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. Wastelanders and Vault-Wilers, welcome back. Today we are continuing our vault showdown.
This is my attempt to pit all of the vaults against each other in order to figure out which one is absolutely the worst of all of them. And if you are just tuning in for this episode, there is one other episode where we did this a few weeks ago. So go check out that episode first and then continue along with this one. Now before I get too far into it, I do have to own up to something.
I made a goof. When I was putting together this big long list of all of the cannon vaults, there might be a few that snuck in here that weren't as cannon as the others. And you go through a big list and you pull from other sources and I just kind of trusted some of those sources. But it's still going to make for a fun conversation because some of them are kind of interesting to know about anyway.
And I have a feeling the non-cannon vaults aren't going to float to the top. So we'll deal with that as we go through because I don't want to have to go back and redo the entire structure of the bracket system because we've already done an episode. So this will make sense in a moment because, well, here, let's just dig into it. Our first matchup this week is vault four versus vault seven.
Now, both of these might be less familiar to some of you. Vault four shows up in the TV show and becomes an important vault for its own reasons. But vault seven, you might be thinking, wait, what was vault seven again? Yeah, we'll get to that.
We'll also be matching up a few other vaults, including the vault tech corporate vault and vault 11 and then also vault one 14. And interestingly enough, this was randomized, vault one 41. Both vaults have two ones and four, but in a different order. So just a little teaser from the beginning, but let's get into it.
All right, so vault four, this comes from the TV show. So spoilers if you haven't checked out the TV show, but also if you haven't checked out the TV show, then what are you even doing with yourself? Go watch the TV show. It's very good.
Plus season two is coming up in, I don't know, five months, where I think December was the date. Anyway, let's get into it. Vault four is run by scientists. This is the vault that Lucy and Maximus get caught in.
This is the vault with all of the inhabitants with funny, weird mutations, like the guy with one eye or the guy with the nose on his forehead. There's a reason why they have those mutations. This vault was set up as an experiment to see what would happen if you have a vault that was led by scientists with no boundaries. Now, that doesn't mean that all scientists are without boundaries for their experimentation.
That's not necessarily true. But in this case, the scientists who were in charge of this vault didn't seem to have any problems with experimenting on human beings in ways that were, well, not to their best interests. I guess you could say one of the things that's revealed from this vault and skip this. If you haven't watched the TV show, just jump ahead about a minute or two is that this is the location where gulpers were created, at least in this part of the world.
The gulpers in the TV show look a little bit different than the ones in fault 76. So there may be similarities and differences between the two. They may have different origins. They might look similar but have come from different experimentations.
Kind of like super mutants kind of show up in different ways sometimes. Anyway, the point of this episode isn't to compare and contrast gulpers and super mutants, but it's to let you know that this was a dangerous place to live because the people in this vault potentially could have been experimented on. And it seems like many of them were, and not just in the sense of like, hey, try out this new ingredient in your drink. It might make you have more energy and you might feel more capable of getting through the day.
No, this is like, let's put you in a vat and inject you with DNA from other creatures in order to create like hybrids, things like that, doesn't seem to be the thing that most of us would want to be doing. So on the list of, is this scary? Would this be dangerous? It's pretty high up there, especially because when you look on the show, so many people in the show who live in this vault look like they were at least the descendants of, if not experimented on themselves, plus there was the moment where the gulpers get loose and that becomes a problem.
And of course, is a dangerous situation. So on the list of how dangerous the vaults are and how terrible would it be to live in a place like this, not the best. There are worse. I really believe that they are worse than this vault, but vault four still on the net, probably don't want to be their list of vaults here.
Let's talk about vault seven though. Vault seven comes from fallout to the board game. The expansion fallout new California and this is one of the ones that slipped into my list because I didn't vet everything. I kind of just trusted the online source, but I guess that's what I get for not double checking every single vault on the list.
But here we go. This is this is double checking it. Vault seven shows up in the board game. It is a location in the game and outside of that, it's actually pretty difficult for me to find too much about this location.
What I have discovered is because I haven't played the game and I have to look up online sources for this, but it turns out that even in the game, the details are very slim. This vault doesn't have a specific location. It depends on how you play the game where the vault ends up. It can be in multiple places like in the capital wasteland or the pit.
