How Much are Fallout Currencies Worth?
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- Опубліковано 17 гру 2022
- Bottle caps, dollars, Roman inspired coins - how much is it all worth? Lets see if we can figure it out!
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![Nuka-World The Happiest Place on Earth / Fallout 4 [47] (Nuka-World 1)](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/isO_EJkCa7U/mqdefault.jpg)
I like to think Radking is just wandering around the Commonwealth, giving out random fragments of his sermons to anyone who can't walk away fast enough, and the complete versions of the sermons we're receiving on UA-cam are basically found footage that's been stitched together.
Lol
Sort of like M'aiq the Liar except more clear lore dumps
Kmsl yesss
Imagine walking through the wasteland and RadKing approaches you, asking for a baseball, so he can compare it to a stack of pre war money.
Kinda the same vibes as the motorcycle dude the raiders of fallout 4 are talking about.
Imagining a mod with a NPC always following while talking in the background even when you’re talking to someone else. Even if he dies, he’ll track you down a few minutes later
Sierra Madre chips are both worth 1 cap and worth 1 pre-war money (10 caps), something you can exploit to nearly double the DLC's loot value.
Who needs heavy ass gold when 10$ weights nothing
L, O, D, S, of E, M, O, N, E. What's that spell? LOADS OF MONEY! Prob'ly.
A bottle cap was originally supposed to be worth one bottle of water. The bottle of water became the standard currency and the cap eventually became the stand in for the bottle of water. So I think the better question is how valuable is water in the fallout universe.
Pretty sure it was 10 caps to a bottle of purified water.
@@Xahnel Every source I can find originates to 1 cap 1 bottle. The value changes before we are ever active in the world.
You could figure that out with caps still, since water became harder and harder to find they had to swap to bottle caps. The change happened very early on too, water wasn't really used as a currency long enough so you'd just need to see how many caps are needed ._. and take that into your caps to usd equation. Let alone as RadKing mentions water would have a scale based on the area much like say ammo which makes it matter even less and even harder to figure that out to begin with. You literally can't figure that out without knowing the cap conversion rate since water's value is given in caps, and the whole to figure that you need a "stable" object so what he's using makes more sense.
@@delphidelion nothing you said is based in reality. need little hallucination though
Seems valuable but asides from the Geck other settlements don't seem to have such hard times finding it
So ironically, I used to collect bottle caps when I was younger. My grandpa owned a bar and the bottle caps would look so cool. So I'd collect the different ones I could find. Be it that everyone makes beer, the caps were endless. That said, I'd also use them as things like title belts for my wrestling toys
Looks like someone's readying up for an apocalyptic world
I had a baby wipes box at my Granny's house where I kept bottle caps.
Ranging from what we tend to think of when we hear "bottle cap" to like milk and modern-day soda lids. I'm not sure why I started but I had fun stacking them in walls and towers
I used to collect ring pulls (yes really) and I would get ecstatic every time I came across one that wasn't regular metallic gray
You forgot the General Atomics Galleria bowling alley, where it's implied that 1 pre-war money is just 1 dollar, as the robot asks you for $5000 and you give it 5000 pre-war money.
The robot is probably malfunctioning, though.
Not probably... absolutely 100% it's malfunctioning. You can even HEAR it malfunction in the dialogue, too.
But that's literally the entire plot point of the galleria.
Just cuz a robots main function to distribute goods is busted doesnt mean the math is. There are other pre-war places with the exact same rate. You really need to educate yourself on hyper inflation and why pre-war money was basically trash before the war and why currency amounts were in the hundreds for a gallon of gas and thousands of luxury ameneties like hotels, movies, bowling, ect.
@@reaper_exd7498 You're missing the point. The point is that the encounter implies 1x 'Pre-war Money' = $1.
The item looks like a stack of $20 bills.
We all know that the Fallout world suffered from inflation.
