Recovery Library Catalog

For the scenario, recovery phases, and analytical framework behind this catalog, see About the Recovery Library.

Feasibility ratings

Rating	Meaning
[A]	Established. Uses existing NZ capability or well-proven methods with known NZ materials.
[B]	Feasible. Requires developing new capability but the materials, energy, and knowledge base exist in NZ. Significant effort and time required.
[C]	Difficult. Dependent on precursor industries or skills that do not yet exist in NZ and must be built first.
[D]	Long-term. Requires decades of industrial development. Documented as a roadmap.

CATEGORY 1: GOVERNMENT EMERGENCY RESPONSE AND STOCKPILE MANAGEMENT

Some of the most consequential decisions happen in the first days and weeks. NZ has significant stocks of critical consumables in warehouses, distribution centers, and retail channels. Securing these stocks requires a combination of requisition (for wholesale/warehouse-level stocks where individual impact is minimal), controlled distribution (where existing commercial channels work better than government seizure), and clear public communication (because democratic legitimacy requires consent, and consent requires people understanding why these measures are necessary).

The CDEM Act provides legal authority for emergency requisition, but legal authority alone does not guarantee compliance, effective logistics, or public trust. The documents in this category must address the political and social dimensions as much as the operational ones.

Phase 1 — First 30 Days

#001. National Emergency Stockpile Strategy [A] NZ’s warehouses, distribution centers, and retail channels hold the only supplies the country will ever have — nothing new is coming in. This is the master framework for government action: which stocks to requisition at wholesale level, which to ration through existing retail channels, and how to document property taken under emergency powers so that institutional legitimacy survives the crisis. Covers legal basis (CDEM Act), logistics, inventory tracking, and allocation decision-making.

#002. Public Communication: The Case for Emergency Measures [A] Rationing only works if people understand why. The core message is simple and must be truthful: supply chains are severed permanently, unmanaged consumption burns through stocks needed for years in weeks, and the system applies equally to everyone. This document covers messaging for different audiences, counter-messaging for resistance and rumor, and — perhaps most importantly — how to honestly acknowledge what the government does not know.

#003. Food Rationing and Distribution [A] NZ normally produces enough food for ~40 million people, but nuclear winter changes the arithmetic — crop yields fall, growing seasons shorten, and import-dependent inputs (fertiliser, fuel, animal feed) disappear. This is the national caloric allocation framework: per-capita targets by phase, distribution logistics through existing supermarket and dairy networks, priority allocations for physical labour and children, and the managed transition from surplus protein (early livestock culling) to reduced steady-state rations.

#004. Pharmaceutical and Medical Supply Management [A] Every pill, vial, and syringe in NZ at the moment of severance is all there will be for years. Pharmacies and hospitals continue operating under government rationing rules, with wholesale distributor warehouses placed under direct control. Covers cold chain prioritisation, immediate shelf-life extension protocols, integration of veterinary stocks into the human supply, and centralised tracking to prevent hoarding and waste.

#005. Printing Supply Requisition and Management [A] Laser toner, stored cool and dry, lasts well over a decade. Inkjet ink dries out in months. Knowing the difference — and acting on it immediately — extends NZ’s high-quality printing window to 5-10+ years. All commercial toner stocks requisitioned and properly stored, working printers maintained, paper centralised. The Recovery Library itself depends on this supply chain: begin printing the most critical documents immediately while reserving capacity for ongoing production.

#006. Vehicle and Transport Asset Management [A] NZ has millions of vehicles but will soon lack fuel and tires for most of them. Suspend registration and fuel access for non-essential vehicles rather than seizing them — same result, less friction. Centralise tire stocks from wholesale channels, inventory the EV fleet as a component donor base, and maintain airworthy aircraft with stabilised fuel for a strategic reserve.

#007. Agricultural and Industrial Consumables [A] Fertiliser, seed stocks, bearings, belts, filters, welding rods, fasteners, lubricants, refrigerant, solar panels — the components that keep farms running and workshops operating. Most of this sits in commercial warehouses where wholesale-level requisition is straightforward and does not directly affect individuals. Centralised inventory and allocation protocols to stretch finite stocks across years of recovery.

#008. National Asset and Skills Census [A] You cannot plan a recovery without knowing what you have. Every workshop, factory, warehouse, generator, lathe, welder, and forge in the country — and every person who knows how to use them. Much can be assembled from existing registries and professional associations. This census becomes the planning basis for the entire recovery effort.

#009. Textile, Household, and Specialist Goods [B] Clothing, bedding, tools, cleaning supplies, and specialist items like optical equipment and sewing machines. Less immediately urgent than fuel or food, but finite and irreplaceable. Managed through controlled retail distribution rather than seizure — existing commercial channels work better here than government stockpiling.

CATEGORY 2: PRECOMPUTED REFERENCE DATA AND TABLES

Data that currently exists only in digital systems and must be precomputed and printed. Several items were standard published references until digitization made them obsolete. The AI facility should generate all of this during its operational period. The most critical items — navigation tables, mathematical tables, engineering data — should be among the first documents printed.

Phase 1 — Print First

#010. Nautical Almanac (Precomputed 100 Years) [A] GPS satellites will degrade within years. After that, every ship finding its position at sea needs printed tables of where celestial bodies are. Daily GHA and declination for the sun, moon, planets, and navigational stars, plus sunrise/sunset and twilight data. Extending to 100 years costs almost nothing once the orbital mechanics computation is set up — roughly 50 pages per year.

#011. Sight Reduction Tables [A] The companion to the nautical almanac — once you know where a star is, these tables solve the trigonometry that turns a sextant reading into a position on the chart. Precomputed altitude and azimuth equivalent to HO 229 / NP 401. Several hundred pages that replace a calculation no one will be doing by hand.

#012. NZ Tide Tables (Precomputed 50+ Years) [A] Enter a harbour at the wrong tide and your cargo vessel is on the rocks. Predicted tides for all NZ standard and secondary ports, plus tidal streams for major straits and harbours, precomputed for 50+ years from harmonic constants. Coastal shipping (Doc #58) depends on these tables being available at every port.

#013. NZ Coastal Pilot and Harbor Guide [A] The knowledge that keeps ships off rocks: approaches, anchorages, hazards, depths, and facilities for every NZ port and harbour. Also covers Australian east coast and Pacific Island approaches for the trade routes that recovery will depend on. Currently digital-only — must be printed before the systems hosting it fail.

#014. Mathematical Tables [A] Before calculators, these tables were on every engineer’s desk. They will be again. Logarithms (4- and 5-figure), trigonometric functions, roots, reciprocals, conversion factors, and statistical distributions — roughly 200 pages that make structural calculations, surveying, and navigation possible without electronics.

#015. Star Atlas (Southern Hemisphere) [A] A navigator standing on deck at twilight needs to know whether that bright point is Canopus or Jupiter before taking a sight — misidentification means a wrong position fix. Printed sky charts optimised for NZ latitudes (35-47°S), showing 57 navigational stars with seasonal visibility. A modest ~25 pages with a long operational life: star positions shift only 1.4° per century.

#016. NZ Topographic and Infrastructure Atlas [A] When Google Maps goes dark, printed maps become planning infrastructure. Geography, elevation, roads, rail, power generation and transmission, ports, and key industrial sites across NZ — printed at A3 for field use. The physical reference for route planning, resource allocation, and every logistics decision the recovery depends on.

Phase 1–2 — Print Early

#017. Engineering Reference Tables [A] Every engineer, machinist, and builder currently looks these up online. Steel section properties, NZ timber span tables, pipe flow rates, wire ampacity, bolt specs, weld data, beam deflection, thermal properties, gear ratios — the collected reference data that makes competent construction and fabrication possible. Without this printed, people guess, and guesses fail.

#018. NZ Climate Baseline Data [A] You cannot measure how far the climate has shifted without knowing where it started. Monthly temperature, rainfall, frost dates, sunshine hours, and wind data by region — the pre-catastrophe baseline that makes agricultural planning and climate monitoring possible under nuclear winter conditions.

#019. Food Composition Tables (NZ Foods) [A] Rationing requires knowing what is in the food you are rationing. Calories, protein, fat, vitamins, and minerals for all NZ-available foods — the reference that makes Doc #3 (food rationing) and Doc #76 (emergency crops) workable, and the tool for detecting nutritional deficiencies before they become clinical.

#020. Pharmaceutical Reference [A] The NZ Formulary currently lives online. When that access ends, every prescribing decision depends on this printed equivalent: dosing, drug interactions, pill identification (when labels are gone), and shelf-life data that determines whether a five-year-old medication is still safe to use.

#021. Chemical Safety Data [A] Recovery means working with chemicals — acids for batteries, ammonia for refrigeration, chlorine for water treatment — often by people without formal chemistry training. Reactivity, safe storage, handling protocols, and first-response procedures for chemicals found in NZ industrial and agricultural settings.

#022. NZ Geological and Mineral Resource Atlas [A] NZ needs copper, iron, limestone, silica, sulfur, and a dozen other minerals to rebuild. Where are they? This atlas maps every known NZ mineral deposit by location, accessibility, estimated quantity, and extraction difficulty — plus known Australian resources accessible via Tasman trade, because some materials NZ simply does not have.

