TWC Roadmaster Tractor Trailer Combo

Why a truck

The infrastructure pack is built to be driven, and nothing tests a highway like an articulated vehicle. The Roadmaster is the TWC Roadmaster 6x4 Tractor, three dry vans (28, 40 and 53 foot), and the coupling between them. Until 26 September 2026 the project and the pack were called Smart-Fifth; the name is retired, the rig is the same.

What shipped

TWC Roadmaster Tractor Trailer Combo (1.5.2, 29 September 2026; first released 14 September as 1.0.0), created by Taroos the Warlock. A tractor and three vans, one coupling:

• The coupling is physical: a plate on the tractor, a kingpin under the van. Back under the van, the jaws close on a native four-second cycle, the landing gear lifts, and the air lines and cord appear between the two. Press H to release; the gear drops first.
• The coupled rig has its own drive and brake balance and a stability controller, tuned over six live-test cycles in August.
• Body work measured against reference trucks: long-nose conventional cab with a flat-top sleeper, chrome stacks and air cleaners, forged-aluminum ten-hole wheels with real bowls and cap nuts, tires with lug and rib treads and embossed sidewall lettering, round reflector headlamps, fog and marker lamps, air-line coils on the cab back.
• Lights driven by the mod on every lens: running, brake, reverse and headlamp emission, glow lights at both rears, reverse floods on the road, headlamp beams. Exhaust smoke from both stacks, more under load.
• Livery: the Commandery seal and wordmark on every unit, gold on black, the website on the vans; six more liveries as kits in the dye slot (Fleet White, Weathered, Rusted, Black and Gold, Vampire, Blacked Out), each fitting the tractor and all three vans, each a workbench recipe, and each in the item menu like the game’s own dyes.
• Cab view: scroll the camera fully in while driving and you sit in the driver’s seat behind real window openings, a 389-style dash of eight gold gauges that read the truck’s own state, the sleeper open behind you. From outside, the driver sits in his seat and holds the wheel at 10 and 2, turning it with the steering.
• Three dry vans: a 28-foot single-axle pup with 60 slots, a 40-foot tandem with 96, and the 53-foot tandem with 120. Storage, weight, durability, price, craft time and recipe scale with the length; the kingpin and landing gear sit at the same stations on all three, so the tractor couples each of them the same way.

How it got there

The mechanical prototype (v0.2.18) was locked on 2 August. On 14 September the pack went from “bland” to released in one long day of passes, each one approved in game before the next began: surfacing and livery (0.3.0), rolling stock and lighting (0.4.0), refinements (0.5.0), lighting and exhaust (0.6.0, 0.6.1), then the public name.

Two defects worth recording. The coupling had been dead since the game’s 31 August update, because the runtime pins the exact game build and nobody had re-checked it; the boot log said so in one line and the line had not been read. And the tractor’s red and amber lenses had shipped since 0.2 without the material keyword that lets emission work at all, so the markers, brake and turn lenses had never once lit. Both are the kind of thing a green build gate cannot see and a night test finds in a minute.

What was learned

Reference photographs measured every pass, a renderer-level check of what the bundle actually carries (not what the build script says it wrote), and a night test as a standing part of acceptance. The Unity project also had its particle module disabled, which silently stripped the exhaust emitters at bundle build while every gate stayed green; counting components in the finished bundle is what caught it.

Level of detail and damage

The game switches vehicle detail with Unity’s own LOD groups, exactly as the stock 4x4 does, and it has no damage meshes at all: its one damage visual is switching on whatever hangs at the engine part’s damaged and broken paths at a quarter and at zero health. So the Roadmaster does both the game’s way. Three shells per body and per wheel, built from the approved surfaced geometry with the baked atlas kept, inside the budgets measured off the stock vehicles. Smoke at the engine bay and fire when broken on the tractor, with a cracked windshield and a sooted hood revealed alongside them; smoke and fire at the bogie on the van, raised by the runtime because a trailer has no engine part for the game to watch. The pass also found and removed five stacked copies of each connected air line that the tractor had shipped since 1.0.0.

