Fallout 4 on /v/

1 Q: why was the institute killing random people and replacing them with synths?

A: They wanted to influence the surface. Shortly before the beginning of the game, the surfacers were going to witch hunt the Institute. Replacing key people and giving them orders can curb the efforts of the top siders. Dumping super mutants onto the surface was the other half of these efforts.

2 Q: Why is Father dodgy about talking about synths, and why they make synths, and why they replace people with synths?

A: He really doesn't want to, for in-game reasons. The Toot despises talking about the synth problem, because every time they talk about it, they might be forced to face the fact that they are making sentient beings into slaves.
The rhetoric floating around the toot is that the runaways and the rebels are just "malfunctions" and bugs that need to be worked out. They pretend they're not being immoral, because they pretend synths are just malfunctioning robots. But there is an extreme level of cognitive dissonance about this, and they are desperately trying to avoid facing this issue, to the point of threatening mind wipes on any synths that even begin to question their status. This can be observed in a random encounter conversation between a courser and a synth floor sweeper. But we do see the purpose of making synths throughout the game. They were originally intended to be the perfect workforce, since they don't need the same amount of food and sleep as regular humans, but they are smarter than robots and have intuition that robots lack, so they can be more autonomous in carrying out orders.
Synths are supposed to be super better robots, but they have the little malfunction of having free will and wishes and dreams and wants and desires. These bugs should be worked out before production advances. Because it's immoral to create things with free will, and then tell them to dig a ditch for every day of their lives. So the Railroad is right, synths should be freed, or the toot needs to at least perfect the process and make it so synths don't want to be slaves. A robot doesn't object to being just a worker after all, since it doesn't have hopes and dreams. It's just a robot. The entire moral quandary with synths is that they have free will and desires.
So there is why synths were made, as well as why Father doesn't want to talk about it.

3 Q: But why can't I convince him to talk about it? I'm his parent.

A: Sean doesn't value your blood relationship. When you first arrive at the toot, he literally says "I didn't expect you to survive out there, in that wasteland". He doesn't give a shit about you. So what makes you think he's going to face the flaw of his life's work just because this person, that he verbalized he doesn't care about, asks him to? He's a sociopath that has been groomed by the Toot from infancy to be a loyal toot scientist. He's not going to suddenly get into the details of the synth program and the potential flaws with you when you waltz into his life. Especially since he's already aware of the issues with the synth program, he just doesn't want to talk about them.

4 Q: Why did the Institute make synths when robots already exist?

A: gen1 and gen2 synths are essentially robots. But the are limited in their capability in similar ways that robots are. They need mechanical repair, and they don't have much intuition and independence. The gen3 synth program can solve both of these issues at once. An FEV derived organic body can repair itself just like humans do, and a robot that has a functioning near-human brain can be very autonomous in carrying out tasks. The Institute is having power issues, and don't want to spend resources repairing and making gen1/2s anymore.

5 Q: Why did Shaun order the cybernetic implant research (which kept Kellogg alive and in top shape for 100+ years) shut down?

A: He saw cybernetics as artificially changing the human form, and his organization is supposed to be about preserving and/or making measured advancements in humanity.
He also hated Kellog, the poster boy for the cybernetics program.

6 Q: If they care about rebuilding why have they been hiding underground for so long? They could've been helping this entire time.

A: They're just waiting for the "tainted" top siders to die off. And they're speeding things along with super mutants. Before the game starts, the Minutemen and various wastelanders were going to try to assault the Toot. And we know from the game that they could have been successful, there actual is a drainage pipe to enter from. The toot does fear an organized and rallied surface, poking around with torches and pitchforks. So they release some mutants to occupy them. They replace some mayors to give a speech about how the toot hasn't taken over the town. They are waiting for the current generation of surfaces to die, because they have been genetically tainted. They are referred to as subhuman in conversations around the Institute.
One the surface population is sufficiently culled, both by natural radiation and predators, and by their own hand in the form of mutants, the Toot plans to go back to the surface. They're mostly waiting for radiation to clear a bit more, and for more wastelanders to die out.
They have no interest in helping, because they see the surfacers as mutated subhuman freaks. "Tainted" as they put it. This echoes the Enclave of fo3.

