Basic Survival

Survival is the state or fact of continuing to live or exist, typically in spite of an accident, ordeal, or difficult circumstances. The 2015 Feral Pandemic virus outbreak lead humans all across the world to face many challenges in order to ensure their survival. Individuals were not only constently under the physcial threat of attack by vicious flesh-eating ferals, but also had to learn to be self-sufficient in the wake of societal and economic collaspe.

Basic Needs
Basic human survival involves the fulfillment of our most basic human needs. Under this category of needs fall both physiological needs and safety needs. These types of needs are considered to be the most fundamental in terms of an individual's ability of sustaining a functioning, healthy life. The most basic needs, including those for food, water, warmth, sleep and shelther, must be met before an individual will concern themselves over fulfilling "higher-level" ones, including the need for companinonship and the need to feel accomplished.

Basic Survival Skills
Broadly, basic survival skills are techniques that encompass the knowledge and skills required for individuals to be self-sufficient and survive dangerous situations without modern ammenities or infrastructure. These skills are meant to provide the basic physiological, safety, and security needs as required for human life such as water, food, shelter, clothing, and medicine.

Timeline
Time effects how individuals and populations go about meeting their basic needs. The ways in which we fulfil these needs differ based on the amount of time that had passed since the occurence of the intial incident. In each section dealing with a human need, a timeline is used to discuss the concept of time in relation to how needs are fulfilled.

Short-term basic need fulfillment sections discuss how basic needs of individuals or small groups of people were fulfilled immediately after the initial occurence of the incidence.

Midterm basic need fulfillment sections discuss how basic needs of individuals and newly forming populations were fulfilled during the middle period between the initial occurence of the incidence and the Sudden Decline.

Long-term basic need fulfillment sections discuss how the basic needs of a population are being fulfilled following the end of the pandemic and into the future, after the Ferals no longer present a threat. As time moves on, more permanent ways of meeting basic needs are beginning to be constructed. This proccess involves moving from more simple, unstable ways of meeting these needs to more complex, self-sufficient and permanent ways. How people and newly formed poplations have gone and are actively going about fulfilling their basic needs in a more permanent way is based on historical methods and systems groups of people had developed in the past. Surviving individuals used their own knowledge of these past methods and systems in their effort to rebuild and were also able to scavenge academic material from abandoned univeristies and libraries to use as a reference.

(See the "Timeline" sections in each of: Water, Clothing , Food , Shelter , First Aid )