#023. Materials Properties Handbook [A] When the specification calls for a material NZ does not have, what can you use instead? Mechanical, thermal, and chemical properties of NZ-available materials, with substitution tables that map imported materials to local alternatives — and honestly flag where substitutes carry a performance gap.

#024. NZ Flora Reference [A] NZ’s native and naturalised plants provide food, fibre, medicine, and timber — but only if people know which species to use and how to process them. Integrates Matauranga Maori knowledge of plant use, which in many cases represents centuries of practical experience that Western botany has only recently begun to document.

#025. NZ Fauna Reference [A] NZ’s wild deer, pigs, and goats shift from conservation pests to food sources overnight. Population estimates, distribution, sustainable harvest rates, and seasonal data for wild game, pest species, and marine species — the reference that prevents overharvest from turning a short-term protein source into a depleted one.

#026. Soil and Agricultural Capability Map [A] Planting potatoes in the wrong soil wastes seed and a growing season you cannot afford to lose. NZ soils mapped by region — type, fertility, drainage, and crop suitability — so that emergency crop expansion (Doc #76) and land use reallocation (Doc #149) put the right crops in the right ground.

#027. Astronomical Calendar (100 Years) [A] Solstices, equinoxes, day length tables, eclipse predictions, and sundial correction data for 100 years. When digital clocks fail, sundials become timekeeping infrastructure — but only if you know the equation of time. Also provides the agricultural calendar anchors for planting and harvest scheduling.

#028. NZ Water Resources Atlas [A] NZ has abundant freshwater — but knowing where it is, how much there is, and how it connects to infrastructure matters when municipal systems degrade. Rivers, lakes, aquifers, dam catchments, and municipal supply sources mapped for the water treatment (Doc #48), hydro maintenance (Doc #65), and agricultural planning documents that depend on this data.

CATEGORY 3: PRINTING AND KNOWLEDGE DISTRIBUTION

Phase 1

#029. National Printing Plan [A] Toner runs out. Paper runs out. But NZ has radiata pine for pulp, carbon black and linseed oil for ink, and existing mill infrastructure to work with. The long-term transition from stockpiled printing supplies to domestically manufactured paper and ink, with the phased shift from laser to letterpress and screen printing as toner depletes. Includes production scheduling for the full library printing programme.

#030. Print Optimization [A] The right font choice and margin settings can stretch a toner cartridge 30-40% further. Font selection, margin optimisation, duplex printing, and toner-saving settings — plus a triage system for which documents need full quality (navigation tables, medical references) and which can use draft mode. Small decisions, large cumulative effect on how long NZ’s printing supplies last.

Phase 2–3

#031. Manual Printing Methods [B] Laser printers are a bridge, not a destination. When toner is gone, NZ needs letterpress, screen printing, and stencil duplicators — technologies that ran the world’s printing for centuries, using ink from NZ-available materials. How many surviving letterpress and duplicator machines exist in NZ is uncertain, but the techniques can also be built from scratch.

#032. Paper Production From NZ Pulp [B] NZ grows 1.7 million hectares of radiata pine and has existing pulp mill infrastructure. Simplified paper production using these assets — not to match modern paper quality, but to produce functional stock for printing the documents the recovery depends on. The quality gap between handmade and commercial paper is real but workable.

CATEGORY 4: CONSUMABLES — DEPLETION AND SUBSTITUTION

NZ’s immediate practical crisis is familiar things running out. Each document covers a specific category: estimated depletion timeline (with stated assumptions), NZ-produced substitutes, and transition plans.

A note on the depletion estimates: these are rough, informed by general knowledge of NZ’s market size and import volumes but not by detailed inventory data. Actual timelines depend on pre-catastrophe stock levels, government requisition effectiveness, rationing compliance, and rates of use — all of which are uncertain. The estimates assume competent centralized management. Without it, they compress significantly.

Phase 1–2

#033. Tires [B] NZ has roughly 20 million tires in service. It manufactures zero — no natural rubber, no synthetic rubber production, no path to domestic pneumatic tire production. Mothballing, centralised stocks, and retreading buy time; solid rubber alternatives may work for slow vehicles. This document maps the depletion timeline, the stopgap measures, and the long-term transport shift to rail, bicycles, and steel wheels that follows.

#034. Lubricant Production [B] Every engine, bearing, and gearbox in the country runs on petroleum lubricants NZ cannot replace like-for-like. NZ substitutes — tallow, lanolin, castor oil, canola oil — are available but inferior. This document maps which applications tolerate biological lubricants, which require modification, and which (high-speed bearings, precision machinery) may not work at all without petroleum-grade products.

#035. Battery Management and Lead-Acid Production [B] NZ’s lithium battery stock is finite and irreplaceable — but proper temperature and cycling management extends useful life to 5-15 years. After that, lead-acid becomes the workhorse: manufacturable from recycled lead and sulfuric acid (Doc #113), heavy and lower-density but proven technology NZ can produce indefinitely. Managing the transition without a gap.

#036. Clothing and Footwear [B] NZ has wool, leather, harakeke fibre, and possum fur — but its last significant clothing factories closed years ago. The raw materials exist; the manufacturing capability does not. Rebuilding garment and footwear production requires training, equipment (household sewing machines exist; industrial machines are scarcer), and pattern knowledge. Key gaps that cannot be filled locally: no elastic, limited zipper stock, no cotton.

#037. Soap and Hygiene [A] One of the few things NZ can start manufacturing almost immediately. Tallow from meat processing plus lye from wood ash — well-understood chemistry with abundant local feedstocks, producible at community scale within weeks. Basic hygiene prevents disease outbreaks that would compound every other problem the recovery faces.

#038. Fastener Production [B] Nothing gets built without fasteners, and NZ imports nearly all of them. Nails from NZ Steel wire rod are straightforward. Screws and bolts require thread-cutting or rolling machinery — available in NZ machine shops but nowhere near the volume currently consumed. Prioritise nails and staples first, then scale threaded fastener production as capability allows.

#039. Abrasives and Cutting Tool Maintenance [B] A dull saw blade is not scrap — it is a resharpening job. Tool resharpening and rehardening extends working life by orders of magnitude, and is the first line of defence against consumable depletion. New abrasive production from NZ garnet and silicon carbide is feasible but slower to establish. Covers the full chain from grinding wheels to hand files.

#040. Refrigeration Transition [B] Modern refrigerants are imported synthetic chemicals NZ cannot manufacture. The alternatives — ammonia (pre-1950s technology, toxic but well-understood) and hydrocarbon refrigerants (propane/isobutane, effective but flammable) — work but are not drop-in replacements. Some cold chain functions may be lost temporarily. This document maps what can be maintained, what requires conversion, and what falls back to salt, ice, and root cellars.

#041. UV Protection [A] Nuclear detonations inject nitrogen oxides into the stratosphere, depleting the ozone layer and raising UV levels for 5-10 years — right when people are working outdoors more than ever. Sunscreen stocks are finite, but clothing adjustments, scheduling outdoor work around peak UV hours, and locally-produced zinc oxide provide effective protection. An overlooked health issue with straightforward solutions.

#042. Contraception and Family Planning [B] An unplanned population surge during a food crisis is a compounding disaster. Copper IUDs are long-lasting and potentially locally fabricable; other methods vary in reliability and acceptability. Covers available options, local manufacturing potential, and the demographic planning implications for workforce, food, housing, and education.

#043. Fencing [B] Pastoral farming does not work without fences, and NZ’s existing fence stock degrades continuously. Wire from NZ Steel, timber posts from plantation forestry, and electric fencing powered by locally produced batteries. The agricultural recovery (Docs #74-76) depends on this supply chain staying ahead of deterioration.

#044. Fishing Gear [B] NZ’s marine fisheries are a major protein source, but modern fishing gear is synthetic and imported. Harakeke fibre nets — traditional Maori technology proven over centuries — provide the long-term replacement. Metal hooks from steel wire. Extending existing synthetic gear life through careful maintenance buys time for the transition.

#045. Chainsaw and Tool Maintenance [B] Wood is NZ’s most abundant energy source, construction material, and chemical feedstock — and harvesting it depends on tools that wear out. Chain sharpening, crosscut saw technique, electric chainsaws near grid power. Manual forestry methods were standard within living memory, but the workforce that knew them is aging fast. Capturing that knowledge is time-limited.

#046. Lighting [B] NZ’s existing LED stock provides roughly a decade of buffer. The real challenge is manufacturing replacement bulbs before that buffer expires — incandescent production requires glass envelopes (Doc #98), filament wire, and vacuum or gas-fill capability. Tallow candles and oil lamps are the fallback if domestic bulb production fails, not the plan. Covers LED stockpile management, off-grid solutions, and the manufacturing transition.

#047. Adhesives and Sealants [B] Synthetic adhesives and sealants — epoxy, silicone, polyurethane — are finite imports. NZ alternatives include hide glue, casein (from milk), pine pitch, and beeswax. These cover many applications but not all; the document maps where natural adhesives work and where gaps remain.

#048. Water Treatment Without Imports [B] Waterborne disease killed more people than bullets in every pre-modern conflict. NZ’s imported water treatment chemicals last 1-3 years; after that, chlorine from salt electrolysis, slow sand filtration (proven technology for centuries), and UV treatment keep municipal water safe. Quality may decline from current standards, but safe drinking water is maintainable.