7 Q: If the top siders were afraid and angry at the toot, why did the toot become exactly what the top siders hated and feared, even if they potentially weren't at fault for the various massacres at first?

A: Yes, this is the main flaw of the toot. They become what the people fear. This is a classic circumstance though. People rebel against the star wars empire, so what do they do? They build the Death Star. It's a classic trope of the villain becoming what the people expect that goes all the way back to Shakespear, and regiciers later becoming afraid of regiciers and other ironic twists. Much of the conflict of Fallout 4 is created off screen, before the game starts, from social ineptitude of Toot administration.

8 Q: But why do anything at all in the first place? They're underground and can just hide.

A: The surface is already aware of the Institute before the game starts. The Institute was originally going to be helpful towards the surface. They sent a representative to the Commonwealth Provisional Government meetings. They were planning on having a mutually beneficial relationship.
But then the synth they sent shot the place up. A malfunction? maybe. On purpose? Maybe. The humans went crazy and shot each other in a fight and he simply defended himself? Maybe. We don't know. We know Toot administration didn't intend the synth to shoot the place up, but who knows what actually happened. The point is that everyone died, and the synth agent was the one who walked out at the end of it. So naturally the people are suspicious of the toot.
This is where the decisions of the toot end up poorly for them. They decide to go underground and cut off ties, and to not interact with the surface anymore. They're bad with people, so when this event happens, they say "welp, fuck that" and close the door. naturally, this response is horrible and naturally the people start to naturally assume that toot is evil and did this. Since they go into recluse mode after it.
So a little while passes, and the surface get out their torches and pitchforks to sniff out the toot and kill them. And this is what sparks the mutants and the replacements.
Tragically, had they just bee n more transparent from the start, things might have gone better.

9 Q: But if the toot scientists are so smart, why did they fuck everything up like this?

A: There is nothing contradictory about insular scientists being socially inept. Much of the conflict in fo4 is from social ineptitude on their part.
Wanting to make a better labor force than gen1 and gen2 synths is not a retarded motivation. Wanting to make robots with intuition, and that require less maintenance because they are organic, and who are FEV derived so have various other advantages like not needing to eat as much and sleep as much is not a retarded motivation.
The plan and motivations of the toot are not actually retarded, everything bad happens mostly from social ineptitude, and scientific intelligence is no guarantee that one is good with people or wise or anything like that.

10 Q: A lot of the conflict in the game is from synths having free will. Why would the toot make them this way in the first place? Why not just make obedient robots?

A: Complete obedience IS the goal of the synth program. That's on their checklist for completing the gen3 synth program. The rebellions and escapes are considered bugs, that will stop happening when they "perfect" the programming of the gen3 synths. Which they state to the player they are still in the process of doing. But they refuse to admit that wanting to be free and questioning your existence is inherent to a complex brain like the human brain. The point of the story is that these sorts of things are inherent in our brains, and that they aren't going to get rid of those "bugs" without also taking away what makes them better than plain robots. The intuition and all that.
The toot would be better off with really complex robots. Not synths, just traditional robots.


11 Q: Why do some characters have odd accents?

A: We know people who have come over from Europe, Tenpenny is an example of one. Emil mentions that he definitely came over from England.

Cait having an accent can, but does not neccessarily mean she came over on a boat. She definitely can have a strong accent without actually coming over on a boat herself. It can be inherited from her parents. That would be perfectly within how the diffusion of language (and accents) works in real life. Recent generations, as well as isolated populations, as well as small groups of isolated individuals, can retain a foreign accent for many generations.
Her just being a huge Irish-aboo could explain it too, but it's less likely than it simply being an inherited accent. She explicitly refers to herself as Irish. She is very clear in referring to herself as Irish. Maybe she just liked Irish culture and is an Irish-aboo, but this isn't what the game suggests. The game suggests that SHE is irish. Whether it was her parents or grandparents or even further up than that who came over is unclear, as it is never explicitly stated who it was or when it was they came over. It could have been several generations ago. We don't actually know the timetable. It could have even been a long time ago, and she's just of Irish descent, like many Americans are now in real life, and her accent is just really strong because she was an isolated population.


