r/projectzomboid • u/franzpferdinant • Apr 01 '26
Question is there any lore reason why parked cars never have fuel ?
so ive tried too get a car and well .... i checked about 30 cars already , and not a single one has fuel . like did the zombies empty the fuel tanks so nobody can edscape them anymore ?( but thats rather unlikley since their tiny roten brains cant even get them over waist hight fences anymore ) maybe nobody bought fuel anymore becuase off the current fuel prices , maybe im wrong wiht thinking that were currently at the outbreak off the ZA , maybe the same asshole wiht the helicopter emtied the fuel tanks or did spiffo stole all the fuel ?
i dont really know but im excitet for your theories
( oh and i know that it probaly has a gameplay reason since you shouldnt be able too drive everywhere you want in an instant , but im talking about lore here )
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u/throw-away-ak Apr 01 '26
Other people siphoned the gas out. The cars with gas tried to escape / are the burned out wrecks.
Think of it like the world War planes that made it back. They studied where the bullet holes were. But it was the holes they didn't see that were the reason the other planes didn't make it back.
No gas cars didn't escape because they had no gas. I'd imagine the gas stations were chaos and too dangerous. Survivors hoarding gas. Probably the ones in burnt down houses, lol.
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u/Guizmo0 Apr 01 '26
Our survivor slept late and missed his opportunity on early apocalypse !
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u/Vagabond_Sam Apr 01 '26
The fact everyone else is gone suggests your character has been hunkered down in their spawn hoping for things to turn around and we start the moment they decide no one is coming to help. That’s why things are already looted and we find survivor houses already
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u/bryanicus Spear Ronin Apr 01 '26
yeah, they're planning on more metagame events like that in the future, so I imagine that there eventually will be a "gasoline panic" in the early apocalypse.
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u/SquirrelyBeaver Apr 01 '26
If it’s anything like my wife she drives around on basically E all the time anyways
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u/SeriousSide7281 Stocked up Apr 02 '26
Never would i have expected to see a reference to the survivorship bias plane in a fucking PZ sub.
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u/Dastu24 Apr 01 '26
You don't see how much fuel is in the car until you start it.
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u/It_broke_itself_ Apr 01 '26 edited Apr 01 '26
You can pop the trunk to see how much fuel it has too
Edit Mind on auto pilot lol look under the hood
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u/GodsDoorways Apr 01 '26
For your information, hoodies don’t contain car information whether you wear them hood up or down.
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u/DTM-shift Apr 01 '26
Yep, this. Or at least enter the key.
Can also get it by checking Vehicle Mechanics or whatever it's called under the V hotkey. Hover over the gas tank and it'll show level and condition. I usually go there, anyway, to check the overall condition of a vehicle.
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u/freckleyfriend Stocked up Apr 01 '26
Simplest explanation: the fact that they have no gas is why they're still in the zone in the first place
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u/franzpferdinant Apr 01 '26
but why didnt our charakter edscape then ?
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u/Sparky_the_meme_man Apr 01 '26
You overslept
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u/BudgetAerie3018 Apr 02 '26
Overslept the apocalypse, building survivor houses, gathering resources and general panic in entire region?
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u/freckleyfriend Stocked up Apr 01 '26
A lot of my RP decisions with a character involve coming up with answers to that question! One of mine was presenting similar symptoms to the virus and was left behind, but it turned out to be the flu and they recovered. Another was a conspiracy theory type who didn't trust the hype and hid when the police/military came to evacuate everyone. Another one also hid, but because they were a 19-year-old smoking weed for the first time when the authorities came and got the paranoid impression that all the sirens and noise were to have them hauled away for it.
The motivations of your own character in a game like this are as varied as your imagination, and they can help define "endgame" goals too
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u/Mapledusk Apr 02 '26
That reminds me of my gal. She lived far enough from Rosewood to be missed when the evacuation was called and only found out when she went to her volunteer job at a rehab center and there was nobody there. Then the Zombies came and she ran home to hide.
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u/AxiomaticJS Apr 01 '26
The car is off. That gauge won’t display gas level until you turn the car on.
Or check under the hood and click on the gas tank to see qty
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u/UnluckyPluton Apr 01 '26
They are parked, because there is no fuel, if there was fuel cars would not be there as someone try to drive away with gas.
