I know it's just a game and all that, but...

How come 200 years after the apocalypse there's a total lack of industrial activity? People are scrounging 200-year-old food cans for a source of metal and no one has reopened a mine. There's a steel foundry with working furnaces but it's not used for producing steel. There are factories staffed by robots with fully fuelled power cores in the basemant generators but the robots just float around and don't repair the production lines.

The actual Industrial Revolution that started in England in the 18th century only took one generation to change the western world completely. That was in a world where no one had known factories and no one previously had a concept of industrialised processes. So how come the descendants of an industrialised world haven't built any new industry after 200 years?

Although you don't see it in the game, if you can reuse tin cans and pool cues to make a simple section of shack floor then you must have a furnace to smelt the metal and a forge to make the struts and nails, plus saws and planes to shape the wood. If you're going to make a machinegun turret then you'll need solder, precision tools and a yard full of moulds to form the casing. With your band of settlers you could do that if you could find the tools, but wouldn't you expand your operation and start selling products to friendly settlements? Wouldn't people turn up looking for work and making your business grow? Wouldn't you end up with a fully-blown turret factory within months? Yep. You would.

However, I know that the answer is that it would spoil the game to admit that with fusion power, functioning industrial robots, and a population of survivors both above and below ground, the Fallout world would have returned to something like its 1950s idyll within a couple of decades. No game for us.

Because every minute in game is 1 second in RL so 200 years for them = 3.3 years for us.

I would say those with the know how died and the skills were not passed on. After a Great War it becomes an issue of survival, not manufacturing. It also appears all the vehicles are derelict so getting raw materials to refining sites would be a huge undertaking, waste of energy and resources. As for you making things, you are from the era of the know how, a handy-man so to speak.

Besides wasn't it industry that started the whole thing? Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it

Fiction is imperfect, especially when liberty is taken with history, tech, or magic. Writers simply can't account for the summed decisions and activity of countless people. We can barely even do so with our own histories that actually happened.


You can quickly find the same weaknesses in TES, or any other high fantasy setting. If one can summon a flame atronauch, then why aren't they being used to power steam tanks? With the "quick and easy" access to energy Magic provides, all high fantasy settings would rapidly become steampunk settings.


The very best we can hope for is a setting where we're too captivated to think on it much.

The Institute is manufacturing new goods but you're right the east coast has a suspicious lack of manufacturing facilities. On the other hand considering how far things have come from Fallout 3 to Fallout 4 in terms of civilization I would guess that by Fallout 5 there will be manufacturing factions.

The west coast has them already. We have the Gun Runners and the Van Graffs who are both weapons manufacturers and it sounds like the NCR has the largest collection of mining and manufacturing facilities in north america (maybe in the world at this point.) Not to mention the water trade and brahmen rancher barons there.

Because that would require BGS to think about other things than just tropes.

Then again, I can't seem to recall any industrial activities in FNV... other than cap counterfeiting factory.

Sure there were. The quarry was running until the Powder Gangers revolted. The Van Graffs and Gun Runners both make weapons. Several NPCs mention NCR manufacturing.

If you woke up in a nuclear winter wonderland where everything was up for grabs, would you really want to get up in the morning, pack your lunch box and work 8-5 5 days out of the week with little or no vacation and a crappy salary? No? I didn't think so.

Wow, it didn't occur to me that mining and weapon manufacturing counts as industry. Thanks, heh.

Eh, I can see the BoS having manufacturing going on in the capital wasteland. They did build an airship, they have a variety of uniforms and weapons they didn't in Fallout 3. Also it could be that the areas suffered more. From what I've seen there are more raider groups in the east then say New California so that could also be a cause for it. Really, it just shows New California was lucky that a growing settlement managed to build a republic that would take over almost all of the western coastline.

what do you think the institute is?

also, BO ted to take any advanced technology for the time and don't forget about the potted meat guy.

there is a cannery that is currently working and that includes a small quest

I can also remember a small drug factory

at least it's something

Where everything is up for grabs including me I'd exchange my labour for protection in a defended settlement rather than huddle under a piece of tin sheeting and hope that I don't get eaten by a monster every night. Not very far removed from the reasons why people go to work today. The world is your oyster right now if you want to walk away and take your chances.

As for the other replies about the BoS etc., factions making their own stuff for themselves is one thing, but I'm talking about people setting up their own businesses all over the place, just as they did in real life. The first factories were set up by individual capitalists in a world without fiat currency, not today's monolithic fascist corporations, and they sprang up like a rash wherever there was fuel, water and raw materials. There should be local versions of the van der Grafs on every street corner, and people should be driving around in contemporary vehicles made in post-war factories founded by post-war capitalists.

