Vault Tec Industries [Fallout]

Today, we take a leap back into the world of Fallout to talk about the reason that Fallout exists-- Vault Tec industries. Surely, a company who's sole reason for existing was to create fallout shelters to save people from a nuclear apocalypse would be a morally rich company, right? We go over everything from their roots to their end to find out.

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Transcript

Hey there, welcome to the Lore’d to Death podcast– a deep dive into the lore of your favourite games, movies, shows, and more! My name is Brett, and today I don’t want to set the world on fire, I just want to talk about Fallout again because why wouldn’t I?

After the craze that has been the Fallout TV show, I think everyone is in that boat. Right after I started watching the show, I redownloaded Fallout 4, loaded up some mods, and started another playthrough… only to have my hopes dashed when Bethesda decided to implement their next-gen update and break every single mod that I installed. So, I was forced to put that on hold until modders slap some flex seal on their work and I can roam the wasteland once again. But to satiate my thirst for Fallout, I’ve decided to write this episode.

You already know by the title, but today I want to talk about Vault-Tec. And in talking about Vault Tec, I just want to put a little forewarning that I will be using lore that was established in the Fallout show since it is considered canon, and it adds a lot of jingle jangle jingle to the topic. I’m also going to be using supplementary content written by Black Isle Studios before Bethesda obtained the IP. I can see why both of these things might rub some people the wrong way, but I think that they’re both perfectly valid, and there’s no reason to leave either out. That being said, there’s going to be spoilers for the games and the show in this episode, so if you don’t want to be spoiled then here’s your chance. So without too much more blabbering on, let’s get right into it.

Vault-Tec was a pre-war company formally known as Vault-Tec Corporation, but I’m going to simply refer to them as Vault-Tec. Vault-Tec started out as a defence corporation with products such as VATS (or the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System, which you can argue whether or not it was a real product or just a game mechanic, but por qué no los dos?), as well as creating the ZAX Artificial Intelligence. Eventually, they won a contract from the federal government which allowed them to design and implement a network of bunkers, which they would be most known for, called Vaults. The Vaults are what made them into the capitalist giant that they were before the Great War, making them the largest company in the world valued at an estimated 3 trillion dollars. But how did they get there?

Well, it’s not exactly known how they got their start, and ain’t that a kick in the head, but we do know that they had their start in as early as 2031, 46 years before the bombs dropped. In 2031, they acquired a local college in Morgantown, and rebranded it as Vault-Tec University, with some of their top employees having graduated from or ended up teaching there. Fast forward to the 2050’s when the travesties of the constant warring, disease, and the collapse of the United Nations resulted in worldwide panic, the U.S. government put Project Safehouse into effect in the year 2054. The details of this project were as simple as the name: keep civilians safe from the effects of impending doom. This included shelters that would protect people from not only nuclear wars, but floods, famine, pandemics, and even asteroid strikes and extraterrestrial invasions. Yes, you heard that right– aliens. But, of course, the main reason for this was because of the threat of nuclear war. The rest of the protections were a cherry on top. 

This is where Vault-Tec was able to step up and place their bid for protecting U.S. citizens from the end of the world. They were, for whatever reason, fairly prepared for this specific situation. At their headquarters in Los Angeles, they built a demonstration vault that served as an example of the facilities that they could provide people as a means to survive a nuclear holocaust. It was this vault that granted them the bid for Project Safehouse, and secured their spot as the wealthiest company in the United States, and maybe the world. The success of this win granted them the ability to expand their facilities and they built a new headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The details of Project Safehouse were largely under lock and key, protected by the New Amended Espionage Act, which means that there’s plenty that we don’t, and will never know. We do know that the U.S. Government commissioned 122 vaults from Vault Tec, and had a budget of $400 billion to do it and that their spending was about $640 billion by the end of construction in 2069. So, Vault-Tec spent almost 150% of their initial budget which leads to an interesting question: how did the U.S. pay for these vaults?

We know by this point, the U.S. was facing a nationwide plague and quarantines, as well as fighting a full-fledged war and undergoing a severe energy crisis. Needless to say, the U.S. was not the mighty mighty man that it used to be. Because of this, they weren’t able to just pay out of their own coffers, but instead relied on the sale of junk bonds to finance the project. If you don’t know what a junk bond is, it’s basically a bond that you can buy that has a higher risk of default at best, but offers higher yields to compensate for the increased risk. So basically you spend a smaller amount on junk bonds than you would other investments and hope that they eventually turn a profit for you, and if they don’t then you hopefully didn’t lose too much. It’s high risk, and unlikely to return a profit, but if it ever did then you would probably be rich beyond your means. And I’m sure at this point, the U.S. understood that nuclear armageddon was on the horizon, so there was less of a chance that anyone would see a return investment on these junk bonds because… well… banks don’t run on nuclear holidays.

