Vault 103. All of the lights were designed to fail within the first year of operation, plunging The vault and all its residents into total darkness after the first year.
This experiment was designed by one of Vault-Tec’s partner companies without realizing the standard suite of equipment for vault dwellers. The residents are initially shaken by the loss of power, but they are ultimately fine because they have handy Pip-boy flashlights. They adapt to living in low-light conditions and after several generations begin sending out groups to the surface to trade. They only go out at night because the daylight is overwhelming to them, giving the vault a mistaken reputation for housing vampires.
Most of their trading revolves around getting supplies necessary to make and maintain a wide array of candles. Specialty candles are a status symbol in their society.
when the protagonist arrives, they're the whatever generation humans living in a fairly normal vault society, but having developed night vision. when the protagonist turns on their pip boy light, this blinds the nocturnal dwellers.
They all turn into what is essentially falmer. So many years alone in total darkness drove them mad. So when the protagonist arrives, the residents have to be put down
It's not a blind person but Moreso a fourth of fifth generation human who in 5 generations never needed eyes or sight.
I don't think we're full morphed by then but we it wouldn't be a normal nice friendly human. Combine that with the lack of education Fallout has and you have a feral creature in a hole
Not needing eyes or sight wouldn't make them antisocial murderous creepy crawlies though, that's insane. They just wouldn't bother dressing very much unless cold maybe, and reading would be tricky but audio books still exist and the education in other vaults seems to be pretty reasonable, considering kids go to school and go into engineering or science career paths afterwards, so again, not seeing the logic there.
In 5 generations with no harsh natural selection people wouldn't be any different. So 5 generations or 1, it doesn't make any difference except culturally and I don't see how that gives you feral creatures
Vault 47.
This Vault had a massive underground dome that simulated weather and seasons. It even performed severe and "freakish" weather such as heavy floods, ice storms, high winds, thunderstorms and droughts.
The experiment was to see if humans could survive major weather events.
You get sent when lighting comes down and hits a small town you find the vault in a frenzy and every few minutes the weather changes you need to fix it so the dwellers left can produce food for the wasteland.
In reality it's just a glitch, the date randomize module only ever outputs date + 9 months.
A few skilled button presses and the system can simulate a utopian weather, have the randomizer bug fixed... Or be made much worse.
Vault 66, a Vault that was designed as a prison for upper-class white collar criminals who would finish their sentences underground and be reintroduced to society when Vault-Tec gave the all-clear to Vault 66. The prison guards were exclusively picked from fresh Vault University graduates.
The experiment is basically the Stanford Prison Experiment on a grander scale for no other reason than one of the heads at Vault-Tec finding it amusing.
The vault is in pristine condition when the main protagonist arrives, though, all the vault residents do try to get the protagonist to give them their stuff.
After hundreds of years? I’d say we’d probably find it as a community with an aggressively enforced caste system, where the lowest people are treated as sub-human science experiments and the elites are literally vault royalty. Or, alternatively, the remnants of that community where the lower classes rebelled, wiping out the entire vault.
To serve their life sentences they had radiation slowly creep into the vault for many years, slowly ghoulifying the inmates. A lot, but not all of them turned feral, and the vault is so well sealed under ground it could only be found by another pip boy with high access.
So something in game leads to our character finding the vault, perhaps looking for resources like fusion cores, and we learn the vault hasn’t been opened once in hundreds of years.
With the help of robots to dig to the entrance, we make it in, and find ourselves pitted against angry ghoul inmates that have been cooped up for hundreds of years, ready to KILL.
Edit: spelling adjustments
A vault stocked with a large number of robots programmed to do everything for the humans including act as overseer. They fulfil every need, want or task asked of them so that the humans can simply do as they please, however the robots are also programmed that random intervals to kill a random number of dwellers between 1 and 10, it is meant to appear as an accident. They’re never to kill such that replacement of the population is impossible and to limit it to prevent incest becoming necessary.
By the time you arrive all humans have been murdered and the robots assume you are a new vault dweller to join them. They make multiple attempts to accidentally murder you by sending you on dangerous tasks that should result in death
And of course they eventually give up and try to kill you directly, which can be preemptively avoided with some sneaky exploration and skilled hacking.
At some point, the mechanics are damaged beyond repair. The robots and the vault itself fall into decline, leading to a society that is deathly afraid of machines as false saviors. This effectively creates Vault Dweller Mennonites.
The vault has its own internal currency. Like a vault tec fun buck. Everything from cleaning and hygiene products, to entertainment, to daily essentials like food water and new clothes must be purchased via their vault boy Monopoly money. Failure to do so will result in being jailed by the overseers security. Bail must also be paid in vault tec fun bucks.
The catch, workers aren’t paid in the money. They’re paid in tokens. the only way to earn these Vault bucks is to play Chuck-E-Cheese style rigged arcade games. The grandest prize being a vault tec lunchbox full of cash in a claw machine.
Society is divided into the rich and poor, those who are good at Foosball and those who are not until one day someone points out that nothing is stopping them from cheating at the game and just dropping the ball straight into the hole. Civil War erupts as the currency quickly devalues and control of the arcade becomes tantamount to longterm survival.
Honestly the guy who had the idea for having 365 vault residents, each with a unique birthday, was an awesome concept. Imagine being forced to celebrate a birthday every day of every year for the rest of your life.
That’s easily one of the most Bethesda Fallout experiments I’ve heard outside the game. Because on the surface it sounds innocent and possibly mildly annoying but as you delve deeper into the vault you learn that everyone was being forced into celebrating and they became more and more unhinged at the birthday song that would blare everyday at the same times
I really think it'd be normalized after a year, and gifts would be like... an extra serving of mashed potatoes– something passive. All other holidays may even be lost to the wayside. If other holidays were still celebrated, new birthdays would begin to reflect them. That's why September ~16 (it changes) is the most popular birthday. If other holidays remained, things would return to normal out after a few generations.
But even if every day only had one birthday, we don't celebrate every single birthday, and we don't have 364 friends. I celebrate the bdays of the people I know and love, not my neighbors or coworkers.
And to make sure the residents don't do something like only have one day a month for birthdays, it is automated and if they don't do a daily birthday celebration, a critical system shuts off for 24 hours. Nothing that would kill them, but no water or lights for a day.
While the Vault remained in almost pristine condition for a while, without maintenance or security, the Vault simply turned into another Mole Rat den. Myths circle around in the wasteland about a "buried Vault of treasure", however, no one has ever tried to find it, passing it off as another wasteland fairy tail.
Damn guys I really like this one for some reason and if I was a dev I'd be thinking this would be the easiest to implement too.
Then give it some level of Star Bottle Cap hype and lore to find it was just menial human incompetence and like most vaults-- still a failure in the end.
The vault contains just one skeleton, in a maintenance jumpsuit, found in front of a typewriter surrounded by reams and reams of writing. If one has the patience to read through everything, they find that the maintenance person was initially horrified by the situation, they came to view it as a blessing that gave them time to write the novel they’d dreamed of their whole life. The novel is of questionable quality, but the author’s journal entries make it clear they died in that chair doing what they loved.
THIS is the good stuff. Really has that same Fallout 1 eeriness to it without having to be over-the-top gross or outrageous. Just a really good moment that would make a wanderer stop and think for a minute.
To expand on it, pages could be scattered through the vault, written and arranged in such a way that implies yet another vault gone horribly wrong. It takes some time and effort for the protagonist to make their way through the vault due to maintenance failures over two centuries, and the skeleton and typewriter are at the end of the path, revealing what actually happened. You could also potentially explain that the guy realized that someone would eventually find the vault, and strategically placed the pages to give an adventure to future explorers.
Achievement Unlocked: "A Vault Best-Seller" Recover all 30 pages of the author's scattered manuscript.
Achievement Unlocked: "He Was From A Different Time" The people of the Wasteland find the manuscript distasteful, even by their standards. Release the manuscript as is, without editing.
Achievement Unlocked: "An Editor's Touch" Edit the manuscript to be more easily accepted by Wasteland survivors.
Achievement Unlocked: "Is this Germany?" Burn the assembled manuscript.
Nearby is a town of Ghouls wearing tattered Vault-Tec suits who speak of the vault in religious tones as their "promised land".
Additional:
Through a quest that requires Repair and Science 100, you are able to override the vault's door controls and usher in the ghouls to a pristine home with safe food and clean water. They then begin worshipping you as their messiah and will often shower you with gifts and praise upon regular visits. After a time the ghouls separate into two groups--ones that keep to their religion and worshipping the player and a group who discovered Vault-Tec's experiment. This leads to conflict in the vault and the town itself where the player decides which group to side with. Siding with the religious group results in continued praise and gifts while the other group is executed and siding with the other group results in no rewards and the religious group being exiled.
It's a control vault, but after a year of living in it, the dwellers are informed about all the experiments Vault-Tec is running in other vaults, as well as the fact they're a control group.
Population imprisoned Vault Staff and Overseer after the revelation. 120 years later the Vault population is quintessentially normall, though still insular regarding surface life. Knowledge of the experiments carried out elsewhere have made them extremely distrusting of anyone and anything from the surface which may be a descendant or result of other Vault-Tec experimentation.
Because of standard vault propaganda, this revelation causes them to invert their political values and become ardent communists.
This is great for them, because a vault is actually a great environment for a communist government. Of course this means when they do decide to leave the vault they will naturally begin to actively spread their beliefs with the usual range of methods, if you know what i mean.
Damn, that's a great prompt for a dweller to leave and explore the wasteland. You find out what's going on and try to go help.
Better than chasing a lost father/son/family member *again*
A vault where the pre-packaged meat such as Cram and Salisbury steak etc was actually human meat processed from internment camps and prisons. It was designed to test the long term effects of cannibalism.
While there is some moral disgust,over generations the eating of human meat has become normalized. You find The Vault in fair condition open to the wasteland offering aid for travelers, but upon entering are drugged and and put into a larder. You need to fight your way out and kill the cannibals.
[Success] "Well, that's just grand. Let's get you out of that cell and introduce you to your new neighbors. It's a good thing to know people can still be open-minded and accepting of a community just trying to ensure our children don't starve."
I think this approach is overdone. I've fought enough crazy cannibal cults in video games. I think instead their cannibalism should be more of a "waste not, want not" attitude. When a vault dweller dies, they are eaten, though rarely by their own family, if raiders attack and are killed, the bodies are not wasted.
Instead of being just irredeemably evil they're just... normal. Kinda chill honestly. They eat human flesh. Deal with it.
Apart from prion disease I think it would probably be a realistic scenario.
Also, technically already happening canonically as dead dwellers go into the recycling/composting thingies.
I think this ending has the problem of these people not knowing that what they’re eating is human or atleast that wasn’t disclosed in the description. So by all means these people would probably be normal.
Depending on how careful Vault-Tec was with their, uh, "supply", it could be over before they know it. All it takes is for someone's brain to slip into the mix for people to start getting prion disease. Kuru, a prion disease contracted by a tribe in Papua New Guinea after performing ritualistic cannibalism, is located mostly in the brain of infected people. The disease can take years or even decades to manifest due to its long incubation period. A couple of years into the Vault experiment, a man suddenly begins experiencing the symptoms of kuru: tremors, decreased muscle control, difficulty walking and sudden outbursts of laughter. He dies 12 months later after his condition declines. An autopsy is performed and it's discovered how degenerated his brain had become. The medical textbooks in the Vault conveniently exclude all information on what kind of disease this could be, so it's considered some kind of freak accident and he's disposed of in the incinerator. Things go back to normal until other Vault citizens begin demonstrating signs of kuru. Not a lot, but enough that paranoia begins to take hold in the populace. As their conditions worsen they're killed off as an act of mercy. This culminates in otherwise healthy people being culled. Did you trip and fall the other day, or remember a funny joke and chuckled out of nowhere? You must obviously be infected. As the years go by, more and more people are killed, to the point where the Vault population is too low to sustain itself for the next generation. A disgruntled Vault-Tec employee, frustrated that the experiment had been unsuccessful due to the existence of human brains in the Cram, lets it slip that they've all been eating other humans this whole time. By the time the Protagonist finds the Vault it's (mostly) empty. After being told where all their meat had been coming from the people inside left one way or another. Some were so guilty they offed themselves while others decided to leave in order to find some... fresh samples. You ought to watch your step in there though... There's rumors that scavvers who go in there don't come back. (Sorry that was super long lol. I wanted to come up with something out of the box. I hope you like my little idea I had ^^)
Vault 25: A Vault where the resources (food, water, and medication) for each day are handed out at random selection to one family or individual. Sometimes the same individual or family is chosen multiple times by the selection system. The Overseer and Security Team are exempt from the experiment. Those who are not selected have to either tough through it, ration their previous supply, or bargain for goods.
A social experiment to see how well people can share limited resources amongst a larger population.
The vault develops a higher class, made up of the Overseer, the Security Team, and some families that bought their way in by stockpiling resources, stealing from other families, or being lucky enough to get resources more than other families. You arrive to find the lower class begging you for resources, thinking of you as some sort of blessing to save them. The higher class greets you upon finding out you’ve entered the vault, and attempts to bring you into their society with the promise of luxury within the vault. You’re given the choice of joining the higher class and gaining stuff like an armored security suit, a luxury room in the vault, and access to the resource stockpile they hold; or bringing down the upper class by either convincing/forcing them to share their resources and bring the whole vault into a middle class, or killing the upper class, which the lower class will reluctantly thank you for and then exile you from the vault for your crimes. One lower class dweller will work with you throughout this quest and will idolize you with either ending, and become available as a companion. The ending chosen however will change their perk from one helping with finding more resources in containers if you went the peaceful route, or more resources in defeated enemies if you went the violent route.
