Start here
Survipedia covers 12 Foundations and 350+ pages. You don't need to read all of it. Pick the persona below that matches your household, and skip straight to the pages that apply to you.
This section is a routing layer, not a content layer. Each persona hub on this page is a short, scan-friendly entry surface that points at the right Foundation pages, Guides, and Scenario playbooks for your specific situation. The depth lives there. The orientation lives here.
If you're not sure which persona fits, two paths work well:
- Run the 10-minute preparedness self-assessment — a free scorecard that identifies your weakest three Foundations regardless of persona. Especially useful if your household spans more than one persona.
- Read First 30 Days Off-Grid Survival Guide — the project's canonical onramp. Works for any persona and takes about an hour to read.
Pick your persona
Medical-dependent household
Your household includes someone on medication, refrigerated biologics, a power-dependent medical device (CPAP, oxygen, dialysis cycler, powered wheelchair), an elder with care needs, or an infant or toddler. Highest-impact starting point if any of those apply — the mortality-window calculus is different and the prep priorities are different.
Low-budget beginner
You want to prepare but you don't have a lot to spend. Most of preparedness value at this tier comes from knowledge, planning, and free or near-free habits — not gear purchases. This hub walks the inexpensive priority order and names the gear-heavy advice you can safely skip in Tier 1.
Suburban family
You live in a single-family detached home in a suburban or small-town setting. The largest US household type, and the one most preparedness content is implicitly written for. This hub organizes around the three threat clusters that hit suburban households hardest: severe weather, extended outages, and evacuation.
Rural homestead
You live on rural acreage — a working farm, a hobby homestead, an off-grid cabin, a land project. Survipedia's strongest content coverage is for this persona; every off-grid Foundation page implicitly serves it. This hub organizes around the four infrastructure systems that define rural preparedness: water sourcing, food production, energy independence, and shelter/access.
Urban apartment (coming — queued as a longer-form guide)
A full-length Urban Apartment Preparedness guide is queued in the production pipeline for renters in 4-story walkups through high-rise buildings. Until it ships, the persona-relevant pages are listed in the Suburban family hub routing tables (most of the supply, communication, and evacuation content applies); the apartment-specific water and energy pages are: Apartment water storage, Balcony solar, High-rise communications, Urban bug-out without a vehicle.
How this routing layer fits the rest of the site
| Content type | Where to find it | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Persona hubs (this section) | docs/start/ |
Routes a specific household type to the right starting pages |
| Foundation pages | 12 Foundation directories (water, food, medical, etc.) | Topic-deep reference |
| Guides | docs/guides/ |
Multi-Foundation deep-dive playbooks (25,000–35,000 words) |
| Scenario playbooks | docs/scenarios/ |
Time-stamped quick playbooks for in-incident response |
A typical reader journey: discover a persona hub → follow its routing to 3–5 Foundation pages → read the canonical Guide for their persona → keep the Scenario playbooks handy for when an incident actually hits.
What's next
If you've identified your persona, click through to its hub above and follow the routing.
If you have feedback on the personas — a household type that should be covered but isn't, a routing recommendation that's off — that signal is welcome. The persona library expands when readers raise real gaps.
Last reviewed: 2026-05-20 · Persona-routing-hub format · Coordinates with Scenario playbooks, Guides, and the 12 Foundation hubs linked in the main navigation.