There's no industry because Bethesda screwed up the timeline and because it isn't deemed needed for the game.

If 200 (210 actually) years was gone by, yes there would be rudementary industries of sorts. A place like Diamond City would need it, and it is surprising to see nothing in the form of craftsman shops / industries at all. Not even a scrapyard for salvage or refurbishing shop. There isn't even a place that tries to collect "old" knowledge from books and whatnot. Yeah, all (mostly) books are "burned" inside non-burned buildings (makes great sense...not)

Anyways. The world is not a realistic take on how a world is or would be, so anything goes. A lot of things doesn't make sense in the game, because it is not needed, just enough to create the illusion of belief is needed.

The industrial revolution was able to happen due to several factors.

1) Civil society ensured property rights and public order

2) Stable currencies and capitalist systems enabled investment and development

3) Widespread literacy and education allowed for innovation and experimentation

4) The physical landscape was a more or less blank slate ready to be developed.

None of those conditions exist in a radioactive wasteland overrun by supermutants and raiders and buried under millions of tons of shattered concrete and steel.

The industrial revolution and the couple of centuries that have followed it are aberrations in human history. Crushing poverty and struggle are the norm, and in the wake of a full on nuclear exchange we'd be likely to return to that. I think the lack of large scale industry is one of the most realistic things about Fallout.

And there absolutely are workshops and small-scale industries, even if we don't directly interact with them. Someone out there is making all those pipe guns, and

It took humanity 20,000 years at least to get to our present technology so a 200 year dark age is nothing. To be practical you need large groups of people to have industry and before that you need large scale farming to support a larger population. Until farming is easier most of your population will be farmers and soldiers to protect them. It seems ok to me in Fallout 4 that mostly you have small craftsmen and scavengers as far as industry goes. There doesn't seem to be enough people to support large industry. With all the chaos that is going on I can see why there is no progress.

Bethesda screwed up the timeline?

Fallout 1: 2161

Fallout 2: 2241

Fallout 3: 2277

Fallout New Vegas: 2281

Fallout 4: 2287

it really seems like that Black Isle screwed it up and neither Bethesda nor Obsidian decided to go back in time

To have industry (and civilization in general) you need some degree of political stability which isn't there in the Commonwealth. If people's have their hands full getting enough food to eat and not getting killed by all the nasty things out there then manufacturing is too much of a luxury. You need trade to reliably distribute excess food to larger settlements so that some people could work in factories and of course you need trade to distribute the stuff made in the factories. There is some trade in Commonwealth but it's shown to be pretty risky business. You need roads to be safe to have effective trade. It's the same reason why there is not a lot of manufacturing going on in real-world Somalia, except of course things are far far worse in the Fallout world. There may be some manufacturing wherever there is effective government and relative safety, so NCR territory, probably the territory controlled by midwestern BoS, maybe the Legion controlled territory.

There are other problems with getting manufacturing going, many factories may be operational but you need knowhow to operate them, all factories will need either parts which aren't being manufactured or raw resources which aren't being mined.

Of course there are many things that are not realistic in FO4 but often things are shown in a too optimistic way. For example most people in the Commonwealth would not be able to read, let alone know how to use a computer or mark something on your pipboy map.

Because distribution is pretty much non-existent. If you want to create steel, then you have to get iron from a mine or scrap from around the Commonwealth. That requires transporting that Iron or Scrap in dangerous territories where Raiders, Super Mutants, Feral Ghouls, and/or mutated wildlife might attack your delivery. Then you look at the form of distribution available, 1 merchant, 1 Brahmin to carry the merchandise, and a few guards. Nothing that would be able to survive a Deathclaw attack or even a bunch of raiders. Since Industry relies on distribution, then without people like the Brotherhood of Steel or Synths protecting the Commonwealth, Industry will always suffer.

As always with such threads (same for FO3 and actually NV too) people ignore that the game takes place in a active warzone. Yes the institute is safe from all this mayhem so it is able to produce synths and more on a industrial level. Trying to make your new TV Dinner (which is absolute nonsens too because who needs TV Dinner in a warzone it's total inpractical) would make you a target in a very short time. Don't mix up the "SPECIAL" player with the average wastelander btw.

1. Property rights come out of the barrel of a gun. The people who made up the workforce in the good old days had no property rights, which is why during enclosure they were kicked off the land and forced into cities where they became the unskilled industrial workforce who weren't even allowed to negotiate their pay or work hours because "public order" meant the police beating up and arresting trouble-makers for sedition. They rented their houses from their employers and bought food in their employer's shops with token issued by their employers at prices set by their employers. They had no rights and very little property, so that concept was not a factor in the Industrial Revolution happening.

