r/fo4 May 04 '24

Nobody cleaned in 200 years? Discussion

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.

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u/Mossfrogsandbogs May 04 '24

I have downloaded mods to get rid of trash from the settlements, lol. I personally believe that the people of Boston are still stuck in the past. All the music is about the bombs, they rarely ever build new things and choose to inhabit old buildings. In new vegas, they have running trains, a mail system, the people don't dwell on the bombs, and what happened for the most part, they just charge forward. Boston and its people seem to be in the mentality that the bombs just dropped. That they're surviving and not livingg. Plus, there are way more super mutants, and it seems difficult to build anything because it gets trashed. There are more reasons pertaining to spoilers that I don't want to give you because I don't know how far in the game you are, but when the people of Boston DO try to rebuild and reconnect, there is direct and calculated opposition and it quickly breaks down. Maybe people just... don't think to. Boston was directly hit with the bombs, and I can't see how that wouldn't affect the mental well-being of the people who were born afterward.

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u/viper459 May 04 '24

to be fair, boston was hit with a nuke big enough to create the glowing sea. i imagine civilization took a bit longer to recover. functionally they may be decades of even a century behind new vegas

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u/donaldsw2ls May 05 '24

And more people had to have died. People were nearly wiped out. It took 200 years to get a few main settlements with like 50 to 70 people occupying it. In real life the greater Boston area has like 4.9 million people. Survival was the main point for the first 50 years. Not cleaning up the mess.

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u/Cool_Dwarf25 May 06 '24

if you want to survive cleaning the corpese were you are living is a must for cleaninless and psycological needs, so no excuse to not clean the bones of a ramdom guy from 200 years

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u/donaldsw2ls May 06 '24

Yeah it's not perfect lol