The robot 100% was calculated to adjust for inflation, and after 200+ years, each stack really was 1 dollar lmfao
@@quinnlee-miller9792 if by 100% programmed to adjust for inflation you mean 100% literally malfunctioning than yes, you're absolutely correct.
I liked in new Vegas we got some lore about how bottle caps are made it’s like real country’s currency a single or couple locations with cap machines and how counterfeiters try and find undiscovered cap machines to use like in the sunset sasprila factory
I knew in the lore that at some point the NCR tried to get everyone to use their dollar instead of caps and of course switched back due to the Brotherhood. But I didn't know that in Fallout 2 NCR dollar were literally the only current to use because I didn't play the game
Ncr didnt really switch back their economy got so inflated that the water merchants brought the cap back
A ncr doller is wirth 40% of a cap
And 10% of legion curency
One of the quests in Fallout 2 is a ghoul giving you a map to a buried treasure, which when found contains thousands and thousands of bottle caps, which are entirely worthless because nobody uses them for currency anymore.
@@EmergencyChannel then the bos blew up their gold reserve the citizens felt unseasy about everything so tried exchange ther money back for gold as fast as the working class sold back their stocks in 1929. and similur to our own history mass seling back to banks causes banks to fail the ncr bank could not give enough gold basck to those who panic sold their money back for gold leading to a colapse in the economy and lost of trust in the ncr dollar
@@EmergencyChannel bruh
One thing about caps, they were originally used by water merchants in Hub (very hard to counterfeit without pre-war tech), and backed by water. I assume this is explanation why F1 and F2 caps and NCR money are worth the same - they are backed by same amount of water by water merchants in NCR.
Can we just take a minute to recognise RadDaddy for having some of the most unique fallout vids? I've only ever seen a handful of economics related videos for the Fallout series so this is nice
I remember the original financial backing for the bottle cap in Fallout was drinkable water. How much water, I'd need to review the lore video to figure out if that's a liter, a gallon, or a day's worth. It was produced by the Shoddy Cast if someone wanted to go back and look into it. Also, remember that the pre-war money, as entirely unbacked currency, is a bargain basement cryptocurrency, mainly because the 8 caps per stack is for the paper the money's printed on plus the retention strap holding all those bills together.
but how much would a days worth be
@@SDSypher 2-3 gallons
@@dinosirbone uh, I hope that's a typo. 2 litres is the generally accepted amount of water to drink in a day, not 2 gallons. For reference, about 3.75 liters are in a gallon.
You're telling people to drink 7-11 liters of water a day. Which is many, many times too much water, and probably isn't all that great for you. Hell, people have trouble drinking one gallon a day.
@@iami3rian394 water is not used only for drinking
"retention strap"... Rubber band.
I'm glad so many great Fallout youtubers exist because I used to have to spend all my time reading the fallout wiki while taking a dump
yuppp 😂
I'm glad I can take a dump in peace because if we lived in the world of Fallout, some creature or raider could burst thro the door or even (God forbid) from below me at any moment.
@@fluttzkrieg4392 you just reminded me of some of the feral ghouls that like to hide in the bathroom stalls.
@@edwingonzalez7691 I have never once encountered that
@@SDSypher I think they're in FNV and FO3, not sure about FO4 as I haven't played much of it tbh
The makeup compact could be foundation. They go for like, $5 to around $50.
I really appreciate your calculations in this video. One minor issue is like to point out, as someone who spent over 5 years handling large sums of cash I can tell you just by looking that there FO4 cash is a standard bank strap of one hundred *used* $20 bills. This is important since used bills never lay truly flat and a bank strap of used money can stand at twice the height of its new counterpart due to the air gaps.
The Sierra Madre gold vs the bullion might be worth looking into
There's also gold in Fallout 4. Which appears to have the same model, and therefore, equal weight. Meaning it can be used for conversions.
