SHTF Forge is a preparedness database, homestead planner, and living simulator that runs realistic long-duration scenarios against your actual inventory, skills, routes, and household: then tells you, specifically, what would have failed. Every byte stays on your device.
Nineteen scenarios — ice storm, EMP, wildfire, drought, civil unrest, income loss, and more — driven by 200 decision events. Your choices echo forward: patch a fence cheap and predators find the gap days later. It tests real field judgment (which mushroom, which ice, read the building before you enter) and locks options to what your database can actually support — no tackle logged, no fishing. Solo scenarios stay solo; nobody trades with you when you’re alone in the backcountry. Fail safely in here, so reality never gets the chance.
No finish line. Seasons rotate every 91 days, consumption is real, production is real, and the clock stops only when a system fails. Days survived is your benchmark, fix a gap, run it again, beat your number.
Livestock yields offset the daily burn. Crops harvest on their real calendar dates mid-scenario — and spoil 40% if you haven’t actually learned preservation. Skills beat stuff, and the engine enforces it.
Keep separate named loadouts — a Get-Home Bag in the car, a 72-Hour Bag by the door, a Truck Bag — each with its own contents. The simulator runs mobile scenarios against whichever bag is active, so you can pressure-test every plan independently.
Track kidding, lambing, farrowing and hatching dates with live countdowns and overdue flags. Project your whole herd’s winter feed — total hay, bale count, and cost — so you buy before prices spike, not after.
A second passphrase opens a harmless decoy household instead of your real data — real AES-256 encryption, not a hidden screen. If you’re ever forced to unlock the device, your real vault stays sealed and invisible. Honest about its limits, and off by default.
Eleven-section planner, deep-pantry checklists, nine calculators (calories, solar, firewood, canner loads), full inventory with rotation alerts, livestock and crop tracking, and a hunting module that banks harvests straight into your food math.
Multi-route egress planning with clear/degraded timing, cache and water markers with coded labels, chokepoint analysis, and a rule-based area critique that flags single-route failure before an evacuation does.
413 graded questions across 25 domains — water, medical, fire, navigation, comms, gardening, homesteading, and more. It tracks what you know, flags your weak areas, and can focus your drilling on exactly what you're worst at. Every wrong answer teaches the principle, then points you at what to learn and what to acquire next.
Eleven offline, searchable how-to guides you read while your hands are busy: field-dressing game, canning, curing, fermenting, rendering fat, soap and candles, beekeeping, dairy and cheese, hide tanning, and a Morse code reference with a printable field card. Every guide carries a plain safety warning and prints for the barn wall or the go-bag. Reference to verify against — not a substitute for hands-on training.
New to prepping? A short guided path walks you through a working setup, one step at a time, then gets out of the way. Prefer litres and kilograms? Flip the whole app to metric in one tap — calculators, planning, and reference all follow.
A climate-zone-aware sowing calendar tells you when to start indoors, transplant, and expect harvest — timed to your last frost. General reference to plan your season, not a replacement for local frost dates.
Attach private notes to any section — they ride along inside your encrypted backup and never leave the device. Share an encrypted backup to your own email or messages in a pinch — the app never transmits, you press send. Your data stays yours.
Every run produces a full debrief on its own — the root cause of your failure, what it dragged down with it, and a priority-ranked action plan with a score forecast: close this gap, your score goes from 38 to 59. It tracks your progress across runs. Want a deeper read? A model you run on your own machine (Ollama) can add analysis — no AI inside the app, so even that stays air-gapped. Optional, off by default.
Every printable: field cards, reference pack, wallet cards, checklists, trip plans, prints pure black on white. That is a decision, not a limitation. Black laser toner photocopies clean for the tenth generation, survives water that makes inkjet color bleed, and stays readable under the red headlamp preserving your night vision, the light where color ink simply vanishes. It prints identically on a $40 used laser and a $4,000 office machine, and costs nearly nothing per set: one per kit, one per vehicle, one per wallet. Our cards look like military technical manuals because they’re built to the same requirements, not the same fashion. If a preparedness document needs color to work, it wasn’t designed for the field.
Open the app, then open your browser’s Network tab and reload. You will see nothing. No web fonts, no CDN, no analytics, no telemetry, no phone-home license check. Most "private" tools quietly pull fonts from Google on every page load; we removed them and used the fonts already on your machine.
Two features touch the internet, and only when you click: Map Intel asks permission before loading the map library and tiles (those providers see your IP, exactly as any online map would: your markers never leave your device), and the optional Local AI Advisor talks only to software running on your own machine. Everything else — planner, inventory, calculators, all 19 scenarios, 413 knowledge checks, every printable card — runs with your network turned off.