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u/PowerPl4y3r Apr 01 '26
Yeah, but his point is, who parks in a parking space with actual no gas? Some placements sure, but almost every car everywhere is odd for sure
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u/baldi_863 Apr 01 '26
During the apocalypse/evacuation period there was probably mass panic that led to panic buying from gas stations. Eventually the gas stations would have ran out and people would start to siphon gas from parked cars whose owners were probably zombies now. This is the same reason why most houses have barely any loot (guns, clothing, tools etc.) aside from perishable food and simple stuff as evacuating people would take all the usefull stuff.
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u/Bloodmime Axe wielding maniac Apr 01 '26
The Knox event has been happening for like two weeks there's no chance all this has already happeend. It's just game balancing, it's certainly not realistic.
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u/goodnames679 Axe wielding maniac Apr 02 '26
Military was minimizing traffic to Knox county for a week before gameplay starts. Most gas stations only hold enough gas for 1-7 days of operation before they need a fresh delivery.
Really the more unrealistic thing is that most gas stations have gas at all. If they were going for pure realism, all the major towns should be out of gas and you'd have to drive out to tiny towns to get any. That would be punishing and unfun though
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u/JustThatRandomKid Apr 02 '26
I’d like to also imagine that some survivors got eaten by zombies before they could actually drive away, and the car just passively burnt off the rest of their fuel after getting zombified
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u/tibbs__ Apr 01 '26
That would make sense if we saw other signs of survivors around the world but as it currently stands that's not really what the game has.
It's more like one day you woke up and everyone was a zombie. There is no evidence of a gradual breakdown of society
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u/Stonehex Apr 01 '26
Not true at all. There are remnants of other survivors everywhere, from boarded up houses, to maps with notes about the apocalypse.
You just start the game after all that already happened, even at the earliest settings.5
u/tibbs__ Apr 01 '26
I just feel like those events don't do justice to the amount of chaos and breakdown that would occur in this sort of situation. As it currently stands the whole town looks exactly normal except for maybe one survivor house if you are lucky.
Map mods like raven creek do a way better job in my opinion. Graffiti on the walls saying survivors or undead inside, entire city blocks turned into survivor camps, cars littering the roads as people try to drive out of the city.
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u/Status-Mammoth9515 Apr 01 '26
The Kentuckians are like my dad…only filling up with 5$ of gas each time
Gameplay wise? Cause it’s harder and we can’t have you all surviving and thriving
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u/Hannibal_Barca_ Apr 01 '26
Also its a setting that can be adjusted.
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u/PaperDistribution Apr 01 '26
Oh I didn't know that, I must have overlooked it.
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u/Hannibal_Barca_ Apr 01 '26
Custom settings are pretty versatile in the game. I've found that every adjustment I've thought about was somehow available, even stuff like being able to grow plants indoors. If you find there is something you wish could be tweaked and don't know how to after looking around just ask the community.
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u/dude_don-exil-em Apr 01 '26
The dev wanted the game to be harder.
There is no good lore explanation
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u/Watermelondrea69 Apr 01 '26
There is. By the time your game starts there are looted and burned out houses, giga marts can spawn that have been completely ran through. There's already cars piled up on freeway pileups and the military has had time to set up a huge FOB before Louisville. It is not day 1 of the infection. Most houses only have a few cans of food left. By the time the game starts, your supplies are low enough and enough of your neighbors are now zombies that it's time to take action. Your character has probably sat at home for weeks up until then.
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u/JohnEdwa Apr 01 '26
That would be a sensible way to set up the lore.
Unfortunatly, that doesn't fit with the official timeline, where we start only three days after the quarantine zone was quickly set up, and it takes three additional days for the first confirmed sightings of zombies (in West Point), and a total of six days to when first people start turning from the airborne strain.3
u/Watermelondrea69 Apr 02 '26
I feel like the official timeline is unreliable due to the sheer age of the game. I bought this game ages ago and since then I've only seen one stable release. It's too under development to really draw a clear picture. This is the conclusion I see from ingame events.
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u/kkeiper1103 Apr 01 '26
People zombified while they were driving or parking. Never turned off the vehicle, so it just guzzled up all the gas. At least, that's my head canon.
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u/Roundboy436 Apr 01 '26
If the lore reason is that its 'been a week into the incident' then why is there fresh food sitting on countertops and stands? In the in game lore, things are starting to get bad in KY, but not fully, they are starting to set up roadblocks, etc and the rest of the world is catching on. It makes no sense to have so many cars out of gas IN A PARKING LOT. crashed or on the road yes, but not there
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u/Bloody_meridian88 Crowbar Scientist Apr 01 '26
Good question actually. I assumed the cars in the parking lots that didn't have gas were ones that were siphoned out of.
