First off, there’s no “Deathmobile” tag. Shame on you, Kevin.
Anyway, this thread is for collecting information on Deathmobiles, or in this case; Mid-sized vehicles used for both exploration and living. If I can find some good info, I’ll be using it on my future guide to Deathmobiles. So please, if you have anything, anything you think might be valuable information in the art of building Deathmobiles, please comment below.
“Rollers” are a unique vehicle attachment which can be found on the “Road Roller” vehicle and probably crafted at high mechanic levels. Tracks are what you find on tanks and bulldozers. They have a much higher durability than wheels and won’t fall off if you hit a sink hole.They are also very heavy, but there’s also a lighter rubber track variant but it’s harder to find.
I haven’t tried them yet, but If your note is to be believed then rollers sure sound like the way to go for your finished end-game deathmobile, over tracks and armored wheels.
My general advice; start from scratch. Think about what your completed deathmobile will look like and start by building basically just the cockpit portion. This way you can get a functional “mini-deathmobile” up and running as quickly as possible, and you don’t have to worry about the massive amount of material required for a full-scale project.
First row is spiked rams, then steel plated heavy duty frames, then more HDF with the reinforced windshield and headlight and armored front wheels, then the driver seat with mounted m249 and floor trunks on either side, then a passenger seat and rear armored tires, and three rear trunks.
Be sure to use all heavy duty frames for the front portion if you want to do any zombie ramming. Armored wheels, armor plating and reinforced headlights and windshields are also a must.
A diesel engine is probably a bad idea early game as diesel can be much harder to find.
Instead of building the RV kitchen, welding rig, vehicle forge and FoodCo buddy attach UPS conversion mods to all the appropriate tools and place them in a UPS compatible charging station. All the benefits of the workstations without tying up the vehicle space.
Vehicle power to UPS is only 10% efficient. If you find yourself doing a lot of crafting and already have plenty of room, then the actual rigs are worth a few extra vehicle tiles.
Turrets are awesome. They are your friend. So are cameras and atomic lamps.
would say the primary issue of UPSing the parts is batch crafting. a hotplate only has 200 charge so you can only batch craft up to 200 charge worth of the item, but if it’s rigged you can batch craft like 10000 charge.
Battery compartment mod is easily the best thing ever if you can find a car battery for each of the tools you want (plus a couple extra) and don’t mind swapping them out here and there. Which is actually a big pain in the ass considering it doesn’t let you pick which battery to install…
You can choose one other battery if one is in your inventory and one on the ground. Also the extra battery mod allows you to reload battery from car batteries?
Yes but the only way to ensure you put the right battery in is to have the empty one in your inventory and drop any others, since it will happily take them from a modified tool. I’ve installed fully charged batteries by accident countless times, since it seems to prefer those.
The storage battery mod allows you to install a small storage, motorbike or car battery into a modified tool and drain charges from that instead of using battery items.
Worth noting, generators have been added to the game. You can take any electric motor or an actual generator and install it in the same slot as your engine to quickly charge batteries. The gas or diesel engine just needs to be big enough to run the generator, otherwise the engine will start and then immediately stop.
I haven’t tinkered with these too much, so I’m not sure what the skill requirements are or if installing a generator significantly increases gas usage.
As a fan of light and mobile small to mid-size deathmobiles, I’ve found there’s three vehicle-mounted tools you really need; the welder, a chemistry/cooking station and a refrigerator. For everything else you can get by on standalone tools and the integrated toolset CBM (which is the most useful CBM in the game IMO).
Basically, generators/alternators passively sap a flat amount of your engine’s power. Installing one on a small engine powering a small vehicle will make a fairly substantial difference to it’s max speed and fuel consumption when moving or idling. If you have a large engine powering a large vehicle you probably won’t notice much difference unless you install all the different types of generator at once.
Rollers are ridiculously strong but IIRC weigh more than any other vehicle part. They will tank your max speed unless you’re sporting a v12 or some other high powered combination.
You can crush a couple tiles worth of trees without them breaking though, and they can chew zombies pretty much all day without a problem.
It should be that multiple axles would reduce your turn radius, and tank style treads allow you to spin in place, but there doesn’t seem to be any actual difference. Even very long vehicles like buses and flat-beds can turn on a dime. Wouldn’t be surprised if these mechanics are already planned for the game.
