When you are new, you need gear as a crutch. There's nothing wrong with that, we all have to start somewhere. As you gain more and more experience, you will learn what gear is important, and what isn't. You will learn what neat survival tricks you saw in a top ten bushcraft tips video work, and what are a waste of time. Put simply, outdoorsmanship skills are something that you will develop continuously, and the longer you do it, the more you will change up your kit (to a point).
SO, starting off by going out and buying all the fancy things that experts recommend you to have is what we in da bidniss call "a monumentally retarded idea". When you start out, start out with cheap shit. Start out with Walmart brand chinesium garbage, and put it through some easy camping. Take your Ozark trail bag, knife, and sleeping gear, and go for an overnight hike. It is utterly imperative that you gain experience before you get good equipment. After doing this a few times, you will begin to realize that certain pieces of kit that looked really cool, or sounded really useful, are utterly useless to you. Give them away. Keep doing this until you start to see which pieces of kit are absolutely necessary to your comfort and survival. Once you have enough experience to stop throwing shit out, THEN you should start buying the good stuff.
Once you start getting a solid kit together, start putting it through more intensive outings. Instead of an overnight, take three days off and do a portion of the Appalachian trail (or whatever European equivalent you overseas niggers have). Deliberately camp in horrific weather. Camp in 40°F temperatures with pouring rain. Camp in 95°F temperatures and intense humidity. Climb mountains and trudge through dense underbrush. Put yourself and your kit through hell. After a long while of this, you will have what you need to get you through any environment.
YouTube videos and top ten gear lists will not teach you anything. Until you go out and learn, all that "knowledge" is USELESS. Whenever I see people with bags full of shiny, unused, expensive gear, I point and laugh because they suck at everything, and their gear won't save them when they hit a rough patch. Hippies, train hoppers, hitchhikers, and homeless bums all manage to live nomadic and almost purely outdoor lifestyles utilizing only the cheapest shit on the market, because they prioritize experience over gear. You can do it as well, and then be better because most of them are 80iq.
In summary, only listen to gear recommendations if you have experience. Inexperienced fags should buy chinesium until they know what they're doing.
The bare minimum tools are a knife, axe, and saw. Ideally, you want all 3 for harvesting firewood. The saw is useful for breaking branches and logs down into manageable lengths, while the axe and knife are better served for splitting and making kindling.
It depends on the type of outing you're on, but for longer hikes you don't really want to bring all of that. It's nice to have an axe and saw when you're car camping (hell, me and my buddies bring chainsaws), but if you're on a thru hike, or even just a long ass backpacking trip, you're going to want to go a lot lighter. Personally, I run one small knife (blad about the size of a finger. Doesn't need to be full tang) and one large knife (something like a kabar, must be full tang). The small knife is for any precision cutting, like cleaning a fish or cutting twigs. The large knife is for batoning wood, and light bushwhacking.
You can't really use these for logs, but a trick to compensate (for wood up to the rough thickness of your arm) is to find two live trees close together, and to run the dead log or branch in between them. Utilizing the law of the lever, you can snap branches down into conveniently sized chunks without the need for tools. Hell, sometimes if a branch is dead on the ground and too thick to break by hand, you can just wack it against a tree at roughly where you want it to break, and it will have the same effect. If you're too noodle armed for either of these methods, you can always just take longer branches and logs, and position them so that only part of them is in the fire. That will let combustion do the cutting for you.
If you want a cooking fire or survival fire, these tricks work great.
You haven't lived until you've taken a drink of water freshly melted from a glacier.
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Based. Drinking freshwater straight is so nice. In the Appalachians, a lot of the water is spring water, so you can drink it straight by the gallon without any worries (but only in the mountains. Once you hit the plains, that shit is tainted. I got dysentery from it once lmao).
Just passed through glacier state park on my current hike, and damn, snow melt water is so nice. Even in the valleys there, the water is so clear you can count the rocks at the bottom of 10+ feet deep creeks. Tastes good too. I got a little more than I would have liked though, as I fell while trying to ford a waist deep creek. That shit is COLD.
I don't even filter or purify if I'm above a valley. So far it's always been safe once you get away from a main creek/river, and start drinking from the small streams that feed it. (Please, anyone reading, do not do this. I am retarded and my luck will eventually run out. Purify your water.)
