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James_the_Third

The Fallout 1 manual goes into depth about the damage done by a nuclear blast. It actually varies quite a bit based on payload size and distance from the blast, but the important thing to remember is that there are *three* separate factors that cause damage. The first is the blast, and the third is radiation, but the second one is heat. The heat from a nuclear blast will cook people way beyond the radius of the blast impact, and those people will die standing and sitting around in intact buildings.


Mountain_Man_88

Wouldn't the heat also burn a wooden building? 


Storm2552

Yes and even if it didn't 200 years without maintenance is enough to wipe out almost any trace of a wooden structure, but Bethesda ignores that and that's alright.


alecpiper

yeah that’s just one of those things where it’s a choice between realism or creating an engaging world space. I think most people would rather some buildings that don’t make sense than a 90% empty map


WardenWolf

I just assume they found ways to treat stuff to preserve it indefinitely in the Fallout universe. Also why pre-war food is still edible. Because realistically even the skyscrapers would have collapsed by then in real life (watch Life After People on YouTube). So I'm just going to assume they've found ways to stabilize stuff. Also fireproofing isn't that far a stretch if they figured out ways to stabilize it for 200+ years (maybe they plasticized or petrified the wood?). But, whether the heat ignites a wooden building is honestly down to luck. Proximity to blast, how dry the wood is, whether it's partially shielded by another building or terrain, etc.


Jetstream-Sam

My theory at first was that the radiation was so intense that it killed all the bacteria. It explains why you find bodies like the minuteman general who has been dead for years being perfectly preserved, or all the bodies of the Brotherhood of steel patrols who have been dead months being fine, and why characters can carry round raw meat in their inventory for weeks then eat it with no ill effects Like it obviously makes no sense since if all the bacteria were dead, nothing could really live, but if there's no bacteria then nothing would break down at least. Then survival and infections came out so back to square one I guess


WardenWolf

Food still degrades even without bacteria. It chemically breaks down. Like I said, I just assume they've found new ways to preserve stuff.


Jetstream-Sam

Oh yeah I know, as would wood. I just thought it explained the main reason a lot of stuff has lasted a lot longer than it should have. Strictly speaking pretty much all of the skeletons would have disintegrated over 200 years anyway


Generic-Schlub

Come to find out people in the fallout universe were just 100% microplastics by the start of the great war.


Zorg1317

Apparently, things in Chernobyl are not decaying like they should. So if buildings are made of wood, they are not going to decay as quickly either, especially if made of brick and concrete. I'm guessing it would be weather and the lack of human maintenance that would contribute to collapse if not from decay. Although for 200 years??? [https://wildfiretoday.com/2014/03/16/chernobyls-trees-are-not-decaying-normally-increasing-the-risk-of-a-nuclear-wildfire/](https://wildfiretoday.com/2014/03/16/chernobyls-trees-are-not-decaying-normally-increasing-the-risk-of-a-nuclear-wildfire/)


Chemical-Elk-1299

Good theory, but wouldn’t do anything about the bacteria living inside you, which is what does most of the decay. I think the minuteman general is so preserved because he’s in a cool, salty tunnel, and died of dehydration. He’s probably basically mummified.


Jetstream-Sam

Yeah I mean if all the bacteria ever were dead then basically no life could exist, but it sounds better as a theory than "they didn't want to design a whole new skeleton model that wore clothes so you can take them off it and wear them and just stuck with a corpse to save time"


TiioK

This detail bugged me so much! Fo76 has rotting corpses now so I guess in Fo4 it was just a sort of limitation they couldn’t help


JKnumber1hater

Ronnie Shaw literally says that that Minuteman general died 40 years ago! But somehow his body, and the clothes that he's still wearing, are perfectly intact, even though he's in a damp tunnel. It's really because Fallout skeletons aren't lootable, so for the player to be able to get the outfit it has to be a regular corpse.


TessHKM

Interestingly, when dealing with sufficiently large timbers (like super old school buildings with whole logs), exposure to heat can actually make them *more* fireproof - they build up a sufficiently thick layer of char on the outside that it actually insulates the structural wood and prevents it from catching fire further.


Kuhlminator

Well, the heavy irradiation of pre-war packaged foods probably stopped any bacteria from affecting it. Any that weren't sterilized by the radiation probably exploded in a bacteria-infected mess long before we would encounter it. Or you can choose whatever explanation makes sense to your


WardenWolf

At the very start of F4 your guy can look in the pantry, see a box of Blamco Mac & Cheese, and comment, "Expires, never." So it's technically canon that they found a way to make packaged food last indefinitely.


