Hey all. So I'm new to the fallout universe with f4 out (call me a noob) and im not sure if it's something I've missed with lore or something else but....with a nuke going off, how in the world are still most of the buildings, cars, materials, etc. still intact? Not to mention it's been roughly 200 years as well...is this just some crappy nuke or is the game just developed that way to be more intriguing....?

most nukes were low yield if I remember correctly. Presumably, a lot of nukes went off but I highly doubt that nukes went off on every last inch of American soil.

The ensuing massive amounts of radiation, the nuclear winter that inevitably followed, the EMPs which wiped out much of the electronics that controlled resource management systems, etc. were probably what really wiped out much of humanity. This would of course, leave inanimate and extremely study things like buildings largely intact.

Old lore notes that nukes in the Fallout universe are "dirty" nukes, aka nukes that has less destructive power but leaves more radioactive fallout.

Plus the whole franchise is seen through a 1950s Science! Lense, its never been about being a accurate post-apoc simulator.

Ahh gotchya, I was thinking the same with the 50s tech and science but then I thought of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and how it destroyed those cities, but yeah it's a game and wouldn't be fun with all these destroyed objects lol

A bit of both. Nukes in this universe traded explosive yield for radioactivity, so thats why all of the major cities you see in the game are still standing, but also still have pockets of radiation kicking around whereas with real life bombs the majority of the fallout would have decayed in a month or two. To put it into perspective there's some lore thing I read where a week after the bombs there was a black rain that killed off the majority of life that managed to survive the blast, whereas in real life black death rain is something that as awful as the war would be, is obviously not going to happen.

There's also the whole suspension of disbelief thing going on, there no actual reason why the buildings would be standing in 2161, some 80 years after the war, which was the first games date compared to Fallout 4s 210 years. Just what needs to happen to make the game actually fun.

Its also worth noting that because we haven't had a real life nuclear war the actual real world effects of what would be the biggest catastrophe to afflict us aren't really 100% pegged down. Some people say that the entire of North America and Europe would burn down into nothing, with the giant firestorms resulting from the blast. Some people think that although the world economy would collapse, you would have South America escape unharmed and truck along with only dire economic conditions instead of a actual apocalypse and complete breakdown of society that we see in much more fiction than just Fallout.

Ok that seems to make more sense, and also, i feel it would make more sense/realism if there were more destroyed buildings and such, I know that the game was built in 50's science, but look at the Hiroshima+Nagasaki bombs, but then again it's a game and realism isn't so important lol

Have you been to the Glowing Sea yet? its where the bomb went off in the southwestern corner of the map.

Its...A little bit worse than Hiroshima. A little bit.

Ok, so they were built with more of an intent to create after effects and not just a destructive explosion, gotchya

Yeah i've only been there for the part in the story, but thats it, i was confused on it and thought it was just the Atlantic or some body of water heavily radiated, I then realised later that was the ground zero....

Hah. Yeah. They really went all out with Fallout 4, having the single bomb have so many effects on the world. There were a lot of places in Fallout 3 and New Vegas where im pretty sure bombs landed, but they never caused something like the pure hell that is The Glowing Sea. Its great.

Wasn't just a single bomb if the Cambridge Crater is anything to go by. The Glowing Sea was either a much larger bomb or a greater concentration of bombs.