Everything I Learned About Economics Playing Fallout

I'm neither proud nor ashamed of it, but there was a time when I was a dealer. I needed quick cash and realized that moving drugs I got cheap (or even free) yielded more than working or running errands for people. It's not like I was some drug kingpin either: I only sold to one guy. At first I'd bring him one or two doses, but once I saw the profits, my obsession with getting him more and more kept growing. That's how I ended up raising brahmin and using their dung to make jet for Bobby De Luca, from Vault 81 in Fallout 4.

The Fallout games have been my go-to series for over 27 years. I've spent more than a thousand player-hours in its universe, and that's without ever touching Fallout 76. Between Fallout (1997), Fallout 2 (1998), Fallout 3 (2008), Fallout: New Vegas (2010) and Fallout 4 (2015), they gave me enough action, entertainment and challenges to have wanted to play the saga across four different decades. And in that time, more than once I ended up quoting it when talking about the real economy.

Sometimes talking about money, what it is and how it works, with notions I picked up equally from my teenage years during the 2001 crisis (with the boom of Argentine quasi-currencies) and from my early adulthood squeezing New Vegas (with the boom of Mojave quasi-currencies). And which in the long run served me equally well to understand Bitcoin, diversification, or managing memecoin portfolios.

And sometimes to support the thesis that minding other people's business is, generally speaking, the least profitable activity. Because yes, in Fallout the NPCs ask you to cross half the desert and face the worst dangers for a dozen bullets as reward, but real life is full of NPCs who hassle you for even less.

The Economic System of Fallout

Fallout is a video game saga of role-playing, adventure and action set in a post-apocalyptic United States with mid-twentieth century aesthetics and the technology of pulp science fiction, with flashy advances in home robotics, nuclear energy, laser weaponry and social simulation and control techniques.

In its lore, satire, and narrative, the saga overflows with complex uses of money, production, trade blockades, credit, scams and taxes. Commentary on the market, the state, governments, the human condition and even issues like racial selection are also found in countless dialogues and in many documents, computers and holotapes you find along the way.

There's economic attrition warfare between the New California Republic and Caesar's Legion in Fallout: New Vegas (hereafter, F:NV). There's the centralist obsession of the Brotherhood of Steel vs the distributed boosterism of the Minutemen in Fallout 4 (hereafter, F4, etc.). You've got the despotic command of Vault City and its food rationing versus the "popular economies" of the Wasteland in F2. Market concentration and premium segmentation, with the Atom Cats moving the money in power armor in F4. Or the militarized monopoly of the New Vegas Strip, "in the hands of Mr. House and his army of tribes and robot police".

But beyond that superstructural flavor, what interests us about the economic system when playing is pretty simple. In a world without large-scale production, where every resource is scarce (including the strength to carry things and the merchant skill to sell them at a good price), any item can have value for any of the communities that keep popping up.

These societies are rhizomatic, sprouting in distributed fashion across all kinds of locations, without a common market to embrace them. Instead, spontaneous exchanges happen in the form of barter, which are put into practice whenever possible and, as you level up your character, become increasingly favorable. And this: almost anything you pick up on your expeditions can serve as a medium of exchange and/or store of value. I have seen the best minds of my generation hoarding ashtrays, desk fans and typewriters because they contain crucial components for weapon mods or industrial crafting.

Long Live Sales!

In Fallout you find major commercial hubs like The Hub (F1), the open-air black market of The Den (F2), the aircraft carrier bazaar at Rivet City (F3), the commercial zones of New Vegas (F:NV) or even Diamond City (F4), which looks like a mall with its specialized shops, display windows and all. In F4 it always happens to me that I'd rather build up Sanctuary than trade in Diamond City. One is a neighborhood, the other is a shopping mall.

Except for some separatists and segregationists, settlements depend on trade between caravans, traveling merchants and visitors who carry money, objects and consumables from outside, because there are no active industries or large-scale distribution systems. It's a survival economy beyond the fact that the nuclear cataclysm happened centuries ago, because at every moment there are threats: thugs, critters, super mutants, addictions, dehydration, radiation, hunger.

And it's a survival economy because in the crisis the flow is cut (currency) and you have to start liquidating stock (inventory). The flow of money feeds commerce. The stock feeds trade. Without formal jobs in sight, except becoming a mercenary or soldier, with war and gambling as the backdrop, it's trade or nothing.

In that context we have a mega-decentralized ecosystem of buying, selling and bartering at small and medium scale, between P2P, small businesses and cataclysmic freelancing. Barter in Fallout replicates an economy similar to decentralized markets where products and services are exchanged without fiat money acting as intermediary, like in barter clubs or crypto exchanges. You can trade almost anything, though some items like purified water, drugs, weapons and their ammo, armor and certain hard-to-find materials are the stars of every Wasteland wanderer's portfolio.

Arbitrage for Everyone

The value of these items varies from game to game and from zone to zone, like a model of a supply and demand system where the scarcity of a product in one location can make its price skyrocket for a specific merchant or even for an entire faction. This opens the door to an arbitrage that turns out to be one of the most profitable strategies.

But, of course, there's also the possibility of farming and manufacturing like an automaton the consumables with the best return on investment, especially in F4, which has a workshop and crafting system that is a game in itself. Always for the same goal: to get more caps.

The existence of a canonical currency provides a simplified unit of account for barter operations, but also an indicator that guides what is perhaps the most lucrative and least invasive activity in the game, which is resource arbitrage.

In economics and finance, arbitrage is a practice that consists of exploiting price differences between two or more markets to obtain profits. This concept is very present in the game's mechanics, which drives constant movement and also steady trading and inventory flow, based on a key element: the carry weight limit of the player character and their companions.

