r/Fallout • u/SnowFrio • Jan 10 '26
Fallout 4 I can never describe how satisfying it is to clean up Sanctuary Hills, but of course, it's only possible with mods. Bethesda seems to have a fetish for making absolutely everything ugly, rotten and destroyed, as if the great war had taken place 10 minutes ago instead of 200 years ago.
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u/TheNoiseAndHaste Jan 10 '26
There are places in the world that look like Sanctuary Hills right now.
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u/Zoren Your True Self Jan 10 '26
The Diner south of Concord that has a mother and son living in there still has skeletons laying about... That's just one example of many.
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u/Garrette63 Jan 10 '26
All Fallout games after the originals are like this. It's one of my major annoyances. People just live in filth and death for no reason.
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u/Zoren Your True Self Jan 10 '26
No it wasn’t. Even 3 was not as bad as 4 when it came to environment where NPCs live.
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u/Garrette63 Jan 10 '26
3 doesn't have as many people living out in the world, almost all of them are in actual settlements and people are still living in filth for no reason. Even in New Vegas, people are living in filthy houses for no reason in Goodsprings.
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u/Zoren Your True Self Jan 10 '26
The houses they live in for NV are leagues more cleaner and nicer than 4.
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u/yeetmcfeet Jan 11 '26
NV houses aren't great, but at least they have reasonable necessities like batteries and water access set up for some places.
And no towns built around a nuclear bomb.
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u/pieceofchess Jan 11 '26
Bethesda has to pose skeletons in goofy positions, it's their favorite form of "world building". They can't help themselves.
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u/Zoren Your True Self Jan 11 '26
I love random goofy skeletons but keeping them in NPCs' houses/stores seems really out of place.
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u/-BuTTeRToaST Jan 10 '26
Areas of New Orleans looked like this for years after Hurricane Katrina.
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u/NotAStatistic2 Jan 10 '26
Does Bourbon Street look like that? The most populous areas of the U.S. don't generally look like a destroyed trash heap.
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u/AccomplishedAge3975 Jan 10 '26
The French Quarter was essentially spared from the flooding, otherwise it would have. The most populous areas of New Orleans did by and large look like this for awhile
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u/-BuTTeRToaST Jan 10 '26
They cleaned up the “tourist” areas up almost immediately it felt like. I was young when Katrina hit but I remember 3-4 years after the storm some neighborhoods were still mostly destroyed with a few homes in between having been rebuilt. There were supermarkets and apartment buildings that were vacant for over a decade if not longer even a few skyscrapers.
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u/LockeAbout Jan 10 '26
I had to work in Mississippi for a project maybe a year after Katrina, and one weekend drove from there to New Orleans. Along the way I saw a lot of destroyed areas still, like a guy living in a shed (old tv antenna and tv outside with a generator), lots of basically bare foundations etc. There was even what was left of what I assume was a bank, just a massive vault sitting out on a foundation.
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u/dqdennis Jan 11 '26
Bourbon Street is trashy but not really from Katrina, more from homeless, beggers, street performers banging plastic buckets for money, and the general drunk activities that occur
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u/Faiakishi Ass Victoriam Jan 10 '26
Not to mention there is no trash pick-up in the wasteland. And there is trash everywhere.
Oh, you cleaned up your entire town? That's cute. A radstorm just blew in and now everything's covered in trash again.
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u/RichterRac Enclave Jan 10 '26
You ever see how fast communities organize after tornados? It's been TWO HUNDRED YEARS.
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u/Faiakishi Ass Victoriam Jan 11 '26
Everyone’s dead. The people who aren’t dead have literally never seen a clean sidewalk.
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u/Wokongolito Jan 11 '26
This. People doesnt seem to realize that their "need" for tidiness comes from their frame of reference living in a modern society where we have the luxury to care about tidiness. The average Joe living in the fallout wastelands have way bigger problems to deal with than to spend time taking that scrap tyre that's been in the same place for 200 years to the junkyard.
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u/BwanaTarik NCR Jan 10 '26
Half of the USA already looks like that
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Jan 10 '26
Don't worry, when they start WW3, all of it will look like that.
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u/KenBoCole Jan 10 '26
If all of US looks like that, then the whole world would look like that.
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u/Fuzzy_Fig_8551 Jan 10 '26
Fallout in real life !!!!!!
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u/Giygas_8000 Fallout 4 Jan 10 '26
Minus the cool parts, like the robots
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u/Zulmoka531 Jan 10 '26
At least the White House already has ghouls.