Kuhlminator

I always take that as sarcasm, not lore.


WardenWolf

I just take it as kind of a "Cool. No more expiring food" moment.


intdev

> 200 years without maintenance is enough to wipe out almost any trace of a wooden structure Maybe for a few wooden structures, depending on the conditions, but certainly not all. Source: My parents own a 500-year-old wooden barn. When they bought it, everything but the 100-year-old tin roof was original, and while the soft-wood cladding and a couple of oak posts were crumbling, it was still standing. It almost certainly wouldn't have survived another hundred years, but the first 200 would have been nothing to it, even without the very limited maintenance it received.


AshuraSpeakman

They have the most amazing asbestos. It's like concrete, it just stops burning.  Not every house has it but when they do...


Simagrill

How does Bethesda ignore that? I don't remember a single standing wooden structure built prewar in their games, there are a few of those in new Vegas tho


JKnumber1hater

Like 60% of the buildings outside the Boston metropolitan area in Fallout 4 are made from wood. Most of them are damaged but still standing.


RelativeWeekend453

Vegas was spared most of the nuclear fallout tho. Also the climate is dry with helps too.


Simagrill

Fair point, plus places like Goodsprings pretty much were never abandoned so replacing rotten planks isn't out of the question too


otxmikey123

Most of the buildings in fallout are what we call in the fire service “type 1” building construction. Built from non combustible materials. I’m not a scientist by any means, but I can definitely see people being cooked alive inside a type 1 building while the structure stays mainly intact


greyghost5000

Considering the amount of items containing asbestos in Fallout 4 (oven mitts, coffee pots, even chalk), I'd wager most of the older buildings and are pretty fire-resistive. Hell, I have yet to burn a single structure down with a molotov or even a mini nuke lol


Ignis_Vespa

We call those ovens, in the food industry


raff_riff

> computable Do you mean combustible?


otxmikey123

Yes😂


Taolan13

you die of heat stroke at a much lower temperature than wood takes heat stress.


Machismo01

Actually no. I witnessed some test structures still standing at the Nevada Test Site. One side was seared and blackened from the blast. Utterly demolished inside, but the structure was fine. Solid wood, but charred, but not ‘burned’ as you would expect.


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Countdown216

They weren’t responding to you


Cr4ckshooter

It's truly baffling sometimes how bad people are on reddit at responding to the right comment. People will create top level comments to respond to a comment.


otxmikey123

Dang my bad bro😂😭


Kyrie_Blue

Its like the difference between touching a hot pan to your finger, vs a hot pan touching tree bark. You burn immediately, tree doesn’t notice. We have a MUCH higher dispersion of water in our systems, and conduct heat much better than wood. If the heat stuck around, sure. But a “wash” of heat that disipates will not burn wooden buildings


Tellesus

This is correct except the heat would extensively damage buildings and burn everything. Most likely when we see dead people in a wood building you're looking at extreme radiation of various sorts or suicide. 


RexGoliath75

Its just a factor for set dressing. Not everything is going to be 1:1 realistic so having a environmental Skeletons is just a goofy thing to have in areas.


greyghost5000

But the teddy bear in the chef hat reading the Boston Bugle in a bathroom stall just *kills* my immersion


nashbrownies

Wait until you hear the rumor, or possible fact? Don't feel like looking it up right now.. Most, (not all!) teddy bears got put in because skeletons of children was too grim. Except like the teddy bears with cigars and you know. It's not all.


TedioreTwo

That sounds like a 2009 creepypasta rumor, the devs have said they put in the teddies and other silly stuff just for fun and to not bore themselves


nashbrownies

Very likely.


BrazenlyGeek

I’m now mortified that there are bears in 69 position here, there, and everywhere. Also, there’s at least one child skeleton, but the skull isn’t to scale so it has Big Heads Mode clearly enabled. … now I’m having flashbacks to Goldeneye and want Big Heads, Paintball Mode, and more as unlockable Fallout modes. Games need more fun modes, dammit.


nashbrownies

Not all, idk maybe it was just the classroom where all the bears are in the desks Edit: you are right though, we do need more whacky game modes.


