Fallout 4 Story Recap: 12 Major Plot Points You Need To Know

11. 2054: US Government Commission Construction Of The Vaults

Vaults are a pretty big deal in Fallout, and not only provide a convenient starting point for three of the five canonical games in the series, but also reveal some dark truths about the kind of people who are in power in its universe. In 2054, the US government commissioned the Vault-Tec Corporation to build 122 Vaults around the country (which should guarantee us Fallout sequels for the next few hundred years). All the vaults were constructed by 2074, but when the bombs dropped in 2077, many of the Vaults sealed up before their assigned inhabitants reached them, because most of the population thought that the nuclear sirens were just another training drill (isn't the point of a drill that you do exactly what you'd do in the real situation?). Each vault was a habitable, self-sustaining environment that could hold up to 1000 people, and was filled with water purification systems, hydro-agricultural farms and defensive equipment. But the real purpose behind the vaults wasn't to save people, but to use them in a giant social experiment, the Societal Preservation Program. The vast majority of vaults were designed for inhumane or dystopian experiments. Vault 87, for example, was purposely infected with the Forced Evolutionary Virus (more on that later), Vault 92 was designed for the training of super soldiers, while Vault 112 - from Fallout 3 - plugged its inhabitants into an endless virtual reality simulator (controlled by a complete psychopath). The vaults were monitored and studied by Vault-Tec, and it was usually the vault's leader, or Overseer, who gathered the data for the US government (or Enclave, as it would come to be known after the nuclear war). The government believed that these experiments were crucial to understanding human behaviour in isolation, and would be vital in their attempts to re-colonise the country after the Great War.