#049. Wastewater Treatment Adaptation [B] Modern wastewater treatment depends on imported chemicals and complex mechanical systems. The adaptation path uses extended aeration (electricity-only, no chemical imports), constructed wetlands, and oxidation ponds — NZ already operates oxidation ponds in smaller communities, so this is proven local technology being extended, not invented from scratch.

#050. Filter Fabrication [B] Disposable filters are everywhere — oil, air, water, fuel — and NZ manufactures none of them. Replacements using cleanable mesh, centrifugal separation, and sand/charcoal filtration keep engines, water systems, and industrial equipment running when the throwaway supply is gone.

#051. Ethanol and Vinegar Production [A] Ethanol is a Swiss Army knife chemical: antiseptic, solvent, anaesthetic feedstock (ether), fuel additive, and vinegar precursor. Producible from grain, fruit, or whey — all abundant in NZ. Among the first domestic chemical production operations that should come online, with applications across medicine, food preservation, and transport.

#052. Wire Rope [C] Cranes, winches, logging, and shipping all depend on wire rope that NZ currently imports. NZ Steel produces wire rod, but the missing piece is stranding capability — drawing wire to gauge and twisting it into rope. Equipment must be built or adapted, making this a harder manufacturing challenge than simple wire products.

CATEGORY 5: FUEL TRANSITION AND TRANSPORT

Phase 1

#053. Fuel Allocation and Drawdown [A] NZ consumes roughly 23-25 million litres of petroleum per day. In-country stocks represent 3-4 weeks of normal consumption, and with the Marsden Point refinery closed since 2022, there is no crude stockpile and no refining capability. Under strict rationing, stocks last 6-18 months; unrestricted, 3-5 weeks. Every day of delay burns through irreplaceable fuel.

#054. Emergency Vehicle Electrification [B] NZ’s EV fleet — tens of thousands pre-war — becomes a component donor base. Motors, controllers, and battery packs transplanted into ambulances, utility trucks, and farm vehicles. Feasible for light vehicles; heavy trucks significantly harder. Must begin while petroleum stocks still allow parallel operation of the existing fleet.

#055. Electric Milk Collection and Cold Chain [B] Milk tankers run on diesel, and NZ’s dairy industry collects from thousands of farms daily. If collection stops, milk spoils on-farm and a major protein source is lost. Electrifying the collection fleet is feasible but involves significant logistics — route planning, charging infrastructure, vehicle conversion — and must happen under time pressure while fuel stocks still allow parallel operation.

#056. Wood Gasification [A] During WWII, roughly a million European vehicles ran on producer gas from wood. NZ did not use this technology at scale, so there is no direct institutional memory — but the technology is well-documented and straightforward, and NZ has abundant wood. The most immediately deployable petroleum substitute for vehicles and stationary engines. Construction should begin within weeks of severance.

Phase 2–3

#057. Biodiesel From NZ Tallow [B] NZ renders large quantities of tallow from its meat industry — a feedstock for biodiesel via well-understood transesterification chemistry. The catch: it needs methanol, which must itself be produced from wood gasification (Doc #111), creating a circular dependency. Ethanol-based transesterification works as an alternative but is slower and lower-yield.

#058. Coastal and Inter-Island Shipping [B] Before roads and rail, coastal shipping was NZ’s primary freight system. As road transport fails — fuel exhausted, tires gone — it becomes so again. A single vessel carrying 500-2,000 tonnes replaces hundreds of truck movements using far less energy per tonne-kilometre. The transition from diesel-powered to sail-assisted coastal freight must begin while fuel stocks still allow parallel operation.

#059. Bicycle Fleet [A] NZ has an estimated 1.5-2.5 million bicycles. A bicycle uses roughly 25-35 watts of human power at 15-20 km/h; a car at the same speed uses 2,000-5,000. The energy efficiency ratio is about 100:1. This is not aspirational sustainability — it is the mathematical inevitability of personal transport without petroleum. Fleet management, conversion from recreational to utility roles, repair networks, and long-term local manufacturing.

#060. Road and Bridge Maintenance [A] NZ maintains roughly 94,000 km of roads and over 4,500 bridges — most designed for a supply chain that no longer exists. Asphalt needs bitumen (imported), steel bridges need coatings and structural steel (imported), and concrete bridges need Portland cement at scale. Timber bridge construction has genuine NZ historical precedent, and route prioritization becomes critical: some roads will have to be abandoned so that others can be kept functional. Covers triage criteria, materials substitution, and the shift from maintaining everything to maintaining what matters.

#061. Electric Rail Expansion [B] Electrifying freight corridors using NZ copper and steel along existing rail corridors. Proven 1920s-era technology in concept, but the actual engineering of catenary construction and locomotive conversion is significant. NZ’s rail network is also in mixed condition — some corridors are well-maintained, others less so.

#062. Aviation: Realistic Capability Window [B] Jet aircraft: fuel-limited. With stabilized reserves, possibly 5–10 years of limited strategic use (NZ–Australia, medical evacuation). Piston aircraft: potentially longer-lived on ethanol blends, but engine modification and testing required. Airframe maintenance by cannibalization is proven practice but fleet shrinks over time. The honest assessment: NZ has a declining but real aviation capability for the first decade, useful for high-priority missions, not routine transport.

Phase 3–4

#063. Hydrogen: Stationary Applications [B] NZ generates far more electricity than it needs for a reduced population — and hydrogen produced by electrolysis converts that surplus into storable chemical fuel. Alkaline electrolyzers are genuinely simple technology: steel or nickel electrodes, a potassium hydroxide electrolyte, and DC power. Low-pressure storage (under 30 bar) avoids the difficult metallurgy of high-pressure systems and is achievable with NZ fabrication capability. The most realistic long-term replacement for natural gas in industrial heating, drying, and backup generation.

#064. Hydrogen for Mobile Use [C] Hydrogen-powered vehicles sound like an obvious pairing with NZ’s electricity surplus, but the engineering reality is harsh. Low-pressure hydrogen in converted internal combustion engines for slow farm vehicles is probably achievable; high-pressure compressed hydrogen for road transport requires pressure vessel metallurgy NZ almost certainly cannot produce. This document maps what is genuinely feasible at what timeline, rather than presenting hydrogen vehicles as a near-term solution — the honest answer is that mobile hydrogen is a Phase 3-4 technology at best, and only for limited applications.

CATEGORY 6: ELECTRICAL GRID

Phase 1

#065. Hydroelectric Maintenance (NZ-Specific) [A] Hydro generates roughly 60% of NZ’s electricity. The knowledge to keep these stations running currently lives in the heads of power company operations staff — this document puts it on paper. Station-by-station guidance for every major facility, covering what matters when spare parts stop arriving.

#066. Geothermal Maintenance (NZ-Specific) [A] Approximately 1,000 MW of baseload generation that runs 24/7 regardless of rainfall, wind, or season — and nuclear winter does not touch it. The challenge is above ground: silica scaling, hydrogen sulphide corrosion, and mineral erosion progressively destroy turbines, pipelines, and wells. NZ has world-class geothermal expertise already in-country; the question is whether local materials and fabrication can sustain operations when imports cease.

#067. Transpower Grid Operations [A] The grid connects every hospital, milking shed, water treatment plant, and workshop in the country. Without it, NZ fragments into disconnected regions. The passive components — steel towers, conductors, insulators — last decades. The vulnerable parts are the active ones: power transformers, circuit breakers, protection relays, and the SCADA systems that allow remote control. Covers managing their progressive degradation while adapting to changed demand patterns.

#068. Rural Distribution and SWER [A] When distribution transformers fail and wooden poles rot without imported replacements, farms lose milking machines, refrigeration, and electric fencing — directly threatening food production. NZ’s rural network spans roughly 150,000+ km of lines, much of it using Single Wire Earth Return technology invented in NZ in the 1920s. Covers prioritisation of which lines to maintain, what can be repaired with NZ materials, and off-grid alternatives when lines must be abandoned.

Phase 2–4

#069. Transformer Rewinding and Fabrication [B] The grid’s longest-term vulnerability. Transformers can last decades with good maintenance, but some in the NZ fleet are already old. Rewinding existing units is feasible — copper wire, steel laminations, insulating oil. Fabricating new transformers from scratch is a different order of difficulty, requiring precision winding, proper insulation, and testing capability. Draws the line between repair and new manufacture.

#070. Copper Wire Production [B] Every motor rewind, transformer repair, and new electrical circuit needs copper wire — and NZ has almost no copper mining. The near-term source is recycled copper from existing infrastructure (wiring, plumbing, motors). Australian copper via Tasman trade is the likely long-term supplement. Covers recovery, refining, and drawing into usable wire gauges.

#071. Wind Turbine Maintenance [B] Modern wind turbines have composite blades, gearboxes, and power electronics — none of which NZ manufactures. Blade repair is difficult, gearbox maintenance is achievable but requires specific knowledge and parts. Some turbines will inevitably be lost to maintenance failure; the question is how fast the fleet shrinks and what can be done to slow it.