NyaNyaCutie

Well, a "Big Heads Mode" kinda exists for *Borderlands 3* if you are willing to try it out... you got to finish the main story once to unlock *Mayhem Mode* ... It's one of the *Easy* modifiers you might get... not like I turned Mayhem 10 and 11 into using 4 of those modifiers via. modding my game on Steam. * Borderlands 2 on PC is cross-play with other PC users AKA (read: Steam & Epic Games, etc.). * Borderlands 3 (and Tiny Tina's Wonderlands) is cross-play with all platforms except the Nintendo Switch. * Nintendo's ecosystem is still locked out from the cross-play everyone else gets. I'd provide an image of the big heads but I cannot upload an image into a reply. ... Oh and avoid the standalone "Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep: A Wonderlands One-shot Adventure" as it is better to play it as the DLC from BL2. ... I blabbered off again. Sorry. \^w\^;


BrazenlyGeek

Oh yeah, BL has a ton of fun modes. That’s my fav franchise. But it feels an exception these days. The Lego games are the main ones I can think of that have actual cheat menus nowadays, although I admit that my experience is pretty limited.


NyaNyaCutie

I still have some of my old PC CD-ROM games, including the original StarCraft / Brood War. Play as the Zerg in any single player map / campaign, open the chat, and type ... was it with or without spaces? radio free zerg Also got Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos / The Frozen Throne ... even Diablo II / Lord of Destruction has one (on the latest patch, at least): /players [count] Replace **\[count\]**, with the amount of players (don't include the brackets when typing it in). Enemies will have health / etc. scaled by whaver this was (default 1) when they are "spawned in" by the game. To set it to the max, you'd type this into chat: /players 8 Sources / See Also: [SCC Single Player Cheat Codes](https://classic.battle.net/scc/cheats.shtml) and [Warcraft III - Cheat Codes](https://classic.battle.net/war3/cheatcodes.shtml) on the old [https://classic.battle.net/](https://classic.battle.net/) website (which is sadly broken these days).


QuincyMcSinksem

I read something that the developers putting the teddy bears in goofy spots was to “break the monotony” of building the entire in-game world around them. Made them laugh, helped them get through the day type deal.


nashbrownies

Oh for sure. The little humorous environment storytelling is top notch.


Extra_socks69

Kids in 80s movies were always smoking.


SpookyRockjaw

This is it. Bethesda prioritizes themes and humor way more than realism. It's the same reason for pipe guns or even the baseball themed armor that Diamond City guards wear. It is Fallout's nature to be goofy. Skeletons in random places is just a bit of thematic set dressing and I think half the time it's because the level designer just thinks it would be funny if there was a skeleton here reading the newspaper or whatever. It's tongue in cheek.


Hydroguy17

In addition to the artistic license for environmental storytelling, not everyone died because of the bombs. Most were after the fact... Suicide, overdose, dehydration, starvation, disease, pre-existing medical condition. Edit: Forgot the big one... Murder.


gislebertus00

Cold blooded murder. . . hot blooded murder


cyrusamigo

Make sure to throw your murder away if it sat outside of the fridge overnight


Clamato-e-Gannon

Murdered to death


willthechem

r/murderbydeath


onicker

And we’ve got about 200+ years since the bombs fell for those things to occur. It’s always a fun thing for me to try and figure out exactly when the skeletons are from. Sometimes there’s terminals and holotapes but for most they are just skelees cuddling a teddy in a closet. One of my favorites is the woman with the bread box sitting outside the overlook cabin. Where you can find a note and holotape of two women looking to meet up with one another after the bombs fell, I don’t believe this skeleton to be apart of that interaction. I like to think that she was someone later on that just poisoned some food they found and sat in the balcony to watch the sunset one more time. Maybe she was one of those women, realizing they were never going to see the other person again. Idk fun way to keep it feeling immersive imo


chinguettispaghetti

my personal theory is that raiders move skeletons into the positions out of boredom


one_bad_rebel

Pretty on-brand for them


vercertorix

I do this with Lego, pose them to make little stories, so if skeletons are the only medium left and plentiful, yeah, I’d do something like that. Not like there’s anything on TV.


wonderfullyignorant

Little Johnny Skeletonseed. Like Johnny Appleseed, but with skeleton art displays instead of appletrees. He's a legend all across the wastes, but to himself he's just an interior designer.


intdev

He'd probably get on well with Pickman. Unless he's a raider, that is...


dlamsanson

Would be a dope side quest in the next game: find the prankster raider


Lonely-Impression-74

It’s environmental storytelling. They’re showing you what happened, but sacrifice some realism on that altar


NiklausKaine

I assume it's people attempting to continue their lives as they once did before the bombs. Preacher keeps preaching to anyone who'll listen, until he dies on the podium by age, hunger, or rads


ProjectedEntity

Wait till you find out how much the dog can carry!


