Part of Phase 2: First Year
Transportation here splits by what’s doing the moving, not by vehicle type: a person’s own legs and a bicycle wheel on one side, a trained draft or pack animal on another, and water on a third. A bicycle covers ground 3-4 times faster than walking at half the energy per kilometer, a trained ox plows in a day what takes a person a week by hand, and a 10-15 kg coracle carries one person plus up to 100 kg of cargo across water nothing else here reaches. Which one to build first depends on terrain and on whether an animal is already available to train, not on a fixed order.
Two of the seven need almost nothing. Bicycle Repair & Fabrication and Sled & Travois Construction both require only Basic Tool Use from Phase 1 (the sled also needs Basic Woodworking), with no animal involved at all. A travois in particular — just two poles, 3-4 m long and 5-7 cm thick at the butt end — works on snow, ice, mud, and ground no wheel can cross, which makes it the fallback option when terrain rules out everything else, including the bicycle.
The animal-powered chain is the longest in this section and has a real order. Harness & Yoke Making comes first — it unlocks straight into Draft Animal Training — training the animal comes second, and Pack Animal Management comes third: its own stated prerequisites are specifically both Draft Animal Training and Harness & Yoke Making, so an animal needs to already be trained and already fitted before it can be loaded as a pack animal. A padded collar harness, with 2-3 cm of clearance at the neck, handles heavier loads than a breast harness, which starts causing chest sores past about 150-200 kg — the harness is what actually sets the load ceiling, not the animal. Cart & Wagon Construction sits alongside that chain rather than strictly after it (its own prerequisites are just woodworking and tool maintenance), but the payoff it describes — a horse pulling 500 kg versus a person’s 25 kg on foot — only exists once there is a trained, harnessed animal to do the pulling.
Coracle & Small Watercraft is the one water-based option, and it stands apart from both other tracks: built from a light frame and waterproof skin in 2-3 days, needing only basic woodworking, it’s the fastest build in this section when the terrain in question is a river instead of a road.
Human-Powered
Moving loads with nothing but tools and your own effort — no animal, no water, the lowest barrier to build.
Animal-Powered
Fitting, training, and then loading or hitching an animal, in the order each one depends on the last.
Water
Carrying people and cargo where no road, wheel, or animal reaches.