@@dr.JackieBright I’d think it would be less pure with those ingots, being that they’d be made by people in the wasteland melting down jewelry and stuff like that which would have likely had a little bit of other metals to start with
in fo76 you missed pleasant valley tickets, and the newest one with the pitt update. stamps. oh and legendary modules and legendary cores. used to make legendary items. oh and among players we use stable flux and scrap as trade currency.
i came for a sermon and left with a PHD in Fallout-enomics, thank you RadKing
About the FO76 lottery prize, could the robot have discounted the taxes off the prize already? By your original account (1 pre-war money = $1,000 dollars) it could have slashed 50% off your prize money. Things get worse since as others pointed out, the FO4 example you gave actually indicates that each stack is $100 dollars, so that would instead suggest that taxes ate 95% of your prize money.
Also, I recall the robot also saying something about a due payment, so perhaps that was also deducted from your prize money and the remaining $5,000 is all that’s left after the deduction plus taxes… out of the original $100,000!
Yeah that sounds right for how taxes on prize money works. The government taxes everything short of the air you breath, only getting 5% of the prize is totally something I believe would happen especially given how crappy America got by 2077.
The pre-war money in FO3 and FNV are $1000 bills. The pre-war money in FO4 are $20 gold certificates.
The texture is bad on the $1000 bills, but they are clearly US $1000 notes. That is the only US bank note that has that design.
This is due to the 2077 inflation that has occurred in the fallout universe. They were using really expensive rare materials to fix things such as platinum components in motorbikes. Essentially a Corvega car has a fusion powerplant inside. Even a Giddyup buttercup costs nearly $16,000.
As someone who works with money, the calculating on how many bills are in a strap was so funny. 100 bills are in a strap, regardless of the denom.
Also, the thickness of the strap isn’t a good indicator of how many bills are in it because how ‘used’ those bills are will make the strap thicker. So straps of 1s and 5s (really commonly used bills) are way thicker than 100s and 50s.
Love the work you put into this video, great job king!
really?
@@olivercharles2930 yes
Man gold really went up in value between Fallout 76 and New Vegas, then down again in Fallout 4
Oh yes I always wanted a video on this. Caps really are pretty volatile depending on location and what you want exactly.
Also depending on your barter skils
i’m a stats major and when i finish school i wanna work in finance / economics and i assume it’s a hyper specific niche but i love your fallout currency/inflation videos! so interesting. love your reasoning behind sorting by uselessness
Legion money is far more valuable than what you stated, in that it can be made into Coin Shot with the chance of recovering the used coin. It also keeps its value as ammo
Because of this, you can profit of killing a, NCR soldier and looting him while retrieving your coin
20:00
Small Bertha in Fallout 4 Far Harbour DLC gives you the Turn Back the fog quest. The first thing she says is:"I have to talk to you. I got 14 1/2 caps. I want to hire you." Which may imply that some people use to divide caps? Completing the quest only gives the player 14 caps though.
Oh yeah, well _I_ don't have to worry about caps, I have a credit card!
One thing I don’t think anyone mentions is how much your audio mixing has improved.
After binging a ton of your old content it was a pleasant surprise to hear the improvement.
In theory, since all legionaries carry Legion coins on them, you could possibly help the NCR back up its currency with more than clean water by constantly killing legionaries and giving the money from them to the NCR.
That would imply trade between the NCR and Legion for the sake of monetary conversion. Otherwise the only worth that the other side would have for the money would be raw material.
@@dr.JackieBright Just melt the captured currency down. Gold and silver have value. Backing up fiat currency with precious metals is a better move than doing it with water or some other resource that can easily drop in value.
... Also, thing to remember, not only did the water merchants back the cap as a currency, itw as backed by the thing they sold: each cap was worth one bottle of _clean_ water. This leads to some hilarity in later games, when a bottle of water costs what now? yeah. xD
Could have sworn the exchange was 10 caps to one bottle.
You should do a full economics series man. I love it and it keeps me coming back!!!!
Just wanna say thanks for the videos... you're a smart kid, got a good narrative style going. Wish I'd have had your talent at that age.