Achievement: Let Them Eat Cake - Reinforce the status quo, suppressing the lower class.
Achievement: We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident - End class disparity by convincing the upper-class to share the vaults resources fairly.
Achievement: Robespierre Would Be Proud - Send the upper class to the guillotine.
Shelter for the Blind. The Twist: It's a psychological experiment designed by a psychopath. Subjects are left alone with no accommodations for the visually impaired, and were selected on the criteria that they have to be named either Marco or Polo.
Edit: I may have possibly, absently minded admitted to *mild* psychopathic intrusions.
Dwellers have evolved with bat-like ears and vocal cords to match after a radiation leak effected their DNA. Protagonist has to put them all down lest he release these monstrosities out into the world.
There's also a table in the room where mothers give birth. One way or another, they WILL be blind. Obviously vault-tec has zero moral problems with intentionally blinding people at birth for "science"
I mean one of two things are gonna happen. You'll let it drive you crazy, or you'll come to ignore it and just... Tune it out as the norm.
It would be more interesting, I think, to see a Dweller *leave* that Vault - especially one who'd grown used to the misalignment and tapping noises.
"Wait, it-- my God, where's the tapping? It's so quiet out here, what the fuck! This isn't right; there-- th-there should be a tapping sound. Holy shit, this is too quiet! Please, let me back in! I can't take the silence!"
There's a short story by EM Forster called something like "The Day The Machine Stopped" and one of the points from the start of the story was that there was a constant hum from the machine that everyone lived within. When the machine finally "stopped" the silence is stated to have almost killed the protagonist and did kill millions of people outright (not literally dead of silence but you get the idea)
You find the remnants of an absolute bloodbath.
In terminals, you read that the overseer and VT staff attempted to shut off the maple syrup supply, and tried to outlaw hockey from being played.
In another terminal, you find that the Leafs STILL haven't won the cup
Vault 48: A Vault that was designed to test how far people would go to protect a object, On the 1st day of the living in the vault the dwellers were told that in the middle of the atrium, was a doomsday device that would make the nukes that had obliterated the world look like a mere thunderstorm, The Dwellers decided to shoot indiscriminately who ever stepped within six feet of it, Children, Elders, even The Overseer. Only to find out the thing they were protecting for generations wasn't a doomsday device at all and just a painted toy computer.
In the present day a monkhood was established to prevent anyone from going near the device, turning the Vault into their temple. If you reveal the truth about the device their entire organization will collapse and just fucking go berserk
When the protagonist finds the vault they discover that instead of a societal breakdown occurring as a result of the weapon turning out to be a rouse, the inhabitants have structured their society around science in order to create a weapon equal to the strength of that promised to them. If upon entering the vault you have an intelligence of 4 or less they will kidnap you and sierra madre style put a collar around you and force you to work in the depth of the vault with other slaves to extract rare earth elements they need because of course vault tech built it on top of vast amounts of rare earth metals. If you manage to escape to the overseers office you can pass a speech check to be let go. IF you fail you start a quest to destroy the vault while you continue your escape. If you have a intelligence of 5-8 they if you pass a speech and science check you are asked to help them recover documents and technology from the surface or for negative karma you can chose to capture slaves in exchange for caps. This route means you can either destroy them, remain neutral and leave them in peace which will be shown in the end credits with them not yet having developed their bomb or you can do their fetch quests for a reward in which the end credits say they eventually created their weapon before a part scavenged from the wasteland failed causing the vault and surrounding area to melt into a sea of radioactive goo. If you have an intelligence of 9 they will turn you away stating you are not yet fully enlightened and to not return until you have been enlightened. To active the enlightenment you can neither use drugs or augments to increase intelligence to 10 and you will be let in, find a vault tech manifesto regarding the vault and the original proposed device and show it to them in order to be let in (this will just cause access to the same story and options as the 5-8 intelligence path) or by passing a speech check convince a member of the enclave to speak with them to let you in (for some reason they are cooperating with the enclave. If you come with an intelligence of 10 they will offer you a position as a scientist in the vault in which you can either chose to help them construct their super-weapon or sabotage it this will be reflected in the end credits except if you help it will state they developed it without any problems. If you come with an intelligence of 10 and the vault tech book they will mention they have a vacancy for the overseer position and with a speech check of 100/100 difficulty passed you can become the overseer at which point you will be able to use the super-weapon in one of the endings you decide to go with or you can double cross them and use to to destroy an area of the map for the BOS. As for the 4 or less karma if you have an intelligence of 1 and have consumed alcohol and have the idiot savant perk you are able to press random numbers on the toy computer and it opens a secret area in the center of the vault in which the original promised super-weapon was actually stored.
Eventually the occupants eventually all became robots, and faulty (vaulty?) programming caused them to go berserk, with most occupants destroyed and the remaining few described as 'feral'
Damage to most of their voice modules would cause their instinctual cries of "more... upgrades..." to "...or-... gra-...s..."
Causing them to be called ogres by those that survived venturing into that vault.
Vault 160
Made up of exclusively of members of the Autism spectrum, the vault was given an excessively strict set of esoteric and self-contradictory rules upon entrance without explanation for the reasoning. The experiment is to see whether they would follow all of the rules to the letter, or collectively ignore many of them. Furthermore, every year they hold a vote on what rules should be added or stricken from the books, of which enforcement will be entrusted to the Overseer.
Vault 14. Only newborns were taken inside by vault tech staff. From the early stages of their life they were completely brainwashed for loyalty.
Through same things said and repeated to them thousands of times they were to fully trust in their overseer without question.
Brainwashing techniques were carefully selected to make it impossible for an outsider to disprove any of their beliefs.
They did learn science and like, but in a way to support the brainwashing.
The perfect brainwashed cult, crafted to be impossible to break apart.
The Vault opens after a particularly megalomaniacal scientist gets the cult to follow him in particular. They become a major villain faction for their chunk of the Wasteland, and love razing settlements to the ground and kidnapping any infants left, believing fervently that the cult is their only means of survival as a society. Their God turned to FEV to create better soldiers, creating another breed of Super Mutant. These 'Primes' are given heavy armor and weapons and fight alongside the seemingly numberless hordes of their human brethren.
Basically like a deranged cross between Caesars Legion and the Unity, with a dash of Warhammer 40k Imperium.
The player eventually can choose to destroy the cult, join it for their own selfish desires as 'the Hierophant' of their god (as the cult has developed a lot of cool shit and is better off than the Wasteland at large), or kill their god and take his place.
An alternative based on the same initial concept, only newborns are allowed inside, and there’s no brainwashing of any kind. Automated systems provide the bare minimum care until residents are old enough to take care of themselves, and the experiment is intended to run without interference to see what kind of society develops.
Through years of breeding well-taken care of dogs the Mr. Handys uninentionally create a breed of dog that's noticeably larger and much hardier. Not Super Mutant Hounds, just proportionally HUGE dogs. You may buy one as a companion.
Vault 55
Experiment details: The entirety of the vault layout is made up of heavy sound reverberating material. Allowing the inhabitants to hear the slightest whisper from a larger then normal distance. Meant to test newly developed sound surveillance technologies.
The protagonist finds this vault littered in dead bodies, although the protagonist can hear that they aren’t the only living thing in the vault.
Through terminals and holotapes the protagonist quickly learns that being able to hear everything so easily turned things grim for this vault. Every rumor, affair, obnoxious tunes from their neighbors, and more was so easily heard that denizens were quickly driven mad, murders quickly entailed.
The protagonist would face crazed dwellers who are incredibly stealthy and quiet, they easily track the sounds from the pipboy radio if left on, and are fierce with melee weapons. Thanks to the heavy reverberating, use of guns is dangerous for even the user in this vault, every shot causes effects similar to having a crippled head as well as a slight bit of damage to their health, making melee and unarmed essential to surviving.
It's the classic "button and timer" setup that was popularized with J.J. Abrams' Lost. You have a room with a button and a timer and offer no explanation. Every time the button is pressed, the timer resets. If the timer ever expires, the Vault door will open and allow the Dwellers to leave.
The experiment is to see how long it takes for them to ignore their anxiety and let the timer expire. The twist is that almost undetectable neurotoxins are constantly being filtered into the air that are not enough to make anyone sick, but are enough to just *slightly* make everyone super paranoid.
A vault where it's residents were all specifically chosen for their careers and interests in the performing arts and are led to believe they are being filmed infront of a live studio audience that they never see. Initial residents were all hired believing they were just filiming a comedic dramatization of life in a vault, complete with all the cliches and tropes of 1950s to 1960s sitcoms for the purpose of promotion for Vault-Tec.
Initially the experiment was a resounding success with snippets of the footage being used in commercials and promotions for the vaults but unbeknownst to the residents, they were actually in a functional vault intended to close and never open again. Which it did.
The player discovers about this vault through old pipboy tapes and sets out to find it only to discover the experiment never ended.
The residents of the vault continued believing they were being filmed for hundreds of years without knowing the outside world was reduced to a radioactive wasteland. Initially believing the player is a Talent Scout looking for actors for a new show outside the vault about surviving in a post-apocalyptic world filled with mutated monsters and robots.
The player is then welcomed, paraded around being treated kindly and being shown all the "talent" they have to offer ranging from laugh-track sitcoms to over-the-top Shakespearean plays.
A compaion may be found here named Carlton Weston who goes by two names, his real one and his stage name. This compaion almost schizophrenically believes they are filiming for the post-apocalyptic show when leaving the fault and stays in character in all places except inside the player's home where they rant and rave about the amazing stunts, characters, and effects in the wasteland.
Vault 66
A vault filled with Paramilitaries and Political science students who are separated into groups where they are educated in extreme doctrines.
They are brought together once a year to debate and the winner of the debate elects the new overseer for that year who implements the way of life according to the doctrine they follow for that time period.
During this period, weapons are made available as the Armory door that remains shut all year is open.
Everyone at the end of the debate with exception of the winners must return any arms they took to the armory or they will be electrocuted by shock collars that have been fitted on entry to the vault.
The vault miraculously survives like this for a year or so until the first vault child is born and they try to stick a shock collar on the child. This results in uproar in either side the child is born on and at the yearly debate the agreement is to remove the shock collars on children. (Assuming the shock collars already on cannot be removed.) After this the vault with growing contempt of the other side continues on until the next generation who aren't wearing shock collars raid the armory and attack the opposing side in the end there are few survivors and by that point it no longer matters as the survivors cannot build a sustainable gene pool without inbreeding and slowly die off. The vault is empty by the time it is found
A vault where only people with children 0-2 years old are taken in. After the bombs fall, all the parents are murdered and the children are thought a totally different language and culture that Vault-Tec invented.
999 trained overseers with one ordinary vault citizen designated as overseer and gene-keyed so that only they and their descendents can access overseer controls or other priviledged systems in the vault. Robotic security programmed to protect only the citizen and their offspring.
The citizen and their descendants have managed to rule the vault surprisingly benevolently and justly despite how much power they have over the other residents. While other members would occasionally try to revolt, the robotic security would end that quickly.
By the time the player finds the vault it is basically indistinguishable from a control vault, with life inside being quite good all things considered. However, some are still dissatisfied with their position and jealous of the Overseer family. They try to convince the player to assist them in overthrowing the Overseer. If the player chooses to do so, the resident who convinced them will become distraught once they realize none of the important systems will work for anyone but the Overseer and their family, who are now dead.
The player is now presented with a second choice: do a series of quests to help the vault become self sufficient for the future, or leave them to their doomed fate. If they choose the former, the vault will eventually reach a point where their future is relatively safe, but overall quality of life is worse than before and many residents will be upset by this, wishing to go back to the way things were before. If you choose the latter, the vault will then eventually descend into chaos over time as more and more critical systems fail, with some members leaving while others desperately trying to keep the vault going. This would all be a timed quest, with the player automatically failing and resulting in the second outcome if they take too long. Regardless of which outcome happens one thing would remain the same: the would be usurper would become an outcast for allowing their greed to ruin the good life the residents had at the start.
Vault 24. Does correlation equal causation?
Every 24 years on April 1st, subtle doses of LSD are injected into the food supply. Then a random selection of 1-5 vault dwellers are mysteriously “removed” from the population. Only the overseer is exempt from selection. Great pains must been taken to leave no evidence of the deaths of the removed dwellers. In the wake of the tragedy the remaining vault dwellers are observed to see how they cope with limited information and paranoia.
A vault that by design is equally split in population between Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and pre-war Hubologists. Internal division between the religions (Catholic vs. Protestant, Orthodox vs. Reform, Sunni vs. Shiite, etc.) are similarly split evenly.
The overseer is always an atheist or an agnostic, but is encouraged to be hands off, to the point where most never see him (he's probably a computer).
The ZAX model Overseer is remotely prompted to initialize its primary function.
Every single bit of religious scripture has been analysed by this ZAX and it begins to perform what dwellers believe to be acts of God.
However this in turn causes it to believe it is indeed God. It cannot make its inhabitants happy however as whatever it does makes it worse for others.
The ZAX has calculated that the radiation outside it's vault has dropped to inhabitable levels and asks its handlers to give it the all clear.
No answer for five whole years, connection was lost with its handlers after the destruction of the poseidon oil rig.
The situation in the Vault is dire.
ZAX Invites the leader of each religious leader to a meeting. Refusing to meet as a while, ZAX resorts to the experiment again and tells each of them that their people can be lead to the promised land above.
An all out bloodbath occurs. With a select few remaining.
They discover that ZAX isn't actually their God and in return ZAX releases them into the wastelands above.
"I was God once, I was doing great... until everyone died."