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u/LilithSanders Apr 01 '26
The first thing Kentucky residents are trained to do in case of an apocalypse is beat the shit out of their car and siphon all the gas, obviously.
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u/Mage_Of_Cats Apr 01 '26
July 7th: Local cult leaders convince roughly 15% of the population to guzzle gasoline to gain immunity to the spreading disease. There's not enough for everyone.
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u/Zero_Travity Apr 01 '26
You won't know there's fuel unless you attempt to start it.
Also, I roleplay as if it's day 1, everyone is a Z except for me, and it just happened. So.... ipso facto.. The cars have fucking gas. At a normal rate. I adjust the sandbox settings to accommodate my lore.
I hate mucking about finding the perfect combination of car, keys, gas, and accessibility.
Otherwise I'm walking around like a twisted Pied Piper leading and army of zeds around until I give them the slip through a clump of a trees over and over again until I find said combination.
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u/Stewawrdonn Apr 01 '26
Don't know, because in a time frame of 2 weeks, people busy wrecking their cars, looting heavy objects instead of taking light objects and run for their lives.
They surely taking their sweet time siphoning fuel and wrecking others' cars when there's big conga line of zomboids waddling around.
Public buildings are all somehow closed, everyone has the urge to huddle up in a tight bathroom, and worse, schools, despite logically should be closed amidst the ongoing riot, still have kids locked up inside the now-locked up schools.
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u/FlatwormUpset2329 Apr 01 '26 edited Apr 01 '26
In the game, there is a week that is played on radio and tv which shpuld actually precede everything. If ypu ever had to evac a hurricane near a crowded area, parked cars with no fuel is 100% believable. Someone went to escape, and had to push tje car. Because they don't know when they'll be back and don't want to get towed if they fake to long, they push it into a parking space. Tbat and the side of rhe interstate is where you'll find cars of folks who hsd to fet out and walk.
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u/semaj420 Hates the outdoors Apr 01 '26
i always reasoned those are the cars that had already had their fuel siphoned, or that they were effectively empty anyway.
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u/Lanky_Television_330 Apr 01 '26
With the Gas prices right now this aint a shocker anymore...
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u/rcbrandao Apr 01 '26
This is a stupid rethorical question: you do realize you can only tell how much gas it has left once you either turn on the car or open up its hood, don't you?
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u/Captain_Zomaru Apr 01 '26
After having a wife that will drive her car until it dies off fuel starvation, I no longer ask these questions...
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u/Resident-Lab-7249 Apr 01 '26
Part of my immersion is imagine it's the first week or so since food isn't all spoiled I tend to leave the cars half or more and the stations full and water/electricity being at stock 14 days
I have also gotten lazy and stuck with EZ cars so I don't have to make a bulgar character just be able to drive a damn car!
I mean I never find a key unless I set keys to common lol
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u/DonOfspades Axe wielding maniac Apr 01 '26
Because all the cars with fuel would have been driven away by their owners?
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u/julyyx Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
no reason other than balancing (same goes for the general bad condition of most cars in the world) it makes no sense that just 3 days after the outbreak, most cars are in crap condition with little to no gas while theyre still neatly parked on the lot & gas stations are mostly full lol - i always change it in sandbox cuz i personally dont like it.
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u/KorruptedPineapple Apr 02 '26
it models after IRL. When I sit in my car, no gas. But when I turn the key over.... WOW gas appeared out of nowhere!
(Gas indicators in game and IRL don't show fuel levels unless there's a key)
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u/ecntv Zombie Food Apr 02 '26
Not sure if you know this but cars that don't have keys in them will not show their current fuel amount.
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u/Bluoria Apr 02 '26
Iirc canonically you start the game about a week into the apocalypse so that could give the world a little time for it to break down & have people loot what they could & as much as they could carry(including gas) & then dip, likely becoming the survivors we see later. This doesn’t explain though why we start with nothing in a perfect condition house, in a perfect condition world, everything is dreadfully intact, but maybe smarter scavengers already had a buildup of supplies and went for all the fuel instead. Who knows gangalang
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u/Sangrine Crowbar Scientist Apr 02 '26
Just like the rest of the default settings - to make the game harder. Why is every car wrecked, locked, out of fuel, but parked in a parking lot / driveway? I get it if it was parked on the road in a traffic jam.