It tends to be inside of a lake. If you get into the vault in the game to explore it, there are a number of rooms you can get into. There are mutant creatures, but it seems like this vault was never actually supposed to have anybody living in it. No overseer, no vault dwellers, nothing yet.
There are things in the vaults that you can fight like these mutant creatures, but there's also a vault guardian that you can deal with and then you get rewarded with like a vault suit for the game, so it's not exactly canon. It's also not really the kind of place that you would want to live in, but the question here isn't, can you live in it? The question is, which one is the worst vault ever and most terrifying? And in that case, vault seven is very dangerous, or at least currently, and who knows what was there before, because there's a lack of information about what was there.
But that also means that if you had stumbled upon this vault sometime after the Great War before it became inhabited by mutant creatures, it probably would have been very safe because if nobody else would have been around, this would have been an actual shelter that you could have used to protect yourself. Well, except for the vault guardian, but maybe you could have taken out the vault guardian and then had a home. That was a lot safer than most of the places in the Wasteland. So it's kind of a tricky comparison, but I'm going to go with four being more dangerous, because first of all, it's more interesting.
Secondly, gulpers were invented there. Third, if you lived there, chances are you would have been experimented on, and there's something that's just more terrifying about a constant, having to live in a place and never feeling safe and having to deal with that creeping sensation that something's wrong, but you don't know what it is, as opposed to, well, I got to fight this bad guy now that if I thought the bad guy, I can just have the vault to myself, feels a little bit more, I don't know, creepy and terrible. I'm going to say vault four wins this one as being the worst of these two vaults. All right, next up, the Vault Tech corporate vault, which sometimes is referred to as the secret vault and comes from, and this is another one that's not in here, the Fallout Brotherhood of Steel game, which is not necessarily considered canon by a lot of people, but it's an interesting place.
So we're going to talk about it and we're comparing that to vault 11. So the corporate vault is a secret vault, a vault tech designed as an underground research facility for high ranking personnel, where they could survive the Great War and continue to develop the science and technology that they'd been working on. And this one was directly in connection with the Enclave. Now, of course, Vault Tech and the Enclave are connected, but this one absolutely was connected because it was supposed to house super secret, high ranking personnel.
So that also means that this vault was off the grid. Most of the other vaults are connected together in some form in order to make sure that some central location or individuals could actually keep in touch with the vaults, if not oversee what was going on, which I know sounds the same as overseer, but the overseers themselves were reporting to somebody in many cases. In this case, this vault was not treated like the other vaults. The inhabitants here were not like other inhabitants.
They weren't necessarily there and being subjugated to some tests that they were unaware of, unless they were the people who were being tested on. And it seems like there's evidence here for continued tests with the forced evolutionary virus, especially in regards to trying to remove and cure the problem with sterility when somebody mutated into a super mutant. So that implies that they were doing tests on individuals. So if you were one of the people living in the vault, then you weren't getting tested on because you were actual Enclave or vault tech, important people, let's just call them important people, VIPs.
But if you were somebody who was captured and had to deal with the tests, then it would have been terrible for you. Now, the story of this vault plays out through the Brotherhood of Steel Game. It's one of the last locations you go to and the vault inevitably is destroyed and is part of a greater conflict. But that's not the thing that we want to consider in this comparison isn't what happens later.
It's what happens in the vaults as it was designed in the early days, what it would be like to have lived there. And in the case of being experimented on, not so great, but also in the case of being somebody who was a VIP, having a place to live, that would have been pretty good, except for the fact that you would have had to deal with the idea that you were doing terrible things to other humans. But in the case of some of these individuals, that didn't seem to bother them. There are people who didn't mind that.
And I'm not sure I could be among those numbers, pretty sure not. I have feeling a lot of you couldn't either. But having a safe place to live, food to eat, shower, bed to sleep in, as opposed to surviving the wasteland. Well, one does seem better than the other, but it is kind of a rock and a hard place situation, even from that perspective.
All right, so let's compare this to Vault 11. Vault 11 shows up in Fallout New Vegas, and this one you might remember because this was the vault that was designed to test the inhabitants' willingness to sacrifice one individual each year to ensure the safety of the remaining population. The overseer in the situation was told that the vault mainframe would kill everyone within the vault if the sacrifice was not made. This one's pretty memorable.