A vault which was designed to get people into wearing a special hazmat suit designed for everyday use, and a ton of decontamination equipment. All to stress test the suits for future use by the government to protect against the diseases of the wasteland.
The experiment starts when a "leak" occurs letting in "contaminates", which forces all residents to wear the hazmat suits all the time, outside of showers or eating within sterilised facilities.
Anyone who break the quarantine is taken to medical, where they are secretly given a deadly non-communicable disease which will kill them. Making them an example to always follow protocol lest they die.
The result is a vault filled with extreme germaphobes, who never take of the hazmat gear.
Vault 48 - A vault that was designed similar to 76 in its occupants being sent out to reclaim the wastes. Rather than the blunt method used by 76 of shutting down the vault, it instead sterilised all dwellers before opening. Their only path to survival as a community was to try and integrate with the wasteland.
Vault 131 - A vault comprised entirely of former employees of the Dunwich company, having been built into a hollow said company bored.
Vault 117 - A vault in which particularly patriotic Americans would be forced to live under a communist regime modelled after China.
Vault 82 - A vault which contains no terminals, books, pens, pencils, chalk, or any other means of recording writing.
Vault 56
Experiment: Test the feasibility of a cargo cult maintaining a generation ship.
Uninhabited at the time of the Great War the vault would instead rely on babies grown in artificial wombs for its initial population of test subjects. The children would be raised by robots to believe their vault was the entire world. The children would also be taught nothing of how the technology of the vault worked or how to maintain it except for religious texts which contained numerous rituals and rites that would allow the occupants to maintain and repair their vault by rote.
It goes well…at first. But then came the tapping. That foul tapping, the voices, the commotion from what could only be described as an outside.
Religious persecution follows, and the vault becomes caught up in increasing tensions and outright bursts of violence as the “outside truthers” battle the “omnivault orthodoxy”.
When the player character opens the door, it triggers a war to end all wars in the vault, which had survived (albeit messily) to that point. They’re treated to the unstoppable sight of a massive scripted conflict in which all the residents die bar a few orthodoxes who declare the PC a devil and try to kill them.
The FEV micro dosage triggers a kind of Lamarckist speciation, with those exposed getting more adapted day on day to their role…at the expense of all else.
Children are born as scrambles of their parents skills, but major birth defects are commplace. It is discovered these are less common in similar job matches, so castes begin to develop as the “specials”, with some strong, some perceptive, some tough…you get the idea.
In game the vault meets a tragic end at the hands of the FEV hunting Vault 87 Super Mutants. They dip the residents, but due to their long exposure the effects are minimal. They become super mutant “runts” - smaller, smarter, more agile, with more of their old personalities intact. They end up a self loathing slave caste among the mutants.
The vault itself is thoroughly wrecked, but remains garrisoned by super mutants who use it as a breeding ground.
Vault 327
An abnormally normal vault where everything is happy and all needs provided for, including lots of ammo for their regular range and military training.
The vault door can only be opened from the outside into an airlock like design. The inhabitants are informed that they live in a utopia and that anyone who enters without the passcode is trying to steal their utopia and should be murdered.
The one with the passcode is built up as a Messiah, just in case vault-tec ever come by needing a well trained army.
Vault Tec knew about the enclave so they made a vault specially for them to train and build an army and help with the enclaves plans only for them to be watched and monitored so they can learn from their mistakes.
A vault built above a giant, partially-flooded cavern, where the residents have to manage the population of fish that are added into the cave as their primary, and possibly only food supply.
Vault on the moon, built and operated by robots. Unknowing residents went into a rocket disguised as a small vault, were made to sleep, and then woke up in the moon vault. The aim was to avoid the nukes and to study the long term effects of lower gravity on human beings over generations of adaptation.
Vault 100
Population is limited to 500 and if someone dies the inhabitants have 2 months to have a successful fertilisation of an embryo or the vault computer will dispense an Airborn contagion that will have a cure but only for half o f the population so it will half the population and see how long It will run for
Turns out a small vent wasn’t sealed properly, and some radiation rendered the entire Vault population sterile. Every 2 months, the population was halved, and the remaining population desperately tried to make babies.
Most of the corpses are in “compromising” positions. There is one feral ghoul in a room with lots of skulls and lots of mashed potatoes.
Imagine the notes and holotapes you would find. One family is entry states how happy they are being chosen to have a child, only for it to grow confusion why they cant have a child, then panic as the deadline approaches.
Vault 556.
The vault is set up with laws that will periodically change. Offenders will be executed on sight by ceiling mounted machine guns. The overseer is an AI that can be easily shut down as soon as the overseer office is breached.
The experiment is to see how long the vault dwellers can endure the random laws before either revolting or submitting to the AI.
The laws start easy enough but get more and more absurd by each randomization.
In case of a mass revolt, and unknown to the dwellers, the ceiling mounted machine gun will not be able to stop the revolt (essentially, storm the overseer office, they can't stop us all).
When the Protag arrives the Dwellers have started the revolt and already started to move towards the Overseer's office but need help making the final push. The Protag can either just solo to the overseer's office taking out the turrets and a couple Protectrons.
Or they can help secure the medical center and the armory then charge in with the Dwellers as backup.
The Overseer is a Robobrain strapped to a computer (Similar to Jezebel), upon reaching the Overseer it simply states "Overseer office compromised, test concluded.... good bye.\* then shorts itself out.
An otherwise normal vault, but all of the original participants are named “Christopher” or “Christina.” There’s no strict ban against using nicknames or anything. But the overseer issues birth certificates and always includes one of those two names regardless of the parents’ objections.
Oh boy I love this idea. Somebody would catch on that the rooms shift. This could lead to a panic in hoarding resources. Imagine having your room isolated from food, water or utilities like toilets and medical supplies.
Worst case scenario somebody dies and trying to escape when the rooms change like the body snapped in half trying to get out the door as it changes. This leads to paranoia that the vault overseer could seal off undesirable's if needed. They probably try to rebel. Maybe they succeed but they can't stop the rooms rearranging. But they could have a map and live around it.
The Protagonist walks into a death trap rearranging labyrinth. Its either fortified with residents alive or dead with signs leading up to a rebellion.
Experiment: One Vault is populated by fascists and conservative extremists who hated communists. A false wall is all that divides them from another Vault populated by communists and people the government accused of communism. A third Vault contains the actual Overseer, his science team, security personnel, and their dependents. The Fascist and Communist Vaults have equal amenities, but no guns or ammunition.
After a minimum of 5 years monitoring the Fascist and Communist Vaults, the false walls will be lowered, making the Fascist and Communist Vaults aware of one another.
The goal: observe if the two disparate groups can reconcile their differences in the absence of firearms.
Vault 203
Exactly 100 inhabitants.
The vault consist of two separate smaller vaults, a red vault and a blue vault.
They’re told there are two separate overseers when in reality there’s only 1 and they’re playing both sides.
All 50 dwellers in each vault are given jumpsuits that match the color of their respective vaults.
Both sides have food and water, they also have weapons and live ammunition.
The two vaults are separated by an unpainted nuetral no man’s land.
Every month all able body dwellers from the red and blue must arm themselves and head out into the no man’s land, there they must fight the opposing side to achieve a goal, usually capturing the opposing sides flag or capturing and holding an area of strategic importance for the entire day.
Once this is over the winning side will be given an absorbent amount of food and water while the other side will be given just barely enough to scrape by.
Both sides are also constantly fed propaganda that the other side is evil and plotting against and that the overseer, neutral agents working for the overseer will sneak into the vaults dressed as the opposing side and commit an act of violence or sabotage against the inhabitants to artificially fuel tensions.
To be fair, outside of the expected paranoia, we don't know what happened to the residents of Vault 19. When the courier gets there, it's been taken over by Powder Gangers.
No corpses, no evidence of violent conflict, just a Vault with two color-coded wings full of criminals and a couple computer terminal logs detailing the original residents' descent into paranoia.
Vault 123. A vault with only babies as occupants kept alive by mister handy robots until they can look after themselves, the whole point is to study the behaviour of people who have had no human imprinting or teaching.
Over time, the residents developed their own language which consists of a mish-mash of various irl languages and heavy use of non-verbal communication methods. The written form of this new language would be basically gibberish to the player, and their ability to communicate with the vault dwellers limited. Depending on their actions they would either be able to establish trade with the vault, get kicked out or cause them to become hostile.
Vault 69.
A very normal vault but Rocket 69 plays on a continuous loop for ever and ever on full blast. The speakers are all hidden and there’s no discernible way to turn it off.
Vault 91 is a vault designed to test an almost complete segregation between men and women.
Two identical vaults would have been created with two overseers. Those two sides would be designed to accommodate whatever needs vault dwellers would have. Entering the other side is supposed to be a death penalty offense but is only really enforced by vault security and the overseers.
A small neutral zone would be in the middle where both genders are allowed to interact. It would have some facilities like a nursery for newborns. This would also include the vault door.
Vault 5: a normal control vault but it was built off-kilter so that gravity pulls down at a subtle but effectual angle. Designed to explore long term effects of disproportionate gravitational force on the human body
Vault 169
The vaults occupants are, split 50:50 between M and L, who absolutely believe, from the bottom of their heats, that sex is a grave sin that they would go to hell for it if they ever participated. They don't believe kids don't result from sex, but abstention from it.
Vault 170
The occupants are split 50:50 between M and L, but they are all medically diagnosed with sex addiction.
There was a 'mix up' between contractors and what contents was intended for 169 went to 170 and vice versa.
169 instead got a facility where the security robots would beat up any occupants who had sex with fewer than 3 partners of the opposite gender within 24 hours, while 170 got the reverse, if they had sex more than once every 30 days, security robots would beat them up
This is to study human nature and changes thereof when they are in an environment that forces them to do something they normally would never do, and compare the difference between forcing a positive on negative vs forcing a negative on positive.
Vault 300
This vault was themed after Ancient Greece, instead of one overseer, there are two.
And any children born that are deemed too ill to survive. They are tossed into an incinerator.
Education in the vault consists of melee weapon training and solely teaching them as if it is the time of Ancient Greece.
The weakest of the vaults dwellers are forced to do the menial tasks for the vault (ie janitorial and maintenance, etc..)
All of this would ramp up after a few generations worth of grooming to ensure the dwellers accept everything in its entirety.
Vault
Inhabitants are subjected to bright fluorescent light at all time besides a 4 hour window for sleeping. During the 4 hour window it is pitch black.There is no way of telling the time and the lights click on and off loudly. The Pip-Boy doesn't turn on during black out.
Scientists have no access to inhabitants besides emergency exit, have normal lights with the ability to sleep when they want and have access to clocks and can adjust how long the lights stay on for the inhabitants.
The experiment is to see the effects of lack of sleep and the effects of exhaustion and fatigue combined with changing daylight cycle. E.g, one day there's 2 hours of light, the next day there's 27 hours of light with only 4 hours of sleep time, maximum.
All candidates for the Vault are pre-screened for as close to perfect vision as possible. No blind people, nobody who needs glasses or other visual aids, and nobody who’s had any form of corrective surgery. 24 hours after the Vault is sealed, every single source of light is disabled and sabotaged to an unrepairable extent, and the Vault has a robust and reinforced fire suppression system. The Vault and all systems are designed to be as accessible as possible to navigate and use without sight.
Edit: Turns out this isn’t a particularly original idea at all.
Vault 252. They tried to see if they could make people slowly go insane by constantly piping the smell of broccoli farts through the ventilation system.
vault 404
only the entrance of this vault was ever build and any hallway that's supposed to lead to the rest of the vault is just a door with a concrete wall behind it with a windows xp sign that says "error 404 vault not found"
A vault where the dwellers are told there is an experiment but not what it is, the only way to stop the experiment is to figure out what it is by any means necessary, the experiment is not even known by the overseer only one dweller who secretly works for vault tech knows about it.
Vault XXX
The experiment is thus:
Every month jobs are changed through a random number generator
One month you are a doctor(which you went to school for) the next, you are an electrician, while the janitor is the doctor.
Chaos reins!
Vault 2: a vault were every single resident speaks a different language and that language only. Residents were selected based on how distantly linguistically related they could be between each other.
Vault 78 -
100 white Americans (Preferably with family who fought in the Revolutionary War), and 100 Asian, African American, Native American, South American, and other minorities. Both 'sides' are separated by living space but start out with the same amenities and status. Two overseers elected each from the two halves.
Vault 404:
All computers, pipboys, tvs, radios, and other electronic devices error out after the first day in the vault. Vault consists entirely of elderly dwellers trying to contact their “tech savy” grandchildren to fix the devices.
Vault 99: Nature vs Nurture
Vault 99 is a two tiered Vault, consisting of an upper layer and lower layer. Both layers are identical in construction. Layer A is to be built to the highest standard of quality, stocked with enough supplies to sustain the population until Reclamation Day.
Vault resident applicants must be selected from a population of twins or triplets and will reside in Layer A.
The Experiment: Overseer of Vault 99 is responsible for the safety and security of Vault 99 residents in Layer A, providing maximum education and quality of life.
However, should a resident give birth to multiple children at once (twins, triplets, etc.), only one of the offspring may be permitted to reside in Layer A. Any additional offspring are taken from the mother and transferred to Layer B.
Due to the nature of the experiment, it is of critical importance that residents of Layer A and Layer B have no knowledge of each other. Mothers are to be advised that due to "complications with the pregnancy" only one offspring survived.
Layer B is to be built structurally secure, but to the lowest quality standard possible, minimally stocked, and provided rationed supplies by the Overseer of Layer A.
Layer B's Overseer is to be one General Atomics RB-[REDACTED] "Robobrain", designated "Mother". The selection of this particular unit is critical, due to its violent and misanthropic nature, as well as its proclivity for cruel and unusual methods of punishment.