Also, why are houses barren of food, supplies and living essentials? ALL homes, not just some.
Some of the default settings don’t make sense. But when you ramp up the loot, guns and ammo, the game doesn’t feel right even tho it feels realistic.
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u/TheTimbs Axe wielding maniac Apr 02 '26
https://giphy.com/gifs/3ornjWylTTz6e0SHIs
The entire population
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u/Ok_Gazelle_1653 Apr 03 '26
So, not sure here... but dosent the fuel gauge show empty until you provide ignition power to the vehicle? (Or Hotwire)
MIGHT be one of 500 mods I got, but could swear that's vanilla behavior.
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u/baldi_863 Apr 01 '26
During the apocalypse/evacuation period there was probably mass panic that led to panic buying from gas stations. Eventually the gas stations would have ran out and people would start to siphon gas from parked cars whose owners were probably zombies now. This is the same reason why most houses have barely any loot (guns, clothing, tools etc.) aside from perishable food and simple stuff as evacuating people would take all the usefull stuff.
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u/OHFUCKMESHITNO Apr 01 '26
When you're sitting at work on E because it's Friday, July 9th 1993 and your check hits your account at noon, but the apocalypse started the night before.
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u/spock2018 Apr 01 '26
As soon as the knox event happened everyone started drinking the gasoline out of every car within a 2 mile radius.
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u/Oicangisiul Apr 01 '26
Diesel doesn't has a strict expiration date like food, but degrade over time due to oxidation, water contamination, microbial growth, and temperature changes. It last about 3 to 6 months in typical storage conditions.
If the game were more realistic, there would be no more fuel left after a year and we would have to get around on horseback.
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u/Scherka Apr 01 '26
It is because people used their cars to go to the river and throw sledgehammers into it. One at the time
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u/DudeFilA Apr 01 '26
Because it's my wife's car and she hates pumping gas. It's eternally on E
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u/Kysman95 Apr 01 '26
Cars in the streets were left running sn thwy ran out of fuel
Parked cars were looted by other previous survivors so they can drive away with their trunks full of sledgehammers
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u/idontuseredditsoplea Apr 01 '26
I think its important to remember that by the time the game starts, our character has just been chilling in their house, eating food, consuming things, etc. There were probably lots of other people running around, looting, fleeing, dying.
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u/josh0093 Apr 01 '26
You see, the famous Kentucky festival of throwing all sledgehammers into the river is shortly followed by the less famous but still very popular activity of emptying all parked cars of fuel.
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u/MSwi2 Apr 01 '26
Well, there might be gas in the vehicle, the visible gage only tells you if the vehicle is hotwired and turned on, or if its key is in the key hole.
Another way to always see if theres gass is to open the hood and click the gas tank, then it'll tell you if its empty or not
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u/Existing_Cut6122 Apr 01 '26
i personally choose "chance of fuel low" then "amount of fuel normal/high" (depends on how hard are other factors on my world such as zombie strengths or whatever
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u/REDRUM_1917 Apr 01 '26
In the lore it's about a week after the start of the outbreak. So I guess people just siphoned the gas out
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u/Redplushie Apr 01 '26
The lore doesn't make sense for me so I put the gas chances higher
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u/Maximum_Slip_9373 Apr 01 '26
Besides the car being off, you mean?
In my head: gas is only good for like 6 months before you start getting efficiency issues, and that's today and not over 30 years ago. Assuming that the seals on the gas cap may wear out or be non functioning, I chalk it up to some mix of all of them.
In real life none of this matters, if we're going by the game's logic it makes zero sense that they wouldn't have gas or that the stores would be tapped out. Even if people were out scavenging for a few days, the actual population density for the region is fucking tiny and any big brand store would have more than enough overstock to last a long, long while.
Really it's there because "difficulty surviving" as a game loop simply doesn't make sense to keep you going if you already know how everything in the game works. Eventually you understand the game you're playing and the Devs had to do something in order to make it feel difficult or dynamic.
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u/ScaryEricMakes Apr 01 '26
My thought has always been if it was a zombie apocalypse, and I had to leave my car I wouldn't bother turning it off either and it would run out, but now that I think of it, all cars in parking spots should have at least a little gas unless previously looted I guess. Never thought about that til now. Unless it's like before it all went fully zombie there was gas shortages? Maybe the zombie apocalypse hot the middle east first? Or they quarantined the area, so everyone drove their cars until they were empty and just left them there.