This is one of the ones that absolutely sticks in my brain and go back and listen to the episode I did about it because I had some very particular points to point out about this. But when it came down to it, it turned out that the test was hoping, or at least the experimenters were hoping that somebody would stand up against this and then everybody would be saved. But it took losing everybody in the vault due to both this sacrificial once a year thing and then the violence that ensued and all the different groups that were vying for control, and eventually it whittled the group that was living there down to five people until they finally stood up against this instruction and the vault let them out. So chances of surviving in Vault 11, pretty low, you would have been down to one of five people from the entire vault, and as living there continued on, it would have become more and more stressful as society degrades and people become violent and all of that.
So a very dangerous situation to be in, but let's compare the two, Vault 11, a dangerous situation where you're most likely going to get killed unless you're one of the five who are left and then even then you have to survive with all the trauma or the corporate vaults where you might be one of the special elite and you survive for a considerable period of time initially. But you have to do some terrible things because you are one of the Enclave or Vault Tech elite who are experimenting on people with FEV, neither situation is great, but in one of them you're more likely to survive. So it seems to me that the corporate vault is probably the better choice because Vault 11 just gets worse and worse and worse over time. So Vault 11, you're the scarier vault.
You're going to move on. All right, next up, two vaults with very similar numbers, 114 and 141. Now, 114, you might remember, 141, maybe not because guess what, another weird number slipped in. Yes, I messed this up, but it's going to be fun.
Go with me here because this one, this one I had never heard about and it might be because I don't regularly play Call of Duty. Yeah, that's where this is going, but hold on to that for a minute because we have to talk about 114 first. 114 shows up in Fallout 4. You can access this vault through the Park Street Station and this was supposed to be a vault for elites, or at least that's how this was marketed.
This was supposed to be especially for in the Boston area. Those people in Boston who were wealthy, loved, luxury, social status, all of those things. And Vault tech realized that some of those individuals weren't going to want to live in a regular vault with a bunch of regular people. So they marketed this vault to them, but of course it doesn't play out like that.
This was supposed to be a luxury vault, but instead they got something else. Families had to live in single room apartments. They had to share dining and bathing locations. Amenities would be minimal.
A personnel interviewed individuals for the overseer position, and the plan was to find somebody with no supervisory or governmental experience and who also had a strong anti-authority bias. Basically, they were trying to find an anarchist in order to run this vault of pampered upper-class people who have expectations that they will be treated a certain way. So there were a lot of applicants, but the one who was hired only went by the name Soup Can Harry. He wouldn't give his actual name.
He considered a name to be a rank and number, like a branding from the government. He didn't believe in the government. He believed that the government was part of the Illuminati. You can see the anti-elite sentiment there, but also that means that they are in direct contrast with the kinds of people living in the vault.
Also fun little side notes. Chances are Soup Can Harry actually ingested a Braxo cleaner before. There's a quote where he says, I've seen the back of them in Braxo boxes. Not for consumption.
Don't you tell me what to do? Oh, eat what I want. So that tells you a lot about this personality. Now, at a later date, this vault gets taken over by the mob, but you can imagine that this situation wouldn't have been great to live in, but even in a situation with a bunch of elites who are not particularly happy about the living situations and a vault being run by this anarchist who also says things like, I'll take the job and I ain't wearing no goddamn tie or pants.
This isn't a great situation, but it may not be as terrifying as many other vaults. All right, so let's compare that to vault 141. This was a crossover event with Fallout and Call of Duty. This was the Call of Duty X Fallout deploy as a vault to dweller events.
This is from back in like a few years ago, and I wasn't even aware of this until I started looking into it. So I guess there's a benefit to incorporating some of these because I wouldn't have known about them. I'm wondering the blog post when this came out. It says, uh, intercepted Missive to Mr.
Jack Cabot from Edward Degan, Missive for October 25th, 2287, Parsons State, insane asylum, commonwealth, Mr. Cabot, to win. Furthering my updates regarding the possible vault 141 escapees, I hope this message finds you well. I have been tracking four military scabs since my eyebot caught a glimpse of them on the outskirts of Beacon Hill.