So the government sold hope to the people to fund Project Safehouse in the hopes that it would be a saving grace for humanity. However, I mentioned before that there were only 122 vaults commissioned, which isn’t a lot. I want to be able to do the maths here, but there are a few issues with getting an accurate number. In looking into the vaults, we know that some vaults had a capacity as low as 100, where other larger vaults could house 1,000 people with hot bunking, but the target may have been around 500 depending on the vault. On top of that, we only know the population of 13 vaults, which doesn’t give us much to go on. However, based on the number of inhabitants that we know were in each of those 13 vaults, we get roughly 2490 inhabitants between those vaults. Take 122/13 and multiply it with that number and we get 23,367 and some change. So let’s assume (generously) that the 122 vaults were able to house 25,000 people. I’m rounding up to the next thousand because some of the vaults that we have information on were sealed prematurely, having less than 100 inhabitants, which I feel skews the numbers a bit. According to the Fallout Bible, pre-war America had about 400 million people living there. Divide that by 25,000 and we get a whopping 0.00625% of people that would have been able to be saved by the vaults, which is pretty sad. Of course, you couldn’t have expected them to save everyone, but that number is just depressing to look at. And, of course, this number might not be totally accurate. This is just based on information that we can find, and maybe that number is closer to 0.01% if more of the vaults were able to house around 500 people each, but it doesn’t seem like that was the case, and it’s probably more reasonable to assume that each vault would  have housed an average of 250 people. 

So that was a whole tangent, but we were talking about budget. So why did Vault-Tec spend $140 billion extra on these vaults than they were commissioned? And that’s a great question. If you’ve ever worked in or around construction, you know that nothing ever goes to plan. At least, it’s that way from my experience. I think the major issue was the lack of definition in the scope of the project given to Vault-Tec when they were awarded the job. I’m sure that there were several things along the way that they didn’t take into consideration, like the amount of technology that would need to be in these vaults to make sure that they were safe for a nuclear apocalypse, and the fact that each vault would need its own dedicated security detail. Small things like that would add up over time. And much like with any corporation, there was a fair share of embezzlement, corruption, and mismanagement to boot. And that’s not even taking the extracurricular vault experiments into consideration.

But, on the journey to creating these vaults, there were several technological wonders that were created, allowing most of the vaults to be built 9 years later in 2063, and the last of the finished vaults to be completed by 2069, like I mentioned before. The development of such technology wouldn’t have been possible without the help of other corporations partnering up with Vault-Tec, like RobCo Industries, which provided the personal information processors, or Pip-Boys, to the vault dwellers. But at the same time that they were doing great things for mankind, they were also simultaneously destroying it in the process.

There’s an incredible moral question when it comes to governing a company that became the most profitable company in the world when their product is something that is only useful when the world ends in a blaze and is only relevant as long as there is war going on. The question being: can Vault-Tec sustain itself as a corporation without becoming morally bankrupt? If the Sino-American war were to end amicably, the U.S. government would cease to have any need for the vaults, so Vault-Tec had an invested interest in making sure that this war continued. This meant that they took voluntary steps in ensuring that the resource wars that were holding the U.S. back never stopped, and they deliberately acquired and buried projects that could solve these crises like cold fusion which is essentially unlimited power. So the answer to that question is invariably, no.

Other technology that was created by or with Vault-Tec that was used in the vaults were large nuclear reactors that would power the vaults almost indefinitely. They also made organ extractors, motion sensors, and even dabbled in virtual reality with the SimTek 5000 which was developed for the sake of getting vault dwellers accustomed to the outside before the vaults were opened. Other technology for the vaults included SimuSun Lighting, which is pretty self explanatory, FloorSuck Autocleaner Systems, Culinator 3000 Kitchen Systems, Entertainotron Rooms and the surveillance system that was installed in each vault, the Eye-On-You system. Their most ingenious invention was probably the G.E.C.K. which was a water purification system that allowed the vaults to basically have unlimited clean, recycled water, and my personal favourite of their products was the Holy Bible: Vault-Tec edition. Everything that they made was generally perceived as reliable and high-quality, which is probably the reason that they were chosen for Project Safehouse to begin with. However, as time went on and they sought to maximise profits, they tended to outsource their manufacturing and let the lowest bidder take the job so quality definitely waned over time, but it was still good enough to survive the apocalypse, for the most part.

The division that was responsible for a large portion of their tech projects was called Future-Tec, and was responsible for a lot more than what I mentioned. Some of the other projects they worked on were related to medical facilities, films that were shown in the vaults, a studio that created games, maps, handled publicity and promotional materials, and more. And you might be thinking, why do they need all of that nonsense if they’re just making fallout shelters? And the answer is pretty simple in that they needed to be able to market and sell the vaults to people. If people didn’t care about the vaults, they wouldn’t get into them regardless if their government was backing them or not.

And so Vault-Tec was kind of the king of marketing. They hired Cooper Howard, a veteran of the Sino-American war and a movie star of the time, to be the face of their commercials. Cooper ended up being known as the “pitchman for the end of the world”, which ended up hurting his career in Hollywood after being ostracised for selling out. And from these promotional shoots came the Vault Boy and Vault Girl, little cartoon characters that would act as their mascots in printed materials and rubber-hose cartoons.

They even had a large exposition at the Museum of Technology which was meant to promote their shelters and explain their functionality and what went into making them. They also had an exhibit at Nuka World, a pre-war theme park, called Among the Stars, which was to showcase the technology that they had been working on for potentially creating colonies in outer space, which we’ll also touch on later. And to top it off, they had all kinds of merchandise made from bobbleheads to lunchboxes, and baseball caps to bomber jackets. They had it all, and it was all necessary to make sure that everyone knew the name Vault-Tec, and that everyone bought into the idea of living in a vault.