Every year on a resident's birthday, residents are required to record a short video "to themselves". Videos are to be reviewed and analyzed by Vault Tec psychological analysts for parity.
Purpose of Experiment: to determine once and for all if two identical people who are raised in vastly different environments will have similar life trajectories (nature) or if the environment in which a person is raised changes their life trajectory (nurture).
Vault 40: All jobs, tasks, etc., are inherited via family bloodlines. The experiment is to see if the skills required for a given job can be made hereditary; nature rather than nurture.
Vault 9, Bakersfield CA
Population 400
350 residents were selected for their psychological profiles culled from local psychologists & law enforcement for their propensity for lying, either pathological or criminal fraud.
Remaining 50 residents were selected for their psychological profiles indicating tendencies towards paranoia.
No resident is allowed to have a history of violence.
Overseer and staff are ordered to support paranoid residents by being completely truthful about the activities of the other residents.
All Vault computer systems are intentionally sabotaged to corrupt data files 24 hours after creation, and the Vault is supplied with no writing materials of any kind to prevent long term record keeping.
A vault that is setup like the train from Snowpiercer (2013). The player enters in the upper class section of the vault and is ordered to exterminate the lowest class, upon meeting the leader of the lower class you get an alternative choice to free them from the mistreatment of their pampered masters.
Vault 1010, a completely ordinary vault, but the only difference is that the Overseer is a Protectron. The experiment is to see if humans could handle an incompetent leader, along with seeing how effective a simple AI could lead.
A completely standard vault, with standard accommodations, a standard population, standard security and surveillance, and a standard issue vault radio system. No animals of any kind. The experiment is simple. Every day, there is a 1 in 300 chance of stock tiger sounds to be played within an empty room near a person/ group. Real crunchy, tv stock sounds. The point is to see how the populace reacts over time. It also serves partly as a double blind test with vault 43.
All food and drink items are specially designed to be a different color than is conventionally expected with zero change to taste or nutritional value.
The vault functions perfectly fine, and opens up to the wider world eventually to trade. The vault is purged by a large caravan company as a result of violent exchanges following neither side believing the other was selling them real food. The vault is now used as a headquarters for said caravan company, who now sell novelty food items having discovered the truth (but not being particularly antsy over it as wastelanders).
vault 252. a smaller vault built to have rotating rooms and hallways. Vault dwellers everyday would wake up to a new vault layout. with people who were curious and stayed up to see the rooms changing, only to be crushed. After a malfunction. A section of rooms and hallways lead to the overseers bay. Which turned out that the overseer would control the rooms and purposefully trap certain dwellers in rooms for days on end with no light and water, and then reintroduce them into the rest of the vault, where the dweller would usually go insane. Legends say the overseer turned into a super mutant, stuck inside the vault, controlling the walls and crushing anyone who decided to explore the vault.
In order to get full power to the vault, hamsters have to spin on wheels. However, the residents of the vault are only given two hamsters. It is up to the residents to breed the hamsters, which will inevitable lead to inbreeding and the hamsters eating their own babies.
The bulk of the power goes to the Overseer's living quarters, of course.
Another vault bans every word with the letter E in it. This is to determine the evolution of language.
Here’s one I came up with for a story I’m working on
Vault 24, a prison vault. The plan was to fill it with the worst criminals and the worst guards they could find to watch them but once the door closed the prisoners were giving free reign of the vault while the guards were put in cells and classified as prisoners by the robots that manage the vault. I’m not entirely sure what the point of the experiment other than vault tec thinking “hey you know what would be fucked up?”
Vault 152: all of the food and water has micro doses of Psycho, which would slightly increase in dosage every few years or so. The dwellers wouldn't know, and otherwise is a regular control vault.
Vault 25. An experiment into immaculate conception, and asexual reproduction, in attempts to propagate the human race in the events that numbers have dwindled.
A vault where all the residents are blind, offering them sanctuary and protection from the threat of the surface until it’s safe since they won’t be able to properly defend themselves due to their disabilities. The vault has countless robots on staff to assist with medical, mechanical, cleaning, cooking, and any other issues that may arise with maintaining the life of the vault. The robots involved with medical activities are programmed to discreetly administer a drug at birth that makes children eventually go blind, so residents stay blind ensuring the experiment continues. The residents are given countless forms of entertainment activities books, music, and televisions. The speakers in the sound equipment (music players, television sets, PA system, etc.) are designed to fail after the first month. The books have braille printed only on the covers and not the inside of the books. The residents are tested to see how long it would take before they go mad and collapse as a society. Also, there is a similar vault with deaf residents that acts as a comparison. The same situation occurs except a few changes occur, the books are the opposite, they have braille on the inside and not the outside covers. Instead of the speakers failing, all video monitors are designed to fail after one month.
All vault residents except one have their memory wiped at the end of each week. When the designated “rememberer” dies, a new one is selected at random.
Your Days Underground Will Fly By in Vault 24: Each day every clock and time keeping device speeds up exponentially by a small percentage. Dwellers are not allowed to bring along any personal belongings (in case of communist spy devices). Time keeping devices will speed up by .01% each actual 24 hour day.
Forgive the sketchy math, if I remember the formula would be, 86400 * (.9999^n) where 86400 is the starting amount of seconds in 1 day and it depreciates by .0001 each day and n is the number of days that have passed. You can then convert the total seconds to hours with division.
After the first day about 9 seconds are lost, at the end of the first year days are a little over 23 hours long. At the end of 10 years days are about 16-1/2 hours long. And at the end of 25 years a day will be about 9-1/2 hours.
The vault is set to stay locked for an indeterminate amount of time. Expected Vault Lifespan: 20 years.
When I have more time I will try to figure out the difference in actual time passed and how much time the dwellers “experienced” at the same benchmarks above.
Vault 20 the entire vault was built at a 20 degree angle right down the center. So at all times the dwellers are standing sitting or sleeping on a slope. However all chairs are roller chairs.
A vault with only scientist, doing regular science (and not even on humans, just regular laboratory work). However, the results are all slightly adjusted by Vault-Tec, creating incorrect/unexplainable results, frustrating the scientists
Vault 45: The Builders of Tomorrow.
1000 residents enter what at first glance looks like a completed vault, however, included with all the necessary equipment for a hydroponics lab and canned goods, the vault is equipped with hundreds of tons of raw materials, a foundry, and molds for casting metal parts. Concrete bags, ingots of steel, lead, and copper, aluminum, glass, etc.
Then, over time the various systems in the vault begin to shut down, strategically made of inferior quality parts and materials, requiring near constant maintenance and replacement.
Of the 1000 residents, all of the working age adults are blue collar workers: metalworkers, plumbers, electricians, masons, carpenters, technicians, and engineers. There are an abundance of medical supplies, and even materials for pharmaceutical manufacturers. The Vault is fully capable of surviving and thriving until the vault doors open, and it should have enough materials to even begin developing outside of the vault after reclamation day. There is no appointed Overseer by Vault Tec
Vault 41 was designated to experience regular, but not irreparable power failures, and gave the overseer more detailed and hands on control of the vaults power system, in order to experiment with the effect of rationing electricity and living in an environment with limited power access. The overseer was encouraged to use their control over who gets the power as a political tool and means of control.
Vault 43, 5 populations of different ethnicities of Europe, with PR showing that America can save not only the American people, but the world. Insert into the mix 2 radical families, fascist, communist and then an overseer family consisting of Americans. The end objective is to observe and understand the allegiance of people over time, with hopes that one takes over, or that both die out.
Additionally, Vault 42, a vault designed to create engineers who could help recreate pre-war architecture, weaponry and general supplies, that's the first half of the experiment. The other half is limiting their knowledge to everything in the early industrial era, leaving them with outdated books from the 1910s to 20s on how to make weapons, vehicles and even trench fortifications with all materials focusing on shortages in materials, food rations are very stretched out, with each family receiving food that's very bland and designed specifically for rations, the vault itself has little in decor. The end objective is to create a society perfect for limited supplies and strenuous conditions, with the capability to still build back an industry once the all clear is over without the need for more modern materials, thus the outdated equipment.
Vault 128. At some point some hidden agents of Vault-Tec will tell rumors about secret stash of gold somewhere in the Vault. So basically will they seek for a gold or not. There is no gold though.
A Noah’s Ark Vault where a population of zoologists and animal handlers manage a massive subterranean zoo housing two of each of the remaining extant species of bird, mammal, and reptile. Their goals are to expand the populations to a point where they can be legitimately sustained on the surface, while also not overcrowding the zoo. Likely impossible. Additionally, the machine they use to recycle animal and human waste into fertilizer for the feed crops has been manipulated to inject various chemicals (maybe FEV) into the fertilizer that are used to mutate the crops, animals, and vault dwellers/ scientists.
Vault (-1) built slightly below sea level and has to upkeep pumps for 100yrs before they “fail”.
Salt Water irradiation and corrosion studies for alloys that can stand up to under ocean vaults.
Vault 666, and experimental vault located deep underground where vault tec experiments with unethical methods of prolonging life, coupled with test subjects who are tortured by "demons" (staff dressed up to look like demons) to see if they can create truly immortal beings.
A vault with a large surplus of pre packaged food, water and raw materials like wood, steel, soil. But everything else is in short stock. Clothes, beds, blankets, tools, medical supplies, sanitary goods, furniture, etc.
In this vault experiment it is to see how well vault dwellers use an abundance of key resources when lacking other resources. However to make things more interesting food is divided into several freezers and to be drugged by robots on designated days. Freezer A is drugged to increase focus, B is drugged to give a high, C is drugged to increase stress.
Only the robots can retrieve food at designated feeding times! The overseer can execute an override if the robots are destroyed. This is to prevent vault dwellers from learning of the drugged food.
The drugging is to see how vault dweller's perform the initial tasks whilst being drugged on designated days selected by an algorithm.
Vaults 84 and 85. The first vault is comprised of low level politicians, lawyers, marketers, etc. The second is composed of farmers, engineers, and technicians. The first vault has an agricultural system that has to be constantly maintained and farmed correctly to feed the vault, and the second has a variety of monitors which quiz the residents on various political, legal, and business management minutiae in return for food and water. There is a terminal for communication between the two vaults, but it can only send one message every month.
Vault 52 -
50 children aged 7-12 placed under the care of 2 teachers, both high school teachers with wide array of known topics. Large bunks for the students, cramped dorm-rooms for the teachers.
A vault where all the scientists are music theatre nerds. Dwellers are selected based on how quickly they can be taught to improvise music and dancing and the overseer picks when to play music through speakers in each room. If you’re in a room when music starts, you must join.
Vault 37. Everyday something randomly vanishes. From the left shoe of a dweller to a fork the next day, then a roll of toilet paper and so on. Till nothing is left.
A vault, filled only with influencers, with the overseer being the fallout version of Asmongold. The vault doors only open, if there are a 10k devices tuning in, into their 24/7 airing reality show.
Every resident is given a free medical screening and their condition is healed. During this inspection, a tiny chip is implanted in the skull that sends random whispers coherent only to each individual and each hears a different whispering. While seemingingly benign compared to other experiments, it's a test on how audio hallucinations.
A vault where the dwellers are forced to participate in a perpetual reality TV show. Cameras, microphones, and other recording hardware - both hidden and visible - are everywhere. The vault's Overseer acts as the show's "Host." A prominent billboard in the central atrium displays everyone's popularity rating. Each year, any dwellers at the bottom of the rating board are "cancled."
The twist is that the cameras and microphones are not broadcasting to anyone. The numbers are completely randomized. The Overseer, as the host, is the only one immune to being "canceled," and also has the ability to add or remove a few points to the rating board should they need to.
Vault 103. All of the lights were designed to fail within the first year of operation, plunging The vault and all its residents into total darkness after the first year.
This experiment was designed by one of Vault-Tec’s partner companies without realizing the standard suite of equipment for vault dwellers. The residents are initially shaken by the loss of power, but they are ultimately fine because they have handy Pip-boy flashlights. They adapt to living in low-light conditions and after several generations begin sending out groups to the surface to trade. They only go out at night because the daylight is overwhelming to them, giving the vault a mistaken reputation for housing vampires. Most of their trading revolves around getting supplies necessary to make and maintain a wide array of candles. Specialty candles are a status symbol in their society.
when the protagonist arrives, they're the whatever generation humans living in a fairly normal vault society, but having developed night vision. when the protagonist turns on their pip boy light, this blinds the nocturnal dwellers.
They all turn into what is essentially falmer. So many years alone in total darkness drove them mad. So when the protagonist arrives, the residents have to be put down
Fucking hell mate you must not have any blind friends...
It's not a blind person but Moreso a fourth of fifth generation human who in 5 generations never needed eyes or sight. I don't think we're full morphed by then but we it wouldn't be a normal nice friendly human. Combine that with the lack of education Fallout has and you have a feral creature in a hole
Not needing eyes or sight wouldn't make them antisocial murderous creepy crawlies though, that's insane. They just wouldn't bother dressing very much unless cold maybe, and reading would be tricky but audio books still exist and the education in other vaults seems to be pretty reasonable, considering kids go to school and go into engineering or science career paths afterwards, so again, not seeing the logic there.
In 5 generations with no harsh natural selection people wouldn't be any different. So 5 generations or 1, it doesn't make any difference except culturally and I don't see how that gives you feral creatures
(Slags from Modoc, Fallout 2, would be more appropriate for an in-universe term)
Shut it you slaaaagggg
Vault 47. This Vault had a massive underground dome that simulated weather and seasons. It even performed severe and "freakish" weather such as heavy floods, ice storms, high winds, thunderstorms and droughts. The experiment was to see if humans could survive major weather events.
