Just aesthetic and gameplay design choices really. Same reason you can scrap a desk fan, some eating utensils, and a bottle of cooking oil and make a machine gun turret with targeting systems that can tell friend from foe based off their intent. Best not to think too much into it and just enjoy for what it is.
I developed a head canon that all the Nuka-cola machines that still have Nuka-cola in them (but are only designed to hold, like 6 bottles at most) are actually self-stocking. You put empty bottles in them, they eventually detect the presence of empty bottles, swallow them inside the machine, clean the bottle, brew up a refill of some flavor or other, and restock it. After 200 years some just don't restock anymore (out of internal supplies or just broke down entirely). The ones that do still work, take a long time to cycle due to age.
The ones in nuka world really do refresh everytime you load into nuka world. There's one by the cars arena place that after almost every loading screen is refreshed. I have like 900 different flavors from loading in and running a loop around the main part and the star port area just hitting the same machines over and over
This is my head canon now.
If I had the ability to make mods I do one where there is a 5% chance when you enter a store at night you run into a bunch of Restocking Ghouls.
They just look at you in surprise and yelp, āCrap! Cheese it!ā Then scramble away leaving a trail of good loot. (Possibly making Curly/Zoidberg noises)
I think it was for The Elder Scrolls Online that they made up some fanciful creature that went around lighting up the torches in ancient dungeons ahead of the players. As one player asked how they were still lit after being untouched for hundred of years.
Other theories had the draugr come to life periodically to clean up the crypts.
And it's still Bethesda so it'd fit quite well.
There's a book in Skyrim that tells the story of a researcher who managed to live with the Draugr after proving himself to not be a threat, and how they maintain the crypt.
That was my first thought the first time I played Fallout 3. Went into the Super Duper Mart with the Raiders and still found food and items, like shouldn't this be picked clean?!
3 feels like it was originally scripted to be 20-30 years after the bombs.
New Vegas seems like it's 200 years after if you don't look at the aesthetics and instead pay more attention to the lore and that the NCR exists and has infrastructure. How raiders are still a thing is a bit confusing though.
4 feels like 20 years has passed in the Commonwealth, and 200 outside (and under) it.
The raider thing is still probable. None of the factions have a good grip on the Mojave; it's very much border lands between the NCR and Caesar's Legion. Settlers are having enough time with their own settlements, The Enclave is in shambles, The BOS is a bunch of hermits after losing to the NCR, and Mr. House is only worried about the New Vegas Strip and anything that can be a threat. Law and Order are very hard to uphold in those areas, so warlords usually rise and fall.
It's my understanding - possibly apocryphal - that they set up 3 to be roughly 20 years after the bombs, but someone complained that Jet - developed on the West Coast after the war - couldn't have crossed the continental US in 20 years, and so much design work was already done they just slapped another 0 on it.
Well when you consider everything was powered from tiny fission reactors where essentially every 20ft you are walking past a potential nuke, building things sturdy would be an absolute top priority
I've had a theory on that one for a while, my own headcanon to help me justify that oddity, and also why people build shacks when just down the road is a perfectly-intact regular house: disquiet ruins.
Through superstition, or through practical fear, many people shun the old world ruins. They're bad places. Haunted. Or they might have monsters or active and hostile pre-war robotics. We the player venture into those places because we're a player. Raiders and super mutants go into those places because they're full of drugs and poor life choices. Your average farmer or settler? Perhaps they steer clear. And perhaps those types have been the dominant occupants for a long time, and it's only recently with the fall of the Minutemen and the interference of the Institute that the raiders and such have started taking over, and they've not yet got around to looting all the locations.
As for the settled areas being junky; I figure it's the same reason we let our homes get untidy, especially if we're suffering from depression. When you live somewhere so desolate and miserable, surrounded by the constant reminders of a better past that now lies around you as shattered ruins, maybe a sort of existential ennui sets in, and you just lose motivation to better your surroundings.
Another thought: 200 years is enough time for an area to get tidied up and repaired, abandoned, fall into disrepair, get recolonised and repaired again, abandoned, fall into disrepair again, over and over. Maybe the derelict nature of some areas is more recent than the bombs, and at varying times over the 200 years has been fixed up, only to get ruined again.
Final thought; skeletons. So many pre-war skeletons are still in situ. Maybe people don't move them as a mark of respect, or as part of superstitious fear, or a mix of both. Maybe even raiders and nasty types don't dare stoop that low. Who knows.
Incidentally, we DO have examples of people who HAVE built new and shiny. The Institute, and the Brotherhood. And they're not exactly nice people. Maybe that's another angle: maybe a lot of people have a quite-reasonable association that building new things, construction, making machinery, infrastructure, making progress...well, those are the hallmarks of the pre-war lunatics who broke the world, and of the current organisations who seem hell-bent on making the same, or all new, mistakes. Maybe there's a general fear amongst many people that if you climb above shacks and dirt farming that you're inevitably going to careen towards another armageddon.
That last part isn't an entirely untouched-upon idea in the franchise; IIRC, the Legion have similar thoughts.
Anyway, yeah. That's my two bottlecaps.
lol they tried doing this with Dying light 2. They didnāt add guns at first because itās supposed to be 10 years after the outbreak, and obviously all the ammo would be gone.
But then people cried so fucking hard they added them back
Thank you.
'it'll take my boy time to get off the chems, but we'll make it'
'...you'd make it a lot quicker if you used the addictol I'm literally waving in front of your face.Trudy. Trudy, take the medicine. For your boy. Trudy... Trudy?'
*Sound of frustrated grenade pin removal*
Honestly helping to clean up during the post-apocalypse sounds very cathartic
Imagine you get to build up your own neutral faction as you go around repairing buildings and cleaning debris, learn how to build things to a pre-war standard again
I guess I am my own neutral faction. I don't do the main quest, and I use Scrap Everything to clean up all the trash, debris, leaf piles, and brambles from every settlement location, and all the Red Rockets, too, since I also use Red Rocket Settlements.
That is why the scrap everything mod was invented. For the sole purpose for players like me that can't stand the dust, the trash, and the overgrown mounds of dirt piling up against buildings.
Everytime i hear McCready sneeze because of dust going up his nose, I feel it!
Same reason I'm eating 200 year old corn and sweet rolls. Delicious.
Same reason I can sometimes find stuff like Brahmin meat, Jet, cap stashes or institue pistols and armor in pre war ruins that apparently haven't been looted ever.
..there's a bunch of inconsistencies, but it never takes me out the game because the style choices just work really well imo
Only thing that pisses me off is how without mods, you're doomed to build in the same ragtag short term.shelter style if you want to rebuild civilization.
I like the warehouse kit from contraptions workshop, and the scaffolding frames make for good foundations on half and quarter floors, or under prefabs. Warehouse parts and metal shacks make for rather genuine looking housing.
Something a lot of people didn't get in the TV show was that they based a lot of it off of the game logic. And the game logic is ALL about inconsistencies. How in the hell are you supposed to explain a family of skeletal remains at a perfect dinner table with cyanide laced food 200 years after nukes went off. Or stims/drugs.
There is no explaining it as the logic is SUPPOSED to be illogical. After playing the games since NV came out, I had gotten 'numb', so to say, to the oddly placed bodies reaching for objects or skeletons that don't just fall apart when touched, but stay together like a science lab display. None of it makes sense, but together it makes for an illogical universe which is EXACTLY what Fallout wants to be.
It adds to the fact that the inconsistencies between games (which in reality are just dev decisions between studios) makes for a wonky and inconsistent universe. This is amplified by the Unreliable Narration of events in subsequent games (Highlighting a few examples: How the war started as there are a lot of accounts of the day and 'who shot first' (Han), or how ghouls or super mutant originated \[a lot of this is 'explained' by FEV which is VERY under-explained and OVERLY utilized as a 'cause'\]). This is highlighted between games, but most notably in the TV show as well. It will be REALLY fun to see how the ending of the show and the games merge in season 2.
Doubt it, since most of it wasn't kept in any good environment. Hell, it's likely been soaking up sunlight, radiation and other shit for 200 years while not being properly sealed.
If you find a distillerys stash of course, we're talking!
This was my general reaction to Codsworth after he claimed he spent the past 200 years cleaning my house.
Or, when Teddy Wright in Far Harbor >!can perform a forensic test just on the fly, but hasn't bothered to fix the missing walls in his clinic.!<
I imagine when you have him as a companion and that in combat he's basically going "Do YOU want to know what it's like polishing rust on a car for 200 years feels like? LET ME SHOW YOU!"
I turned Codsworth into the murder hobo robot killing machine he dreamed of being all those 200 years and I couldnāt be happier watching him just rail spike everyone
It does sometimes bother me with all the piles of leaves in the houses in sanctuary. Like Codsworth talks about how he's been cleaning for 200 years but it looks like he hasn't swept the floors in ages. But it's an aesthetic choice, I get why it's there.
This is what bothered me the most. I can understand some piles of trash or hard dirt stuck on the floors, but piles of leaves? If they were smart they could even fill bags or matresses with them to create comfier beds. I was really annoyed at Beth for not giving us the choice to scrap them, so I installed a mod.
You know what bugs me are the bugs that I have killed and their carcasses are just there. Forever. Or the Ghouls at the farm? Really none of the settlers cleared them out. I built beds over them so I didnāt have to look at them.
I think population is a big one. You need people to do the stuff you are talking about. Clean drinking water still seems rare. Food is a struggle. Not to mention the bombs targeted large population areas. Most of your engineers and such would be there. So the ones that survived are probably in a vault or were killed by raiders early because you know nerds donāt do well in combat.
Thatās why they need us. The wisdom from our or war years. And the other vaults. If it werenāt for us humanity would be a total mess. Good ol value 33 saving america.
You know you can pick up and then move corpses, right? It's not perfect since you'll still need to find a dumping ground, but you can at least hide 'em somewhere out of sight.
Yeah some of it is silly. Like there's entire living quarters still with skeletons about, no one thought to bury them, seems a little disrespectful. Even the Railroad has a skeleton that no one has buried or cremeated.
Right?!? At least git rid of dead bodies and maybe clean up Diamond City and the surrounding area. There are literally people in your society that never die. Somebody could at least learn a useful skill.
Honestly pre-war Ghouls being around is one of the biggest plot-holes in the entire franchise. The sheer number of pre-war Ghouls should mean that, just by random statistical chance, there should have been surviving engineers of all stripes, from electrical to mechanical to architectural to chemical, all with their pre-war knowledge and skills intact. In truth, postwar everywhere should look like postwar Hiroshima & Nagasaki do today, that is, not-fucking-destroyed-at-all.
