Sleeping facilities in vehicles, gas mileage and weight of cargo

I found a nice moving van and want to turn it into a mobile base. It won’t let me set out a rollmat in the storage area. I set down blankets to sleep on and the game told me “sleeping on this grass is uncomfortable”. There are no options to 'i’nstall a bed in the vehicle menu. Do I need a higher skill in construction or mechanics? Do I just build a bed in there using the non-vehicle construction menu?

One more thing, does the weight of your cargo affect your gas mileage?

Until you get the skill to install a bed, seats are pretty easy to install, reinstall a reclining seat and you can sleep in that, and dropping blankets on the location will also help.

Dropping a blanket/rollmat etc drops them onto the ground or into the storage. It’s wierd.

“Until you get the skill to install a bed”

What skill is that? Mechanics?

Yes, mechanics, also make sure you have the material and tools for installing the bed, and you can’t install it into a space which has a aisle, or something else in the way. If you do a search in the install menu and can’t find the item you want to install, that means you can’t install that item there because it is an invalid location.

Great, thanks guys!

Yes additional weight hurts fuel efficiency.

Currently it doesn’t, at least not noticeably so.

It was enough to spoil the fuel efficiency tests until it was locked down, and I’d guess it would be quite significant if you compared an empty vehicle to an identical one stuffed with a survivor-load of miscellany. If you compare with and without a handful of items, I would expect the effect to be infentesemal.

I seem to recall that the comfort of a car bed isn’t meaningfully higher than a car seat, so you should be fine just sleeping in the car seat.

Yeah, I’ve never had a problem with sleeping in regular seats, not even reclining.

I got bored and decided to check the code. The tile you’re trying to sleep modifies your sleepiness as follows:
Regular Bed + 5
Makeshift Bed, Vehicle Bed, Cot, Sofa or Thick Webbing(With Webwalker Mutation) +4
Rollmat, Fur Rollmat, Armchair, Improvised Shelter or Vehicle Seat(Any) +3
Straw Bad, Hay, or Tatami +2
Floor, Waxed Floor, or any Carpet +1

Having the Chloromorphosis mutation gives a +10 on dirt, dirt mounds, pits and shallow pits. You get a +5 on grass. Anywhere else, including vehicles and furniture, gives a -999, so basically impossible.

Having the web weaver or web spinner mutation gives you a +10 on thick web and a -999 everywhere else.

Not having any of those things present imposes a penalty on your sleepiness equal to the move cost of the tile you’re on. So the most important thing is making sure you have anything to sleep on, and the difference between a vehicle bed is only 1 point, +4 vs +3.