In Search of the Highest Bidder

Arbitrage in Fallout basically means paying close attention to not using certain items, always picking up others, and holding others until you reach higher skills, larger locations and fundamentally more desperate buyers, always with the mindset of squeezing out more cash. This strategy triggers as soon as you realize you can't carry infinite weight and you choose some location to set up a stash.

But beyond that, Fallout's own narrative, with its missions and NPCs, forces situations where you're exposed to arbitrage. It's not just the case of Bobby, the jet addict from Vault 81 in F4, but also Doctor Barrows from the infirmary at the Museum of History in F3, who pays much better than anyone for creature parts like giant mosquito blood or mirelurk glands. Also in F3, the Nuka-Cola Quantum bottles can be sold to the collector Sierra for a price above the generic rate; and in F:NV, the Sunset Sarsaparilla caps have their own story arc. In F4, the Atom Cats pay more caps for fusion cores to power their power armor. And, in general, the Brotherhood pays well for technology and military or robotic parts.

The Money of the Wasteland

In Fallout there's traditional money but it's not the canonical payment unit. "Pre-war money" is more of a lootable object that has no carry weight and lets you accumulate value for the mid to late game, when our barter skills and such allow us to exchange them for their maximum value. You can even use it as ammo for the Junk Jet, or to craft other things. But in reality, the most widely used currency is "caps" or soda bottle caps, especially Nuka-Cola ones. A bizarre choice for someone unfamiliar with the lore, but one that makes total sense in context.

Caps have no intrinsic value, but they are widely accepted as a unit of measure for purchases, sales and exchanges, and also for mission and job payments. They're portable, don't deteriorate easily, and are hard to counterfeit in a world where almost all soda bottling plants were destroyed by the bombs. It's not that different from Argentine bills, which at the end of the day are paper + ink; or from any other kind of token, like casino chips, a store voucher or even a stablecoin backed by a protocol. Even in F:NV there is a character who counterfeits caps.

In fact, other currencies appear in the saga, like the silver denarii and gold aurei of Caesar's Legion. Some smaller communities also created their own currencies, just as the casinos have chips and many companies used to issue vouchers. Treasury bonds from the government? Those too. And gold bars, one of the objects I love hoarding most for the late game in my hideouts (especially if you visit the Sierra Madre casino in Dead Money, one of the DLCs for F:NV, where

In the mid to late game, another DLC from Fallout: New Vegas changes the Falloutverse economy quite a bit, because it makes a bunch of truly inconsequential items suddenly relevant. In The Sink, the location at Big Mountain (in the DLC Old World Blues), there are little robots, consoles and even a toaster that can turn junk into more valuable ingredients.

The New California Republic and the "Water Standard"

Then there are the New California Republic dollars (NCR), which enable a very interesting story. The NCR is the specter of the old pre-war US government, now fully interventionist, seeking central territorial control, public resource management and the expansion of the Wasteland's tax system, the Mojave, the Commonwealth, the world? On the other side is the Brotherhood of Steel, a hyper-militarized theocratic cult obsessed with hoarding and dominating all surviving technology, from power armor to energy weapons.

The NCR was the first large-scale form of organization, years after the bombs, and over time established its payment method, the NCR dollar, backed by gold. Its bills had wide acceptance until the clashes with the Brotherhood, which managed to destroy the gold reserves. NCR dollars notably lost their value.

From that point, one of the few organized commercial ecosystems in the entire saga, The Hub, found the chance to re-establish caps as currency, setting up a reserve system with high liquidity. Literally, because they established a standard where a certain amount of caps is exchangeable at any time for a bottle of purified water. Something like a stablecoin of the radioactive world.

Tried and True: The Illegal Economies

Gangsters, pimps, dealers, thieves and burglars are the golden boys of the Fallout universe. Because, as in most dystopias, here drugs and weapons, sexual servitude and slavery are central elements in the economy of the Wasteland and the Commonwealth. They contribute to the narrative and setting of a world where social conventions and moral guardrails have collapsed. They thematize physical exploitation even in post-human environments and so on.

But before all that, they're memorable because they're the sectors that pay the best, especially drugs: they tend to be very light and quite expensive, offering an optimal ratio in a game where a large part of your time is spent collecting things, managing inventory, trading what you won't need and deciding what to drop so you're not walking in slow motion for two hours.

The Gun Runners of F:NV, for example, are one of the most powerful commercial organizations in the saga and also one of the premium buyers for advanced player characters with the ability to mod weapons to top levels. The ability to create and customize weapons adds one of the few production layers in this economic framework, which basically comes down to producing food or water and manufacturing weapons or drugs.

Across several installments of the saga there was also a prominent role for the sex trade, with Madame Stella and the Cat's Paw in New Reno (F2), where you can even invest in the business; or casinos like the Gomorrah (F:NV), where prostitution is just another luxury service. The rewards for working for the factions that control or protect those monopolies are substantial.

As for slavery, in F3 you can buy and sell people at Paradise Falls, with missions to capture some NPCs as slaves; and in F:NV this theme returns with Caesar's Legion, where there are also missions to capture or free people as part of commercial agreements.

Regarding drugs, as early as F2 getting into trafficking the jet from the Khans was a lucrative activity. Jet is addictive, and that ensures constant demand and therefore sustained income. These are all practices that can earn you enormous amounts of caps if you have no qualms or if you don't mind getting your hands dirty. Literally: to make jet at the chemistry stations in F4 you need fertilizer and plastic, and the fertilizer comes from brahmin dung. Which is why, at the beginning of this article, I was a drug dealer. Not because I'm a bad person, but because this specific post-nuclear drug practically makes itself.

"I don't want to set the world on fire", says one of the most memorable songs from Fallout lore. But well, it's also a maxim that war never changes, and you've got to make a living in the post-apocalyptic world.