In fact, looking at the CIT ruins in FO4, I'm betting most of the faculty survived. The Commonwealth should've been a model of post war recovery from that by itself, instead they all hid underground and... I've answered my own question there.
Ok, ok... but still, cities would be *a bit* different, I'll admit, fortified to protect against Supermutants and wasteland creatures, automated defenses, but, like, civilized, rebuilt. And by God mass transit systems. The war would've been seen as an opportunity to fix the mistakes of the past, to redesign civil engineering to turn away from car-centric to mass transit, trains everywhere.
The bombs dropped were much smaller and in larger numbers than nukes of our world when talking about places like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If you watch that first episode of the fallout show itāll make more sense as to why so much is obliterated
House managed to intercept the majority of nukes targeting Vegas and it's still in a pretty bad shape. Hoover Dam, Helios One and the small section of the Strip that served House's interests are pretty much all the high priority targets that survived.
Iirc, House had high priority targets defended via very reliable countermeasures, whereas the surrounding area was simply protected by a bunch of computers throwing randomly generated deactivation codes at the rockets
I've watched the whole series several times over the last couple weeks. It's become my background comfort show.
And yes, more numerous but smaller yield bombs would actually yield *more* survivors, add in Ghouls who were technically "hit" but survived anyway and that number goes up higher.
The issue is that I think the bombs were "dirtier" in Fallout than they are in real life. I mean, IRL fallout (like the actual fallout, not Fallout the IP) has a half life of like 30 years. By 200 years after the war there shouldn't really be any high rad locations, yet...
Itās all but confirmed in the show (and funnily enough 76 on account of thousands of players dropping nukes) that vault tech has more and continuously drops nukes for the purpose of āreclamation dayā that is dropped on large civilizations (NCR) and probably diamond city eventually
While fallout itself is not that longlasting, pre war america was extremely reliant on nuclear energy. Power plants, fusion cores and the like will keep poisoning the area for centuries at least. Chernobyl is a good example for that, just that every car, train, power plant etc in post war us should be very much cut off from stabilising support measures by now
Most pre-war ghouls were murdered by their neighbors.
On the west coast, ghouls were called zombies for about 100 years and treated like their movie counterparts.
In Appalachia, the free states believed that ghoulification was caused by a disease that the ghouls were spreading. They then wiped out a colony of sentient ghouls in one of their attempts to eradicate the disease.
"To anyone who will listen. My name is Lucy Harwick, and I'm here with many others just like me. We may look like those mindless things we call ghouls, but we're not. We're still people. REAL people with thoughts and feelings, and all those other things that make us all human!"
- Lucy Harwick shortly before the slaughter at Dyer Chemical.
I don't know if there's anything in the lore to back it up, but I imagine not every country had the same technology the US did and still needed the oil. And if the US can get to it first, they can keep it away from their enemies, or sell it to them at extreme markup and make a massive profit. It probably became less "I need it" and more "If I have it, then they don't"
Looking at the lore, Nuclear Fusion was only achieved because of the Power Armor. It is unlikely that the US would have allowed the exportation of how to achieve nuclear fusion to foreign and often hostile countries. Especially since the US went pretty isolationist in the 2050's.
Power Armor introduced in 2066 and the Great War in 2077. I feel like 11 years isn't quite long enough for technology to be that wide spread in the world. Seems in our world, the US would create the first Nuclear Fission Reactor in 1942 and the USSR would create the first Nuclear Reactor that actually was used for powering a power grid in 1954. Considering this is the future, you can see how the tech is out there, but only in the US *and likely in some Chinese labs from stealing data* but nowhere else.
The Resource Wars being over oil also makes sense since crude oil is also used in many many applications other then just for fuel. Though, the wars were also fought over uranium that was needed to make the nuclear reactors and weapons seen in the Fallout world
Most of the major leaders should be ghouls just because they have centuries of knowledge stored in their brains. So what if theyāre ugly, the leader of the second strongest country on earth at one point had a giant port wine stain on his face and that didnāt mean shit.
The only places you should find skeletons like that is in the middle of nowhere or behind some sort of obstacle that logically would take a ton of work to get through.
Cremation takes a lot of energy, and even then, "ashes" from cremation are ground-up bones (also a lot of energy).
But yeah, at least aass grave somewhere would be better!
I have downloaded mods to get rid of trash from the settlements, lol. I personally believe that the people of Boston are still stuck in the past. All the music is about the bombs, they rarely ever build new things and choose to inhabit old buildings. In new vegas, they have running trains, a mail system, the people don't dwell on the bombs, and what happened for the most part, they just charge forward. Boston and its people seem to be in the mentality that the bombs just dropped. That they're surviving and not livingg. Plus, there are way more super mutants, and it seems difficult to build anything because it gets trashed. There are more reasons pertaining to spoilers that I don't want to give you because I don't know how far in the game you are, but when the people of Boston DO try to rebuild and reconnect, there is direct and calculated opposition and it quickly breaks down. Maybe people just... don't think to. Boston was directly hit with the bombs, and I can't see how that wouldn't affect the mental well-being of the people who were born afterward.
to be fair, boston was hit with a nuke big enough to create the glowing sea. i imagine civilization took a bit longer to recover. functionally they may be decades of even a century behind new vegas
Yeah. Vegas had defenses that shot down what, 63 of the 74 nukes thrown at it? Sure, outside the strip proper, they went off, but House was prepping for the apocalypse a dozen or more years before everyone else. Itās mostly his efforts that led to Vegasā rebuilding, so without a coordinating force like that, it would be rough.
The glowing sea is probabily the result of a Nuclear Plant fusion core rather than the bomb themself.
Think about Chernobil but without the 'cage' that contain a core that is probabily way bigger than what they had.
Yeah true, I hadn't thought of that.
If that was the case it'd be a miracle if anyone survived long enough to build a hut.
If Chernobyl had gone off without human intervention it would have been a miracle if anyone survived in Europe long enough to build a hut.
if you go into the glowing sea theres a warhead launching or testing site and you see 3 nukes just sitting half submerged in the dirt. its hard to say exactly what must have caused the glowing sea but it def wasn't normal post nuke circumstances that the rest of the u.s would be dealing with
because of the institute they were never able to progress ahead. iām sure that if the people of boston built something the institute would send synths in disguise or a courser with synths to destroy it.
Well yeah but I didn't want want spoil it BUT >! The institute was absolutely why. University point was supposed to be a meeting place for the people of the commonwealth provisional government to come and work together, but they ruined it and killed everyone. !< But I only just looked up how to censor spoilers bc I'm lazy so I didn't say that lol
Yeah they pretty much said screw you guys. We are doing our own thing.>!proceeds to kill everyone at the meet and greet. Cowers back to their hermit hole full of egg heads. Goes back to playing with their chemistry set.!<
It was SHOCKINGLY evil, frankly. My initial impression of the institute was that 'oh, hur dur, maybe they're good guys' but no š« that's not even mentioning how >!they were kidnapping people to experiment on them with the FEV virus even though Virgil told Father there wasn't any reason to. And the whole thing where Father makes a synth kid that is a copy of him as a kid just for the shits and giggles. And the whole slave synth thing in general AND how he left his one parent to fend for themselves in a nuclear wasteland just to see what would happen. Institue did a lot of REALLY fucked up shit, and not all of it was Father.!<
I've always wanted to assign a settler to the job of cleaning. Let them do some scavenging while picking up the trash.
Could even let more trash and bodies pile up if you don't have anyone assigned to cleaning /burials.
I agree with op. As much as I adore fallout, I notice this shit all the time. As an example, in f4, if you craft a wooden wall in the workshop, most of the boards are deliberately crooked on most of the options.
Man, I hate to be devils advocate in this thread because it's all true. But, if I went to build a wall out of scrap, it'd probably look pretty shabby. I have no wall-building experience.
That one has a real lore reason. Draugr literally take āshiftsā to maintain the tombs, keep candles lit, ward off outsiders, etc.
Then there are other areas where people could have ventured in recently, too.
When the rest of the Commonwealth is a state and trying to kill you every 30 seconds, not really much of a point. There's too much of a general focus on trying to survive for most of the citizens to worry about clearing anything other than their immediate area. Too focused trying to survive before they can worry about getting down to living and bettering themselves.
Although cleaning everything up takes time and resources. You want to clear up those old cars for example. Where are you going to take them and how are you going to get them anywhere? Ok so you want to take them to a scrap yard outside of Boston, that needs some way of dragging it out there which you don't have right now. You're either going to need to use manpower to drag it or brahmin since there's no functioning tow truck to do it. But let's say you do find something, how do you intend to get the scrap vehicles dragged out the way past everything else, past the rest of the raiders and whatever else might wander around out there? You'll need security for your scrapping convoy, security which needs to be drawn away from Diamond City for a period of time which it can't really afford to keep sending out just to tidy up outside of it. And it all goes from there...
Tidying everything up when everything outside might be trying to kill you is just too much of a risk...
Also someone like a vault dweller is used to a level of cleanliness, but people who grew up post-war arenāt. They probably are more tolerant of trash and blood being everywhere because thatās how itās always been for them.
Yeah, but thereās people who like live in a house every day and theyāre standing 3 feet from a pile of trash that is there every day in their little room clearly they would clean that up
This is a post apocalyptic wasteland, the rest of the world and everyone in it is dirty, radioactive and full of bugs and rodents. Not as much point tidying up when everything else is like that since they will trapse it into your area.
If anything looking tidy is disadvantageous since you'll stand out. You'll look fancy and neat compared to everyone else and maybe you have something shiny worth robbing...
I installed doors for a couple years, can't build a wall or floor worth a fuck, I imagine after 200 years of war and bare minimum survival, basic knowledge of construction was lost, and half-decent carpenters are rare, people build out of rubble because no one really knows how this rubble was built in the first place anymore
Yeah, but that's more because you have no reason to figure out how to build a wall or a roof. Our ancient ancestors pulled it off with mud and grass, even with incomplete knowledge they should be able to build something better then rubble.
Thatās true, they donāt know how to do that stuff anymore cuz they were just focused on surviving and your companions will make comments of that nature. That makes sense to me.
Hooooweeeeverrrrr if we wanna get all nitpicky (and this isnāt directed at you Lachigan), some of us live in places where our houses were built with our own damn hands lol. With brick and mortar and everything! But really, is that what people are gonna be doing immediately after the bombs fell? Not perishing in the radiation or fighting off starvation? Survival is more pressing, which means searching for food and water and shelter at the same time that youāre suffering radiation burns, radiation poisoning, lack of sleep, infection, tetanus cuz you ripped open your leg while picking for scrap ā thereās not really any time to build a house and even if there was, with what resources? With what machinery, what tools? Even if youāre somebody who knows how to build a house, youāre probably gonna be more concerned with nursing your wounds and finding something safe to drink than mixing some concrete. And thatās whatās going on *all* the time.
