Civilization101Blueprint

Take it offline

A blueprint that needs a network is not a blueprint. This page is the actual procedure — what to download, in what order, onto what, and what to do when the digital copies eventually fail.

Keep this site on this device

Every page and data file was saved when you first opened the site. Photographs are saved as you view them, so a page you have not opened may show no pictures offline. To keep all 569 photographs (132.1 MB), save them now, on a connection you do not pay for by the megabyte.

The single most important sentence on this site Do this now, while everything works. Every scenario this site is written for is one in which downloading is no longer possible. The cost today is an afternoon and a disk; the cost later is infinite.

1. The tiered download plan

Work down this list. Each tier is useful on its own, so a partial job is still worth doing — stopping after the first row already puts you far ahead of almost everybody.

PriorityWhatSizeWhy this order
1Wikipedia ZIM (Kiwix)5–110 GBIf you take one thing, take this. Effectively every technical article ever written, readable offline on a phone.
2Hesperian health guides~400 MBTiny, and the highest lives-saved-per-megabyte on the list.
3This site's book list~3 GB205 curated titles, each verified. See below for the bulk method.
4CD3WD archive~13 GBVillage-scale appropriate technology. The original site is dead — take the Archive mirror.
5OpenStax + LibreTexts~17 GBThe teaching layer. This is how generation two learns.
6Project Gutenberg (complete)~15 GB textCheaper to take whole than to curate.
71911 Britannica + FAO + WHO~20 GBIndustrial process detail, agriculture, and public health.

Everything above fits comfortably on a single 256 GB drive. A 1 TB drive holds all of it several times over, which is what you actually want — see redundancy below.

2. Getting the books in bulk

Every individual title in this library is on Project Gutenberg. Rather than clicking 205 links, mirror the collection:

  • Gutenberg publishes a machine-readable catalogue of all ~90,000 works — the same file used to verify every id on this site.
  • Their mirroring guide describes how to pull the whole archive politely. Do not hammer the main site; use a mirror.
  • For Kiwix content, the ZIM directory holds every archive; library.kiwix.org lets you browse before committing to a download.

3. Media: what actually survives

Read Constraint 6 first. The short version is that modern storage is dense, cheap and short-lived, and its real weakness is that reading it requires a working civilization.

MediumHoldsRealistic lifeVerdict
Paper (rag or archival)One bookCenturiesThe only medium that needs no technology to read. Print the critical fifty.
Hard diskTB5–10 yr unpoweredGood working copy. Bearings seize; spin it up yearly.
SSD / flashTBYears unpoweredCharge leaks silently. Never the only copy. Power it yearly.
M-DISC optical25–100 GBClaimed centuriesBest consumer archival option, but needs a working drive.
Microfilm / microficheThousands of pages500+ yrReadable with a lens and daylight. Genuinely underrated.
The failure nobody plans for Your disks will probably outlive your ability to read them. Interfaces, filesystems and file formats go extinct while the media is still physically perfect. Store in plain, open, documented formats — plain text, PDF/A, EPUB — and keep at least one copy that needs no machine at all.

4. Verify the copy you hold

A downloaded file can be altered after you download it, and nothing inside it can tell you whether it was. Check it against the published hash before you trust it, and again before you rely on it years later — a copy that has silently rotted on failing media fails this test too.

Linux, macOSsha256sum civilization101-blueprint.html
Windowscertutil -hashfile civilization101-blueprint.html SHA256
You are reading the offline edition, which carries no hash of itself A checksum written inside a file changes the bytes it is the checksum of. Verify against the value published on the website instead.

5. Redundancy rules

  • Three copies, two media types, one off-site. The standard archival rule, and it exists because every part of it has failed for someone.
  • Verify annually. Checksum the files. Silent corruption is the normal failure, not a dramatic one.
  • Refresh every few years. Copy to fresh media. An archive is a process, not an object.
  • Print the index, on paper, and store it with the drives. A disk nobody knows the contents of does not get prioritised in a crisis.

6. Print these, on paper, now

If electricity fails permanently, everything digital becomes an inert brick. These are the ones worth ink:

  • Where There Is No Doctor and A Book for Midwives — Hesperian.
  • Water treatment and sanitation basics — WHO household guidance.
  • A regional edible-plant guide for wherever you actually are. No global book substitutes for this.
  • Seed saving and a planting calendar for your latitude.
  • Basic first aid, fracture and wound care.
  • This site. Every page here is designed to print cleanly, with URLs spelled out. Use your browser's print function on the ladder and each tier.

7. Reading it with no grid

  • A small e-reader draws very little power and runs for weeks on a charge. A modest solar panel and a battery will keep one alive indefinitely.
  • Keep one device deliberately offline and unpatched, purely as a reader. Its only job is to still work in ten years.
  • Store electronics dry, in sealed containers with desiccant, and away from static. Damp kills far more salvaged electronics than age does.
  • Keep a spare of the reader and its cable. A functioning archive with no working reader is not an archive.

8. The collections, in priority order

Priority 1 — do these first

Priority 2 — do these next

Priority 3 — when you have room