I never quite understood, why in Fallout 3 they chose to use caps? It made sense in Fallout 1, since caps were backed by the Hub (which was an economic superpower at the time), but were eventually abandoned as currency, and replaced by gold which was backed by the NCR, Vault City & New Reno.

I know, I couldn't get my head around it ethier.
Plus, it's bit ironic that DC wasteland are using the same form of currency that they used over in the west.

Just a design decision IIRC, Like tactics' Ring Pulls... There's no authority like the water merchants to back them.
Not something we're supposed to think about too much,

The caps could just as well be gold coins. What or who decides the value of either? The lack of any surviving factories or other means to make them renders any counterfeit caps very unlikely.

Currency has to be backed by something, and it doesn't make any sense to use caps since no one actually backs them. It would make more sense for each town to issue their own currency, or some sort of promissory note.

I don't think that Fallout 3 really has powerful enough towns to back a currency, Rivet City excepted.

(I suppose Megaton could be argued, but they aren't exactly known for their organisational skills).

I always wondered how Megaton functioned, since there never seemed to be much of an organized government etc.

Also this brings up another question, how do trade caravans survive? There are no established trading companies, and the only traders that you actually see throughout the game, are nothing more than individuals walking around with junk.

Well Fallout 3's settlements look and function like how the very first settlements functioned after the bombs fell 200 years earlier. A design decision I didn't like.
After 200 years, you'd expect the trade to be much better organized than 4 fellows refilling their supplies in ruins where 5 people live and do nothing.
Rivet City seems the most organized, with a council, but it's such a small settlement that it doesn't make much sense. Half of the population are guards with no social life.

As for caps, it's another of Beth's design decision to make Fallout 3 closer to the first title.

I agree it does seem quite strange. Personally I don't think caps would have become currency - in fact I don't think there would be currency at all anymore.

It would revert back to the barter system, where Items, Food, Water, Medicine and of course Weaponry would become the currency of the day. Paper or Coin money would be meaningless, worthless garbage because that's primarily their value today (other than metals to be melted down into bullets). We add money to these games because that's what we know and it passes the Fun test (Who doesn't like to shop?). Plus the barter system is completely subjective to the transaction taking place, and people might find this strange or difficult to conform to.

Caps makes a fun currency, I think it was used in the game for the sake of money being Bottlecaps, and for no other "realistic" reason. I'm down with that, caps are fun!

Caps , gold , whatever. It's how I get my .44 ammo. That's all.

I think the reason behind the main currency being bottlecaps is that all around the capital wasteland there are nuka cola factories, so without any viable source of currency to fall back on, they turned to the one form of currency that was available...bottle caps..thats just a thought. :celebration:

[Also this brings up another question, how do trade caravans survive? There are no established trading companies, and the only traders that you actually see throughout the game, are nothing more than individuals walking around with junk.]

Who said Traders survive in the wastes?


My trade caravans didn't survive lol. I notice that some caravans were missing, so i investigated. Turns out, raiders don't like trade caravans.... :foodndrink:

I always thought regular old coins made the most sense. They can last hundreds of years in circulation. They tie survivors of the great war to pre-war society. There are billions of them in ciculation today. If 90%+ of our population were destroyed, there would be plenty enough coins around to sustain an economy for generations.

See this was the most lacking part of the game to me. Societies, it's 200 years after the bomb drops, is not one wastelander smart enough to even say hey what if instead of having four caravans with 2 people in them, lets have twenty people make up a huge caravan. I though bottlecaps because it's a rougher currency. Paper bills could fly away, be torn etc. Also in Fallout 1 or 2 caravans are a huge deal and you can go on their routes and they use many more Brahmin and guards. There is like 4 trading companies in the Hub. Each with it's own set up. They probably have multiple caravans and different routes. The ones in fallout 3 are awful, one brahmin and a guard? They must not make much.

Maybe because of the Nuka Cola factory and all the bottle caps on the Nuka Cola.

It just seems like Bethesda trying to be "nostalgic" while looking over continuity. It is rather cool though, because using bottle caps for currency adds to the desperation of the world, and to be honest the circumstances are about the same, but the east hasn't had two heroes, The Vault Dweller and The Chosen One. We only see the beginning of the story of the first hero The Lone Wanderer. Protagonists typically have a great effect on the world they live in

This is why those history classes were actually important. Just because we do something or have something now it doesn't mean it occured in the past. Currency, especially currency backed by some other valuable commodity is pretty recent. Past currency was more often based on the item itself whether it was gold, silver or copper or a type of seashell or a wooden nickle. It was paper notes that came to be a representitive denomination of a valued metal.

Caps make sense, it's rare because they're not longer made or reproducable yet also plentiful enough in the Fallout timeline to be currency. I do remember decades ago when bottlecaps were very plentiful. As kids we collected them, often asking store owners that had soda machines to give us the caps. Note for really young people: the machines had a bottlecap remover and the caps dropped into a holder until emptied. We found things to do with them including play money. Quite possibly someone making the game knew about this.

The Wasteland deals mostly with barter yet also have currency and that makes sense. Again look at history; MOST people in the past had little access to money especially lots of money. Fallout is a raw and simple time economically, perfect for a game system to justify very simplistic trade and sale.

I would imagine bottle caps were chosen as a currency in the Capital Wasteland for the same reasons they were chosen back west, a fairly plentiful amount of them survived the war, but at the same time they're not something that can be easily forged, they're also small and easy to carry in large amounts, which seems to make them a good currency to me, after all, with the modern idea of currency, it's not the item itself that's valuable, the value of it comes from whatever value people assign to it. And how do we know they're not backed by any faction? It's never mentioned, but just because something isn't mentioned doesn't mean it's not true, and no one ever said that bottle caps aren't backed by anyone either, I'd guess that if anyone is backing them, it's Rivet City, since that seems to be one of the largest and most organized settlements in the game, while admitably I am not certain if Rivet City would realistically be able to get other settlements to accept the same currency, it does seem to make more sense than it being backed by say... Megaton.

Of course, the reason for the design decision is probably because that's what was used in Fallout 1 and Bethesda wanted to make the game closer to Fallout 1, but since you put this in here rather than Fallout 3 general discussion, I don't think you wanted to know why Bethesda decided to do it.

Currency does not have to be backed by anything.

It's the faith in the currency that keeps it alive. People give value to the currency by agreeing on what it represents. Nowadays the gold and silver standards have long been dropped, so the money we have now is basically worthless, except for the value we give it. People give value to currency and don't want that value to decrease. Hence the watermarks, silver lining etc on our banknotes and the various prints on our coins. It's hard to forge it, and by aking it hard to forge we can keep the value of the money at a stable level.

As said before, bottle caps are small, light, and not very easily reproduced because the wasteland lacks the means to produce them. Granted, the same can be said about tin cans and bottles, but neither are small or lightweight objects. Because they aren't easily forged, the suplly stays stable and whatever value we give to it stays stable as well.

They could have gone with pre-war currency but, judging on the inflation before the great war and our current monetary system, the numbers on it would be large, and the lower the number, the easier to do the math.

If given the choice between dragging heavy junk around to trade for ammo and food, or something lightweight that resembles a value I'd rather go with the latter. Besides that, the big flaw of bartering with goods is that you can never be sure anyone needs the goods you are carrying. If you have a substitute for goods that is commonly accepted, and thus has a common value, you are assured of always being able to get whatever you need as long as you have this substitute.

I don't find caps that stupid to use to be honest.