Now there is some epic maths. 2500 divided by 25 equals 1000. Great job 23:08.
I used to collect bottle caps in a box as a kid, the thing is, after a couple years they all got rusty.
Radking: how much would a bottle cap have to be worth for you to pick it up?
Me: wait, it had to be worth something?
Ever since I heard about the guy that sent over 2,000 caps to Bethesda I've been collecting bottle caps. I currently have 1,520 caps
The reason they were hesitant to accept those caps is because of repeat attempts. Also why I want to refund Destiny 2 Lightfall.
Radking: Have you ever wondered how much a bottle cap is worth?
Daisy: Bro, the hell are you on?
The storyteller vibe is real
I think i recall somewhere in the lore that the US was hitting a major inflation rise by the time of the Great War. So it's not unrealistic to assume that a stack of bills was very undervalued (think Germany during the Weimar Republic; there's a few pictures of kids using worthless marks as building blocks and a man wheeling a cart of stacks around) That said, brilliant mathing on your part! That was very entertaining
Me, who is a hoarder when it comes to these kinds of games.. You are damn right I am picking up those items regardless if it sells well or not lol... If it is for crafting/repair or quests I keep them, everything else that I do not use ( like armor, weapons, ect ) I will sell.. and I pick up everything.. Keep in mind I also play on the hardest difficulty on top of any survival mode that might exist ( either base or modded ) so things that normally might not have weight.. Have weight. Like ammo.
Goblin mindset.
Don't tell people that your a hoarder. My advice to you. < if this was real life. Hilarious!
@@Sksk27547 If you read the whole thing then you would have already known that its in games, not real life.. That and I only do those things in singleplayer games.
Radking explains the lore of caps and money.
Takahashi: *Nani ni Shimasuka?*
Wow. Great video. In depth research delivered cool and coherently.
I tried to calculate the value of a bottle cap through the fact that in fallout 4 there's a farm that pays 3 caps per melon harvested
I think it's safe to assume that harvesting melons isn't going to be much different in fallout world vs real life (assuming that the players ability to instantaneously do that is just an abstraction and canonically people can't just do that)
so now all you need is find how much harvesting contractors are paid per melon irl
I know its usually ~15$/hour
but I wasn't able to find how much melons per hour is in there as I have no experience in the field (get it?)
best I can guesstimate is 5 melons per hour per person as you need to also bring it to a specific location - one central drop off point
but that would set the value of a bottle cap to be exactly 1 to 1 with $
which is… certainly a find
I'm open to any discussion about that tho, if anyone has been harvesting melons irl by any chance please enlighten me
Present day farms are usually much larger than the small single family steadings in the wasteland, so I'd imagine the central drop off point is much, much closer meaning you can make more trips. To get to the numbers of roughly what Radking had you'd basically have to double the melons per hour. 10 melons per hour isn't honestly that much of an effort I'd image, I'd figure like you could probably get 30 melons an hour pretty easy too. It's picking up a fruit and putting it in a wheel barrel or something maybe a few dozen yards away. Tedious but not hard. A rate of ten melons an hour might include pruning the plant and adding fertilizer so it grows the next melon as well as weeding the area. General maintenance stuff for the garden would take more time than the actual lifting of the melon and I guess that is what most of the actual work is that gets waved away as a video game abstraction. So probably a reasonable rate imo. Foodstuff is also extremely valuable given the conditions of the apocalypse and would be overly valued compared to today.
I played fallout 4. "Diamond city" is a very expensive place. The house that the player can buy, comes out to be more than $100 a square foot. Assuming that 1 bottle cap equals $1. If the game situation was real life, the best option would be to fix 1 of the houses in sanctuary, and live there. Assuming few people know about it.
If i was in Arizona, i would join 1 of the factions. I am referring to fallout 3. If this was real life.
Bottle caps would rust and or loose their color. Eventually they would be not in circulation anymore. That could cause a lot of problems.