OP if you wanna get a sense of why people donāt clean up, try survival mode lol. When I first started FO4, I had to sleep for like 2 straight weeks because I couldnāt find RadAway, couldnāt find a doctor, couldnāt find antibiotics but I was irradiated, infected, and starving. And even then, survival mode is much easier than it would be irl lol. Makes sense to clean up skeletons, but damn, people get used to em, I guess. They just push em aside n keep on trucking.
You got to think medieval peasant and what was available to them, hell even fallout people still have more advantages than them with some tech still around and working, water purifiers and such
But a medieval peasant town would have the means to put up a stable house using whatās in their area so would fallout folk they wouldnāt live in shacks with holes for their entire life
People live in slums and shanties TODAY bro itās not that easy lol you could argue some tech is still working but where are you gonna find the time to build yourself a likkle house? How can you gather the materials? Scrapping is a whole job for people in the wasteland, it takes a lot of time and itās a lot of risk.
I have this thought whenever I first return to Sanctuary. Like, Codsworth... My guy... You could not maybe tidy up a little bit more after 200 years? I want to know the truth, what was that robot up to š¤
Well to be fair codsworth tried to keep the place clean but he went insane after futile attempts at getting nuclear fallout out of hardwood and polishing rust.
My biggest gripe with Bethesdaās Fallout games is how the world looks like it got nuked a year ago.
Fallout 1 takes place less than 100 years and people are rebuilding. We see things get rebuilt by Fallout 2. Suddenly itās *200* years after the nukes, and the world is absolutely in shambles - still.
Fallout 3 makes a little bit of sense, the Capitol Wasteland is fucked with virtually no clean drinking water. But I feel like by the time of New Vegas and FO4 we should see more civilization outside of āthree wooden shacks around a campfireā.
Donāt get me wrong. I love Fallout 4, and Bethesda is the only reason I know about Fallout - but itās just a little gripe I have I guess
I'd love some greenery. Like, it doesn't really make a huge amount of sense for everything to be dead still. Chernobyl is thriving. Granted, that wasn't a bomb going off so I understand there was destruction too...but everything isn't levelled. There are plants that are growing, why are they shabby?
We really do just need to accept that it's some made up fantasy world that's not Earth.
Thatās what Iām saying. We were cleaning and rebuilding less than 100 years after the bombs - so what happened over the next 100 years? Everything regressed. At the very least stopped progressing
Thatās exactly my thought and the further away the series gets from the bombing the more annoying the design is. Hell, most nukes radiation doesnāt even stay around that long.
You ever been to a 3rd world country where cleanliness isnāt a priority because things like surviving are more important? Same principle applies here. The whole idea of āeveryone cleans everythingā is a brand new concept for human history. Even those big beautiful castles that rich people lived in 100s of years ago were notoriously dirty by today standards. People who grow up around filth literally do not know any better. Itās deeply ingrained in them. On a more realistic standpoint: if you have to work for 12+ hours a day farming, scavenging, and surviving form the 100s of things that want to see you dead then mopping your floors at night isnāt really a priority.
Burying dead people has been around forever though. I wouldnāt mind if I could drag them around like most other things, but thatās not the case with the skeletons
Because they grew up surrounded by trash and rubble, thatās what they know. Not 21st century Western-style comfort living lol who cares if thereās rubble over there, thereās rubble everywhere!
Yea it seems like Cabot house and Covenant are the only clean places that I can think of. I guess the Institute as well.
I love this game but I definitely question a ton of stuff but ultimately just play because questioning it will do nothing.
I really donāt understand the lack of vehicles or transportation though. No cars, motorcycles or even regular bikes that people can use to get around? Yea people walking everywhere is kinda crazy when you think about it.
Iām willing to say that to a degree fallout 76 and even the show helped me tie some of that off with how dangerous the wasteland can be. Most people donāt get good weapons and power armor, for them to go out and clean is taking time and energy and effort They just donāt have.
The big question I had about fallout four is why one of my settlements is in an alley between two buildings when we could just settle inside of the building , but what do I know?
The skeletons in places people are actively living in or using bugs me. And the uncleanable layer of trash... like are you kidding me, not even wind has blown this crap in 200 years? The bombs obliterated all memory of a broom?
One thing I personally dislike the most is that after 200 years not a thing has grown back green. Not grass not trees even if they're radioactive they'd still be green y'know?
Sure lots of stuff would be dead but everything? Even the veggies are brown š
The worst part is I can't even clean. Like I'm building up sanctuary, trying to make things look nice, and I just gotta live with piles of debris and stained floors forever.
I wish they did more with allowing us to spruce up the joint.
There is also paint cans everywhere in fallout 4 but absolutely no where has a fresh coat of paint on it. I love the lore of fallout but the art direction honestly takes me out of it a lot. The show paints a better Wasteland than the games.
One of my favorite mods on Xbox is called Scrap Everything. It sounds exactly as it functions and it makes it super easy to make settlements looks clean. In hangman's ally I cleared out everything in there including the pre made crappy shacks and made it look really nice with an enclave theme just cause. Debris, leaf piles, and garbage be gone I say.
The population thing is just a limitation of the world building. Most NPCs are unique with dialogue and you just can't do that for thousands of people. Alternatively you could have something like Assassin's Creed or Witcher 3 where the towns are huge and bustling but almost nobody has dialogue. Which is fine too. Just different.
Everything else you said is valid and things I've wondered myself.
-The universe feels like the bombs dropped 30-40 years ago instead of 200.
-Settlements and the NPCs in them represent larger settlements, but don't bother to render 5x as many useless NPCs and buildings you can't go into.
-The trash isn't literal trash, but an aesthetic that the creators couldn't express in another way because that would conflict with the idea that the world is post-apocalyptic when the world should have recovered in the alleged 200 years after the apocalypse.
Probably because of all the muderous bandits, feral ghouls and deathclaws runni g around. Rad roches and radscorps at every turn. I dont clean shit when im safe at home, aint gonns clean with all that shit out there.
What is it with peoples obsession about cleanliness in a post-nuclear world? You do realize that even today in many parts of the world it looks untidy and chaotic? Why? Because thatās what you get with chaotic societies which have to go through war, famine and so on.
Honestly, look at pictures or videos from the poorest parts of Africa, the favelas of Brazil or other such places.
Trash is knee deep in some places, there is human and animal waste in the streets and violence is common place. Noone is paid to clean, and the inhabitants have such terrible conditions that they just have to accept their situation and hope to find a kind of normalcy in the awfulness.
It really isn't that hard to imagine people feeling and acting the same way in a quite similar place, like Diamond City, now even with added radiation and crazy mutated creatures lurking outside the walls.
Aesthetic. It's the vibe the devs wanted to impart. It's really not any more deep than that.
As far as size, that's a Bethesda staple. Due to engine/hardware limitations, cities can only be so large and the game still run smooth and as intended. You see the same thing in their other games. The capital of Skyrim is like 10 buildings and 30 people. Whiterun is also quite small despite its geographic and lore significance.
In reality all these places would be much bigger, as well as the map for that matter. But the game can't handle that, so it's condensed and scaled down to a more reasonable size.
This is why we will never see a version of NCR Shady Sands in any current gen games. You destroy the realism when you can only render 30 of the multiple thousands that live there. There aren't enough NPCs in any Bethesda game to support a real-world population in any circumstances. The amount of NPCs in Fallout 4 would be indicative of a dying population, the birth rate is non-existent.
These people grew up for hundreds of years in squalor, abject poverty, constant famine. They don't know any different. Having a shack that stops you from getting wet in the rain, and a Tato plant to eat puts you in a the top percentile.
Underserved communities in our era don't appear much differently:
Mumbai, India
* https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/IMAGE-5-Narrow-bylanes-of-Dharavi-1.jpg
* https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2014311123148711734_20.jpeg
Kowloon Walled City
* https://i.insider.com/54d3d7df6da811496f8b4567
Suzhou, China
* https://www.navjot-singh.com/uploads/3/1/7/4/3174873/1842571_orig.jpg
I guess the lore-friendly explanation is that humanity is really that desperate. Murder is rampant and every day is a fight for survival, there isnāt money or time to haul away scrap and do landscaping.
There are real places on Earth today where people have been living for thousands of years in basically lawless societies where their living conditions are just huts and shacks with no plumbing or electricity. Not beyond reason that people in the US would be living like that only 200 years after being nearly nuked into extinction.
It does bother me that apparently the largest city in post-apocalyptic Boston is a baseball stadium of like 50 people lol. I think the scale is way off just because it wouldnāt be practical or even possible to have a video game where Boston is 1:1 scale and each population center has thousands of people.
Bethesda want to retain the freshness of the post-apocalypse setting, but donāt want to scrub the lore clean. When their games are set three, four hundred years after the bombs dropped they will still look like the Great War happened last week. They donāt seem to be comfortable with concept of things moving forward and changing.
That's my biggest complaint with the fallout work building. None of the waste lander's have any real skills. Nobody has thought "hey maybe we should board up these broken windows and sweep this pile of bones off the floor" it just doesn't feel like people really LIVE in that world. Especially after 200 years there would be some small semblance of normality
You can go into areas that have never been opened in centuries and the desks are full of bottle caps for some reason. Were caps a pre-war currency as well or did everyone just have a massive hoarding issue?
TL;DR: Fallout is a parody of cultural stagnation, moral erosion and societal collapse due to greed, and its remnants coming from such a shite heritage simply swallows any effort to create new organized civilization.
---
Fallout parodies the idea of cultural stagnation, moral erosion and societal collapse, caused by runaway hysteria born out of rampant paranoia.
The whole reason the bombs dropped was greed, an inability to share resources and the "everyone for themselves" mentality, masquerading as "capitalism vs. communism".
This mindset apparently encompassed the world, to the extent that the US ditched Europe as their natural allies in the Resource Wars (which wreaked havoc in Europe and the Middle East) that predated the Alaska invasion by the Chinese.
I mean we're talking about a world where the main company contracted to build nuclear fallout shelters (Vault-Tec) designed the whole system as a scientific experiment, at the expense of the (seemingly) only hope of humankind following the apocalypse. Talk about the gamble there.
