Part of Phase 0: First 72 Hours
Security in the first 72 hours is less about an attacker than about correctly ranking what can actually kill you — a person fixated on defending against raiders while drinking contaminated water dies of dysentery long before anyone shows up. This section works through that in order: assess which threats are real and how likely they are, read the environment early enough to act on what you find, manage the specific way cold kills through ground contact and wind, and only then plan the exits a real crisis forces you to use.
Threat Assessment comes first by design — it carries no prerequisite, and its own unlock list leads directly into Situational Awareness, which names Threat Assessment as its own prerequisite. The logic is that you can’t watch for the right things until you know what the actual threats are: feral dogs lose their fear of people faster than wild predators and hunt in packs, disease vectors like mosquitoes and rats have historically killed more people than every predator combined, and the real first filter is a short set of regional questions — what large predators sit within 20 km, is there standing water nearby, are there signs of feral dog packs — rather than a generic fear of danger.
Situational Awareness then trains the actual watching. The eye’s sharp-focus cone covers only about 3 degrees, so a near-to-far scan — roughly 10 m, then 10-100 m, then 100 m to the horizon — deliberately uses peripheral vision for movement and central vision for detail, because neither alone covers both jobs.
Thermal Management and Escape Routes round out the section but are filed here from the shelter and navigation deep-dives rather than built on that same prerequisite chain. Thermal Management is specific about where heat actually goes: ground contact steals body heat roughly 25 times faster than air at the same temperature, which is why insulation beneath you matters more than any wall or roof above you, and why still, trapped air — loose dry leaves, fluffy grass over packed grass — outperforms anything solid. Escape Routes is the exit-planning half: a real escape route leads to one specific safe destination, not just away from danger, and every camp needs at least two of them, rehearsed in advance with supplies already staged, because deciding a route under actual stress is exactly what this page exists to avoid.
Reading the Threat
Working out what can actually kill you, then learning to notice it early enough to act — in the order each one depends on the other.
Staying Warm
How the body actually loses heat, and why what’s underneath you matters more than what’s over you.
Planning the Exit
Routes to a specific safe destination, staged and rehearsed before a crisis forces the decision.