"We take what we need and want"- institute. Hahaha! hilarious! I can't stop laughing now! The director maybe would tell everyone in diamond city, "everyone, this is a robbery". Tell them that, over and over. Maybe even once a week, maybe every Sunday. Diamond city, and any other town.
I love stuff like this, not sure why but I love trying to see how fictional currencies compare to modern USD or a comparable currency depending on the game. For instance me and a friend of mine managed to using hamburgers (yes I know,) calculate how much a Credit in Halo was worth, I can't quite remember the exact number we came to, but I do remember what price we came up with for the Spartan Laser, $175,203 or the same cost of a single Javelin missile in modern day money. So do with that useless info what you will.
The Big Mac Index is a (humorous) real-world tool to compare different currencies and economic areas
@@johtajakansio I did not know of that, fascinating. I must do more research on this subject. Thanks for sending me down a rabbit hole that will consume my day(this isn't sarcasm, I love learning new things.)
I think the pre war money is a bit scuffed in game because it's just a generic look and could easily have a lot of people with a lot of dollars especially if there was hyper inflation. I think best to discount prewar money as an item
This sort of analysis is a good reminder that ANY currency (dollars, caps, tokens, points, scrip) is only worth what someone else will give you for it.
This is the kind of crunchy amazing content that sets Radking apart from the rest. Magnificent analysis. I can't wait to buy the 99 cap Dave NFT trading cards he just announced for his Republic.
Also WTF, IM ONLY SUBBED ON MY PERSONAL CHANNEL AND NOT THIS ONE, bad Hammy!!!
*Hits subscribe with a powerfist*
Can confirm from my personal account. BAD HAMMY.
TLDR: the cap systems is probably less like modern day exchange, and more like a basic bartering system, where the value is determined more by the individuals, rather than having a set value
Peppermint Mocha, lemonloaf, and radking, a great way to start my day
Caramel Mocha, sirloin steak and eggs for me 🤝
coffee, water and sewing for me 💪🏼
Barbacoa tacos, coffee, and Radking 👀
One issue is the barter system, prices can vary greatly depending on your stats
Love your videos, super excited to see this one :D
Since the "Pioneer Scouts" are a thinly veiled reference to BSA, it shouldn't be too hard to find the real world price for uniform pieces that you can exchange for in game. Good work as always tho!
I googled Fallout Inflation to find your other video you mentioned on it, but I don't get what the Deathclaw bending a Mr Handy over the Dug Out Inn bar has to do with how much the money is worth...
I just found this channel, now I can't stop watching. It's like an addiction
radking, i hate to break it to you but that is a makeup compact. any pressed powder in a little container with a mirror is a compact. a makeup case is usually just something to hold lose makeup, like a bag or plastic box.
So at 23:04 it is $2,500 and a stack of 25 prewar money that would make it $100 each stack not $1,000 but you probably noticed in editing but I just had to point it out but cool video and the info is pretty interesting and cool as hell lol
That's pretty close to what I calculated. If 1 cap is backed by 1 quart of water then the value is about 25 cents on the low end and about $4 on the high end.
I would argue that the makeup compact, with its intact and protected mirror, could be quite useful...
I forgot to bring a stealth boy into the Sierra Madre vault a couple days ago and was annoyed at myself until I remembered oh yeah, 10 luck, 100 barter equals out to around 120,000 caps if you hoard the chips like every single one of them is a unique weapon
I think the main usage of prewar money is like, rolling cigarettes, packing dried herbs or medicine powder... Utilities like those.
It's a piece of nice paper, you can't ask for more in such a world.
I applaud your decision to include the magic 8-ball, despite your perception of it as a toy.
I would say it is more of a novelty item. It can be enjoyed by all ages.
Unlike a toy, it has limited entertainment for a continuous block of time: Creativity can only take a person so far when you’re asking questions to an inanimate object that gives limited answers. Though that same property provides plenty of entertainment for brief periods of time between tasks (which may be more suitable for independent people as they roam the wasteland).