By the 2070’s, the same decade that the bombs would drop, Vault-Tec had deemed the U.S. as a failed nation. From Bud Askins, senior junior vice president of Vault-Tec, we understand that they had no interest in keeping America alive because of this notion, and so they opted to place their hopes in Vault-Tec and keep it alive instead. This kind of goes against the entire point of Project Safehouse, which was a means to ensure that the people and history of the United States remained intact in the event of a nuclear holocaust. But I guess when capitalism is your overlord, anything goes. And so, Vault-Tec decided that the best way to preserve themselves was to team up with different corporations, as I mentioned before with the RobCo partnership, to turn the vaults into a series of test environments and basically have them serve as social experiments on a grand scale. This is where things started to get really weird.

Each vault was designed for something different, and each would have a different experiment going on inside of it. Vaults were essentially auctioned off to other corporations so that they could do what they wanted with them, but I believe the majority of vaults still remained in Vault-Tec’s control. Some vaults were fairly benign, serving as places where experimental technology would be made away from the prying eyes of ethics or simply serving as a control vault, which had pretty well no purpose other than saving people from the apocalypse. There were some very purposeful vaults like Vault 22 whose purpose was to study and research genetically modified flora and fauna, and some bizarre vaults like Vault 77 where they locked away one guy in the vault alone with a bunch of puppets for company. And you might be wondering, what is the point of having social experiments happen in the vaults when you could have more vaults like Vault 22 that are strictly useful? The answer would be: data. And the plan was to basically sell that data off with the help of the Enclave.

And who is the Enclave? Too much to go over in this episode, that’s for sure. In fact, there’s probably more history to them than there is to Vault-Tec, but let’s go over the sparknotes version. Pre-war, the Enclave was a deep state paramilitary group. It was a cabal of powerful individuals from across the U.S. which included former presidents and politicians, scientists, industrialists, and pretty well anyone else who was insane enough to join their group who had any pull in the country. They were, in their eyes, the cream of the crop of mankind, and to others they were a bunch of rich bullies who were unwilling to give up their power and were separate from the United States. Basically, they were a bunch of conspiracy theorists who loved racism, darwinism, and plenty of other isms, but that’s not really giving them enough credit. It’s hard to understand exactly what they were without going into excruciating detail. The main point is that it was a group of rich, powerful people. 

But, what was their goal? They wanted all of this data, but for what purpose? And, initially, it was to gather data and research so that they could create a multi-generational starship that would be the real saviour of society in the event of the bombs dropping. The idea was that a thermonuclear war would decimate the planet’s surface (which they’re absolutely correct about), and that the only way for humanity to survive was to abandon the planet and find a fresh start without all of the delicious radiation. But, that starship would take only the world’s “best and brightest” which meant those in the Enclave. So, this is a big part of the reason why Vault-Tec went crazy with their experiments. They had a range of experiments going on, from useful to seemingly insane, and all of that data was being funnelled to the Enclave so that they could take the findings and use it to build their starship.

So, with the rich and powerful basically taking full control over the vaults and using them for experiments rather than safe shelters, Vault-Tec was in full villain mode. Of the 122 vaults, only 17 of them were control vaults, meaning that only those 17 were made to properly function as a safehouse. The other 105 vaults were sold off and held experiments where, like I said before, corporations could do whatever they wanted away from the prying eyes of the government. This meant that there were plenty of instances where people died in these experiments, and not only that but there were plenty of instances where the vault was designed to kill or harm people so that they could feed that data to the Enclave. A great example of this is in Vault 12 where they were studying the effects of a gradual radiation leak, meaning that the vault doors were designed to not seal properly, turning the vault dwellers into ghouls. Did they expect that they would all turn into ghouls? Probably not. They probably expected them to just grow an extra limb and die young. But the risk was worth the cost to them. I want to go over each of the vaults that we know of, and go over the experiments that were planned for them and what ended up happening, but I think I’m going to leave that to the end of the episode. For now, let’s focus on Vault-Tec and what they were up to.

Ethics were thrown out the door, and any ethical concerns were dismissed as being close-minded and counter-productive. This extended to their employee handbook which was, and I can’t really find a great way to describe this other than, fascist. If you thought Amazon warehouses were bad, just you wait. The Vault-Tec employee handbook was so in-depth that it had everything planned out down to bathroom breaks which were a maximum of 135 seconds. Their abusive labour practices were exploitative and unethical to say the least. Employees were also often subject to medical experiments which, believe it or not, were not popular. There were several instances where the workplace and practices within the workplace were attributed to severe depression and even suicide on multiple cases, but these were all buried along with all of the other unethical practices that they were involved in. You might wonder why there were no whistleblowers for Vault-Tec, and that’s a sad story. Because of the nature of the work that they were doing for Project Safehouse, Vault-Tec was covered under the New Amended Espionage Act, which was an operation specifically meant to silence any leaks about The U.S’s military operations which included the vaults. So, with the government at their back, any whistle blowing attempts would have been more harmful for the whistle blower than Vault-Tec.

