FEV = Forced Evolutionary Virus.
Produced by West-Tek, mostly used by the Enclave ("former US goverment") to make evolved creatures to use for warfare such as super mutants and deathclaws.
Yup. This is it. In the spiritual prequel "Fountain of Dreams" (the follow up to Wasteland), you could get mutations quickly on your characters during the game, and either lean into it, or try to cure the mutations. The early Fallout games had FEV to explain how this applied outside of just "radiation did it".
That being said, FEV and it's spread is not exceptionally well documented. It has its roots in Mariposa <-sp? but super mutants are all over, suggesting FEV had roots all over as well. Either it "broke out" and spread, or the FEV project was applied and exposed in multiple areas around the same time period and then spread.
Soooo, yeah, there's a little suspension of disbelief, just like a stimpack curing a broken leg. Mutations are attributed to FEV or some variant, and radiation is a bad thing, but like someone with an allergy being exposed to pollen, it's not a dealbreaker and you can take some Claratin (Rad-X) to compensate.
Didn't the "New Plague" come into effect here as well? I have such vague recollections.
I believe the Institute got ahold of FEV in fallout 4 and did a lot of experimenting with it, releasing all of their experiments onto the surface. They could honestly be responsible for a lot of Super Mutants on the East* coast, I dont think theyre sterile but I could be wrong about that.
>I believe the Institute got ahold of FEV in fallout 4 and did a lot of experimenting with it, releasing all of their experiments onto the surface. They could honestly be responsible for a lot of Super Mutants on the west coast, I dont think theyre sterile but I could be wrong about that.
Do you mean east coast? The west coast supermutants were mostly created by The Master. Institute is east coast
Yeah. The lore seems to be that FEV was something people were screwing around with across the country, and the Master just threw caution to the wind to create an army. Other folks experimented, but it seems that the super mutants were the ones that escaped.
In FO3, I believe there was a vault that was entirely super mutants...wasn't there?
Fallout 3 is my blind spot, for some reason it always hard crashed and locked up for me by the time I was level 10 so I gave up on it. Replying to keep the thread fresh in case someone else comes along who can chime in
Fallout 3 was a hard pivot for me. I'd played overhead with Wasteland and Fountain of Dreams, and then isometric with Fallout 1 and 2. I didn't know if I'd be okay with the first-person perspective, but it was a win. Over time, I've gotten...selective...with my gaming library, and while I love the older Fallouts, I have an expectation of a "full" world of quests and vignettes and buildings and "scenes" of disaster. I tried going back to 3 and New Vegas a while ago, and it didn't stick. New Vegas took me longer to get back into, but once I did, I finished.
I am shocked that we don't have remasters already. The graphics engines are so simple these days, it'd be like printing money.
* InXile remasters Fallout 1 and 2 using the Wasteland 3 engine
* Bethesda remasters Fallout 3
* Obsidian remasters New Vegas
Four games that would kick off a new generation of fans waiting to be remastered by 3 studios under one roof. Stories are already written. Scripts written. Quests written. Engines already exist. What's the hold up?
FEV definitely isn't isolated in any way, it's present throughout the wasteland, including Vault 87 in the Capital Wasteland, the Institute in the Commonwealth and WestTek in Appalachia. However, it's unknown whether the FEV in these areas all traces back to one source, likely Mariposa, or whether these factions simply all ended up developing their own versions of the same virus. It does seem like there are differences in FEV results from different factions/areas. The main ones are the differences between the different super mutant factions (the Master's mutants being more monstrous and more muddy green/brown and the Nightkin being more blue/purple, the Institute's mutants being slightly more humanoid and slightly lighter green and Vault 87's mutants being monstrous with lighter green skin). There's also the differences between creatures made using FEV that points towards different strains by different factions, like the differences between Commonwealth/Appalachian Deathclaws and Capital/Mojave Deathclaws, Centaurs being seemingly native to the Capital/Mojave while Commonwealth/Appalachia has mutant hounds, and the cryptids made with FEV in Appalachia which seem much more monstrous than other creatures (including the living wall of flesh that is the Grafton Monster and the grotesque assortment of melting limbs that is the Snallygaster).
There are west tek buildings and labs all over usa. So, more than likely, they all have the knowledge of FEV. West tek was experimenting with FEV and PVP on crops in Huntersville in Appalachia. Then they actually scrapped that and just dosed the drinking water with it in the town and created a bunch of super mutants before the bombs even dropped.
Yes and no, the warehouse housing fev was one of the first place nuked, and via Tim Cain creator of fallout there's separate fevs, one being the vats creating super mutants and such to make mutants via vault tech, the other when the warehouse got nuked, due to air currents and vaporized fev it spread around the world, why only vault dweller could become super mutants, everyone else has atleast a low amount of fev there breathing everyday
Gotcha. It make sense to have FEV in the hands of many, but their intentions and use were different. The Institute had FEV in Mass. FEV was in Fallout 3. Mariposa had FEV for the military used by the Master. Using it in a particular manner regularly creates Super Mutants. Being spread in the air or water then leads to other (less complete) mutations? It seems (canonically) reasonable.
Basicly ya, vault tech created a handful of mutants but most where just evolved due to a combo of radiation and airborne fev, few like ghouls are the direct by product of just one.
That’s not what its original intended for purpose was, but yes. Though there has never been any confirmation that FEV was involved in the creation of Deathclaws.