Don't get me wrong, I uderstand that the game requires the willing suspension of disbelief, but there is no rationalisation for why at the grass-roots level the whole of North America remained in the Stone Age for 200 years after the war.

Because the game and story wouldn't be as good. That's why.

Yeah and a whole Institute too... as already mentioned. So the basic premise of this thread is actually false.

Let's have an industry-themed DLC.

You can put 100 hours of gameplay into a character that goes to work at Thicket Excavations every day, until some NPC hero A-hole in a Vault jumpsuit comes along one day and puts a Gauss Rifle slug into your head from across the map because there's something shiny at the bottom of the pit he wants.

Game Over.

Awesome.

You don't understand the premise of this thread.

The institute is a high-tech organisation that survived the War underground and uses its secret capabilities to manufacture secret technology for its own secret purposes. It doesn't manufacture and sell goods to the outside world. The Institute has nothing to do with commercial industrial activity.

One cannery doesn't make an industrial landscape and quarrying was going on 5000 years ago.

When Arkwright built the first factory it didn't take long for other people to see that it was a good idea and factories sprang up everywhere in competiton with him and expanding the mechanised division of labour into every possible commercial activity. In Birmingham in the 1800s there were hundreds of separate factories producing buttons, hundreds producing pins, hundreds producing pen nibs, etc.

In 2277 there is nothing but Wombles making use of the things that they find. There should be small-scale factories turning out all the basic manufactured goods that people need in everyday life. Nothing that would attract the BoS.

In real life it's only 200 years since the world was a purely agrarian economy with a few craftsmen serving the rich. Now we all have flat-screen TVs. We made it this far without fusion power and an army of pre-programmed Mr Handys to kick-start the process. But in F4 you can't even buy a new TV dinner.

In short, if the Fallout games were set in the ten or twenty years immediately after the War then it would be fine, but 200 years later the world should be back to normal.

200 years after an all out nuclear war that was so powerful it changed landscapes and mountain ranges. I doubt that is enough time for the radiation alone to come down to safe levels. Making buttons and bows would be the last thing on peoples mind, if they were even alive. The ones who died in the initial attack would be the lucky ones. Even the survivors if they were able to reproduce babies would probably be so mutated and deformed they would be lucky to even walk. Urban areas where industry was prominent of course would have been hardest hit, those living in rural areas that did survive would not make a journey to any industrialized area, as they know it was ground zero, radiation would kill them, and it makes no sense to do so.

Er well, there is industry, Stoneworks, huge Ironworks, Mining ....... and goodness knows what, and I am only a fraction into the whole relatively huge content of the game. The nitty-gritty and nuts-and-bolts of the making of individual items, the making of such things, rest assured they are all being done by lesser mortals.... behind-the-scenes....It is the game and game-play of the players though that is on a much higher-plane.... as would be that of a government, minutiae being left to lesser mortals.... so... we players only need to concentrate on the brilliance of our roles in out our role-play. Lesser things being done by lesser beings.

So, raise your sights up a bit

easiest way to look at this is that Fallout world is in a time period that is in recovery. Similar to Mad Max. People hoard resources. if someone were to start manufacturing, it would most likely get stolen from larger forces that want the same stuff for their own needs.

We are just now seeing a gradual kickstart to a new society. this will take time. Making mass production isn't on the top of the list atm. gotta get infrastructure going, get militia to work cohesively, get some kind of leadership that is also at the least socialist to unite the people that want to get a life that their ancestors had.

But pop a Radaway pill and the radiation sickness all goes away. The people in Fallout world have so many advantages that are only science fiction in our world that they don't have any excuse not to have rebuilt within 200 years.

If that was the case, why so many ghouls? Because not everyone has access to it, or enough to stave it off forever.

Infrastructure came after industrialisation. The canols, and later railways, were built to serve the factories that already existed. There was no electricity and no instant communication. You've got a cohesive militia ready to defend your production line when you have twenty settlers armed with miniguns and missile launchers. Socialism is a pablum created by bankers to calm the disgruntled workforce long after the world as we know it was created by capitalists.

The only problem with Fallout's scenario is that 200 years is too long.

Thanks, but my sights are set high enough to say that the world should be back to normal after 200 years in the Fallout universe.

The quarries and iron works in this game aren't even producing anything. They are just hideouts for bandits.

Then why ask the question.

It's science-fiction. It doesn't have to make complete pragmatic/logical sense. It doesn't have to fill every loop hole and leave no room for imagination.

That said, you can consider the Fallout universe as a new dark age. And as is the case with almost all dark ages in all the civilizations they occurred: there's no easy way out. It takes civilization centuries to recover back to a level equal to where it was before.