The True Purpose of Vaults in Fallout

Tim, that shirt is awesome.

Im currently working on a homebrewed ttrpg system for Fallout set in washington between FO1 and 2, finding your channel has been an absolute blessing. Im sure itll take years to get the system funtional, let alone the world building. Thank you very much for all the ideas youve shared and given

it seems like this was filmed on vhs and i love it

personally i'm more of a fan of it just being vault tec being evil bastards and toying with people bc they have the money to.

thats just me tho

I absolutely prefer this original idea to the current "Vault-Tec does experiments because evil". It never sat quite right with me that they would do these strange experiments for potentially hundreds of years just for kicks. Like, what, down to the last man they're ALL sadistic and evil and manipulative? Sounds like a bad young adult dystopian novel.

That could connect to Starfield (I haven’t played it)

I have always thought that the Vaults were exactly this! It fits so well and thank you for verifying my theory.

My thoughts are as follows.
Earth is a big place. Without world travel, the Enclave (or the Commie version of them) could easily have established a society elsewhere. Its a fact that the world had space based operations. Why not have the Enclave and the ChiCom's have bases on the moon? And they send shuttles between the Earth and the Moon at very isolated bases around the world. Make the next Fallout game based out of Alaska so we can see the aftermath of the Anchorage war. Turns out, the Enclave has a super soldier program, why not make their group trying to recover vaults in the Alaskan wilds. Players can find and interact with US Army special forces ghouls who were around when things went belly up. Or ChiCom ghouls. Maybe there is a slow burn war going on between these Ghoul factions. Maybe out there in the frozen wastes is a vault filled with a proto FEV, and the Enclave super soldiers mutate on contact with it.

These are just a few of my fanfiction based ideas I came up with talking to my brother about Fallout Lore.

This explains so much.

So cool :D

Damn I always assumed this, feels so good to get it confirmed. I mean multi-generational space travel would be such an unknown territory for the human psyche.

In your opinion, were the experiments useful to Vault-Tec? Were they meant to survive and fly out into the stars?

How does that make sense?
Agriculture is evidently still possible in acceptable scale post-apocalypse, let alone that the G.E.C.K was thing known pre-war.
Furthermore, normal vaults would have made more sense with the Enclave's plans in F2.
"Wipe out any and all FEV affected organisms and use unmutated humans to rebuild America."

Also, how would they go about documenting and collecting the vault test data?
Did every vault have a terminal connected to a central server?
What if something happened and the connection was severed? Whoops, oh well?
How could the accuracy of the data be verified? Did they have access to every camera in every vault at all times?
Would the discovery of said information to the inhabitants of the oil rig have caused any unrest?

You could still have created stories and drama with the original model, but decided to retcon into something that has to increasingly protrude explanations to loosely justify itself.

Fallout is my favorite franchise but I've come to see the significant lack of internal consistency and desire a lore revision with F1 being used as the untouched foundation. For example, instead of the Oil Rig being destroyed by a Mary Sue in F2, consider that it was left in an uninhabitable state after a mutiny (possibly sparked by the player) left unrepairable damage to the reactors and structure itself. The remaining Enclave evacuated to Navarro being left with no other choice but to play by the rules of the wasteland they either remain in isolation or eventually integrate into the highest echelons of the NCR and later formalize it as the alleged legitimate successor/continuation of the U.S.A.
The end effect of the NCR in by the time of NV would be politically near identical with the distinction of a better organized military.

So.. was there no place gathering the data?

Man this is so much cooler...

Did you say generational ship? You wouldn't need that if you could go warp 10.

I never understood the Enclave and Vault motivation.

Sure, it's another layer of convolution, but it doesn't make any more sense explicitly. Assume all 1k vaults produce novel results that can be learned from and incorporated in the starship design, there is still so much fictional handwaving that would have to occur to explain the ability to manufacture and launch a nuclear powered multigenerational vessel. Which is all before you even begin to consider the problem of actually identifying a viable exoplanet.

EVERY player that has played Fallout has always been WHY was they built :)

So those Ghouls from Fallout 3 that blasted off were onto something

finally somebody who talks to me in person instead of endless zooming into fallout landscapes

Actually I never liked that all vaults were supposed to be under so called social experiment projects. It could be some of them but not all.

I don’t get why people are crying. Bethesda have kept the gist of what you’ve just explained. Everything I know about Fallout is Bethesda Fallout and the experimenting has always been the point of the vaults even now.

You and the other people you mentioned are creative geniuses though, Todd Howard ain’t got the brain capacity to come up with ideas like these but he’s smart enough to continue to use them as their purpose

But, that legitimately doesn't make sense, because it would always be much harder to try to teraform a new world than fix the earth at any stage.

Also once the nuclear war happened it would always already be too late for anyone to build a generational space ship to get away from the planet and preserver people in a pre-war state.

What did they expect a few nuclear bombs to drop and then stop or to lie and somehow get everyone into the vaults but then have no one interested in saving them once the lie came out and they were all locked up in the vaults?

It doesn't add up.

The Enclave were the good guys and that's a hill I'll die on

I recently watched first season of Silo, and then I found out about the book it is based on and read it as well (because I am not waiting for season two) and I wonder would've Hugh Howey took an inspiration from the fallout, because his series has suspiciously similar controll system over the waults, an overseer reporting to the main, adminstrative government silo and whole project was built buy government and residents of silo's went through generations and don't know about "overseers" business.

