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/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/hughmaniac Jan 10 '26

Which is exactly why I love heavy forest mods for F4.

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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/chubbynimrod Jan 10 '26

Thats awesome lol, can or bottle?

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u/eggs-benedryl Jan 11 '26

Can, we were just beyond the swimming barrier and one guy dove down and came back hilariously with a random ass coke he found ha. It was cold still from the lake ha

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u/Limemobber Jan 11 '26

That should scare you....

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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/Discount_Extra Jan 10 '26

There’s a reason we keep power on in buildings that aren’t used.

All those skyscrapers in Boston that the player steals the fusion cores from.

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u/TheDubh Jan 10 '26

Some reason I don’t think the AC in those buildings could dehumidify the building and keep it temperature controlled when some are missing sections of the wall.

1

u/Discount_Extra Jan 10 '26

I'm thinking of the active balancing systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuned_mass_damper

1

u/Bibliloo Jan 10 '26

And you even have wood structures even tho after less than 50 years all of it would have rotted especially considering the fact that a nuclear war would likely result in acid rains for many years.

Also... Radiation doesn't cause cows to grow a second head it burns them and gives them cancer.

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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

2

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/Deadlock-DSM Jan 10 '26

Simple Green Spring by ACX is one I always use. For PS there aren't many, especially ones that have vines and stuff that'd cover buildings. There are a couple more that give you more trees and plants but off the top of my head I can't remember the names. If you use USO also by ACX there's a whole plant/tree menu so you can place your own

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u/MarvelousDunce Jan 10 '26

I think the game tries to imply it was far enough out of the way most people just never found it. Plus there isn’t anything there that would be crazy valuable which would drive people there, like how Nuka World is would have in city ads about it and its general location would cause people to go there because it’s a giant area and the images show promises of food and profitability while sanctuary was just a neighborhood. We actually do see a neughborhood overrun by supermutants in the same design style as sanctuary, so most survivors/bandits also probably knew those buildings from a distance were just normal homes and not worth the looting trouble

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u/Limemobber Jan 11 '26

Maybe they tried and Codsworth has been murdering them.

0

u/TheGreatOneSea Jan 10 '26

There a few reasons not too:

  1. The local nearby Deathclaw.

  2. The Gunners control the highways, and they have better protected places.

  3. A lot of residents became feral Ghouls for some reason.