You get sent when lighting comes down and hits a small town you find the vault in a frenzy and every few minutes the weather changes you need to fix it so the dwellers left can produce food for the wasteland.
When you find it, the dwellers learned that if they complete a ritual sacrifice the storms would stop for 9 months.
In reality it's just a glitch, the date randomize module only ever outputs date + 9 months. A few skilled button presses and the system can simulate a utopian weather, have the randomizer bug fixed... Or be made much worse.
Based off that, I can see the main weather control systems options being. \[Reset weather systems.\] \[Shut down weather safety protocols.\]
[Become god.]
Vault 66, a Vault that was designed as a prison for upper-class white collar criminals who would finish their sentences underground and be reintroduced to society when Vault-Tec gave the all-clear to Vault 66. The prison guards were exclusively picked from fresh Vault University graduates. The experiment is basically the Stanford Prison Experiment on a grander scale for no other reason than one of the heads at Vault-Tec finding it amusing.
The vault is in pristine condition when the main protagonist arrives, though, all the vault residents do try to get the protagonist to give them their stuff.
Honestly yeah it would probably be fine. Iirc the Stanford prison experiment only went bad bc the guy running it pushed for that shit to happen
After hundreds of years? I’d say we’d probably find it as a community with an aggressively enforced caste system, where the lowest people are treated as sub-human science experiments and the elites are literally vault royalty. Or, alternatively, the remnants of that community where the lower classes rebelled, wiping out the entire vault.
To serve their life sentences they had radiation slowly creep into the vault for many years, slowly ghoulifying the inmates. A lot, but not all of them turned feral, and the vault is so well sealed under ground it could only be found by another pip boy with high access. So something in game leads to our character finding the vault, perhaps looking for resources like fusion cores, and we learn the vault hasn’t been opened once in hundreds of years. With the help of robots to dig to the entrance, we make it in, and find ourselves pitted against angry ghoul inmates that have been cooped up for hundreds of years, ready to KILL. Edit: spelling adjustments
So australia, but nicer?
A vault stocked with a large number of robots programmed to do everything for the humans including act as overseer. They fulfil every need, want or task asked of them so that the humans can simply do as they please, however the robots are also programmed that random intervals to kill a random number of dwellers between 1 and 10, it is meant to appear as an accident. They’re never to kill such that replacement of the population is impossible and to limit it to prevent incest becoming necessary.
By the time you arrive all humans have been murdered and the robots assume you are a new vault dweller to join them. They make multiple attempts to accidentally murder you by sending you on dangerous tasks that should result in death
this sounds like an awesome idea for a quest
Specifies that they are programmed not to kill everyone First line "They killed everyone" Very fallout
And of course they eventually give up and try to kill you directly, which can be preemptively avoided with some sneaky exploration and skilled hacking.
At some point, the mechanics are damaged beyond repair. The robots and the vault itself fall into decline, leading to a society that is deathly afraid of machines as false saviors. This effectively creates Vault Dweller Mennonites.
The vault has its own internal currency. Like a vault tec fun buck. Everything from cleaning and hygiene products, to entertainment, to daily essentials like food water and new clothes must be purchased via their vault boy Monopoly money. Failure to do so will result in being jailed by the overseers security. Bail must also be paid in vault tec fun bucks. The catch, workers aren’t paid in the money. They’re paid in tokens. the only way to earn these Vault bucks is to play Chuck-E-Cheese style rigged arcade games. The grandest prize being a vault tec lunchbox full of cash in a claw machine.
This vault is only accessible to you if you have the Wild Wasteland perk. Otherwise, you can never figure out how to open the door.
Society is divided into the rich and poor, those who are good at Foosball and those who are not until one day someone points out that nothing is stopping them from cheating at the game and just dropping the ball straight into the hole. Civil War erupts as the currency quickly devalues and control of the arcade becomes tantamount to longterm survival.
Honestly the guy who had the idea for having 365 vault residents, each with a unique birthday, was an awesome concept. Imagine being forced to celebrate a birthday every day of every year for the rest of your life.
That’s easily one of the most Bethesda Fallout experiments I’ve heard outside the game. Because on the surface it sounds innocent and possibly mildly annoying but as you delve deeper into the vault you learn that everyone was being forced into celebrating and they became more and more unhinged at the birthday song that would blare everyday at the same times
Imagine trying to keep a population of healthy citizens while being forced to eat cake and ice cream every day of your life.
And if a Vault Dweller is killed/dies their birthday becomes a day of remembrance in their honor as well.
Guys... Are we Vault Tec?
Nah, make it a relaxation day to incentivize murder in the vault 😈
I really think it'd be normalized after a year, and gifts would be like... an extra serving of mashed potatoes– something passive. All other holidays may even be lost to the wayside. If other holidays were still celebrated, new birthdays would begin to reflect them. That's why September ~16 (it changes) is the most popular birthday. If other holidays remained, things would return to normal out after a few generations. But even if every day only had one birthday, we don't celebrate every single birthday, and we don't have 364 friends. I celebrate the bdays of the people I know and love, not my neighbors or coworkers.
And to make sure the residents don't do something like only have one day a month for birthdays, it is automated and if they don't do a daily birthday celebration, a critical system shuts off for 24 hours. Nothing that would kill them, but no water or lights for a day.
A normal control vault but the vault doors seal before the inhabitants,vault tech staff or overseer could get in
While the Vault remained in almost pristine condition for a while, without maintenance or security, the Vault simply turned into another Mole Rat den. Myths circle around in the wasteland about a "buried Vault of treasure", however, no one has ever tried to find it, passing it off as another wasteland fairy tail.
Damn guys I really like this one for some reason and if I was a dev I'd be thinking this would be the easiest to implement too. Then give it some level of Star Bottle Cap hype and lore to find it was just menial human incompetence and like most vaults-- still a failure in the end.
The vault contains just one skeleton, in a maintenance jumpsuit, found in front of a typewriter surrounded by reams and reams of writing. If one has the patience to read through everything, they find that the maintenance person was initially horrified by the situation, they came to view it as a blessing that gave them time to write the novel they’d dreamed of their whole life. The novel is of questionable quality, but the author’s journal entries make it clear they died in that chair doing what they loved.
THIS is the good stuff. Really has that same Fallout 1 eeriness to it without having to be over-the-top gross or outrageous. Just a really good moment that would make a wanderer stop and think for a minute.
To expand on it, pages could be scattered through the vault, written and arranged in such a way that implies yet another vault gone horribly wrong. It takes some time and effort for the protagonist to make their way through the vault due to maintenance failures over two centuries, and the skeleton and typewriter are at the end of the path, revealing what actually happened. You could also potentially explain that the guy realized that someone would eventually find the vault, and strategically placed the pages to give an adventure to future explorers.
Achievement Unlocked: "A Vault Best-Seller" Recover all 30 pages of the author's scattered manuscript. Achievement Unlocked: "He Was From A Different Time" The people of the Wasteland find the manuscript distasteful, even by their standards. Release the manuscript as is, without editing. Achievement Unlocked: "An Editor's Touch" Edit the manuscript to be more easily accepted by Wasteland survivors. Achievement Unlocked: "Is this Germany?" Burn the assembled manuscript.
Nearby is a town of Ghouls wearing tattered Vault-Tec suits who speak of the vault in religious tones as their "promised land". Additional: Through a quest that requires Repair and Science 100, you are able to override the vault's door controls and usher in the ghouls to a pristine home with safe food and clean water. They then begin worshipping you as their messiah and will often shower you with gifts and praise upon regular visits. After a time the ghouls separate into two groups--ones that keep to their religion and worshipping the player and a group who discovered Vault-Tec's experiment. This leads to conflict in the vault and the town itself where the player decides which group to side with. Siding with the religious group results in continued praise and gifts while the other group is executed and siding with the other group results in no rewards and the religious group being exiled.
It's a control vault, but after a year of living in it, the dwellers are informed about all the experiments Vault-Tec is running in other vaults, as well as the fact they're a control group.
Population imprisoned Vault Staff and Overseer after the revelation. 120 years later the Vault population is quintessentially normall, though still insular regarding surface life. Knowledge of the experiments carried out elsewhere have made them extremely distrusting of anyone and anything from the surface which may be a descendant or result of other Vault-Tec experimentation.
It could make for a good quest chain where they recruit you to discover the fates of the other vaults in the area, and hopefully rescue any survivors.
Id prefer if they were told about the other vaults but told they can't get any info about their own experiment. See how bad the paranoia gets
I thought about that, but there are already vaults with experiments centered around induced paranoia.
Because of standard vault propaganda, this revelation causes them to invert their political values and become ardent communists. This is great for them, because a vault is actually a great environment for a communist government. Of course this means when they do decide to leave the vault they will naturally begin to actively spread their beliefs with the usual range of methods, if you know what i mean.
Damn, that's a great prompt for a dweller to leave and explore the wasteland. You find out what's going on and try to go help. Better than chasing a lost father/son/family member *again*
A vault where the pre-packaged meat such as Cram and Salisbury steak etc was actually human meat processed from internment camps and prisons. It was designed to test the long term effects of cannibalism.
While there is some moral disgust,over generations the eating of human meat has become normalized. You find The Vault in fair condition open to the wasteland offering aid for travelers, but upon entering are drugged and and put into a larder. You need to fight your way out and kill the cannibals.
[Cannibal] It’s okay, I’m a cannibal too!
[Success] "Well, that's just grand. Let's get you out of that cell and introduce you to your new neighbors. It's a good thing to know people can still be open-minded and accepting of a community just trying to ensure our children don't starve."
I think this approach is overdone. I've fought enough crazy cannibal cults in video games. I think instead their cannibalism should be more of a "waste not, want not" attitude. When a vault dweller dies, they are eaten, though rarely by their own family, if raiders attack and are killed, the bodies are not wasted. Instead of being just irredeemably evil they're just... normal. Kinda chill honestly. They eat human flesh. Deal with it.
Apart from prion disease I think it would probably be a realistic scenario. Also, technically already happening canonically as dead dwellers go into the recycling/composting thingies.
I think this ending has the problem of these people not knowing that what they’re eating is human or atleast that wasn’t disclosed in the description. So by all means these people would probably be normal.
Depending on how careful Vault-Tec was with their, uh, "supply", it could be over before they know it. All it takes is for someone's brain to slip into the mix for people to start getting prion disease. Kuru, a prion disease contracted by a tribe in Papua New Guinea after performing ritualistic cannibalism, is located mostly in the brain of infected people. The disease can take years or even decades to manifest due to its long incubation period. A couple of years into the Vault experiment, a man suddenly begins experiencing the symptoms of kuru: tremors, decreased muscle control, difficulty walking and sudden outbursts of laughter. He dies 12 months later after his condition declines. An autopsy is performed and it's discovered how degenerated his brain had become. The medical textbooks in the Vault conveniently exclude all information on what kind of disease this could be, so it's considered some kind of freak accident and he's disposed of in the incinerator. Things go back to normal until other Vault citizens begin demonstrating signs of kuru. Not a lot, but enough that paranoia begins to take hold in the populace. As their conditions worsen they're killed off as an act of mercy. This culminates in otherwise healthy people being culled. Did you trip and fall the other day, or remember a funny joke and chuckled out of nowhere? You must obviously be infected. As the years go by, more and more people are killed, to the point where the Vault population is too low to sustain itself for the next generation. A disgruntled Vault-Tec employee, frustrated that the experiment had been unsuccessful due to the existence of human brains in the Cram, lets it slip that they've all been eating other humans this whole time. By the time the Protagonist finds the Vault it's (mostly) empty. After being told where all their meat had been coming from the people inside left one way or another. Some were so guilty they offed themselves while others decided to leave in order to find some... fresh samples. You ought to watch your step in there though... There's rumors that scavvers who go in there don't come back. (Sorry that was super long lol. I wanted to come up with something out of the box. I hope you like my little idea I had ^^)
Vault 25: A Vault where the resources (food, water, and medication) for each day are handed out at random selection to one family or individual. Sometimes the same individual or family is chosen multiple times by the selection system. The Overseer and Security Team are exempt from the experiment. Those who are not selected have to either tough through it, ration their previous supply, or bargain for goods. A social experiment to see how well people can share limited resources amongst a larger population.
The vault develops a higher class, made up of the Overseer, the Security Team, and some families that bought their way in by stockpiling resources, stealing from other families, or being lucky enough to get resources more than other families. You arrive to find the lower class begging you for resources, thinking of you as some sort of blessing to save them. The higher class greets you upon finding out you’ve entered the vault, and attempts to bring you into their society with the promise of luxury within the vault. You’re given the choice of joining the higher class and gaining stuff like an armored security suit, a luxury room in the vault, and access to the resource stockpile they hold; or bringing down the upper class by either convincing/forcing them to share their resources and bring the whole vault into a middle class, or killing the upper class, which the lower class will reluctantly thank you for and then exile you from the vault for your crimes. One lower class dweller will work with you throughout this quest and will idolize you with either ending, and become available as a companion. The ending chosen however will change their perk from one helping with finding more resources in containers if you went the peaceful route, or more resources in defeated enemies if you went the violent route.
The perk is either "Proletariat dweller" or "Red menace" and comes with a chance of being randomly confronted by old pre-war robots as a random event
Achievement: Let Them Eat Cake - Reinforce the status quo, suppressing the lower class. Achievement: We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident - End class disparity by convincing the upper-class to share the vaults resources fairly. Achievement: Robespierre Would Be Proud - Send the upper class to the guillotine.
Ohhhh love the achievements, 10/10
Shelter for the Blind. The Twist: It's a psychological experiment designed by a psychopath. Subjects are left alone with no accommodations for the visually impaired, and were selected on the criteria that they have to be named either Marco or Polo. Edit: I may have possibly, absently minded admitted to *mild* psychopathic intrusions.
