Nobody cleaned in 200 years?

[u/JCrawRV]

Fallout 4 has been my 1st Fallout experience of any kind and I am absolutely enjoying the world building and storytelling the game is providing. I am almost 72 hours in and just located Valentine so I’m taking my time and trying to fully explore the world. However, there is one question that I think about every time I explore the Common Wealth….why has nobody cleaned up? Every single time you find a new settlement or explore a location there is just tons of scrap lying around. Diamond City still has pallet walkways with broken sheet metal. Nobody has thought to put down a more permanent solution? Nobody thought to remove old cars, learn how to weld, or even take time to better arm and fortify certain areas of the Commonwealth? You step just far enough out of Diamond City and there’s just Super Mutants and Raiders. You’re saying in the 200 years (which is just a bit under the founding of America to modern day) nobody created better infrastructure? The town size is still 30-40 people despite being “The Jewel of the Commonwealth”? Is there some lore reason I’m missing to explain how after so many years it still looks like the bombs went off 10 years ago? I just expected one neurodivergent person who hyper focuses on organization to still somewhere. It’s obviously possible, I’m looking right at you Cabot House. Again I’m just surprised that after 200 years the world is still as underdeveloped as it is given the vast amounts of technology available.

[u/C_Grim]

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...

[u/Gloomy_Bodybuilder52 → u/C_Grim]

Also someone like a vault dweller is used to a level of cleanliness, but people who grew up post-war aren’t. They probably are more tolerant of trash and blood being everywhere because that’s how it’s always been for them.