Method, and its limits
A reference that is confidently wrong is worse than one that admits what it does not know — especially this one, which is written to be used when checking is no longer possible.
How the sources were verified
Every Project Gutenberg identifier on this site was resolved against Gutenberg's own machine-readable catalogue — pg_catalog.csv, 90,647 records — rather than written from memory, and then fetched over HTTP to confirm it resolves. Collections were fetched directly.
This matters more than it sounds, because of two failure modes that a casual check misses entirely:
The corrections that resulted are listed below, because they are a useful demonstration of why you should not trust a citation you have not opened:
| Title | Commonly cited | Actually |
|---|---|---|
| The Practical Distiller | 21237 | 21252 |
| Electricity for Boys | 23511 | 22766 |
| The Dyer's Guide | 19534 | 53797 |
| Brick and tile manufacture | 20447 | 60550 (different work) |
| CD3WD archive | cd3wd.com | Domain dead — Archive.org mirror only |
What this site is
- 140 steps across 8 tiers, each with prerequisites, inputs, process, failure modes, a verification test and sources.
- 205 individually verified books and 17 bulk archives, all free and legal.
- A dependency graph that answers the question that actually matters at the bench: given what I have, what can I attempt next?
- Analysis of the six constraints, nine recurring patterns, five collapse mechanisms and a forward projection.
What this site is not
- Not climate- or geography-neutral. The ladder assumes temperate conditions with water, soil, wood, clay and some ore. Change those and the sequence changes.
- Not a schedule. Timings scale with population, skills, salvage and luck. Treat them as ordering.
- Not tested. Nobody has run this. The tiers below 4 are well documented historically; the projections in Futures are explicitly speculative and marked as such.
- Not a solution to the social problem. Groups fail on trust, fairness and authority far more often than on technique, and no book fixes that.
- Not a claim that tier 6 is reachable by a small group. It is not, and saying otherwise would be flattering and false.
On numbers
Where a figure is contested in the literature — EROI ratios, minimum viable populations, media lifespans — this site says so rather than picking a number and stating it plainly. Treat orderings as robust and specific values as arguments. Anywhere a claim rests on a single interpretation, such as the Tasmanian technological simplification, that is flagged in the text.
Design notes
- Works offline. A service worker saves every page and data file on the first visit, and each photograph as you view it; Take it offline saves all of them at once. The single-file edition holds everything in one file.
- Prints cleanly. Every page prints as a field document with URLs spelled out, because paper does not need electricity.
- No accounts, no server, no tracking. Progress is stored in your browser and nowhere else.
- No build step. Plain HTML, CSS and ES modules — deliberately, so it can be read, modified and re-hosted by anyone with a text editor.
Corrections
Every claim here should be checkable. If a link has rotted, a Gutenberg id is wrong, or a process is described in a way that would not work at the bench, that is a defect worth fixing — the whole point is that it still works when nobody can check it any more.
Corpus version 1.0 · content updated 2026-10-13 · links verified 2026-10-09