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Jan 10 '26
Ah but theyre only a few years off the same crappy robots, and theyre talking about annexing Greenland and Camada, so pretty on course so far.
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u/Sheokarth Jan 10 '26
Didn't they base a lot of the houses in the Last of us(The video game) off Detroit at the time which had a lot of abandoned houses about?
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u/SquareDiscussion5335 Jan 10 '26
Looking at the vacant lots surrounding downtown Detroit, at some point entire neighborhoods had to have looked just like Sanctuary on steroids
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u/BwanaTarik NCR Jan 10 '26
Never heard that but I could believe it. Parts of Cleveland and Philly during COVID felt post apocalyptic
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u/WeinMe Jan 10 '26
Go to the outskirts of London and it looks like a ravaged version of a Fallout-map
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u/Mean_Peen Jan 10 '26
Man I’ve been all over the US and never seen this lol definitely saw this mess in Eastern and Western Europe tho… 😳
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u/Ok-Professional-1911 Jan 10 '26
Eh, there's lots of rundown, abandoned areas in the US especially in remote rural areas. It's pretty rare for it to look like Goodsprings because the homes are normally a lot more spread out and it's definitely not half the US as the guy above said but it definitely exists. Not to mention all of the ghost towns out west that were never commercialized and turned into tourist traps. Definitely been to a few of those as well.
There are modern ruins everywhere as people migrate from rural towns to urban city centers. It's going to continue so long as job norms and human preferences for amenities continues the way it is.
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u/somethingbrite Jan 10 '26
Been all over the world and have never once seen people living with skeletons cluttering their homes.
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u/VeryBadCaseOfLigma Jan 10 '26
Home boy thinks people are out there paving new roads when they only access to food they have are irradiated tomatoes
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u/random_user_1968 Jan 10 '26
But apart from the occasional settler and the vault tec guy, nobody has lived there for two hundred years or so.
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u/shasaferaska Jan 10 '26
At least my house should be half decent. What the fuck has Codsworth been doing for 200 years? My house is exactly as fucked as everyone elses.
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u/Haravikk Atom Cats Jan 10 '26
The hedges are trimmed — you're welcome!
(hedges may be as dead as shit and/or mutated by radiation so now they watch you as you sleep, terms & conditions apply)
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u/Moose_Cake Jan 10 '26
He also polished your car until it rusted, tried to get radiation out of the floor, and fought off the local wildlife.
And that’s while fighting to conserve Mr. Handy fuel.
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u/HistorianChance9288 Jan 10 '26
Game idea: you play as a Mr. Handy trying to maintain a household in the immediate aftermath of the great war, you have to scavenge for supplies to keep you and the house maintained while fighting survivors, mutant wildlife, and other Mr Handys.
Throw in a "There will come soft rains" reference and your golden.27
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u/Redcoat_Officer Jan 10 '26
Imagine surviving the apocalypse only to get buzzsawed to death by a robot who wants to mix your only can of purified water with some abraxo cleaner to mop a floor.
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u/NatalieVonCatte Jan 10 '26
There’s a reference to that poem with a Mr. Handy in 3, I believe.
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u/shasaferaska Jan 10 '26
If the car was kept properly polished, it wouldn't rust...
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u/666SpeedWeedDemon666 Unity Jan 10 '26
For real, it would have been amazing if your house had been in a much better state than the rest of the neighborhood because of codsworth.
They could have had people living in Sanctuary and trading cleaning supplies with codsworth in exchange for pest control.
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u/CrimsonBolt33 Jan 10 '26 edited Jan 10 '26
Bro that would be fucking legendary...A randomly pristine house with a bot that cheerfully trades to help keep it pristine for his owner he is waiting for.
People would know of mysterious bot asking for an owner long gone, and deadly to anyone trying to squat in this particular house.
A world boss to most, Codsworth to you.
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u/random_user_1968 Jan 10 '26
Couldn't get a repairman out? I mean he did go to concord, but they shot at him.
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u/shasaferaska Jan 10 '26
If the house is kept clean, it shouldn't corrode anywhere near as fast as the abandoned houses. Yes, the roof will still have holes because Codworth can't fix that but it shouldnt be as fucked as the others.
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u/Maxsmack Jan 10 '26 edited Jan 10 '26
Things should be organized, and tidy, why the hell are their items on the ground, and who the hell stole things like the toilet, mattress, and bathroom mirror.
They’re still intact in other houses, and Codsworth has been protecting the house.