2. They didn't use currencies, they used money - silver and gold. Money had been stable for 5000 years, it was they way that it was used that changed. That point is a red herring.

3. Literacy spread when public-spirited industrialists salved their consciences by sponsoring the building of schools after they had made their fortune in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, and later spread further when societies of organised labour raised money by subscription to build libraries and sponsor educational speakers because they wanted their children to be better educated than they were. You are confusing the cause with the effect.

4. A blank landscape like the Wasteland? It's not all buried under millions of tonnes of rubble is it? Most of it is virgin, desolate land. Even in the cities there are plenty of buildings still standing that could be put to good use.

You and wellsoul2 are right that the industrialised part of human history is a tiny blip, but my point is that you can't put the genie back in the bottle, especially when there are still factories with robot workers and vaults full of survivors who didn't all have amnesia. A lot of the cars littering the wasteland would make perfectly good carts even if they were pulled by brahmin but no one has though of that. I haven't seen a single wheeled vehicle in use by anyone.

We're not talking about rebuilding General Motors. In a settlement of 20 people 4 of them can produce 24 food. Give two others miniguns and put them on watchtowers. That leaves 14 pairs of hands to put to productive work other than farming. With the help of robots and electricity you could easily have settlements specialising in producing some useful thing and trading it with other settlements for the useful things that they produce. That's the kind of low-level industrialisation that I'm talking about and it would definitely have happened well within 200 years.

This made me lol =)

It's still being debated if this was, indeed, a good idea.

Also, if anyone decided to make something in the wasteland that was attractive to anyone else, the Enclave, BoS or Institute would probably kill you and take it over.

1) Thanks Chairman Mao. I know that rights have to be backed up by force but someone had property rights, correct? The people who set up factories could feel reasonably certain that when they showed up at work the following day the place wouldn't have been taken over by a warlord during the night.

2) Money had been stable for centuries but full on capitalism (which I also mentioned) was relatively recent. It's absolutely not a red herring. Without investment, and the possibility of a return on that investment, you won't have large scale manufacturing.

3) Ok. Illiterates who didn't understand math or engineering drove the industrial revolution

4) The landscape tends to come in two varieties in Fallout games: hopelessly cluttered with rubble that can't be moved without heavy machinery or relatively clear land that uninhabitable because you're getting 20 rads a second. Have you actually walked around in this game? I'm surprised I have to point this out.

And the OP very much is talking about heavy industry like GM. As I pointed out people are clearly engaged in the kind of low-intensity manufacturing you're talking about. There are people out there making pipe guns, loading ammunition, producing armor and clothing, cooking drugs, purifying water etc.

Even granting your argument that people don't have amnesia and assuming they could harness a robot workforce and assuming they could keep a target like that safe from invaders answer me this: what are they going to manufacture and to whom are they going to sell their product? What is the motive for such a massive undertaking when there's no marketplace for whatever it is you're making?

As the series goes on it seems that a lot of the places we visited in previous games got their act together and are learning civilization, industry and all. NCR is very much a modern nation state, and back in DC the BOS was able to build a entire airship, alongside all of the fancy modern equipment they have outfitting their forces.

Im sure by the time of Fallout 5 or what not we will see The Commonwealth turn into something similar. Its just how the themes of the series are. People are trying to rebuild the old world, but living in a successfully rebuilt world doesn't make for a exciting game, so off to the war zones of the east and west we go to be a vital part of the history of that particular set of wastes that is able to rise above.

Raiders, Mutants, Ghouls, devastation..... it's hard to see any industrialation getting off the ground.....just survival would be the order of the day for most. Though knowledge would be there, available via the Brotherhooh of Steel, whose very purpose was to preserve such knowledge.... were they to part with that knowledge, but first to bring more order to the land. That being largely the purpose of the player, is it not?

Well....maybe those other people are doing things like mending clothes..cleaning..etc. I don't know how realistic Fallout 4 is and if 4 people can produce 24 people's food in reality.

I guess once you get the shops going people are making or scavenging stuff for the shop.

Also...maybe there was settlements and trade and low level trading of useful things in the near past.

Maybe due to raiders and supermutants and others destroying settlements people just gave up on everything but basics.

If this is really how you feel and youve read books, i pity your existance.