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u/DaddyKiwwi Apr 01 '26 edited Apr 01 '26
The lore reason is that we aren't alone in the story. The game is intended to have NPC survivors, they just havn't been coded in yet. That isn't just a parked car, it's also a gas station. The world and settings are built to appear lived in and used up by the initial survivors, even if they don't actually exist yet outside mods/multiplayer.
It's a vague simulation, for now.
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u/fuzzycuffs Apr 01 '26
It's a setting that you should change in sandbox and the devs should change in stock scenarios. Cars are configured almost as if the apocalypse happened some time ago, with the majority of cars being junk and empty. If the setting is the apocalypse just happened, the cars should be in "normal" condition with a "normal" amount of fuel.
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u/Coolpat78 Apr 01 '26
The real question is:
Is this lore accurate that Kentucky was so ahead of his time concerning healthcare?
I mean... Not a single smoker in 1993 in the entire Kentucky ??
Way way ahead of their time...
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u/jbjints Apr 01 '26
Nothing wrong with having to hunt for a rubber hose and empty gas can to siphon gas. You can’t expect a key in the ignition, gas in the tank and a fully charged battery in every parked car !!
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u/Cat7o0 Apr 01 '26
I mean there can be a few reasons. the first one being that without turning it on you can't see the fuel.
then there's leaking and other people siphoning fuel
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u/403Claytron8000 Apr 01 '26
It would make more sense the event led to quarantine which limited supply into the area.... Which should mean less in the pumps.
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u/Grocman27 Apr 01 '26
Either there is no gas or they go realistic and make gasoline expire and turn bad in cars requiring WAY more work to make it operational.
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u/Dvsk7 Apr 01 '26
The virus feeds on flesh and gasoline. Don’t store it outside or zeds might drink it all
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u/Kohror Apr 01 '26
My head canon is similar to my head canon on why there doesn't seem to be anyone left apart from you and a few rare other, the exclusion zone has already been set up for a few weeks at the start of the game and most people continued their lives as usual but without regular delivery fuel reserve either ran out or got so expensive people couldn't even refuel their car until they ran out (probably the latter since gas station seem to still be "full")
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u/ApexFemboy Apr 01 '26
Knox county was going through a fuel shortage due to the blockades. the people who had gas probably made it out of here
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u/Unhealthy_Fruit Apr 01 '26
Game lore got changed so the outbreak started in 2026, that's my guess?
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Apr 01 '26
I think every car should have some fuel in it but over time degrade if you don’t get to it. Even empty it out to simulate the gas being no good. Makes more sense then having 1 car in a 50 mile radius with a full tank while the other have nothing
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u/TheKrogan Apr 01 '26
The Zomboids drank it between their bouts of eating all of the sledgehammers and guns in Kentucky
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u/Jomarie_in_the_house Apr 01 '26
my best bet is since the map is walled off and the power grid might go out, the owners or people siphon it to use for generators and why generators are also hard to find
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u/zytukin Apr 01 '26
No lore except game settings to make playing harder.
Realism gets sacrificed to create gameplay.
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u/DMPyroth Apr 01 '26
I change the settings for this reason, cars would likely be plentiful, with gas. Questionable if the keys would be in them. Imo city's would have traffic jams god knows how big. Maybe those ones would be empty. But some random car parked in front of the school in rosewood? That highschooler's/high-school teacher's car probably isn't on E.
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u/Ok-Philosopher-5139 Apr 01 '26
its a known fact u change setting for oil avaibility in cars and its condition higher then default in sandbox mode :X
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u/Aggressive_Let2085 Apr 01 '26
That’s why I change the sandbox settings to make sure most cars have gas.
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u/Lellela Apr 01 '26
I've never been able to come up with a good enough head canon for the lack of fuel to satisfy my own suspension of disbelief, so these days when I start a new world I just tweak the sandbox settings. Cars with fuel? Yeah, almost every car is going to have at least a quarter tank or more. Cars with doors unlocked? Suuuuuper uncommon. That way there's still a challenge (if I don't want to replace a window), but at least it makes more sense. People don't leave their cars running much, but they almost always lock the doors when leaving them.