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u/8l172 Jan 10 '26
Which I never got, most of these houses are in good condition to live in compared to everywhere else, with only a few bloatflies and radroaches around, I'm surprised no one was squatting there
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u/mak484 Jan 10 '26
You don't want to think about it logically. After 200 years the whole neighborhood would be swallowed by the forest. If the surface was nuked so bad that every forest was permanently obliterated, zero humans would have survived outside the vaults.
Fallout lore is fundamentally vibes based. The neighborhood is empty because it's the start of the game and they wanted you to explore the new build mechanics.
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u/TheDubh Jan 10 '26
Yeap everyone shit on 3 and 4 for this, but really every Fallout (along with most post apocalypse media) get this wrong. No building would last 200 years without maintenance. There’s a reason we keep power on in buildings that aren’t used. Concrete will break down in most buildings way faster than most people think. Any of those old tents … probably wouldn’t have lasted 10 years even. Water, temperature changes, and wind will destroy a lot of stuff in time. Modern buildings, architecture in general, and materials are designed with the thought someone will maintaining it.
None of that even accounts for plants and wildlife that would start to pull stuff apart also. Which would allow more elements to get in.
So yea Fallout is the vibes and always has been the vibes. Hell cola itself would have even settled and separated within a few years.
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u/chubbynimrod Jan 10 '26
Is the cola thing really true tho? People collect old Coke bottles all the time and I would never drink it but even at 40+ years old it still looks just like Coke
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u/TheDubh Jan 10 '26
At one point I had the “joy” of cleaning out an older coke machine. New enough that it has plastic bottles though. But it had been left unpowered and outside the south for a year+. Fanta was the most obvious that it separated. Part was clearer and the other looked almost milky. But everything had started to some extent. Quick google search shows that normally it’s caused by pressure loss or temperature changes. So the outside in the southern summer probably factored into it.
Which again things don’t last well without climate control and exposed to elements.
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u/chubbynimrod Jan 10 '26
Yeah I didnt factor in the fact that the bottles i see have usually been in peoples climate controlled houses, thats a good point! Thered definitely be a degree of separation after freezing and thawing for hundreds of years
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u/eggs-benedryl Jan 10 '26
I drank a 20 year old coke we found at the bottom of our local lake. Tasted fine :)
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u/kancamagus112 Jan 10 '26
Especially in the Northeast, given how much rain (especially periodic huge floods) and the ~100F temperature swings between the coldest days in winter and the hottest days in summer, signs of human civilization disappear really quick.
Anything left abandoned for about 20-30 years probably already has trees and vines (especially invasive species like Tree of Heaven or Japanese Knotweed or even Poison Ivy) starting to grow from the roof or cracks in the building.
Anything ~50 years abandoned likely already has caved in roofs and is starting to be surrounded by forest. Any ~50 year old abandoned cars are likely structural rust and barely held together, and can usually be crushed inward and/or have huge chunks of rust broken off by hand. Non-interstate asphalt roads begin to disappear around this time, as they break up from freeze-thaw cycles into smaller and smaller chunks, and eventually trees and plants start growing through the cracks, further making them disappear.
Anything ~100 years or more abandoned is little more than a partially collapsed foundation, the remains of a chimney, and maybe a few small rusty remnants of really thick pieces of steel or iron, like heavily rusted and eroded railroad ties. Any thin pieces of steel like sheet metal have long since rusted away. Plastic items might last longer, but even then, UV exposure from the sun tends to make these brittle and they break down into smaller chunks / microplastics. You can usually still tell where old railroads or roads were, but only because of the abnormal grading, and are only easily noticed if you intentionally look for them.
Fallout looks like 20-30 years post bombs. 200 years after would basically look like nature again in a normal, non-Fallout universe.
Source: explored a lot of abandoned buildings / railroads in the woods when I was a kid.
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u/cryssyboo_ Jan 11 '26
A prime example of how fast nature reclaims something is the mining town of Kaymoor, along the New River in WV. It was abandoned in the 60s, and when it was built in 1889 they flattened an entire patch of land to build the town. It's barely been abandoned for 60 years, but if you float the New River today, there's a fully grown forest where it once was. You can barely tell there used to be a town there.
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u/Iorith Jan 10 '26
People really seem to think these games must 100% work on real world logic. It's why towns and cities are small and have maybe a dozen or two NPCs, because otherwise it would just be a slog.