Plus, the properties of the 8-ball prevent it from being a proper ball. The differing densities of multiple objects and fluids prevent it from rolling smoothly on level terrain, and the density of the protective casing means it will absorb a great deal of any force exerted on it (won’t go flying when struck with a bat, way too painful to kick around).
charge card is the only currency i need
I like the intro man, it's got a bit of Signalis in it.
That is an interesting question. What factors would affect the value of cap based upon location and time? I know that inflation and how a particularly commodity is valued probably has some effect. However, what if an item has no value or intrinsic worth in our time, but is quite valuable after the war. One example here would be cans. Cans can be a source of tin, steel, and aluminum in the wastelands, but they have virtually no value in our time.
I’d have thought the natural items for measuring the height of a stack of bills would have been a bullet. Because you know a 10mm bullet is 10mm. Even if the casing has a larger diameter you can still just look at the bullet itself.
Just cuz they portray 1 dollar as a stack doesnt make it so. Most fallout items didnt get any accuracy to their dropped item. Ever dropped a single bullet from your inventory?
To me the Fallout Universe is like what if the society of Jetsons had ended in a massive nuclear war.
They sell Nuka Cola bottle caps as upgraded tokens for Fallout Wasteland Warfare table top RPG. As far as I can tell they are real bottle caps that were just never put on a bottle. They sell for $16 for 50 caps now (I don't know if the price has changed since they were released at least 2 years ago). Not sure if you can actually determine anything from this, but it is another data point to look at.
All I just want to say is that the inherent value of money being higher, doesn't necessarily mean the economy is doing better.
caps aren't 1 to 1 with modern money, fusion tech or a stealth boy would be priceless now, it's all based on a barter economy of how hard to obtain something is vs how much it's wanted. a single 9mm bullet is 3 caps, a box of 100 is 45c IRL. a blood pack is 1 cap, usually in america you get 12 dollars for donating blood, the 1 cap gum is 99c pre war on the pack, from just these 3 items it is worth $0.0045, $12, and $0.99 at the same time not to get into military gear, services or anything.
In NV it's said that the NCR dollar is worth less out in the Mojave than in the homeland because the traders and people who live in the Mojave don't trust it as much as the cap. It's not because economic struggles
That's because caps are backed by water, but the NCR dollar isn't backed by anything.
With Fallout 4's component and scrapping mechanic, I believe it gives a way to determine the value of different items to the Commonwealth, being the difference between the value of the raw materials and the value of the manufactured goods.
I always thought the exchange rate between caps and dollars was two bills for every one cap. Thank you for putting in the real effort to figure this out.
It is if you have absolutely no barter or speech points put into bartering. However if you take the middle road (average), it comes out to 25 cents a cap. A dollar will go for four caps
I occasionally trade US$ for credits in the FO4 Creation Club.
I also used to trade US$ for atoms in the FO76 Atomic Shop.
But I enjoyed the video anyway. Thumbs up👍🎅🎄✌
Compared to gold a cap is with $21.33 in fallout 4
Inflation a bitch huh? 😂
Yeah
THAT'S 2000 BOTTLE CAPS
GoddAYUM that takes up some volume. Absolute chad right there
It's funny how fallout 1 caps have similiar value to polish currency.
Video idea: analyze the cost of the Mojave campaign in actual caps and make that into real dollars
Still waiting for a Fallout story arc where that old 50 cap Magic 8 Ball changed hands until it ultimately spurred a cultist tribe, who worship billiards and fight with rebar-reinforced cue sticks and throw weaponized cueballs, though I'd expect that more from Interplay than Bethesda.
Great work Your Irradiatedness, may Atom bless you with his Glow.
Also, maybe the bill differences between 4 and 76 are because even though the game doesn't show it, they're different values.
Moe just casually checking out the RadKing's drip.
