The Ultimate Survival Gear List of 2024

Even though many of us joke every now and then about struggling to survive in this harsh world, most of us never really face the actual challenges of survival. This benefit, taken for granted by too many, was achieved by the efforts of generations of people who had much more complications in their daily life than we do now.

However, none of the major difficulties of the last couple of centuries could compete with the raw hardships of survival, except for periods of famine and epidemic (how cyclical our history is). Our distant ancestors had to get by with nothing more than a set of simple hand-made survival tools and their self-preservation instinct.

Opportunities to repeat this authentic experience are quite hard to come by, for most of us won’t dare to enter the woods without a set of survival gear behind our backs. We’ll make a bold statement saying that the majority of even the most passionate outdoor enthusiasts are not too eager to live through that exact survival experience our ancestors had to deal with daily.

What we look for is a way to re-establish that bond with nature that now feels almost intangible and sometimes even severed. But we don’t need to resort to primal practices to do so. A day or two out in the wild with nothing but your trusty survival kit can be enough to rekindle that spark and once again feel unity with Mother Nature. That is one type of survival kit our outdoor sport store can help you assemble. However, there is another scenario that might require you to utilize a different set of equipment – an emergency survival kit.

As opposed to survival equipment for a weekend runaway, emergency survival kits contain everything one might need to survive should an accident cross paths with you. Some items on an emergency survival gear list coincide with those you’d take on a vacation trip. They are not identical, though, and neither are the functions they are supposed to fulfill.

One is supposed to help you get through a day or two out in the wilderness, while the other includes items that can sustain you for a longer period of time, while also giving you tools to dress a wound or get in contact with the closest emergency unit. It might be an overkill to take everything but the kitchen sink every time you leave home, but the motto of the wise is beware of surprises.

Our list of survival gear covers the items that will help you endure the challenges a wilderness may pose. All of them should also be included in your list of emergency survival gear.

Fire Starting Tools

Many seasoned survival experts prioritize making fire over finding sources of food and water since death from hypothermia comes much quicker than from exhaustion or dehydration. If it is a planned trip, your chances of dying from either are pretty low (but never non-existent).

However, making a fire is traditionally considered a must-do for anyone who partakes in a survival trip. There are two poles where people stand on that question. The first group says that none of the modern fire-starting tools give you an authentic experience, that’s why you need to use only what you can find in a forest. The other group says there is no need to complicate things, and there is nothing wrong with using a lighter to accelerate things because time is of value.

While nothing beats the argument that getting fire all by yourself brings incomparable satisfaction, actually making fire is not as easy as shown in movies. Rubbing two sticks together won’t bring you any result, the same goes for striking a spark from two flints. The art of fire-making is much more intricate than it might seem, and no tools that might help you with that are excessive.

We recommend getting several means of fire-making just to be on the safe side. Those include lighters, water-resistant matches, flint or magnesium fire starters, and emergency tinder. With this fire starting kit, you’ll be able to set a campfire even if the rain decides to pay you a visit.

Knives and Blades

Being the Mister Versatility of our list of survival gear, a knife will be your most trusted companion with countless possible applications. The options you have with a knife are numerous, and our advice is to have a pair of these tools. One should be a sturdy fixed-blade knife with a plain edge since it is handy for the majority of tasks and easy to sharpen.

The second tool should be a swiss army knife that hides a dozen other tools underneath the red handle. With those two buddies, there won’t be a thing you can’t cut, saw, open, or do whatever your swiss knife might allow you to.

At the end of the day, it’s better to have a knife and not use it than to need a knife and not have it. The same could be said about almost every item on our list, but we bet you got the idea.

Headlamp

Night time is not the most optimal period for any activity in the forest (unless you have some shenanigans brewing in your mind). However, you never know what might drive you to have a walk or, Heaven forbid, a hasty run in the middle of the night.

Evenings are not much better in terms of visibility, and tall tree trunks obscuring the light don’t help the situation either. There are many more conventional means of lighting the space around you, but we deem headlamps the most convenient of them all.

They keep your hands free and have fewer chances of slipping or falling off, leaving you guardless against the darkness. And, of course, if you are taking something that needs batteries to run, you should take extra batteries just to be on the safe side.

Sustenance and Water

You might think: What kind of a survival trip is that if you have food and water packed? While there is some reasoning behind this argument, you won’t want to rely solely on a chance to come across an edible plant or your ability to find and hunt an animal (especially if you are not planning on taking a bow or a rifle.)

There is some benefit to healthy fasting, but you need the energy to perform all those grueling tasks a survival trip entails. Food should be non-perishable, preferably dried, and energy-enriching. You might also want to take a water filtration device just in case you run out of water.

First Aid Kit

A first aid kit is directly linked to your chances of survival, which makes it one of the most important pieces of survival equipment. Your first aid kit should include gauze, band-aid, antiseptic wipes, and antibiotic ointment to treat bleeding injuries; medicine and lotions to help with digestive issues, headaches, and allergies; splints, duct tape, and wraps to treat bone and ligament injuries.

The given list might sound excessive to some of you, but it is a bare minimum that should always be somewhere in your backpack. It takes as little as getting injured yourself to never underestimate the importance of a first aid kit again. However, you can skip the being injured part and get straight to compiling a first aid kit.

With these tools for survival, you can rest assured your chances of having an enjoyable surviving trip to the wilderness are pretty high. Of course, this list is by no means complete, and we didn’t include items like tents, blankets, and the rest because we don’t know about your plans.

These items, however, are must-haves for any planned or not planned situation where you might need to get by without the fruits of civilization for a while. You can use this list of gear for survival as a foundation to build on. There are several more items any outdoor survival enthusiast can make use of, but we’ll cover them in another article.