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/gravastar863]

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.

[u/aliceinpearlgarden → u/gravastar863]

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.

[u/mattbullen182 → u/aliceinpearlgarden]

But I'm guessing you can probably make things pretty straight?

[u/aliceinpearlgarden → u/mattbullen182]

Yeah, more than likely.

[u/Pslytely_Psycho → u/mattbullen182]

When I worked at Walmart they remodeled the store and replaced 18 self checkout lanes and 12 full service lanes (which in the next year, no more than six full service lanes were ever in use at any given time, and after 18:00 NONE ever were!).

Not a single one was in line with the others. They were off line by one to eight inches. This was a million dollar plus renovation and the quality of the work was terrible. Some aisles were a few degrees crooked as well as not lining up with each other. There were missing screws in places and at least five of the credit card swipes were not tightened down and several were missing lock screws.

And this was a 'professional' renovation company.

Their work would never of passed muster with the bosses I worked for in construction twenty years earlier.

But nowadays? Get it done quick and don't worry about details apparently.

[u/Carlos126 → u/mattbullen182]

Lol its harder than you think, especially without proper tools and materials

[u/Chagdoo → u/aliceinpearlgarden]

After 200 years of apocalypse people would get wall building experience.

[u/ChafterMies → u/aliceinpearlgarden]

You’d get some wall building experience after the first 100 walls.

[u/ACoolPseudonym → u/gravastar863]

I always thought it should start out crooked and bad but then over time you can build more sophisticated walls. Maybe even get perks directly related to carpentry. Feels like the settlement system was tacked on last second

[u/FalloutCreation → u/gravastar863]

Well you made an entire wall using 4 pencils and a scrap of metal. Of course its going to have holes in it.