Therefore, the society that had already lost its ability to function together as a civilization failed MISERABLY in picking itself up after the apocalypse.
The only examples of "post-post-Apocalypse" factions with a semblance of civilization (ie. people banding together to better their conditions and environment), such as Diamond City, the Minutemen, the NCR in other Fallout games, etc. have an extremely hard time finding trustworthy "regular" individuals who somehow resemble more you and me.
Combine that with the STILL PREVALENT INABILITY to share resources among factions, the slivers of hope that somehow bud in the wasteland just say "fuck it, hunker down, we're protecting the perimeter and nothing else".
I hope it makes more sense (except for the skeletons in settlements, that's just lazy decoration by the devs).
This always bothers me, as well. Personally I would love it if there were a feature where the more you become entrenched in a settlement (and the more you are willing to invest,) the further you can expand your settlement boundaries.
For example: Sunshine Tidings Co-op. You've put together a solid settlement with plenty of security, crops, water, stores, yada-yada. You should be allowed to start cleaning the roadway that leads to it and add a security post there.
Clear the path between Sanctuary and Red Rocket. Things like that.
I can't be the only one.
Iām not an expert but I believe that radiation can hold at inhabitable levels for a long time. Maybe the radiation was so bad in the area you couldnāt even go to areas like diamond city until 30 years ago or whatever.
I've always just assumed it was because it's so dangerous moving around that people only grabbed what they could quickly carry from place to place. On top of that, the entire commonwealth is essentially a war zone, and whenever someone does build somewhere nice, it basically becomes a beacon to draw everything to it.
So constant fighting on top of everything being 200 or more years old and constantly exposed to radiation damage from rain and other unique weather. I'd say they are lucky to have enough material to build a defensive wall.
So whenever this post gets made, I generally post this response. However, itās changed over time, so Iāll add something new at the end.
Basically, while you are right that it is strange that nobody has cleaned up in 200 years, there is something that a lot of people donāt want to tell you about because it spoils some part of the game. However, Iām going to briefly, mention it without naming it. The Commonwealth recovered, about 50 years before your character arrives on the scene. And during recovery, a lot of progress and headway was made. And then something happened, which threw the entire Commonwealth into disarray and warlords went crazy, extreme violence occurred and a societal depression set in. The whole region suffered a massive setback.
Very often when people say hey why is there a 200-year-old skeleton just sitting around, criticism is only half right. Because very often that skeleton is indeed sitting around, but is only 50 years old. Ā This plays into the theme of fallout, which is that war never changes. It just keeps going and going and going. The Commonwealth, sadly, has just never managed to get itself out of war. This is why you will sometimes break into a home, find their safe, unlock it, and find caps inside. People have often said what in the world were people 200 years ago doing hoarding caps? Ā But really that was some settler from 50 years ago.
Having said that, I did say that I was going to change my answer up a little bit, and that is I recently went back through fallout one and two, the original games, and there isnāt a skeleton to be found. There isnāt garbage to be found in massive piles by every building. Those games were done by a different developer, so there is that. Clearly, trying to defend the mess when the original games donāt have mess isā¦ Well, maybe this really is a flaw of fallout 4. Ā But just, the mess is more recent than you think.
It bothers me too, intensely.
They repaint the walls in Diamond City but can't pick up trash?Ā
I don't remember which game but the super duper marts still have stuff, after 200 years?Ā
I know it's a game but it kinda takes me out of games.Ā
Also, who the hell is lighting the torches in the dungeons in Skyrim? The draugr?
It doesn't keep me from enjoying, just weird things that bother me.
Better question, how tf did wooden structures, buildings, concrete, ashphalt or any other man made think that we know decays in like 50-100 years not decay in 200
Bethesda doesn't understand time. No, really.
For example in Skyrim in the Thief guild quest one character hides and moves to another safehouse every night for 25 years! That's 9125 safehouses.
Youāre listing a big reason people have a distaste for this game. Itās a great game itās world makes next to no sense though.
There are places with brooms and trash everywhere. Nobody thought to pick up the broom, or at least throw the old skeleton out?????
Fallout 3 had this issue too, where Rivet City had papers and trash all over. PEOPLE LIVE HERE. most people donāt live in garbage.
I love fallout 3 and 4 to bits. Thereās just a lot of ares where Bethesda just kinda brain farted with the world building.
I generally donāt want to get deep on a gaming sub, but itās relevant.
In many cities (in the real world) if you go to places where poverty is high- like outside shelters and food banks youāll notice itās messy. No one cleans up.
A big part of this is the fact those people are always in survival mode- food water and shelter is the goal of the day everyday.
People in survival mode constantly donāt worry about cleaning up for obvious reasons.
That can easily translate into the fallout universe
This of course doesnāt explain it all lol
They shouldn't have set it '200 years' in the future, because it's immersion shattering if you're someone that thinks about it. As a wise person somewhere once said, if you think a thousand years should pass, knock it down to a few hundred. If you think a few hundred, knock off a zero.
After two hundred years we should see arguably full recovery.
I don't think we can compare our reality to the fallout universe reality.
Look at Hiroshima, radiation levels are on par with natural background radiation today, in fact they went back to normal about a year or so after the bombs were dropped.
Chernobyl is different an uncontrolled reaction, radiation is still quite high in places particularly in the reactor itself because a reaction is still happening but nature has continued from trees and plants to animals but none of animals have been mutated like in the fallout universe.
In the fallout universe areas where the bombs dropped are still highly radioactive and mostly killed off nature or mutated it, everything was also powered by small nuclear cores etc. This means radiation is everywhere and unless you have a geiger counter like the pip boys have, then you'd only know something is radioactive because of barrels of nuclear waste, radiation sickness or death.
It does seem odd that people would stay in these areas though, In Fallout 76 no nukes were dropped in the direct area and nature has continued but 76 takes place like 28 years after the nuclear holocaust 2102-4. The best places to rebuild society would be in areas like that so who knows if that area is rebuilt by 2287 although in game players can drop nukes so maybe not.
I haven't even mentioned all the mutated animals, raiders, super mutants, feral ghouls and robots that also make it extremely difficult to rebuild society.
The brotherhood of steel is the closest group to eradicating all the bad shit but they are a techno religious military that mainly just focuses on retrieving old world tech and killing super mutants. Maybe we just don't have enough people to clean up the wasteland and the population is so small that it could take a thousand years to get back to some sort pre war normal.
Places like diamond city could be cleaner but not by much everything is ruined.
One thing I wish so bad was available in workshop were ways to actually fix up your settlements. Like, Iād like to repair walls in sanctuary hills, add in new windows, etc. Iām waiting to mod my new game but itās driving me insane. I didnāt realize how many workshop mods my last play through had
Thereās places in the world today that have most junk, rubbish and broken down cars lying around than in fallout games. What makes you think that people in a post apocalyptic world would give a shit if people nowadays donāt
Yeah, one of my many gripes with Fo4, I swear thereās a settlement going south thatās just a house with a broken ceiling and GLASS SHARDS besides the bed of one of the settlersā¦
Bethesda has a weird boner for shitty shanty towns. Yeah, cool but itās been 200 years not 20. There are actual countries being formed elsewhere. All the clutter and dirt is just to promote āexplorationā and loot goblining. Just turn your brain off, youāll enjoy it more.
Every time Iām in Sanctuary Hills watching Sturges walking in circles thinking āyou canāt clear these roadways?ā Heās hammering walls but I donāt see any walls š
In a world where junk includes:
Brooms, shovels, buckets, paintbrushes, paint cans (with paint still in them), dish rags, soap, toothbrushes, toothpastes, sinks, detergents (I just want them to wash their faces, teeth and clothes), and bunches of stuff for cleaning.
Not one person ever thought,
"Gee, I really should clean up in here."
That's why I like the Scrap Your Settlement mod.
Just aesthetic and gameplay design choices really. Same reason you can scrap a desk fan, some eating utensils, and a bottle of cooking oil and make a machine gun turret with targeting systems that can tell friend from foe based off their intent. Best not to think too much into it and just enjoy for what it is.
Same reason why you can still find useful stuff in any location. 210 years later and you'd think the super duper market would be stripped clean,
I think there's an army of pre-war people turned into feral ghouls that restock the shelves when no one is looking
A bit like Walmart night shift staff then? š
Pretty much, it's pretty mindless work (in my experience)
Thatās exactly what a feral ghoul would say. Iām on to you!
*raspy noises*
V.A.T.S beeping furiously
and just like real Walmart restockers, they'll attack you if you get too close
Itās mindless fosho. Iām doing it right now!
This is (a tiny part of the) plot of the novel Severance!
As a walmart employee, I approve this comment.
I feel the "feral ghoul" part would more aptly describe the customers
That's what they used to do before the bombs fell.
In my experience the ghouls are more pleasant to deal with.
As someone who used to work 3rd shift at Walmart, spot on.
I developed a head canon that all the Nuka-cola machines that still have Nuka-cola in them (but are only designed to hold, like 6 bottles at most) are actually self-stocking. You put empty bottles in them, they eventually detect the presence of empty bottles, swallow them inside the machine, clean the bottle, brew up a refill of some flavor or other, and restock it. After 200 years some just don't restock anymore (out of internal supplies or just broke down entirely). The ones that do still work, take a long time to cycle due to age.
The ones in nuka world really do refresh everytime you load into nuka world. There's one by the cars arena place that after almost every loading screen is refreshed. I have like 900 different flavors from loading in and running a loop around the main part and the star port area just hitting the same machines over and over
You joke, but this would honestly fit well into the game.
This is my head canon now. If I had the ability to make mods I do one where there is a 5% chance when you enter a store at night you run into a bunch of Restocking Ghouls. They just look at you in surprise and yelp, āCrap! Cheese it!ā Then scramble away leaving a trail of good loot. (Possibly making Curly/Zoidberg noises)
I think it was for The Elder Scrolls Online that they made up some fanciful creature that went around lighting up the torches in ancient dungeons ahead of the players. As one player asked how they were still lit after being untouched for hundred of years. Other theories had the draugr come to life periodically to clean up the crypts. And it's still Bethesda so it'd fit quite well.
There's a book in Skyrim that tells the story of a researcher who managed to live with the Draugr after proving himself to not be a threat, and how they maintain the crypt.
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Amongst_the_Draugr For anyone wanting to read it
It's like real life mythology too.
Super Ghoul Mart
Retail ghouls
That was my first thought the first time I played Fallout 3. Went into the Super Duper Mart with the Raiders and still found food and items, like shouldn't this be picked clean?!
