you really should try making one way devices for snares, or making fishhooks, or removing a fishhook, with just a knife, The vice grip-wire cutters of the Crunch are quite useful. So are the 2 file blades of course (once you add one of them) for sharpening the saw and shovel. So is the chisel, the hook/scoop knife, the flathead end of one of the file blades, and the awl. One screwdriver is needed, so that you can fit other handles to the E-tool. One handle needs to be a long one, to let you stand up and dig or move snow with it. The other, right-angled branch sort of handle lets you convert the shovel into a pick/adze/hoe. Having dumped the SS serrated knife blade for a carbon steel regular blade lets you whittle better and then you can also sharpen it with a rock, and drive sparks with it, if need be. The shovel can do quite a bit of the heavier knife work.
The main thing to understand, tho, is to forget about the log cabin bs and to keep the shelter mobile, moving it to the easily-gathered wood, as well as using a Dakota fire pit to not waste fuel. If you set up the shelter to face the 9am sun, half a removable, reflective liner for your jacket, and take part of your 12x12 tarp as a clear PEVA plastic, you can create a Korchanski supershelter,-Yukon chair. Using the greenhouse effect of the sun's shining thru the clear "door" of the shelter, to be reflected by the jacket liner, your shelter will be 30F warmed at noon than it was at dawn. This can let you sleep from 11 am to 5 pm, while doing things at night to generate metabolic heat. They give you a light for the camera, a headlamp and change out your batteries once a week, when they come to do medical checks and swap video cards.
Mongolia's summer is just 2 months long, with one month each of spring and fall. They drop you in mid-summer. So you've got less than 2 months before the first freeze. There's no way in hell you can gather enough wood to get you thru a Mongolian winter, even if you COULD somehow gather and preserve enough food to do so. So you have to go with the underground shelter. Understand that once it's freezing there, it's REALLY frozen. So, once it is consistently below freezing temps in daylight hours and if you've wet down the dirt that you excavated (while it' was still warm) the walls and roof of the dugout are proof from bears and wolves. It's your little doorway that will be the weak point. You'll be using the backpack and the cameracase, stuffed with dry grass, as the main closure element of your doorway, with loose dirt and dry grass all around those 2 items completing the project. You have to be able to come out once a week, so as to stone boil and melt more ice and snow for drinking water and you'll be eating dried fish and jerky while in there. You'll be able to rehydrate the flesh, tho, given that you'll have 5+ gallons of water in the legs and sleeves of the rainsuit. You want only a 1/2" hole above your door and another one at the bottom of the foot end,for ventilation potential and even then, you'll want to plug those holes most of the time, once it gets truly cold
I seriously doubt that anyone else will last even a month into really cold weather, if they didn't make and use netting and didn't make such a grass-stuffed dugout. Which is why it's worth the gamble to take the 12x12 tarp instead of the sleeping bag. It's warm for the first month that you're there, so there's no need of the sleeping bag at all during that time. But there's a LOT of need of the netting that you can cut/tear the tarp and make, so as to grab all the fish possible before they return to the lakes for the winter.
Nothing is perfect in life and this show has been very carefully set up to force people to break weak, quite early. Then they pick the weakest link sort of people who apply, too. They'll never let anyone on this show who knows how to make it last 4-5 months. Doing so would cost them a million $ out of what would have been profits. Also, people like Canterbury, Graham, Lundin and the like will never be on this show. Not cause they'd do well, but because they themselves know damne well that they wouldnt! Their internationally televised failures would cost them a LOT of students and sales of their books and videos.