The boss of the legendary role-playing game explains how many vaults there are in Fallout

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Thanks to the Amazon series, the apocalyptic setting of Fallout is back in 2024. The actual game “Fallout 1” was created by Interplay in 1997. The lead designer at the time, Tim Cain, now talks about how many fallout shelters, the vaults, were planned in the world of Fallout and how many were implemented.

This is what Cain says about the number of vaults in Fallout: In a vlog, the role-playing game designer talks about the number of vaults in Fallout. These are the bunkers where the Americans were supposed to flee to wait out the fallout after the nuclear disaster. Some of the vaults were used for strange experiments.

But Cain says that this is not “canon”, he just said what he knows:

  • The team estimated there would be 1,000 Vault Tec Vaults in the US – that was simply an aesthetic number.
  • The artist asked him how many digits had to be left free on the back of the game pieces and Cain said 1,000 so that it would be a round number. Because he was a programmer and started counting with “0”, 3 digits on the back were enough – so 0-999.
  • There was such a “Vault 0” in Fallout Tactics – here Vault Tec had cut the budget so much that the AI ​​malfunctioned and developed murderous tendencies

    • The official trailer for the Fallout series on Amazon in German

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    Vault Tec has built far fewer vaults than they should have

    So there are 1,000 vaults in Fallout? No, Cain immediately qualifies that. If 1,000 vaults had really been built, you would have had to see about 20 vaults in Fallout 1 and 2, which cover the whole of California, for that to be statistically reasonable. But in the games, only four to six vaults were seen in total.

    Cain says there could be an “in-game explanation” for this. Vault Tec simply didn’t build 1,000 vaults, not even close:

    “Vault Tec has built less than half, probably far fewer, vaults than they were supposed to. I believe it’s far less than a thousand.”

    Cain considers Vault Tec to be a typical construction company that gets a huge contract from the government because it submits the lowest bid, but then fails to actually complete the contract because it cuts corners at every turn.

    There is evidence that only about 120 Vaults exist in Fallout

    As PCGamer explains, there is a map in the TV show that shows 120 vaults. This means that the vaults in the current Fallout canon are actually as rare as Cain suspects. Even 1,000 vaults would not have been nearly enough to adequately protect the population of the USA:

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    What was the highest number ever seen in a vault? According to a list of all known vaults, the winner is “Vault 118” in Fallout 4: For Harbor (via fandom).

    The vaults in Fallout have a morbid fascination, because the inhabitants there didn’t just serve their time, but some of the vault inhabitants were subjected to crude experiments that still delight SF fans and stimulate the imagination. Even if you would certainly rather be in one vault than another: Fallout has a “Vault 69” and it is just as bad as you think

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