Expansion Library — All of Human Knowledge, Offline

This guide is the portable core — under 600 MB, fits any pen drive. When you have internet, you can pull down the rest of recorded knowledge to read forever offline: the whole of Wikipedia, all of Project Gutenberg, medical encyclopedias, repair manuals, dictionaries and more — using free, open ZIM files and the Kiwix reader.

The idea: keep the small, hand-curated survival guide on your drive always. Then, while the grid is up, download the giant reference archives below. Once they're on your drive, they work with no internet, forever — exactly like this guide. A 256 GB drive or a cheap external SSD can hold all of Wikipedia with images and all of Project Gutenberg combined.

How it works — 3 steps

Install Kiwix — the free offline reader for ZIM files. kiwix.org/download — Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, or Kiwix-Serve to share over a local network. Install it now, while you have internet.

Download the ZIM files you want from the cards below (each is one self-contained file). Save them to your drive alongside this guide.

Open them in Kiwix — point Kiwix at the .zim files and browse, search, and read offline. No account, no internet, no expiry.

Build a Survival Drive — what fits

Drive	What you can carry
This guide only	~0.6 GB — the curated survival core (any USB stick ever made)
32 GB stick	Guide + Medical Wikipedia + Simple Wikipedia + Wikivoyage + iFixit + a Gutenberg subset
128 GB stick	Add full Project Gutenberg (every public-domain book) + Wikipedia "nopic"
256 GB+ / SSD	Add full Wikipedia with images — essentially the whole library of humanity in your pocket

Pen-Drive Essentials small & high-value

The highest survival-value archives that fit on a modest drive.

The Big Archives needs a large drive / SSD

The complete sets. Sizes are approximate and grow over time — pick the flavour that fits your drive.

💡

Tip: Wikipedia comes in three sizes — maxi (full, with images), nopic (full text, no images — ~75% smaller), and mini (article intros only — ~95% smaller). Pick by how much room you have. The download links below open the official Kiwix directory where you choose the flavour and the latest date.

Offline Maps & Navigation

Your phone's GPS works with no signal and no SIM. The GPS chip listens to satellites directly — once you've downloaded the maps while online, you can navigate offline, anywhere, forever, even in full grid-down. A whole-UK offline map is well under 2 GB. Download your region now.

🗺️ Open the built-in offline map — renders right in this browser, no app needed. Prototype region: Northern England & Yorkshire. Add any region with extract-map.sh.

UK map, by detail	Approx size
One region / county (e.g. your local area)	~100–400 MB
Whole UK — navigation (Organic Maps)	under 1 GB
Whole UK + topographic contour lines (OsmAnd)	~2–2.5 GB
Raw OSM data — Great Britain `.osm.pbf`	~2.0 GB

Scripted download (optional, recommended for the big files)

Prefer the command line? get-knowledge.sh in the repo is a one-button downloader for these archives — no need to hunt for the exact dated filename yourself. Built for connections that will drop mid-transfer over a multi-hour or multi-day download: it checkpoints progress, resumes exactly where it stopped, retries with backoff, and verifies the finished file against the SHA-256 Kiwix publishes for it (not just its size).

# the one-button case: full Wikipedia, with images (~115 GB) -> ./zim/
sh get-knowledge.sh wikipedia-maxi

# any other archive on this page — see the exact names:
sh get-knowledge.sh list

# check a download already on disk is intact and readable, no re-download:
sh get-knowledge.sh --recheck

# grab a whole curated bundle in one run (skips what's already verified if
# it's interrupted and re-run): medical + travel + textbooks + repair +
# dictionary + primary texts + the four survival-specific archives above
sh get-library.sh core

# or hand-pick several: sh get-library.sh wikimed gutenberg wikibooks

Every archive lands in ./zim/. If kiwix-tools is installed (brew install kiwix-tools on macOS, apt install kiwix-tools on Debian/Raspberry Pi), the scripts also build zim/library.xml automatically — a combined catalogue so kiwix-serve --library zim/library.xml serves every downloaded archive from one page with search across all of them, instead of opening each .zim individually in the Kiwix desktop app.

ZIM files and Kiwix are produced by the Kiwix non-profit and are free to use and share. Wikipedia content is CC BY-SA; Project Gutenberg texts are public domain. Browse the full catalogue at library.kiwix.org.