#072. Micro-Hydro Design and Construction [A] NZ has a genuine history of micro-hydro, thousands of suitable sites, and the manufacturing capability to build Pelton and crossflow turbines locally. One of the more straightforward paths to new generation capacity — energy infrastructure NZ can actually construct from domestic materials.

#073. Solar Panel and Inverter Maintenance [B] Panels are the robust half — rated 25+ years, often lasting longer. Inverters are the weak point: complex electronics with finite life that NZ cannot manufacture. Simplified inverter designs for basic applications may be achievable, but full-function grid-tied units are not. Covers maintenance, bypass strategies, and getting the most from a depleting fleet.

CATEGORY 7: AGRICULTURE

Phase 1

#074. Pastoral Farming Under Nuclear Winter [A] Grass-based farming is more resilient than grain agriculture — grass does not need a specific maturation window to produce food. But grass growth under 5 degrees C of cooling and reduced sunlight drops significantly, and by how much is the question the entire food plan hinges on. Covers stocking rate reductions, regional variation, and the honest ranges rather than point estimates.

#075. Cropping and Dairy Adaptation Under Nuclear Winter [A] NZ’s dairy industry was built for export — milk powder for the world. That market is gone, and milk powder takes enormous energy to produce. The shift is to cheese, butter, and fluid milk for domestic consumption. Covers the processing transition alongside the harder reality: extended animal housing, supplementary feeding, and what dairying looks like when winters are longer and colder.

#076. Emergency Crop Expansion [A] Potatoes, brassicas, barley, oats, root vegetables — the crops that actually grow under nuclear winter conditions. The south is hit harder by cooling than the north, so planting calendars are region-specific. Covers variety selection, realistic yield expectations, and the transition from NZ’s narrow current crop base to a calorie-maximising programme.

#077. Seed Preservation and Distribution [A] A single gram of lettuce seed contains roughly 700 seeds, each capable of producing a 300-500 g head — one gram becomes 200-350 kg of food. No other stockpile item has this multiplication ratio. The question is whether NZ can transition from a system that imports most commercial seed to permanent self-sufficiency in seed production, especially given the dominance of hybrid cultivars that do not breed true.

#078. Food Preservation [A] Without refrigeration at scale, food preservation reverts to methods that worked for millennia. Smoking, salting, drying, fermentation, and pickling — all achievable from NZ materials (sea salt, ethanol-derived vinegar, wood for smoking). The knowledge is well-established; this document assembles it for a country that has largely forgotten how.

Phase 2

#079. Geothermal Greenhouses [A] Iceland grows tomatoes and cucumbers at 64 degrees north using geothermal heat. NZ’s Taupo Volcanic Zone and Bay of Plenty have the same resource. Scaling this to meaningful food production under nuclear winter requires construction and management capacity that does not yet exist, but the physical prerequisites — heat, water, land — are all present.

#080. Soil Fertility Without Imports [A] NZ imports virtually all synthetic fertiliser. Composting, legume rotation, NZ rock phosphate, seabird guano, and biochar can partially substitute — but crop yields will be lower. How much lower depends on soil type, crop, and management intensity. This document is about closing that gap as far as possible, not pretending it does not exist.

#081. Aquaculture [A] Mussels and oysters require no feed, no arable land, and minimal infrastructure — they filter plankton from coastal waters. As pasture productivity crashes and land-based protein declines, shellfish farming is one of the few food strategies that does not trade off against other food sources. Covers expansion of existing farms, freshwater eel and trout production, and the uncertainty around plankton productivity under nuclear winter.

#082. Hunting and Wild Harvest [A] NZ has millions of wild deer, pigs, and goats — plus marine fisheries and a coastline rich in kaimoana. Meaningful protein sources, but not at the scale of pastoral agriculture. Covers sustainable harvest levels, regional game populations, and the risk of overhunting in the first desperate years.

#083. Beekeeping Adaptation [A] Roughly a million managed hives in NZ, providing pollination that emergency food crops depend on — brassicas, clover for pasture recovery, orchard fruit. Honey is calorie-dense and stores indefinitely. The threat is varroa mite: imported synthetic miticides last 1-3 seasons, after which NZ must transition to locally producible organic acid treatments or face devastating colony losses.

#084. Pest and Weed Management [A] NZ imports roughly $700-900 million in crop protection chemicals annually, with virtually no domestic synthesis. Existing stocks cover 1-3 seasons. After that, crop losses rise from perhaps 10-20% to 20-40% — a significant hit that compounds nuclear winter and fertiliser losses. Covers the transition from chemical eradication to integrated management using methods that were standard NZ farming practice within living memory.

#085. Animal Breeding and Genetic Diversity [A] When herds are culled to match reduced carrying capacity, the survivors carry the genetic future of NZ’s livestock. Lose too much diversity and the herds lose disease resistance, reproductive fitness, and adaptability — and those mistakes are irreversible. Covers breeding strategies for small populations under selection pressure that nobody has faced before.

Phase 3+

#086. Agricultural Recovery as Climate Normalises [A] Nuclear winter does not last forever. As temperatures recover over 5-15 years, NZ can begin reintroducing crops, rebuilding pasture, and increasing stocking rates. Getting the sequencing right matters — expand too fast and you overgraze degraded land; too slowly and you waste productive capacity.

#087. Tropical and Trade Crops [A] As climate normalises and trade routes open, NZ’s agricultural possibilities expand. What can NZ grow that it currently does not — Northland subtropicals, new fibre and oil crops — and what must it import? The long-term shape of NZ’s agricultural economy beyond survival mode.

CATEGORY 8: MANUFACTURING

Phase 1

#088. Spare Parts Triage [A] Everything mechanical eventually breaks, and when it does there is no reorder. What fails first, what matters most, and what can be cannibalised from lower-priority equipment. A national inventory and prioritisation framework for the parts that keep water flowing, food moving, and power generating.

#089. NZ Steel Glenbrook: Continuity [A] NZ’s only steelworks, and the foundation of every manufacturing plan in this library. Glenbrook makes steel from Taranaki ironsand — a domestic ore source that does not depend on imports. The question is whether the plant can keep running without imported consumables (refractories, electrodes, alloy additions) and what product range it can realistically deliver.

#090. Scrap Metal as Resource [A] Millions of vehicles, shipping containers, and steel-framed structures — NZ’s existing metal stock is enormous. But you cannot melt mixed alloys indiscriminately. Alloy identification and sorting is the difference between useful steel and unusable slag. Covers the national scrap inventory, sorting methods, and integration with Glenbrook and regional furnaces.

Phase 2

#091. Machine Shop Operations [A] The meta-capability. Dozens of technical documents in this library assume the ability to machine replacement parts — which conceals an enormous amount of implicit capability. NZ has likely hundreds of workshops with lathes, mills, and skilled operators. Training new machinists is one of the most important workforce priorities in the entire recovery.

#092. Blacksmithing and Forge Work [A] A forge, an anvil, a hammer, and scrap steel — enough to produce hoe blades, hinges, hooks, nails, chain links, ploughshares, and ship brackets. No electricity required, no precision instruments, no imported consumables beyond the steel itself. Addresses a wider range of everyday metalworking needs than machine shops, is faster to establish, and every NZ farm has forgeable scrap steel lying around.

#093. Foundry Work [B] When you need a complex shape in metal — a pump housing, a gear, a pipe fitting — casting is often the only practical method. Sand casting in iron, bronze, and aluminium using electric melting furnaces, which NZ’s grid can readily power. NZ has some existing foundry capability; this document covers expanding it.

#094. Welding Consumable Fabrication [B] Welders burn through stick electrodes fast, and NZ imports all of them. Domestic fabrication from NZ wire and flux materials (limestone, rutile sand, cellulose binder) is feasible but the flux composition requires experimentation — this is applied chemistry, not a simple recipe. Getting it wrong means weak welds on load-bearing structures.

#095. Electric Motor Rewinding [B] An estimated 3-6 million electric motors drive virtually every productive system in NZ — water pumps, milking machines, grain mills, machine tools. All were imported; none are manufactured here. When a motor fails, rewinding capability is the difference between a repair and a permanent loss. NZ has perhaps 30-80 rewind shops nationwide; the binding constraint is copper magnet wire, which is finite and must eventually be produced domestically.

#096. Bearing Repair and Fabrication [B/C] Every rotating machine in the country runs on bearings, and every bearing eventually wears out. Plain bearings from bronze or babbit metal are achievable in Phase 2-3. Ball bearing reconditioning is feasible in Phase 3-4. New ball bearing manufacture — hardened steel, precision grinding — is genuinely difficult and may take until Phase 4-5. The document maps what is achievable when.

#097. Cement and Concrete [A] NZ already produces cement — Golden Bay limestone, volcanic pozzolan, electric kilns. This is about maintaining existing capability and adapting production when imported additives run out. Cement is the binding material for infrastructure that cannot be built from timber alone: water treatment plants, bridges, foundations.

#098. Glass Production [B] NZ does not currently produce glass — but it needs window panes, laboratory vessels, light bulb envelopes (Doc #46), and eyeglass lenses (Doc #110). Parengarenga silica sand and electric furnaces provide the raw materials and energy. Building this capability from scratch requires furnace construction, process development, and training — a significant but achievable industrial project.

