An offline household continuity kit. Run one command, get a manila envelope you can print and put in a drawer. Behind it, a library of playbooks, PDFs, offline Wikipedia, maps, and optional local AI — for when the internet is gone or you just want a serious reference cabinet.
./tools-scripts/build-envelope.shThat creates a folder of 11 files you print once and put in a manila envelope labeled "Just in case." Tonight sheet, summons cards, blank roster, first-weekend checklist, killer cards, water/bleeding/first aid. Leave it on the counter. That is the whole point of this repo for most households.
If something is happening right now, open START-HERE.md — three doors: Emergency now, I have tonight, Building the full kit.
If you only have twenty minutes tonight and no printer, open playbooks/cards/tonight.md and do the eight things before bed.
Survival is personal. A good resource for a healthy adult in a detached house can be wrong for an apartment renter, a wheelchair user, a dialysis patient, a parent with infants, an elder living alone, a person without a car, or someone with local legal or cultural constraints.
The playbooks give conservative defaults and point to sources. Change them for your body, household, climate, terrain, budget, medical needs, disability access, pets, local law, and trusted local emergency instructions.
This repo can mean very different things on disk depending on how far you go.
As of April 23, 2026:
- fresh tracked checkout from GitHub: about 1.1 GB
- typical local
git clone+ checkout: about 1.8-2.0 GB on disk - current fully loaded maintainer tree with optional downloads and local models already present: about 974 GB
You do not need 974 GB to use SHTF. That number is a fully loaded machine with optional Wikipedia, reference bundles, maps, and multiple model stacks already cached.
Short version:
| If you want... | Budget for... |
|---|---|
| Base repo only | ~1.1 GB ZIP / ~1.8-2.0 GB Git clone |
| Base repo + one current Ollama Qwen path | ~20-33 GB total |
| Base repo + raw HF Qwen cache | ~54-58 GB total |
| Base repo + Gemma 4 E2B retained locally | ~25 GB total |
| Base repo + giant offline refs + models | hundreds of GB |
Detailed breakdown: docs/storage-footprint.md
Two halves:
- Playbooks — short checklists and cards for when a full manual is too much.
- Library — the authoritative references the playbooks point into. 144 Kindle-ready books plus source PDFs, offline Wikipedia, topo maps.
Everything is sourced from US government publications (public domain), WHO/UN freely distributed guides, Peace Corps manuals, Project Gutenberg, and FEMA / CDC / NOAA / FCC guidance.
Build a first version. Review when your life changes. See playbooks/tier-1-setup/00-first-weekend.md.
- Household roster
- Go-bag per person
- 14-day water + food stockpile
- Cash + documents
- Family communications plan
- Digital hardening — password managers, 2FA, backups, SIM-swap protection
- 01. House fire — the most likely real emergency
- 02. Severe weather — hurricane, tornado, blizzard, heat dome, flood, ice storm, lightning, dust storm
- 03. Earthquake (Cascadia focus)
- 04. Wildfire evacuation
- 05. Extended grid-down
- 06. Pandemic
- 07. Cyber collapse
- 08. Nuclear — distant fallout, near airburst, dirty bomb, reactor accident
- 09. Civil unrest / bug-in
- 10. Stranded or lost
- 11. Offline lookup drill
- Stay or go — movement versus shelter framework
- Triage
- Signalling & rescue
- Myths that kill
playbooks/cards/ — make a printable bundle with ./tools-scripts/print-cards.sh.
Read these two early: what-kills.md and when-not-to.md. They may change what you buy and what you do.
The rest: summons · first aid · stop the bleed · water purification · psychological first aid · chronic conditions · radiation shelter · radio frequencies · offline knowledge map · family comms (fill in).
playbooks/recovery/ — insurance claims, FEMA IA, documentation salvage, contractor vetting, financial recovery, housing displacement, mental-health timeline, legal-document reconstruction, household recovery. The first 72 hours are about staying alive; the next year is often the second hard problem.
kindle-ready/ is flattened so you can drop it straight onto a Kindle via USB. Files are category-prefixed so they sort together on the device.
