What's the single most important item for any survivor to have?

Oh TAILOR KIT and more importantly SOLDERING IRON, which almost always seems to be impossible to find. Makeshift any WELDER= more important than HACKSAW. If you have the time you can bash/dismantle anything and everything for scrap metal but putting it together you will never have enough DUCT TAPE. Cars are plentiful enough that you can scavenge BATTERIES for heavy power requirements until you can get hacksaw and get SOLAR PANELS charging the batteries

I’d say clean water. Without it my @ tends to succumb to Dehydration…

yeah but water is easy enough to get, so its not a problem

Welding goggles

Welders are nice, but a lot of stuff competes for batteries in the early game. A single acetylene torch with a decent charge is a godsend for getting your first vehicle up and running, as well as B&E jobs without setting off alarms.

The frustration of having either of the two (or both) but not a single pair of welding goggles in the entire city is torture. Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got 'til it’s gone?

meh. plastic bottle string and spray paint can. Job done or glasses and spray paint.

I had no idea you could do that until just now. So thanks for that.

Acetylene torch then as a matter of convenience. It just makes getting a working deathmobile running a snap.

Just going to say, I have to agree with Kevin.
It’s a towel.

definately. wait… whats towel do again? (a)ctivate to get rid of wet status? nothing? whatever doesn’t matter towel wins. Its a talking non-verbal towel even better.

Well, let me run down my early-game survival needs. Assuming I don’t have a container to store water, I’ll need a waterskin. To make that I need a sewing needle. To make a sewing needle, I need a knife to carve wood or bone. Also need a knife to make the skewers for a fire drill, assuming I lack a lighter. And the skewers are nifty for early-game cooking.

So in theory, a knife would be my single most important survival item, just like in real life. But wait, hold that thought a moment. Unlike in real life, makeshift knives can do all this cutting just as well as a proper knife, and they’re trivial to make? And just what is the first step to making the basic makeshift knives, which ALSO happens to be essential for making a stone pot for boiling water?

A rock. Or really, anything with a hammering quality of 1. But still, if you’re starting from scratch, Mr. Rock is your friend.

true way to boil it down to the basics. mr. rock or lump of steel/other hammering of 1 item but especially mr. rock. who can then be crafted with piece of wood and string into makeshift hamer of 2 hammering 1 fine? for extra goodness.

Much like in Dwarf Fortress, you can never have too many rocks. Good for the stone hammer of course, and stone pot, stone knife, shovel, axe, etc.

CBM: Integrated Toolset

Your life.

You don’t need to live to survive, nonsense. The zombies can attest to that.

The blob is animating the bodys. Is the blob dead?
I wear leather. So i move something dead arround. That doesn t mean that i am dead.

And you need to live to survive . Per definition only a living thing can survive.
Even if a dead thing moves around it can not survive because it wasn t considered alive in the first place.

Curse your blobby logic, foiled again. ;A;

The blob is animating the bodys. Is the blob dead?
I wear leather. So i move something dead arround. That doesn t mean that i am dead.

And you need to live to survive . Per definition only a living thing can survive.
Even if a dead thing moves around it can not survive because it wasn t considered alive in the first place.[/quote]

viruses are not alive or dead and they can survive

Plus there’s the question of post-Cataclysm robots surviving despite not living. o3o

meh they are not survivors, they are not even serving their intended purpose. They continued to exist after the apocalypse, they have not survived it. There is a difference.

Hush, you’ll hurt their simulated feelings. XP