Open your mind; fallout 4 diverts from our history after WW2. Its completely different. They never invented miniturised components among other things (which was a major development in OUR history. Massive. Unbelievably so. Things like the touchscreen ) which is basically why they're still stuck in the 50's, why earths natural resources were strained so fast, blahblah


Alongside the fact that, in this universe, the government did not take any regard for its people. (Yes, i know people think this in ours but it was ALOT more profound)

And because of this, there was no real "lets rebuild once the world is destroyed" plan put in place.


There was also an extensive nuclear fallout which caused worldwide EMP, which renders the factories defunct with nobody alive that knows how to work and repair them PROPERLY (not just fixing a few furnaces, one step in many to produce nice-made structure)


I could waffle on, this was shortened ALOT. If you want backround, read about it. Dont complain about fiction as a whole because you're too lazy and poetic to grace some cannon story with your presence.

I think the issue is that industrialization as we know it at ALL is exceptionally complex, relying on countless subsystems and component systems in order to be working. The idea that there would/should be industry populating the Commonwealth (or indeed the rest of the continental US) after the devastation described in Fallout lore is almost absurd. Additionally, the statement made earlier in the thread that things should have been back to normal in "a few decades" actually shows a nearly complete lack of understanding of what any sort of industrial or manufacturing industry does on a realworld, realtime basis.

If total nuclear annihilation had actually happened, it is not out of the question whatsoever for the world in Fallout 4 to be a fairly good representation. Let's consider a few facts:

- In today's world (and undoubtedly the same way in FO's nuclear powered society) one farmer and a small support team can grow enough food to feed hundreds and hundreds of people on acreage that a hundred years ago, when things were more or less human or animal powered, would be able to feed fifteen to twenty five people.

- Industry as we know it relies on countless systems and subsystems, as aforementioned. Even at a VERY high level: raw materials need to be mined, grown, gathered, or processed. They then need to be transported to some facility. There, that facility needs to be able to produce a sustainable output. Then that output has to be sent to stores/distribution points/etc. This is just a very basic view of the process, and even here, you can see where a team of raiders/supermutants/synths could come along and cause damage to that point in the chain (which would delay or shutdown every link in the chain thereafter).

- Only advanced societies allow for industry to happen in the first place (along with other things like art, science, history, and other advanced knowledge fields). In short, if you have a village of 200 people, and all of them are involved in the growing of crops or the hunting of game, then there's no one left over to be involved in things like building widgets, or what-have-you. So, you'd only start seeing advanced technology/science/industry in very large societies where there were plenty of people involved in growing enough to food to feed everyone, allowing some others to apply themselves to those other industries.

- Tools. There is a point where a post-nuclear-apocalypse world simply wouldn't be able to come back to where they were before the fall. Take a factory for example. The simple technological scale alone would end any real efforts towards getting a factory up and running again. The tools and knowledge to make/generate the tools and knowledge (not a typo) needed would ultimately be too great. "Ok, I know I need to repair this super advanced machine, so in order to do that, I'll need these super advanced tools, so in order to get those, I'll need to build this other advanced machine that makes those tools needed in order to repair that super advanced machine, and oh, the repair will also need these parts that aren't just lying around, so I'll need ANOTHER, DIFFERENT advanced machine to make this certain part I need (which I don't even know I need because I have no idea what I'm even looking at, or what this giant machine in this warehouse even does)..." and on and on.

So, in summation: food would be scarce in the Fallout world where there's not that much powered agrarian/farming machinery. Some Mister Handy's or Protectrons aren't going to allow a Farmer to seed two THOUSAND (have you ever actually seen that much land at once?) acres in anything approaching a reasonable time. So, settlements will remain small, because it becomes exponentially more difficult to feed more people when you're having to do everything by hand. And so no one has any time to start learning advanced engineering concepts when they're exhausted from a long day of being out hunting radstags or growing mutfruit.

All in all, I see no issue with Fallout's world being a bombed out wasteland 200 years after the bombs fell. It's actually very realistic. Finding so many things lanterns, books, or canned spam still around 200 years later? Now, that's maybe not as realistic...

Agriculture is an industry.

The entire premise of the Minutemen and settlement side of the game is that YOU are bringing stability to the region and allowing water, food and and chems to be produced- with Local Leader perks going into what is essentially a federation of settlements. This is industry. It likely would be further along, if not for raider groups and their demands of the crop yields that farming settlements produce.
It is amply evidenced in game that conditions for real industry are not present until you get on scene.

If you look at the pre-war industrial places in the game, they are over run with raiders and supermutants.
This makes it hard for the type of industry you might be hoping for to take place.
However, the Forged do use a raider group for metal production, which is not actually going too well.