I have a collection of caps in a box. I have about 250 currently, a lot of them from soda from when I was a teenager. Now it’s from the odd beer that I may have, so the collection isn’t growing as fast, especially since I’ve stopped eating and drinking anything unhealthy. Better to stay fit I say than shove junk in your mouth 💪🏾
So, gonna point out that in the casino portion of the Sierra Madre, the dialogue with the cashier makes it clear that one pre-war money is one dollar. This also can lead us to believe that 5 dollars was a reasonable price for a box of mac and cheese pre-war, seeing as you exchange one chip for one dollar and Blamco Mac and Cheese costs 5 chips at the vending machines. With how rampant inflation was pre-war, 5 bucks for a box of mac and cheese seems like a pretty good deal.
This seems about right.
What I wanna know is: How the hell would you haul all the caps around. I drink enough to know that is impossible
RadKing, I hope you enjoy your holidays and may Atom bestow his glory onto you.
I think 3.5% annual inflation is close to the past 100 year average
Thanks to Radking's data. 2000 caps equates to 60usd at 33caps per dollar. Mr.House searched for the Platinum Chip for approximately 204 years.
in one year alone Mr.House spent around 24k usd. This would imply that Mr. House spent around $4,896,000 usd in total to find it. holy crap.
Different perspective here, with a real world example.
Back on Fallout 4's launch in 2015, a guy bought a copy of the game with 2240 caps. If the game was 60$ on release, that would make 1$=37.33 caps. Adjusted for inflation of the dollar from 2015 to 2022, the correct ratio today is 1$=29.63 caps.
The difference between fo4 and 76 potentially got the price difference on pre war money from being different dollars. In 76 it may be intended to be 200 dollar bills especially considering theirs nothing as far as I'm aware to contradict their being more dollar bill variations and the bot delivering it was likely given that value do to it being easier to carry.
I've personally been saving every single bottle cap I can get my hands on for years. If that ends up being the standard currency of the apocalypse, I'll probably be dead. But anyone who comes across my stash may have a great week. Given that I have somewhere around 800. It's been a few years since I bothered counting them.
Fallout means a lot to me and reminds me of my childhood. And as someone who has played all the series of the game on the date it was first released, I must say that one of the most ridiculous things in Fallout is the currency, especially in terms of being the most inconsistent. Cuz to put it shortly, in a world like Fallout, the last thing you would ever want to do would be replacing money with something heavier, easy to cheat and counterfeit and will also take up a lot of space, a lot. And it makes no sense even for a game. Plus, in a Fallout universe, you would never have any idea about the current inflation. Therefore, the method people would use would be highly likely exchange.
I can only theorise that the currency serves a game function that's attempted to be justified in lore.
A way to reward the player with loot or payment for quests that doesn't overload the players inventory.
@@MediumRareOpinions That's the most laughable of all. Cuz such a lore do not and cannot exist. That's not even what lore is. That's the people who cannot make reasonable connections with the things and the reality and make things up and call'em lore. Not happening, sorry. And the more you force it to happen, the more you move away from the reality. One way and scientifically proven only way to reward a player from a game on the other hand is to make him feel the realism and thus release dopamine in the mind. That's how and when people (unconsiously) feel the reward and enjoy a game or basically anything. Even a like you get on the Twitter or Instagram. And no sir, you cannot make it really happen by making the player loot or steal thousands of caps unnoticed(?) or by rewarding the player with thousands of caps for a "quest" he completed. On the other hand you do make it happen when you reward the player with something like a weapon, an item or an apparel or when you enable the player to exchange something with another as in real. Cuz this would make it real.
