“Indoors or…. What is indoors?” Unsettling Settlements in Fallout 4

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This is the sixth article in the Playing Inside: Board Games, Video Games, and the Indoors series, which explores the ways that board games, video games, and other types of indoor play impact and guide our understanding of the environment.

Deep underground in a nuclear bunker, known as Vault 33, rows of corn grow beneath artificial lights. An idealised image of an American farm with bountiful fields is projected onto the walls behind the crops. From a distance, the real and fake corn plants are almost indistinguishable. As with all of the underground Vaults depicted in the Fallout media franchise, this artificial environment is unsettling, even at its most picturesque.

A screenshot from the Fallout (2024) television series showing an indoor farm growing rows of corn. The ground is covered with artificial grass and there is a realistic image of a farm landscape projected onto the walls.
This uncanny indoor farm features in the first episode of the Fallout (2024) television series.

Uncanny settlements haunt the post-apocalyptic wasteland of the Fallout franchise. Each video game in the series features unsettling Vaults, strange farms, half-destroyed houses, dangerous supermarkets, and iconic United States landmarks reimagined in a desolate landscape. As a postapocalyptic satire of American consumerism, Cold War politics, and atomic culture, the Fallout video game series plays with these uncanny inside/outside spaces. Yet this disruption can only go so far when faced with the realities of game mechanics. Released a decade ago, Fallout 4 (2015) was the first in the series to enable players to create their own buildings and structures in the game. By examining these systems, however, we find that certain definitions of inside and outside remain firmly in place.

A screenshot from the videogame Fallout 4 (2015) showing a community farm growing inside the grounds of Boston’s Fenway Park baseball stadium. Three non-player characters sleep on mattresses on the ground beneath corrugated iron shelters, while a fourth tends to some crops in the background.
A screenshot from Fallout 4 (2015) showing an NPC community farm inside Boston’s Fenway Park stadium

In Fallout games, the widespread consequences of nuclear war challenge traditional relationships with animals, plants, and the environment. Any contact with water that has not been purified gives the player’s character radiation poisoning. Any food eaten raw is radioactive. Almost all species of plants and animals have been subject to significant mutation or genetic manipulation. Within a new ecosystem of giant mutated creatures, humans are no longer at the top of the food chain. Players can choose for their character to consume the meat of almost any individual they kill, including that of other humans. Likewise, the player character is always under threat of becoming food for some dangerous creature.

Amongst all this horror, Fallout 4 is unique in the franchise for encouraging players to build a home on the wasteland, quite literally.1 As an optional part of the game, running parallel to the main storyline, players can choose to spend hours of real time gathering scrap, building homes and furniture from recycled materials, and planting crops one-by-one in the parched, irradiated earth. They may choose to live alone or recruit nonplayer characters (NPCs) to build a cooperative community.

In the crumbling ruins around Boston, Fallout 4 players can establish farmsteads in a variety of unusual spaces, including destroyed suburban neighbourhoods, a truck stop, abandoned city streets, or a drive-in movie theatre. Even the outfield of the iconic Fenway Park stadium has been converted into a farm with mutated crops and two-headed cows. Every game in the series addresses environmental destruction and societal collapse, yet only Fallout 4 offers the tools to build self-sufficient, collaborative communities.

A screenshot from the videogame Fallout 4 (2015) showing the player planting a carrot in a small patch of dirt in the street of a postapocalyptic suburban neighbourhood. A vivid green user interface shows statistics for their settlement, such as the population size, their happiness, and how much food they produce.
A player planting crops in patches of dirt on a postapocalyptic suburban street in Fallout 4 (2015)

Of course, player agency means that these settlements can take almost any form. From bizarre gravity-defying structures and solitary fortresses topped with machine gun turrets to haphazard collections of beds set outdoors among scattered crops. However, players must consider the desires of their NPCs if they want a thriving community. For NPCs to be happy, players must provide for four fundamental needs: water, food, defence, and shelter. In this latter requirement, we find the meeting point between player creativity, the franchise’s unsettling of inside/outside spaces, and the need for quantifiable systems in game design.

A screenshot from Fallout 4 (2015) showing a simple player-made wooden structure with a mattress and a sleeping bag. Resembling a cube without walls, the structure consists of a wooden floor and a flat roof supported by four pillars.
A screenshot from Fallout 4 (2015) showing a simple player-made structure with a mattress and a sleeping bag. According to the game, these beds are sheltered ‘inside.’