#099. Timber Processing [A] 1.7 million hectares of plantation forest — over 200 years of domestic consumption at pre-event rates. The resource is not the constraint. The constraints are fuel for harvesting, saw consumables (bandsaw blades, chainsaw chains) that NZ does not produce, and timber treatment chemicals without which radiata pine rots in ground contact within 2-5 years. Covers the full chain from standing tree to finished timber, including the transition to alternative preservation methods as CCA chemicals deplete.

#100. Harakeke Fiber Processing [A] One of the world’s strongest natural fibres, and NZ has it growing everywhere. Harakeke provides rope, cordage, textile fibre, and composite reinforcement. Maori muka processing knowledge — centuries of refinement — is directly applicable and represents one of the clearest examples of matauranga Maori providing immediate practical value in the recovery.

#101. Tanning and Leather [B] Boots for the workforce, harness for draft animals, drive belts for machinery — all leather, and NZ’s existing stocks wear through within 2-5 years of heavy use. NZ slaughters millions of cattle and sheep annually, producing hides as a by-product. The problem is not raw material but processing: NZ’s domestic tanning industry has contracted to a handful of operations. Covers vegetable tanning from NZ bark, the full chain from hide preservation to finished leather, and the real performance gap versus chrome-tanned imports.

#102. Charcoal Production [A] Blacksmithing, foundry work, and metal casting all require high-temperature solid fuel that raw wood cannot provide. Charcoal fills this role and also serves as the basis for water filtration (activated charcoal), soil amendment (biochar), and chemical feedstock. The simplest production method — an earth mound kiln — requires nothing but a shovel, an axe, and knowledge. NZ’s 1.7 million hectares of plantation forest provide more than enough raw material.

#103. Salt Production [A] Food preservation, water treatment, caustic soda for soap, leather tanning, animal nutrition — salt is non-substitutable across all of them. Lake Grassmere in Marlborough produces 50,000-70,000 tonnes annually by solar evaporation, but nuclear winter’s reduced sunlight and cooler temperatures could cut output by 30-60%. NZ consumed roughly 150,000-220,000 tonnes pre-event. Covers maintaining Grassmere, supplementary coastal salt pans, and forced evaporation using grid electricity.

#104. Clothing and Textile Manufacturing [B] NZ has the raw fibre — wool, leather, harakeke, possum fur — but almost no garment manufacturing infrastructure. The last significant clothing factories closed years ago. Covers rebuilding the capability from spinning through sewing, the training pipeline, and the key gaps: no elastic, limited zipper stock, and no cotton production.

#105. Fencing Wire and Nails [B] Without fencing wire, NZ’s livestock control system collapses and pastoral agriculture breaks down. Without nails, timber construction stalls. One of the few manufacturing chains where the entire process — from ironsand ore to finished product — already exists within NZ: Glenbrook produces steel, Pacific Steel at Otahuhu draws wire and makes nails. The question is whether this capacity can scale to replace imports when imported consumables (drawing dies, lubricants) deplete.

Phase 3–4

#106. Electric Arc Furnace (Regional) [B] Steel production beyond Glenbrook — regional electric arc furnaces recycling scrap metal closer to where it is needed, reducing transport dependence. NZ has the electricity. The constraint is graphite electrodes: NZ does not produce graphite and natural deposits are limited. Covers furnace design, electrode alternatives, and the regional distribution of steelmaking capacity.

#107. Rubber Recycling [B] NZ’s entire rubber supply is embodied in existing products — principally 22-25 million tires. There are no rubber trees, no synthetic rubber production, and no near-term pathway to either. Once a tire or rubber product reaches end of life in its original form, mechanical grinding, devulcanisation, and pyrolysis can recover material value — but reclaimed rubber reaches only 40-70% of virgin mechanical properties. Covers what is recoverable and what is not.

#108. Paper and Pulp Production [B] NZ imported all its printing and writing paper. When those imports stop, the Recovery Library cannot be printed, government cannot administer, and schools cannot teach. NZ has two pulp mills (Kinleith and Tasman), 1.7 million hectares of plantation forest, and a renewable electricity grid — the physical basis exists. The challenge is adapting mills that produced export-grade kraft and containerboard to produce the printing paper, tissue, and writing paper that NZ actually needs.

#109. Aluminum Smelting and Recycling [B] Tiwai Point smelter runs on dedicated Manapouri hydro power — NZ’s largest single electricity consumer. Maintaining this highly specialised facility is feasible in principle, but alumina feedstock is entirely imported. Without Australian bauxite via Tasman trade, the smelter processes only recycled aluminium. Covers the decision framework: when does maintaining Tiwai Point justify the effort versus recycling alone?

#110. Eyeglass Lens Manufacturing [B] Roughly 2 million New Zealanders depend on corrective lenses — without them, a significant share of the workforce cannot read, drive, or perform skilled tasks. NZ currently imports every lens it uses. Basic single-vision grinding from locally produced glass (Doc #98) is achievable; multifocal, high-index, and coated lenses are not. Covers the optical grinding process, prescription measurement with minimal equipment, and realistic limits on what can be produced domestically.

Phase 4+

#111. Methanol From Wood [B] Methanol is an industrial solvent, a fuel, and a chemical feedstock — it is the gateway to producing formaldehyde, acetic acid, and biodiesel. NZ has 1.7 million hectares of plantation forest and can produce methanol through wood gasification followed by catalytic synthesis. The key constraint is the catalyst itself (typically copper-zinc-alumina), which NZ may need to source from Australia via Tasman trade.

#112. Lime and Caustic Soda [B] Lime and caustic soda are foundational industrial chemicals — needed for soap production, paper processing, water treatment, leather tanning, and chemical synthesis throughout the library. NZ has substantial limestone deposits, particularly at Golden Bay, and lime kilns are straightforward to build and operate. Caustic soda (sodium hydroxide) can be produced from salt (Doc #103) and electricity via the chloralkali process. Covers the production chains, energy requirements, and downstream applications.

#113. Sulfuric Acid [C] Sulfuric acid is the single most consumed industrial chemical in the world — used in fertiliser production, lead-acid batteries, chemical processing, and metal refining. NZ has a domestic sulfur source: geothermal fields in the Taupo Volcanic Zone. The challenge is not raw material but process engineering — producing and storing a highly corrosive acid requires acid-resistant containment (glass-lined steel, PTFE, or ceramics) that NZ would need to fabricate or adapt. Rated [C] because the containment problem is significant.

#114. Ammonia Synthesis: Prerequisites and Roadmap [D] Ammonia is the basis of all synthetic nitrogen fertiliser — without it, NZ farming relies entirely on biological nitrogen fixation (clover, legumes) and whatever stockpiled urea remains. The Haber-Bosch process requires hydrogen, nitrogen, high pressures, high temperatures, and a catalyst, each step depending on industrial capabilities that must be built first. This is a multi-decade dependency chain. Covers the prerequisite roadmap honestly, including the possibility that Tasman trade with Australia may deliver ammonia faster than domestic synthesis.

#115. Semiconductor Processing Roadmap [D] Every computer, radio, and control system in the library ultimately depends on semiconductors — and NZ’s entire stock is finite. Eventually, electronics must be manufactured locally or sourced through trade, or computing capability degrades to nothing. This document maps the multi-generational prerequisite chain: silicon refining, photolithography, clean-room fabrication — each requiring industrial capabilities that do not yet exist in NZ. Rated [D] because this is among the longest and most demanding dependency chains in the library, and may realistically emerge first in a region with a larger industrial base.

CATEGORY 9: MEDICAL AND HEALTH

Phase 1

#116. Pharmaceutical Rationing and Shelf-Life Extension [A] NZ imports virtually all its medicines — total in-country stock represents roughly 3–5 months of normal consumption, and domestic production is years to decades away. Total death counts over five years are similar across rationing scenarios (35,000–56,000 vs 30,000–53,000), but the composition is fundamentally different: age-weighted insulin allocation saves approximately 5,000 children with Type 1 diabetes by bridging them to domestic production, while all 5,000 die under equal distribution or no rationing. Person-years of life saved under aggressive rationing are roughly 2–2.5x higher than without it. Drug-by-drug gap analysis with three scenario comparisons, age-stratified mortality tables, person-years analysis, allocation ethics including age-weighted deprescribing, and the hardest questions about who keeps their medication as supply runs out.

#117. Surgical Consumable Conservation [A] Modern surgery assumes disposable everything — single-use gowns, gloves, drapes, sutures, scalpel blades. NZ imports all of them and manufactures none. When the supply chain stops, hospitals must shift to sterilisation and reuse protocols that were standard practice a generation ago. Covers autoclave maintenance as a top equipment priority, suture alternatives including catgut from sheep intestine, and the triage decisions about which consumables to conserve most aggressively.

#118. Anesthesia Alternatives [B] Without anesthesia, surgery reverts to pre-1846 conditions — conscious patients, limited to amputations and surface procedures, with shock as a leading cause of death. NZ’s imported anesthetic agents will deplete within years. Ether production from ethanol is achievable chemistry, and regional and spinal techniques reduce the need for general anesthetics. The practical challenge is quality control: impure ether is dangerous, and the gap between “can synthesise” and “safe to administer” is where lives are lost.