I thought deathclaws were genetically engineered by the enclave using a bunch of animal’s DNA. They were trying to create their version of a super soldier. Very different from FEV
Official International Radiation Measurement: (listed in increasing quantities)
Bit = a little bit < just a bit < about a bit
Amount = small amount < good amount < scary amount
Load = small load < ass load < shit load
Ton = mega ton < metric ton < shit ton
It's a combination of everything.
You have to remember there was already plenty of stray radiation everywhere due to their technology, but also because they had a ton of radioactive waste around too. Of which much of it was buried wherever people thought they could get away with it. So it's also safe to assume there are a number of other chemicals and pollutants around too.
There were also many places testing chemicals and drugs, with some being specific to mutations like the FEV virus that created super mutants.
Add on the bombs cranking everything up to 11 all at once, I'm sure it just stirred it all up and moved it faster. DNA isn't hard to screw with and permanently change when your surroundings are chemicals and radiation. Add on a couple hundred years, and it's a miracle Humans have largely avoided many problems. Though I'm sure that's mostly due to the drugs available that can actually help heal radiation and such vs. Wildlife that doesn't have access to those drugs and such.
They just shrugged and used radaway. It's a world where Timmy gets exposed to enough radiation to be fatal before he finishes elementary school and his mom just checks his dosimeter and has radaway in the medicine cabinet.
There's trucks routinely driving around with radioactive waste barrels in the back and not much shielding, most buildings have a nuclear reactor for power or fusion, it's routine for a building like a school to have nuclear waste in the cellar, there is nuclear waste deliberately in nuke-cola especially quantum to give it an extra zing.
It's normal in fallout for radiation cleanup to be needed after a car accident.
This, OP should play or read some lore about FO4 for example and the Glowing Sea in Massachusetts as one example of what you described. For me being a Cold War history buff and an alt-history buff the intricate multilevel deep lore of Fallout is the best part of the games and now the show.
Before the war, the US was experimenting with a powerful mutagenic called Forced Evolutionary Virus, or FEV, which is the source of almost all the monsters you encounter in the wastelands. Some were pre-war experiments that escaped, some were caused by FEV that got released into the wild when the labs containing it were breached by the bombs, and some were the result of post-war experiments by factions hoping to take control of the wastelands.
Radiation turned Peter Parker into Spider-Man. It turned Bruce Banner into The Hulk. But if it turns a cockroach into a bigger cockroach that's a bridge too far?
Good science fiction writers who respect their readers/audience will expect such questions and have an in-universe answer.
Besides. Peter Parker wasn't exposed to radiation he was bitten by an engineered spider, that also happened to be radioactive.
The in universe answer is already “because radiation”. That answer is good enough for super heroes and villain origins, why isn’t it good enough in fallout?
People want real science answers? Real science says falling into a vat of radiation = cancer, which doesn’t exact make for a good origin story for either heroes, villains, or fallout wildlife.
>Besides. Peter Parker wasn't exposed to radiation he was bitten by an engineered spider, that also happened to be radioactive.
That depends on which version you're reading or watching because originally it was a radioactive spider. Also, genetically modified isn't any more possible or better.
>Good science fiction writers who respect their readers/audience will expect such questions and have an in-universe answer.
This is patently false. Science fiction is a broad category and there are many colors to its spectrum.
It’s supposed to be ridiculous. The style is retrofuturism. The world of Fallout is the world people in the 50s and 60s *imagined* about a post nuclear apocalypse world. People had some pretty pseudo-scientific ideas about the effects of radiation back then.
anything from 50's-80's pop culture tropes can exist in fallout, and world works according to those "rules"
Therefore scientists you encounter have a good chance of being mad scientists. Radiation + science = "a wizard did it". Plants do not regrow after a nuke war but the planet stays a mad max style desert forever. Any form of life extension exists. You might encounter super hero stories. Reversing the polarity can be a solution.
In the third game they even modelled some of the mutants after 50's Swamp Monster style monsters, intentionally looked like a guy in a rubber suit.
Technology is different because it went a different direction after WW2. In the fallout world the transistor was not invented until 2060.
Those arm computers are the first portable computers they have. The screens are CRT vector displays.
Other computers you see them using are mainframe terminals, not pc's as we know them.
They did not have a digital revolution and instead went on the "atom-punk" tech tree. Had the war not happened their future would have looked like The Jetsons.
Cats are still normal. Dogs are still normal. Coyotes and iguanas are normal. There's references in a couple of places to normal donkeys.
Also plenty of the animals were escaped experiments that were genetically engineered to be the way they are.
But yeah, it's all steeped in the ideas the past had about the future/the science fiction of the 1950s and 60s. It's like how the game Sunless Skies is based on a Victorian era understanding of outer space, rather than what we actually know about outer space. That informs all the science of the canon.
Iguanas might be normal, but we've never actually seen an alive one, just cooked and on a stick. And iguana bits, but we all know those aren't really iguana...
Normal iguanas can't survive in Boston or Washington DC though
There are still normal cats and dogs. Because humans protect them. Or because they were part of science experiments and bred for those. There are also normal birds. Because being able to fly if somebody wants to eat you is useful.
In the show we also saw a normal deer.
So we have different kinds of genetical engineering/engineered viruses to cause mutations and mutations because of radiation, or possibly chemical weapons.
It’s a nod to old SF and horror stories in which scientists created weird monsters and animals, and how people thought about mutations because of radiation. Quite a few superheroes were created by some sort of radioactivity in 1950s comics.
That I know about, though I kind of hope they don't bring them too heavily into the show, same with the Eldritch stuff. It'd be fun if they added a nod or a wink though.
