Making a Supercar: Guide

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Vehicles are very useful to have; whether for smashing zombies or having a joyride. But, you don't want to make a regular car. You want a supercar. Cataclysm: DDA provides a quite robust system for piecing together your own vehicle in any shape or size, from a solar-powered tricycle to a semi-truck covered in spiked plates.

Required Tools and Parts

You will need, at minimum, these things to build your own car or supercar:

• A high enough mechanics skill to install the parts you desire
• An engine (or more) (faster the better; V8 engine is the best)
• At least 3 wheels
• Vehicle controls
• At least one, and probably more, steel frames.
• At least one seat
• A welder, and some batteries to power it. Lots of batteries. Alternatively, an integrated toolset
• A wrench, or again an integrated toolset
• Fuel - be it hydrogen, gasoline, or plutonium cells.
• A hacksaw

You may want other fun parts, you can see more parts at Vehicles. The integrated toolset is highly recommended if you can find one as they use a lot less batteries and perform the jobs of many different tools in one neat package. If you pick the android trait and start with a toolset, thank your lucky stars.

• Armor (steel/superalloy/spiked/hard), spiked does additional damage to zombies.

Where To Start

The easiest way to get parts is to salvage them from other vehicles, therefore it is highly recommended to source a working vehicle first so that you can move between wrecked cars that may be far apart quickly. Look for a car that has a working engine and enough wheels by examining it, the vehicle interface will tell you the condition of the car's various parts by moving the cursor around with the movement keys. If it doesn't have any gas you'll need to find some, either by filling a bottle or other container at a gas station by examining the pump, or by examining a car and siphoning the tank with a rubber hose. Thenexamine your vehicle again and while the section with the gas tank is selected press f to fill the tank. When you have a small amount of gas, you can drive it to a gas station to fill it up to 100%. Now you have a working vehicle, you have the option of travelling around to collect the parts you need to start from scratch or to augment the already functional vehicle.

The next step would be to gain the mechanic skill required. You could give yourself level 1 in character creation and this would be enough to remove parts from cars which levels your mechanics skill pretty quickly. Alternatively, you can scavenge and Read the "Under the Hood" (beginner) and "Mechanical Mastery" (advanced) books to bring your skills up. Starting with the Wannabe Mechanic profession starts you off with Under the Hood.

Gathering Parts

You have many options to gather parts for a vehicle. The most obvious and recommended is other vehicles, and with the correct tools in your inventory you can strip down broken down cars for all the parts you would need for a functional vehicle. There are many broken down vehicles in and around towns, including some of the more rare vehicles like bubble cars and solar powered cars. You will of course have to contend with the inhabitant of towns and it may not be the safest option. Your best bet is to travel along roads, where you will find sparse numbers of wrecked vehicles. If you plan on removing a part and immediately installing it on your current vehicle, park alongside the wreck no more than two tiles away and stand between them to remove the parts you desire; this way you can simply move two tiles over to your vehicle and install them straight off the ground. Note that parts cannot be removed if something is mounted to them, it can be tricky to completely dismantle a vehicle without running into this problem, but the general rule of thumb is start with the wheels and remove the outer parts moving inwards.

You can also find parts in a garage as well as tools and other supplies such as jerry cans. Having a jerry can full of gas in your trunk might get you out of a pinch someday. Garages typically have an unfinished vehicle inside which you could scavenge from or items in lockers or on counters. Be aware some parts are very heavy, so if you want to lug and engine or steel plating out you should probably park somewhere nearby.

Public Works are another great source of tools and sometimes parts. They usually have a working flatbed truck with a little fuel in as well, it's well worth raiding one if you see it on your map. Farms are another option for gathering tools and maybe a working truck, but less likely.

Planning Your Design

You should decide early on what your vehicle is going to be. Super fast quad bike? Drag racer? RV? Tank? These are all possibilities, as well as hybrid designs as you may choose. Planning your design will lead to less headaches and backtracking later on. Some important things to note when planning your vehice:

• Only one tank can be placed per tile
• Only one engine can be placed per tile
• Nothing else can be placed on door tiles
• A tile is considered "enclosed" (ie. not explosed to the elements) if it contains a board, a closed door, a windscreen, a roof or an RV kitchen unit.
• You can attach plating to just about anything
• The more wheels and engines you add, the worse the fuel efficiency but the faster and the less likely to break down it will be
• If your driver's seat doesn't have a seatbelt you will go flying through the windscreen sooner or later so make sure there is one installed

Choosing Your Engine

V8 engines are the biggest and most powerful in the game, so if you need a lot of horsepower then these are what you want. V6 engines are the most common and found in most cars and trucks you will find, they are mid-powered and when stacked will still provide a lot of power. Electric motors are reasonably common, being fuelled by solar panels and storage batteries and while they don't pack much of a punch they are much much quieter than gas guzzling engines (but not silent). There are other more exotic engines such as the plasma engine or the minireactor, however these are going to be tough to locate and even tougher to keep fuelled up. If you want a big, noisy gas guzzling truck or something speedy then you want to hunt down a V8 or install several V6s, or if you want something small and more stealthy you should install an electric engine or one of the many motorbike engines.

Choosing Your Wheels

Your wheels should match in size, as you might expect. Installing "wide" variants of the same size is perfectly fine (eg. installing a 20" wide wheel alongside a 20" wheel). Finding cars with full sets of wheels is not uncommon, the Semi Truck can have a maximum of ten wheels if you manage to find one.

Wide wheels, while heavier than regular ones don't trigger mine when rolling over them, and should be preferred to normal wheels.