The Apocalyptic Economy

[orbmace]

I would like to get people's view on the Fallout economy, to see if there is a general consensus on how things work in the wastelands.

I think having the basic fundamentals down, will help when creating some realism mods, I currently have 2 things on my mind:

 

1st: bottle caps

At first I thought bottle caps as the primary currency was stupid, surely a pure barter system would be used in the hostile wastelands? who the hell would exchange vital supplies for a tiny bottle top?

with our current reality, the creation of a unit of exchange might sound fair enough, but would the people of the wastelands really buy into bottle caps?

 

though after thinking about it a bit more, the fallout universe is a 1950's/futuristic wasteland, and if my memory serves me correct, bottle caps back in the day where made of metal (steel?) and not cheap plastic or aluminum.

following this through:

- metal has value to the people of the wastelands? and bottle caps just happens to be a convenient way to represent that? (easier than carrying around scrap bits of metal)

- if metal does have value, that implies the the people of the wastelands have the ability to work metal and produce things?

 

2nd: wasteland resources

is it 100% based on scavenging? obviously scavenging things from the old world plays a large part, and there is no form mass production/industry, but can these people produce things at all?

my thoughts are:

- fallout 3 is 200 years after the war.

- how much could people scavenge things from the old world, like food, medicine, ammo, for over 200 years?

- no Agriculture (though i do remember some in fallout 1 and 2)

- only non meat food i've seen is mutfruit, which I'm assuming is a feral fruit, and not farmed

- there is a repair skill, so they can at least repair things.

- player can get a laboratory, so drugs can be produced

- megaton was built after the war, they also built a water purification facility (maybe also a waste management system?).

 

my conclusion is, they don't have the ability to gather any raw resources (i.e. no mining and stuff) but they can produce anything from scavenged resources, and are capable of more than just repairing old things.

 

please feel free to correct, confirm or add anything.

[Midicow]

Who would be stupid enough to exchange items for strips of clothy colored paper or metallic coins?

 

Nuka cola factories are pretty much out of commission, and although steel and steel working is readily available, I'm sure there is some identifying markings on the cap that are hard to reproduce that keeps wastelanders in general from counterfeiting them.

 

Also storyline wise, the bottlecap currency is "backed by rivet city merchants".. like the brotherhood script was backed by the BOS in FOT, or the Californian script junk from fo2 was backed by the Californian capital.. so it will be worth something as long as those places back it's value.

 

Finally yeah seems mostly based on scavenging..

 

Some things in the game seem to pop out of thin air though.. these are gaping holes in most games that are rpgish.. but really npcs don't actually need to do anything except follow scripting, or surely everyone would either starve or kill eachother over food/land/clean water/etc before you could even get halfway through the main quest..

 

(Thats actually exactly what happens if you screw around with mods in oblivion.. Npcs start running out around the world hunting food, stealing it, getting into fights, etc.. really really fun)

[orbmace]

Who would be stupid enough to exchange items for strips of clothy colored paper or metallic coins?

I don't see any reason to compare our current economies (or even the pre-war society of fallout) to the wastelands.

though you could look at and compare earlier civilizations, and from my understanding before the creation of credit, currency was always something solid i.e. gold, silver, copper etc..

 

Also storyline wise, the bottlecap currency is "backed by rivet city merchants".. like the brotherhood script was backed by the BOS in FOT, or the Californian script junk from fo2 was backed by the Californian capital.. so it will be worth something as long as those places back it's value.

so rivet city backing bottle caps is fallout cannon? I guess if thats the case, then that would be the general consensus.

 

decided to google this and got http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Currency (yeah like a wiki is suppose to help :rolleyes: )

 

anyway whatever the general consensus is, I'll go along with it (publicly, if I was to release a mod) though personally still doesn't fly

[Gotcha44]

Well, to give a reasonable short answer:

A nuclear disaster on a scale like this does have the power to send civilization back to the stone age.

 

Factories that mold steel would be gone. The knowledge to build these factories would be gone, since most people with this knowledge would have died and computers and books would be ruined.

So, yeah, people would have to scavenge for leftovers to try to make a civilization that they would have been used to before the war. But most technology would simply have been lost.

(The Brotherhood of Steel tries to avoid the loss of even more technology and harvests all they can, although in Fallout 3 they only seem to be interested in militaristic stuff.)

 

No more computers=no digital money (not that Fallout 3 has ATMs, but that's besides the point), paper money would have been very sparse, like in Fallout 3, since, well, paper and fire/radiation...

With the loss of money they would need something to make up for it. It'd be history repeating itself, but In Fallout they start out with bottlecaps instead of animals/grain/seashells and whatnot.

 

Bottlecaps are brilliant. No one can replicate them without a working factory. The edges on such a cap are near impossible to handcraft, and no one has the means to press logo's on them. And they stay around, due to being metal.

[furtim]

I thought the in-game explanation for the availability of firearms and ammo is that the Brotherhood maintained some limited factories and traded away their production for other supplies they needed. I can't remember which, but this was definitely explained in either F1 or F2.

 

The Vaults would probably have some kind of production capacity in them, as well, so they could either trade like the Brotherhood did or else the Vaults could be scavenged by Wastelanders and the production equipment setup elsewhere.

 

However, the knowledge for retooling the (presumably) automated factories has almost definitely been lost, so that might explain why a more official currency than bottlecaps can't be forged, even though more complicated items like bullets can. There might also be a nostalgic, culture-driven use for establishing and trusting some form of currency, despite the fact that pure barter makes sense. Note how many people who weren't born until two hundred years after the nukes flew still express desires to return to "the old days" that they only know as legends passed down from previous generations...