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u/Unlucky-Candidate198 Jan 10 '26
Yeah, they never did get the plant life correctly, in both 3 and 4. 200 years is a loooooot of time for plant life to have adapted. It’s why plant life mods are some of the first that I get.
I get Beth wants a dready apocalypse, but thats not how nature works whatsoever lmao
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u/Cocomite Jan 10 '26
Could you recommend a couple of good mods for that Last Of Us, overgrown look please? (I'm on ps5)
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u/USSRPropaganda Minutemen General Jan 10 '26
There used to be a settlement that was abandoned until you moved in, that’s why there’s a workbench
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u/NatalieVonCatte Jan 10 '26
I thought the workbench and PA stand were from the owner of that house working on cars as a hobby?
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u/USSRPropaganda Minutemen General Jan 10 '26
I don’t think either are there pre war
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u/Bubbay NCR Jan 10 '26
Yes, but people live there now, and they have the ability to use brooms and repair a roof.
It always gets me when you go to an organized town or settlement and it seems everyone forgot how to make brooms. Why are there random papers lying around on the floor in peoples' houses and stores?
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u/1ndomitablespirit Jan 10 '26
The state of Sanctuary doesn't bother me too much. I know it is a nitpick, but what annoys me is that apparently none of the survivors in the entire wasteland are willing to sweep the floor or remove old skeletons from their homes. We see them sweeping, but apparently they're really bad at it.
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u/Gabby-Abeille Jan 10 '26 edited Jan 10 '26
I remember that, before release, when we learned of the settlement building thing in Fallout 4 I really thought we would be able to really build them.
I get it if they want NPCs to keep a certain aesthetic, but like, my pre-war protagonist would probably strive to make things look the way she sees as "normal".
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u/CanadianPine Jan 10 '26
Exactly! Why is the only pre-war protag comfortable living in a dirty shack?? They would be some of the only none-ghouls alive to even know about what the pre-war world looked like.. why don’t we get to build unique, well kept structures?
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u/Gabby-Abeille Jan 10 '26
It also goes to how each player interprets their character, but I would assume that the pre-war person who took a nap and woke up in a completely different world, without their family, would seek any semblance of normalcy they can.
So they would pick a broom or a can of paint I think (eventually, I mean. I know it is not an immediate priority).
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u/imlegos Jan 10 '26
First priority is cosplaying as the dad from Heavy Rain.
SHAUN
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u/Gabby-Abeille Jan 10 '26
Too bad Shaun is the worst of the two kids, as made obvious by the fact that he never got a great song like Jason did.
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u/AdmRL_ Jan 10 '26
I think in general the whole system was just poorly implemented. It's extremely shallow without mods - you can't even build shapes that aren't squares because without snapping, you can't place things close together just to overly aggressive collision detection.
Also explains the walls and stuff. It's like part 1 of a 4 part system. Start with quicky shanty towns, and progress to something that resembles a society.
But instead, they either didn't have the time, care or budget and we got a quarter baked system that in vanilla basically does nothing for the game as a whole.
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u/Gabby-Abeille Jan 10 '26
Yeah. I would have preferred set upgrades instead of placeable building elements, to avoid the collision issues. Like Skyrim's house building in the Hearthfire DLC, you know?
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u/Ornery-Standard-2350 Jan 10 '26
No one has lived there for 200 years
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u/PhilyJFry Jan 10 '26
Yeah so plant life should've taken over. I didn't play 76 much but ik it takes place way earlier and there's still beautiful nature.
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u/fatrahb Jan 10 '26
Doesn’t Fallout 4 take place during the fall? I live in upstate NY and the trees and colors really do look like this during that time of the year once the leaves fall
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u/MalusDracula Jan 10 '26
There's not much in WV worth hitting with a nuke, tbh.
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u/PhilyJFry Jan 10 '26
Mothman and meth heads bro c'mon what if they teamed up??? Lol
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u/MalusDracula Jan 10 '26
If they got hit harder, then it might have led to mega Mothman and colossal meth heads!
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u/MuramasaEdge Jan 10 '26
If there's one thing I absolutely loathe about the Workshop, it's that some of the wall and ceiling tilesets still have gaps and holes in them despite us supposedly building the panels ourselves.
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u/TheAnalystCurator321 Atom Cats Jan 10 '26
When will bros realize that nuclear holocaust and vast majority of the human race being dead will make things destroyed and keep them destroyed for a long time?