In Fallout 4, each NPC needs their own bed inside a shelter to be happy. This system further complicates the franchise’s unsettling of inside/outside spaces with players asking: what is indoors? A month after the game’s release, user Simking (2015) created a community discussion post on the Steam gaming platform with the title “Indoors or…. What is indoors?” They write:

So the game tells us that settlers want their beds indoors, but what does the game consider indoors? i [sic] can put all of their beds in prefab shacks with doors, all completely enclosed. Yet the settlers will consistently wander around complaining aboug [sic] the bed situation. Do the pre-existing structures count as indoors even though you cant [sic] put doors on them? its [sic] so confusing.1

According to the game, ‘shelter’ means a bed under a roof. A sleeping bag on the ground in the open air is not sheltered. A sleeping bag on the ground beneath a half-collapsed building with gaping holes in the roof is sheltered. Even rusted sheet metal propped on a frame without walls counts as being inside for the game’s definition of a ‘shelter.’

However, when a green-tinged radiation storm rolls into the settlement, no player-made structure can provide sufficient shelter. To seek safety from the radiation, player characters need to enter a space that the game defines as truly inside. These are structures with large complex interiors—such as shopping malls, factories, or Vaults—that are separated from the vast exterior wasteland by a loading screen. From inside, a player can no longer see the outside landscape. Instead, most windows are opaque or show a simplified image of the ‘outdoors,’ such as a sky, rather than a true view of the exterior environment.

A screenshot of a damaged mid-century modern house in Fallout 4 (2015) with gaps in the roof and a missing front door. The room has been decorated with salvaged mid-century furniture, including a red couch and chairs, a wire magazine rack, a television showing a black-and-white test card screen with the message: “please stand by.”
Entering this house in Fallout 4 (2015) does not require a loading screen. It is not one of the truly inside interior locations. A such, the game defines it as ‘inside’ for the purpose of NPC shelter requirements, but not for protection from radiation storms.
A screenshot from Fallout 4 (2015) of a messy abandoned warehouse with tall shelves of haphazard crates and rusted kitchen appliances. A shattered glass roof shows a blue sky with fluffy white clouds above.
In Fallout 4 (2015), this warehouse is a truly inside interior location that is separated from the outside by a loading screen. The shattered glass roof shows a simplified image of a generic sky, rather than a direct view of the game’s exterior environment.

Within this context, player-created structures are technically outside because they have been built on top of the game’s exterior landscape. Players cannot create truly inside spaces. In special cases players can decorate and build inside existing structures, such as through a purchasable home in Fenway Park’s Diamond City or through the Vault-Tec Workshop (2016) add-on content. Without the use of modding tools, however, players cannot create these interior locations, nor can they create a connection between an interior location and the outside world.

Here we find the limits of Fallout 4’s unsettling of inside/outside spaces. Player agency and creativity can only go so far within the game’s limits. For certain systems, there still needs to be a strict delineation between indoors and outdoors. Within the Fallout franchise, it seems fitting that we experience this line most clearly when seeking shelter from radiation. Yet, within this violent setting, entering an interior location usually means setting foot in enemy territory. Even if playing inside means ‘shelter’ in Fallout 4, it never really means ‘safety.’

Notes

1 Whilst the online multiplayer game Fallout 76 (2018) allows players to build a base (known as a C.A.M.P.), the function is focused on utility and creative expression for the player. For instance, players can use their bases for storage, modifying and repairing their weapons or armor, and for displaying unique decorative objects and trophies. Unlike the rest of the franchise, Fallout 76 also features landscapes that seem almost unaffected by nuclear war, such as lush green forests and a near-pristine golf course.

2 Simking. “Indoors or…. What is indoors?” Steam Community Discussions, Dec 12, 2015.

References

Bethesda Game Studios. 2015. Fallout 4. Bethesda Softworks. Microsoft Windows,

PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

Bethesda Game Studios. 2018. Fallout 76. Bethesda Softworks. Microsoft Windows,

PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

Fallout. Season 1, episode 1, “The End.” Directed by Jonathan Nolan, aired Apr 11, 2024, on

Amazon Prime Video.

Simking. “Indoors or….What is indoors?” Steam Community Discussions, Dec 12, 2015. https://steamcommunity.com/app/377160/discussions/0/494631967658890828

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Candice Allmark-Kent

Candice is an American-British independent scholar in the fields of literature and science, history, ecocriticism, and human-animal studies. She received her PhD in 2016 and expanded upon that research for her book Literature, Science, and Animal Advocacy in Canada. She studied at the University of Exeter in England and Carleton University in Canada. She has taught British, Irish, and North American literature and history. Her specialist expertise is the history of animals in Canadian literature, including the wild animal story and Nature Fakers controversy.

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