Phase 2

#119. Local Pharmaceutical Production: Honest Assessment [B/C] NZ does not manufacture any pharmaceutical drugs — every pill, vial, and tablet is imported. When rationed stockpiles run out, what can NZ actually produce domestically? The honest answer: some things (oral rehydration salts, aspirin, morphine from cultivated poppies, iodine from seaweed), but not most of what modern medicine relies on. Penicillin fermentation is theoretically documented but the quality-control barrier is severe, and contaminated batches are worse than no antibiotic at all. Modern antibiotics, paracetamol, biologics, and vaccines remain out of reach for the foreseeable future.

#120. Eyecare [B] Approximately 2 million NZ residents need corrective lenses — nearly 40% of the population whose ability to read, work, and function depends on a product NZ has never manufactured. When existing glasses break and contact lenses expire, the country needs domestic lens grinding from NZ-produced glass and a distributed optometry capability that does not rely on imported diagnostic equipment. Covers the feasible (single-vision lenses) and the infeasible (multifocal, high-index, coated lenses).

#121. Dental Care [B] Dental problems do not pause for a catastrophe — untreated decay and infection can become life-threatening, and NZ’s entire dental supply chain is imported: filling materials, local anaesthetics, extraction forceps, even the fluoride in toothpaste. Dental health will decline, and this document is honest about that rather than implying full substitution. Covers triage priorities, maintaining existing equipment, local anaesthetic alternatives, and the training pipeline to expand NZ’s dental workforce beyond its current ~2,800 dentists.

#122. Mental Health: National Grief and Purpose [A] Every person in NZ will know that much of the world has been destroyed and that family and friends overseas are likely dead. It is an unprecedented psychological burden on an entire nation, experienced simultaneously. The document addresses community-level response and national social cohesion: how a country grieves collectively, finds shared purpose in the recovery effort, and prevents despair from undermining the practical work that survival demands.

#123. Midwifery and Maternity [A] Babies keep coming regardless of catastrophe — NZ averages roughly 58,000 births per year, and that number will not drop to zero. NZ’s midwifery model is already community-based and less hospital-dependent than most developed countries, which is a genuine advantage. The challenges are imported consumables (oxytocin, antibiotics, surgical supplies for caesarean sections) and maintaining the referral pathway for complications when hospital capacity is degraded. Covers sustaining safe birth outcomes with a contracting supply chain.

#124. Veterinary Medicine [B] NZ’s economy runs on livestock — 26 million sheep, 10 million cattle, and 800,000 deer, all of which get sick, injured, and parasitised. Virtually all veterinary pharmaceuticals are imported: anthelmintics, antibiotics, vaccines, anaesthetics. Keeping animals healthy without resupply means prioritising the most economically critical herds, stretching existing drug stocks, and developing local alternatives where possible (e.g., plant-based anthelmintics with partial efficacy). A major livestock disease outbreak in a population with degraded veterinary capacity could threaten the national food supply.

#125. Public Health Surveillance [A] Disease surveillance is what prevents outbreaks from becoming epidemics — and in a population with degraded medical capacity, an undetected epidemic could kill more people than the original event. Water treatment disruptions, sanitation failures, population displacement, and reduced vaccination coverage all increase infectious disease risk. NZ’s existing public health infrastructure (district health boards, ESR laboratory network, notifiable disease reporting) provides the skeleton; the question is how to maintain surveillance coverage as laboratory consumables deplete and staff are stretched across competing priorities.

#126. Medical Device Maintenance [B] Medical devices are the infrastructure of modern medicine — without autoclaves, surgery stops; without X-ray, fractures are set blind; without ultrasound, obstetric complications go undetected. NZ has thousands of these devices and no ability to manufacture replacements. The document maps a triage hierarchy: autoclaves are essential, relatively simple, and worth maintaining at all costs; X-ray machines are important but their tubes have finite life and are irreplaceable; ultrasound is solid-state and potentially longer-lived; MRI and CT scanners should be abandoned early as their maintenance burden exceeds their recoverable value.

CATEGORY 10: COMMUNICATIONS AND COMPUTING

Phase 1

#127. NZ Telecommunications Maintenance [A] Cell towers fail first — their battery backup and complex electronics make them the most fragile layer. Fiber-optic networks last longer with maintained terminal equipment and power. Copper landlines outlast everything. Planning for graceful degradation through these layers, keeping NZ connected as each system thins out.

#128. HF Radio Network [A] NZ has 2,000–4,000 amateur radio operators — a ready-made national communications backbone that needs no imports and no infrastructure beyond antennas and electricity. Begin immediately, while modern systems still work, so the network is proven and practiced before it becomes the primary long-distance link.

#129. AI Inference Facility Operations [A] The gap between what a recovering society needs to know and what its available specialists can provide is vast. A pre-positioned AI inference facility — drawing 500 kW–1 MW from NZ’s renewable grid — closes that gap by translating compressed knowledge across medicine, engineering, chemistry, and agriculture into specific, actionable guidance. This facility produced the Recovery Library itself and can continue generating useful output for years, provided the hardware survives.

Phase 2–4

#130. Device Life Extension [B] NZ has millions of laptops, phones, and tablets — each one a library, a calculator, and a reference tool that cannot be replaced when it dies. Repair, power management, and cannibalization of failed units can stretch this fleet for 10–25 years, but building a trained repair workforce from a small base of existing electronics technicians starts now.

#131. Radio Equipment Fabrication [B] NZ’s existing HF radio fleet sustains the network for 10–20 years before capacitor failure and semiconductor aging thin it to nothing. After that, NZ builds its own — a staged path from simple Morse transmitters using hand-wound coils and salvaged vacuum tubes, through regenerative receivers, to discrete-transistor transceivers. Radio is simpler than computing; the first transmitters used 1890s technology.

#132. Digital-to-Print Priority Schedule [A] Hard drives last 3–6 years under continuous use. SSDs degrade after 5–10. Meanwhile, laser printers depend on imported toner that will run out. There is a window — roughly Years 0–5 — during which NZ has both functional digital storage to read from and functional printing capacity to write to paper. This window closes from both ends simultaneously. What gets printed determines what knowledge NZ carries forward.

#133. Local Network Architecture [B] Hospitals sharing patient records, repair depots accessing technical manuals, community libraries distributing Recovery Library content — none of these need the global internet. NZ has an enormous installed base of routers, switches, and Ethernet cable in homes, businesses, and schools. Repurposing this equipment for local and regional networks extends the value of NZ’s digital infrastructure long after wide-area connectivity contracts.

Phase 5–7

#134. Computing Self-Sufficiency Roadmap [D] Stockpiled devices provide a bridge of 10–25 years. After that, discrete transistor systems are theoretically achievable, but the prerequisite industrial base — semiconductor-grade silicon, clean rooms, photolithography — is substantial. This capability might emerge first in a region with a larger population and industrial base. NZ’s role may be as knowledge provider rather than manufacturer.

#135. Computer Construction: From Raw Materials to Stored-Program Computer [D] The library’s most ambitious technical document. A practical guide for building a stored-program computer from germanium transistors fabricated from NZ-available materials — starting from raw ore and ending with a working machine. The dependency chain is long, but every step is mapped.

CATEGORY 11: MARITIME

Phase 1–2

#136. NZ Port Operations [A] NZ’s thirteen commercial ports survive physically intact under the baseline scenario — the challenge is that they were built for container ships, diesel-electric cranes, and imported spare parts. The transition from containerised shipping to break-bulk cargo and eventually sail-powered trade requires deciding which ports to maintain at full capability, which to simplify, and how to handle cargo when the cranes stop working. NZ ran harbours for over a century before containerisation; it can do so again.

#137. Cook Strait Link [B] The 22 km separating NZ’s two main islands is the country’s single most important internal transport link. The South Island produces the majority of NZ’s food; the North Island holds 77% of the population. Each ferry crossing burns 3,000–5,000 litres of marine diesel. At pre-event service levels, the ferry fleet alone consumes 30,000–50,000 litres per day. How to maintain inter-island throughput while fuel depletes, then transition to sail-powered crossings.

Phase 2–3

#138. Sailing Vessel Design (NZ Materials) [B] Cargo and passage vessels for Tasman and Pacific trade, built from radiata pine, native hardwoods, and harakeke fiber rigging. NZ has an existing boatbuilding industry and a strong sailing community — genuine strengths. The gap between recreational boatbuilding and ocean-going cargo vessels is significant, but NZ is better positioned for this than most countries.

#139. Celestial Navigation [A] GPS satellites degrade within years. After that, every vessel crossing the Tasman or the Pacific finds its position the way mariners did for centuries — sextant, chronometer, and printed tables (Docs #10–11). NZ’s maritime community already holds this knowledge; the task is expanding it to every crew putting to sea.

#140. Coastal Trading Network [A] Before roads and rail, coastal shipping connected NZ — and it will again. With 15,000+ km of coastline and dozens of ports, the geography is ideal. The problem is that today’s available cargo capacity is almost entirely diesel-powered: NZ’s ~1,200 fishing vessels carry 5–20 tonnes each but burn fuel, while offshore-capable yachts use no fuel but carry almost nothing. Bridging that gap — and building purpose-built cargo sailing vessels — is a multi-year programme.

