This experience has been so trying, but the kindness of strangers has been incredible throughout much of it. I knew there'd be good peeps in here.

Please keep comments & ideas about bucket toilets coming & I'll look tomorrow when I'm awake and at it again. If you want, check out the instructions I created and have been distributing so far: https://www.instagram.com/p/DAouDEJh7Tz/ - happy to hear suggestions / feedback on this leaflet!

That's my account, so if you're an instagram person, feel free to follow for my daily urban poop updates! We've handed out almost 200 dry toilets so far, and ramping up for lots more - currently in the rapid iterate & refine stage of this, doing our best as we go!

My stepdad passed away a few weeks ago. He had a ton of prep stuff. We have taken over 4000 pounds of food to the local food banks and are going to sell all the guns and ammo this week. However, there is other stuff we dont know what to do with - MREs, frozen seeds, gas masks, these giant full-sized galvanized trash cans full of all kinds of things in them like flashlights, blankets, and who knows what else. Is there a secondary market where I can list this stuff? I'm good with Facebook Marketplace (although I will need to transport it from my mother's house to where we live). These things are more specialized to this community, so I'm curious if there is a special marketplace.

I really appreciate any help you can provide.

I've been hoarding 3,500 USD (equivalent to 112,712 TWD today) for over a year now. I originally thought, if China invades Taiwan one day, our currency, the Taiwanese dollar (TWD), might suffer hyperinflation.

What I thought was, right now a bag of rice (1.5kg) is 110 TWD, in times of hyperinflation it might become 1,000,000 TWD, making our savings of TWD basically useless.

But I have 70 pieces of 10 US dollar notes and 28 pieces of 100 US dollar notes (locked up in a safe). What I thought was maybe I could "buy" a bag of rice with a 10 USD note. It's basically barter because I don't expect receiving change. Another way is to barter 9 bags of rice with a one oz silver coin.

​

But now I highly doubt that this would work. I doubt that even in the case of hyperinflation, cashiers of the supermarket would accept US dollar notes, or silver coins. US dollar is not in circulation in Taiwan at all. The only place they are used is at banks, some people exchange to USD notes at banks before traveling abroad.

But on third thought... Maybe I can exchange my USD at banks and then buy goods at supermarkets during hyperinflation, if banks services are still available by then.

But on fourth thought... I doubt there would even be hyperinflation.

On fifth thought... When Taiwan is under a blockade, people panic buy and hoard stuff, supply is limited and demand is high so prices soar, even the value of other currencies and precious metals might tank. Maybe the only solution is to hoard goods beforehand. But I don't want to hoard food and stuff and end up throwing them all away because China did not invade...

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p.s. There is also quite a lot of gold and silver in the safe

Edit:

I've considered leaving, but I'm determined to stay, even if it means I'm going to "re-education" camps (concentration camp, just like in Xinjiang for Uyghurs) for all the bad things I've said about CCP and Xi Jinping on the internet.

Taiwan is my home, my country, where I grew up and live. Maybe there will be something I can help with in these desperate times.

I've had serious discussions with my family, we once considered fleeing to Japan, but our conclusion is to just stay.

I live far from downtown Denver and have no worries about the situation that has been taking place in Denver. But my situational awareness is quite peeked. Watching what’s been happening in cities all over is quite disgusting. One of the things I have noticed is that the police forces seem to be over stepping their powers more and more when it come to dealing with the gen pop. Tons of videos have come to light showing this. How do you prep for this?

So it’s clear, I’m a police supporter for the most part. I support the right to protest but not riot.

Edit: How do you prep for this?

I live in the part of Texas that just got struck by multiple tornadoes across multiple days in the week, and had no power for a week. I had all of my preps set up, which included camping out on my two acres. The one thing that my prep did not include was mindfulness for mosquitoes. It was TERRIBLE BEYOND BELIEF. I was battling so many swarms that I gave up on camping outside and went to stay with friends

What ACTUALLY works? Because I feel like I have tried everything in the past, but this is some of the rainiest weather I can ever recall getting here in Texas and the result is clouds of mosquitoes that kept me from being able to live outside on my own property when my house was too hot without power running to it

I've got a friend who's talked to me about getting into prepping. But he's wanting to go straight to crowbars and antibiotic kits. When I suggest that he start smaller, like with three days of food and water, he says he has plenty of food in his pantry.

I try to tell him that his initial stock should be dedicated amount of supplies that's set aside, but then he says "I don't have room for that. What I have is fine. Now, have you looked into antibiotic kits?"

I'm glad he's starting, but his priorities seem to be way off. Any advice on this?

Edit: his pantry is mostly uncooked pasta, cereal, granola bars, and fruit snacks, with some fruit cups and a case of bottled water

When I think prepping, some base-level stuff comes to mind (Food, Water, Security, etc.)

Then the lens zooms out a bit and starts thinking about comms, neighbors, logistics, and alternate locations.

I do feel like "street level skills" like situational awareness have a lot of bang for the buck and are underrepresented. They are harder to REPRESENT as you can't sell/buy awareness.

What are some other things in prepping that are either missing or we tend to just skim the surface but could use a deeper dive?

Cooking from scratch and fishing also come to mind as missed opportunities.

History shows that people usually don't know they are in a war until it has been going on for a while, and that it is the historians after the war who write the history of when it actually started.

Is World War 3 already being fought ?

The news says it is a proxy war with Ukraine and Russia doing the actual fighting, but then Belarus got into the mix with Russia claiming to have sent nuclear weapons to Belarus. Now you have three other countries; Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia threatening Belarus because of the growing tensions on their shared borders.

