#fallout worldbuilding

My hands are stained orange because I had to process a ton of citrus. There's a 5 litre jar with soon-to-be preserved lemon/mandarins/satsumas and a little container of yuzu kosho made with orange and lemon instead of yuzu.

While packing the jar and separating zest from pith, I began thinking about citrus in Fallout. Limes are mentioned in passing in Fallout 2 though they do not appear in game for player character use:

Punga fruit is possibly based on Buddha's hand citrus. That being said, it doesn't grow in Maryland, much less in the mashup of St. Mary's county/Ocean City, MD where Point Lookout is based. That said, the punga could be based on the idea of a mutated paw paw, which grows everywhere in the state, even in Baltimore city. Paw paws are also heavy and weigh down the stem, similar to the way punga are shown in-game. Maryland is also a place where you can cultivate some tropical plants, so maybe a seed was dropped at the right time when the bombs dropped and the climate changed?

Complicating matters: even Deezer's Lemonade in FO4? It's not made with lemons and has not been since the bombs.

Here's the lemonade recipe from Fallout 76 confirming the above: in-game lemonade in this game is not made with actual citrus, but acid.

There is, of course, Nuka-Cola Orange. But we don't have a recipe, perhaps implying that all the Nuka-Cola Orange around is remnants from the old world. Real-world equivalents like Orange Crush are made with high fructose corn syrup, "natural flavours" (likely oils from the peel + a blend of orange varietals), citric acid, sodium benzoate, gum arabic, and food colouring to create the syrup before it's mixed with a carbonation agent.

So: citrus in Fallout remains illusive!

As far as I could find, it's actually a common misconception that originally a Bottle Cap was equal to one bottle of water. In fact, I couldn't find a single instance of anyone in Fallout 1 actually stating that the currency is backed by water. That's an, albeit extremely sensible, assumption that's been propagated as fact. The reasoning we get for the choice of the Bottle Cap only comes up in New Vegas from Alice McLafferty's dialogue. The implication there is that Bottle Caps act as a convenient currency because of their difficulty to counterfeit. When asked about genuine Caps, Alice says, "Lots of little things - the paint on the label, the machining, the type of metal it's made from. I know there's counterfeit caps floating around, of course. Fortunately, they're very time-consuming to make, so the numbers are small." We can gather, largely through conjecture, that the Bottle Cap was selected because of their prevalence, difficulty in manufacture, and relative size and weight. Of course, by Fallout 2 (2241), Bottle Caps have been entirely phased out in favor of the newly minted and gold backed NCR Dollar.

Now about that NCR Dollar. In Fallout 1 (2161) a 10mm Submachine gun has a base value of 1,000 Bottle Caps and in Fallout 2 a 10mm Submachine gun has a base value of 1,000 $NCR. In the same vein, a box of 12 Gage Shotgun Shells will run you 225 Bottle Caps in Fallout 1, and the same box will run you 225 $NCR in Fallout 2. We can then infer that within the eighty year gap between Fallout and Fallout 2, the value $NCR has become equivocal to the Bottle Cap.

By the time of New Vegas in 2281, a forty year time jump, the NCR's economy has largely tanked as a consequence of the Brotherhood war. Going back to our initial examples: a 10mm Submachine gun has jumped in value to 2,370 Bottle Caps. In $NCR that equates to $5,925 (using the metric of $100=40 Caps). That's a nearly 600% (592.5%) increase! In only forty years! Checking the shotgun shells however is a different story strangely enough. 20 Shotgun shells in 2281 only costs 40 Bottle Caps or $100. That's a 17.7% decrease in value. That said, I think the supply of ammunition is more than likely going to increase at a rate higher than functional firearms, so that's not entirely far fetched.

Another instance of item values going down are Gecko hides. In 2241 a Silver Gecko pelt had a value of 25 bucks with a Golden Gecko pelt going for $125. Forty years later... Silver Gecko hides are still $25 (10 Bottle Caps) but Golden Gecko hides have dropped to only $50 (20 Bottle Caps). Weird stuff here. I think this more stems from the easier access to other, better hides for the use of crafting leather - brahmin are being ranched on an industrial scale now after all.

While we're here, let's look at the Madre's gold bars. In Bottle Caps, a single 10oz gold bar has a value of 10,547. Converting that to $NCR, a single 10oz bar of pure gold goes for $26,367.50. As far as I could tell the $NCR doesn't use cents for some reason, so let's say that rounds down to $26,367. That means as of 2281, an ounce of pure gold is equal to $2,636 (rounded down). For comparison, 1oz of pure gold would be equal to 1,054 (rounded down) Bottle Caps. If that sounds bad, well then it may be unfortunate to know that as of today, July 13th 2026, 1oz of gold is equal to $4016.43. This may look bad, but in simpler terms this means that $1 NCR is equal to $1.52 US. Not as staggering, but it's tremendously funny that the NCR's economy is doing better than my own country's.

in my personal opinion, i wasn't super fond of the show, it made some choices i simply disliked and i took me out of it, because of this, the various ideas and concepts i work on in my free time (and may eventually post)tend to diverge in a new path away from the lore/info we get from the show, and i was curious how many others would feel about this, what your take is on creating media/concepts with the show in mind

The Old River Control Structure (ORCS) is currently the only thing IRL keeping the Mississippi River from changing course to flow into the Atchafalaya River, which has a steeper and shorter path to the ocean, so it's where the river naturally wants to go. The Mississippi does this every ~1000 years or so, and the river would've changed course around the 80s or 90s, but the ORCS is preventing that from happening. This is because New Orleans and Baton Rouge (and many other smaller cities along the Mississippi) are hugely important ports to the US economy, so if the river just stopped flowing through them, a massive amount of infrastructure would be destroyed or rendered useless, and the river would become unnavigable for some time, causing billions of dollars of trade loss and a global shortage of grain.

So in Fallout, I think that the ORCS (and New Orleans) would be significant targets during the Great War, since taking them out would cripple the US' ability to recover economically. As a consequence of this, the Atchafalaya River would turn into the main course of the Mississippi, flooding many towns and cities (including, most notably, Morgan City) along the path. The former route of the river would eventually become a saltwater estuary reaching up to 230 miles inland, all the way to Baton Rouge, and depriving the entire region of its primary source of fresh water and transportation.

After 200 years, people would get used to it and the new course of the Mississippi would become navigable again, except now the new focal point of settlement would be the ruins of Morgan City due to the source of constant fresh water. Maybe the wasteland name could just be Morgan and it could have a bunch of scrap & wood stilt architecture, that'd be fun. Also, boats! Lots of boats! Boating would be a big part of the culture in Morgan. Cool boat factions. There would also be a ton of pre-war barges along the Mississippi that are now stranded or sunk, so plenty of room for salvage too!