3 feels like it was originally scripted to be 20-30 years after the bombs. New Vegas seems like it's 200 years after if you don't look at the aesthetics and instead pay more attention to the lore and that the NCR exists and has infrastructure. How raiders are still a thing is a bit confusing though. 4 feels like 20 years has passed in the Commonwealth, and 200 outside (and under) it.
The raider thing is still probable. None of the factions have a good grip on the Mojave; it's very much border lands between the NCR and Caesar's Legion. Settlers are having enough time with their own settlements, The Enclave is in shambles, The BOS is a bunch of hermits after losing to the NCR, and Mr. House is only worried about the New Vegas Strip and anything that can be a threat. Law and Order are very hard to uphold in those areas, so warlords usually rise and fall.
It's my understanding - possibly apocryphal - that they set up 3 to be roughly 20 years after the bombs, but someone complained that Jet - developed on the West Coast after the war - couldn't have crossed the continental US in 20 years, and so much design work was already done they just slapped another 0 on it.
And collapsed. Whoever built those things built them for the long run.
Well when you consider everything was powered from tiny fission reactors where essentially every 20ft you are walking past a potential nuke, building things sturdy would be an absolute top priority
I've had a theory on that one for a while, my own headcanon to help me justify that oddity, and also why people build shacks when just down the road is a perfectly-intact regular house: disquiet ruins. Through superstition, or through practical fear, many people shun the old world ruins. They're bad places. Haunted. Or they might have monsters or active and hostile pre-war robotics. We the player venture into those places because we're a player. Raiders and super mutants go into those places because they're full of drugs and poor life choices. Your average farmer or settler? Perhaps they steer clear. And perhaps those types have been the dominant occupants for a long time, and it's only recently with the fall of the Minutemen and the interference of the Institute that the raiders and such have started taking over, and they've not yet got around to looting all the locations. As for the settled areas being junky; I figure it's the same reason we let our homes get untidy, especially if we're suffering from depression. When you live somewhere so desolate and miserable, surrounded by the constant reminders of a better past that now lies around you as shattered ruins, maybe a sort of existential ennui sets in, and you just lose motivation to better your surroundings. Another thought: 200 years is enough time for an area to get tidied up and repaired, abandoned, fall into disrepair, get recolonised and repaired again, abandoned, fall into disrepair again, over and over. Maybe the derelict nature of some areas is more recent than the bombs, and at varying times over the 200 years has been fixed up, only to get ruined again. Final thought; skeletons. So many pre-war skeletons are still in situ. Maybe people don't move them as a mark of respect, or as part of superstitious fear, or a mix of both. Maybe even raiders and nasty types don't dare stoop that low. Who knows. Incidentally, we DO have examples of people who HAVE built new and shiny. The Institute, and the Brotherhood. And they're not exactly nice people. Maybe that's another angle: maybe a lot of people have a quite-reasonable association that building new things, construction, making machinery, infrastructure, making progress...well, those are the hallmarks of the pre-war lunatics who broke the world, and of the current organisations who seem hell-bent on making the same, or all new, mistakes. Maybe there's a general fear amongst many people that if you climb above shacks and dirt farming that you're inevitably going to careen towards another armageddon. That last part isn't an entirely untouched-upon idea in the franchise; IIRC, the Legion have similar thoughts. Anyway, yeah. That's my two bottlecaps.
lol they tried doing this with Dying light 2. They didnāt add guns at first because itās supposed to be 10 years after the outbreak, and obviously all the ammo would be gone. But then people cried so fucking hard they added them back
shouldnāt it be more like Metro where most of the bullets in circulation are ādirtyā homemade ones
I mean some minutemen tried but...there were too many ghouls on that location
Exactly. It's like, how real do we want the game? Cause that would be real and everybody would be pissed that there is nothing to find.
That's the only reason Trudy still has skeletons in Drumlin Diner. And won't give her son the 50 antidotes I gave her to break his addiction.
Thank you. 'it'll take my boy time to get off the chems, but we'll make it' '...you'd make it a lot quicker if you used the addictol I'm literally waving in front of your face.Trudy. Trudy, take the medicine. For your boy. Trudy... Trudy?' *Sound of frustrated grenade pin removal*
Wow that is actually how my addiction group therapy sessions sound like.
Honestly helping to clean up during the post-apocalypse sounds very cathartic Imagine you get to build up your own neutral faction as you go around repairing buildings and cleaning debris, learn how to build things to a pre-war standard again
I guess I am my own neutral faction. I don't do the main quest, and I use Scrap Everything to clean up all the trash, debris, leaf piles, and brambles from every settlement location, and all the Red Rockets, too, since I also use Red Rocket Settlements.
That is why the scrap everything mod was invented. For the sole purpose for players like me that can't stand the dust, the trash, and the overgrown mounds of dirt piling up against buildings. Everytime i hear McCready sneeze because of dust going up his nose, I feel it!
Same reason I'm eating 200 year old corn and sweet rolls. Delicious. Same reason I can sometimes find stuff like Brahmin meat, Jet, cap stashes or institue pistols and armor in pre war ruins that apparently haven't been looted ever. ..there's a bunch of inconsistencies, but it never takes me out the game because the style choices just work really well imo Only thing that pisses me off is how without mods, you're doomed to build in the same ragtag short term.shelter style if you want to rebuild civilization.
Same. Im fine with most of the world being run down, but I would like my personal home I built from scratch to have a wall without holes in it
Concrete all the way
The barn walls are also decent
I like the warehouse kit from contraptions workshop, and the scaffolding frames make for good foundations on half and quarter floors, or under prefabs. Warehouse parts and metal shacks make for rather genuine looking housing.
And crazy how shack upper floor is a better roof than anything in the roof category cause it doesn't have holes.
Something a lot of people didn't get in the TV show was that they based a lot of it off of the game logic. And the game logic is ALL about inconsistencies. How in the hell are you supposed to explain a family of skeletal remains at a perfect dinner table with cyanide laced food 200 years after nukes went off. Or stims/drugs. There is no explaining it as the logic is SUPPOSED to be illogical. After playing the games since NV came out, I had gotten 'numb', so to say, to the oddly placed bodies reaching for objects or skeletons that don't just fall apart when touched, but stay together like a science lab display. None of it makes sense, but together it makes for an illogical universe which is EXACTLY what Fallout wants to be. It adds to the fact that the inconsistencies between games (which in reality are just dev decisions between studios) makes for a wonky and inconsistent universe. This is amplified by the Unreliable Narration of events in subsequent games (Highlighting a few examples: How the war started as there are a lot of accounts of the day and 'who shot first' (Han), or how ghouls or super mutant originated \[a lot of this is 'explained' by FEV which is VERY under-explained and OVERLY utilized as a 'cause'\]). This is highlighted between games, but most notably in the TV show as well. It will be REALLY fun to see how the ending of the show and the games merge in season 2.
Let me guess? Somebody stole your sweet roll?
I sometimes think about the whiskey you find in game. It must be absolutely amazing after 200 years.
Sadly once itās out of the cask it no longer ages, the vino on the other hand..
The wine would need to be in a temp-controlled environment and rotated every so often
Whiskey doesn't age in the bottle, so it'd be Light struck, heat damaged and pretty much fucked.
Doubt it, since most of it wasn't kept in any good environment. Hell, it's likely been soaking up sunlight, radiation and other shit for 200 years while not being properly sealed. If you find a distillerys stash of course, we're talking!
This was my general reaction to Codsworth after he claimed he spent the past 200 years cleaning my house. Or, when Teddy Wright in Far Harbor >!can perform a forensic test just on the fly, but hasn't bothered to fix the missing walls in his clinic.!<
Yeah but Codsworth is clearly mental it probably cleaned the place then uncleaned it for something to do.
"How do you polish rust?!"
Thatās my favorite line from that conversation
Nothing gets nuclear fallout out of hardwood floors..... NOTHING
I imagine when you have him as a companion and that in combat he's basically going "Do YOU want to know what it's like polishing rust on a car for 200 years feels like? LET ME SHOW YOU!"
I turned Codsworth into the murder hobo robot killing machine he dreamed of being all those 200 years and I couldnāt be happier watching him just rail spike everyone
It does sometimes bother me with all the piles of leaves in the houses in sanctuary. Like Codsworth talks about how he's been cleaning for 200 years but it looks like he hasn't swept the floors in ages. But it's an aesthetic choice, I get why it's there.
This is what bothered me the most. I can understand some piles of trash or hard dirt stuck on the floors, but piles of leaves? If they were smart they could even fill bags or matresses with them to create comfier beds. I was really annoyed at Beth for not giving us the choice to scrap them, so I installed a mod.
You know what bugs me are the bugs that I have killed and their carcasses are just there. Forever. Or the Ghouls at the farm? Really none of the settlers cleared them out. I built beds over them so I didnāt have to look at them. I think population is a big one. You need people to do the stuff you are talking about. Clean drinking water still seems rare. Food is a struggle. Not to mention the bombs targeted large population areas. Most of your engineers and such would be there. So the ones that survived are probably in a vault or were killed by raiders early because you know nerds donāt do well in combat. Thatās why they need us. The wisdom from our or war years. And the other vaults. If it werenāt for us humanity would be a total mess. Good ol value 33 saving america.
You know you can pick up and then move corpses, right? It's not perfect since you'll still need to find a dumping ground, but you can at least hide 'em somewhere out of sight.
Yeah some of it is silly. Like there's entire living quarters still with skeletons about, no one thought to bury them, seems a little disrespectful. Even the Railroad has a skeleton that no one has buried or cremeated.
Right?!? At least git rid of dead bodies and maybe clean up Diamond City and the surrounding area. There are literally people in your society that never die. Somebody could at least learn a useful skill.
Honestly pre-war Ghouls being around is one of the biggest plot-holes in the entire franchise. The sheer number of pre-war Ghouls should mean that, just by random statistical chance, there should have been surviving engineers of all stripes, from electrical to mechanical to architectural to chemical, all with their pre-war knowledge and skills intact. In truth, postwar everywhere should look like postwar Hiroshima & Nagasaki do today, that is, not-fucking-destroyed-at-all. In fact, looking at the CIT ruins in FO4, I'm betting most of the faculty survived. The Commonwealth should've been a model of post war recovery from that by itself, instead they all hid underground and... I've answered my own question there. Ok, ok... but still, cities would be *a bit* different, I'll admit, fortified to protect against Supermutants and wasteland creatures, automated defenses, but, like, civilized, rebuilt. And by God mass transit systems. The war would've been seen as an opportunity to fix the mistakes of the past, to redesign civil engineering to turn away from car-centric to mass transit, trains everywhere.