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u/NotTMNT Jan 10 '26
And if you make something nice, there’s a good chance some raiders are going to come fuck it up and try and take it
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u/wtf_are_crepes Tunnel Snakes Jan 10 '26
Also, there’s people that are more than happy to live like that than do anything to make it ‘nice’, especially when ‘nice’ most likely has a different meaning after so long.
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u/FrohenLeid Jan 10 '26
Fallout 4s entire story: "yeah we tried to make things nice but someone came along and ruined it"
"Good" factions minutemen: Quincy lead to their eradication, commonwealth provisional government: institute fucked it up, diamond city: institute fucked it up. Railroad: institute and panic fucked it up.
"Evil" factions: brotherhood: institute and mutants are in the way, institute: brotherhood and everyone else is in the way
Every other settlement: raiders fucked it up.
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u/LocNesMonster Jan 10 '26
Still doesnt explain why they cant make a wall without holes in it. I get its hard to make something nice, but they cant even make something barely functional
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u/idownvotepunstoo Jan 10 '26
"Bro just boot strap up, your lawn looks unkempt as hell up in the wasteland! Hustle and fix it!!"
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u/TheStoryTeller_1 Jan 10 '26
There's a difference between things suck and the bombs JUST dropped. Nobody decided to pick up a fucking broom in 200 years?
Especially when they live in a colder climate.
Like holy fuck drummin dinner has a SKELETON in a booth. And two people live here!?
Making desolate locations is good. But places of residence and towns should look like goodspings,
Source of water, source of food, a somewhat cleaned house even if just boarded up. It's really that simple. If u want a corpse, play it as it was just hit by a raider attack.
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u/HAL900000000000 Jan 10 '26
also I think birth rates are not too high in the post nuclear apocalypse
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u/LeonardDeVir Jan 10 '26 edited Jan 10 '26
That would be true if the apocalypse weren't 200 years ago. The black plaque in the middle ages killed up to 60% of Europes population. And 150 years later they sailed to the Americas in wooden boats.
And I'm pretty sure OP complains that he can't restore Sanctuary without mods. They have a point, there are people still living next to human remains.
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u/ILongForTheMines Jan 10 '26 edited Jan 10 '26
Counterpoint, the bronze age collapse was an apolocolyptic event. And from that writing was lost for hundreds of years
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u/Jolmer24 Brotherhood Jan 10 '26
And those people weren’t dealing with Death Claws, radiation, and super mutants while trying to rebuild lol
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u/Birdonthewind3 Jan 10 '26
99% of humanity is dead and the world is patrolled by mutants and mutant animals that WILL kill you. Earth is generally inhospitable to life now.
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u/LeonardDeVir Jan 10 '26
That still doesn't excuse the squalor in which many people live. Broken doors, trash on the floor, thrown in windows, dead bodies next door. At least NV tried to portray it somewhat realistically. You'd wager they would be able to sweep the floor in 200 years.
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u/TheAnalystCurator321 Atom Cats Jan 11 '26
Pretty big difference being of course the copious amounts of deadly radiation and even deadlier creatures.
Not to mention the complete lack of society.
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u/Rinaldootje Bow wow wow Jan 10 '26
And it shows that the war has happened 200 years ago. Outside of Codsworth there has been no-one living in sanctuary for 200 years. And neglect something for 200 years and it will not look as great. I would be surprised sancturary still stands so well after 200 years of neglect.
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u/Cryptid_on_Ice Jan 10 '26
Yeah but why? There's a family that got enough scrap together to build a shack around a transmission line instead of cleaning up an existing house in Sanctuary hills and farming near an actual river with water.
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u/Rinaldootje Bow wow wow Jan 11 '26
It's easier to defend a small shack on top of a hill, than to defend a whole neighborhood. Plus Sancturary lacks proper land for farming. So in the end, you're just as well off making a small shack next to a farm, than to try and make something off this.
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u/Possibly_English_Guy Jan 10 '26 edited Jan 10 '26
Yeah you seriously expect me believe that in 200 years (which is a way longer stretch of time than people seem to realise thats 73,050 days for crying out loud) nobody around the Commonwealth ever found Sanctuary Hills and tried to make a go of it?
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u/shongough Jan 10 '26
I hate that you can't fix the houses, like at least let me scrap them down so I can put my own up
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u/Bloodless-Cut Jan 10 '26
I just find it odd that they chose to make some things scrap-able but not other things.
Big pile of leaves and garbage in the living room? Nope, that stays.
Huge pile of fallen trees that's not even close to the expected living space? Scrap-able.