| # | Category | Count | Highlights |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Medical | 10 | Where There Is No Doctor/Dentist, WHO surgical guide, psychological first aid, essential medicines |
| 02 | Survival | 42 | US Army field manuals (survival, marksmanship, urban ops, cold weather, mountain), FEMA, nuclear survival, knots, trapping |
| 03 | Food & Water | 38 | Gardening, seed saving, beekeeping, canning, foraging, fishing, butchering, sausage, distillation, brewing, water purification |
| 04 | Herbal Medicine | 5 | Culpeper's, WHO medicinal plant monographs |
| 05 | Radio & Comms | 11 | Baofeng UV-5R programming, ARRL emergency comms, CHIRP |
| 06 | Power & Solar | 4 | Off-grid solar, wind, biogas, solar cookers |
| 07 | Sanitation | 6 | Emergency hygiene, composting toilets, WHO WASH |
| 08 | Mechanical | 9 | Engine repair, soap making, weaving, leather tanning, micro hydro |
| 09 | Navigation & Weather | 4 | Celestial navigation, meteorology, weather patterns |
| 10 | Construction | 10 | Log cabin, brickmaking, carpentry, barn construction, FEMA safe rooms |
| 11 | Metalworking & Crafts | 5 | Blacksmithing, forge work, pottery |
Rebuild from source URLs: ./tools-scripts/download-kindle-content.sh
Original source PDFs by topic (medical/, survival-guides/, food-water/, radio/, power-electrical/, maps/), NOAA radio frequency sheets, offline Wikipedia (Kiwix ZIM), USGS topo maps. See USAGE.md for scenario-based usage of the library.
When you have power but no internet, a local language model can still answer questions. Start by asking the repo which lane fits this machine:
./tools-scripts/choose-local-model.shThat chooser handles the hard part: platform, RAM, free disk, Ollama storage, and the least-bad next step for this machine. On capable Apple Silicon Macs it will steer toward current Qwen3.6 Ollama builds. On smaller or more conservative setups it will steer toward the self-contained Gemma 4 repo-local path.
Keep the manual commands as advanced options. The normal path is: run the chooser, follow its steps, then use OpenCode or Hermes from the local endpoint it sets up. Details and manual setup notes live in docs/local-ai-models.md and docs/qwen36-27b.md.
Too large for GitHub. See DOWNLOADS.md for step-by-step instructions, or use the one-shot parity bundle:
./tools-scripts/download-acid-parity.sh --list
./tools-scripts/download-acid-parity.sh ifixit ready-gov wikivoyage post-disasterSee docs/acid-v2-parity.md for the parity matrix against a typical commercial offline-reference device.
| Resource | Size | What |
|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | ~136 GB | Full English Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wiktionary (Kiwix ZIM) |
| Stack Exchange | ~85 GB | Stack Overflow + 14 specialized Q&A sites |
| Medical wiki | ~10 GB | MDWiki medical encyclopedia |
| Topo maps | ~66 GB | 1,729 USGS GeoPDF maps for CA/OR/WA |
| Street maps | ~2 GB | OpenStreetMap for west coast states |
| Video tutorials | ~1.7 GB | Baofeng radio, solar power, knot tying |
| AI models | 17 GB – 31 GB current Ollama Qwen; 52 GB – 56 GB raw cache; ~23 GB – 303 GB retained Gemma path | Run the chooser first, then use current Qwen in Ollama or Gemma 4 in llama.cpp |
| File | Use |
|---|---|
| START-HERE.md | Emergency dispatcher — open this first in a crisis |
| playbooks/cards/summons.md | Fill privately, print, wallet. Screenshot only if safe |
| FIELD-INDEX.md | Short file-level index of the whole repo |
| USAGE.md | Scenario-based library usage |
| DOWNLOADS.md | Optional large downloads |
| AGENTS.md | Contract for AI agents working in this repo |
Helper scripts (in tools-scripts/):
build-envelope.sh— the one thing: generates the print-once manila envelope (11 files, one PDF if pandoc is installed)print-cards.sh— bundle every emergency card into a printable bundle; PDF when pandoc is installedhousehold-setup.sh— blank private templates;--quick/--full --summonsask moreget-squared-away.sh— report what is set up and what is missingverify-all.sh --essential— deeper verificationlaunch-wikipedia.sh— open Kiwix with local ZIM fileslaunch-maps.sh— open mapsserve-local-network.sh— share this repo to a household LANchoose-local-model.sh— recommend a sane local model from RAM, disk, and platformset-opencode-model.py— point the repo-local OpenCode config at the model you actually pulledsetup-gemma4.sh— optional local AI: download + build + test Gemma 4 (E2B default;--allfor all four)
Repository structure, scripts, docs, and playbooks are released under MIT. The books and guides within have their own licenses — primarily US government works (public domain), WHO/UN, and Project Gutenberg. See individual files.