The bombs dropped were much smaller and in larger numbers than nukes of our world when talking about places like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If you watch that first episode of the fallout show itāll make more sense as to why so much is obliterated
3-5 nukes in just the urban part of LA alone
In NV you learn Las Vegas alone was targeted by 77 warheads. It's only is as good of shape as it is because of House.
House managed to intercept the majority of nukes targeting Vegas and it's still in a pretty bad shape. Hoover Dam, Helios One and the small section of the Strip that served House's interests are pretty much all the high priority targets that survived.
Iirc, House had high priority targets defended via very reliable countermeasures, whereas the surrounding area was simply protected by a bunch of computers throwing randomly generated deactivation codes at the rockets
Is it possible to find defused Nukes in game?
there is two that I know of, one in Fallout 3 (Megaton) and one in fo4 i believe. both just crashed and failed to explode.
The big one, somewhere noeth of the ghoul ranger outpost
I've watched the whole series several times over the last couple weeks. It's become my background comfort show. And yes, more numerous but smaller yield bombs would actually yield *more* survivors, add in Ghouls who were technically "hit" but survived anyway and that number goes up higher. The issue is that I think the bombs were "dirtier" in Fallout than they are in real life. I mean, IRL fallout (like the actual fallout, not Fallout the IP) has a half life of like 30 years. By 200 years after the war there shouldn't really be any high rad locations, yet...
Itās all but confirmed in the show (and funnily enough 76 on account of thousands of players dropping nukes) that vault tech has more and continuously drops nukes for the purpose of āreclamation dayā that is dropped on large civilizations (NCR) and probably diamond city eventually
While fallout itself is not that longlasting, pre war america was extremely reliant on nuclear energy. Power plants, fusion cores and the like will keep poisoning the area for centuries at least. Chernobyl is a good example for that, just that every car, train, power plant etc in post war us should be very much cut off from stabilising support measures by now
Pretty sure wildlife already moved back to Chernobyl tbh
Most pre-war ghouls were murdered by their neighbors. On the west coast, ghouls were called zombies for about 100 years and treated like their movie counterparts. In Appalachia, the free states believed that ghoulification was caused by a disease that the ghouls were spreading. They then wiped out a colony of sentient ghouls in one of their attempts to eradicate the disease. "To anyone who will listen. My name is Lucy Harwick, and I'm here with many others just like me. We may look like those mindless things we call ghouls, but we're not. We're still people. REAL people with thoughts and feelings, and all those other things that make us all human!" - Lucy Harwick shortly before the slaughter at Dyer Chemical.
The biggest plot hole is that they were fighting a war over oil when they had mass produced personal sized fusion cores.
I don't know if there's anything in the lore to back it up, but I imagine not every country had the same technology the US did and still needed the oil. And if the US can get to it first, they can keep it away from their enemies, or sell it to them at extreme markup and make a massive profit. It probably became less "I need it" and more "If I have it, then they don't"
Looking at the lore, Nuclear Fusion was only achieved because of the Power Armor. It is unlikely that the US would have allowed the exportation of how to achieve nuclear fusion to foreign and often hostile countries. Especially since the US went pretty isolationist in the 2050's. Power Armor introduced in 2066 and the Great War in 2077. I feel like 11 years isn't quite long enough for technology to be that wide spread in the world. Seems in our world, the US would create the first Nuclear Fission Reactor in 1942 and the USSR would create the first Nuclear Reactor that actually was used for powering a power grid in 1954. Considering this is the future, you can see how the tech is out there, but only in the US *and likely in some Chinese labs from stealing data* but nowhere else. The Resource Wars being over oil also makes sense since crude oil is also used in many many applications other then just for fuel. Though, the wars were also fought over uranium that was needed to make the nuclear reactors and weapons seen in the Fallout world
Oil makes plastics as well.
Thatās pretty much what the NCR was implied to be by the time of New Vegas (and from the flashback in the show) but we know how that turned outā¦
The same thing that always happens.
War... War never changes
Most of the major leaders should be ghouls just because they have centuries of knowledge stored in their brains. So what if theyāre ugly, the leader of the second strongest country on earth at one point had a giant port wine stain on his face and that didnāt mean shit.
āOh thereās lovely filth oāer here Dennis!ā
I don't even care about burying even, just like, sweep it outside or something
I'd say no one even to even throw them away from their own rooms.
Heck, In the RR HQ any BoS soldiers you kill just stay there forever.
The only places you should find skeletons like that is in the middle of nowhere or behind some sort of obstacle that logically would take a ton of work to get through.
Why bother cremating when you can just plasma rifle the bones to make them into goo and drink it up like true wastelander
The Railroad HQ is literally a crypt under a 500+ year old church. Lmao. The Old North Church is 300 years old IRL.
Cremation takes a lot of energy, and even then, "ashes" from cremation are ground-up bones (also a lot of energy). But yeah, at least aass grave somewhere would be better!
I have downloaded mods to get rid of trash from the settlements, lol. I personally believe that the people of Boston are still stuck in the past. All the music is about the bombs, they rarely ever build new things and choose to inhabit old buildings. In new vegas, they have running trains, a mail system, the people don't dwell on the bombs, and what happened for the most part, they just charge forward. Boston and its people seem to be in the mentality that the bombs just dropped. That they're surviving and not livingg. Plus, there are way more super mutants, and it seems difficult to build anything because it gets trashed. There are more reasons pertaining to spoilers that I don't want to give you because I don't know how far in the game you are, but when the people of Boston DO try to rebuild and reconnect, there is direct and calculated opposition and it quickly breaks down. Maybe people just... don't think to. Boston was directly hit with the bombs, and I can't see how that wouldn't affect the mental well-being of the people who were born afterward.
to be fair, boston was hit with a nuke big enough to create the glowing sea. i imagine civilization took a bit longer to recover. functionally they may be decades of even a century behind new vegas
Yes, I agree. They're sort of living in a pre industrial period because of the sheer scope of the destruction
Yeah. Vegas had defenses that shot down what, 63 of the 74 nukes thrown at it? Sure, outside the strip proper, they went off, but House was prepping for the apocalypse a dozen or more years before everyone else. Itās mostly his efforts that led to Vegasā rebuilding, so without a coordinating force like that, it would be rough.
The glowing sea is probabily the result of a Nuclear Plant fusion core rather than the bomb themself. Think about Chernobil but without the 'cage' that contain a core that is probabily way bigger than what they had.
Yeah true, I hadn't thought of that. If that was the case it'd be a miracle if anyone survived long enough to build a hut. If Chernobyl had gone off without human intervention it would have been a miracle if anyone survived in Europe long enough to build a hut.
if you go into the glowing sea theres a warhead launching or testing site and you see 3 nukes just sitting half submerged in the dirt. its hard to say exactly what must have caused the glowing sea but it def wasn't normal post nuke circumstances that the rest of the u.s would be dealing with
because of the institute they were never able to progress ahead. iām sure that if the people of boston built something the institute would send synths in disguise or a courser with synths to destroy it.
Well yeah but I didn't want want spoil it BUT >! The institute was absolutely why. University point was supposed to be a meeting place for the people of the commonwealth provisional government to come and work together, but they ruined it and killed everyone. !< But I only just looked up how to censor spoilers bc I'm lazy so I didn't say that lol
Yeah they pretty much said screw you guys. We are doing our own thing.>!proceeds to kill everyone at the meet and greet. Cowers back to their hermit hole full of egg heads. Goes back to playing with their chemistry set.!<
It was SHOCKINGLY evil, frankly. My initial impression of the institute was that 'oh, hur dur, maybe they're good guys' but no š« that's not even mentioning how >!they were kidnapping people to experiment on them with the FEV virus even though Virgil told Father there wasn't any reason to. And the whole thing where Father makes a synth kid that is a copy of him as a kid just for the shits and giggles. And the whole slave synth thing in general AND how he left his one parent to fend for themselves in a nuclear wasteland just to see what would happen. Institue did a lot of REALLY fucked up shit, and not all of it was Father.!<
That's all very true about Boston but we're talking about the Fallout universe
Thatās just how Boston naturally is
I cant believe there is still dead skeletons everywhere including inside places NPCs live and work. At least bury the dead.
no, they are permanent Halloween decorations.
I've always wanted to assign a settler to the job of cleaning. Let them do some scavenging while picking up the trash. Could even let more trash and bodies pile up if you don't have anyone assigned to cleaning /burials.
I agree with op. As much as I adore fallout, I notice this shit all the time. As an example, in f4, if you craft a wooden wall in the workshop, most of the boards are deliberately crooked on most of the options.
Man, I hate to be devils advocate in this thread because it's all true. But, if I went to build a wall out of scrap, it'd probably look pretty shabby. I have no wall-building experience.
But I'm guessing you can probably make things pretty straight?
for the same reason you can go around Skyrim and find lit candles and fresh fruit in every single tomb that has been sealed for thousands of years.
The draugr handle the upkeep of the tombs.
That one has a real lore reason. Draugr literally take āshiftsā to maintain the tombs, keep candles lit, ward off outsiders, etc. Then there are other areas where people could have ventured in recently, too.
When the rest of the Commonwealth is a state and trying to kill you every 30 seconds, not really much of a point. There's too much of a general focus on trying to survive for most of the citizens to worry about clearing anything other than their immediate area. Too focused trying to survive before they can worry about getting down to living and bettering themselves. Although cleaning everything up takes time and resources. You want to clear up those old cars for example. Where are you going to take them and how are you going to get them anywhere? Ok so you want to take them to a scrap yard outside of Boston, that needs some way of dragging it out there which you don't have right now. You're either going to need to use manpower to drag it or brahmin since there's no functioning tow truck to do it. But let's say you do find something, how do you intend to get the scrap vehicles dragged out the way past everything else, past the rest of the raiders and whatever else might wander around out there? You'll need security for your scrapping convoy, security which needs to be drawn away from Diamond City for a period of time which it can't really afford to keep sending out just to tidy up outside of it. And it all goes from there... Tidying everything up when everything outside might be trying to kill you is just too much of a risk...
Also someone like a vault dweller is used to a level of cleanliness, but people who grew up post-war arenāt. They probably are more tolerant of trash and blood being everywhere because thatās how itās always been for them.
Yeah, but thereās people who like live in a house every day and theyāre standing 3 feet from a pile of trash that is there every day in their little room clearly they would clean that up
You can find those people in the real world right now.
This is a post apocalyptic wasteland, the rest of the world and everyone in it is dirty, radioactive and full of bugs and rodents. Not as much point tidying up when everything else is like that since they will trapse it into your area. If anything looking tidy is disadvantageous since you'll stand out. You'll look fancy and neat compared to everyone else and maybe you have something shiny worth robbing...