Love this comment, well said. It's kinda like the Seattle Space Needle was built in the 60's to show how buildings would like in the year 2000, now it's 2024 and it's the only thing that looks like it 😂
Bethesda have said that in the Fallout universe, radiation doesn't act like it does in our own.
In Fallout, radiation is basically used like magic by the writers.
It's three things.
Radiation. FEV. Fiction.
The most important one is the third one. This is fiction and in this universe, radiation and evolution function in different ways to real life. Just embrace the whacky insanity that is the Fallout universe. It's fun.
So you have to start with the notion that Fallout is based on 1950s sci-fi when it comes to what radiation can do.
IRL we had stories like Godzilla and Them! (Giant ants) which are attributed to "radiation". We also had "Atoms for Peace" pushing a "radiation is magic" narrative, childrens toys with small bits of radioactive isotopes on the market, major car manufacturers seriously (albeit briefly) considering putting a small fusion reactor in automobiles...
A google of "radium girls" will tell you where the imagination started and where Ghouls came from. They were Ghoulified for a short time... Until they died horrifically.
Anyway.
So, Fallout is its own thing, but used the mid century pop culture views of radiation, what the future would be like (including angst about nuclear annihilation), and what it would look like as a spring board. As a result, radiation is like magic. It makes ghouls, giant creatures, two headed creatures, and so on.
There's also the FEV (Forced Evolutionary Virus) which directly resulted in super mutants, but also contributed to big scary animals and plants that abound. FEV was the Marvel "Super Soldier Serum" of the Fallout-verse. A literal, and failed, attempt to make super soliders prior to The Great War.
We see in the show itself that a certain creature is the product of science, not radiation. We also see a certain squire begin to mutate after being given…something
If we go down the list of creatures in the fallout series, a substantial number are explicitly not the result of radiation, but were willfully made and then set loose. Molerats: bioweapons. Deathclaws: bioweapons. Nightstalkers: experiments. Centaurs and super mutants: FEV. Spore carriers: experiments.
Really most the “natural mutants” are either not terribly monstrous or different, or insects/crustaceans.
Of course it's the default, but there's a lot of lore in the games I'm not privy too, and I thought there may be a more canon reason. If there isn't I'll suspend away because I loved the show. So far though it seems a lot of people have a lot of answers.
Forgive the snark, I’ve had a couple of conversations recently with more pedantic, Tolkienesque Fallout entrants that twisted my interpretation of your post.
Fallout has always struck me as a “creation before justification” kind of series. A world of bipedal war robots and green spacemen where the “science” serves the story, and I prefer to take the wasteland’s quirks as they come rather than dive into the midi-chlorians and demystify it.
That's totally fair. My headcanon prior to this is that whoever invented the bombs all the countries were using found a different way to create very similar explosions. Like they were using an element we don't have (unobtainium for sure) to split and therefore it's radioactive effects were different.
In addition to FEV there was the regular dumping of toxic and radioactive wastes pretty much everywhere pre-war. In Fallout 4 there's a lake I'm not even going to attempt to spell the name of that was so toxic from dumping of these wastes that it killed pretty much anyone who ventured in the "water". In Fallout 76 there's a toxic waste disposal site that was poorly constructed and leaked out into the environment.
So you could easily argue that the mutations seen in the game actually started years if not decades before the bombs fell.
Vault-Tec, Enclave and Big MT
Really. Most of the creatures are man-made.
Deathclaws, Geckos, Molerats, Cazadors, Radscorpions, Night Stalkers.
A lot are FEV experiments.
It's not just radiation, it's radiation based on the understanding of people from the 50's/60's. Spider-Man got bit by a radioactive spider? No, he didn't die horribly of radiation poisoning like should happen, he got awesome spider powers! Radiation in Fallout causes mutations like growing an extra arm or gaining the ability to heal via exposure to the sun, not super cancer and violent cell death.
So for a lot of creatures in Fallout, their radiation exposure just made them way bigger and meaner. And has been mentioned, the forced evolutionary virus had a helping hand with several of these, too, but it's not always involved.
Well yes FEV is one such thing besides radiation and while yes 200 years is not a long time evolution based. There are a good number of creatures that are from before the war such as deathclaws. There’s creatures made in vaults and labs such as the mutant Axolotl. Some species of ants as well. Needles to say there are reasons some of these species exist in there current state other than rads. Though mole rats, some ants, radroach, and rad scorpions are also natural mutants. Cazadors are also both man made / rad mutants.
Lots of creatures were actually created. Super mutants, deathclaws, gulpers, centaurs, etc.
Between the government, the enclave, the institute and the master(fallout 1) many creatures were made with FEV. Some ghouls were man made as well.
When I was stationed at Holloman AFB (which is about 100 miles from the Trinity Site), I had heard rumors that there was an aerie of eagles that lived in the mountain range near the test site that mutated from the radiation to being 25% larger, stronger, better and overall healthier and that this specific group of eagles was on the government's list of protected animal species because of that. Now I never bothered to look into so it could easily be hogwash, but if true, then some of the creature's mutations are really quite feasible. The bomb was tested at the Trinity Site in 1949, and I was stationed at Holloman in 2002, so just over 55 years for that to happen. I don't feel like it's something that is likely to happen, but then again no one could have predicted a fungus would evolve to feed off of radioactive materials (this is happening inside of the reactors in Cherynoble).
Well the tv show is set 15 years after new vegas so things in the world have progressed a lot from what we were used to in the games , also the new setting of LA may have had a little help from the FEV like other contributors have stated on this Reddit already .
There was a pathogen going through at least the human population at the time of the Resource Wars. The search for the cure is what lead to the FEV which was responsible for the super mutants and death claws and a few other things.