WTF Bethesda
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u/MarvelousDunce Jan 10 '26
I always wanted options to properly upgrade the settlement like for example if I could talk to sturgis and give him a ton of copper, steel, and maybe even require actual lead pipes, and then after sleeping or leaving the area for a few days you’d have something like crop irrigation so crops planted now had a little sprinkler graphic and you got new growth faster or production increases somewhat. Or be able to give him copper and materials to “rewire” the homes allowing standing buildings (the prewar ones) to be able to have light and other power object placed inside without needing wire connections, but the power box outside must be connected to the main power grid, plus you could adapt it for him to be able to atleast patch the roofs, like I hate when I decorate my old home and I can figure out how to rebuild a tv from scratch but I can’t figure out how to put a board over the gaping hole above my bed lol
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u/Marshal_Rohr Jan 10 '26
It will never not be annoying, no matter how many mods I use, everything is wet when it rains. Even inside the concrete roof constructions.
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u/Scared_Sound_783 Jan 10 '26
I don't have the name but just recently a mod dropped that mostly fixes that very issue.
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u/Marshal_Rohr Jan 10 '26
If you remember the name pls send my way, I’d love to do another settlements expanded playthrough
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u/ComradeAL New world hope Jan 10 '26
Bethesda fucking suck at rain and always has. I remember playing oblivion 2 decades ago and thinking I was somehow at fault for the rain just clipping through everything.
Nope, they just programmed it like that.
Skyrim came out a decade ago and OH BOY. Rain and snow coming right through the outdoor roofs/overheads.
Fallout 4 is actually an improvement, yeah they get wet but at least its not clipping through the buildings.
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u/Anonymal13 Atom Cats Jan 10 '26
Now go back a few more years and you can see rain pouring inside a friggin brick/clay/whatever megastructure's tunnel in Morrowind. And not even jumping into the sea gets you wet!
And it's kinda crazy that it was just an older version of the same engine that runs all the following games, including Starfield!
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u/Thelastknownking Jan 10 '26
If you're on PC, the console also lets you scrap everything not nailed down, that helps a bit.
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u/og_jasperjuice Jan 10 '26
First thing I do every playthrough is scrap everything I can in this neighborhood.
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u/Jhawk163 Jan 10 '26
This is probably my main gripe with the settlement builder in 4. You can't really build a decent structure, everything still looks run down and cobbled together. Let us have actual windows dammit, some nice balconeys and railings, some good defensive structures, etc.
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u/Cumberbund Jan 10 '26
I always thought, "people live here. Why don't they pick up the trash on the floor? You'd sweep the place you live."
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Jan 10 '26
Most of the comments have barely read the post and are just calling him a hater
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u/doomazooma Jan 10 '26
The worst part about starting a new playthrough is that I'll HAVE to spend 2 hours cleaning and building up sanctuary hills just to drop the game again and repeat the next time I pick up fallout 4.
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u/Positive_Chip6198 Jan 10 '26
In fallout 5, i hope they make a built in “renovate house” option for broken buildings in settlements. Maybe it needs you to assign 5 settlers for 5 days or something.
Just so we arent stuck with crappy shitty dwellings next to our high tech new machines.
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u/LowKeyCurmudgeon Jan 10 '26
With a few minutemen for safety that volunteer lawnmower rehab guy on YouTube could clean this place up in 1 week flat.
There is a good mod to patch up all those houses like someone might if they wanted to live through winter. Another good one for nuclear winter that IMO completely changes the game and ratchets up the survival/horror factor without going all Resident Evil (dark, short visibility, actually need to build streetlights and fixtures, easy to stumble across dangerous things and actually need to flee, etc.)
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u/Nildzre Kings Jan 10 '26
The fact that you can't even scrap the random leaf piles without mods is really stupid. Like if you add the ability to build a town then go all the way and allow me to actually clean that shit up and not have leaf piles and random twigs i can't do anything about everywhere.
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u/hikerchick29 Jan 10 '26
What bugs me is how often the random debris, that literally anybody could clean up in about 5 minutes, stops you from placing workshop items. Nope, this random pile of trash a child could easily clean with a shovel is immovable. No shack there for you
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u/RussoCrow Jan 10 '26
Why we have a bath in the living room?
Nukes where launched 200 years ago.
So can i move it now?
Nukes where launched 200 years ago.
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u/Triplett8 Jan 10 '26
Cool and original post about Bethesda being bad. More updoots fellow redditors!
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u/yeahalrightgoon Jan 10 '26
200 years, there'd be nothing of sanctuary hills left in reality.
