2. What's The Big Deal With The Vaults?
Emerging from Vault 111 after a cosy 200 year snooze at the start of Fallout 4, you may think that vaults are the best thing in the world - aside from the fact that literally everyone apart from you died in that particular one (but hey, they wouldn't have been alive after 200 years anyway, right?). Vaults, however, are far more than just bomb shelters in the Fallout mythos. The US government commissioned 122 vaults to be built in 2054, with most of them being completed by 2074. But unbeknownst (weird word) to the population, these vaults were actually designed to study people under various conditions, with the majority of them being the site of cruel and unethical experiments. Vault 13, for example, was designed in a way that radiation would intentionally leak into it, so that the government could study what effect it would have on people (not a good one, obviously). Vault 112 was plugged into a virtual reality simulator run by a psychopathic overseer, while Vault 106 was filled with airborne psychoactive drugs that drove the whole place insane. Only a small number of vaults were built purely with the purpose of sheltering their inhabitants, and you're likely to hear a lot of talk in the wasteland about the terrible things that happened in the vast majority of them. If you're intrigued to read about the most shocking experiments that happened in Fallout's Vaults,
you can find 10 of them here.