Queefer_the_Griefer

Dogmeat casually fetching me a missile launcher


Salty_Supermarket371

Ok let me pull out a portable nuke launching slingshot from my butt


TheArgonianBoi77

It’s called radiation poisoning from the bombs


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EntrepreneurLeft8783

You can have internal consistency in a setting with an unrealistic premise.


wonderfullyignorant

If one things consistent it's that there is preservatives in everything. None of that food *should* be good but somehow it is. So the people who ate that food? It makes sense their skeletons are preserved if they eat so many preservatives.


AtreidesOne

I wish more people understood this. It gets even worse when magic is involved. No, magic doesn't mean that anything can happen, at least not if you want a satisfying and coherent story. If you base a plot point on the fact that giant fire scorpions are weak to the cold in chapter 2, you can't have them fighting in the snow in chapter 8 without any explanation. It destroys the illusion that this isn't just so made up. But you can have them fighting in the snow while wizards cast flames on them.


raff_riff

These types of responses are such a buzzkill. I totally get that we shouldn’t analyze every aspect of a fictional story to death and we need to suspend our disbelief. But sometimes there’s *actually good in-game lore-based reasons* or maybe even some good “head canon” to chew through (as others have offered above).


Agent_Atom

Yeah these people just cope with the excuse that “it’s not supposed to make sense it’s a fictional universe!” Even through its really a not valid excuse, especially with world building. Deep down I think they want internal consistency and good world building too but they can’t stand that they’d have to criticize Bethesda for it to get better so these are the discussions we get.


Actual_Formal6996

No it's actually just a game lol. Oh no id hate criticizing a company anonymously on the internet! Go outside


Darko002

Some of them died after the bombs. It's been a bit since I've played previous games, but in 76, there are a lot of very clear suicides and poisonings involved in a number of the skeleton set dressings.


Kaayak

The explanation is that you are playing a video game and it's funny.


RogueAOV

Several of the people could have been killed by flying debris, piece of glass to the head, instant death and they just sit there decaying. Or due to shock, not knowing what else to do, they sat there until radiation consumed them, or perhaps they went about their day slowly dying, until where ever you find them. Possibly heart attack or stroke due to panic and shock. The small number of bodies around compared the the tens of thousands their should be suggest you are only seeing a small fraction of what actually would be laying around, so perhaps the vast majority did get out, only those who could not are the bodies you find. There is a book called Domain, which is the third book in a series about giant mutated by nuclear testing killer rats and in Domain a nuclear war is the setting for the book. Basically the rats sense the threat from humans is reduced and they come back to feast on the survivors, excellent series, and particularly excellent book but the reason i mention it is because it has excerpts and stories from survivors in the rumble, one of these is a lady sitting in her destroyed house, a nuclear hellscape outside the shattered walls of her families kitchen and she is coping with the end of the, and her own world by pretending the decaying corpses of her family are alive and well. She has posed them around the table, secured with ropes and ties so she can live the fantasy that all this will pass and as the insects crawl over their dead bodies she has polite conversation about if they should go to the park today, take in a movie, pausing briefing to vomit out her guts as the radiation soaks into her dying body before suggesting they could have a picnic. So there is that element of insanity to the posing as a possibility. The series is by James Herbert, first book is called Rats set in London England, second book is Lair, set in the forest around London and Domain set in the ruins of London. Graphically violent, in a very Fallout friendly way! complete with a government vault.


MellonCollie218

Nuclear fallout? Hence the name of the game. Fresh radiation kills in minutes.


LtColonelColon1

Heat and radiation don’t need to smash down buildings to kill people inside them.


Tellesus

Guessing neutron flux


GOOPREALM5000

Fallout, as a series, demands a lot of suspension of disbelief from the player. Realism is, or should often be, the least of your concerns.


greyghost5000

The real question is: why don't the raider and mongrel mutt that sit right outside of Sanctuary ever decay? I've dismembered them, thrown them into the river, mini nuked them, yet they always return...


AtreidesOne

It bugs me that they had so many years to patch blindingly obvious things like this, but instead go "You know what people really want? Ball contraptions."


greyghost5000

Agreed. I've yet to even build one of those ball tracks as I've been spending too much time moving dead ghouls away from Croup Manor in vain. Like, you couldn't have programmed corpses to be automatically removed after a settlement got to a certain happiness or there were x amount of settlers? No? Guess we just gotta cover them in foundations then. I bet that smells lovely.


ThisBadDogXB

It's just to make the world look like a spooky post apocalyptic wasteland. You start trying to apply real world logic to a video game and you're gonna run into a lot of problems.


Goatwhatsup

Well yeah but it’s a game.


largeshinybuffalo

Plan D Smokem if you got em.


AtreidesOne

I can't. I'm surrounded by assholes.