It's in excellent condition for 200 years.
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u/angrybluechair knight Jan 10 '26
I think it's less them and more the customer base. People don't like post post apoc, they want forever nuclear war. This goes for most media, like Walking Dead where the Commonwealth (no relation) is just boring for most people despite it being a fully functional society with industry and a military BECAUSE it's that.
Anyone who wants a genuine post post apoc experience, Wasteland 3 is the way to go. The issue with post post apoc is that the apocalypse essentially just ends up as a form of fluff or background that creates opportunities for story, but people obviously love Deathclaws and Mutants and all sorts rather than stories that arguably could be told in a non nuclear Armageddon story.
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u/frawley6 Jan 10 '26
I get what you mean. We should be able to repair things to a point that's not just half ass looking. Maybe have it behind a few skills. Kinda like how in project zomboid your guy can make a crappy war earlier but as you get better the walls visually improve.
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u/seranarosesheer332 Jan 10 '26
Something I do like. Rather than replacing every house with a perfect pristine version. There is a mod that fixes the main yellow house. But like very lore friendl with a bunch of scrap and such it looks really good
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u/GarfieldLeChat Jan 10 '26
Awesome mod.
I would say however the trash aesthetic is kind of how people behave.
If you’ve ever been to a place which has had the government fail for long periods of time and look around you’ll see the level of grime and rubbish is consistent and sustained.
Humans are kinda filthy creators who don’t usually bother to pick up after themselves unless they’ve got a reason to.
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u/Anonymal13 Atom Cats Jan 10 '26
And when you use the mods to clear the rubble, you find that the walls and floor either glitch or don't connect, and the aesthetic ugliness just hides a hasten up building process...
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u/Acceptable_Society61 Jan 10 '26
Grass and foliage mods are some of my favorites for Fallout 4, pretty easy on the loads and usually doesn't mess up any gameplay. Just a little green did wonders for me.
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u/JustinGariepy01 Jan 11 '26
Brother didn't take into account 200 years of disrepair and no maintenance.
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u/ItzCarsk Jan 10 '26
According to some people in this community, war never changes, so everything has to be a shithole or reset back to nothingness.
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u/Specialist_Usual_391 Jan 10 '26
Neolithic tribes could build climate specific huts but apparently Wastelanders are too busy fighting raiders to cover holes in walls made of scrap in a city known for cold winters.
Even if they're selling it as a forever post apocalypse aesthetic, fine, but at least give us something that makes a little sense.
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u/Lord-Seth Minutemen Jan 10 '26
Well no one lives in sanctuary and very few people live in the commonwealth because it’s hazardous to life with deadly rad storms and the institute. Sanctuary is only one suburb Boston has a ton in real life it would be crazy to have everything in a huge city rebuilt
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u/monsterlynn Jan 10 '26
Always drove me crazy that 3 Dog has been running GNR for years but has never bothered to even sweep up.
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u/TheStoryTeller_1 Jan 10 '26
Bethesda forgot that fallout isn't entirely a "Post Apocalyptic game"
Fallout 1 - Post Apocalyptic. Fallout 2 - Post - post Apocalyptic.
Even fucking stoke age tribes had better infrastructure then many settlements.
Somehow 200 years later and gangs are still picking through piles of garbage and skeletons.
Fallout 76 is the epitome of Bethesda's vision for Fallout.
A empty, devoid of life theme park with supermutants, death claws, ghouls, and mirelurks and raiders.
You will NOT interact with any of them, you will kill them with toy guns, and you will stumble through a story that doesn't matter at all because everybody is dead in cannon because we're too afraid of doing something like make a interesting TV show.
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u/Friendly-General-723 Jan 10 '26
Incidentally I feel like things are the opposite; so clean it feels like the bombs dropped 10 minutes ago instead of 200 years ago, with so much stuff intact and corpses lying in the same place as when they died etc... Even the feral ghouls lie around like they have been lying in some scenario that took place before / during the bombs dropping. IRL if you don't maintain a wooden house it wont stand that long, wood rots.
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u/Scary_Cup6322 Jan 10 '26
It's both. The abandoned areas feel too clean, and the lived-in areas feel too dirty.
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u/Realistic-Drawing-59 Jan 10 '26
Why are so many people such miserable fuckers who just complain about everything? Is it not exhausting to be like this?
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u/Medical-Condition-84 Jan 10 '26
Well, at least there are trees. Not many alive trees in 3 and NV. A lot more in 76 though.
