Fuel

Lore & Background

The Lethal Company's operation is brutally simple: send employees into decommissioned industrial zones, have them haul back as much scrap metal as they can carry, and collect a cut of the sale. The company provides the vehicle, the radio, and a thin layer of liability shielding. Everything else—ammo, batteries, and the fuel to actually get to the scrap and back—is the employee's problem. The vehicle at base is the only reliable way to cover the distances between the staging area and the deeper scrap caches, and it runs on a finite, non-renewable supply of Fuel that the company does not replenish between contracts.

This creates a quiet, recurring tension in every run. Crews must decide how much Fuel to hoard in inventory versus how much to leave in the tank, whether to make a risky detour to grab a canister they spotted in the distance, or whether to accept the walk. In the industrial zone and on the moon, that walk means traversing open corridors, climbing ladders, and exposing yourself to the entities that patrol the dark. The Fuel canister, small and unremarkable in your hand, represents a margin of safety that can vanish the moment you need it most.

Over time, the community has built an almost superstitious relationship with Fuel. A crew that returns to base with an empty tank and no spare canister has effectively declared that the next trip is a gamble. Veterans will stash an extra canister in a known corner of the map before a long run, treating it the way a hiker treats a spare water bottle: not glamorous, but the thing that keeps you alive when everything else goes wrong.

In Their Own Story

The radio crackled once, then went quiet. Mara's flashlight beam swept the corridor and found nothing but a broken conveyor belt and the smell of old grease. She crouched, set the canister on the floor, and tapped her comms. "Got one. You good?" A pause. Then Kael's voice, flat and tired: "Tank's empty. We're walking back."

Mara looked at the Fuel in her hands. One canister. She could top off the vehicle and drive the last two hundred meters, or she could keep it in her pocket and hope the corridor stayed quiet. The light at the end of the hall flickered. Something heavy shifted in the dark behind it. She made her choice, slotted the canister into her inventory, and started running.

Reader's Guide

**Fuel** — a small canister that powers the base vehicle; without it, you walk.

Practical stats: - Weight: light (one inventory slot) - Capacity: one fill per canister - Range affected: vehicle travel distance per fill - Found: scattered across maps; no fixed spawn - Carriable: any crew member, any time

Tactical note: Always leave at least one canister in the vehicle tank before you start a run. If you drain it completely and find yourself in a deep scrap cache with a hostile entity closing in, you are on foot. A common new-crew mistake is grabbing every Fuel canister they see and stuffing it into personal inventory while leaving the tank dry. If something goes wrong mid-run, that stashed Fuel is useless until you physically walk back to base. Keep the tank topped, carry one spare, and treat any additional canisters as a bonus, not a plan.

Avoid: don't spend a canister on a short trip you could walk in thirty seconds. Save it for the long hauls where the distance actually matters.

Did You Know?

• Fuel is the only resource in Lethal Company that has zero combat utility but is arguably the most important item to carry on a run.
• Any crew member can pick up and carry Fuel; it is not restricted to a specific role or loadout.
• The base vehicle will not start without Fuel, making it a hard gate on every scrap run rather than a soft convenience.
• Fuel canisters are found in the open world and are not purchasable or craftable, so a missed canister is a permanent loss for that run.