12 Q: Why is the Fallout map a wasteland, but places like Chernobyl and Nagasaki are verdant? In articular, grass.

A: Radiation works differently in Fallout. Both the bombs and the radiation itself.
Fallout bombs were designed to irradiate an area and make it inhospitable. They do this through having a high radiation yield, but lower explosive yield. So the radiation lingers and creates a toxic environment. In real life, the bombs used had a high explosive yield. So a larger radius was vaporized, but the radiation didn't linger for 200 years like in Fallout.
Additionally, people actively cleaned up these areas in real life.
But also very importantly, is that Fallout universe bombs follow the conventions of 1950's science fiction works, where people thought nuclear bombs would cause godzilla and there would be radioactive clouds. In real life, we discovered that it's not quite like that, and it's more of just a really bigger bomb that has radioactive side effects.

13 Q: Why are there pipe guns in pre-war safes and containers?

A: This one is two parts. The first is that some of them are actually pre-war. Pre-war americans really were making homemade guns to use in case the resource wars spread to the mainland united states. Whether it be foreign invaders or civil unrest, lots of people prepared with homemade guns. We see this on the cover of one of the Guns N' Bullets magazines. People really did have a homemade gun in their bank safe, or in their lunch box, or in their dresser drawer, etc.
The second half is that many containers simply follow the same leveled list, and lots of things that might not make 100% sense are the result of gameplay mechanics, and lots of containers sharing a loot leveled list.

14 Q: Why does Father let you destroy the Institute?

A: This one is a bit of speculation, but the alternative is that he's an idiot, so we'll consider this alternative to that.
Shaun wanted the institute to fall. He secretly resented that they ripped his family apart, they killed his mother/father, they kept him from reaching out to the remaining parent, they expected him to not leave his duties to spend time with them even when they got to the toot, he knows they raised him in a way that prevents him from loving them. When you show up at the toot, he doesn't feel as a son should. He feels as a scientist should when he gets a new lab rat. He's smart though, so he realizes this, and he hates it. He wants to feel like your son, but he can't, because he's been raised a certain way and now he's a sociopath. So he hates this, and hates the toot. So he orchestrates events to destroy the toot. he sets Kellog up to die, he leaves Virgil alone despite the ability to kill him, he leaves the teleporter running and unguarded, he lets the synths gather rebellion supplies in the literal broom closet, etc. He wants all this to happen.
He allows the wasteland to have your ear before he does. You get an impression of the Institute from Piper, from Nick, from University point, from synths trying to kill you, from Art being replaced, from the brothers in Diamond City killing each other, the stories of the roving gen1 death squads, and all these horrible things before you even get to the institute. Instead of just being the ones who wake you up and welcome you to the new word, they let you stumble out of the vault and meet all these people who hate the institute.

A #2:
Father hated the Institute. It would explain why he lets you hate it before you even get there. Why he lets you meet the RR first, and the MM first. Why he makes you meet Kellogg, the man who killed your parent, before you meet the Institute itself. He shows you the worst of the Institute. He lets you see University Point, he lets you get the story on the roving gen1 death squads, he lets you almost get killed by coursers and synths, he lets you see the fear in H2-22 or whatever his name was, he lets you get all this data from wastelanders, to make you hate the Institute before you even get there. The wasteland has your ear before he does, and he lets it happen.
He could have lied, and said he didn't wake you up because of fear you were injured and being kept alive or some science bullshit you might not look into. Anything. But no, he straight up says "yeah, you living or not was entertaining". he makes you hate him, and the organization.
"Give her free reign to look anywhere she wants, we have no secrets" knowing you're going to find an FEV lab, records of murdering Warwick and all those people, knowing you're going to find terminals with all this horrible shit on it.
So you hate the institute. He names you director with 2 outcomes, both of which he is fine with. The first is that you simply destroy it. You dismantle it completely. He finally gets his revenge. On Kellogg, and then the toot itself. For killing his father, for taking him away from you, and for making him into their perfect little leader. He's aware he was groomed.
Or you reform it. Which is ok, at least most of the people he hates are out of a job.


15 Q: Why did the Brotherhood Of Steel just blow up a place that had superior technology? Couldn't they have used some of it?

