Devlog #8: Armour plating finished, and a .50 cal for the tub

This round wrapped up the vehicle armour work from last time across the whole fleet, added items for wheels and bull bars, and put a crew-served .50 cal on the back of the utes. It's a car round through and through.

Armour plating, now on all 13 cars

Last devlog we had plates built and fitted on the sedan, with the rest of the fleet in progress. That's done now — the ambulance, post van and remaining pickup are all plated too, and the look has been reworked across the board.

Every plate is still crafted at the Workbench and carried as an item with its own icon, but the design moved to full-panel flat scrap plates instead of smaller patchwork pieces. Rivets and seam welds run along the edges, and doors get a tube-framed look with chain-link mesh over the windows instead of solid steel. Windscreens are louvred so you can still see and shoot through them. Plates sit about 6 mm proud of the car's own bodywork, which reads a lot better than plates sitting flush — it actually looks bolted on rather than painted on. Tailgates now have their own chain-link window section, and the ambulance and post van get their box sides plated floor to roof. Wheel arches get round, flared plates wrapping the guards.

A new scrap wrench, also craftable, lets you unbolt plates again if you want to pull them off. Every plate, the doors, and the wrench all sit on the hotbar now: hold the item with its slot key and a see-through ghost shows exactly where it'll land on the car in front of you. Left click bolts it on, and the on-screen prompt is explicit about it — "[LMB] Bolt on armour" to fit, "Remove armour" to pull one back off.

We also finished reworking how crashes damage a car. Instead of a flat impact number, it's now our own speed-loss model: how hard a crash hits you scales smoothly with how much speed you lose in it, from gentle bumps around 35 km/h up to full pile-ups at 130 km/h. Armour scales that damage down once it's fitted, and there's a short grace period right after you spawn so you don't get punished for a crash you didn't cause.

A driving HUD readout now shows an ARMOUR bar alongside fuel and condition, so you can see at a glance how much protection a car's still got.

Wheels are items now

Wheels have moved off being a fixed part of the car model and into the same item-and-fit system as everything else. Wrecks can now be missing a wheel entirely, and you fit a replacement straight from the hotbar the same way you'd bolt on a door or a plate. Off-road wheels are a step up from the standard ones — more grip, and they resist going flat — and a flat tyre now actually shows as a flat tyre mesh instead of just a performance penalty you can't see.

The tailgate on the back of the utes and wagons also got split into two separate parts: the gate itself, and its window. That lets us treat the window the same way we treat door windows — plate it, chain-link it, smash it — independently of the gate panel underneath.

Bull bars and roof racks

A roo-style bull bar can now be fitted to the front of any car that doesn't already come with one built in — the utes, pickups and SUV that ship with a factory bull bar can't get a second one stacked on top. Getting the thing to actually sit snug against the bumper took a few passes; it went from a noticeable 25-30 cm gap to the body down to about 2 cm once we fixed the mounting offset, so it finally reads as part of the car instead of floating in front of it.

Every car can also take a roof rack: a welded frame, chain-link floor, and bolted feet holding it down to the roof. It's a cheap craft — 6 scrap and 1 metal plate at the Workbench — so it's an easy early pickup.

A .50 cal for the tub

The new piece this round is a mounted .50 cal for the open-tub utes and pickups. It's a proper gun mount: a pedestal post bolted down to the tub floor behind the cab, braced up onto the cab or roll bar for support, with a turntable ring on top carrying a Browning-style heavy machine gun.

Like armour, it's crafted at the Workbench — 15 scrap, 4 metal plate and 3 carbon steel — and bolts onto the tub the same way a plate does. Climb up into the tub and press E and you'll see "Man the .50 cal" instead of the usual back-seat prompt; from there you aim with the camera and fire with left click. There's new handmade .50 cal ammunition to go with it, crafted ten rounds at a time from scrap and chemicals.

We spent a good chunk of time making the gun feel like a .50 cal and not just a bigger rifle. It fires around five rounds a second, each hit lands heavy, the gun kicks your aim upward with every shot and jerks back on the mount, and the sound is louder and deeper than anything else in the game right now. Standing at the gun, your character holds a proper gunner's stance: he walks around the post as it swivels to track your aim, his arms tilt to follow the barrel, and his hand stays locked onto the grip the whole time.

Honest state of it: the gunner pose gets rough when you aim low — there's no proper aim-down pose yet, so it can look a bit off — and the left hand can drift out of place. It's being played and tested right now rather than signed off. The .50 cal ammo is also still wearing the regular 7.62 icon in the inventory; that's a placeholder, not the final art.

Smaller fixes

Smashed-out wreck windows were taking the tail-light lenses with them, because the lamps had ended up modelled as part of the glass instead of the body. That's fixed in the files, though we haven't confirmed it holds up in an actual play session yet. Overnight we also knocked out some car moss streaking that looked wrong, tuned up a road material, and added navigation around the roughly 50 parked cars scattered across the main map so people and traffic route around them properly instead of getting stuck.

What's next

• Hands-on testing of the .50 cal mount and ammo, with a focus on fixing the low-aim gunner pose and the drifting hand.
• Real .50 cal ammo icon, so it stops borrowing the 7.62 art.
• Confirm the tail-light/window fix actually holds up on wrecks in-game.
• Damage-test the bull bar and armour in real crashes and fights, and tune the numbers.