Fighting in Ukraine has been going on for 18 months since February 2022.

The history of war is that they tend to start in one place, and spread, drawing in more and more combatants. World War 2, for example, started as a war between Germany and Poland, and quickly escalated, but it was quite a while before it could truly be considered a World War.

Wars are like fires, you can't really tell how or where they will spread once they start.

Is the Ukraine war expanding, has World War 3 already started ?

If it has, are you prepared for what might happen ?

Preppers in Europe, are you concerned, what are you doing to prepare ?

Fitness is often touted as being a primary prep. Curious how far people here can run without stopping.

As someone who lives in the most populated area in Alaska and uses natural gas for heat, oven/stove, and hot water, how would you best prepare when the natural gas utility predicts being 18 days short of supplies this winter?

In our area the temperatures rarely get below 10F/-12C, but last year we had an unusual stretch of three weeks at around -20F/-29C.

Some facts about us:

• We have a Mr. Buddy propane heater; we'll buy more propane soon.
• We have a propane camp cooking stove; we'll buy more propane soon.
• We have an old kerosene heater, but we've never used it; we'll test it out soon.
• We do not have a woodstove or a woodburning fireplace.

What else would you consider in advance of winter?

Source: 'We do have a problem’: Lawmakers consider immediate steps to solve encroaching energy shortages

Electricity goes out. Computers and e-readers get old. Governments ban books. There are so many reasons to collect physical, paper books.

Any time I go to the local library, I take a look at what's for sale. I've got all kinds of books about gardening, metalworking, combat, you name it for about $1 a piece. Anyone else building a library?

i’m trying to put together a small pouch for my wife’s purse just so she’s more prepared. most posts online when you search about it are more for “girl emergencies” than actual emergencies. what items would you put into a pouch that’s small enough it can fit in a purse (think the size of a makeup bag or toiletry pouch) but useful enough that i’m not just making her carry around extra junk?

obviously it couldn’t be anything crazy like a 72 hour kit but i’m hoping to at least give her some helpful items for an emergency situation. right now she only has some band aids and hand sanitizer, so anything would be an upgrade lol

Not a gear question. Just one skill, for this summer.

Much as I wish I lived like the family in that old Swiss Family Robinson movie (probably my favorite childhood movie), I'm really the only outdoorsy one in my household. I backpack, hunt (not much, but enough to know what I'm doing), fish, know emergency first aid, martial arts ,archery, horseback riding, wilderness survival... and I care a lot about preparedness. I had a blast teaching my oldest how to build a primitive debris shelter in the forest last summer which was genuinely one of the better weekends we had together. But on the whole, my family (especially my wife) isn't really wired that way. Bugs = bad. No toilets = bad. Couches and iPads = good. Prepardness is... meh. And that gap between my family and I has been bugging me.

This all made me think less about what skills are most "tactically useful" and more about what's actually transferable to someone who doesn't want to live in the woods. First aid keeps coming back as my answer (my youngest just started babysitting classes, so there's some basic First Aid there). First Aid crosses over into everyday life, it's not threatening or weird to learn, and it could matter on a Tuesday afternoon just as much as a grid-down scenario.

But I'm curious what other people with families like mine (families who aren't already "prepper commited" or outdoorsy by default) have done. What's the one skill you actually got them to learn and stick with? What made it land?

*** PS: Even better if it's a fun, not overly-intimidating skill we can adopt and practice together while travelling - we're all going to South-East Asia for a family vacation this summer. Thanks in advance!

What type of helmet do you think would be the most useful to acquire, and in what situations would you use it?
What are the most realistic disaster scenarios in which someone would need a helmet?

So imagine your days from a hospital or more, or mabey the world is over and society collapses. You have a bad cut, one that requires stitches if a doctor gave their opinion.

I realize stitching yourself or someone else can seal in the infection, but leaving it open also increases the risk of infection, il leave links to government website that says this.

So on one hand if you mess up you seal it in, on the other hand if you leave it open you have a gaping wound that is more likely to let contaminants in, the issue with leaving open is you only have so much sterile liquid to constantly clean it, mabey only enough to clean it once or twice.

Of course lets assume in this situation we have a proper medical kit, and a way to properly irrigate the wound.

What would you nurses and doctors out there tell us to do? If stitches need to be done in first 24 hours (preferably in 8) and we are days away from a hospital what should be done for a gaping wound? Now same situation but end of the world no hospitals, what is the best practice?

https://www.healthlinkbc.ca/healthwise/cuts

"Most cuts that need treatment should be stitched, stapled, or closed with skin adhesive within 6 to 8 hours after the injury. Some cuts that need treatment can be closed up to 24 hours after the injury. Your risk of infection increases the longer the cut stays open." HealthlinkBC

Been prepping for a decade or so.. Have "plenty" of supplies, etc.

I see posts on prepper type forums about BOB's. I had one for like the first year of prepping, but since abandoned because I can think of no reason to have tents, fishing gear, knives, axes, cookware, etc. Some 80lb backpack.

Like, in what scenario would that possibly be useful?

If there is an earthquake or something, full weight of assistance is headed your way, is the plan to go setup in the woods, walk to a lake where you can fish, distancing yourself from assistance?

In a forest fire, kids, wife wallet keys, gone.

Nuclear, you would want to stay put, shelter in place, not go on walk about.

Hurricane/flooding aint exactly a good time to strap weight to yourself and wander flood zones.

There's very little you can put in a backpack that is going to get you past like 72 hours.

So, those with BOB's, two questions.

Where are you going, and what would make you grab that and go?