A: The BoS see the tech as an abomination. They destroy it rather than use it because they think it's a bad direction to go in at all, and would rather just not pursue anything involving synths.
They don't collect the potato and energy reactor data because maxson is kind of a zealot and wanted to blow stuff up.
in his defense though, they were going down in there and didn't know how much resistance they were going to face. It could have been a warzone. So the policy of "blow it up, better safe than sorry" would have been correct if it was a million coursers down there, instead of the dozen or so we see.
Remember, the BoS was founded the day the original Maxson killed a bunch of scientists and burned the FEV labs. The BoS's primary goal is to collect useful technology. but they have always had the plan B of destroying any technology that they deem too dangerous to have around. Synt technology happens to be FEV derived, and FEV is the original boogeyman for the BoS, so that might have something to do with it too.

16 Q: Why do the gunners shoot me on sight?

A: They're mercenaries more than anything, and don't care at all about stepping on people to finish a job. All it would take for them to shoot you on sight, or anyone on sight, is just someone paying them to. We don't know if it's specifically you they are told to shoot at, or if they're told to just shoot at anyone.
Additionally, when the Gunners are between jobs, they will rob people and extort caps for using a road, and those sorts of things. So some of it could be that sort of thing.

17 Q: Who caused the great war?

A: In the Mothership Zeta DLC for Fo3, aliens are trying to get the launch codes for earth's nukes from a human they abducted. In Fo2, there is a conversation with a supercomputer that describes how computers with a certain level of awareness often commit suicide, or go crazy. This computer suggests the great war was caused by these supercomputers who were bored, or crazy, or just wanted something to do. In Fo4, there is a terminal in the Switchboard that describes the Chinese as launching their nukes first, and the U.S. responding with their nukes while the first are already in the air, suggesting that China started the actual nuclear warfare, up from conventional warfare.
But the actual answer is that none of these conflict. All three of these can happen on the same Halloween morning. There is nothing stopping the supercomputers from launching China's nukes around the same hour that the Chinese leaders decided to launch them, around the same hour the Zetans get the launch codes and launch them themselves. All of these can simultaneously happen.
The point is that it doesn't matter. The message of Fallout is that humans always kill each other, and it doesn't matter if they do it with rocks or nukes or their supercomputers. Fallout is about human nature, and that message is intact in the events of the games themselves, regardless of some background detail. Even though the message would be better represented by humans deciding to launch the nukes.
It's worth noting that it's possible the Zetans were trying to stop the war. They were torturing a human for the launch codes as part of a plan to take them, similar to a parent taking a dangerous toy away from a child. But this is speculation.

18 Q: Why is there X-01 armor in Boston?

A: X-01 armor was made pre-war, but only in a prototype stage. One of the only sets of it was on display as a promotional piece in Nuka World. The Enclave design and produce the Hellfire X-01 armor as a part of their own development, and base it on these pre-war X-01 prototypes.
The player character of Fallout 4 potentially collecting like 20 suits of X-01 is just a gameplay element that is not reflected in the lore. They just spawn at certain levels, and not everything that happens in the games strictly represents the lore or represents how things would really happen.

19 Q: Why are the Super Mutants in Boston so dumb? Why do they kill themselves with nukes?

A: Mutants being dumb has been a part of their design since the beginning.
There was a generation of smart mutants. The early ones that were hand made by The Master were smart. But after that, further generations got dumber and dumber as other people took over making them.
A smart mutant is just a smart as a smart person, but most mutants, like 95% alive now, are not smart. They're the dumb ones that are from subsequent generations.
The east coast mutants think they're hard to kill and are are surprised every time you kill them, and so it wouldn't surprise me at all that, in the mutant's mind, he just slam dunks the nuke on the ground in front of you and then he celebrates killing you while the puny explosion happens all around him. They think they're the pinnacle of evolution and that not much can harm them.
So sort of, yeah. The answer kind of is that they're dumb. Or more accurately, delusional and prideful. But it's not "bad writing" to have a faction like this, it's just one of the societies in the world and what they believe.

