Vehicles

There are no working cars left. Everything you see on the roads is a derelict. A vehicle you drive is one you rebuilt with your own hands.

Restoring one

• Get a frame tag: pry one off a wreck with a toolkit, find one in loot, or buy one at the Haven Motor Pool.
• Start the restoration at a garage bay: the Motor Pool, Joshua Road scrapyard, Rogers Salvage, or a vehicle hangar of your own.
• Craft the parts at the garage and fit them. The last part makes it yours, and it comes with its own key. The crew rolls it out and parks it in the yard outside the bay.

Faction vehicles look intact, but they're locked shut and can't be entered, searched or towed.

Boats

Boats are rebuilt the same way, from hulls left at the marinas, the piers and out on the Alamo Sea. Most of them are still tied up where their owners left them.

• Swim or walk out to a derelict hull and pry the hull ID plate with a toolkit. You learn how that boat goes together, and half the time the plate is good enough to start a restoration.
• Take the plate to a boat yard: Puerto del Sol, the Galilee pier on the Alamo Sea, or the slipway at Paleto Bay. A garage won't take a hull, and a boat yard only works on boats.
• Each boat needs its own marine parts, built at any garage bay or boat yard: outboards, a sterndrive or a diesel, fuel tanks, propellers and hull repair kits. A small skiff's outboard pull-starts and needs no battery.
• She launches at the yard with her own key. Open the vehicle menu aboard with I to drop anchor: she holds where you leave her, even after a restart. Without it she drifts.
• Fish from a boat over deep water and the bites come faster, the fish are bigger, and the rare ones show more.

Driving

Engines never start themselves. Hold Y to crank, and tap it to switch off. Cold weather, a flat battery and bad fuel make it harder, and cranking too long floods it. Buckle up with B in any seat, driver or passenger: you hear the belt click home, and the dash shows Belt on or Belt off. Unbelted, a hard head-on crash at 35 mph or more puts you through the windshield. Open the vehicle menu with I for the trunk, glovebox, lights, push, wipers and repairs.

Fuel

Every gas station is dry. Fuel comes from siphoning wrecks, derelicts and other people's tanks with a hose and a container, from rare aircraft crashes, and from what you make yourself in a fuel still. Homemade fuel burns faster, wears the engine and makes it stall more.

Weather and ground

Wet roads take longer to stop on, packed snow much longer, and ice is treacherous. Mud, sand and snow dig spinning wheels in, so go gently or get someone to push. Sharp rubble punctures road tires, and deep water can wreck the engine for good. The dead slow you down if you drive into a crowd, and at speed they wreck the radiator and the glass.

Keys, locks and alarms

Your key locks, unlocks and starts your vehicle, and anyone holding it can do the same. Keys drop with your pack when you die, so a stolen key is a stolen car. Your vehicle stays exactly where you parked it. Without a key, a thief has to break a window or hotwire it, and your alarm draws every infected within about 390 feet.

It stays in the world

There are no garages that keep a car for you and nothing brings it back to you. A vehicle is wherever it was left, through every restart, with its dents, its paint and dirt, the doors it lost, its fuel, its battery and whatever is in the trunk and the glovebox. The garage's Your vehicles list shows where each of yours is. To fit upgrades, drive it into the bay.

• A vehicle that is destroyed stays where it died as a burnt-out wreck, and anyone can loot its trunk. Hook it behind a tow truck and haul it into a garage bay, and the crew can rebuild it there for a repair kit. Left alone, it rusts away after about three weeks.
• A vehicle nobody drives, starts, locks or opens for six weeks is written off. It goes flat and dead where it stands, and it belongs to nobody after that.
• You can keep up to six vehicles out in the world at once, wrecks and restorations in progress included.
• Some vehicles get left behind for anyone to take, like a convoy truck after an ambush. Start it and the keys are still in it: it's yours from then on, and it stays where you leave it like any other.
• A derelict you tow away and drop somewhere else stays where you dropped it.

Getting out leaves the engine running, and a running engine is loud.