Bet MGM is an official sports betting partner of the National Hockey League and has everything for the action on the ice. Hockey fans in Canada can place live bets, create same-game parlays, take player props on their favorite skaters, and Bet on the 2026 Stanley Cup Champion, including if that team will be from Canada or the USA. Bet MGM also has original bets, which are hockey markets you can't find anywhere else. And it's not just about what you can do on GameDay.
The Bet MGM app has improved its lineup this season to include instant withdrawals, data insights, and a brand new reward hub. Download the Bet MGM app today and enjoy the NHL like never before. Bet MGM.com for terms and conditions, 19-plus to Wager, Ontario only. Please play responsibly.
If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. Bet MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming, Ontario. Robots Radio, Games, Lore, Stories, Community, Just Press Play. Welcome to the Fallout Lorecast, the podcast that explores the boundaries of our knowledge about the world of Fallout.
So it's been a while since I've talked about vaults, specifically. Now, they do come up, of course, now and then, depending on the topic of the week and what else is going on. But having episodes that specifically talk about vaults is something of the past. It's been, well, six years, it's been six years, five to six years since I did that series way early on, where I talked about each of the vaults and it was little mini-episodes if you remember those.
And it's been a long time. I don't remember off the top of my head many of them by number anymore. It's been so long. Now, of course, there are some that are the more popular ones or the ones that come up more often.
You know, that kind of stick in my head. But I thought this would be a fun opportunity to do something kind of fun and different with the vaults while also giving myself and all of you a refresher about what each one is. What is this idea? Well, I thought it would be fun to do a bracket where I compare each vault to another vault.
In order to determine what would be the most terrifying vault of all and I'll be going through every single, well, every main vault, none of the speculative ones, none of the non-canon ones, but the main ones that you show up in main games and we'll be going through each one, talking about it, talking about the one that it's pitted against, and then I will be weighing the two options if I had to decide which one I would like to live in and which one I wouldn't, and the one that I wouldn't will move on to the next round. That's how it's going to work until we get through all of the vaults and there really aren't that many that we have solid information on. So this should go relatively quickly knocking out a few match-ups, I guess, every episode that we do this. And I'm going to bounce back and forth between this and then the business episodes and kind of some other stuff that comes up along the way.
So I thought this would be fun. I've taken all of the numbered vaults and some of them that don't have numbers and like the vault tech corporate vault or the university vault, I put them all randomized into a bracket system. There's going to be a first round and then there's going to be a second round, the ones that win by being more terrible will move on to the second round, but the second round is highly populated with other vaults that got like a bi-week because of the odd number of vaults. And then once we get through the second round, everybody will have contested somebody else.
So then we are in the, I don't know what is it, quarter finals, I guess, that's round three and then the semi-finals will be round four and then the finals, that's it, that's round five after that. And then if you make it through the finals, you're in the championship game and then the last two vaults will compete to see which one is the absolute worst or at least according to me, for my perspective on it and my personality and my tastes or interests, I guess, we'll see whatever weighs into this. So that means that the results of this may come out different for you and I'll be sharing a layout, a screen capture of this bracket system on the discord. So if you'd like to try this out for yourself as we go along, you can do that and of course your answers might be different than mine.
So things will develop and you'll be able to kind of check things off off the list. You know how that goes. We're here, let's get into it. Our first matchup and I remind you, I hit the random button.
This is randomly seeded is vault 76 versus vault 79, both of which are extremely important vaults for Fallout 76 and then we're going to move on from there to, well, it goes all the way down to the bottom vault zero and vault eight and then we'll see how far we get in this episode. Here we go. All right, so the first thing we need to do is go back over with just a summary about what each of these vaults is, how it exists or why it exists, what the experiments were, what it might be like to have lived there, any of that so with each of these, it'll be kind of a summary that I've written. I'll just kind of go through it real quick and it'll be a reminder and then I'll talk about the other one and then we'll compare the two and we'll see which one wins or loses.
However you want to phrase that, I guess. All right. So vault 76, if you've played Fallout 76, you are from vault 76, some things that we need to remember about it. It was a control vault and so yes, control vaults are going to show up in this competition, but I have a feeling most of them won't be making it too far because generally they're safer than the other vaults.