#141. Boatbuilding Techniques [B] NZ built wooden boats for over a century, and Maori built ocean-going waka hourua for centuries before that. The knowledge exists, but the modern industry has moved overwhelmingly to fiberglass and aluminum. Perhaps a few dozen people in NZ still hold traditional wooden boatbuilding skills, and most are older. Covers timber selection for NZ species, carvel and clinker planking, plywood construction, caulking, fastenings from NZ metals, sailmaking from canvas and harakeke, and the training pathway to rebuild the workforce.

Phase 3+

#142. Trans-Tasman and Pacific Trade Routes [B] Australia is 2,000 km away — 1–2 weeks under sail. Chile is 4–8 weeks. These are NZ’s lifelines for copper, rubber, tropical crops, and other materials that cannot be sourced domestically. Passage planning, seasonal weather routing, cargo priorities, and the trade relationships that make the voyages worthwhile.

Phase 5–6

#143. Powered Vessel Propulsion [C] Sail is NZ’s near-term maritime future, but powered vessels offer speed and reliability that sail cannot match. Hydrogen, ammonia, or synthetic fuel propulsion once NZ’s industrial chemistry reaches the point where these fuels can be produced domestically. Timeline is highly uncertain and depends on progress across multiple prerequisite industries.

Phase 1

#144. Emergency Powers and Democratic Continuity [A] Rationing, requisition, workforce direction, land use reallocation — recovery requires extraordinary government powers sustained over years, not weeks. The legal framework exists under the Emergency Management Act 2023. The harder problem is governance quality over the long term: ensuring decisions are good, errors get corrected, and the government retains the public trust on which compliance depends. Democratic institutions are not just principles to uphold — they are error-correction mechanisms.

#145. Workforce Reallocation [A] Roughly 65–70% of NZ’s 2.7 million workers are in services — tourism, finance, marketing, retail — that largely cease to exist when global trade stops. Meanwhile, agriculture, manufacturing, grid maintenance, and healthcare are critically short-staffed. NZ has enough people; it does not have them in the right jobs. Moving hundreds of thousands of workers into essential sectors is the largest single organisational task of Phase 1.

#146. Border Management and Immigration Under Catastrophe [A] NZ is one of the few countries that can probably feed its population under nuclear winter, with a modest surplus — estimated capacity for an additional 1–5 million people. This makes NZ an obvious destination for refugees from the Pacific Islands, Australia, and beyond. Every person who enters arrives by sea or air, both controllable. The hard question: how does NZ decide who enters, how many, and under what conditions — balancing food security against humanitarian obligation?

#147. Public Communication: Ongoing Strategy [A] Initial crisis solidarity erodes. By month six, public trust depends not on the shock of the event but on whether the government has been visibly honest, competent, and fair. The difference between 70% and 90% compliance on fuel rationing alone represents months of essential transport. NZ has genuine strengths here — RNZ’s nationwide transmitter network reaches ~97% of the population, and the renewable grid keeps broadcast infrastructure running indefinitely.

Phase 2

#148. Economic Transition [A] What happens to money when imports stop permanently? The NZ dollar can survive as a domestic medium of exchange — but only with immediate, deliberate intervention. NZ’s own WWII economic management provides relevant precedent: rationing, price controls, and managed currency coexisted for over a decade. The challenge is ensuring emergency economic controls are effective without becoming permanent.

#149. Land Use Reallocation [A] Approximately 8.5 million hectares of NZ pastoral land — roughly half the country — is optimised for dairy and meat export to markets that no longer exist. Canterbury’s arable land grows cereals for foreign buyers. Urban land is zoned for a service economy. Every hectare still producing export commodities for a vanished market is a hectare not feeding NZ’s own population. Covers which land shifts to which uses, in what order, under what legal framework, and how competing demands are resolved.

#150. Treaty of Waitangi and Māori Governance [A] NZ’s Maori population — approximately 900,000 people — is younger than the national average, disproportionately represented in primary industries, organised through governance structures (iwi, hapu, marae) that already function as emergency management networks, and in control of assets valued at over $70 billion. Marae are distributed nationwide with communal kitchens and sleeping facilities. The document addresses mobilising indispensable practical capacity through the Treaty partnership that makes mobilisation effective.

#151. NZ–Australia Relations [A] Australia is 2,000 km away, reachable by sail in 1–2 weeks, and holds copper, bauxite, rubber-bearing plants, and a larger industrial base. NZ holds food surplus, AI inference capability, and technical documentation. The trans-Tasman relationship is the single most consequential bilateral partnership for both countries’ recovery — and it must be established via HF radio within the first weeks.

#152. International Relations: The Wider World [A] Beyond Australia: the Pacific Islands face existential food threats, Chile and Argentina are 6–10 weeks away by sail, and fragments of the Northern Hemisphere may survive. NZ’s engagement develops slowly — HF radio contact first, maritime contact over years. If the AI inference facility survives, NZ possesses something no other surviving nation likely has: the ability to produce specialised AI consultation modules for partner countries, transforming its diplomatic weight.

#153. Currency and Exchange [A] The NZ dollar ceases to function internationally the moment global financial infrastructure collapses. Domestically, it can survive — but only if the government maintains confidence through price controls, monetary discipline, and perceived fairness. The alternative, reverting to barter, imposes enormous transaction costs on every economic exchange. For international trade, initial Tasman commerce operates through direct barter — goods for goods, negotiated per voyage.

#154. Justice System Adaptation [A] Every recovery action requiring public compliance — rationing, requisition, workforce direction — depends on people believing the rules are fair and that grievances have a remedy. NZ’s 58 District Courts and ~15,000 police officers face simultaneous pressure from new emergency offence categories, reduced capacity, and shifting public expectations. Covers adapted court procedures, community justice, tikanga Maori dispute resolution, and the design principles that keep the system perceived as fair under extraordinary stress.

#155. Population and Demographic Planning [B] A 10% error in the population assumption means miscalculating food requirements by enough to feed 500,000 people. NZ enters the post-event period with ~5.2 million people, but within 3–5 years the population size, age structure, and geographic distribution will have shifted substantially — increased mortality among the elderly and chronically ill, rising births as contraceptive stocks deplete, and immigration that could add anywhere from 50,000 to 500,000 over the first decade. Every planning document depends on getting these projections approximately right.

CATEGORY 13: EDUCATION AND SKILLS

Phase 1

#156. Skills Census [A] NZ’s scarcest post-event resource is not food or fuel — it is specialised human knowledge. Without a skills inventory, the retired transformer engineer in Napier goes unnoticed while Christchurch’s grid fails for want of exactly that expertise. Professional registries can be pulled in days, but the unregistered skills that recovery depends on — self-taught welders, heritage boatbuilders, kuia who hold weaving knowledge — require active searching before their holders are lost.

#157. Accelerated Trade Training [A] NZ needs to retrain tens of thousands of people from surplus service-sector occupations into critical trades within 12–24 months, using a training system designed for 3–4 year programmes at steady-state throughput. WWII precedent shows it can be done — allied nations produced functional tradespeople in 3–12 months. Accelerated training produces competent workers for defined tasks, not versatile craftspeople. That is acceptable in the near term; the full apprenticeship system (Doc #159) rebuilds depth over years.

Phase 2

#158. School Curriculum Adaptation [A] NZ’s 2,500 schools serving 800,000 students are recovery assets far beyond education — they provide routine for traumatised children, free parents for the recovery workforce, and serve as community gathering points in every town. Keep them open on Day 1. But the curriculum must change: the economy students will enter is agricultural and manufacturing-oriented, the tools are hand tools not computers, and the knowledge they need most is how to grow food, build structures, and work with materials. Phased transition over three years.

#159. Apprenticeship System [A] Accelerated training (Doc #157) fills the immediate gap, but NZ’s long-term recovery requires tradespeople who can work independently, diagnose unfamiliar problems, and train the next generation. This document restructures NZ’s existing apprenticeship framework — compressing the traditional 3–4 year pathway to 18–30 months for priority trades by intensifying training and crediting prior competence, while maintaining safety standards for high-risk trades like electrical and nursing.

#160. Heritage Skills Preservation and Transmission [A] Blacksmithing, traditional woodworking, manual forestry, animal husbandry, fiber arts, celestial navigation, mātauranga Māori — these skills exist in NZ’s older population and Māori communities, and their holders are aging. There is a window of perhaps 10–20 years to preserve and transmit this knowledge before the last holders die; after that, re-learning takes decades of trial-and-error. The preservation effort is straightforward if it starts now. Includes the Mātauranga Māori partnership framework, Recovery Council governance structure, and quality assurance protocols for traditional knowledge integration (formerly Doc #161).

#162. University and Research Reorientation [A] NZ’s eight universities and seven Crown Research Institutes employ ~10,000–12,000 academic staff and house the country’s only analytical chemistry labs, electron microscopes, controlled-environment growth chambers, and advanced materials testing facilities. These instruments will determine whether NZ can produce replacement lubricants, identify nuclear-winter-tolerant crop cultivars, and synthesise essential pharmaceuticals. Letting this infrastructure sit idle while researchers are redeployed as manual laborers would be a catastrophic misallocation of NZ’s most irreplaceable resource.

