Avoiding Fuel tank explosion / mitigating its damage

Game Talk The Bunker
1

Hi everyone. I play CDDA for some months now but this is my first forum post. Sorry in advance for my bad english, it isn’t my primary language.

Last night I’ve had a very good run and was wandering around with my car. It was 100% military composite armor, with welding rig, kitchen, 60L of clean water, in other words, it was my mobile base. After returning from looting a shop, before I even started the engine, something hit my fuel tank and it exploded, insta-killing me. I had some good armor (heavy survivor suit) but torso hp got to 0 in one turn.

That was extremely frustrating. The same char, on the beginning, got into a bad situation with two broken legs and two broken arms, 200+ pain, and grabbed by two zombies. (congrats on the grabbing mechanic, very realistic and funny). I couldn’t hit, i couldn’t wield my guns. Even in the face of certain death he managed to crawl to a nearby bush so he could light it and burn the zombies down. So surviving this difficult fight was very fun, nothing like helplessly burning to death in one turn. There’s nothing i could have done, except maybe designing my car in another way, which is the purpose of this post.

I’ll start with a mea-culpa. The fuel tank was next to the driver’s seat. This was dumb, but i was not expecting it to explode, of course. My car was 4 frame long, from seat to trunk door. So some questions:

  1. If the tank was mounted in the last tile of my car, could I have survived the explosion? My entire loot would be lost, though?

  2. The metal tank was a 60L one and it was nearly full. A smaller tank could have saved my life? Does the damage from the explosion accounts the amount of fuel?

  3. Or should I be even more cautious: a) mounting externally(does it pay to let it easier to get hit by turrets, chicken walkers etc ?); or even b) surrounding an internally mounted with boards and some armor?

  4. Or should I go environment friendly (only eletric motors) ?

  5. In fact, vehicle bases are still viable?

That’s it. Sorry for the long read. Edit: corrected typos.

2

If you want to be perfectly safe, then option 4. The best set-up I’ve had was two enhanced electric motors and an array of 6 upgraded solar panels. That’ll should provide you with all the fuel and power you need. It’s also a lot quieter than combustion and refuels itself.

3

Electric is a good solution once you get enough storage batteries and solar panels to make it truly sustainable.

As far as gas tanks go, you might have survived if it weren’t on an immediately adjacent tile. You probably shouldn’t put anything holding fuel on an “edge” tile of a vehicle where it can take a direct collision, though. Maybe you could make your next car a little bit longer and try to place it under the back seat a few tiles away from you next time.

Unless this has happened to a lot of other players, I’m going to assume this happens pretty rarely though. I’ve never had my own vehicle explode with me in it before.

Vehicle bases are still very viable. The majority of players seem to use them. There are some planned nerfs to fuel availability and the difficulty to make one, but unless the changes are drastic I think the majority of players will keep using mobile bases.

4

The only time I ever had this happen was when I tried run over one of the burrowing enemies from the Arcana mod… apparently, they don’t get hit until the pop up to attack you when adjacent…

But yeah, fuel tanks need to be 1) not on the outside of the vehicle, 2) not adjacent to the outside of the vehicle, and 3) not adjacent to you.

Number 3 can be somewhat safely skipped if you follow 1 and 2 religiously.