But here, let's get into more details. This vault 76 was intended to function exactly as it was advertised to the public, which of course isn't always true, where there were no hidden experiments. This was as it said it was. The primary purpose was to house a selection of the best and the brightest people who would then emerge 25 years later in order to repopulate and rebuild Appalachia and, well, America.
The vault was scheduled to open after 25 years and its life support system was designed to shut down soon after opening in order to make sure that everyone actually left the vault. Now, other than the idea that the power would shut down, there's no real danger inside vault 76. I mean, it might be the kind of location that somebody would want to try to pillage later or a raider would love to get in there in order to find maybe some actual clothing that isn't broken down and worn out. But other than that, there's really no danger in vault 76 other than you have to leave.
The real danger comes with being thrusted back out into the wasteland in order to deal with whatever's going on in the wasteland. So in some ways, vault 76 is just the wasteland if you think of it like that. But we have to maintain this to the situation that you are in the vault and then what it feels like coming out because anyone who would leave any of these vaults would be, well, stuck in the wasteland. So that doesn't really make this different than the other vaults, even though the intentionality of the vault was to force this population to go back out into the world.
So what is the real danger of vault 76? Not a whole lot. You just hung out for 25 years waiting for the doors to open and then they did. And for the most part, it was probably one of the safest places you could possibly be.
So what about vault 79? Vault 79 is a secret vault. This is located in the Savage Divide in Appalachia. So close by to 76.
And the only way that you would know you would found it is if you had found the cave, basically, this Bailey family cabin. It's nearby there. There's an entrance inside a cave. There's a metal locked door and then that, of course, leads to the rest of the vault.
Now this wasn't like the other vaults. It wasn't designed for people. This was designed to hide something before the Great War, the US government transferred all of the gold bullion from Fort Knox to vault 79 and they intended to use this to rebuild the American economy after the nuclear apocalypse. Now, even though the vault wasn't designed for people, at least for experiments on people, there were people who were in the vault because they needed to be there in order to maintain and operate it.
But probably most importantly, to protect all of the gold 120 dwellers lived here and they, like I said before, were not part of a greater experiment. They lived comfortably. They had whatever they needed, the food, the supplies that they needed, and of course, not everything goes to plan. I have a feeling that vault tech in designing this vault and with the United States government did not think that the dwellers from another vault would be the ones who invaded and you're given the opportunity in the storyline.
Do you ally yourself with raiders? Do you ally yourself with settlers? How do you make your way into this vault and then what do you do when you get there? But from our perspective, we're not looking at how do you get in the vault, but what would it be like to be one of the people living inside the vault?
And so what we know is that these people lived relatively comfortable lives inside this vault for 25 years and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, they get invaded. Ironically, by a vault dweller from a nearby vault, Vault 76, and whoever they seem to want to bring with them. So in the game, this plays out however you play through the scenario. Now this makes it hard to say that a certain event was canon.
Did you raid with the raiders? Did you help foundation get inside? The things go according to the way that they would go depending on who you brought with you? All of that stuff is up in the air.
None of that is canon. And all of it is influenced by your decisions because you were the one who was there in that scenario. So I propose that we look at the scenario from a different perspective. You're in this vault.
It is a highly, highly valuable location. And at some point, whether it's a group led by the 76 dweller or if it's some other random group, eventually somebody would have tried to invade. And if it wasn't your decisions that were made in that scenario, it would have been somebody else's. So theoretically, this is not necessarily a safe place to be.
Yes, they can defend themselves and they have the ability to do that. But it's also the kind of place that is more likely to be raided than Vault 76. So let's compare the two. You have two relatively safe places that take pretty good care of the people inside their vaults.
But in one case, after 25 years, you're thrust out into the world and in the other case, you are supposed to stay in the vault and just maintain what you're doing and protect it, knowing that at some point in the future, you could be attacked or raided by somebody who wants what you have down there because they figured it out. So in that scenario, for the time you're spending in the vault, Vault 79 is more dangerous. Sure, they can protect themselves or at least attempt to, but they're also a much bigger target than just Vault 76 with a bunch of people just kind of living there. So in that case, being in the vault is both, well, it doesn't have an end time.
It's not like you can just say, okay, it's been 25 years. I'm tired of this place. I'm ready to go somewhere else. So you are permanently stuck there.
But also you're potentially going to be attacked at some point, which does happen. They get raided at some point in the story line. So we know whether that was us or somebody else, eventually it was inevitable. It would have happened.