Don’t take our word for it. The whole program is one HTML file. Read it.
No accounts, no forum, no tracking, by design. Feedback comes in private — email contact@shtfforge.com (aliases welcome; we never publish who asked for what). It goes out public — every monthly changelog lists what shipped and what’s under consideration, and Forge Edition owners’ requests carry priority weight. That’s the voting system, anonymous in, transparent out.
The whole tool is one small file that runs in any browser and works fully offline after the first load. That makes it a command post for a place, not just a device: run the supply, water, medical, route, drill, and after-action picture for a homestead, a bunker, or a bug-out location — grid up or grid down. Deploy it on a Raspberry Pi, an old laptop, a desktop, a tablet, or the phone in your pocket. If it has a browser, it runs.
The grid-down setup. Put one low-power brain node — a Raspberry Pi 5 or a mini-PC — in charge. It hosts the app and, if you want it, runs the optional local AI. Everyone else opens the app on their own phone or tablet over your local network and shares that one AI. A Pi draws a handful of watts and runs all day off the same small solar-and-battery setup that powers your radios. No internet anywhere in the loop.
In your pocket, too. It’s a progressive web app: tap Add to Home Screen and it installs like a native app — icon, full screen, and working offline. Log the harvest at the tailgate, tick the kit checklist in the garage, run a drill from the truck. One honest note for Vault Lock users on iPhone: run it in the browser tab rather than the installed icon, since iOS restricts passphrase prompts in installed apps. Dedicated app-store builds are on the roadmap; the tool in your pocket works today.
Most software dies the day its company folds or its servers go dark: the subscription lapses, the login server vanishes, and the tool you depended on is a blank screen. This one can’t die that way. It’s a single self-contained file — no account to expire, no cloud to shut down, no license server to phone home. Copy it to a Raspberry Pi in a bunker, cut the internet, and it still runs: this winter, next decade, long after we’ve moved on. It holds up under two decades of heavy daily logging without breaking a sweat, and it stays fast even on the cheapest Pi. The plan you build today doesn’t depend on us being here tomorrow. That is the whole idea.
Where does my data live? In your browser’s local storage or, in the desktop build, in a file on your disk. There is no server. Export encrypted backups (AES-256-GCM, in-app) and store them like the sensitive documents they are.
Will my data stick around on my phone? Yes — with one iPhone caveat worth knowing. On Android and computers, your data persists normally. On iPhone/iPad, Apple erases data saved in a browser tab after about 7 days of not opening the site — but apps added to the Home Screen are exempt. So on iPhone, tap Share → Add to Home Screen and open it from that icon; your data then persists like any app. The app detects if you're in a tab and reminds you (and it asks the browser for persistent-storage permission automatically). If you're browsing in Private/Incognito mode, the app warns you up front that nothing can be saved. Either way, export a backup now and then — good practice on any device.
Does the license phone home? No. Keys are cryptographically signed and verified offline against a public key embedded in the app. No activation server exists.
What information does a purchase expose? Only what your checkout provider requires for payment. The app itself never knows or asks who you are, the license email is whatever you gave at checkout, and aliases are fine.
Internet requirements? None for the app itself — it makes zero network requests when it loads, and runs fully offline. The one exception is the Map tab, which pulls map tiles from the internet on demand; everything else — inventory, simulator, knowledge, calculators, printables — works with no connection. The desktop build blocks all non-localhost network at the process level.
Can I run it air-gapped, off a USB stick? Yes — that's the design. Copy the app to a USB stick and open it on an offline computer; the free version runs immediately. A paid license activates once in a secure context (over https:// or on localhost), then works offline forever — over your LAN and grid-down. The desktop app activates offline with no such step. Full walkthrough ships in the download.
Is the simulator a game? No. It’s a stress test of your actual database with rule-locked decisions, honest failure states, and after-action critiques that map directly to purchases, skills, and planner sections.
Refunds? 30 days, no questions, through the checkout provider.
Educational tool, not professional advice. SHTF Forge helps you plan, calculate, and rehearse. Its first-aid and resuscitation content reflects the 2025 American Heart Association / American Academy of Pediatrics CPR & ECC guidelines at time of release and is educational only — it is not medical advice and does not replace certified hands-on training or a clinician. Guidelines change; verify against current official sources. Nothing in the tool is copied from copyrighted books, courses, or videos. Preparedness decisions, and their consequences, remain yours.