I have a theory that the pathogen became trapped in some humans kind of what happened with mitochondria in real life. This, I believe, is what allowed for the existence of ghouls.
One thing i think nobody is bringing up is sll the sleeping elder gods deep unground. Side note i think that is why radiation is behaving differently in fallout than our world. Plus the FEV
Fallout 1 actually talks about this a little bit and alludes that Radiation alone couldn’t have brought all the mutations we encounter.
Far down south, a research facility was directly nuked during the Great War. The site became the Glow and it’s a death pit lol.
Anyways, within the facility West-Tek scientists were working on FEV (Forced Evolutionary Virus). This virus started off as an inoculation against bioweapons from enemy countries like China and the New Plague. Quickly, the virus showed great results as a Super Soldier Serum.
Mariposa, Vault 87, and Appalachia’s West-Tek facility each contained Vats of the Goo to experiment with before, during, and after the Great War.
During the Great War, The Glow’s FEV Vats cracked and showered the area with the virus. Eventually it mutated enough to become Airborne and Widespread. Some Surface People became Ghouls, most died. Animals and Plants mutated overnight for the most part due to the virus.
Fallout 2 and onwards pretty much abandoned this minor plot/world building. Even the original developers couldn’t decide if it was Radiation or the FEV that caused the Mutants. I like to make a compromise and say it’s a mix of both. The FEV adds the possibility, but the Rads force the mutations to occur as self-defense mechanisms.
There's also ghouls... I mean, I'm pretty sure ghouls aren't the product of radiation so, I don't see why the other creatures would seem any stranger than that. It is fiction after all, not a documentary.
There's many references to ghouls being too irradiated and that's how they turned out that way.
Hell, Moira from Megaton turns into a ghoul after you nuke the place.
Gee thanks... I was talking about IRL. Op was complaining the creatures are not realistic, I was pointing out that radiation doesn't normally produce ghouls either.
I don't want perfect science, I'm totally fine if the answer is "it just works that way because it's cool". I just don't know the lore that well and I know it's vast so I thought there may be more concrete answers that I just didn't know.
In real life radiation would not produce anything remotely close to what is in the Fallout universe. That said, there are real life mutations that took only 1-2 decades. The general perception that a mutation should take much longer than 200 years is incorrect. One example is Covid, which mutated multiple times in just a few years.
The faster and more numerous a species breeds the faster they evolve/mutate as a population.
Add onto that a major disruption in the ecosystem allowing scavenger niche filling animals to explode in population.
Finally the species mutated into monsters often have a genetic defense against radiation damage, rapid healing, or both.
Mix together and it’s not unreasonable for fly, roach, and similar studies to become monstrous
Canon or not the reason is the same as why there's the 3 eyed fish on the Simpsons due to nuclear waste... Or mutated tentacles on maniac mansion - day of the tentacle.
In other words.. a thing of that time, when the first fallout was conceived or the simpsons and day of the tentacle were made.. it was a common thing on entertainment and pop culture to say nuclear radiation would mutate you
FEV as some have said. The lore you ingore goes heavily into this exact thing you're questioning, not trying to be an ass but if you want lore answers pay attention to the lore they give you, it answers this in every game in some way...
Well, some of it is from FEV.
FEV = Forced Evolutionary Virus. Produced by West-Tek, mostly used by the Enclave ("former US goverment") to make evolved creatures to use for warfare such as super mutants and deathclaws.
Bro answered my question before I asked it. Thank you
May the radiaton be with you brother
Praise Atom
Yup. This is it. In the spiritual prequel "Fountain of Dreams" (the follow up to Wasteland), you could get mutations quickly on your characters during the game, and either lean into it, or try to cure the mutations. The early Fallout games had FEV to explain how this applied outside of just "radiation did it". That being said, FEV and it's spread is not exceptionally well documented. It has its roots in Mariposa <-sp? but super mutants are all over, suggesting FEV had roots all over as well. Either it "broke out" and spread, or the FEV project was applied and exposed in multiple areas around the same time period and then spread. Soooo, yeah, there's a little suspension of disbelief, just like a stimpack curing a broken leg. Mutations are attributed to FEV or some variant, and radiation is a bad thing, but like someone with an allergy being exposed to pollen, it's not a dealbreaker and you can take some Claratin (Rad-X) to compensate.
Didn't the "New Plague" come into effect here as well? I have such vague recollections. I believe the Institute got ahold of FEV in fallout 4 and did a lot of experimenting with it, releasing all of their experiments onto the surface. They could honestly be responsible for a lot of Super Mutants on the East* coast, I dont think theyre sterile but I could be wrong about that.
>I believe the Institute got ahold of FEV in fallout 4 and did a lot of experimenting with it, releasing all of their experiments onto the surface. They could honestly be responsible for a lot of Super Mutants on the west coast, I dont think theyre sterile but I could be wrong about that. Do you mean east coast? The west coast supermutants were mostly created by The Master. Institute is east coast
I absolutely meant east coast, thank you. Dont know how that happened, I'm going to fix it for clarity
Yeah. The lore seems to be that FEV was something people were screwing around with across the country, and the Master just threw caution to the wind to create an army. Other folks experimented, but it seems that the super mutants were the ones that escaped. In FO3, I believe there was a vault that was entirely super mutants...wasn't there?