There were other executives, such as Barb Howard and Bud Askins, who were willing to instigate a nuclear exchange if it meant that Vault-Tec would be able to get more research data. Since they believed that the U.S. had failed, they thought that if they were the ones who dropped the bombs first on American soil, starting the exchange that would turn the Earth into a dustbin, that they could wipe the slate clean and redefine mankind. In the spirit of competition, several of the corporations who they had worked with, including RobCo, Big MT, REPCONN, and West Tek, were in on this idea and that’s a big part of the reason that the other corporations had any stake in the vaults at all. Like Barb Howard said, “We have over a hundred vaults spread across America. Enough for each of you to claim several, where you can play out your own ideas for how to create the perfect conditions for humanity. Whatever you want to do, no one needs to know. And may the best idea win.”

All of these companies together aimed to play god with the world, and America in particular. And since they were at the top, being the wealthiest corporation in existence, they could do so without any repercussions. Like I said, Barb Howard floated the idea to these corporations that they should launch a premature strike to instigate the apocalypse so as to intentionally design societies that would rise from the ashes of the old world but it wasn’t done so just for the fun of it. Ultimately, the goal was to create a society (or several societies) that could learn from the mistakes of the old world, and rise up to a new level where there was no friction, no conflict, and where there was no war. The world at this point was too far gone, in their eyes, and a fresh slate was what they thought was best for society, even though they knew that they would be wiping out 90% of the population of Earth in doing so.

Of course, these plans were all internal and I’m sure that there were numerous NDA’s signed by all of their co-conspirators. And despite them literally planning the end of the world, they were voted company with the brightest future in January of 2077. Around the same time, they were facing a bit of a decline in sales because of rumoured peace talks to end the Sino-American war, but that was all dashed pretty quickly with the battle of Anchorage and the subsequent Anchorage reclamation (in which the first T60 Power Armour units were deployed in Alaska and successfully ended the decade-long Chinese occupation) which caused their stocks to go up again. People were either on two sides about this event, and either believed that the Chinese military was finally backed into a corner and were going to be defeated, putting a stop to the nuclear threat, or they believed that this aggression would not stand and it was going to be the spark for a nuclear exchange. Either way, the war was still going, which meant that Vault-Tec was profiting.

Because of their stock going up, they decided to capitalise on the opportunity by selling off single vault spaces. This was a two-pronged approach by Vault-Tec. By selling off these spaces, they were able to instil a new anxiety in folks about the gravity of the situation, raising panic about the end of the world. And in doing so, they would raise profits, giving them more fuel to recycle this idea and put more into making sure that the country stays in its sorry state. The more money that Vault-Tec can squeeze out of Americans, the less they can fight back and put an end to their own suffering.

Vault-Tec was really drumming up the threat that everything could end in an instant, and so they were constantly doing drills to prepare people. But this ended up having an adverse effect, whether they intended it or not. People got bored of pretending, and less and less people showed up for the drills. This also meant that when the time came, and the bombs dropped, the vaults were not as populated as they were meant to be because people assumed that the real thing was the boy crying wolf. They thought it was a false alarm, and so most vaults weren’t at capacity when they sealed them. This limited the information that they hoped to get out of the vaults because even before the vaults sealed, during the test drills, the drop in people showing up made it harder and harder to collect what they needed to ensure their plans would work after the bombs dropped.

Vault-Tec’s solution, Vaults 31, 32, and 33, were relatively successful in the end. They did what they needed to do for the most part, but not as effectively as they had hoped. They wanted to be the ones to repopulate the surface, but they fell short on that because they hadn’t anticipated that people would be creating settlements so soon after the bombs dropped. Whether it’s because some vaults opened earlier than planned, or because there were more ghouls on the surface than they expected, they weren’t the first up there. And so they basically just stuck to their vaults underground and hid out there until some of them were forced out. We’ll go over the exact plan of these vaults when we talk about the others, though.

The same went for pretty well all of the other vaults. The ones that were supposed to reclaim the Earth after it was wiped clean never did, and humanity ended up finding a way to make it work without them. So, really, none of these corporations, including Vault-Tec, won in the end. They all ruined the world for nothing, and allowed it to become the raider-infested, irradiated pile of rubble that we see in the games.

Over the next couple hundred years, Vault-Tec faded into obscurity. The vaults were seen as this boogie man story to a lot of people, because they had just never seen them. To the people who knew about the vaults, they knew that there was plenty of technology inside of them that they could scrap and sell for caps, assuming they could get inside. As for Vault Dwellers, we saw this in the show that they’re seen as these pampered, goodie-two-shoes people who don’t belong in the wasteland. This is true for some vault-dwellers, but as we saw as well they are more than capable with the training that is provided in the vaults. They’re just looked upon like they’ve never suffered any hardships, which is honestly true compared to the people who were born and raised in the wasteland.

And that’s pretty well it for Vault-Tec. They were a capitalist giant pre-war, with these delusions of grandeur and sense of self that was larger than their pockets. They wanted to rule the world, and they decided that the best way to do that was to turn it off and turn it back on again. Only, they weren’t there for the reboot. They got too big for their boots, and ended up disappearing with the rest of the old world.