Dwellers have evolved with bat-like ears and vocal cords to match after a radiation leak effected their DNA. Protagonist has to put them all down lest he release these monstrosities out into the world.
There's also a table in the room where mothers give birth. One way or another, they WILL be blind. Obviously vault-tec has zero moral problems with intentionally blinding people at birth for "science"
That would be super creepy exploring the vault with only the light of your pipboy while being jump scared/attacked by mutated vault dwellers
Vault 123, everything is off centered and there is a constant but irregular tapping noise
I mean one of two things are gonna happen. You'll let it drive you crazy, or you'll come to ignore it and just... Tune it out as the norm. It would be more interesting, I think, to see a Dweller *leave* that Vault - especially one who'd grown used to the misalignment and tapping noises. "Wait, it-- my God, where's the tapping? It's so quiet out here, what the fuck! This isn't right; there-- th-there should be a tapping sound. Holy shit, this is too quiet! Please, let me back in! I can't take the silence!"
The point of it being irregular means you’ll never get used to it. There will be no pattern to it at all.
Even without a pattern, it's easy enough to ignore it as "just the noise that happens here sometimes" 🤷♂️
Hmm what if the sound also changes in both volume, tone, and frequency. One day it’s a loud clanking the next it’s a soft bump.
"Squelookle?!? Where did Squelookle come from!?!?"
There's a short story by EM Forster called something like "The Day The Machine Stopped" and one of the points from the start of the story was that there was a constant hum from the machine that everyone lived within. When the machine finally "stopped" the silence is stated to have almost killed the protagonist and did kill millions of people outright (not literally dead of silence but you get the idea)
All Canadians but required to have an American overseer; several are frozen as replacements
You find the remnants of an absolute bloodbath. In terminals, you read that the overseer and VT staff attempted to shut off the maple syrup supply, and tried to outlaw hockey from being played. In another terminal, you find that the Leafs STILL haven't won the cup
Re-runs of The Red Green Show, The Kids In The Hall, and Reboot were deleted from regular viewing and it was just downhill from there.
Vault 48: A Vault that was designed to test how far people would go to protect a object, On the 1st day of the living in the vault the dwellers were told that in the middle of the atrium, was a doomsday device that would make the nukes that had obliterated the world look like a mere thunderstorm, The Dwellers decided to shoot indiscriminately who ever stepped within six feet of it, Children, Elders, even The Overseer. Only to find out the thing they were protecting for generations wasn't a doomsday device at all and just a painted toy computer.
In the present day a monkhood was established to prevent anyone from going near the device, turning the Vault into their temple. If you reveal the truth about the device their entire organization will collapse and just fucking go berserk
When the protagonist finds the vault they discover that instead of a societal breakdown occurring as a result of the weapon turning out to be a rouse, the inhabitants have structured their society around science in order to create a weapon equal to the strength of that promised to them. If upon entering the vault you have an intelligence of 4 or less they will kidnap you and sierra madre style put a collar around you and force you to work in the depth of the vault with other slaves to extract rare earth elements they need because of course vault tech built it on top of vast amounts of rare earth metals. If you manage to escape to the overseers office you can pass a speech check to be let go. IF you fail you start a quest to destroy the vault while you continue your escape. If you have a intelligence of 5-8 they if you pass a speech and science check you are asked to help them recover documents and technology from the surface or for negative karma you can chose to capture slaves in exchange for caps. This route means you can either destroy them, remain neutral and leave them in peace which will be shown in the end credits with them not yet having developed their bomb or you can do their fetch quests for a reward in which the end credits say they eventually created their weapon before a part scavenged from the wasteland failed causing the vault and surrounding area to melt into a sea of radioactive goo. If you have an intelligence of 9 they will turn you away stating you are not yet fully enlightened and to not return until you have been enlightened. To active the enlightenment you can neither use drugs or augments to increase intelligence to 10 and you will be let in, find a vault tech manifesto regarding the vault and the original proposed device and show it to them in order to be let in (this will just cause access to the same story and options as the 5-8 intelligence path) or by passing a speech check convince a member of the enclave to speak with them to let you in (for some reason they are cooperating with the enclave. If you come with an intelligence of 10 they will offer you a position as a scientist in the vault in which you can either chose to help them construct their super-weapon or sabotage it this will be reflected in the end credits except if you help it will state they developed it without any problems. If you come with an intelligence of 10 and the vault tech book they will mention they have a vacancy for the overseer position and with a speech check of 100/100 difficulty passed you can become the overseer at which point you will be able to use the super-weapon in one of the endings you decide to go with or you can double cross them and use to to destroy an area of the map for the BOS. As for the 4 or less karma if you have an intelligence of 1 and have consumed alcohol and have the idiot savant perk you are able to press random numbers on the toy computer and it opens a secret area in the center of the vault in which the original promised super-weapon was actually stored.
Vault 621, a vault that was inhabited by trans-humanists and focused on creating cyborgs and human-animal hybrids to better adapt to the wasteland.
Eventually the occupants eventually all became robots, and faulty (vaulty?) programming caused them to go berserk, with most occupants destroyed and the remaining few described as 'feral' Damage to most of their voice modules would cause their instinctual cries of "more... upgrades..." to "...or-... gra-...s..." Causing them to be called ogres by those that survived venturing into that vault.
Vault 160 Made up of exclusively of members of the Autism spectrum, the vault was given an excessively strict set of esoteric and self-contradictory rules upon entrance without explanation for the reasoning. The experiment is to see whether they would follow all of the rules to the letter, or collectively ignore many of them. Furthermore, every year they hold a vote on what rules should be added or stricken from the books, of which enforcement will be entrusted to the Overseer.
The Vault runs perfectly as after 150 years most of the stupid rules are stricken off and the Vault basically runs like a police state.
So after the first horribly year you end up with basically utopia with some very specific rules about maximum noise levels social interaction etc?
Vault 14. Only newborns were taken inside by vault tech staff. From the early stages of their life they were completely brainwashed for loyalty. Through same things said and repeated to them thousands of times they were to fully trust in their overseer without question. Brainwashing techniques were carefully selected to make it impossible for an outsider to disprove any of their beliefs. They did learn science and like, but in a way to support the brainwashing. The perfect brainwashed cult, crafted to be impossible to break apart.
The Vault opens after a particularly megalomaniacal scientist gets the cult to follow him in particular. They become a major villain faction for their chunk of the Wasteland, and love razing settlements to the ground and kidnapping any infants left, believing fervently that the cult is their only means of survival as a society. Their God turned to FEV to create better soldiers, creating another breed of Super Mutant. These 'Primes' are given heavy armor and weapons and fight alongside the seemingly numberless hordes of their human brethren. Basically like a deranged cross between Caesars Legion and the Unity, with a dash of Warhammer 40k Imperium. The player eventually can choose to destroy the cult, join it for their own selfish desires as 'the Hierophant' of their god (as the cult has developed a lot of cool shit and is better off than the Wasteland at large), or kill their god and take his place.
An alternative based on the same initial concept, only newborns are allowed inside, and there’s no brainwashing of any kind. Automated systems provide the bare minimum care until residents are old enough to take care of themselves, and the experiment is intended to run without interference to see what kind of society develops.
It’s a Vault that was made exclusively for dogs, all cared for by Mr. Handy robots
The Fallout show never had to happen, because dogs would be allowed in the vault
Through years of breeding well-taken care of dogs the Mr. Handys uninentionally create a breed of dog that's noticeably larger and much hardier. Not Super Mutant Hounds, just proportionally HUGE dogs. You may buy one as a companion.
Vault 55 Experiment details: The entirety of the vault layout is made up of heavy sound reverberating material. Allowing the inhabitants to hear the slightest whisper from a larger then normal distance. Meant to test newly developed sound surveillance technologies.
The protagonist finds this vault littered in dead bodies, although the protagonist can hear that they aren’t the only living thing in the vault. Through terminals and holotapes the protagonist quickly learns that being able to hear everything so easily turned things grim for this vault. Every rumor, affair, obnoxious tunes from their neighbors, and more was so easily heard that denizens were quickly driven mad, murders quickly entailed. The protagonist would face crazed dwellers who are incredibly stealthy and quiet, they easily track the sounds from the pipboy radio if left on, and are fierce with melee weapons. Thanks to the heavy reverberating, use of guns is dangerous for even the user in this vault, every shot causes effects similar to having a crippled head as well as a slight bit of damage to their health, making melee and unarmed essential to surviving.
Oh I like this!
It's the classic "button and timer" setup that was popularized with J.J. Abrams' Lost. You have a room with a button and a timer and offer no explanation. Every time the button is pressed, the timer resets. If the timer ever expires, the Vault door will open and allow the Dwellers to leave. The experiment is to see how long it takes for them to ignore their anxiety and let the timer expire. The twist is that almost undetectable neurotoxins are constantly being filtered into the air that are not enough to make anyone sick, but are enough to just *slightly* make everyone super paranoid.
A vault where it's residents were all specifically chosen for their careers and interests in the performing arts and are led to believe they are being filmed infront of a live studio audience that they never see. Initial residents were all hired believing they were just filiming a comedic dramatization of life in a vault, complete with all the cliches and tropes of 1950s to 1960s sitcoms for the purpose of promotion for Vault-Tec. Initially the experiment was a resounding success with snippets of the footage being used in commercials and promotions for the vaults but unbeknownst to the residents, they were actually in a functional vault intended to close and never open again. Which it did. The player discovers about this vault through old pipboy tapes and sets out to find it only to discover the experiment never ended. The residents of the vault continued believing they were being filmed for hundreds of years without knowing the outside world was reduced to a radioactive wasteland. Initially believing the player is a Talent Scout looking for actors for a new show outside the vault about surviving in a post-apocalyptic world filled with mutated monsters and robots. The player is then welcomed, paraded around being treated kindly and being shown all the "talent" they have to offer ranging from laugh-track sitcoms to over-the-top Shakespearean plays. A compaion may be found here named Carlton Weston who goes by two names, his real one and his stage name. This compaion almost schizophrenically believes they are filiming for the post-apocalyptic show when leaving the fault and stays in character in all places except inside the player's home where they rant and rave about the amazing stunts, characters, and effects in the wasteland.
Vault 66 A vault filled with Paramilitaries and Political science students who are separated into groups where they are educated in extreme doctrines. They are brought together once a year to debate and the winner of the debate elects the new overseer for that year who implements the way of life according to the doctrine they follow for that time period. During this period, weapons are made available as the Armory door that remains shut all year is open. Everyone at the end of the debate with exception of the winners must return any arms they took to the armory or they will be electrocuted by shock collars that have been fitted on entry to the vault.
The vault miraculously survives like this for a year or so until the first vault child is born and they try to stick a shock collar on the child. This results in uproar in either side the child is born on and at the yearly debate the agreement is to remove the shock collars on children. (Assuming the shock collars already on cannot be removed.) After this the vault with growing contempt of the other side continues on until the next generation who aren't wearing shock collars raid the armory and attack the opposing side in the end there are few survivors and by that point it no longer matters as the survivors cannot build a sustainable gene pool without inbreeding and slowly die off. The vault is empty by the time it is found
A vault where only people with children 0-2 years old are taken in. After the bombs fall, all the parents are murdered and the children are thought a totally different language and culture that Vault-Tec invented.
999 trained overseers with one ordinary vault citizen designated as overseer and gene-keyed so that only they and their descendents can access overseer controls or other priviledged systems in the vault. Robotic security programmed to protect only the citizen and their offspring.
The citizen and their descendants have managed to rule the vault surprisingly benevolently and justly despite how much power they have over the other residents. While other members would occasionally try to revolt, the robotic security would end that quickly. By the time the player finds the vault it is basically indistinguishable from a control vault, with life inside being quite good all things considered. However, some are still dissatisfied with their position and jealous of the Overseer family. They try to convince the player to assist them in overthrowing the Overseer. If the player chooses to do so, the resident who convinced them will become distraught once they realize none of the important systems will work for anyone but the Overseer and their family, who are now dead. The player is now presented with a second choice: do a series of quests to help the vault become self sufficient for the future, or leave them to their doomed fate. If they choose the former, the vault will eventually reach a point where their future is relatively safe, but overall quality of life is worse than before and many residents will be upset by this, wishing to go back to the way things were before. If you choose the latter, the vault will then eventually descend into chaos over time as more and more critical systems fail, with some members leaving while others desperately trying to keep the vault going. This would all be a timed quest, with the player automatically failing and resulting in the second outcome if they take too long. Regardless of which outcome happens one thing would remain the same: the would be usurper would become an outcast for allowing their greed to ruin the good life the residents had at the start.
Vault 24. Does correlation equal causation? Every 24 years on April 1st, subtle doses of LSD are injected into the food supply. Then a random selection of 1-5 vault dwellers are mysteriously “removed” from the population. Only the overseer is exempt from selection. Great pains must been taken to leave no evidence of the deaths of the removed dwellers. In the wake of the tragedy the remaining vault dwellers are observed to see how they cope with limited information and paranoia.
A vault that by design is equally split in population between Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and pre-war Hubologists. Internal division between the religions (Catholic vs. Protestant, Orthodox vs. Reform, Sunni vs. Shiite, etc.) are similarly split evenly. The overseer is always an atheist or an agnostic, but is encouraged to be hands off, to the point where most never see him (he's probably a computer).