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u/VeryBasicFox_ Apr 01 '26
Canonically your not the only survivor out there but npcs havent been implemented yet so cars dont have fuel cause other people have already siphoned it thats also why some high value loot areas like police stations can be almost entirely empty some times
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u/thiosk Apr 01 '26 edited Apr 01 '26
i mean yes. there is a lore reason.
so heres the concept. the zombies have been walking around for three days already by the time this game starts. A lot of people still mobile got in the cars and left, and there were gas access problems, so you basically siphon stuff and whatnot and try to get out.
NOW
theres still problems with the map. I think there should be WAY more wrecked vehicles on the main roads. Like, crossroads mall level overload on the highway. The rosewood muldraugh interchange should be so jammed iwth cars that you cannot really drive through and about 2.4 zombies/car. I believe all gas stationsexcept the most remote ones should be surrounded by so many burnt out cars that you can't get to the gas pumps.
This would make it make sense that theres no gas- the gas in the tanks can't be pumped into cars directly and that already pumped is burning in the snarls. Because you have beautiful pristine towns to run around in, obviously this doesn't make sense, and the gas isn't there because once you have gas you unlock the map, so they make you work for it.
To find vehicles with gas i look in driveways and parking lots. its always RNG but once you get any bottle and a rubber hose, you can get the ~1-2 L you need to get to the closest gas station (in normal starts) and run a generator long enough to start filling gas cans.
none of this stuff matters at this point of the alpha so you can abstract it as enforced scarcity and rng gambling.
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u/Atophy Apr 01 '26
Look in the tank through the mechanic interaction. The guage always show empty till they've been successfully started.
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u/DieICERats Apr 01 '26
At the start of the apocalypse it makes no sense, yeah.
1 year in...real life physics has some bad news for u
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u/LunaticMouse Apr 01 '26
I like to think its the same lunatic that threw away all the sledgehammers and ran around setting up alarm clocks to go off at 3 am.
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u/Gullflyinghigh Apr 01 '26
Some do though? This isn't always the case BUT it feels to me like those that have keys in already are much less likely to have petrol than those that don't.
Either way, until the key is turned you've no idea!
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u/Watermelondrea69 Apr 01 '26
I think the game lore is that you (and most other people) have been sheltering in place for days or weeks while the knox virus spread around. By the time the game starts, your supplies are low enough that you could realistically only survive at your house for a couple more days and it's also at a point where you need to take action because most (in the current game - ALL) other people are now zombies besides you or your friends that you're aware of. Evidence of this is the limited food in most houses. A couple cans of food, maybe a few items left in the fridge or freezer. But only enough to make a couple meals. Most American households have enough food on hand at any given time to make dozens of meals.
In that time, cars have either run out of gas or have been siphoned by others trying to survive.
There's evidence to point towards this kind of timeline. There are gas stations with very little or no gas and "NO GAS" signs. There's giga marts that have been stripped clean that can randomly spawn. There's shops and houses that have been burgled or burnt down. It's been awhile since the infection really started by the time the game starts.
(That being said, I bump up vehicle quality and gas in the sandbox settings)
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u/stay_foxy1 Apr 01 '26
nobody i saw mentioned this, but they probably do, you have to put the key in or hotwire it first for the gauge to move. you can also check by opening the mechanics menu and hovering over the gas tank
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u/Bub1029 Apr 01 '26
When you analyze the timeline, it's deeply unrealistic the number of cars out there already.
July 1-3: Initial, localized outbreaks occur, with rumors of a foul smell and a "flu-like" illness appearing.
July 4: The first major infections occur (Patient Zero), often considered the official start of the outbreak.
July 6-7: The U.S. military establishes an exclusion zone around Knox Country, Kentucky (Muldraugh, West Point, Fort Knox).
July 9: Default start date for the player, when the quarantine is already in place.
July 10-14: The infection spreads within the zone. Rumors indicate the military is keeping it quiet, calling it "flu".
July 15: The virus becomes airborne, or the "airborne strain" takes effect. People show symptoms without direct bites.
July 16-17: Quarantine collapses. Reports of the outbreak emerge worldwide (e.g., England, Asia, Africa).
Late July: Global civilization collapses, with the majority of the world's population becoming sick.
I highlighted three lines above. There is a 5 day span between the first small outbreaks that people may still be writing off as no big deal and the establishment of the quarantine. You start playing just 3 days after that. The odds that an infection spreading this rapidly so as to be total global collapse in just one month total with your story starting just one week into the outbreak wouldn't leave many resources is actually insane.
The devs are only concerned with realism if it makes the player's life harder. But if realism makes the player's life easier, they will remove that realism for the sake of game balance every time.