There are also shipments of craft materials you can buy from vendors. This would suggest that there is industry regarding these items.
Whether it is full on scavenged, or there is any work going into smelting and the like isn't really shown- but to be sure there is an industry around it, otherwise those shipments wouldn't be available..

The big takeaway is that through building and allying settlements, you are trying to create the conditions for such things to happen.


200 years or no, we cannot assume that since the NCR was able to get up and running, every other location in post war north america were able to.

I, for one, certainly wouldn't start a business in an environment where homicidal, psychotic raiders; feral ghouls (or ghouls for that matter... EWWWWW!); giant scorpions; carnivorous giant cockroaches; massive green superhuman mutants; giant deadly reptiles with horns and claws; and regular doses of radiation at every turn; not to mention synths and a super-secret institute that could kidnap me or my family members or friends at any time; paramilitary xenophobes that would rather shoot you than talk to you; and religious zealots who shoot you with incredible doses of radiation; and scavengers that would rather kill you than trade with you.

Honestly, I'm surprised that anyone manufactures anything. I mean, honestly, who makes all that armor, ammo and weaponry?

Maybe a junk shop though. That would work (there is an awful lot of junk out there). Of course I'd be in a bunker surrounded by hundreds of defensive turrets and enough traps to make Indiana Jones feel at home.

When you compare the East to West it does seem rather different stage, East seemed a bit more stable and less war torn. I think it also helped that it had more control vaults with GECKs, we've only seen one control on the East cost and that's 101 which didn't get a GECK. So less skilled and educated people with a farming kit does slow progress down.

There's small scale local industry but a lot of things it's easier to scavenge for it than produce yourself. Some things that seem to be produced locally: meds, armour, alcohol and some processed foods such as noodles. Anything else they haven't got the ability to really do or the need.

Why is it some people in this thread equal industry with high tech stuff? Industry simply means production is made within an economy. That's the meaning of the word in its simplest form.

Goat herder deliver wool, weaver makes it to cloth, seamster makes it to simple clothing and sell it on the market. It could be fur made things, pottery etc. And you have an industry. It is that simple. Yet, you see nothing regarding craftmansship in Diamond City apart from a few farmers. You can't sustain and maintain a bigger society as Diamond City on vendors and a few squaremeters of crops. It is not believable. Even our ancestors made simple things they could trade, anything from simple jewelry to complex things like small ships.

Or have human invention suddenly come to a grinding halt from the day the bombs where dropped? In time of needs, it is when man is most inventive, just not in Fallout

The surivivor could started colonial age (USA) manufancer building/tools: Blacksmith, glass blower, wood carvier, Brickmarker, etc.

No goats or sheep for wool. They only have brahmin which would let them make some leather goods, milk doesn't seem to be used ingame which is strange and could be used to make cheese. There doesn't seem to be any plants producing cotton or simlar products to make clothes so there's only leather clothing really.

There is a clothing shop in Diamond city, I've taken it as they buy and repair the salvaged clothes from the wastes.

The fact that we have crafting stations, which we see NPCs use, does imply that people do craft items- at least for themselves.
I would imagine that some of these items are traded for other goods. Just as we mod weapons, armor and the like and can trade it for other good- and if you think about it, there is no reason why it would be prominently shown in that context.
This would mean it's not anywhere on the scale of what would actually be considered industrious.
This could be due to many reasons, among them the high prices for items that are necessary to live. It may be that paying someone else to craft items for you is a luxury that no one can really afford, so people make their own crafts.
If no one can really afford to buy well made items in volume, there isn't much need for a business based solely on those things.
One bit of manufacturing industry we do see in Diamond city is the Bobrov's Best Moonshine

For all we know, traders make mods to the items they sell, since there is no industry based around it.
Trade of course, is its own industry.

Then we have Scavengers, showing that there is industry, or at least some semblance of profession around scavving. Them being an actual faction, which would indicate that they have somewhat of a monopoly on that particular industry.

Large scale industry, though, needs customers to make it worth something, and conditions for it to happen.
When we see the larger picture of the Commonwealth- People being randomly taken by the Institute, Raids on settlements, Super Mutant aatacks, betrayal of the group that was attempting to bring stability to the area- we can see that it isn't really a viable setting for large scale industry to take root, let alone thrive.

Was just an example on how small time industry works.

Yeah, I'm aware that they probably decided to not make it too detailed, but would have been a nice touch.

I know, but just saying there's very little primary production to support any industry like that :/ is annoying there's such limited wild life really. Would make hunters more important to support the crop production and then could have the leather and bones being used from them. Rabbits would of been a good move for food and fur :/