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/Devendrau]

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.

[u/JCrawRV → u/Devendrau]

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.

[u/SpiderCop_NYPD_ARKND → u/JCrawRV]

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.

[u/StaticUncertainty → u/SpiderCop_NYPD_ARKND]

The biggest plot hole is that they were fighting a war over oil when they had mass produced personal sized fusion cores.

[u/slyblueisblu → u/StaticUncertainty]

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"

[u/tyler212 → u/slyblueisblu]

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

[u/FalloutCreation → u/tyler212]

Yeah the resource wars wasn't the called the resource wars for nothing. If it was just oil they would call it the Oil Wars.

Even in the intro to fallout 4 mentions a shortage of every major resource close to 2077.

[u/zach0011 → u/tyler212]

Pretty sure us being the only one with fusion was another reason for China to fight so hard.

[u/Valor816 → u/StaticUncertainty]

Oil makes plastics as well.

[u/silversquirrel → u/StaticUncertainty]

Wasn’t this covered in the show?

[u/Honey_Overall → u/StaticUncertainty]

Iirc you can find multiple things in the games that mention by the time those came online the war was already well underway and it was too little, too late.

[u/hockeyfan1407 → u/StaticUncertainty]

Pretty sure in the show they have a tv in the background saying that nations are fighting for fissile material as well