This was an interesting idea that popped into my head while playing Fallout 3. It seems like it is possible to pretend that you character uses mutated flora from the Wasteland as medicine. For example there's the Cave Fungus and Punga Fruit which heals a lot of health and cures radiation sickness, and then there's the Mutfruit and Crunchy Mutfruit which is supposed to be treated as food and gives you a little radiation sickness while healing a tiny bit of health, but I guess you can pretend that instead of simply eating it as food that you can abstract the medicinal properties from the fruit to make medicine for treating injuries.

I've always been fascinated by the idea of healing injuries and treating poison and sickness with herbs, and I think it'd be an interesting roleplay to become a doctor who specializes in using things from the Irradiated Wilderness of the Capital Wasteland for treating the injuries and radiation sickness of his or her patients. What do you guys think of this idea?

Also I suppose some Wasteland Animals can produce substances that would be useful as substutes for chems like how Fire Ants produce a nectar that helps protect against burns and Nukalurk's tissue can heal a lot of health while at the same time giving a boost of energy.

Healing with herbs? Sounds like more Resident Evil to me.

New Vegas has a lot of this. Survival and campfire crafting allow you to do all of the above and more. It's a lot less available in F3 as there aren't many pickable plants, other than, as you say, Cave Fungus and Punga.

It's a good idea, though. I like using the environment to your advantage.

Heh yeah, I did kind of get the idea from Resident Evil. Especially since I'm roleplaying as one of the characters from Resident Evil 5. :hehe:

I know New Vegas has a lot of it, but since I think Fallout 3 gives you more freedom to roleplay I'd rather use this idea for my character in Fallout 3. It's just too bad that there aren't more plants in the Wasteland that can be picked, but I can collect all the Punga Fruit, Mutfruit, and Cave Fungus I can find and carry it will me to heal injuries and radiation and bring it to my laboratory in Tenpenny Tower and pretend to study it. Plus there's also the Ant Nectar which is useful as natural though mutated medicine. :yes:

Yeah, though somehow I can't see Excella living off the flora and fauna of the wasteland. She would much more likely have her own personal Mr Handy robot follow her around to keep her patched up and looking fabulous.

Well actually she's the CEO of a pharmaceutical company so she has some basic knowledge of medicine which is evident by the fact that she knows how to carefully use a syringe and that Wesker trusted her with giving him his daily dose of PG67A/W serum, plus she started with a first aid spray in The Mercenaries Reunion which I think was due to her occupation, kind of like how Rebecca started with two first aid sprays because she was a medic. But I'm getting side-tracked...

What I mean is it was stated in a file that Tricell had exploited the herbs and minerals found in Africa to produce medicine and chemicals for their company to sell. So even though Excella may not actually be knowledgable about using herbal medicine as much as she is factory-produced medicine, since in my game I'm pretending Excella is a one-woman army running the Tricell Corporation from the comfort of her own home in Tenpenny Tower, I can pretend that she collects samples of plants and creatures found in the Wasteland to be studied for medicinal value.

Herbal medicine has been around since Fallout 2. The classic recipe is Xander Root mixed with Broc Flower. It heals surface wounds, but it clouds the mind.

I actually wish Fallout 3 had more herbal medicine, but I guess it makes sense that there's not many plants outside of Oasis, Point Lookout, and the mushrooms growing in Little Lamplight. Washington DC was hit very heavy by bombs so pretty much all the trees and plants in the Wasteland are dried up and dead, where other places that weren't hit as bad such as Point Lookout or New Vegas the plants survived but mutated due to the exposure to radiation.

Anyways I guess I'll just have to make due with the Mutfruit, Punga Fruit, and Cave Fungus. I know they're meant for eating and I can't really make medicine out of them, but I can't always pretend.

After 200 years most of those plants should be coming back. If anything you can do the tedious work of making new plants, making recipes, and making medicines that do stuff like AP regeneration, night-vision, or boosted radiation resistance.

I dunno, I would think it would take a lot longer than 200 years for plants to grow back in an area that's been heavily hit by atomic bombs. The most you would get are those irradiated green mushrooms like the ones that can be found growing occassionaly in the game. There are the mutated trees growing in Oasis however, and the fungus growing in Little Lamplight that absorbs radiation. However the plants produced from those areas are used more as food than actual medicine, but that can be an example of plants starting to re-grow in the Wasteland.

You should totally go look at some pictures of chernobyl, it's hugely overgrown. While chernobyl wasn't a nuclear bomb, it was a reactor explosion - a much dirtier explosion, getting radioactive material everywhere, wheras a nuke is generally designed to *not* get radioactive material everywhere. If F3 were realistic it would look more like Oblivion than anything else.

OK so it's not realistic (like anything in Fallout's 1950's World of Tomorrow is), but obviously the desert wasteland is meant to feel more apocalyptic. I mean the world is supposed to be destroyed, and seeing dryed-up trees and damaged buildings just gives you that feeling more than if they made it look exactly like the forests in Oblivion.

Edit: OK, I deleted that last part because I was being a tad rude. I apologize.

Oh, absolutely, stick with the wasteland, the atmosphere is much more fitting - but 200 years after the war IRL would bring about a tangled jungle all the same. I think anybody taking this as a bad point of fallout missed the totally realistic energy weapons, robots, perfect AI, cars that literally run on nuclear reactors, so on and so forth.

Yeah I totally agree, but I was still being out of line so I deleted that last part in my post. I hope I didn't just start another flame war. :unsure:

The thing is, is that most radiation from after the effects of a nuclear bomb is from radioactive fallout. In reality, fallout isn't *that* radioactive and tends to wash away with rain fairly quickly. This was know even back in the 50s, so you can justify putting more plantlife in a mod. Hell, on the other side of the continent is farms and plantations. If anything it'll give more incentive to keep playing and modding Fallout 3, because it'll give you a big project.

But I think that only applies to an atomic bomb hitting one area, in Fallout's world the entire earth was hit by atomic blast and the places that weren't hit fell victim to the radiation that spread through the air and water. The radiation basically killed everything and infected the entire earth's water supply, so it either killed off or mutated a lot of animal and plant life. That could explain why there's no normal plants growing in the Wasteland and that it's all mutated. Even the Capital Wasteland had some mutated plants but probably less because Washington DC was hit directly by the bombs.

I dunno, regardless of how we try to explain it I don't realism really applies to Fallout 3 or any of the Fallout games. :shrug:

Actually, what really hurt the global plant life in the Fallout universe is a global radioactive rainstorm that occurred a week after the war. However, I think it's safe to say that D.C.'s soil is safe for plant life. I can see why there can be little plant life in D.C. because most of it died, and we don't see a lot of agricultural projects in D.C. like we did in California. So, putting plants wouldn't hurt, but neither would leaving it be.

Can you actually pick the fungus? I haven't been playing long so there are still a lot of things I haven't discovered yet. Anyway, I tried mousing over the little mushrooms (a habit I have from Oblivion), but I don't think I saw any way to pick them...