This explains vault 0 as a data collection and control master vault. Probably was also to continue on with research into space flight and when complete radio the Enclave for space flight. Makes the fallout new Vegas true ending even more sad. Mr. House was the best choice.

wtf is with the video quality?

The funny thing is, even AFTER a nuclear war, Earth's still a nicer place to live than, say, Mars, purely on the basis of gravity and having a magnetosphere!

And the series has been riding your coattails ever since.. Thanks for making these videos! The first two Fallout games remain two of my all-time favorites on any platform. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the decision to deviate from an isometric viewpoint. Even though I ended up finishing Fallout 3, booting it up for the first time remains one of the most disappointing moments of my life (not even exaggerating). I so much loved the art style and what was established in the first two games, that much of the third game really left me with a bad taste. I felt a bit like they'd kind of ruined something I love, even if it was a decent-ish game.

Thank you for answering that question ❤

Imagine making a game so good, that 26 years later you get on a platform that didn't even exist at the time to talk about your thought process behind making it.😍

Thanks Mr. Tim Cain for those wonderfull fallout game(s) ( fallout 1 and also Fallout 2 ) The idea about vaults really was a good story but also thinking like the bombs dropped in nagazaki and hiroshima in WW2 there is like more then 60 years past since the bombing but people are living here as normal as possible like same radiation levels all around the world , maybe the idea might be better in a way that in a certain year no matter the outcome of the nuclear explosions happened in the surface around all the world , in some specific point of time the nature is hoing to heal herself and make the world habitable again soo the vaults designated for the people to wait for that healing process

So you mean to say that the Enclave the Remnants of the American Govt. (At least that is what they are in current lore) were active before the Bombs fell?

A few questions then.

1. How many of the Best and Brightest were supposed to make it to the Ship after the construction? Given the genetic diversity issue with too few people.
2. Who were supposed to build this ship after the research was completed?
3. How was vault tech supposed to keep in touch with the vaults? (as in current games Vault Tech lost all connection just after the Bombs dropped)
4. What, in your opinion were the Backbone experiments to be Run Aside from what you mentioned in the Video?

I'm fascinated by what your thoughts and answers are. (I love world building and want to create my own world someday Maybe a book series)

Man I don’t think this guy knows what he’s talking about when it comes to fallout. Has he ever even played the games? :p

My question is, what were the enclave planning on doing after the vaults were used? There would be nothing left do with the data after a war, assuming there was anyone left to collect it.

If they had already figured out the technology behind water purification, cryo tech, etc they must have already gone through rigorous testing which would likely give them enough information to reasonably the outcome I would imagine.

I hope this doesn't come across as rude, I'm just an overthinker.

Imagine a vault that was designed with the purpose to see how human bodies developed after being in zero G for extended periods of time.

THe idea fits in perfectly, i hope its canon.

Actually kind of insane how much that ties up. The Enclave would collect the data, solving the mystery (at least to me) of who would even benefit from the experiments once Vault-Tec HQ was vaporized, giving a reason for the Enclave to be crazy eugenicists who want to poison everyone who isn't "pure" in Fallout 3, giving further reason to the existence of Vault 101, 111, 22, etc. And even the failed experiments would be good data, in a sick way, of how certain failstates were achieved and what not to do. i.e., Vault 11, all these people formed political blocs, went crazy and killed each other, here's how to avoid that.
Even John Henry Eden in Fallout 3. I can just imagine the Enclave transplanting him onto a ship and he becomes like the Computer from Paranoia, their HAL-9000-esque overseer figure.

Love your shirt. Watching these videos, getting to know you a bit through this one facet of your life, that shirt, I'm really starting to think everyone here is right. Timothy Cain is a national treasure needing protection. Perhaps in a vault.

If you did a podcast, I'd listen to it for sure.

Gary!

This idea is pure genius and makes perfect sense. I hope I can meet the man who came up with this along with you Tim Cain. You guys inspire me, and I hope one day in the Fallout games they make use of this narrative. You could also say that the vaults accomplish other objectives like if the spaceship fails eventually humanity will survive so it even has a fallback.

Bethesda taking notes 📝.

Even Obsidian was clueless of Vault-Tec's purpose. Like how would Vault 21's gambling based court system help run a starship.

Whatever comes out off his mouth are canon until further installments from Bethesda are released. His idea for Fallout is amazing, darker, and more distopian compared to Bethesda's interpretation and continuation. Fallout 3 however will remain as my favorite Fallout installment. I just wish Bethesda continued the darker aspects of the original Fallout.

Its so sad that this great ip fell into false hands and god, how they massacred our boy

That sounds a lot more grounded than what vaults have evolved into. I absolutely hate that they are just now just excuses for whacky, non beneficial experiements by a stupid-evil aligned government

This is more of a childish dream lol, I assume that you are done with fallout and Bethesda probably also wouldn’t be interested but it’d be nice if you could be brought on as an “idea guy” akin to George Lucas with Star Wars. Might breathe life into a stale (in my opinion) franchise. Fallout 1,2, and new vegas are the best of the series and all 3 have infinite replay value, the Bethesda game are not so replayable. Just my opinion of course