Car fuel

[Ciuffoblu93]

Being able to recover fuel from cars

[Leeanda]

This has been asked for quite a few times in the past, so a thumbs up from me😊

[Lexilogo]

It'd be great, though I think more uses for fuel would need to be added to warrant adding this much more of it to the world.

[Cyclone35]

From what I looked up, I found this description regarding fuel sitting in a car for too long:

In general, pure gas begins to degrade and lose its combustibility as a result of oxidation and evaporation in three to six months, if stored in a sealed and labeled metal or plastic container. Ethanol-gasoline blends have a shorter shelf life of two to three months. 

So considering how much time has past before the quiet apocalypse occurred, most of the fuel in cars evaporated. Probably explains why you can't drive them during an aurora. Still, there might be some vehicles that still have a little bit of fuel stored in them. If anything, it could be used as an improvised accelerant for starting fires.

[Lexilogo]

6 hours ago, Cyclone35 said:

So considering how much time has past before the quiet apocalypse occurred, most of the fuel in cars evaporated.

Survival and Wintermute take place immediately after the Aurora begins, and I always assumed most of the game's cars were abandoned the moment the Aurora made them useless. The economic collapse obviously preceded everything but some of the road network must have still been active, Blackrock was getting a bus of new prisoners.

 

Sidenote about this, because it's an interesting aspect of apocalypse fiction that rarely gets acknowleged: The main problem with gasoline after that amount of time is actually its viscosity and the solid gums that will form, that's why it's "gone bad" because it'll interfere with an engine's mechanics and grind it to a halt. It breaking down to the point that it can't be flammable anymore though, I don't think that's a concern, even after decades of it being stored. If you find fuel in a large tank and carefully harvest it to try and make sure you're only getting the liquid, you can still get some good fuel out of that tank, long after its shelf life.

[Ciuffoblu93]

1 hour ago, Lexilogo said:

Survival e Wintermute si svolgono subito dopo l'inizio dell'Aurora, e ho sempre pensato che la maggior parte delle auto del gioco fossero state abbandonate nel momento in cui l'Aurora le aveva rese inutili. Il crollo economico ovviamente ha preceduto tutto, ma parte della rete stradale doveva essere ancora attiva, Blackrock stava ricevendo un autobus di nuovi prigionieri.

 

Nota a margine su questo, perché è un aspetto interessante della fantascienza apocalittica che raramente viene riconosciuto: il problema principale della benzina dopo quel lasso di tempo è in realtà la sua viscosità e le gomme solide che si formeranno, ecco perché è "andata a male" perché interferirà con la meccanica di un motore e lo fermerà. Si rompe al punto che non può più essere infiammabile , però, non penso che sia un problema, anche dopo decenni di conservazione. Se trovi carburante in un grande serbatoio e lo raccogli con cura per cercare di assicurarti di ottenere solo il liquido, puoi ancora ottenere del buon carburante da quel serbatoio, molto tempo dopo la sua scadenza.

In old diesel engines the fuel still runs the old diesel

[ThePancakeLady]

1 hour ago, Lexilogo said:

Survival and Wintermute take place immediately after the Aurora begins, and I always assumed most of the game's cars were abandoned the moment the Aurora made them useless. The economic collapse obviously preceded everything but some of the road network must have still been active, Blackrock was getting a bus of new prisoners.

Are we sure, though? Wintermute tells of people trying to leave the island, some leaving notes behind. And it tells of a financial collapse, shipments of goods and fuel not coming through. Buffer Memories in Survival Mode also tell some of these tales. So some of the vehicles may have been abandoned log before the First Flare occurred, bringing planes down- simply because they were out of gasoline (petrol) and both the Orca Station and the QGS were out of fuel and other supplies for tourists and other less hardy residents of the island. And was the bus carrying new prisoners, or established ones coming back from work on a so-called chain-gang? Sent out to fell trees or work around the mines and quarries, taking the place of the regular workers who decided to get the heck out once ferries or cargo plane shipments of food and sundries stopped arriving. The corporate overlords weren't going to stop stripping valuable resources from the island, perhaps- and prisoners may have been promised early releases or special treatment at the prison in return for laboring (likely hollow promises, but desperation is always a good motivator, innit?). 

The game, both in Wintermute Story Mode and Survival Mode leaves enough open for each of us to imagine a good bit of what came before, and in Survival Mode, we have no idea how long our survivor has been barely scraping by and staying alive on pure instinct before lucidity returns and they "wake up" and start trying to thrive instead of just barely surviving. 

[The Feng Hunter]

10 hours ago, Lexilogo said:

Survival and Wintermute take place immediately after the Aurora begins,

Survival takes place AFTER Wintermute. We don’t know how long after Wintermute, either, but we know they’re not simultaneous:

Spoiler

• Grey Mother’s kettle with spoon has been used.

• MacKenzie leaves a note to Jace on the door to the Blackrock Workshop.

• Blood on the floor of Paradise Meadows Farmhouse echos the prisoner’s dilemma.

• Bloodscrawled “PERSEVERENCE MILLS” at the bus crash has long since eroded away.

So it’s thus impossible to say just WHEN Survival sandbox occurs.

[Lexilogo]

4 hours ago, The Feng Hunter said:

Survival takes place AFTER Wintermute.

Ah ok, thank you. I always assumed Survival was a different continuity, I wasn't aware newer Wintermute stuff implies Survival is post-Wintermute. (IDK how intentional it is but I will take your word for it)

Regardless, I will say that the canonicity of Survival's time period hasn't seemed to affect us looting stuff before, we've found tons of stuff that should've rotted away if it's months after the apocalypse, so I don't think it should affect this suggestion one way or another. Still pretty interesting to think about.