And now that we’ve talked about Vault-Tec for a while, let’s talk about the vaults. I went over the general layout and technology within the vaults in my previous episode about pre-war life, so I just want to talk about the different vaults, what experiments happened in each vault, and what the outcome was. So let’s just go from the lowest number and work our way up. And I will warn you ahead of time, this is a doozy. There’s a lot of vaults out there, and over the years many of them have been entirely fleshed out so this isn’t going to be a quick in and out. There’s a lot to go over!

Vault 3 was in Las Vegas, Nevada, and it was a control vault. Like I mentioned before, the control vaults were the only ones made to properly withstand the nukes and were made to be livable past that point. However, I’m still going to mention these vaults and talk briefly about what happened to them. So, Vault 3 chose to remain in isolation until a water leak forced them to open up their doors and trade for goods and services. And as you might know, a vault that opens its doors doesn’t stick around for long, and Vault 3 was subsequently raided by fiends and the inhabitants were slaughtered.

Vault 4 was in Los Angeles, California, and was technically an experiment, but was known to the public as per a commercial by Cooper howard. The Vault was inhabited by only scientists who were free to run their own experiments with no oversight from any higher-ups. This sounds like it could be something that would be for the good of the people, but then again people ruin everything. These scientists adopted a policy of letting outsiders into the vaults where they would engage in genetic experimentation on the outsiders. This included stuff like turning someone into a cyclops, or giving them extra ears. Eventually the test subjects broke out and took down the scientists, reclaiming the vault for themselves. Because they were all mistreated, they wanted Vault 4 to be a true place of refuge for outsiders, and continued to let in outsiders and help them as needed.

Vault 8 was in Northwestern Nevada, and was also a control vault. This vault was opened earlier than other vaults, and in 2091, just 14 years after the Great War, opened its doors and established a settlement around the vault called Vault City.

Vault 11 was in the Mojave Desert, Nevada, and was a social experiment to see the population’s willingness to sacrifice individuals in the interest of general safety. The group had to choose one person every year to sacrifice or else everyone in the vault would be killed. The vault dwellers would make a decision by democratic election for the next 16 years and things got really political in the vault, and it didn’t end very well. The vault dwellers separated into blocs who had their own agendas as to who needed to be sacrificed, and they would coerce other residents to vote in their favour, or they would threaten them. Eventually, there was a coup and a subsequent massacre, leaving only five residents alive. The remaining vault dwellers laid down their arms and went into the sacrificial chamber where they confronted the computer to tell it that they would not be sacrificing anyone this year. They fully expected to die, but to their surprise a message came up on the screen that unveiled the experiment to the five, and congratulated them saying that their “commitment to human life is a shining example to us all” and as a reward, the vault doors unlocked and they were free to go.

Vault 12 was in Bakersfield, California, and was a vault dedicated to medical experiments studying the effects of gradual radiation exposure. I mentioned this one before, but I’ll reiterate for the sake of the bit. The door to the vault was intentionally designed with the flaw that it was not properly sealed, thus gradually flooding the vault with radiation. The inhabitants became ghouls over time, and ended up founding the city of Necropolis, the city of ghouls.

Vault 13 was around the Sequoia National Park in California, and was a control vault. The inhabitants were content to stay in the vault, not interested in going to investigate the wasteland, until their G.E.C.K. failed, forcing them to send out the Vault Dweller (the protagonist of Fallout 1 &  2) to get a replacement. Because of the Vault Dweller’s shenanigans, the Enclave was responsible for killing or kidnapping the remaining inhabitants who didn’t leave after the Vault Dweller did.

Vault 15 was in Southern California, and was a social experiment in which the inhabitants largely had different religious, ethnic and ideological backgrounds. The vault’s opening was specifically delayed by several decades to see how different people from different backgrounds would interact with each other in isolation. There was inevitable strife and eventually, when the vault opened 50 years later, the inhabitants split up into several groups. Three groups left and formed the three main raider gangs: the jackals, khans, and vipers. One group left and founded Shady Sands, and the rest of them stayed in the vault and tried to salvage what wasn’t taken by the ones who left.

Vault 17 was somewhere on the West Coast, I’m assuming in California, and there isn’t a ton known about this vault. I’m not sure what the experiment was, but the inhabitants were kidnapped by the Unity, a group led by the Master (whom we don’t have time to get into in this episode), and turned into super mutants.

Vault 19 was in the Mojave Desert and was dedicated to studying the effects of factionalism, meaning that they were intentionally divided by their values by means of inducing paranoia and mistrust amongst the vault dwellers. The two groups that were formed were called the red and blue sectors. The inhabitants were subjected to subliminal messaging and there were faked acts of sabotage to reinforce the aforementioned paranoia. This eventually led to several of the inhabitants developing forms of psychosis and ultimately we don’t know what happened to them The vault was eventually inhabited by a gang called the powder gangers.

Vault 21 is actually sort of hilarious in a terrible way. Situated in Las Vegas, Nevada, it was a social experiment to study excessive gambling. And how did they do this? They made it so that all decisions in the vault were resolved through games of chance. It was surprisingly stable give the nature of it for several years until in 2274, Robert House, who was the founder of RobCo Industries, was able to use this against the inhabitants and visited the vault with a proposition. He gambled away the rights to the vault and won it in a game of blackjack. Now the owner of the vault, he stripped it of its resources and turned it into a hotel.

