Scale: 5–30 People | Timeframe: Years 1–3
Phase 3 is where a group of 5-30 people stops being a household and starts being a community, across years one through three — the eleven domains here split into building the place a community lives in, sustaining it with food and health, producing the materials it needs, and organizing the people themselves. None of the domains is strictly sequential; which gets attention first depends on which gap — housing, food surplus, conflict, or defense — is actually most urgent for a given group.
Settlement Planning, Construction & Engineering, and Water Infrastructure build the physical place. Settlement Planning covers surveying tools, leveling, triangulation, road layout, and property boundaries. Construction covers bridges, roads, structural loads, and machine-tool bootstrapping. Water Infrastructure spans aqueducts, wells, pumps, cisterns, piped distribution, and flood control.
Food at Scale and Health & Sanitation sustain the group once it’s housed. Food at Scale covers caloric budgeting, community kitchens, canning, smoking, and seed bank management — feeding more people than a single household’s methods can reach. Health & Sanitation covers post-collapse medicine at that same scale: surgery, anesthesia, fracture care, dosing, and disease surveillance.
Crafts & Industry and Chemistry make the materials the rest of the group draws on. Crafts & Industry covers smelting copper ore and alloying bronze, then drawing both into wire through draw plates and die geometry. Chemistry covers distilling alcohol, making soap and lime mortar, dyeing fiber, and processing tar and petroleum.
Governance & Organization, Psychology & Culture, Defense & Security, and Communication & Signals organize the people. Governance covers building a council, assigning roles, resolving disputes, and running a census once a community outgrows the single household. Psychology & Culture covers addiction, grief, leadership, education, rituals, and conflict mediation. Defense & Security covers gunpowder safety, negotiation with neighbors, and watch scheduling. Communication & Signals covers the telegraph keys, Morse code, and emergency radio protocols that keep a group coordinated once it’s too large, or too spread out, to run on shouting distance.
Place and Infrastructure
Surveying, building, and watering the physical settlement.
Sustaining the Group
Feeding and treating more people than a single household’s methods can reach.
Making and Processing
Metal and chemistry: the raw-material tracks the rest of the group draws on.
Organizing the People
Governance, culture, defense, and the communication that holds a group together once it outgrows shouting distance.