Little update with my run so far.
I found a sports car with a pristine engine and instead of yanking it out to replace a swat vehicle or security van’s diesel engine with a V12 gasoline one, I decided i’d go for a sorta mad max in style type deal.
So I ended up repairing the car fully, replacing a seat with a bed and welding armor plating to the car with the plating that I found from an APC nearby. Slapped four solar panels, two storage battery packs, a recharging station, a large electric motor on the front (moved the engine and motor a space back to protect it from impacts), a military composite ram, replaced the two trunks with cargo spaces, and finally welded a steel jerrycan full of water to the back.
I pulled most of these electric utilities from a cart that I had made by attaching wheels to a cargo space and slapping a charging station, a car battery, a solar panel and finally an electric control unit on it to have some sort of mobile shopping cart with a lot of storage and could charge the batteries on my arc welder.
I was going for a minimalist style of play, since I looted the holy trinity of reach weapons which were a pike +1, a naginata +1 (looted from a goblin encampment) and a lucerne hammer that I made in my previous world, I basically had all my bases covered.
Simply boiling the water at a river to replenish my jerrycan supply, and using a cast iron pot/pan + survivor mess kit and a heat cube (which is a magical item that provides infinite heat charges for cooking and lighting) I pretty much had everything set.
No need for a big fancy kitchen, no forge and welder, I won’t be making new weapons nor will I need the welder since my recharging station is charging batteries for the arc welder, and no need for a metric ton of different types of ammo/guns/melee weapons when I only needed (and used) three. Just have what I need, and that’s it.
My only real issue here is keeping food preserved, since I want to maximize space and keep my two cargo spaces.
In any case, I ran through a couple of cities, and a few handfuls of towns and villages and got myself well-supplied. I’m thinking of pruning some unnecessary items to save some space, but for now i’m based at a large rural house/homestead area. They had two chickens of which I made a wooden pet carrier from disassembled furniture inside the house, and befriended a horse to see if I could ride it but I was too heavy for it, apparently.
Anyway, I made four smoking racks and a charcoal kiln by smashing rocks with a pickaxe in the surrounding forest, and felled a tree for it. I’m gonna fill up the racks with another horse that’s been clomping nearby and see if 80L of space can reasonably smoke a whole horse and dehydrate the rest.
In all honesty, i’m really liking the small and compact frame that I have. The 4 tile wide vehicle makes maneuvering cities a breeze and I don’t have to fumble around with trying to get my wide and long swat truck around tight corners or between wrecks.