Vault 22 was in the Mojave Desert, and was one that I mentioned before that was there to study the creation of genetically modified crops and flora. Eventually, they created a fungus that was able to inhabit the bodies of humans while they were trying to create a form of fungi-based pest-control. Eventually, all of the inhabitants turned into spore carriers, unbeknownst to themselves, which eventually killed them through things like forced pneumonia or organ failure. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the fungi managed to find a way to control the dead bodies of the vault dwellers and raised them from the dead as aggressive creatures whose sole purpose was spreading spores and infecting more people. That’s the stuff of nightmares.

Vault 29, on the West Coast somewhere and… well, we know nothing about it except for a bit from a holotape from one Trisha Miller who stated that vault 29 was full of rich, obnoxious teenagers.

Vault 31, on the other hand, located in Santa Monica, California, was a social experiment consisting of three interconnected vaults. So vault 31 was connected to vault 32 and vault 33 via tunnels, but they were divided by giant vault doors. Vault 33 was the vault that was Lucy’s home in the show which, just like vault 32, housed a regular population where there wasn’t an obvious experiment going on. Vault 31, however, was much different. It was home to Bud Askins, if you remember our favourite Vault-Tec go-getter, who at this point was a brain on a roomba who was maintaining the vault in perpetuity. The reason for this was because it was his pet project pre-war, and several Vault-Tec employees were cryogenically frozen under his watch. They would periodically be unfrozen when a new overseer needed to be elected in one of the other two vaults. The point of this was to make sure that the leader of the vaults were someone from Vault-Tec who would uphold the values set by the company and Bud Askins, and would eventually go up to the surface to claim it under a monopoly. The residents of Vault 32 eventually found out the truth about vault 31, and started a riot in which they were all killed by either infighting, suicide, or starvation. Later, the vault was taken over by Lee Muldaver’s raiders, who got into vault 33 and killed many of the people there, instigating the events of the show. Currently, as far as we know, vault 32 has been repopulated with members of vault 33, and they are both under the control of Bud Askins from the shadows. Of course there’s a lot more nuance to it, but that’s the entire plot of season 1, so I don’t think I’m going to go over that.

Vault 34, in the Mojave Desert, was a social experiment in which the inhabitants were given access to an overstocked armoury with no safety precautions or security measures in place. So, basically, it was a bunch of people who were isolated and given as many weapons as they could want. The vault dwellers manually installed locks and restricted access to the armoury and gave access over to the vault security. There was eventually a schism that led to some of the inhabitants to leave the vault and form the gang known as the Boomers. In the scuffle, the reactor was damaged and radiation leaked into the vault, ghoulifying or killing everyone inside over time.

Jumping all the way up to Vault 51, which was in Northwestern West Virginia, in the Appalachians, was a social experiment where an AI, ZAX 1.3c, was appointed with selecting the ideal overseer from the inhabitants rather than have them be selected through a democratic process. ZAX ended up going a little overboard in their testing of the inhabitants and started to test them by putting them through various crises like hosting a talent show where their bedding and personal possessions were put on the line, which eventually escalated to lethal threats. Then, through manipulating the inhabitants, it encouraged the inhabitants to start killing each other off one by one.

Vault 62 we know of, but it has been inaccessible up until known history. Its home is in West Virginia, southwest of Lewisburg, but nothing is known about happened or what is currently happening in this vault.

Vault 75 which was Maiden, Massachusetts, was both a social and medical experiment, jolly days, which has the purpose of using eugenics to breed young inhabitants into perfect soldiers. It was placed under a middle school, and the point of that was to convince the children who attended the school that this vault was a safe place to go in the event of a nuclear war. When the bombs did drop, and parents took their children there, they were immediately separated from their children and the adults were executed by the security detail. The children were told horrors of the “Uptopland” which is what they called the wasteland, and that the only way they would survive the horrors up top was to get strong and become good soldiers. And then, by process of harvesting genes from prospective candidates, they created those soldiers. They left the vault at some unknown point, and with its doors open the Gunners made their way in to expand their hold in Maiden.

Vault 76, North of Flatwoods, West Virginia, was a control vault. The vault doors were set to open 20 years after the bombs dropped, and its inhabitants were instrumental to recolonizing Appalachia. Plenty of the inhabitants were students or graduated from Vault-Tec University, and it was their job to make sure that civilization happened as normal up on the surface after the bombs dropped. However, they didn’t open as scheduled. The inhabitants got used to their cushy life in the vault and stayed in there for several years past when they were supposed to. They eventually opened up 25 years after the bombs dropped, in 2102, largely due to overpopulation, and set out to recolonize Appalachia.

Vault 77 was in an unknown location and home to the lone man with many puppets. As he was being sealed in, all alone, he pleaded that this had to be a mistake and to let the other people into the vault, but he was shut in by his lonesome. A year and a half later, he found a crate full of hand puppets and started to play with them to pass the time and quickly lost himself to playing games with them. Almost two months later, he began to think that one of the puppets was actually talking to him and he tore apart the “king puppet” in a fit, and tried to blame it on a vault boy puppet who told him that it was he who was responsible. Horrified of what the dog puppet were to do if he found out what he had done, so they escaped the vault together, leaving it uninhabited. This has to be one of my favourite vaults because of how ridiculous it is, but it’s also incredibly messed up when you think about it.