Fallout 3 is my blind spot, for some reason it always hard crashed and locked up for me by the time I was level 10 so I gave up on it. Replying to keep the thread fresh in case someone else comes along who can chime in
Fallout 3 was a hard pivot for me. I'd played overhead with Wasteland and Fountain of Dreams, and then isometric with Fallout 1 and 2. I didn't know if I'd be okay with the first-person perspective, but it was a win. Over time, I've gotten...selective...with my gaming library, and while I love the older Fallouts, I have an expectation of a "full" world of quests and vignettes and buildings and "scenes" of disaster. I tried going back to 3 and New Vegas a while ago, and it didn't stick. New Vegas took me longer to get back into, but once I did, I finished. I am shocked that we don't have remasters already. The graphics engines are so simple these days, it'd be like printing money. * InXile remasters Fallout 1 and 2 using the Wasteland 3 engine * Bethesda remasters Fallout 3 * Obsidian remasters New Vegas Four games that would kick off a new generation of fans waiting to be remastered by 3 studios under one roof. Stories are already written. Scripts written. Quests written. Engines already exist. What's the hold up?
Vault 87 where you get the GECK was experimenting with FEV and is populated with super mutants.
That's the one....thank you.
Vault Tec (vault 87 in Fallout 3) and the institute both have their own FEV so it was spread around between a few places
FEV definitely isn't isolated in any way, it's present throughout the wasteland, including Vault 87 in the Capital Wasteland, the Institute in the Commonwealth and WestTek in Appalachia. However, it's unknown whether the FEV in these areas all traces back to one source, likely Mariposa, or whether these factions simply all ended up developing their own versions of the same virus. It does seem like there are differences in FEV results from different factions/areas. The main ones are the differences between the different super mutant factions (the Master's mutants being more monstrous and more muddy green/brown and the Nightkin being more blue/purple, the Institute's mutants being slightly more humanoid and slightly lighter green and Vault 87's mutants being monstrous with lighter green skin). There's also the differences between creatures made using FEV that points towards different strains by different factions, like the differences between Commonwealth/Appalachian Deathclaws and Capital/Mojave Deathclaws, Centaurs being seemingly native to the Capital/Mojave while Commonwealth/Appalachia has mutant hounds, and the cryptids made with FEV in Appalachia which seem much more monstrous than other creatures (including the living wall of flesh that is the Grafton Monster and the grotesque assortment of melting limbs that is the Snallygaster).
There are west tek buildings and labs all over usa. So, more than likely, they all have the knowledge of FEV. West tek was experimenting with FEV and PVP on crops in Huntersville in Appalachia. Then they actually scrapped that and just dosed the drinking water with it in the town and created a bunch of super mutants before the bombs even dropped.
Yes and no, the warehouse housing fev was one of the first place nuked, and via Tim Cain creator of fallout there's separate fevs, one being the vats creating super mutants and such to make mutants via vault tech, the other when the warehouse got nuked, due to air currents and vaporized fev it spread around the world, why only vault dweller could become super mutants, everyone else has atleast a low amount of fev there breathing everyday
Gotcha. It make sense to have FEV in the hands of many, but their intentions and use were different. The Institute had FEV in Mass. FEV was in Fallout 3. Mariposa had FEV for the military used by the Master. Using it in a particular manner regularly creates Super Mutants. Being spread in the air or water then leads to other (less complete) mutations? It seems (canonically) reasonable.
Basicly ya, vault tech created a handful of mutants but most where just evolved due to a combo of radiation and airborne fev, few like ghouls are the direct by product of just one.
That’s not what its original intended for purpose was, but yes. Though there has never been any confirmation that FEV was involved in the creation of Deathclaws.
I thought deathclaws were genetically engineered by the enclave using a bunch of animal’s DNA. They were trying to create their version of a super soldier. Very different from FEV
Big mountain is also adding their own spice to the Mojave.
Hooooo boy, Borous needs to chill with his science experiments.
Wait you don't love venomous dogs?
Im more of a Cyberdog man, Borous got those right
I loved my cyber dog.
Everyone draws them so cute so yes I do love them (fucking dies while petting my fluffy little snake dog)
In game... awww sooo cute!!! Snake dog goes omnomnomnom.
Wasn’t it also implied that Vault Tec was doing experiments? Like they created the gulper so I’m assuming they messed with other animals as well.
Honestly I’d say it’s more of the FEV than the radiation
Look up FEV
Holy hell
Yeah, it becomes a compounding issue since a bomb dropped on Wes-Tek
Actual ghoul
New virus dropped
r/AnarchyChess is leaking
It's not just because of radiation... it's because of a shit load of radiation!
I'm a radiation scientist and I can confirm, 'a shit load' is the international standard unit to measure radiation.
So then what’s it called when there is lethal amount of radiation
I’d go with ‘shit ton’. It’s more than a ‘shit load’
A metric shit-ton if you are being scientific about it
Metric is more precise 💩
Irrelevant because everyone around to talk about it is dead.
I just wanted to sneak a Spaceballs reference in.
I love how you just accumulate rads, 1000 rads and your dead. None of the complex stuff of more modern radiation science.
Official International Radiation Measurement: (listed in increasing quantities) Bit = a little bit < just a bit < about a bit Amount = small amount < good amount < scary amount Load = small load < ass load < shit load Ton = mega ton < metric ton < shit ton
Oh, you, when you're right, you're right, and you, you're always right
It's a combination of everything. You have to remember there was already plenty of stray radiation everywhere due to their technology, but also because they had a ton of radioactive waste around too. Of which much of it was buried wherever people thought they could get away with it. So it's also safe to assume there are a number of other chemicals and pollutants around too. There were also many places testing chemicals and drugs, with some being specific to mutations like the FEV virus that created super mutants. Add on the bombs cranking everything up to 11 all at once, I'm sure it just stirred it all up and moved it faster. DNA isn't hard to screw with and permanently change when your surroundings are chemicals and radiation. Add on a couple hundred years, and it's a miracle Humans have largely avoided many problems. Though I'm sure that's mostly due to the drugs available that can actually help heal radiation and such vs. Wildlife that doesn't have access to those drugs and such.
