Part of Phase 0: First 72 Hours
Salvage in the first 72 hours means grabbing everything genuinely needed from an area before time, decay, or other people empty it — a single hardware store holds more tools than a medieval village built in a decade, an abandoned car holds 40-60 liters of gasoline, and a street of twenty such cars holds a thousand liters or more, degrading until someone siphons it. Priority Salvage List is the one article every reader needs first: it carries no prerequisite of its own, and it is the explicit prerequisite for all five of the specialized articles below, because it’s the triage pass that decides what gets grabbed in the first six to seventy-two hours before any of the specifics matter.
Once that priority pass is done, the five deep-dives split by category and don’t depend on each other — fuel, tools, medicine, seeds and food, and books can be tackled in whatever order matches what’s actually nearby. Fuel Siphoning & Storage covers the gasoline still sitting in abandoned cars, which keeps degrading the longer it’s left. Tool Identification & Repair is about function over brand: a rusty wrench pulled from rubble and cleaned with vinegar outworks a pristine multitool you’ll never actually find, and this is also the article that unlocks Phase 1’s Building Material Recovery and Vehicle & Machinery Cannibalization once the right tools are in hand.
Medicine Cabinet Raid ranks antibiotics above a rifle in a world without pharmacies, and judges a medication by its real shelf life rather than the printed expiration date — it’s also what unlocks Phase 0’s own First Aid section, since finding the medication comes before knowing how to use it. Seed & Food Salvage treats the two as a single find-and-test problem: canned food buys months, but a packet of tomato seeds can feed a family every season after, if it’s tested and planted before it spoils. Library & Bookstore Priorities is the only one of the five with nothing it unlocks — a printed book can still read five hundred years after it was made, the way the Gutenberg Bible does, so it’s ranked here by the durability of the knowledge itself rather than by what it leads to next.
Start Here
The triage pass that decides what gets grabbed first, before any of the categories below matter.
What to Grab, By Category
Fuel, tools, medicine, food and seeds, and books — five parallel deep-dives, tackled in whatever order matches what’s actually nearby.