Vault 79, north of the Dolly Sods Wilderness in West Virginia (are you tired of me saying West Virginia yet?), was a secret service facility that was intended to house the United States gold reserves. However, in a seemingly common theme, the reactor leaked, ghoulifying or killing the agents who were assigned to the vaults. The survivors were rescued by the residents of Vault 76, who were enacting a heist to steal the gold reserves.

Vault 81, in Boston Massachusetts, was a research facility whose scientists would work on developing a universal cure for diseases. That sounds pretty altruistic, right? Wrong! They used unwilling test subjects to do their experiments on, and the overseer eventually kiboshed the operation because of a moral objection. The scientists were locked in a portion of the vault with no means to escape, and so they eventually died after trying to continue their experiments on mole rats.

On to Vault 87, in Northwest Virginia, which was another research facility that was dedicated to studying the effects of a forced evolutionary virus, or FEV, on humans with the surrounding population as test subjects. If you know about FEV, then you know where this is going. Long story short, FEV is what created super mutants, and so the people who were turned into super mutants eventually overpowered the researchers and took over the vault.

Vault 88, which was northwest of Quincy, Massachusetts, was a testing facility for experimental productivity-boosting equipment that was supposed to be used in other vaults. However, the vault’s construction was never completed, and the overseer became a ghoul. Later in Fallout 4, she recruits the Sole Survivor to help her carry out the experiments.

Vault 92 was in Olney, Maryland, and was a medical facility that was testing the effects of white noise and specifically trying to induce violent tendencies with it. The inhabitants, surprise surprise, went insane. They were driven to madness, and in an aggressive rage, killed each other. Who would have thought that would be the outcome?

Vault 94 was also north of the Dolly Sods Wilderness, and was a social experiment testing the viability of pacifist belief systems in a post-apocalyptic world. All of the inhabitants were members of a nonviolent religious group with the exception of one devious Vault-Tec employee. The vault dwellers were not given any means to protect themselves, and were urged to open their vault doors to other survivors who would likely be raiders, and the point was to see how they reacted to that aggression. The employee eventually confessed to the experiment, and urged the inhabitants to find a way to arm themselves, which they ignored and were subsequently massacred by outsiders. 

Vault 95, southwest of Natick, Massachusetts, was an experiment where addicts were given experimental treatments for rehabilitation and urged to stay clean of chems. Once again, that sounds like a good thing, right? Oh man why can’t we have nice things? The inhabitants went through a program for five years. That’s no easy task, if you know anything about addiction. Then, a Vault-Tec employee who was masquerading as someone also going through rehab opened a secret stash of drugs to entice the other inhabitants were informed of the stash and their reactions were documented. Unfortunately, after the stash was opened, the vault dwellers quickly resorted to violence. While initially the test results had been positive and the hypothesis was that when an individual is sealed off from the outside world and cannot physically get the drugs they’re after, they can recover, that all went to the wayside once the drugs were reintroduced into the community. Some tried to resist the temptation, but ultimately succumbed. Later, the vault was occupied by the Gunners, and it’s not known what happened to the original occupants.

Vault 96, south of Spruce Knob Campground in West Virginia, was a research facility that was intended to monitor and study the local flora and fauna so that they could be preserved for the future.However, the actual goal was to use genetic engineering to develop anti-mutant vaccines. The whole thing was run by the overseer, Erik DeMarcos, who basically made the others do his research under duress, and because of the unethical nature of the vault, if they failed to meet their quotas there was an automated security system in place that would kill the residents. Eventually, they decided that they didn’t want to be there anymore and tried to sabotage the security systems and escape, but were unsuccessful and were killed in the process. After they were killed, the test subjects were able to escape the facility.

Vault 101, west of Springvale, Virginia, was an experiment in which overseers were granted unlimited authority over a vault, and it was intended to stay closed in perpetuity. Eventually, one of the overseers decided to secretly open the vault doors and send out scouting parties into the wasteland where they recruited an outsider, James, as a doctor. James was father to the Lone Wanderer, the protagonist of Fallout 3, and when they both left the vault, it fell into a civil war and the residents splintered into different groups. Some who wanted to remain isolated, and some who wished to live on the surface.

Vault 106 was in northwestern Virginia, and was there for the purpose of seeing what happened when psychoactive drugs were released into the air via the filtration systems. To no one’s surprise, this ended in chaos. The overseer was sure that the experiment would be brief and nonlethal, but when people started to suddenly hallucinate out of nowhere, they became violent and overran the security personnel. The vault was basically destroyed in the process, and the drugs never stopped being filtered into the air, which meant that any survivors were constantly under its effects and anyone who entered the vault afterwards would be as well.