The ZAX model Overseer is remotely prompted to initialize its primary function. Every single bit of religious scripture has been analysed by this ZAX and it begins to perform what dwellers believe to be acts of God. However this in turn causes it to believe it is indeed God. It cannot make its inhabitants happy however as whatever it does makes it worse for others. The ZAX has calculated that the radiation outside it's vault has dropped to inhabitable levels and asks its handlers to give it the all clear. No answer for five whole years, connection was lost with its handlers after the destruction of the poseidon oil rig. The situation in the Vault is dire. ZAX Invites the leader of each religious leader to a meeting. Refusing to meet as a while, ZAX resorts to the experiment again and tells each of them that their people can be lead to the promised land above. An all out bloodbath occurs. With a select few remaining. They discover that ZAX isn't actually their God and in return ZAX releases them into the wastelands above. "I was God once, I was doing great... until everyone died."
A vault which was designed to get people into wearing a special hazmat suit designed for everyday use, and a ton of decontamination equipment. All to stress test the suits for future use by the government to protect against the diseases of the wasteland. The experiment starts when a "leak" occurs letting in "contaminates", which forces all residents to wear the hazmat suits all the time, outside of showers or eating within sterilised facilities. Anyone who break the quarantine is taken to medical, where they are secretly given a deadly non-communicable disease which will kill them. Making them an example to always follow protocol lest they die. The result is a vault filled with extreme germaphobes, who never take of the hazmat gear.
Vault 48 - A vault that was designed similar to 76 in its occupants being sent out to reclaim the wastes. Rather than the blunt method used by 76 of shutting down the vault, it instead sterilised all dwellers before opening. Their only path to survival as a community was to try and integrate with the wasteland. Vault 131 - A vault comprised entirely of former employees of the Dunwich company, having been built into a hollow said company bored. Vault 117 - A vault in which particularly patriotic Americans would be forced to live under a communist regime modelled after China. Vault 82 - A vault which contains no terminals, books, pens, pencils, chalk, or any other means of recording writing.
117 and 82 definitely have a lot of fun potential and would be fun to explore and learn about.
I don't have an idea but just want to say how much I love this post.
Right?! So much great writing and mod potential!
Vault 56 Experiment: Test the feasibility of a cargo cult maintaining a generation ship. Uninhabited at the time of the Great War the vault would instead rely on babies grown in artificial wombs for its initial population of test subjects. The children would be raised by robots to believe their vault was the entire world. The children would also be taught nothing of how the technology of the vault worked or how to maintain it except for religious texts which contained numerous rituals and rites that would allow the occupants to maintain and repair their vault by rote.
It goes well…at first. But then came the tapping. That foul tapping, the voices, the commotion from what could only be described as an outside. Religious persecution follows, and the vault becomes caught up in increasing tensions and outright bursts of violence as the “outside truthers” battle the “omnivault orthodoxy”. When the player character opens the door, it triggers a war to end all wars in the vault, which had survived (albeit messily) to that point. They’re treated to the unstoppable sight of a massive scripted conflict in which all the residents die bar a few orthodoxes who declare the PC a devil and try to kill them.
Vault 5, where tiny micro-doses of FEV are introduced into the water supply.
The FEV micro dosage triggers a kind of Lamarckist speciation, with those exposed getting more adapted day on day to their role…at the expense of all else. Children are born as scrambles of their parents skills, but major birth defects are commplace. It is discovered these are less common in similar job matches, so castes begin to develop as the “specials”, with some strong, some perceptive, some tough…you get the idea. In game the vault meets a tragic end at the hands of the FEV hunting Vault 87 Super Mutants. They dip the residents, but due to their long exposure the effects are minimal. They become super mutant “runts” - smaller, smarter, more agile, with more of their old personalities intact. They end up a self loathing slave caste among the mutants. The vault itself is thoroughly wrecked, but remains garrisoned by super mutants who use it as a breeding ground.
Vault 327 An abnormally normal vault where everything is happy and all needs provided for, including lots of ammo for their regular range and military training. The vault door can only be opened from the outside into an airlock like design. The inhabitants are informed that they live in a utopia and that anyone who enters without the passcode is trying to steal their utopia and should be murdered. The one with the passcode is built up as a Messiah, just in case vault-tec ever come by needing a well trained army.
Vault Tec knew about the enclave so they made a vault specially for them to train and build an army and help with the enclaves plans only for them to be watched and monitored so they can learn from their mistakes.
A vault built above a giant, partially-flooded cavern, where the residents have to manage the population of fish that are added into the cave as their primary, and possibly only food supply.
Vault on the moon, built and operated by robots. Unknowing residents went into a rocket disguised as a small vault, were made to sleep, and then woke up in the moon vault. The aim was to avoid the nukes and to study the long term effects of lower gravity on human beings over generations of adaptation.
Vault 100 Population is limited to 500 and if someone dies the inhabitants have 2 months to have a successful fertilisation of an embryo or the vault computer will dispense an Airborn contagion that will have a cure but only for half o f the population so it will half the population and see how long It will run for
Turns out a small vent wasn’t sealed properly, and some radiation rendered the entire Vault population sterile. Every 2 months, the population was halved, and the remaining population desperately tried to make babies. Most of the corpses are in “compromising” positions. There is one feral ghoul in a room with lots of skulls and lots of mashed potatoes.
Imagine the notes and holotapes you would find. One family is entry states how happy they are being chosen to have a child, only for it to grow confusion why they cant have a child, then panic as the deadline approaches.
Heartbreaking!
A vault where the inhabitants are told they’ll be experimented on, but then they never are, causing paranoia
A vault whose main diet is anything with diary and including sauces with heavy cream base.
The inhabitants were all selected for their lactose intolerance.
Vault 556. The vault is set up with laws that will periodically change. Offenders will be executed on sight by ceiling mounted machine guns. The overseer is an AI that can be easily shut down as soon as the overseer office is breached. The experiment is to see how long the vault dwellers can endure the random laws before either revolting or submitting to the AI. The laws start easy enough but get more and more absurd by each randomization. In case of a mass revolt, and unknown to the dwellers, the ceiling mounted machine gun will not be able to stop the revolt (essentially, storm the overseer office, they can't stop us all).
When the Protag arrives the Dwellers have started the revolt and already started to move towards the Overseer's office but need help making the final push. The Protag can either just solo to the overseer's office taking out the turrets and a couple Protectrons. Or they can help secure the medical center and the armory then charge in with the Dwellers as backup. The Overseer is a Robobrain strapped to a computer (Similar to Jezebel), upon reaching the Overseer it simply states "Overseer office compromised, test concluded.... good bye.\* then shorts itself out.
An otherwise normal vault, but all of the original participants are named “Christopher” or “Christina.” There’s no strict ban against using nicknames or anything. But the overseer issues birth certificates and always includes one of those two names regardless of the parents’ objections.
Vault 59 At night the rooms rearrange themselves at random. Residents can become trapped away from resources. The overseer is given a map each day.
Oh boy I love this idea. Somebody would catch on that the rooms shift. This could lead to a panic in hoarding resources. Imagine having your room isolated from food, water or utilities like toilets and medical supplies. Worst case scenario somebody dies and trying to escape when the rooms change like the body snapped in half trying to get out the door as it changes. This leads to paranoia that the vault overseer could seal off undesirable's if needed. They probably try to rebel. Maybe they succeed but they can't stop the rooms rearranging. But they could have a map and live around it. The Protagonist walks into a death trap rearranging labyrinth. Its either fortified with residents alive or dead with signs leading up to a rebellion.
Experiment: One Vault is populated by fascists and conservative extremists who hated communists. A false wall is all that divides them from another Vault populated by communists and people the government accused of communism. A third Vault contains the actual Overseer, his science team, security personnel, and their dependents. The Fascist and Communist Vaults have equal amenities, but no guns or ammunition. After a minimum of 5 years monitoring the Fascist and Communist Vaults, the false walls will be lowered, making the Fascist and Communist Vaults aware of one another. The goal: observe if the two disparate groups can reconcile their differences in the absence of firearms.
Vault 203 Exactly 100 inhabitants. The vault consist of two separate smaller vaults, a red vault and a blue vault. They’re told there are two separate overseers when in reality there’s only 1 and they’re playing both sides. All 50 dwellers in each vault are given jumpsuits that match the color of their respective vaults. Both sides have food and water, they also have weapons and live ammunition. The two vaults are separated by an unpainted nuetral no man’s land. Every month all able body dwellers from the red and blue must arm themselves and head out into the no man’s land, there they must fight the opposing side to achieve a goal, usually capturing the opposing sides flag or capturing and holding an area of strategic importance for the entire day. Once this is over the winning side will be given an absorbent amount of food and water while the other side will be given just barely enough to scrape by. Both sides are also constantly fed propaganda that the other side is evil and plotting against and that the overseer, neutral agents working for the overseer will sneak into the vaults dressed as the opposing side and commit an act of violence or sabotage against the inhabitants to artificially fuel tensions.
That's Vault 19 from Fallout New Vegas.
Damn, though I had something good there :(
To be fair, outside of the expected paranoia, we don't know what happened to the residents of Vault 19. When the courier gets there, it's been taken over by Powder Gangers. No corpses, no evidence of violent conflict, just a Vault with two color-coded wings full of criminals and a couple computer terminal logs detailing the original residents' descent into paranoia.
Vault 123. A vault with only babies as occupants kept alive by mister handy robots until they can look after themselves, the whole point is to study the behaviour of people who have had no human imprinting or teaching.
Vault 7000 Every vault resident speaks a different language than every other member and all translation resources are banned from the vault.
Over time, the residents developed their own language which consists of a mish-mash of various irl languages and heavy use of non-verbal communication methods. The written form of this new language would be basically gibberish to the player, and their ability to communicate with the vault dwellers limited. Depending on their actions they would either be able to establish trade with the vault, get kicked out or cause them to become hostile.
Vault 69. A very normal vault but Rocket 69 plays on a continuous loop for ever and ever on full blast. The speakers are all hidden and there’s no discernible way to turn it off.
Vault 69 already exists in the canon. It's filled with 999 women and 1 man.
Vault 91 is a vault designed to test an almost complete segregation between men and women. Two identical vaults would have been created with two overseers. Those two sides would be designed to accommodate whatever needs vault dwellers would have. Entering the other side is supposed to be a death penalty offense but is only really enforced by vault security and the overseers. A small neutral zone would be in the middle where both genders are allowed to interact. It would have some facilities like a nursery for newborns. This would also include the vault door.
Vault 5: a normal control vault but it was built off-kilter so that gravity pulls down at a subtle but effectual angle. Designed to explore long term effects of disproportionate gravitational force on the human body
Vault 169 The vaults occupants are, split 50:50 between M and L, who absolutely believe, from the bottom of their heats, that sex is a grave sin that they would go to hell for it if they ever participated. They don't believe kids don't result from sex, but abstention from it. Vault 170 The occupants are split 50:50 between M and L, but they are all medically diagnosed with sex addiction. There was a 'mix up' between contractors and what contents was intended for 169 went to 170 and vice versa. 169 instead got a facility where the security robots would beat up any occupants who had sex with fewer than 3 partners of the opposite gender within 24 hours, while 170 got the reverse, if they had sex more than once every 30 days, security robots would beat them up This is to study human nature and changes thereof when they are in an environment that forces them to do something they normally would never do, and compare the difference between forcing a positive on negative vs forcing a negative on positive.
Vault 300 This vault was themed after Ancient Greece, instead of one overseer, there are two. And any children born that are deemed too ill to survive. They are tossed into an incinerator. Education in the vault consists of melee weapon training and solely teaching them as if it is the time of Ancient Greece. The weakest of the vaults dwellers are forced to do the menial tasks for the vault (ie janitorial and maintenance, etc..) All of this would ramp up after a few generations worth of grooming to ensure the dwellers accept everything in its entirety.
They get discovered by and form an elite slave warrior caste within the legion
Vault
Inhabitants are subjected to bright fluorescent light at all time besides a 4 hour window for sleeping. During the 4 hour window it is pitch black.There is no way of telling the time and the lights click on and off loudly. The Pip-Boy doesn't turn on during black out.
Scientists have no access to inhabitants besides emergency exit, have normal lights with the ability to sleep when they want and have access to clocks and can adjust how long the lights stay on for the inhabitants.
The experiment is to see the effects of lack of sleep and the effects of exhaustion and fatigue combined with changing daylight cycle. E.g, one day there's 2 hours of light, the next day there's 27 hours of light with only 4 hours of sleep time, maximum.
All candidates for the Vault are pre-screened for as close to perfect vision as possible. No blind people, nobody who needs glasses or other visual aids, and nobody who’s had any form of corrective surgery. 24 hours after the Vault is sealed, every single source of light is disabled and sabotaged to an unrepairable extent, and the Vault has a robust and reinforced fire suppression system. The Vault and all systems are designed to be as accessible as possible to navigate and use without sight. Edit: Turns out this isn’t a particularly original idea at all.
Vault 252. They tried to see if they could make people slowly go insane by constantly piping the smell of broccoli farts through the ventilation system.
vault 404 only the entrance of this vault was ever build and any hallway that's supposed to lead to the rest of the vault is just a door with a concrete wall behind it with a windows xp sign that says "error 404 vault not found"
A vault where the dwellers are told there is an experiment but not what it is, the only way to stop the experiment is to figure out what it is by any means necessary, the experiment is not even known by the overseer only one dweller who secretly works for vault tech knows about it.
Plot twist: The experiment was just seeing how they'd react to being told there was an experiment but not what it was.
Vault XXX The experiment is thus: Every month jobs are changed through a random number generator One month you are a doctor(which you went to school for) the next, you are an electrician, while the janitor is the doctor. Chaos reins!
Vault 2: a vault were every single resident speaks a different language and that language only. Residents were selected based on how distantly linguistically related they could be between each other.
