What the TV show doesn’t tell you about the backstory of the vaults in Fallout

The vaults in a Fallout game are some of the most iconic and essential parts of the whole experience. In pretty much every game in the series, you start out with your character in one – a vault dweller who for one reason or another has to venture to the nuclear wasteland above. For Amazon’s TV adaptation of Fallout, it makes total sense that like the games our lead character Lucy Maclean is a vault dweller leaving behind the (somewhat) safety of the vaults for what waits outside. But here’s what you don’t know about the vaults if you’re new to Fallout, because the TV show doesn’t explain much about them.

What even are the vaults?

Vaults in Fallout, as we saw in the TV show, were where the rich ran from the bombs and got underground for safety from nuclear war. Vaults were built by Vault-Tec and in the lore of Fallout they were being promoted heavily to the public as the world feared nuclear attack. Everyone in them dodged radiation because the vaults were deep underground and heavily fortified. They were all equipped with resources for survival longevity.

Neither in the games nor the Fallout TV show do we even know the total of vaults, but it’s in the 100s. The vaults have anything form a few hundred to a couple of dozen residents and in the games some people were frozen in cryogenic tubes.

So they’re all good, right?

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Um, no. Basically, the company behind the vaults are extremely shady and what they didn’t tell the public is that a lot of the vaults were set up for human experimentation. In the games, there’s a vault where everyone was exposed to a virus and died or became something worse: A super mutant. There’s another Vault-Tec filled with the world’s best musicians and forced them to listen to white noise. Another had human sacrifice.

The TV show implies more than a little is shady and wrong with the vaults – but that’s the main lore of them from the games explained.

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