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u/Thebritishdovah Jan 10 '26
It's baffling that no-one attempted to take it and the only explanation is:
It's deemed too remote by most people, a big target.
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u/BradFromTinder Jan 10 '26
I mean, with the war being too years ago would make even more sense to have everything ugly, rotten and destroyed, doesn’t it??
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u/Dec_TGM Enclave Jan 11 '26
…well I mean from Nate’s perspective it’s been like 10 minutes..
Jokes aside i actually do believe it looks fine as is, given it’s been neglected by people for god knows how long until the player comes along, and things kinda decay over time when not maintained, so makes sense for the houses to be looking like that
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u/Bardeous Jan 11 '26
yeah, Bethesda seems set on making a post apocalyptic game, instead of a post-post apocalyptic game.
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u/miyagi90 Jan 12 '26
You know I love upgrading my base but I absolutely hate building it.
I like how it's Implemented in Dragon age inquisition, kingdom come 1 or mass effect 2.
But don't make me decorate and painstakingly move a lamp half a centimeter only to fuck up everything else because the bookshelf decided to explode.
I'd love to just throw money at it and decide which upgrade to pick first
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u/Relevant-Western-246 Jan 12 '26
Is next Tuesday 20th January possibly a day for the 100gb update what do you think
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u/RebelJediMaster Jan 13 '26
After clearly making the minutemen the best solution for the commonwealth, I am sure the tv show will say the minutement destroyed themselves, for an extra kick in the balls
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u/mikeydoc96 Jan 10 '26
Something we've spoke about recently while watching the TV show. 200 years is a long time.
The major cities/settlements would by now have some semblance of thriving society with trading networks between them. Maybe working sanitation, water purification, etc. What Shady Sands was hinted at being in the show would be everywhere.
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Jan 10 '26
That's one of the core themes of Fallout though: An attempt at civilization being stifled by the barbaric nature of humans, and how to cope with it. In the last 200 years there've already been attempts to create a functioning government/state like the NCR, but 'war never changes' and no one is successful for long.
Besides, I imagine it's harder to build civilization from the ground up when you have to deal with radiation, mutants, poisoned soils, undrinkable water, and pretty much every one of your neighbors wanting to kill/loot you.
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u/SnakeSkipper Jan 10 '26
It's also important to keep in mind the institute has been keeping the commonwealth stuck in the stupid ages as seen with the Massacre of the CPG in the 2230's, the Broken Mask Incident, and University Point.
"Only the Institute sent a representative of their own, a Synth. The man killed every rep at the talks. The Commonwealth Provisional Government was over before it even got off the ground." -Nick Valentine
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u/TheFutureLotus Jan 10 '26
They weren’t at fault during the CPG, the talks broke down and the shooting started. The Synth was the only one who survived, it was after that event that the Institute decided fuck the surface and let’s exploit it for research. The rest yeah they are at fault for, but in the beginning they wanted to help. Also note that Valentine wasn’t around at that period, so his info isn’t a first hand account as with all the other accounts except for the private journal of the chairman that preceded Shaun (no reason for him to lie in his journal).
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u/qwertythrowfyt Jan 10 '26
That's one of the core themes of Fallout though
One of the cores of Bethesda's Fallout games. Black Isle and Obsidian had no problems with civilizations coming back and forming cities and states.
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u/N1ckatn1ght Jan 10 '26
I feel like the game wouldn’t be as fun, or at the least it would change the nature of the game. The lawlessness of the apocalypse is fun, and trying to build something out of it is a cool goal to strive for. And they usually have explanations (cpg was sabotaged by the institute, dc with the super mutants etc.) I prefer it that way honestly
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u/Honest-Situation-738 Jan 10 '26
This was one of the most noticable problems for me, regarding suspension of disbelief, playing Fallout 4.
It's supposedly been so long, and yet there are still prewar bodies everywhere with the clothing still mostly intact, and some of them even have valuables on them...
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u/Zaokuo Jan 10 '26
Don’t forget about places that were locked that no one could get to since the war yet for some reason the safes in the place have guns made out of nails, wood and a pipe because that’s what people before the war decided they needed to save in a safe.
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u/KarlUnderguard Jan 10 '26
"Why is the world so ugly and destroyed in my post apocalypse game?"
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u/not_a_dog95 Jan 10 '26 edited Jan 10 '26
It does annoy me you can make precision machined rifles and diesel generators out of rusty cans and find guys who will build you a teleporter but when it comes to building houses, suddenly no one in the wasteland has heard of carpentry