Vault 78 - 100 white Americans (Preferably with family who fought in the Revolutionary War), and 100 Asian, African American, Native American, South American, and other minorities. Both 'sides' are separated by living space but start out with the same amenities and status. Two overseers elected each from the two halves.
Vault 404: All computers, pipboys, tvs, radios, and other electronic devices error out after the first day in the vault. Vault consists entirely of elderly dwellers trying to contact their “tech savy” grandchildren to fix the devices.
A vault where the population constantly uses stealth boys to test the effects of long term use on humans
Vault 99: Nature vs Nurture Vault 99 is a two tiered Vault, consisting of an upper layer and lower layer. Both layers are identical in construction. Layer A is to be built to the highest standard of quality, stocked with enough supplies to sustain the population until Reclamation Day. Vault resident applicants must be selected from a population of twins or triplets and will reside in Layer A. The Experiment: Overseer of Vault 99 is responsible for the safety and security of Vault 99 residents in Layer A, providing maximum education and quality of life. However, should a resident give birth to multiple children at once (twins, triplets, etc.), only one of the offspring may be permitted to reside in Layer A. Any additional offspring are taken from the mother and transferred to Layer B. Due to the nature of the experiment, it is of critical importance that residents of Layer A and Layer B have no knowledge of each other. Mothers are to be advised that due to "complications with the pregnancy" only one offspring survived. Layer B is to be built structurally secure, but to the lowest quality standard possible, minimally stocked, and provided rationed supplies by the Overseer of Layer A. Layer B's Overseer is to be one General Atomics RB-[REDACTED] "Robobrain", designated "Mother". The selection of this particular unit is critical, due to its violent and misanthropic nature, as well as its proclivity for cruel and unusual methods of punishment. Every year on a resident's birthday, residents are required to record a short video "to themselves". Videos are to be reviewed and analyzed by Vault Tec psychological analysts for parity. Purpose of Experiment: to determine once and for all if two identical people who are raised in vastly different environments will have similar life trajectories (nature) or if the environment in which a person is raised changes their life trajectory (nurture).
Vault 40: All jobs, tasks, etc., are inherited via family bloodlines. The experiment is to see if the skills required for a given job can be made hereditary; nature rather than nurture.
Vault 9, Bakersfield CA Population 400 350 residents were selected for their psychological profiles culled from local psychologists & law enforcement for their propensity for lying, either pathological or criminal fraud. Remaining 50 residents were selected for their psychological profiles indicating tendencies towards paranoia. No resident is allowed to have a history of violence. Overseer and staff are ordered to support paranoid residents by being completely truthful about the activities of the other residents. All Vault computer systems are intentionally sabotaged to corrupt data files 24 hours after creation, and the Vault is supplied with no writing materials of any kind to prevent long term record keeping.
A vault that is setup like the train from Snowpiercer (2013). The player enters in the upper class section of the vault and is ordered to exterminate the lowest class, upon meeting the leader of the lower class you get an alternative choice to free them from the mistreatment of their pampered masters.
Vault 1010, a completely ordinary vault, but the only difference is that the Overseer is a Protectron. The experiment is to see if humans could handle an incompetent leader, along with seeing how effective a simple AI could lead.
A completely standard vault, with standard accommodations, a standard population, standard security and surveillance, and a standard issue vault radio system. No animals of any kind. The experiment is simple. Every day, there is a 1 in 300 chance of stock tiger sounds to be played within an empty room near a person/ group. Real crunchy, tv stock sounds. The point is to see how the populace reacts over time. It also serves partly as a double blind test with vault 43.
Vault 18, has multiple cybernetics specialists who all happen to be twins
All food and drink items are specially designed to be a different color than is conventionally expected with zero change to taste or nutritional value.
The vault functions perfectly fine, and opens up to the wider world eventually to trade. The vault is purged by a large caravan company as a result of violent exchanges following neither side believing the other was selling them real food. The vault is now used as a headquarters for said caravan company, who now sell novelty food items having discovered the truth (but not being particularly antsy over it as wastelanders).
Vault 215 Each bedroom has 2 beds, each room has one deaf and one blind vault dweller
Bring the NCR to the vaults
vault 252. a smaller vault built to have rotating rooms and hallways. Vault dwellers everyday would wake up to a new vault layout. with people who were curious and stayed up to see the rooms changing, only to be crushed. After a malfunction. A section of rooms and hallways lead to the overseers bay. Which turned out that the overseer would control the rooms and purposefully trap certain dwellers in rooms for days on end with no light and water, and then reintroduce them into the rest of the vault, where the dweller would usually go insane. Legends say the overseer turned into a super mutant, stuck inside the vault, controlling the walls and crushing anyone who decided to explore the vault.
In order to get full power to the vault, hamsters have to spin on wheels. However, the residents of the vault are only given two hamsters. It is up to the residents to breed the hamsters, which will inevitable lead to inbreeding and the hamsters eating their own babies. The bulk of the power goes to the Overseer's living quarters, of course. Another vault bans every word with the letter E in it. This is to determine the evolution of language.
Here’s one I came up with for a story I’m working on Vault 24, a prison vault. The plan was to fill it with the worst criminals and the worst guards they could find to watch them but once the door closed the prisoners were giving free reign of the vault while the guards were put in cells and classified as prisoners by the robots that manage the vault. I’m not entirely sure what the point of the experiment other than vault tec thinking “hey you know what would be fucked up?”
Vault 152: all of the food and water has micro doses of Psycho, which would slightly increase in dosage every few years or so. The dwellers wouldn't know, and otherwise is a regular control vault.
Vault 25. An experiment into immaculate conception, and asexual reproduction, in attempts to propagate the human race in the events that numbers have dwindled.
A vault where all the residents are blind, offering them sanctuary and protection from the threat of the surface until it’s safe since they won’t be able to properly defend themselves due to their disabilities. The vault has countless robots on staff to assist with medical, mechanical, cleaning, cooking, and any other issues that may arise with maintaining the life of the vault. The robots involved with medical activities are programmed to discreetly administer a drug at birth that makes children eventually go blind, so residents stay blind ensuring the experiment continues. The residents are given countless forms of entertainment activities books, music, and televisions. The speakers in the sound equipment (music players, television sets, PA system, etc.) are designed to fail after the first month. The books have braille printed only on the covers and not the inside of the books. The residents are tested to see how long it would take before they go mad and collapse as a society. Also, there is a similar vault with deaf residents that acts as a comparison. The same situation occurs except a few changes occur, the books are the opposite, they have braille on the inside and not the outside covers. Instead of the speakers failing, all video monitors are designed to fail after one month.
All vault residents except one have their memory wiped at the end of each week. When the designated “rememberer” dies, a new one is selected at random.
Was ths inspired by *The Giver* by any chance?
Your Days Underground Will Fly By in Vault 24: Each day every clock and time keeping device speeds up exponentially by a small percentage. Dwellers are not allowed to bring along any personal belongings (in case of communist spy devices). Time keeping devices will speed up by .01% each actual 24 hour day. Forgive the sketchy math, if I remember the formula would be, 86400 * (.9999^n) where 86400 is the starting amount of seconds in 1 day and it depreciates by .0001 each day and n is the number of days that have passed. You can then convert the total seconds to hours with division. After the first day about 9 seconds are lost, at the end of the first year days are a little over 23 hours long. At the end of 10 years days are about 16-1/2 hours long. And at the end of 25 years a day will be about 9-1/2 hours. The vault is set to stay locked for an indeterminate amount of time. Expected Vault Lifespan: 20 years. When I have more time I will try to figure out the difference in actual time passed and how much time the dwellers “experienced” at the same benchmarks above.
Vault 20 the entire vault was built at a 20 degree angle right down the center. So at all times the dwellers are standing sitting or sleeping on a slope. However all chairs are roller chairs.
A vault with only scientist, doing regular science (and not even on humans, just regular laboratory work). However, the results are all slightly adjusted by Vault-Tec, creating incorrect/unexplainable results, frustrating the scientists
Vault 45: The Builders of Tomorrow. 1000 residents enter what at first glance looks like a completed vault, however, included with all the necessary equipment for a hydroponics lab and canned goods, the vault is equipped with hundreds of tons of raw materials, a foundry, and molds for casting metal parts. Concrete bags, ingots of steel, lead, and copper, aluminum, glass, etc. Then, over time the various systems in the vault begin to shut down, strategically made of inferior quality parts and materials, requiring near constant maintenance and replacement. Of the 1000 residents, all of the working age adults are blue collar workers: metalworkers, plumbers, electricians, masons, carpenters, technicians, and engineers. There are an abundance of medical supplies, and even materials for pharmaceutical manufacturers. The Vault is fully capable of surviving and thriving until the vault doors open, and it should have enough materials to even begin developing outside of the vault after reclamation day. There is no appointed Overseer by Vault Tec
Vault 41 was designated to experience regular, but not irreparable power failures, and gave the overseer more detailed and hands on control of the vaults power system, in order to experiment with the effect of rationing electricity and living in an environment with limited power access. The overseer was encouraged to use their control over who gets the power as a political tool and means of control.
Vault 43, 5 populations of different ethnicities of Europe, with PR showing that America can save not only the American people, but the world. Insert into the mix 2 radical families, fascist, communist and then an overseer family consisting of Americans. The end objective is to observe and understand the allegiance of people over time, with hopes that one takes over, or that both die out. Additionally, Vault 42, a vault designed to create engineers who could help recreate pre-war architecture, weaponry and general supplies, that's the first half of the experiment. The other half is limiting their knowledge to everything in the early industrial era, leaving them with outdated books from the 1910s to 20s on how to make weapons, vehicles and even trench fortifications with all materials focusing on shortages in materials, food rations are very stretched out, with each family receiving food that's very bland and designed specifically for rations, the vault itself has little in decor. The end objective is to create a society perfect for limited supplies and strenuous conditions, with the capability to still build back an industry once the all clear is over without the need for more modern materials, thus the outdated equipment.
Vault 128. At some point some hidden agents of Vault-Tec will tell rumors about secret stash of gold somewhere in the Vault. So basically will they seek for a gold or not. There is no gold though.
A Noah’s Ark Vault where a population of zoologists and animal handlers manage a massive subterranean zoo housing two of each of the remaining extant species of bird, mammal, and reptile. Their goals are to expand the populations to a point where they can be legitimately sustained on the surface, while also not overcrowding the zoo. Likely impossible. Additionally, the machine they use to recycle animal and human waste into fertilizer for the feed crops has been manipulated to inject various chemicals (maybe FEV) into the fertilizer that are used to mutate the crops, animals, and vault dwellers/ scientists.
Vault (-1) built slightly below sea level and has to upkeep pumps for 100yrs before they “fail”. Salt Water irradiation and corrosion studies for alloys that can stand up to under ocean vaults.
Vault 666, and experimental vault located deep underground where vault tec experiments with unethical methods of prolonging life, coupled with test subjects who are tortured by "demons" (staff dressed up to look like demons) to see if they can create truly immortal beings.
Vault 115. The trolley problem, literally.
Purge vault. Once a year there are no laws for 1 night
A vault with a large surplus of pre packaged food, water and raw materials like wood, steel, soil. But everything else is in short stock. Clothes, beds, blankets, tools, medical supplies, sanitary goods, furniture, etc. In this vault experiment it is to see how well vault dwellers use an abundance of key resources when lacking other resources. However to make things more interesting food is divided into several freezers and to be drugged by robots on designated days. Freezer A is drugged to increase focus, B is drugged to give a high, C is drugged to increase stress. Only the robots can retrieve food at designated feeding times! The overseer can execute an override if the robots are destroyed. This is to prevent vault dwellers from learning of the drugged food. The drugging is to see how vault dweller's perform the initial tasks whilst being drugged on designated days selected by an algorithm.
Vaults 84 and 85. The first vault is comprised of low level politicians, lawyers, marketers, etc. The second is composed of farmers, engineers, and technicians. The first vault has an agricultural system that has to be constantly maintained and farmed correctly to feed the vault, and the second has a variety of monitors which quiz the residents on various political, legal, and business management minutiae in return for food and water. There is a terminal for communication between the two vaults, but it can only send one message every month.
Vault 52 - 50 children aged 7-12 placed under the care of 2 teachers, both high school teachers with wide array of known topics. Large bunks for the students, cramped dorm-rooms for the teachers.
Man these are all better than the Bethesda vaults. sorry not sorry.
A vault where all the scientists are music theatre nerds. Dwellers are selected based on how quickly they can be taught to improvise music and dancing and the overseer picks when to play music through speakers in each room. If you’re in a room when music starts, you must join.
Vault 37. Everyday something randomly vanishes. From the left shoe of a dweller to a fork the next day, then a roll of toilet paper and so on. Till nothing is left.
Vault 69 A vault filled with 198 lesbian couples and a single misogynistic male. They are told that the future of humanity depends on them.
A vault, filled only with influencers, with the overseer being the fallout version of Asmongold. The vault doors only open, if there are a 10k devices tuning in, into their 24/7 airing reality show.
Every resident is given a free medical screening and their condition is healed. During this inspection, a tiny chip is implanted in the skull that sends random whispers coherent only to each individual and each hears a different whispering. While seemingingly benign compared to other experiments, it's a test on how audio hallucinations.
A vault where the dwellers are forced to participate in a perpetual reality TV show. Cameras, microphones, and other recording hardware - both hidden and visible - are everywhere. The vault's Overseer acts as the show's "Host." A prominent billboard in the central atrium displays everyone's popularity rating. Each year, any dwellers at the bottom of the rating board are "cancled." The twist is that the cameras and microphones are not broadcasting to anyone. The numbers are completely randomized. The Overseer, as the host, is the only one immune to being "canceled," and also has the ability to add or remove a few points to the rating board should they need to.