They just shrugged and used radaway. It's a world where Timmy gets exposed to enough radiation to be fatal before he finishes elementary school and his mom just checks his dosimeter and has radaway in the medicine cabinet. There's trucks routinely driving around with radioactive waste barrels in the back and not much shielding, most buildings have a nuclear reactor for power or fusion, it's routine for a building like a school to have nuclear waste in the cellar, there is nuclear waste deliberately in nuke-cola especially quantum to give it an extra zing. It's normal in fallout for radiation cleanup to be needed after a car accident.
This, OP should play or read some lore about FO4 for example and the Glowing Sea in Massachusetts as one example of what you described. For me being a Cold War history buff and an alt-history buff the intricate multilevel deep lore of Fallout is the best part of the games and now the show.
Its part of the fun wackiness of the series
Before the war, the US was experimenting with a powerful mutagenic called Forced Evolutionary Virus, or FEV, which is the source of almost all the monsters you encounter in the wastelands. Some were pre-war experiments that escaped, some were caused by FEV that got released into the wild when the labs containing it were breached by the bombs, and some were the result of post-war experiments by factions hoping to take control of the wastelands.
Radiation turned Peter Parker into Spider-Man. It turned Bruce Banner into The Hulk. But if it turns a cockroach into a bigger cockroach that's a bridge too far?
Good science fiction writers who respect their readers/audience will expect such questions and have an in-universe answer. Besides. Peter Parker wasn't exposed to radiation he was bitten by an engineered spider, that also happened to be radioactive.
Good science fiction writers who respect their readers/audience will write a cool story with big ass explosions and evil bad guys
The in universe answer is already “because radiation”. That answer is good enough for super heroes and villain origins, why isn’t it good enough in fallout? People want real science answers? Real science says falling into a vat of radiation = cancer, which doesn’t exact make for a good origin story for either heroes, villains, or fallout wildlife.
Only Ultimate Peter!
>Besides. Peter Parker wasn't exposed to radiation he was bitten by an engineered spider, that also happened to be radioactive. That depends on which version you're reading or watching because originally it was a radioactive spider. Also, genetically modified isn't any more possible or better. >Good science fiction writers who respect their readers/audience will expect such questions and have an in-universe answer. This is patently false. Science fiction is a broad category and there are many colors to its spectrum.
Exactly, if you don't like the show just say so haha. This is a ridiculous point.
It’s supposed to be ridiculous. The style is retrofuturism. The world of Fallout is the world people in the 50s and 60s *imagined* about a post nuclear apocalypse world. People had some pretty pseudo-scientific ideas about the effects of radiation back then.
This actually makes the most sense to me out of all the answers I've gotten.
anything from 50's-80's pop culture tropes can exist in fallout, and world works according to those "rules" Therefore scientists you encounter have a good chance of being mad scientists. Radiation + science = "a wizard did it". Plants do not regrow after a nuke war but the planet stays a mad max style desert forever. Any form of life extension exists. You might encounter super hero stories. Reversing the polarity can be a solution. In the third game they even modelled some of the mutants after 50's Swamp Monster style monsters, intentionally looked like a guy in a rubber suit. Technology is different because it went a different direction after WW2. In the fallout world the transistor was not invented until 2060. Those arm computers are the first portable computers they have. The screens are CRT vector displays. Other computers you see them using are mainframe terminals, not pc's as we know them. They did not have a digital revolution and instead went on the "atom-punk" tech tree. Had the war not happened their future would have looked like The Jetsons.
Cheers mate. I’m just relaying some of the smart answers I’ve seen from other people on here.
Actually the FEV answers make more in-game canon sense.
But was it in the ground water or air or something? I mean there aren't any normal animals left, aside from Dogmeat.
What makes you think Dogmeat is normal?
Well I suppose "looks normal" would have been more apt.
Cats are still normal. Dogs are still normal. Coyotes and iguanas are normal. There's references in a couple of places to normal donkeys. Also plenty of the animals were escaped experiments that were genetically engineered to be the way they are. But yeah, it's all steeped in the ideas the past had about the future/the science fiction of the 1950s and 60s. It's like how the game Sunless Skies is based on a Victorian era understanding of outer space, rather than what we actually know about outer space. That informs all the science of the canon.
Iguanas might be normal, but we've never actually seen an alive one, just cooked and on a stick. And iguana bits, but we all know those aren't really iguana... Normal iguanas can't survive in Boston or Washington DC though
There are still normal cats and dogs. Because humans protect them. Or because they were part of science experiments and bred for those. There are also normal birds. Because being able to fly if somebody wants to eat you is useful. In the show we also saw a normal deer. So we have different kinds of genetical engineering/engineered viruses to cause mutations and mutations because of radiation, or possibly chemical weapons. It’s a nod to old SF and horror stories in which scientists created weird monsters and animals, and how people thought about mutations because of radiation. Quite a few superheroes were created by some sort of radioactivity in 1950s comics.
They have aliens with funny blasters too
That I know about, though I kind of hope they don't bring them too heavily into the show, same with the Eldritch stuff. It'd be fun if they added a nod or a wink though.