Handling and controls

The bobtail truck lagged and leaned before it turned at walking pace. The wheel angle was never the lag; the body was: eight and a half metric tons on wheel colliders with less lateral grip than the stock 4x4, a center of mass at 0.95 m, and no low-speed physics substeps. The runtime now applies a tune at spawn, read from six bwRoad* lines in vehicles.xml, so it can be adjusted without a rebuild. Trailer release, which had been H only, is now also D-pad Down on a gamepad, “Release trailer” in the seated hold-B menu while a van is on and the truck is stopped, and the same entry in the truck’s interact menu from outside. Hooking up stays physical: back the plate under the kingpin.

Publication

On the Downloads page as TWC Roadmaster Tractor Trailer Combo 1.5.2 (29 September 2026). 1.5.2 puts the six livery kits in the item menu, like the game’s own dyes, in a world and in the prefab editor. 1.5.1 fits the driver to the cab: both hands on the wheel at 10 and 2, turning with it, the wheel raised and the riders seated lower and further back, the seats behind them. 1.5.0 added six paint livery kits for the tractor and all three vans: put one in the vehicle’s dye slot, take it out for the Commandery livery; the 53’s lettering now sits in front of its side posts. 1.4.0 added the dry van family: the 28-foot pup and the 40-foot tandem beside the 53, one rule for every number (storage and everything else scales with the length), the tractor and the 53 unchanged. 1.3.0 puts you in the cab: scroll the camera fully in while driving the tractor and you sit in the driver’s seat behind real window openings, in front of a 389-style dash whose eight gold gauges read the truck’s own state, with the sleeper open behind you; with the lights on the gauges glow and a dome light comes up. 1.2.1 made both vehicles craftable at a workbench from the game’s own vehicle parts (no earlier version shipped a recipe, only the creative menu worked) and replaces the item icons with renders of the built vehicles at the game’s icon size; its README now says outright that the one folder is the whole mod, with a multiplayer note. 1.2.0 added three levels of detail on both units and every wheel, damage states, a bobtail handling tune the runtime reads from vehicles.xml, and trailer release by H, D-pad Down, the seated hold-B menu or the truck’s interact menu. 1.1.0, the same day, was the rename: mod folder TWC-Roadmaster (delete the old BabyWarlockSmartFifth folder), new mod and item names. Entity ids are unchanged so vehicles already placed in a save carry over. Requires V3.2.0 b10, the stock Harmony folder and EAC off.

The numbers

Game units are meters per second; miles per hour for reading.

Crafting

Workbench recipes from the game’s own vehicle parts, the same pattern as the stock 4x4; the gating lives on the parts, not the recipe.

• Tractor: 10 wheels, 2 truck chassis, 2 truck accessories, 2 small engines, 2 car batteries.
• 28’ van: 4 wheels, 2 truck chassis, 1 truck accessories.
• 40’ van: 8 wheels, 2 truck chassis, 1 truck accessories.
• 53’ van: 8 wheels, 3 truck chassis, 1 truck accessories.
• Livery kits: 60 paint and 2 duct tape each.

Controls and requirements

• Game build: 7 Days to Die V3.2.0 (b10). The runtime checks the exact build and turns itself off with a log line on any other build; after a game update, wait for a pack update.
• The stock 0_TFP_Harmony folder that ships with the game, and EAC off.
• Multiplayer: every player and the server need the same folder; models, icons and code do not push from the server.
• Stands alone: this is its own mod and drives the game’s own roads. The interstate in some of the screenshots is the Interstate Framework, a separate mod that is not included in this download and not released yet.
• Known limits: the air lines are a fixed pose that stretches on tight turns; the interior draws only at the nearest level of detail; the body materials are non-metallic by design, and the chrome is a baked reflection.

Credits and license

Created by Taroos the Warlock with Baby Warlock. Bodies, wheels, textures, livery, coupling runtime and tuning are original work. The Commandery seal is the lab’s own mark. Free to use, share and include whole in modpacks with credit; not for sale; asset use not allowed; upload to other sites not without permission. A free fan project for 7 Days to Die, not affiliated with or endorsed by The Fun Pimps or any vehicle manufacturer.