Nero Buys's Alone Season 13 Gear List: All 10 Items

Note: Alone Season 13, the show's first international World Championship edition, was still airing when this was written, and Nero Buys's placement had not yet been recorded in the sourced data.

Nero Buys is an army veteran and bushcraft survival enthusiast from New South Wales, one of the ten contestants pulled from seven countries for Season 13's first-ever international cast. He founded an outdoor youth program and tested his survival skills in Canada in 2024, ahead of filming near Aklavik in the Northwest Territories. Buys's own page has more on his background, and our Season 13 guide covers the full field. One sourcing note: season 13 gear lists so far come from a single detailed piece of pre-season coverage rather than multiple confirmed sources, so treat the specifics as reported until the season fills in the record.

The full list

Item	Category	Notes
Sleeping bag	Sleep system	Brand not recorded
Ax	Cutting tool	Brand not recorded
Multitool	Utility	Brand not recorded
Paracord	Utility	Brand not recorded
Fishing line and hooks	Fishing	Brand not recorded
Bow and arrows	Hunting	Brand not recorded
Cooking pot	Cooking	Brand not recorded
Snare wire	Trapping	Brand not recorded
Salt	Food	Brand not recorded
Ferro rod	Fire starting	Brand not recorded

This is a fully sourced list of ten categories, but none of Buys's items carry a specific brand or model in the underlying research. Where a brand isn't recorded, it's stated plainly rather than guessed. For a closer look at the less common picks, see the salt block and ferro rod pages, along with bow and arrows.

The two unusual choices

Two things stand out against the standard 10-item spread most contestants pick. Buys skipped a saw entirely, leaving the axe as his only cutting tool for felling and processing wood, a gap that most contestants avoid by carrying both. In its place, he brought salt, an item that shows up rarely in recorded gear lists and does nothing for shelter or fire; it's a food and preservation pick, useful for curing meat or fish for longer storage or simply making a limited diet more tolerable over a long run.

As a bushcraft enthusiast who founded his own outdoor youth program, Buys clearly had reasons for both calls. Skipping the saw suggests confidence in axe-only wood processing, and packing salt over a second cutting tool or a backup fire source suggests he was planning for a long game rather than a fast one, prioritizing food quality and morale over redundancy. Whether that trade paid off depends on how his run actually went, which wasn't yet recorded as of the most recent data pull.

How it compares across the field

Season 13 drew its ten contestants from Canada, the United States, Australia, Slovenia, Portugal, Wales, and New Zealand. As of the most recent recorded data, only two placements were logged: Dave Booth (ninth, 4 days) and David Young (tenth, 3 days). Buys and six others, including fellow Australians and the rest of the international cast, had no outcome recorded yet.

Across the 101 of 187 Alone contestants who have a recorded gear list at all, salt appears on very few of them, most contestants use their pot and fishing or trapping gear to cover food, and add nothing else for taste or preservation. Buys's list is the more specialized pick in this batch of Season 13 posts. For the official rules on gear selection, see alone-rules, and for how the rest of the recorded cast built their kits, the full Season 13 gear roundup has the complete list.