Best Slingshot for Alone-Style Survival, per the Show

A slingshot is one of the rarest picks in the entire gear record. Across all 19 season and spinoff files tracked, only three contestants are documented carrying one at all: Sam Larson and Dustin Feher on season 1, and Zachary Fowler, who won season 3 with one. That is three picks out of 187 tracked contestants, and exactly one of those three won.

What the one winning pick teaches

Fowler's item is logged as a "custom-made slingshot with 2 elastic bands," and the catalog's own product entry, attributed to a Scout XT frame, notes explicitly that his was custom-modified and that he is "the only known winner to use a slingshot." Both of those details point the same direction: nobody has won this show by grabbing a slingshot off a shelf and packing it as-is. The one documented winning example was built or altered by the contestant to fit how they intended to hunt with it, small game and birds at close range, not the deer- or fish-scale food sources that dominate the rest of the ten-item list.

Sam Larson and Dustin Feher both carried a slingshot on season 1 without it being singled out as a deciding factor in either result; Larson placed 2nd and Feher 5th. Neither entry names a brand or a modification, which is the more typical pattern for this item when it is used at all: a plain slingshot, carried alongside more conventional food-gathering gear rather than in place of it.

Documented slingshot carriers

Contestant	Season	Result	Documented detail
Sam Larson	US 1	2nd, 55 days	Slingshot
Dustin Feher	US 1	5th, 8 days	Slingshot
Zachary Fowler	US 3	Won, 87 days	Custom-made, 2 elastic bands (catalog: Scout XT, custom-modified)

That is the entirety of the documented record for this item. Popularity trackers cited in the catalog rate it "rarely-picked," and this data agrees. It is also worth noting what is missing: unlike the primitive bow (which the show documents as required to be "predominately made of wood") or the gill net (which has documented, if conflicting, mesh and dimension limits), no official rule for the slingshot is recorded anywhere in the source data. There is nothing here suggesting production restricts the item beyond the general ten-slot cap; it simply is not a popular enough pick to have generated a documented rule at all.

Scale is the other honest context. A primitive bow shows up on 59 gear-list entries in this same dataset, a gill net on 15, and trapping wire on more than 50. A slingshot's three entries are not a rounding error next to those numbers, they are close to the floor of what "documented at all" looks like on this show.

What actually decides it

With a sample size of three, this is not an item where the show's history can hand you a confident recommendation the way it can for an axe or a saw. What it can tell you honestly is that the one contestant who won with a slingshot did not use a stock one. If you are drawn to this item specifically, the documented pattern says to treat a commercial frame as a starting point to modify, not a finished tool, and to expect it to supplement rather than replace a bow, gill net, or trapping wire, all of which show up on far more winning lists than this one does.

The slingshot gear page has the full catalog entry and pricing note. See the rules breakdown for the complete approved item list, and Zachary Fowler's season 3 recap for the rest of his winning loadout.