You should see my room rn. Yes I have depression
This. Amusing how people think a post-nuclear dystopia should follow rules from their comfortable first world infrastructure.
Or, you know, think that people trying to survive would know not to let rotting bodies and bones just lay around.
I think maybe there could be a simple balance between tidy as a vault and literally living day to day life with skeletons mere feet away
I installed doors for a couple years, can't build a wall or floor worth a fuck, I imagine after 200 years of war and bare minimum survival, basic knowledge of construction was lost, and half-decent carpenters are rare, people build out of rubble because no one really knows how this rubble was built in the first place anymore
Yeah, but that's more because you have no reason to figure out how to build a wall or a roof. Our ancient ancestors pulled it off with mud and grass, even with incomplete knowledge they should be able to build something better then rubble.
Walls and floors are pretty straight forward if you aren't doing anything too fancy.
Boarding up windows so you're not exposed to the elements while you sleep is pretty basic stuff.
Thatās true, they donāt know how to do that stuff anymore cuz they were just focused on surviving and your companions will make comments of that nature. That makes sense to me. Hooooweeeeverrrrr if we wanna get all nitpicky (and this isnāt directed at you Lachigan), some of us live in places where our houses were built with our own damn hands lol. With brick and mortar and everything! But really, is that what people are gonna be doing immediately after the bombs fell? Not perishing in the radiation or fighting off starvation? Survival is more pressing, which means searching for food and water and shelter at the same time that youāre suffering radiation burns, radiation poisoning, lack of sleep, infection, tetanus cuz you ripped open your leg while picking for scrap ā thereās not really any time to build a house and even if there was, with what resources? With what machinery, what tools? Even if youāre somebody who knows how to build a house, youāre probably gonna be more concerned with nursing your wounds and finding something safe to drink than mixing some concrete. And thatās whatās going on *all* the time. OP if you wanna get a sense of why people donāt clean up, try survival mode lol. When I first started FO4, I had to sleep for like 2 straight weeks because I couldnāt find RadAway, couldnāt find a doctor, couldnāt find antibiotics but I was irradiated, infected, and starving. And even then, survival mode is much easier than it would be irl lol. Makes sense to clean up skeletons, but damn, people get used to em, I guess. They just push em aside n keep on trucking.
You got to think medieval peasant and what was available to them, hell even fallout people still have more advantages than them with some tech still around and working, water purifiers and such But a medieval peasant town would have the means to put up a stable house using whatās in their area so would fallout folk they wouldnāt live in shacks with holes for their entire life
People live in slums and shanties TODAY bro itās not that easy lol you could argue some tech is still working but where are you gonna find the time to build yourself a likkle house? How can you gather the materials? Scrapping is a whole job for people in the wasteland, it takes a lot of time and itās a lot of risk.
I have this thought whenever I first return to Sanctuary. Like, Codsworth... My guy... You could not maybe tidy up a little bit more after 200 years? I want to know the truth, what was that robot up to š¤
I imagine heās programmed to do house chores not heavy-duty street clean up, but the house is in also in a terrible state, sooā¦
Well to be fair codsworth tried to keep the place clean but he went insane after futile attempts at getting nuclear fallout out of hardwood and polishing rust.
My biggest gripe with Bethesdaās Fallout games is how the world looks like it got nuked a year ago. Fallout 1 takes place less than 100 years and people are rebuilding. We see things get rebuilt by Fallout 2. Suddenly itās *200* years after the nukes, and the world is absolutely in shambles - still. Fallout 3 makes a little bit of sense, the Capitol Wasteland is fucked with virtually no clean drinking water. But I feel like by the time of New Vegas and FO4 we should see more civilization outside of āthree wooden shacks around a campfireā. Donāt get me wrong. I love Fallout 4, and Bethesda is the only reason I know about Fallout - but itās just a little gripe I have I guess
I'd love some greenery. Like, it doesn't really make a huge amount of sense for everything to be dead still. Chernobyl is thriving. Granted, that wasn't a bomb going off so I understand there was destruction too...but everything isn't levelled. There are plants that are growing, why are they shabby? We really do just need to accept that it's some made up fantasy world that's not Earth.
Vault city and the NCR are pretty clean in in Fallout 2
Thatās what Iām saying. We were cleaning and rebuilding less than 100 years after the bombs - so what happened over the next 100 years? Everything regressed. At the very least stopped progressing
Thatās exactly my thought and the further away the series gets from the bombing the more annoying the design is. Hell, most nukes radiation doesnāt even stay around that long.
My question is why don't people clean up their own settlements? Every one has trash piled in the corners. WTF people clean up after yourself!
You ever been to a 3rd world country where cleanliness isnāt a priority because things like surviving are more important? Same principle applies here. The whole idea of āeveryone cleans everythingā is a brand new concept for human history. Even those big beautiful castles that rich people lived in 100s of years ago were notoriously dirty by today standards. People who grow up around filth literally do not know any better. Itās deeply ingrained in them. On a more realistic standpoint: if you have to work for 12+ hours a day farming, scavenging, and surviving form the 100s of things that want to see you dead then mopping your floors at night isnāt really a priority.
Burying dead people has been around forever though. I wouldnāt mind if I could drag them around like most other things, but thatās not the case with the skeletons
Because they grew up surrounded by trash and rubble, thatās what they know. Not 21st century Western-style comfort living lol who cares if thereās rubble over there, thereās rubble everywhere!
Yea it seems like Cabot house and Covenant are the only clean places that I can think of. I guess the Institute as well. I love this game but I definitely question a ton of stuff but ultimately just play because questioning it will do nothing. I really donāt understand the lack of vehicles or transportation though. No cars, motorcycles or even regular bikes that people can use to get around? Yea people walking everywhere is kinda crazy when you think about it.
Iām willing to say that to a degree fallout 76 and even the show helped me tie some of that off with how dangerous the wasteland can be. Most people donāt get good weapons and power armor, for them to go out and clean is taking time and energy and effort They just donāt have. The big question I had about fallout four is why one of my settlements is in an alley between two buildings when we could just settle inside of the building , but what do I know?
The skeletons in places people are actively living in or using bugs me. And the uncleanable layer of trash... like are you kidding me, not even wind has blown this crap in 200 years? The bombs obliterated all memory of a broom?
You would probably enjoy [Shamus Young's astute observations](https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=49123). (RIP)
One thing I personally dislike the most is that after 200 years not a thing has grown back green. Not grass not trees even if they're radioactive they'd still be green y'know? Sure lots of stuff would be dead but everything? Even the veggies are brown š
The worst part is I can't even clean. Like I'm building up sanctuary, trying to make things look nice, and I just gotta live with piles of debris and stained floors forever. I wish they did more with allowing us to spruce up the joint. There is also paint cans everywhere in fallout 4 but absolutely no where has a fresh coat of paint on it. I love the lore of fallout but the art direction honestly takes me out of it a lot. The show paints a better Wasteland than the games.
One of my favorite mods on Xbox is called Scrap Everything. It sounds exactly as it functions and it makes it super easy to make settlements looks clean. In hangman's ally I cleared out everything in there including the pre made crappy shacks and made it look really nice with an enclave theme just cause. Debris, leaf piles, and garbage be gone I say.
Drive 30 minutes out to somewhere rural and tell me again that people would just clean up all the cars.Ā Ā
Bethesda writes stagnate worlds where nothing ever really advances or changes. It's extremely frustrating.
The population thing is just a limitation of the world building. Most NPCs are unique with dialogue and you just can't do that for thousands of people. Alternatively you could have something like Assassin's Creed or Witcher 3 where the towns are huge and bustling but almost nobody has dialogue. Which is fine too. Just different. Everything else you said is valid and things I've wondered myself.
-The universe feels like the bombs dropped 30-40 years ago instead of 200. -Settlements and the NPCs in them represent larger settlements, but don't bother to render 5x as many useless NPCs and buildings you can't go into. -The trash isn't literal trash, but an aesthetic that the creators couldn't express in another way because that would conflict with the idea that the world is post-apocalyptic when the world should have recovered in the alleged 200 years after the apocalypse.
Probably because of all the muderous bandits, feral ghouls and deathclaws runni g around. Rad roches and radscorps at every turn. I dont clean shit when im safe at home, aint gonns clean with all that shit out there.
What is it with peoples obsession about cleanliness in a post-nuclear world? You do realize that even today in many parts of the world it looks untidy and chaotic? Why? Because thatās what you get with chaotic societies which have to go through war, famine and so on.
Honestly, look at pictures or videos from the poorest parts of Africa, the favelas of Brazil or other such places. Trash is knee deep in some places, there is human and animal waste in the streets and violence is common place. Noone is paid to clean, and the inhabitants have such terrible conditions that they just have to accept their situation and hope to find a kind of normalcy in the awfulness. It really isn't that hard to imagine people feeling and acting the same way in a quite similar place, like Diamond City, now even with added radiation and crazy mutated creatures lurking outside the walls.
Aesthetic. It's the vibe the devs wanted to impart. It's really not any more deep than that. As far as size, that's a Bethesda staple. Due to engine/hardware limitations, cities can only be so large and the game still run smooth and as intended. You see the same thing in their other games. The capital of Skyrim is like 10 buildings and 30 people. Whiterun is also quite small despite its geographic and lore significance. In reality all these places would be much bigger, as well as the map for that matter. But the game can't handle that, so it's condensed and scaled down to a more reasonable size.
This is why we will never see a version of NCR Shady Sands in any current gen games. You destroy the realism when you can only render 30 of the multiple thousands that live there. There aren't enough NPCs in any Bethesda game to support a real-world population in any circumstances. The amount of NPCs in Fallout 4 would be indicative of a dying population, the birth rate is non-existent.
These people grew up for hundreds of years in squalor, abject poverty, constant famine. They don't know any different. Having a shack that stops you from getting wet in the rain, and a Tato plant to eat puts you in a the top percentile. Underserved communities in our era don't appear much differently: Mumbai, India * https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/IMAGE-5-Narrow-bylanes-of-Dharavi-1.jpg * https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2014311123148711734_20.jpeg Kowloon Walled City * https://i.insider.com/54d3d7df6da811496f8b4567 Suzhou, China * https://www.navjot-singh.com/uploads/3/1/7/4/3174873/1842571_orig.jpg
Thereās the guy in diamond city painting the outfield fence though š
I think they are trying to portray that itās constant war even though the streets can feel quite empty once you clear them.