They ventured all over the place from spectacle island clear across to Fort Hagen. As you know, I'm always looking for people who know how to handle themselves in dangerous situations. And from what I hear, they may fit the bill. They can certainly handle themselves in a fight.
Their leader appears to answer to the name Price. Gruff sort favors a gauze rifle at long ranges. Wicked hot. Seen him take out a Myerlerk at a hundred paces.
Could be the overseer. Scarlet over at the dugout inn tells me she's had chats with one of them. Gent called Gaz seems to be Price's right hand man, tasty with a pistol, a bit moody. One of them, they called Ghost, quiet type with a strange face, might be a fellow ghoul.
Shorter chap as well, Scottish fellow, wonder how a mole rat like him passed selection. For my tracking, and I can't be sure of this of course, but it appears this squad hails from one of those remote islands off the coast near the old Boston light. I haven't pinpointed the exact entrance and mapping it as a chore as the pit boys playing up again, but Vault 141 seems to be under the ancient gun emplacement east of here in the Atlantic. I know you have misgivings given that they're all British, but they're more rough and tumble, salt of the earth types.
Plus, they're stacked to the gills with armaments. Shall we organize and meet and greet? Your faithful servant. Edward.
So that's basically it. And yes, you heard that right. What they're doing here is they're pretending that in the future, the characters from Call of Duty are vault dwellers who have escaped to the vault and were for some reason housed in this vault. British military operatives housed in Vault 141 escape.
Use fallout like weapons like Gauss rifles and Gauss rifles. Is it Gauss or Gauss? I don't even know. Pronunciation is difficult, but that these people came from a vault, but we'd get no description about what the vault was like other than maybe it housed British military for some reason.
But why would you still have British military in a vault in 2287? Unless maybe there's like a time travel thing happening here. It doesn't make any sense. And I'm every so often when I'm the kind of person who might pick up a Call of Duty game every so many years, just try it out, shoot some people in the face again and then move on.
But I'm not up to date on any of these details. So if you have more information, if you are somebody who got into this even more interestingly, if you're the kind of person who doesn't usually play Call of Duty, who saw this fallout crossover and were like, heck yeah, I'm picking up Call of Duty in order to play as a vault dweller with the same names and personalities as other Call of Duty characters who are already in the Call of Duty universe, let me know because that seems like such a strange combination. And so yeah, I'm kind of making fun of this a little bit. But I mean, in the light of, you know, the, I guess, fortniteification of video games and the crossovers of everything, yeah, it's pretty cheesy.
But it's also very weird and interesting, kind of in its own way to be studied and to understand, does this work? Did this draw any of you into playing Call of Duty? Do you even know this was happening? Because I pride myself on being very up to date on all the things that are going on, especially with Bethesda, especially with Fallout and Elder Scrolls, and yet I don't have any recollection of this at all.
So somehow it just flew under my radar. There was probably an email that I didn't open. There was probably some notification that went up on social media that I just ignored because I've been trying to spend less time on social media. I don't know.
Pretty weird, weird stuff. So okay. So let's compare the two. 114, 141, 141.
We don't know a whole lot about other than military operatives might have come from this location and it's not canon. Vault 114, on the other hand, well, you've got a bunch of families who are living in a terrible situation because they expect to be pampered and they weren't pampered. But worse than that is that the initial overseer seems kind of like he's, I don't know, not a great guy to be running a vault like that. So I'm sure this situation would have degraded very quickly.
So without more information about 141, living in a vault with some military dudes, it's not so bad. I have friends who serve in the military. That's, they could be nice people. Who knows?
Vault 114, a bunch of pampered yuppies who are complaining that they have to live in single family apartments and a guy who's insane running the whole thing. Yeah, that seems way worse. So that one wins for being worse. Let's move it into the next round.
All right. So the vaults moving on today are vault four, vault 11, vault 141. All of the canon vaults. So interesting that those are the ones that move over.
So I'll be continuing this in future episodes in the next few weeks and going back to the businesses of all, which I've gotten some really cool feedback. Those people really enjoyed that series. I had no idea because people hadn't really responded about that for the first few episodes. And then all of a sudden I've seen people posting things about how they really enjoy that.
So please let me know. The more I know which things you enjoy and which things you prefer, the more I can kind of cater the episodes. So I do appreciate that. Also, before we get to the end of the show, I wanted to kind of fill in some details about some things that came up in the patron chat last week.