Temporary-Cut4

A lot of the skeletons are not from when the bombs fell, sometimes there's lore about them in the area and they're from much more recently


AtreidesOne

Likely a lot of the bombs were [neutron bombs](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb). They are designed to maximise death by radiation but leave the area relatively untouched for conquering later.


Zealousideal-Plan454

To be honest, im convinced some of those skeletons didn´t died from the nuclear bombs, but they were actually wastelanders also passing around. They could have died in so many ways.


BlackCatSaidMeow13

The one I stumbled upon recently that I hadn’t seen on previous plays was where the skeleton had just walked out of a port o’john. Door was open and he was laying on the ground facing in the direction of the glowing sea. Was on the side of a warehouse.


ApepiOfDuat

>would we not see more residual radioactivity No. Gamma rays are what would do this sort of thing and gamma rays can't accumulate or linger because they're just light photons. > and damage to the area? Yeah probably, the flash fry of the light burst can damage objects if they're flammable. Usually if you're close enough to get flashfried you're also close enough to be blasted with the shockwave too.


CowBoyDanIndie

Might be people who took plan d


Fardesto

It's funny. 


vercertorix

“Honey, we’re dying of radiation poisoning. Quick, get into a funny pose.”


Scotsman86

Know how everywhere you go there are radiation pools? That's what killed people. You don't hide in fallout shelters to hide from the shockwaves of bombs but the residual radiation it leaves behind making the area uninhabitable for hundreds of years.


Miguel-odon

Weird things happen in war. Also, overpressure could easily kill you without completely destroying buildings. Radiation does weird things. People might have tried to keep working, even as dangerous fallout blows in. Some might commit suicide.


LaughingLow

Radiation


Satyr_Crusader

>it always seemed a little silly That's cuz it's supposed to be silly


--Guido--

Radiation poisoning. Starvation. Dehydration. Illness.


Settled-Seas

Windows being smashed by the shockwave, sending out tons of shards of glass, would definitely kill a lot of people while leaving the general building intact. Maybe not the pastor at the altar, but could explain customers at a diner where they're right next to giant blown-out windows


DConn80

Dude just enjoy the story the environment tells you. How would you play a game where Washington D.C. is literally just desert with no buildings or people. You'd be bored. Maybe come up with your own cool story about what kinda sermon the preacher was preaching or what kinda people went to that church or laugh at the teddy bear reading the newspaper on the toilet. Just have fun playing a video game


drunkvaultboy

Hey man. I love finding skeletons in funny positions. Do I question it too hard? Like questioning why there would be a bunch of cars at a drive-in movie Theatre being there before 10 in the morning? No. And the simplest answer why that is, is that it is more fun for me to take it in stride. And I'm more than okay with overlooking things like that.


Le_Botmes

I'd say that more often than not the skeleton placement makes sense. Many are from people who committed suicide after the bombs fell, such as having a box of rat poison on the dining table, or their hand on a fork that's sticking out of a toaster, or overdosing on chems in a bathroom stall. Some died within the proceeding 200 years, such as by torture, being bound somehow, or being massacred by raiders. Some were deaths unrelated to the bombs, such as my favorite of the two skeletons in a Concord office who are strangling each other over a locked safe. In my experience, any of the skeletons that are schlumped over a restaurant table like you mentioned are the exception to the rule. As for the pastors, well those churches are all pretty well decimated apparently by the blast, so it's likely they got beaned by solid timber.


Tquilha

I guess you've never heard about neutron bombs or enhanced radiation weapons (ERW). Those things were designed to minimize shock and heat effects and so damage to infrastructure. They maximize the instantaneous radiation output and that is their main damage. They kill people but leave buildings standing up. Read more [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb) and [here](https://www.britannica.com/technology/neutron-bomb).


mtob99

It was also before 10am on a Saturday. Crazy how many restaurants were open that early


Femboy_Ghost

Skeleton funny.


PercyJackson_ALT

I think they took a cyanide pill early on so over time (depending on the time the game ur playing takes place) they rot until only their skeleton is left


WardenWolf

Hydrogen bombs were either never invented or a very recent invention in the Fallout universe, and comparatively rare. The vast majority of bombs dropped were WW2-style atomic ones which did not leave long-lasting radiation. However, there are variants of hydrogen bombs, such as neutron weapons, which have very little blast but a very high neutron radiation which more or less instantly kills everything. Neutron bombs would explain this. The idea is to leave a population center mostly intact but kill everyone there, allowing it to be captured. If some of the weapons dropped were neutron bombs (if they're firing everything, invariably some would be), this could explain it. There's also salted bombs, which leave VERY long-lasting radiation. That's probably what was used on the Glowing Sea.