So in this case, 79 is the more dangerous vault. It's the less pleasing situation to be in. The one argument you could make against this is that after 25 years, you are just sent back out into the wasteland if you're from Vault 76. So okay.
Yeah, that's not great. You have to survive. But the whole point of Vault 76 was to train and prepare you to survive on your own, which means that you're more capable than anybody else who would have had to leave a vault or decided to leave a vault to try to make their way out on the surface. So in that case, I think 79 is the more difficult place to live because you're trapped.
You don't have the freedom. At least in 76, you can get out and you can make your own choices and live your life. In 79, you are trapped. And on top of that, you will inevitably have to defend that location at some point in the future and you will be attacked.
So from that perspective, 79 wins. It's the more dangerous vault. It moves on to the next round. Congratulations, Vault 79.
All right. Next on the list, Vault 0 versus Vault 8. What was Vault 0? What was Vault 8 again?
Well, I'll tell you. Hold on to your horses. All right. So Vault 0 is installed in the Cheyenne Mountain Complex.
Cheyenne is that pronounced correctly in Colorado. It is the largest of all the vaults by total volume. It was designed to be a central hub or kind of like this nucleus, this center point among an entire system, an entire network of vaults across the country. Unlike most of the vaults which were designed for an experiment, this one actually wasn't designed for an experiment.
It had a different purpose. To ensure the survival and future leadership of humanity after the war, it accomplished this or at least aimed to accomplish this by housing the greatest minds, does this sound familiar, of pre-war America and cryogenic stasis alongside advanced robotics and machinery. You might be thinking, weren't those greatest minds in Fallout 76's vaults in Vault 76? But no, those were the greatest minds of Appalachia.
Those were those people in that area and from some other locations. But this is the top of the top greatest minds. This would have been, well, according to Vault Tech in America and probably the Enclave, who they thought those minds should be because of their status and accomplishments and more likely their social connectedness with the people who were actually in charge of everything. This facility was not overseen by a human overseer the way that most of the other vaults are.
It was run by AI, an intelligence called the calculator, and the calculator was responsible for managing not just the resources, but coordinating with the surface when things became safe. It would initiate the Exodus protocol, which was a plan to lead the reclamation and rebuilding efforts using the stored intellect and technology, and of course, the people who were cryogenically frozen. So this sounds a lot like Vault 76, except for cryogenically freezing people in order to maintain them for a much longer period of time. 76 was an experiment to wait 25 years and then try to go back out into the surface, which makes sense.
Because as I talked about years ago in the episode about how long nuclear fallout actually lasts in an area, 25 years would have been a good time to try to do that. There are places that have had nuclear events that after a few decades are pretty survivable again. And there are large sections of Appalachia that didn't get bombed. So this seems like a reasonable way to manage a vault like that.
But what happens if the world outside is less predictable, more dangerous? What if things take longer to get back to some sort of baseline where humans would be safe out there? Well, that's where you can freeze package everybody just like in your freezer for a day when you need something and then thaw them out. So this seems like not a bad setup.
You're one of the best and brightest you are preserved for the future when things would be good to come back out. But guess what? Things don't work out that way. Tactics, by the way.
So I believe it's on that list of defined by Bethesda to be canon properties. So it's on our list. Also if things aren't 100% canon or just kind of on the edge of canon, if it's fun and it makes sense for this little competition, why not include it, right? So this is in Volotactic Tactics.
The story plays out where you actually have to breach this vault at the end of the game because you have to confront the calculator and the people inside the vault are not doing so good. Their minds have been probed and plugged into the calculator and the rest of the system. And that didn't work out so good for them. The best and the brightest who were put into vault zero were brain damaged.
So by the time the warrior, your character is able to get into the vault, they have to fight against not just the defenses of the vault, robots and things like that, but also some of the survivors who have been thought out who are now brain damaged. So in that case, not a great vault to be in. I'm going to put this on the, hey, this is definitely worse than the other two that we talked about. And not only will this vault eventually be attacked again by somebody that the player is controlling, but more likely than not, you're going to have brain damage.
You're going to be frozen. Your brain will suffer. The best of you will suffer. And if you do survive, you're not going to be in great shape.
It's going to be rough. All right. So let's talk about the other vault, vault eight. So this is another one of the Western vaults.
