What is inside
Real manuals, stored on the device.
This is a reference collection, not a set of articles somebody wrote about a reference collection. The documents are the documents, they install onto the phone as files, and when an answer cites page 41 there is a page 41 you can open.
- 1,421Documents
- 122,509Indexed passages
- 80,155Pages with indexed text
- 15Subject packs
Measured on the reference build, 20 August 2026. The library grows, so these are what it holds today rather than a promise about launch day.
01Contents
What the collection covers
The subjects below are what the library is organised around today.
122,509 passages across 1,421 documents. The subject names are the ones the app itself uses on the download screen. A passage is the unit the search returns: a few paragraphs of one page, not a whole document, which is why a short manual and a long one do not count the same.
Read the two columns together. Firearms is the largest set of documents in the library and one of the smallest by the amount of text in each, because an owner's manual is thin and there are eleven hundred of them. The subjects with the most to read are the ones with the fewest, longest books.
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Medicine
Field and wilderness medicine, first aid, wound care, burns, fractures, and what published guidance says about treating people when a hospital is hours away or unreachable.
Reference only, never a substitute for care -
Water
Finding it, moving it, filtering it, disinfecting it and storing it. The part of preparedness that goes wrong first and matters soonest.
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Food preservation
Canning, curing, smoking, drying, fermenting and cold storage, including the tested procedures where the exact numbers are the whole point and guessing is how people get hurt.
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Homestead systems
Wells and pumps, septic, wood heat, generators, batteries, solar, plumbing and the practical wiring of a place that has to keep running on its own.
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Growing and livestock
Gardening and field crops, soil, seed saving, and the care, feeding and common ailments of the animals a smallholding actually keeps.
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Mechanical repair
Small engines, pumps, vehicles, tools and appliances, plus the equipment handbooks that tell you what a specific machine wants rather than what machines in general want.
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Communications
Radio: the bands, the licensing, antennas, propagation, and how to actually make a link work between two points when the phone network is not an option.
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Navigation and fieldcraft
Map and compass, terrain reading, shelter, fire, signalling and moving through country on foot.
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Encyclopedias and how-to
Offline copies of large general references and repair and how-to collections, so the questions that fall outside every category above still land somewhere.
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Firearms
Owner and operator manuals for specific firearms: how a particular model comes apart, what its parts are called, and what its maker said about running it. More documents than any other subject here, and among the shortest.
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School subjects
Textbooks and course material, from primary readers through algebra, chemistry and navigation. The part of the library that is not about an emergency at all. It is there for the long stretch after one.
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Maps
Vector maps for search and routing plus topographic sheets with terrain contours, both stored on the phone and positioned by GPS. See how it works offline.
02Method
How the collection is built
The boring parts that decide whether it is trustworthy.-
Documents are kept whole
Each source is stored as the document it is, with its pages intact, so a citation can point at a specific page and that page can be opened and read in full.
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Every source is recorded
Each document carries its title, its origin and a checksum of the file. That is how the app can prove the copy on your phone is the copy that was indexed, and not something that got truncated on the way in.
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Exact procedures are quoted, not paraphrased
Some subjects have no safe paraphrase. Canning times, dosing tables and toxic identification are the obvious ones. In those areas the app is built to quote the source or decline, rather than reword numbers that were chosen carefully by someone who tested them.
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You choose what to install
The full collection is large. The subjects are separate downloads, so you can take the whole thing or take the parts that match your situation and your storage.
A library of real manuals is not small, and we are not going to pretend a phone swallows it for free. The install is measured in gigabytes and it scales with how much you choose to carry. Rather than say that and leave it there, here is the whole list, measured off the packs the app downloads.
- Documents 7.25 GB
- Maps 3.59 GB
- Search index 0.57 GB
Sizes are what the pack server measured on disk, in megabytes of a thousand kilobytes, the way a phone counts storage. The running column is the total once you have taken everything above that row, so you can read down it until you reach the space you have. The server offers 23 packs and 22 are listed: the one left out is a smaller build of the search index, an alternative to the one above rather than an addition to it.
Map packs are built per region, so their coverage is local and their size depends on where you are. The two Wikipedia packs are listed and not served yet, and they are drawn empty for the same reason the planned tier is drawn empty everywhere else on this site.
The decision this table is for: the top four rows are more than half the install, and none of them is medicine, water or repair. Someone with a small phone can leave the two biggest sets behind and still carry every subject that answers an emergency.
03Continue