Which Old-Timey (Pre-Industrialization) Skills Do You Have? (Read OP for more info if confused)

Plow and haul logs with a horse and then call me. Durn city-slicker. :wink:

Forgot - I can make quill pens and could theoretically make ink. The recipes I know are for parchment, though, and might burn paper. It would take it awhile, though, so it could be used for short term notes and messages.

Oh! Hey! Does calligraphy count?

Vegetable gardening. Very handy.

Related: canning and drying food.

I can slaughter, butcher and cook animals both land and water-based.

I can also keep little children and pre-teenaged boys from killing themselves or each other.

All of them. All the ones listed, and then a bunch of others mostly picked up from decades of re-enactment

Except growing my own plants. If it’s not basil or a carnivore, I have the Black Thumb.

Yeah, the only one I’m really good at is starting and maintaining a fire. But I’ve read how to clean and butcher animals, and I’ve done enough things close to that (including killing and dissecting nice when i worked in a lab, and cutting down large cuts off large mammals into smaller pieces) that I’m sure I could learn to do it fast enough. Similarly, I once knapped a flint, and I bet i could learn to do that decently if I practiced.

I am a decent gardener, I can prune and graft fruit trees, and I’ve gathered and eaten lots of wild edibles. I even once tracked bees to their hive. (I could raid the hive, but I don’t think I could catch it.)

But I’m not going to fare very well in the post-medical age, either. I won’t die as fast as the diabetics, but I’ll have issues.

I have prehensile toes.

Candling eggs and gardening and canning food.

Additional Skills:
Carpentry
Wooden boat building & maintenance like packing seams.
I know a little blacksmithing and could pick up more.
I could operate a pre-industrial printing press, though I could not build one without plans.
Basic leather working

My food gathering & growing ability however is lacking strongly. I’ll trade my skilled work for food of course.

I can build a fire outside but that’s about it.

But I’ve been friendly for nearly 20 years now with a whole message board full of handy nerds who know how to do all this other stuff, apparently, so hopefully that gets me somewhere in the apocalypse :wink:

There needs to be a “No survival skills at all” selection!
I can crochet. I can do hand sewing if I must. I can’t do tailored garment construction, but that’s actually a fairly recent invention. I can make something that will cover your body from an adequate length of material, without a pattern. I’ve made candles.

On a theoretical level I understand weaving and spinning, and even shearing sheep and preparing wool and cotton for spinning.

Actually, on a theoretical level, I know how to make a log home. I’m not strong enough to do it, but maybe if I get a cute young guy to do the work for me? wags eyebrows
ETA - I can’t knit at all. Can’t even wrap my mind around it.

We’re short on the acquisition of food here. If I had a shotgun I could hunt birds and critters but even those and larger game can be depleted in an area pretty quickly. Fishing will help in some regions, not so much in others. Recognition of herbs and vegetables is going to be tough. If you think you can identify mushrooms then you eat them first. I can identify some fruits and nuts, but there may not be a lot of that close by anyway, someone needs to be able identify lots of edible plants, and the inedible ones also.

Ditto.

HIstorical recreationist here. You could turn my husband and I loose with an ax, a shovel, a couple knives and a breeding pair of sheep, pigs and chickens in the spring and we could set up a reasonable homestead, though giving us some seeds and onion sets would be nice. I would be reasonably happy subbing potatoes for our carb of choice, though grains are nice. We have actually done a sheep to shawl where we had to fabricate the loom and tools to turn wool into yarn and thread though that can be a lot of work [but the sheep roast at the end is tasty]