20 Q: Yeah but why do they kill themselves so much?

A: They like explosions. They like seeing the puny humans get blown up. They like a very hands-on approach to doing this. Most mutants use sledgehammers and nail board and stuff, but some choose to use nukes.
It is not reaching or unreasonable to say that they think it's cool to use nukes by hand, and they say stuff like "good explosion brother!" when a suicider blows up some group of settlers or something.
This is how mutant society is. Making a bigger explosion makes you cool. It's not more complicated than that.
Real life people have done this exact sort of stuff. Going off to die in some fight and seeing how many you take with you is an "honorable" way to die in some cultures. They don't care that they could have fought normally and maybe lived, they'd rather do the "glorious" thing and call attention to themselves.
This is totally in line with how mutants think of themselves.
A mutant using his nuke when a bloatfly attacks him is literally just a game thing, because they don't have a script to switch to a secondary weapon when a certain type of weak enemy or whatever attacks them. Why suiciders exist in the world is sound, why a suicider blows his load on a bloatfly is just a game mechanic.

21 Q: Why are there pipe guns in pre-war buildings and containers?

A: There is a terminal that discusses confiscating weapons from people at a military checkpoint.
Boston was under marital law after riots, where they weren't allowed to have weapons.
Weapons were confiscated from anyone deemed a "dissident", and the definition of a "dissident" became wider and wider as time went by.
A BATFAL terminal discusses the permit system for acquiring things like combat armor, and how they regulated this process.
The very existence of the Detroit magazine proves that people had been making pipe weapons. It is clear that guns were ubiquitous in pre-war america, but that changed during the war, where they became regulated in some areas. American attitudes dictated that they still wanted their guns though, so they made their own in the areas where they were more heavily regulated.
Pre-war American government took guns away from some people, and they still wanted to have some. There was also a recent Chinese invasion of American soil, and people wanted the ability to fight should more of that happen.


22 Q: Why is there Jet in pre-war buildings or containers.

A: Contrary to popular belief, Myron did not invent Jet. He standardized it and commercialized it, and tested the formula he used on a lot of people before settling on the formula he used, but Jet is actually just brahmin jenkem. Not to be confused with cow jenkem.
In pre-war America, food industry scientists added a new additive to cow food, that made them develop different, much like our growth hormones in real life. As a result, the pre-war cows had this new additive in their poop. When people came by to make jenkem, this new additive upgraded regular jenkem into what we know as Jet. Myron merely commercialized this process. So it was more of a half-truth that he invented it. There were people getting high on "jet" hundreds of years before Myron was born, but they would not have called it that or have had a standardized process of making it.

23 Q: How are there super mutants in Appalachia in Fallout 76 id Super Mutants weren't invented much later by the master or in vault 87?

A: The Wes-Tek facility near Huntersville released some FEV into the Huntersville water supply as an experiment, to see the effects of FEV outside a lab setting. The people of Huntersville got sick, and assumed it was a contagion outbreak. The military was called in to quarentine the area, and no one knew the real explanation. When the military officers on site sensed something was amiss, they were quickly replaced by officers who didn't question their orders. Some of the symptoms the infected people of Huntersville experienced were increased size, increased aggression, lowered reasoning skills, and a green hue to their skin. These are the first known super mutants, and were pre-war. It's worth noting as well that there is a super mutant head in the robobrain facility in Fallout 4 as well, meaning at least one of the wes-tek facilities pre-war made a mutant form (whether it was ever alive is not known) which they sent to the robobrain facility to be examined to see if they were suitable for robobrain use. So pre-war super mutants have been alluded to for quite some time already, if in an extremely limited number and only in a lab setting.

24 Q: How are there Brotherhood of Steel members in Appalachia if Roger Maxson was all the way over on the west coast?

A: In Fallout 3, we learn that Roger Maxson, in California, was in radio contact with the pentagon and the white house on the east coast. So it's been canon that he has a phone since Fallout 3. In Fallout76, we learn new info, which is that he briefly phoned one of his old army friends, Elizabeth Taggerdy, and described to her what he found in the WesTek labs that made him so angry. She merely agrees with him, and decides to help him with his new faction idea. There are many terminals and notes from her people about thinking the whole Knights and Squires stuff is stupid, but they all fundamentally agree with Taggerdy and follow her in her and maxson's efforts to oppose the misuse of technology.
They only speak on the phone for a short amount of time, mere months, before the Appalachia splinter of the BoS is destroyed and scattered by the Scorched plague and the Scorchbeasts themselves.
Overall, this new BoS lore doesn't conflict with anything else we've already known, it's merely an addition.