This is in Northern Nevada, and this is the vault that turned into vault city. It was constructed to house around a thousand people and was also a control vault, like some of the others we've talked about. So no experiments, no intended, well, bad things that would happen to the people there. The original plan for vault eight was for it to remain sealed for 10 years, 76 was 25.
So this is only 10. And then after those 10 years, the residents would be led outside in order to recolonize the surface. Sound familiar? It's really interesting detail because of the four vaults we've gone through.
They all are very similar in some of these details, right? But of course, things don't work out the way that they're planned due to a logistical error. Vault eight received a shipment of hundreds of water chips that were meant for vault 13, which plays into the storyline of all at one and vault 13 got an extra garden of Eden creation kit. So they've got an extra deck.
But of course, this creates a scenario that is not optimal for either vault. After 14 years, the enclave signals the all clear and vault eight is opened up. And the citizens of all eight form vault city. They use the get to terraform the environments.
They have power from their generators and the city grows. Now, the story goes that the generators only have about 15 years of use when you get there and they're looking for a solution in order to keep the power on and the events of the game play out. So let's talk about the nature of being part of vault eight. Well, it's pretty safe.
It's one of those safe locations. You're only in it for a very short period of time. You're let out into the world. You don't have any extra water chips.
So people actually have to leave, but they've got a get they terraform the environment around them. They make it livable. They create a village and they all live in the village, aside from just kind of the natural dangers and conflicts that crop up by being part of a group of people trying to survive outside of that. Vault eight is a very good scenario.
So if we compare the two, they both are set up to be what are supposed to be good, safe vaults with, well, relatively not super dangerous situations going on, but involved zero. The fact that they plug everyone's brains into the machine and of course the calculator who runs everything. And then those people are brain dead and get invaded later as opposed to the events of vault eight where they are just safe for a while and then they get out and they survive. Vault eight seems kind of like 76 to be one of the most ideal versions of the way a vault should work.
And you can't use the dangers of the wasteland against choosing to go to that vault because the assumption is that you wouldn't have chosen to go into vault if you weren't expecting to be able to leave at some point anyway. So in this scenario, vault zero is the more dangerous place to be and it moves on to round two. Congratulations, vault zero. Communist detected on American soil.
We go farce engaged. All right, time for our third and final matchup for this episode. This is a weird one. This is a weird one.
All right. We've got and I promise I hit random on these the similarities or the weirdness of at least this matchup totally random. This is round three. Let's round one for these vaults for vault 77 and vault three.
So some of you are like, what vault 77? Yes. The man or one man in a crate of puppets, the vault from the Penny Arcade sketch and the vault three, which is the vault from New Vegas where the fiends live because that's right. They killed everybody in the vault and took over the vault and turned it into a fortress and a place where they could do all their drugs and, you know, ratering is ratering a word.
Did you just verbize verbalize? Nope. That's not it. That's a new word too.
I just verbized it down. It's not anything, but maybe I'm sure there's a word for it, but I'm not going to look it up right now. All right. So let's talk about we got fiends.
Vault three becomes the fiends. They get murdered by the fiends. It's really there's just terrible. If you're a vault three, you're murdered.
That's it. You're done. That's it. You can attack by the fiends.
You're dead. So not a great vault to be in. I'm going to put that on the probably higher up on the don't want to live there or die there vault list. Vault 77 though.
Okay. What's the details with all 77 because this is one that people ask about pretty regularly, but it only shows up in the Penny Arcade comic under any detail. It shows up in Fallout three because you can find a jumpsuit with the number 77 on it and a holotape. But other than those two things, which I'll get into more detail in a moment, all we know is that there's one dude and is great of puppets.
The date is February 4th, 2079. So yeah, a few years after the bombs dropped puppet man founded creative puppets immediately began playing with them and he quickly lost himself in the puppet games. By March 30th, he started to believe that the vault boy puppet was talking to him that night he tore apart the king puppet and then accused the vault boy puppet of murder. The vault boy puppet responded that it was actually puppet man himself who murdered the king puppet, promoting the two to escape in fear for what the dog puppet might do.
Puppet man left vault 77 soon after leaving the location uninhabited. So that's what the comic says. Here was the inspiration for the comic, the jumpsuit and a holotape. That sounds like this.
Like I told you, man, I don't know where it came from, but it freaks the boys out some story from a while back about a stranger with no name. Just get rid of the damn thing. Ain't no good gonna come from keeping it around, besides if it is his, maybe he'll come back for it. Comprende.
