It’s dangerous out in the Zone. Let your Uncle Angus show you how to pack light and still cover all your bases on the road.
Contents
Guide to the McGuyver Road Kit
All credit goes to Nikas Zekeval!
Too Much Loot, Too Little Room
If you, Driver, are a pack-rat, like me, and want to loot things to the ground in Perpetual Stability zones, or just drag large armored car parts back while still in the outer zone, space is at a premium. Especially in the early game when you are still trying to unlock side racks and storage.
This is not helped by the long list of suggested and nice-to-have things for leaving the garage. If you want no door or breakdown to stand in the way of your kleptomania, er, efficient collection of Zone Resources, you are taking a large bite out of the cargo room to carry things back. Especially if the situation never comes up requiring you use some of it. However, you do have a craft mat in your car, and can make things on the road. Which leads me to this, the McGuyver Road Kit. The stuff to take to make sure you can make everything you’ll need.
Packing Basics
The suggested “get into everything including trouble” road kit is as follows. This is limited to things that can be done solely with the craft mat in your car. As such, things like the Liberator, Hand-Vac, and Anchor Radar are not included. You have to make and load them at the garage to have any unless you get lucky and find a gas station with a workstation in it.
Most of this is also on your suggested list from the garage diagnostics, or covers for one such item. Two of these need research but only need Stable Anchor Energy to reach.
The official survival kit checklist the garage suggests is a scrapper, 1 can of repair putty, 1 battery jumper, and 3 road flares. The rest of the list are so you can get into any locked doors or handle repairs that require specific kits to fix, rather than just slapping repair putty on it.
- Kits: Are stackable in groups of 3, all are single-use items save Repair Putty.
- Medkit: Literal lifesavers.
- Mechanic’s Kit: Might not need it much, but remember your left front wheel when you arrived? Or if your engine gets fried.
- Sealing Kit: The space-efficient alternative to a spare tire or keeping stuff from leaking in a cracked window.
- Electrical Kit: For fixing shorted car parts or opening shorted keypad doors. Research Required to unlock.
- Battery Jumper: The Bunny might keep going and going, but your lights and such won’t forever without one.
- Repair Putty: All-purpose fix-it material.
- Tools: Non-stackable, variable size. Lost after a certain number of uses. I suggest recycling mostly used tools in the Matter Deconstructor and starting out with fresh tools, or ones mostly so.
- Prybar: The Zone Skeleton Key. Also keeps can knock Bunnies off your car.
- Scrapper: If you can’t pry it up, chop it into lootable sized pieces.
- Impact Hammer: When you need to knock really loud.
- Relightable Flare: Far superior to the basic Road Flares.
Uncle Angus’s Recommended Kit
- Duct Tape: The Handyman’s Secret Weapon.
- 9v Batteries and Copper Wire: Portable power to recharge your car or open a code-paneled door.
- Electronics: The finishing parts of the Electrical Kit and Battery Jumper.
- Gas Cylinder: Only needed for the Impact Hammer, but if you need it, you will feel the lack.
- Cloth: Bandages. Pack a partial stack of a dozen for emergencies.
- Flares: Emergency light source and useful for crafting relightable flares or crude headlights.
Extras for Cautious or Time-Crunched Drivers
- Chemicals: Needed for repair putty. Consider packing a couple of premixed buckets.
- Rubber: One of the components of a Sealing Kit. Pack a partial stack if you’re worried about not having a handy tire to scrap.
- Glass: Relatively common. Used in Repair Putty and Crude Doors. Pack a partial stack if you feel the need.
For When You Think the Zone is Out to Get You
We know it is, Driver, but unless it’s really bad, this is stuff better sourced on the go since it is so common.
Metals and Plastics – Please remember to recycle
Common material, just take a scrapper to nearly anything. Or take a peek into most containers while looting an abandoned home or ARDA trailer. Often a byproduct of getting to the electronics, batteries, and copper wire of anything electronic you scrap. Not hard to hunt down really.
Just know what car components produce what. Crude components can drop metal, plastic, duct tape, and glass for doors. Better ones will give just metal, sometimes in plates, along with special material needed for their resistance, such as thermosap from armored parts.
Tires besides rubber will drop plastic for spares, metal for Summer and Off-Road. Again, sometimes refined, into gears in this case.
About the only supply concern is to make sure to hang onto enough to rebuild any worn-out tools. Getting into an “I need the material to get the material” situation for this stuff is embarrassing.
Uses:
- Prybar (4/0)
- Scrapper (3/6)
- Impact Hammer (9 metal only, 6 for Gears)
My advice is to pack a spare tire, it has the same size footprint as a sealing kit or a mechanics kit and can fix any problem you may have with a tire instantly simply by swapping it out. And when I say “spare tire” I actually mean another of whatever tire you have equipped and not the actual “spare tire” which is obviously not great.
From what I recall a tire is a 3×3 item, and doesn’t stack. Sealing kits are 2×2, and can stack three in the same spot.
It won’t help you if you get a bald tire though, or one of those other things that stop you from being being able to use it again. Having a spare has saved my bacon more than once.