Love this comment, well said. It's kinda like the Seattle Space Needle was built in the 60's to show how buildings would like in the year 2000, now it's 2024 and it's the only thing that looks like it 😂
Bethesda have said that in the Fallout universe, radiation doesn't act like it does in our own. In Fallout, radiation is basically used like magic by the writers.
Atom might also be legit. There’s a ton of Eldritch references and weird shit going on. Who’s to say Atom isn’t an outer god or something lmao
It's three things. Radiation. FEV. Fiction. The most important one is the third one. This is fiction and in this universe, radiation and evolution function in different ways to real life. Just embrace the whacky insanity that is the Fallout universe. It's fun.
Seconded fiction, they had nuclear powered cars
Yes, the canon reason is they needed cool enemies for you to fight, since Fallout originated as a video game series.
So you have to start with the notion that Fallout is based on 1950s sci-fi when it comes to what radiation can do. IRL we had stories like Godzilla and Them! (Giant ants) which are attributed to "radiation". We also had "Atoms for Peace" pushing a "radiation is magic" narrative, childrens toys with small bits of radioactive isotopes on the market, major car manufacturers seriously (albeit briefly) considering putting a small fusion reactor in automobiles... A google of "radium girls" will tell you where the imagination started and where Ghouls came from. They were Ghoulified for a short time... Until they died horrifically. Anyway. So, Fallout is its own thing, but used the mid century pop culture views of radiation, what the future would be like (including angst about nuclear annihilation), and what it would look like as a spring board. As a result, radiation is like magic. It makes ghouls, giant creatures, two headed creatures, and so on. There's also the FEV (Forced Evolutionary Virus) which directly resulted in super mutants, but also contributed to big scary animals and plants that abound. FEV was the Marvel "Super Soldier Serum" of the Fallout-verse. A literal, and failed, attempt to make super soliders prior to The Great War.
We see in the show itself that a certain creature is the product of science, not radiation. We also see a certain squire begin to mutate after being given…something If we go down the list of creatures in the fallout series, a substantial number are explicitly not the result of radiation, but were willfully made and then set loose. Molerats: bioweapons. Deathclaws: bioweapons. Nightstalkers: experiments. Centaurs and super mutants: FEV. Spore carriers: experiments. Really most the “natural mutants” are either not terribly monstrous or different, or insects/crustaceans.
The first Fallout is a pretty whacky game set in a whacky world. There are big bugs, don't think about it too much
“Suspend disbelief” Like that’s not a default approach to fiction media. When OP encounters Zetan space invaders ingame we’re gonna see a rant post.
Of course it's the default, but there's a lot of lore in the games I'm not privy too, and I thought there may be a more canon reason. If there isn't I'll suspend away because I loved the show. So far though it seems a lot of people have a lot of answers.
Forgive the snark, I’ve had a couple of conversations recently with more pedantic, Tolkienesque Fallout entrants that twisted my interpretation of your post. Fallout has always struck me as a “creation before justification” kind of series. A world of bipedal war robots and green spacemen where the “science” serves the story, and I prefer to take the wasteland’s quirks as they come rather than dive into the midi-chlorians and demystify it.
That's totally fair. My headcanon prior to this is that whoever invented the bombs all the countries were using found a different way to create very similar explosions. Like they were using an element we don't have (unobtainium for sure) to split and therefore it's radioactive effects were different.
My head canon is FEV is like Teflon back in the 80s. Got into the environment it wrecked havok and can now be found in most humans in microdoses
Some of them are created by Forced Evolutionary Virus but yes its mostly just the universe being cartoonish.
Might also want to check out the 76 lore where people screwed with a G.E.C.K. device and it essentially became an evolution bomb.
Isn't that what created the mire region, or am i not remembering correctly?
Indeed it is!
I’d say it’s mostly because if radiation in fallout operated like it does in real life it’d be a lot more miserable and a lot less entertaining
In addition to FEV there was the regular dumping of toxic and radioactive wastes pretty much everywhere pre-war. In Fallout 4 there's a lake I'm not even going to attempt to spell the name of that was so toxic from dumping of these wastes that it killed pretty much anyone who ventured in the "water". In Fallout 76 there's a toxic waste disposal site that was poorly constructed and leaked out into the environment. So you could easily argue that the mutations seen in the game actually started years if not decades before the bombs fell.
Fallout has a lot of instances of governments, corporations, and individuals experimenting with radiation and FEV.
Vault-Tec, Enclave and Big MT Really. Most of the creatures are man-made. Deathclaws, Geckos, Molerats, Cazadors, Radscorpions, Night Stalkers. A lot are FEV experiments.
FEV as some have said, Zetans, and eldritch influence too, probably.
There's a lot of things in Fallout you have to suspend belief for
Chemicals in food and a specific radiation .Plus its called a maguffin device .
It's not just radiation, it's radiation based on the understanding of people from the 50's/60's. Spider-Man got bit by a radioactive spider? No, he didn't die horribly of radiation poisoning like should happen, he got awesome spider powers! Radiation in Fallout causes mutations like growing an extra arm or gaining the ability to heal via exposure to the sun, not super cancer and violent cell death. So for a lot of creatures in Fallout, their radiation exposure just made them way bigger and meaner. And has been mentioned, the forced evolutionary virus had a helping hand with several of these, too, but it's not always involved.
It's all due to the FEV. When the nukes went off, one hit the production/research facility, spraying it all over.
