Survivalist.AI

Here are my current favorite offline apps for long plane flights, hiking in remote locations, or while hunkered somewhere without internet.

• Utilities
  • Survivalist.ai Offline AI App
  • Offline Maps
  • VLC Media Player
  • YouTube Premium
  • Seek by iNaturalist
• Games
  • Shattered Pixel Dungeon
  • The Battle of Polytopia
  • Yes, Your Grace

Utilities

Survivalist.AI can provide hours of entertainment (“tell me a dad joke”), but its main goal is to provide useful information without the need for internet. We’ve crammed the largest LLMs (Large Language Models) that can reasonably fit in the latest iPhones and iPads and run in available RAM, yet they are still about 400x smaller than GPT4 (reported to be 800GB in size).

Offline Recipes

I asked it to suggest a recipe for a vegetarian lunch, and this is what it came up with. It actually sounds pretty tasty.

Me
Can you suggest a recipe for a vegetarian lunch

AI
Of course! Here’s a simple and tasty recipe for a vegetarian lunch:

Vegetarian Quinoa Salad

1. Cook 2 cups of quinoa according to package instructions.
2. While the quinoa is cooking, chop 2 cups of mixed vegetables (such as cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, red onions and bell peppers) into bit-sized pieces.
3. In a large bowl, combine the cooked quinoa, chopped vegetables, 1/2 cup of chopped fresh parsley, 1/4 cup of chopped fresh mint, 1/4 cup of chopped fresh cilantro, 1/2 cup of crumbled feta cheese, and the juice of 1 lemon.
4. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
5. Serve chilled as a refreshing and nutritious vegetarian lunch. Enjoy your delicious meal!

I then asked Survivalist.AI how to make blueberry muffins and this is what it said:

AI
To make blueberry muffins, you’ll need the following ingredients:

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 1 teaspoon baking powder 1/2 teaspoon baking soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 cup granulated sugar 1 large egg 1 cup milk 1/2 cup vegetable oil 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries

First, preheat your oven to 375°F (190°C). Next, in a medium bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. In a large bowl, whisk together the sugar, egg, milk, vegetable oil, and vanilla extract. Then add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir until just combined. Gently fold in the blueberries.

Line a muffin tin with paper or silicone cups, and fill each cup about two-thirds full with the blueberry mixture. Bake for 18-20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Allow the muffins to cool in the tin for a few minutes, then remove them to a wire rack to cool completely.

Enjoy your delicious homemade blueberry muffins!

During times when the internet is down and you are looking for safe routes for bugging-out, there is no better resource than to have an accurate map. While Apple and Google Maps usually require internet to function, it is possible to download detailed Apple Maps for offline use, which we highly recommend.

VLC is an open source multimedia player that plays almost any format of video, from .mpegs and .mp4 to DVDs, VCDs and other obscure formats. It also handles streaming in various formats. VLC is non-profit, subsists on donations, and is free from ads and other spyware.

This is a must-have to go with your library of gardening, homesteading, fishing, farming and other survival videos.

You can download it for iOS, Mac, Android, Windows and Linux devices at the VideoLAN Organization site here.

Yes, it costs $13.99 a month, but hear me out. If you don’t want to go to the trouble of downloading YouTube and other videos for VLC to play, then I would instead have YouTube Premium on my phone. It is ridiculously simple to download videos for offline viewing (press download), and the native app is very fast. The downside is that videos that you download may be deleted if YouTube for some reason deletes the video – for example due to a copyright strike, or if the owner decides to remove the video.

But this is an excellent companion to VLC player, and far more convenient during normal times.

I would suggest downloading all the critical videos for viewing with VLC, and fill up your phone with nice-to-have YouTube videos. I have hundreds of videos downloaded on my 256GB iPhone 14 Pro.

I’ve tried several apps designed to identify plants offline and found Seek by iNaturalist stood out as the easiest to use. Controls are intuitive and it works right out of the box – there’s no need to download any plant or flora databases. I was impressed by its accuracy in identifying various plants and weeds. Also, it can provide the common name for plants which is much more usable for casual gardeners like myself. I know what a palm is but not an arecaceae. Seek is free to download and recommended.

Games

This is a rogue-like dungeon crawler which can be both fun and incredibly frustrating. There is no game-saving in the spirit of the classics so storming in like Leeeeeroy Jenkins is not going to work.

You need to patiently and methodically explore each level to uncover hidden areas and to find the keys to open treasure chests. Dungeons are randomly generated thus providing unlimited hours of entertainment.

Spoiler: to kill wraiths, draw them to a door then attack. I have no answers for killer crabs.

Shattered Pixel also runs in a small footprint, leaving valuable space for your gigabytes of downloaded Apple maps.

The Battle of Polytopia is a turn-based strategy game with elements from Risk and SimCity. In standard mode, the whole game unfolds in 30 turns. I find it perfect for breaks during work, when all you want is a short breather.

You start off as a primitive tribe with no resources. During the course of the game, you’ve got to explore the land and conquer villages, discover and build on new skills like fishing and hunting, and at the same time defend your cities from other invaders.

The learning curve on a game like Civilization VI might seem steep, but you can start playing Polytopia after a short tutorial.

The game has options to increase the number of opposing tribes and difficulty level so while it’s easy to learn, it’s difficult to master.

The Battle of Polytopia takes up 154MB of storage.

This is quite an unusual, but very entertaining game that weaves a story according to the many decisions you need to make. You are King Eryk, ruler of Davern, one of several kingdoms in the land. As King some of your many jobs are to take care of your family and loyal subjects, defend your kingdom from attackers, strike agreements with allies, deal with bankers looking to enrich themselves, and build sources of income to pay for all your expenses.

The demo is playable for a good number of turns so that you get a solid feel for it.