Build 42 Vehicles: Hotwire, Fuel, Trailers & Work-Van Loot

How Do You Start a Car You Have No Key For? Cross-Verified

The gate is confirmed identically in both guides and matches the anchor already published on our Electrical skill guide: hotwiring needs Electrical 1 and Mechanics 2, or the Burglar occupation which skips the gates. The loop is seat → vehicle radial → Hotwire Engine → start, and a working battery is still required underneath it all. One guide adds that attempts make noise and can trip alarms, and that better-condition cars are harder — we treat the alarm-chance scaling as single-sourced until a third write-up lands.

Keys beat all of it: glove boxes, ignition, visors, nearby corpses, and the house that owns the driveway. A key start is quiet; a hotwire is a noise event with a skill check attached.

What Changed About Fuel in Build 42? Cross-Verified

Vehicles run inside B42’s new fluid rules, and the two guides agree on every load-bearing point:

• Siphoning requires a hose — carry one or you are pouring from cans.
• Gas pumps need power — stations work until shutoff; after that, powering the pumps with a generator keeps the underground reserve accessible.
• Gasoline evaporates from open containers — sealed cans, stored ventilated and outdoors.
• Plan routes like food — a thirsty sports car between towns is a trap; keep a can in the trunk, not only at base. The full fuel-system picture is in the water collection guide’s pump discussion.

Driving itself stays a noise magnet: engine sound pulls zombies, hitting them damages the car over time, and both guides’ rule is identical — use cars to leave, not to mow, and kill the engine when parked or the battery dies overnight.

Why Are Work Vans the Real Loot Update? Three-Source

The official Build 42.20 feature overview is the anchor: “business-related work vans — each loaded with its own special and specific loot,” plus location-specific liveries. Both guides then catalogue the same pattern from different angles — trade-branded step vans, Valulines and pickups carrying the tools of their business (blacksmith, masonry, butchers, mobile libraries, craft supplies), with per-container loot tables unpublished. The shared practical rule falls out of it: open every weird business vehicle you see — a florist step van is a container roll, not scenery.

Trailers move the same economy: general and covered trailers for stone, metal and logs, livestock trailers for moving animals by road. Both guides agree towing exists and behaves as a system with its own limits; the one-source specifics (exact trunk capacities, trailer detach thresholds) are held pending a third written source rather than printed here.

What 42.21 changed for drivers is official, not community-reported. The patch notes say the most common complaint since stable launch was the new XXL trees “occasionally getting in the way of the player — especially when driving”, and that 42.21 makes them “cutaway better for players in vehicles”, stop hiding the houses and furniture they overhang, and raises their overall transparency. TIS calls it an improvement rather than a finish line.

Three other 42.21 entries matter on the road: driving on high ping (~150+) no longer lets the map fail to load in front of you; walkie-talkie VOIP works while driving again; and a cluster of vehicle-seat exploits is closed — you can no longer collect sand and gravel, make chum, drag corpses into inventory, or stash animals in your inventory through the passenger seat. Player-built campfires also stop colliding with vehicles, so your fire pit can sit by the driveway without eating your bumper.

Sources & Verification

Single-source numbers (capacities, detach behavior) are named as pending and not asserted. The driving changes above are quoted from the official 42.21 changelist.