And we were discussing some of the stuff that was going on in Fallout 76. And I believe it was pumpkin who said that he kept getting the same fish while fishing. And I was like, well, I haven't, I haven't gotten into that yet. Well, took some time this weekend, got back into Fallout 76 and have started fishing and holy crab.
There's some cool lore going on with the fishing and the fisherman and the weird looking fish guy. And I love the hermit crab that is pulling their boats. All of that stuff is very cool. And definitely some connections to the interloper because there's a picture on one of the tables that has a picture of the interloper.
So there is some Cthulhu-esque old god stuff going on, which totally makes sense for a fishing thing because if you're familiar with some of those stories, it has to do with being out at sea and seeing these very weird things like Cthulhu himself potentially out in the ocean. So very cool stuff. Go check that out. I've caught a number of different fish.
I've been trying to figure out, okay, how do you get the better bait and how do I knock out certain requirements? How do I find a place where it's raining? Because it seems like there's better fish when it's raining, there's all sorts of stuff going on. Also, I took the time during that to actually go through the quest line where you can turn into a ghoul.
And I know I'm a little bit late on that one as well. But it's interesting. There's this whole other faction of individuals of only ghouls who are living on the very edge of the map at the top, like kind of northeast part of the map, and they are gruff. They are a rough group.
And you can see that the Fallout 76 devs are not shying away from some darker sides of the content, especially the whole concept of feral ghouls potentially turning at any moment, and what that means for society continues to get fleshed out. And this is something that is distinctly different than the information that we had, or at least the clarity around this information, even when I started the show, five or six years ago, when the show launched. It was one of those things where it was kind of, I don't know, debatable, whether ghouls were safe to be around some of them, go feral, but does every ghoul eventually go feral? Is that something that you're scared of happening because people are just kind of racist against ghouls?
Or is that something that's legitimately a concern, even for the ones who have been around for 200 years? And there are hints throughout the stories in the rest of the games about how that may or may not work. Is that particular to an individual? Is it not?
Is it more of a general thing? But it seems to be that they are fleshing this out in more and more dire ways. Or at least the ghouls themselves, and this follows along with the stuff going on with the TV show as well, but the ghouls themselves also understand that they are most likely going to turn feral at some point, and that is a very real thing that continues to get pushed in the narrative of these more recent releases like the TV show and updates for 76. So I find that all very interesting, and I wanted to make sure that I plugged that stuff because this is a living, breathing world still.
And I think this is one of the things that when people dismiss 76 because it had a bad launch or they dismiss the TV show because, well, it's not a game. It's a TV show. They're missing out on developments in this world that are legitimately interesting. So just wanted to kind of put that in there at the end of this episode, because not only we get more around what it's like to actually be a ghoul and how that actually works, but we also get things like axolotls that you can find from fishing, which are super cute and also weird.
So they totally fit into fallout. So I just wanted to put all that stuff out there. And also, to remind you or inform you, if you didn't know yet, that you can leave a message for the show. So something I rolled out recently, go to voiceline.app slash fallout and you'll be able to leave me a voicemail.
Now it says you can leave up to like five minutes, but please try to keep it to under two because that seems like a good amount of time to put on a podcast and to be able to answer your questions. And I'd love to hear your comments and your questions and potentially get you on the show. I can't. I can't say that everybody who leaves a message will make it onto the show, but those who I select will make it on future episodes and I'll be able to respond and you'll get your voice right on the show.
So voiceline.app slash fallout. All right, let's go. Thank our patrons. We'll be right back.
If you have any questions about Newcomer. All right. Let's go to our newest patron, Jess some guy who signed up just today as I'm reporting this. Welcome to the patreon.
Jess some guy also have to shout out Germanator, our sentry bot or only sentry bot currently. And thank you to all of all of you who support the show and keep this going. You guys know the drill. Head over to patreon.com slash fallout.
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Come join us. I'd love to hear your speculation on all of that. And what do you think about these episodes and trying different things out? Thanks for being here.
And until next time, stay safe out there. And if you are a wealthy person and they tell you they have a vault specifically for your needs, don't believe them. It's probably terrible. All right.
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