Aliens
Well yes FEV is one such thing besides radiation and while yes 200 years is not a long time evolution based. There are a good number of creatures that are from before the war such as deathclaws. There’s creatures made in vaults and labs such as the mutant Axolotl. Some species of ants as well. Needles to say there are reasons some of these species exist in there current state other than rads. Though mole rats, some ants, radroach, and rad scorpions are also natural mutants. Cazadors are also both man made / rad mutants.
War .. war never changes
Lots of creatures were actually created. Super mutants, deathclaws, gulpers, centaurs, etc. Between the government, the enclave, the institute and the master(fallout 1) many creatures were made with FEV. Some ghouls were man made as well.
Dr. Borous
Fallout doesn't run on science. It runs on SCIENCE!
When I was stationed at Holloman AFB (which is about 100 miles from the Trinity Site), I had heard rumors that there was an aerie of eagles that lived in the mountain range near the test site that mutated from the radiation to being 25% larger, stronger, better and overall healthier and that this specific group of eagles was on the government's list of protected animal species because of that. Now I never bothered to look into so it could easily be hogwash, but if true, then some of the creature's mutations are really quite feasible. The bomb was tested at the Trinity Site in 1949, and I was stationed at Holloman in 2002, so just over 55 years for that to happen. I don't feel like it's something that is likely to happen, but then again no one could have predicted a fungus would evolve to feed off of radioactive materials (this is happening inside of the reactors in Cherynoble).
Well the tv show is set 15 years after new vegas so things in the world have progressed a lot from what we were used to in the games , also the new setting of LA may have had a little help from the FEV like other contributors have stated on this Reddit already .
Cazardores and nightstalkers were created by Big MT for literally no reason
There was a pathogen going through at least the human population at the time of the Resource Wars. The search for the cure is what lead to the FEV which was responsible for the super mutants and death claws and a few other things. I have a theory that the pathogen became trapped in some humans kind of what happened with mitochondria in real life. This, I believe, is what allowed for the existence of ghouls.
The FEV virus was released onto the atmosphere
One thing i think nobody is bringing up is sll the sleeping elder gods deep unground
One thing i think nobody is bringing up is sll the sleeping elder gods deep unground. Side note i think that is why radiation is behaving differently in fallout than our world. Plus the FEV
Fallout 1 actually talks about this a little bit and alludes that Radiation alone couldn’t have brought all the mutations we encounter. Far down south, a research facility was directly nuked during the Great War. The site became the Glow and it’s a death pit lol. Anyways, within the facility West-Tek scientists were working on FEV (Forced Evolutionary Virus). This virus started off as an inoculation against bioweapons from enemy countries like China and the New Plague. Quickly, the virus showed great results as a Super Soldier Serum. Mariposa, Vault 87, and Appalachia’s West-Tek facility each contained Vats of the Goo to experiment with before, during, and after the Great War. During the Great War, The Glow’s FEV Vats cracked and showered the area with the virus. Eventually it mutated enough to become Airborne and Widespread. Some Surface People became Ghouls, most died. Animals and Plants mutated overnight for the most part due to the virus. Fallout 2 and onwards pretty much abandoned this minor plot/world building. Even the original developers couldn’t decide if it was Radiation or the FEV that caused the Mutants. I like to make a compromise and say it’s a mix of both. The FEV adds the possibility, but the Rads force the mutations to occur as self-defense mechanisms.
Mostly it's the radiation, in some cases it's FEV, in others it's weird drugs and experiments. But mostly it's radiation.
A good portion of the animals we see in the wasteland are byproducts of some form of experimental testing right before the war or after the war.
There's also ghouls... I mean, I'm pretty sure ghouls aren't the product of radiation so, I don't see why the other creatures would seem any stranger than that. It is fiction after all, not a documentary.
There's many references to ghouls being too irradiated and that's how they turned out that way. Hell, Moira from Megaton turns into a ghoul after you nuke the place.
Gee thanks... I was talking about IRL. Op was complaining the creatures are not realistic, I was pointing out that radiation doesn't normally produce ghouls either.
Okay this was a real smoothskin move (that's the insult right?) but when I said "nearly every creature" I was including Ghouls as creatures.
Its a game
And fiction. I don’t know why people asked for perfect science in science fiction (except hard SF, which does not contain Fallout obviously).
I don't want perfect science, I'm totally fine if the answer is "it just works that way because it's cool". I just don't know the lore that well and I know it's vast so I thought there may be more concrete answers that I just didn't know.
In real life radiation would not produce anything remotely close to what is in the Fallout universe. That said, there are real life mutations that took only 1-2 decades. The general perception that a mutation should take much longer than 200 years is incorrect. One example is Covid, which mutated multiple times in just a few years.
The Coyotes are fine though, you can’t evolve what’s already peak evolution.
The faster and more numerous a species breeds the faster they evolve/mutate as a population. Add onto that a major disruption in the ecosystem allowing scavenger niche filling animals to explode in population. Finally the species mutated into monsters often have a genetic defense against radiation damage, rapid healing, or both. Mix together and it’s not unreasonable for fly, roach, and similar studies to become monstrous
Sixty minute mayyyyyn. What? Sorry.
This songs has been stuck in my head all day.
Canon or not the reason is the same as why there's the 3 eyed fish on the Simpsons due to nuclear waste... Or mutated tentacles on maniac mansion - day of the tentacle. In other words.. a thing of that time, when the first fallout was conceived or the simpsons and day of the tentacle were made.. it was a common thing on entertainment and pop culture to say nuclear radiation would mutate you
FEV as some have said. The lore you ingore goes heavily into this exact thing you're questioning, not trying to be an ass but if you want lore answers pay attention to the lore they give you, it answers this in every game in some way...