So this seems to be implying that the person that this person is afraid of is the puppet man from the vault and that at some point in those early days, centuries before the events of this politic, assumingly, I guess we don't have a date on the holotape, but the events of Fallout 3 are 2277. The story from the comic is 2079, so this is almost 200 years later. But it seems to be implying that the puppet man has the vault suit or at least had this vault suit and was terrifying because he was insane. Now of course, the comic isn't canon.
It might become canon. I mean, I could see Bethesda in some future game making a reference, kind of an Easter egg reference back to the mythology that has been created by this comic about Vault 77. And it seems like it was originally supposed to be maybe something else that got fleshed out more in Fallout 3 and then just never did. So we just get these little remnants of things.
So what do we actually know about Vault 77? Well, not a whole lot outside of this holotape. We know that maybe somebody who came from it was crazy. But therefore, it was a dangerous situation.
If we take into consideration the comic, we know that by the time this puppet man found the vault two years after the bombs dropped, it was empty. Now, was it always supposed to be empty? Was it just a storage facility and it happened to have this creative puppets for some reason? Or were there people that were originally there and they just didn't survive?
So if we break it down and we consider only what we know about Fallout 3, then we don't really know anything other than somebody who wore the Fallout 77 jumpsuit was scary enough to record a holotape about. That's all we know. If we incorporate the comic, we know that it was empty, for what reason we don't know, and a crazy person lived there and became the puppet man. So from that perspective, and assuming that there's no other details about what was in the vault as if nobody actually lived there outside of the puppet man, then if you go with the comic version, it's reasonable to assume that you would have to have been the puppet man, which means that you survived because we have to compare this to Vault 3.
These are the two that are head to head here. And we know if you were one of the original dwellers in Vault 3, then you got murdered by the fiends. Period. That was it.
There's no evidence of survivors. There's no evidence of any life outside of the fact that you were in it and then sometime later the fiends attack and everybody gets murdered. So if you go with Vault 3, you definitely get murdered by raiders. If you go with Vault 77, then either if you just take the strict Fallout 3 stuff, we know that somebody creepy lived there, or at least stole of jumpsuit.
And worst case scenario, you yourself are the puppet man from the comic. In which case you're insane, but you're still alive. So it seems to me that Vault 77 is the better of the two options because there's possibility for survival, or there's possibility that there's just a lot we don't know about this place and something crazy happened, but again, more possibility for survival. So congratulations, Vault 3.
You move on because, well, everybody got murdered. It's quite the triumphant sounding music for ending a line with everyone got murdered, but we're going to go with it. We're going to go with that and we're going to wrap up this episode. I hope you enjoyed this and I hope you're excited about where this is going next week.
We're moving on. We're continuing with Round 1. We're going to be talking about Vault 4 versus Vault 7, Vault Tech Corporation Vault versus Vault 11. So some of those early vaults.
And once we get to Round 2, we'll find out that Vault 79 is going to go up against 44, Vault 0 is going to go up against 17, and Vault 3 will go up against the University training vault. We're coming up. We'll go back and forth between some of these episodes, some of the business episodes and some other things in the future. But before we go, thank you so much for your continued support on Patreon, patreon.com slash follow at Lorecast, and you'll get shout outs if you sign up and we don't have any new ones this week.
But come join us, get ad-free episodes, get stickers and t-shirts, join us on our Patreon chats, all sorts of fun stuff over there, and it keeps the show going. So I really do appreciate that. Also, you can help out by leaving a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts. If you do so in the US, I will read it out on a future episode, and you can also share the show with your friends or your grandmother.
Why isn't there a Skyrim grandma? Why isn't there a Fallout grandma? Somebody should become a Fallout grandma. Share it with your grandma.
She would appreciate it. Thanks for tuning in. Have a wonderful weekend. Until next time.
I guess if you find a crate of puppets, maybe leave them alone. So you don't go insane. See you next time. To plug into everything else we're doing, check out robotsradio.net, reach out to me on Twitter at robots underscore radio, check out the robots radio rocket club where you can join me and a bunch of our other creators creating your podcast, starting a new podcast or helping your current podcast grow.
There's more information about that on robotsradio.net as well, and you can always talk with us and the entire community over 2,000 people on the robots radio discord. Come join us. We'd love to chat with you. See you guys next time.