CATEGORY 14: CONSTRUCTION AND HOUSING

#163. Housing Insulation Retrofit [A] NZ housing is notoriously poorly insulated by international standards — and nuclear winter makes that a survival issue, not a comfort issue. Mass retrofit using wool, wood fiber, and recycled cellulose. The materials are abundant and domestic; the constraint is organising the labour to install them across 1.8 million dwellings while every other sector also needs workers.

#164. Timber Construction (NZ Seismic) [A] Population redistribution from cities to agricultural regions requires new housing, and the next major earthquake — inevitable on NZ’s plate boundary — will destroy buildings that can no longer be rebuilt with imported steel and engineered fasteners. NZ has 1.7 million hectares of plantation radiata pine and 60,000–80,000 people in residential construction trades. Covers seismic timber framing without imported fasteners, span tables for NZ species, and foundation options that reduce concrete demand.

#165. Plumbing and Water Systems [A] Clean water in, sewage out — the single most important public health intervention in modern history. NZ’s plumbing infrastructure spans roughly 28,000–32,000 km of water supply pipes and 18,000–22,000 km of wastewater pipes, all dependent on imported PVC, polyethylene, brass fittings, and rubber seals that deplete within 2–5 years. The shift to recycled copper, concrete and clay pipes, gravity-fed systems, and rainwater collection — before failures produce the disease burden that killed millions before modern sanitation.

#166. Firefighting Adaptation [A] Under import severance, every building that burns is a permanent loss. Fire risk rises substantially — more open flames for cooking and heating, combustible building modifications, degraded maintenance — at the same time that firefighting capacity declines from fuel constraints and depleting foam stocks. NZ’s existing volunteer brigade model (~11,800 volunteers, ~650 stations) is already closer to the long-term sustainable model than a fully professionalised service would be.

#167. Community Infrastructure [A] A community kitchen serving 200 people uses roughly one-third the fuel of 70 separate households cooking independently. Shared workshops, clinics, and insulated gathering halls concentrate scarce skills, equipment, and energy. NZ has a dense network of existing buildings to repurpose — over 700 marae, thousands of churches and school halls, sports facilities, and community centres. Adaptation before new construction; build purpose-built facilities only when repurposing is exhausted.

CATEGORY 15: KNOWLEDGE PRESERVATION AND DISTRIBUTION

Phase 1

#168. Recovery Library Master Index [A] 171 documents across 15 categories — and they are useless if the person who needs one cannot find it. This is the map to the collection: how it is organised, how to find what you need, and where to start depending on whether you are a farmer, a doctor, a community organiser, or a government planner. If you are reading this in the first hours after the event, skip to “What to Read in the First 48 Hours.”

Phase 2

#169. Regional Library Network [A] The farmer in Southland needs the agricultural documents; the doctor in Gisborne needs the pharmaceutical references. Without physical distribution, the Recovery Library remains a Wellington file cabinet. NZ already has one of the world’s best distribution systems: approximately 330 public library facilities across 67 territorial authority networks, staffed by ~3,500 trained librarians. Reorienting these from recreational lending to recovery knowledge distribution is the most cost-effective infrastructure decision in this entire library.

#170. Ongoing Printing and Publishing [B] Recovery generates new knowledge every season — which potato cultivars survived nuclear winter best, which soil management techniques maintained fertility, which anaesthetic protocols worked in the field. Without a publishing system, the community that discovers a superior cold-tolerant variety benefits while the community 200 km away does not. NZ needs 50–200 high-value publications per year — field reports, technical bulletins, medical findings — distributed through the regional library network.

Phase 3+

#171. Knowledge Adaptation for Other Regions [A] NZ’s AI-generated technical documentation could be valuable to other surviving regions — Australia, Pacific Islands, South America — but how valuable depends on what those regions need and whether they develop their own knowledge sources. The real value may lie not in exporting NZ-specific documents but in using the AI facility to generate region-specific guidance tailored to each partner’s materials, climate, and industrial base.

#172. Long-Term Archival Strategy [A] Laser-printed documents on standard acidic paper become brittle within decades. Digital storage degrades within years without maintenance. Without a deliberate archival strategy, the knowledge that made recovery possible is lost to NZ’s descendants. NZ can produce archival-quality acid-free paper from domestic materials, and properly stored it lasts centuries. For the most critical information, inscription on stone or fired ceramic is proven to last millennia and is within NZ’s capability.

APPENDIX A: FEASIBILITY SUMMARY

Rating	Count	Meaning
[A] Established	102	Existing NZ capability or proven methods
[B] Feasible	57	Requires new capability within NZ’s reach
[B/C] Mixed	3	Partially achievable, harder portions long-term
[C] Difficult	5	Significant challenges, precursor industries needed
[D] Long-term	4	Decades of development; documented as roadmap

Note: Some [A] ratings may be optimistic. Ratings should be reviewed by NZ domain specialists.

APPENDIX B: DEPLETION ESTIMATES

These are rough estimates assuming competent centralized management. Actual timelines depend on stock levels, requisition effectiveness, rationing compliance, and usage rates — all uncertain. Without centralized management, timelines compress substantially.

Consumable	Estimated Managed Life	NZ Substitute	Key Docs
Diesel / petrol	Months (strict rationing)	Wood gas, biodiesel, electric	#53, #56, #57
Aviation fuel	Years (stabilised, strategic use)	Limited ethanol blends	#62
Laser toner	5–10+ years (stored, rationed)	Manual printing methods	#29–31
Vehicle tires	Years (mothball + retread)	Solid rubber for slow vehicles	#33
Lubricants	Years (requisitioned bulk)	Tallow, lanolin, plant oil	#34
Pharmaceuticals	Varies widely by drug	Limited local production	#116, #119
Clothing basics	2–4 years	Wool, leather, harakeke	#36
Batteries (lithium)	5–15 years (managed)	Lead-acid (local)	#35
Refrigerant	Years (leak-dependent)	Ammonia, hydrocarbon	#40
Water treatment chemicals	1–3 years	Salt electrolysis, sand filtration	#48
Electronics	5–25+ years (staggered)	Repair; local mfg is decades away	#130, #134
Eyeglasses	Years (existing stock)	Local grinding eventually	#110

APPENDIX C: PHASE 1 GOVERNMENT ACTIONS

First 30 days, approximate priority order:

Declare national emergency under CDEM Act
Activate public communication — explain the situation honestly (doc #2)
Fuel requisition and rationing (doc #3)
Pharmaceutical stock management through controlled distribution (doc #4)
Printing supply requisition; begin printing critical documents (doc #5, #29)
Suspend non-essential vehicle use; centralize tire and battery stocks (doc #6)
Requisition agricultural and industrial consumables at wholesale level (doc #7)
Establish food rationing
Launch skills and asset census (doc #8)
Establish HF radio network (doc #128)
Workforce reallocation planning (doc #145)
Secure seed stocks (doc #77)
Border management (doc #146)
Agricultural planning for first nuclear winter season (docs #74–76)
Identify and protect critical personnel
Begin wood gasifier construction (doc #56)
Community soap production (doc #37)
Housing insulation retrofit (doc #163)
Ethanol production (doc #51)
NZ–Australia communication via HF radio

APPENDIX D: DOCUMENT SPECIFICATIONS

NZ-specific by default, with adaptation notes for other regions
Phase-tagged
Self-contained — no internet dependency
Heavily illustrated
Materials-realistic — NZ-available materials, depletion-aware, trade-aware
Layered: quick-start procedures + detailed background
Feasibility-rated [A] through [D]
Uncertainty acknowledged — ranges rather than point estimates where appropriate
Versioned and dated
Pre-catastrophe: peer-reviewed by NZ domain specialists
Multi-format: digital, print-ready (A4/A3), laminated field cards
Languages: English primary, te reo Māori integration. Spanish, Portuguese for international editions.
Distribution: every NZ library, school, hospital, marae, civil defense center, major farm

Total documents: 171 Estimated total page count: 25,000–35,000 pages Precomputed reference data: 19 Strategic requisition and planning: 9 Printing operations: 4 Consumable management: 22 Operational and technical guides: 120

Feasibility ratings

CATEGORY 1: GOVERNMENT EMERGENCY RESPONSE AND STOCKPILE MANAGEMENT

CATEGORY 2: PRECOMPUTED REFERENCE DATA AND TABLES

CATEGORY 3: PRINTING AND KNOWLEDGE DISTRIBUTION

CATEGORY 4: CONSUMABLES — DEPLETION AND SUBSTITUTION

CATEGORY 5: FUEL TRANSITION AND TRANSPORT

CATEGORY 6: ELECTRICAL GRID

CATEGORY 7: AGRICULTURE

CATEGORY 8: MANUFACTURING

CATEGORY 9: MEDICAL AND HEALTH

CATEGORY 10: COMMUNICATIONS AND COMPUTING

CATEGORY 11: MARITIME

CATEGORY 12: GOVERNANCE AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

CATEGORY 13: EDUCATION AND SKILLS

CATEGORY 14: CONSTRUCTION AND HOUSING

CATEGORY 15: KNOWLEDGE PRESERVATION AND DISTRIBUTION

APPENDIX A: FEASIBILITY SUMMARY

APPENDIX B: DEPLETION ESTIMATES

APPENDIX C: PHASE 1 GOVERNMENT ACTIONS

APPENDIX D: DOCUMENT SPECIFICATIONS