Vault 108, North of Washington D.C., Maryland, studied the effects of leadership conflicts. Most leadership positions were issued by a terminally ill overseer upon entry, which meant that he would die shortly after the vault was closed which would provide a catalyst for conflict as they would need to elect a new overseer suddenly. The power supply was also made to fail in 20 years or so, and the backup power was not enough to power the vault, there was three times the necessary amount of weaponry in the vault, and it also lacked basic entertainment. So, it was set to fail and test how people would band together and solve these issues… or apparently how they would start cloning the same man, Gary, forever. Gary had several clones of himself made, and the Gary’s became immediately hostile against non-Gary’s. I don’t know why they decided to continue after they learned this fact, but they kept going. After the 53rd Gary, the inhabitants started to wonder, “why do we keep cloning Gary? We don’t have any more room left in the observation rooms” and finally asked themselves what to do about the situation. Then came Gary 54, who was a violent psychopath who started injuring people right off the bat. Eventually, the Gary clones overran the vault, and there was nothing left but Gary. This has to be my favourite vault, honestly.

Vault 111, in Sanctuary Hills, Massachusetts, as you might know, was studying the long-term effects of cryogenic stasis. The catch is that no one knew that they were going to be cryogenically frozen, but rather learned that once the bombs dropped they were locked inside and so they had no choice but to hop into their pods and hope for the best. The all-clear signal was never given, and the inhabitants weren’t woken up, resulting in the security detail and staff to abandon the vault. Eventually, some rapscallions from the institute broke into the vault, stole a baby and killed its mother, and cut power to the vault, killing everyone else except for the Sole Survivor, the protagonist of Fallout 4.

Vault 112 was in Smith Casey’s Garage in Virginia (and yes, that’s an automotive shop), hosted a social experiment where the inhabitants were placed in a virtual reality simulation that was controlled by the overseer. The overseer basically tortured the inhabitants in VR for centuries for his own sick amusement. He would force the inhabitants to kill each other in VR, and them resurrect them in the simulation with no recollection of what happened and continued to use them as his playthings for as long as he lived. What was the point of this? I really don’t know. Fun, I guess.

Vault 114 was in Boston, Massachusetts, and was a social experiment in which only wealthy members were granted access to the vault. They would then be stripped of their luxury and forced to live in squalor under an incompetent overseer who was specifically picked out by Vault-Tec because they had zero qualifications. This overseer’s legal name was not known, but only ever referred to himself as Soup Can Harry who held the firm belief that the government was using tax dollars to pay for Illuminati FreeMason sex parties and loved eating Abraxo cleaner. That’s the kind of man who was in charge of this vault. The purpose was to see how the inhabitants reacted to having everything taken away from them and to see how the stress of having ol’ Soup Can Harry in charge of their lives affected them.

And lastly, we have Vault 118 which was on Mount Desert Island in Maine. This was a social experiment in which 10 residents would live in luxury while the other 300 would live in impoverished squalor. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the 10 who got to live a life of luxury were also in charge of the rest of the inhabitants and the vault. The lower class section of the vault was never completed because the construction funds were embezzled, and so this never really came to fruition. Instead, one of the main investors was funding the robobrain project, which is pretty self explanatory, and the 10 lucky luxury members had their brains transferred into robots and they lived their lives inside the vault. The only one who wasn’t a robobrain was the overseer, who was the only living person in a vault full of violent robobrains. Eventually there was a murder, as there always is, which forced them to finally open their doors to seek a detective who could help them solve the case.

And boy, oh boy, that’s the end of that. I didn’t expect that to go on as long as it did, but here we are. There are a few other unfinished or unnumbered vaults, but there isn’t a ton of detail surrounding them so I don’t feel the need to go over them. Maybe one day, when we get the next fallout game, I’ll amend this list or make a new episode going over new vaults. We’ll see what happens.

So you can clearly see that Vault-Tec was not a morally rich corporation. While you might think that the ones who were creating fallout shelters to save people from the end of the world might have some interest in actually saving people, you would be wrong in assuming that. As time went on, they got increasingly worse and worse, especially with the vault experiments. And I’m glad they eventually just faded into obscurity. That is, until the return of the show. We’ll see what season 2 brings with the new information that Vault-Tec might have been the ones who dropped the bombs in the first place. I wanted to touch more on that topic, but I just don’t think that there’s enough information to tell us whether or not that's true. It seems like the bombs dropped earlier than expected, and even Vault-Tec wasn’t entirely prepared for it, but that could be a farce as well. I wouldn’t put it behind them.

And so, what do you think? Do you think that there’s any universe where Vault-Tec could have not been the villains of the story? Or how about the vaults, do you have a favourite? After going over all of them, I think that Gary’s vault is my personal favourite. There are a lot of good ones, but that one just tickles me pink.

You can find us online @loredtodeath on your favourite social media apps, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have any questions or suggestions for topics, please send me a message wherever you can find me or at loredtodeath@gmail.com. If you’re using the Spotify app, there’s a Q&A function attached to the episode where you can submit any questions or topics. I would love to hear from you!

And remember, if a salesman comes to your door asking you to buy a ticket for a fallout shelter, you might want to consider what’s going to happen to you inside that vault. Is it worth being subjected to a potential lifetime of torture, or would you rather just look into the glowing eyes of a nuclear bomb and hope for the best? I know which I would choose.

And I’ll lore you to death in the next one.

Oh, and I hid probably a dozen easter eggs in this script. And, no I won’t elaborate more.

C’ya.