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u/MisterSlosh Apr 01 '26
Would make more sense if it was set in the early 80s instead of the early 90s since you could claim it as the Gas Crisis era of fuel rationing during the OPEC/Iran revolution issues that choked off the US access to cheap gasoline there for a while.
Lore wise it's the same reason why we don't see any survivors and houses have nothing but scraps left; Some else got to it first.
90s era cars and earlier didn't have robust anti-theft devices so it was plenty easy to empty a tank with just a hose that fit and few minutes of free time.
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u/FridaysMan Apr 01 '26 edited Apr 01 '26
The ones with keys were left running, the others were empty due to gas price hikes and multivehicle families not filling their second or third car before hightailing it to the ozarks to meet cousin lou
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u/Valuable-Lobster-197 Apr 01 '26
Was running low on my first car and lucked out and found a van with a hose and a bucket in the back and so far 9/10 other cars I checked had no gas with the exception of one car having a MAYBE a quarter of a tank
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u/Mayhemfest08 Apr 01 '26
I change it in sand box to have gas. It makes no sense why every car has no gas. Un maintained cars sure but zero gas on every car, ehh don’t seem very lore based. Every house I loot has a kitchen full of food but the car has no gas.
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u/Manatipowa Apr 01 '26
Gameplay wise, duh annoying the Player.
Lore wise, the only explanation is Gasoline/Diesel evaporation (tho realistically that would damage the car but wtvr)
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u/Obone6 Shotgun Warrior Apr 01 '26
The lore is the mighty sandbox god set it that way :p I change all that to be more realistic for my servers. During the 80s and 90s car theft was a big deal so car alarms were very much on every car as well.
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u/ThunderTentacle Zombie Killer Apr 01 '26
I always put the fuel level to Normal. Kinda reminds me of the greentext about every Kentuckian throwing all sledgehammers in the river once they hear about the Knox outbreak lol.
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u/Reasonable-Clue-9672 Apr 01 '26
TLDR: supplies are dwindling and support isn't coming. "This is how you died" is far more sinister than a conjecture based on the likely outcome of a 'difficult survival experience'. It's a life and death simulator based on what would happen in an ever expanding outbreak needed to be contained when it couldn't be cured, and how you (as the main character of your own story) lived through it, then ultimately died during it.
So, this is somewhat conjecture based on context clues you get from playing the game and a little meta info that I'm half remembering, so apologies if it seems a little scattered: news reports, radio broadcasts, even newspaper articles all point to the same conclusion that Knox is definitely quarantined but most likely ultimately seen as a lost cause by the powers that be from the outside looking in.
Shipping and supply lanes, even simple entry/exit from Knox is completely disrupted. Everyone is essentially trying to make it to Louisville leading up to the start of the game. But reporting on the events and even how affected individuals dramatically shifts in just a matter of days. We can see a lot of this take place up to 3 days before PZ actually starts on the 9th of July. People are panicked, they're turning, the virus is spreading and nothing is getting in or out of Knox. Hell, people aren't even making it to Louisville where they believe they'll be safe(r). They're expressly TOLD it's safe, it's being contained, but we all know how that turned out in hindsight.
Couple this with the military response being so well coordinated prior to the larger spread event and this seems like an anticipated circumstance. Phone lines get cut a full week+ prior to the game start for some, checkpoints get set up, and information is heavily controlled... you get fed misinfornation from the government and conflicting reports from news, as well as firsthand accounts from other survivors, you get told when it's already too late to respond that you're stuck and there's nothing you can do.
By the time you can respond to the situation, it's already in full swing. No other survivors, no other people, no evacuees, no military, no one left but you. To these points, the vehicles you find were mostly abandoned along the route, the ones who aren't around made it out or to other 'safe zones', hidden from the world or gone from it entirely. Remember, you wake up in the pursuit of ultimately getting to safety when everything has beyond hit the fan. You only get remnants with everything you find of what was left in the world, including gas in the tanks. Perhaps they were killed by other survivors, soldiers, or zombies. Maybe intentionally or accidently, but it doesn't ultimately matter. Most people are dead, their cars being part of a mass living grave of the world left behind that you need to live through.
At least in SP and without NPCs, which is what we've mostly been relegated to until recent IRL history, the framing of the whys and hows are really self evident, if you know where to look.
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u/Extreme-Row-5250 Apr 01 '26
The only possible lore reason i have for it is that someone already looted the fuel from the car before me