Taking a different approach. While Fallout is a fun game that I happen to love playing, in the real world, you have so many sources telling you to invest in silver and gold for the upcoming apocalypse of the month. To be realistic, gold is of no more value than paper currency in the end of the world. There has already been a case of a guy who forked over a gold krugerrand (worth about $1000 USD at the time) for a couple gallons of supposedly clean water during a natural disaster. Honestly I can only think of one "currency", and one REAL economic system if the world blows up. A logical approach to currency is most likely bullets. I have seen it argued that it makes a poor currency because you would then become afraid of shooting your gun because it is literally burning money, but if you buy bullets with a different currency, it still costs you money every time you shoot your gun. it takes different amounts of materials to reload different types of cartridge, so even hand loaders will see different value in different types of bullet... but the only REAL economy will be barter. The simple art of you and I sitting down and negotiating how many eggs from your chickens it will take to buy the piston I scavenged from the broken down truck on the side of the road a few days back. It may cost you 6 eggs, but your neighbor 12 just because you are a better negotiator. This is the only true economy in the wastelands. I have what you need, do you have what I want? General scrap will have the lowest value, useful scrap more so, ammo more so, and food, medical supplies, etc. will be at the top of the list. Old currency... not worth the paper it is printed on. Gold and Silver... to a craftsman maybe worth something because they can use it to make something look nicer. The silver MAYBE because silver is somewhat antibiotic IF you can process it correctlycinnamon roll in the next town over for the exact same price. the differences in price will be how merchant caravans thrive in the real world... they will acquire cheep items in one area and take them some place that does not have them, just as it was thousands of years ago.
9:21 That may be the case in Fallout 3 onward, but in Fallout 1&2, it is made clear that Pre-War food is rare and inedible, with only 3 instances of it appearing in the entirety of Fallout 1, one of which is in the possession of Gizmo.
_"A television dinner. You're not sure, but it's definitely not edible. You're not quite sure if it ever was."_ *-Small dusty box of some sort*
_"You have no idea what "Instant Spaghetti" means."_ *-Box of noodles*
From these descriptions, it can be deduced that Pre-War food is nothing more than a miscellaneous collector's item, and certainly does not form the base of the food chain. I suppose this is an example of something the later games retconned, so I'm just pointing out that purely in the context of Fallout 1&2 only, these items have arguably even less utility than in later games. The gap between The Great War and the beginning of Fallout 1 is 84 years, so a more apt comparison in our world would be with the value of a box of food that's survived since WWII. It's not something you'd go out of your way to get just to eat.
It doesn’t even make sense why the East Coast uses caps. The whole reason the West Coast does is because caps were backed by fresh water. Like the modern day gold reserves.
My guess is after the Great War and getting used to wasteland, the traders have been traveling east to west and back, spreading idea through words of mouth or demonstration of using caps as wasteland currency like how the term Yao Gui (that seem to be everywhere) is used in both East and West Coast.
When you try giving the Mr handy bottle caps for a new assaultron body he'll say something like "trash, actual garbage as currency?"
I think it’s funny that people were selling legacy weapons for 100’s of dollars and now they are worth nothing because they were removed
take gold bar from fallout NV. it's extremely valuable and has a caps worth. find its weight, and value in USD as of dead money coming out. compare USD to worth in caps. done.
The manifest says there's $2,500 in cash, and there's 25 stacks, that's $100 per stack, not $1000 per stack. The next solution was right though, 50 stacks equaling $100,000 comes out to $2000 per stack.
Just look up how much bottle caps cost in the 50 because you were able to sell them for money
"And then fallout 76 comes along and ruins it" fact check true
16:03 You earned more likes than I am allowed to give for calling out fiat currency.
The difference between how each game converts nominal dollar amounts to "pre-war money" stacks might be because nominal value doesn't matter at all, the material the bills are made of is what gives stacks of money their value.
So the reason $2,500 in the Fallout 4 plane equalled 25 pre-war money stacks and the $100,000 prize in Fallout 76 equalled 50 stacks could have been because of different denominations in the stacks. It even works out with realistic denominations: Either $1 bills in the plane and $20 bills in the prize or $5 bills in the plane and $100 bills in the prize.
Even if you treat the in-game models as gospel... just because the top bill is $20 doesn't mean they all are ;-)