Every vehicle

There are no military vehicles in vanilla Build 42; those come from mods.

The recipes come from the Laines Auto Manuals or the Mechanic job; see magazines. Tank capacity drops as the tank’s condition falls.

Livestock and horse trailers arrived with Build 42’s animals; see moving animals. Sports cars reportedly cannot tow.

Build 42 spawns liveried versions of the ordinary models, and the trunk loot follows the livery rather than the body. A police Nyala is still a Nyala, but its trunk rolls from the police list; a mail Step Van is a Step Van with postal loot. The paint tells you what you are looking at, and the owning building tells you where to look.

The trade vans are the Build 42 addition worth hunting. An electrician van is a plausible source of wire and electronics, a carpenter van of nails and tools, and a mobile library Step Van of books, all in a 160-capacity trunk. They sit outside the matching business, so a repair shop, lumber yard or landscaping office is worth a detour even when the shop itself has been picked clean. See loot locations for where those businesses are.

There is no ice cream van and no military truck in vanilla Build 42. Game files list a plain and a camouflage D6 and Bulldriver, but they roll ordinary heavy-duty loot, not army gear.

How good a car is when you find it is decided by sandbox settings and by the zone it spawned in, not by luck alone. On the default Apocalypse preset the vehicle options are: General Condition Normal, Initial Gas Low, Chance Has Gas Normal, Locked Vehicle Frequency Sometimes, Vehicle Alarms Frequency Rare, Vehicle Spawn Rate Low and Recent Survivor Vehicles Low. Outbreak and Rising raise the spawn rate to Normal. Siren Shutoff Hours defaults to 0, which means a car alarm wails until the battery dies, so a triggered alarm is a problem you leave behind rather than wait out. All of these can be changed in sandbox settings.

Engines are rolled per vehicle. A spawned engine gets about 60 to 100 percent of its model's engine force depending on the quality it rolls, and each model has a quality ceiling: the Cossette is listed at 90, the D6 and Bulldriver at 80, the Nyala and most vans at 70 and the Dart at 60. A high-quality engine starts more reliably in cold weather and is also harder to hotwire.

Keys spawn in one of a few places: in the ignition, in the glove box, on the ground beside the car, on a zombie near it (a firefighter zombie next to a fire truck is the classic case) or in a box or drawer in a nearby building. When you are near a car and carrying its key, a key icon appears over your character. Leaving the key in the ignition is safe and does not drain the battery.

Hotwiring needs Electrical 1 and Mechanics 2, or the Burglar occupation. Sit in the driver's seat, open the vehicle radial menu and pick Hotwire Engine. A failed attempt makes noise but does not damage the car or your tools. Locked doors are opened by smashing a window or removing it through the mechanics panel.

Open the driver's door, not the trunk, when you first test an unknown car. If an alarm fires you are already in the seat and can drive it away from the noise.

Vehicles are placed when a map cell first loads, using parking zones painted on the map. Each zone type has its own quality rules, which is why a trailer park never gives you a mint sports car and a nice suburb rarely gives you a wreck. Changing the spawn rate later does not refill cells you have already visited.

About one burnt car in five is rolled from a special burnt list, the rest from ordinary models. A burnt vehicle still counts as a vehicle for the spawn budget, so a street full of wrecks is not a bug. If you want a specific model, go to its zone: a pickup to a farm or logging yard, a van to an industrial estate, a sports car to the lake houses and the richer streets of Louisville and Riverside.