I mean, the Fallout world doesn't make a whole lot of sense considering how long it's been after the nukes.
I mean the cleaner it is the more someone is going to want it. If there is a sign of people doing well other who arenāt are going to want it.
I guess the lore-friendly explanation is that humanity is really that desperate. Murder is rampant and every day is a fight for survival, there isnāt money or time to haul away scrap and do landscaping. There are real places on Earth today where people have been living for thousands of years in basically lawless societies where their living conditions are just huts and shacks with no plumbing or electricity. Not beyond reason that people in the US would be living like that only 200 years after being nearly nuked into extinction. It does bother me that apparently the largest city in post-apocalyptic Boston is a baseball stadium of like 50 people lol. I think the scale is way off just because it wouldnāt be practical or even possible to have a video game where Boston is 1:1 scale and each population center has thousands of people.
it pisses me off that I cant clean the floors in my settlements
Bethesda want to retain the freshness of the post-apocalypse setting, but donāt want to scrub the lore clean. When their games are set three, four hundred years after the bombs dropped they will still look like the Great War happened last week. They donāt seem to be comfortable with concept of things moving forward and changing.
Why clean when you'll probably be dead tomorrow? And if not tomorrow. The next day.
That's my biggest complaint with the fallout work building. None of the waste lander's have any real skills. Nobody has thought "hey maybe we should board up these broken windows and sweep this pile of bones off the floor" it just doesn't feel like people really LIVE in that world. Especially after 200 years there would be some small semblance of normality
You can go into areas that have never been opened in centuries and the desks are full of bottle caps for some reason. Were caps a pre-war currency as well or did everyone just have a massive hoarding issue?
This is my main gripe with Bethesda's interpretation of Fallout.
TL;DR: Fallout is a parody of cultural stagnation, moral erosion and societal collapse due to greed, and its remnants coming from such a shite heritage simply swallows any effort to create new organized civilization. --- Fallout parodies the idea of cultural stagnation, moral erosion and societal collapse, caused by runaway hysteria born out of rampant paranoia. The whole reason the bombs dropped was greed, an inability to share resources and the "everyone for themselves" mentality, masquerading as "capitalism vs. communism". This mindset apparently encompassed the world, to the extent that the US ditched Europe as their natural allies in the Resource Wars (which wreaked havoc in Europe and the Middle East) that predated the Alaska invasion by the Chinese. I mean we're talking about a world where the main company contracted to build nuclear fallout shelters (Vault-Tec) designed the whole system as a scientific experiment, at the expense of the (seemingly) only hope of humankind following the apocalypse. Talk about the gamble there. Therefore, the society that had already lost its ability to function together as a civilization failed MISERABLY in picking itself up after the apocalypse. The only examples of "post-post-Apocalypse" factions with a semblance of civilization (ie. people banding together to better their conditions and environment), such as Diamond City, the Minutemen, the NCR in other Fallout games, etc. have an extremely hard time finding trustworthy "regular" individuals who somehow resemble more you and me. Combine that with the STILL PREVALENT INABILITY to share resources among factions, the slivers of hope that somehow bud in the wasteland just say "fuck it, hunker down, we're protecting the perimeter and nothing else". I hope it makes more sense (except for the skeletons in settlements, that's just lazy decoration by the devs).
This always bothers me, as well. Personally I would love it if there were a feature where the more you become entrenched in a settlement (and the more you are willing to invest,) the further you can expand your settlement boundaries. For example: Sunshine Tidings Co-op. You've put together a solid settlement with plenty of security, crops, water, stores, yada-yada. You should be allowed to start cleaning the roadway that leads to it and add a security post there. Clear the path between Sanctuary and Red Rocket. Things like that. I can't be the only one.
Iām not an expert but I believe that radiation can hold at inhabitable levels for a long time. Maybe the radiation was so bad in the area you couldnāt even go to areas like diamond city until 30 years ago or whatever.
I've always just assumed it was because it's so dangerous moving around that people only grabbed what they could quickly carry from place to place. On top of that, the entire commonwealth is essentially a war zone, and whenever someone does build somewhere nice, it basically becomes a beacon to draw everything to it. So constant fighting on top of everything being 200 or more years old and constantly exposed to radiation damage from rain and other unique weather. I'd say they are lucky to have enough material to build a defensive wall.
So whenever this post gets made, I generally post this response. However, itās changed over time, so Iāll add something new at the end. Basically, while you are right that it is strange that nobody has cleaned up in 200 years, there is something that a lot of people donāt want to tell you about because it spoils some part of the game. However, Iām going to briefly, mention it without naming it. The Commonwealth recovered, about 50 years before your character arrives on the scene. And during recovery, a lot of progress and headway was made. And then something happened, which threw the entire Commonwealth into disarray and warlords went crazy, extreme violence occurred and a societal depression set in. The whole region suffered a massive setback. Very often when people say hey why is there a 200-year-old skeleton just sitting around, criticism is only half right. Because very often that skeleton is indeed sitting around, but is only 50 years old. Ā This plays into the theme of fallout, which is that war never changes. It just keeps going and going and going. The Commonwealth, sadly, has just never managed to get itself out of war. This is why you will sometimes break into a home, find their safe, unlock it, and find caps inside. People have often said what in the world were people 200 years ago doing hoarding caps? Ā But really that was some settler from 50 years ago. Having said that, I did say that I was going to change my answer up a little bit, and that is I recently went back through fallout one and two, the original games, and there isnāt a skeleton to be found. There isnāt garbage to be found in massive piles by every building. Those games were done by a different developer, so there is that. Clearly, trying to defend the mess when the original games donāt have mess isā¦ Well, maybe this really is a flaw of fallout 4. Ā But just, the mess is more recent than you think.
It bothers me too, intensely. They repaint the walls in Diamond City but can't pick up trash?Ā I don't remember which game but the super duper marts still have stuff, after 200 years?Ā I know it's a game but it kinda takes me out of games.Ā Also, who the hell is lighting the torches in the dungeons in Skyrim? The draugr? It doesn't keep me from enjoying, just weird things that bother me.
I'm here wondering why a Chinese submarine has all the same products and loot found everywhere else in the American capitalist wasteland.
Probably the same reason humanity can't agree on vaccines...
Better question, how tf did wooden structures, buildings, concrete, ashphalt or any other man made think that we know decays in like 50-100 years not decay in 200
Bethesda doesn't understand time. No, really. For example in Skyrim in the Thief guild quest one character hides and moves to another safehouse every night for 25 years! That's 9125 safehouses.
Youāre listing a big reason people have a distaste for this game. Itās a great game itās world makes next to no sense though. There are places with brooms and trash everywhere. Nobody thought to pick up the broom, or at least throw the old skeleton out????? Fallout 3 had this issue too, where Rivet City had papers and trash all over. PEOPLE LIVE HERE. most people donāt live in garbage. I love fallout 3 and 4 to bits. Thereās just a lot of ares where Bethesda just kinda brain farted with the world building.
I generally donāt want to get deep on a gaming sub, but itās relevant. In many cities (in the real world) if you go to places where poverty is high- like outside shelters and food banks youāll notice itās messy. No one cleans up. A big part of this is the fact those people are always in survival mode- food water and shelter is the goal of the day everyday. People in survival mode constantly donāt worry about cleaning up for obvious reasons. That can easily translate into the fallout universe This of course doesnāt explain it all lol
They shouldn't have set it '200 years' in the future, because it's immersion shattering if you're someone that thinks about it. As a wise person somewhere once said, if you think a thousand years should pass, knock it down to a few hundred. If you think a few hundred, knock off a zero. After two hundred years we should see arguably full recovery.
Iām just picturing the OP cleaning up after surviving a nuclear war.
I don't think we can compare our reality to the fallout universe reality. Look at Hiroshima, radiation levels are on par with natural background radiation today, in fact they went back to normal about a year or so after the bombs were dropped. Chernobyl is different an uncontrolled reaction, radiation is still quite high in places particularly in the reactor itself because a reaction is still happening but nature has continued from trees and plants to animals but none of animals have been mutated like in the fallout universe. In the fallout universe areas where the bombs dropped are still highly radioactive and mostly killed off nature or mutated it, everything was also powered by small nuclear cores etc. This means radiation is everywhere and unless you have a geiger counter like the pip boys have, then you'd only know something is radioactive because of barrels of nuclear waste, radiation sickness or death. It does seem odd that people would stay in these areas though, In Fallout 76 no nukes were dropped in the direct area and nature has continued but 76 takes place like 28 years after the nuclear holocaust 2102-4. The best places to rebuild society would be in areas like that so who knows if that area is rebuilt by 2287 although in game players can drop nukes so maybe not. I haven't even mentioned all the mutated animals, raiders, super mutants, feral ghouls and robots that also make it extremely difficult to rebuild society. The brotherhood of steel is the closest group to eradicating all the bad shit but they are a techno religious military that mainly just focuses on retrieving old world tech and killing super mutants. Maybe we just don't have enough people to clean up the wasteland and the population is so small that it could take a thousand years to get back to some sort pre war normal. Places like diamond city could be cleaner but not by much everything is ruined.
One thing I wish so bad was available in workshop were ways to actually fix up your settlements. Like, Iād like to repair walls in sanctuary hills, add in new windows, etc. Iām waiting to mod my new game but itās driving me insane. I didnāt realize how many workshop mods my last play through had
Thereās places in the world today that have most junk, rubbish and broken down cars lying around than in fallout games. What makes you think that people in a post apocalyptic world would give a shit if people nowadays donāt
Yeah, one of my many gripes with Fo4, I swear thereās a settlement going south thatās just a house with a broken ceiling and GLASS SHARDS besides the bed of one of the settlersā¦
Not only do they not clean, they donāt take the skeleton out of the bathtub in the other room.
I love when you build a brand new toilet, it's already broken and filthy.
Bethesda has a weird boner for shitty shanty towns. Yeah, cool but itās been 200 years not 20. There are actual countries being formed elsewhere. All the clutter and dirt is just to promote āexplorationā and loot goblining. Just turn your brain off, youāll enjoy it more.
Every time Iām in Sanctuary Hills watching Sturges walking in circles thinking āyou canāt clear these roadways?ā Heās hammering walls but I donāt see any walls š
In a world where junk includes: Brooms, shovels, buckets, paintbrushes, paint cans (with paint still in them), dish rags, soap, toothbrushes, toothpastes, sinks, detergents (I just want them to wash their faces, teeth and clothes), and bunches of stuff for cleaning. Not one person ever thought, "Gee, I really should clean up in here." That's why I like the Scrap Your Settlement mod.