@@MarcTelang Well, it wasn't currency anywhere according to Fallout 2, since The Hub joined NCR and stopped backing the caps decades prior. The fact that Fallout 3 and later games have bottle caps is one of the many retcons / oversights that happened when Bethesda acquired the franchise.
@@havcola6983 That doesnt matter, the Hub is in the far west even if they stopped backing the caps others might have started to back it once it´s established some worth and far away area´s like the capital wasteland in Fallout 3 should be pretty unaffected if the Hub in California backs NCR money or caps now. In New Vegas it makes actually even more sense since its a neutral intermediate currency between the faction currency of NCR and Legion gaining worth through being acceptable for all parties.
NV has dead money dlc and the big encompassing joke is you went through all that to get the "treasure of the sierra madre" and inside the vault is all these gold bars, which really would have no value in the wasteland, but on top of that, they are so heavy, you can only carry a few out with you and can never go back and get the rest. i mean, they are worth a good amount of bottlecaps, if you can get them out, but by then, you probably have so many caps, you don't even need it
a melee only person would last about 5 minutes in the wasteland unless they stayed in Diamond city, or traveled surrounded by the brotherhood of steel.
@@ididntmeantoshootthatvietn5012 if it was realistic, and you're running around post apocalyptic America with a melee weapon you're getting dropped in one shot by some guy with a milsurp rifle like a mosin or getting sprayed down with some garage made direct blowback subgun. In the game, melee builds can be strong, irl there's the expression "don't bring a knife to a gunfight"
An elderly man I work with told me about when he was a child they would trade bottle caps in at the store for a chocolate bar. Since then it’s been my head cannon that the children that survived in Fallout grew up and had this memory of using bottle caps as currency
Would make sense because there’s only a finite amount of bottle caps out there after the nuclear ☢️ war 🤷♂️ so and with money 💵 becoming obsolete 🤷♂️ then the bottle caps would be worth more. ;) 👍
That’s…genuinely the cutest headcanon for this franchise 😭 Idk I like the idea of kids being able to be KIDS, yknow? If the kids irl these days can’t be kids anymore, I hope they can still have that in a fictional universe
When I was a kid my school in prince George did can tab drives. They didn't want the cans just the tabs. They would trade 25 for a chocolate bar. I used to go door to door in my neabourhood to get then and I would return the cans use them torent Pokémon movies and turn the tabs in at the end of my school day for snacks to watch the movie with
there was a point where pennies and metal US currency were actually worth more separated than as a coin. also back then recycling was actually a valuable thing to do. now? well, the industries admitted most stuff, whoops, the majority of stuff, isn't recycled. what so ever. recycling bin? same stink pit at the next been not labeled recycling.
I think it would be interesting if bottle caps from different beverages acted as different denominations of money with more common beverage, bottle caps like nuka cola being worth less than rarer caps like vim
their "durability" will not include their printing, as it will soon be scraped off from their sharp edges while being carried in bulk in bags and boxes. like sand in the desert is a round corn.
You would need some bits of information that would be almost impossible to obtain. In order to give the different values to various company's bottle caps dependent on their rarity, you would have to know how many of each were ever made, how many had survived to the point where they became currency, what had happened to the machinery that made them, and if that machinery could, if destroyed, be reconstructed. No-one sensible would ever choose to base a currency on bottle caps, of course. Forgery was almost the next invention to come along after coinage, and people got so good at it that nations spend millions, even billions, on designing coins and banknotes that are as inordinately difficult and expensive to fake as possible. Their entire economies depend on it. .
What's weird to me, well one of many things lol, is finding caps in safes that appear (due to situation they're encountered in) to be pre-war, untouched by subsequent events. Why would anyone put bottlecaps in a safe pre-war? Maybe they saw this video? And don't get me started on bullets and weapons in trashcans...
To me, weapons and ammo in odd places like that seem like post-war dead drops, which were never picked up. It certainly wouldn't explain every instance of stuff like that, but it's my headcanon.
I've seen people hide money in a corncob, put it in a hollowed-out doorframe, fill the space with sunflower seeds and glue, sand it down, then paint it to look like the doorframe again. I ain't questioning shit.
@@JoMcD21 true enough, and if it were pre-war money I’d think little of it. I try to be prepared, but I’ve yet to start squirreling away bottle caps lol.
It started off at select locations like the Whitespring Nuka Vendor, only to be adapted to other vendors through the efforts of the Responders tinkering with the station bots.
I think a modern version of this could be soda tabs. Even lighter than caps, with holes for carrying them, and a very complex design to “forge” in a wasteland.
In ancient Sparta currency was in the form of iron rods. It had a two-fold benefit: (1) They were hard to steal in large amounts, so theft of money was a waste of time, and (2) when Sparta went to war weapons became more expensive so it encouraged Spartans to melt down their currency and turn them into weapons.
Spartan citizens didnt need to steal because they were given land and slaves for free once reaching adult hood making them a wealthy landed aristocrat from birth. Of course this was if you were a Spartan citizen but helots were completely subjugated and the proletariat were very subdued.
as kids, we used to play this hopscotch game where you needed a "token" to throw to move. we used to all just get rocks. then one day, one of the kids found a bottle cap and stuck mud in the hollow side and used that instead. we all thought it was so COOL. we all went scavenging to find the coolest bottle caps to make our own bottle cap tokens and show off how much cooler our cap was. the coolest caps were beer caps and the more exotic it was, the cooler you were. Coors and Budweiser were everywhere, but anything else and you'd be the envy of the group and could exchange it for stuff from other kids.
3:55 interesting that the Metro series was able to implement this idea pretty well, imo. Dirty rounds vs Pristine military grade ammunition. Use the cheap dirty rounds for combat or use your very valuable military grade ammunition, that doubles as currency, to do much MUCH more damage than the cheap rounds.
I do wonder if Dmitry Glukhovsky read about Fallout's initial concept on clean bullets as currency and perfected it, after all he stated that he drew inspiration from the Fallout series.
I think it's because they have very different vibes. It's been years since I played a Metro game but I remember them being much harder and I would assume the books have a darker tone. Having to weigh the pros of cons of shooting your money is good for a darker setting like Metro, less for the wackier vibe of Fallout. Both are good it just depends on what kinda game/story you want to make.
Kinda odd how, despite it being one of the factors that lead to bottlebaps being chosen, we never see strings of bottlecaps in game. At least as far as I remember, they always are depicted as singles or unseen within a boxes inventory.
imagine if season 2 opens with a flashback of nuka cola becoming a huge corp then it shows the factory which they are being bottled in and a bottle cap falls on the ground and while a employee is picking it up it transitions into the ghoul or lucy in the present time picking up a bottle cap they found on the ground
i like to think that, because of the influence of fallout and it being a widely known and popular game, that if something like that happen in the real world some people may accept caps in trades and for currency lol
I was going to say this seems likely but it's very rare I encounter bottle caps in my country. The drinks mostly come in plastic bottles and cans. So maybe something else would be better. Honestly in the UK 1 and 2 pound coins are tough, made out of metal and are already currency.
Its nice to have different currencies in games rather than the standard "Credits or dollars" most tend to use. I once played an MMO where the currency was poker chips. (Fallen Earth) it was a unique take on what people would be able to get their hands on because there was no central banking system anymore.
Also, proper poker chips are made of ceramic and are pretty damn durable. The paint might wear off but the impressions would remain. You can use a regulation ceramic poker chip as a whetstone to sharpen steel.
In the early 2000s, credits on cell phones became currency in the Philippines and many African countries. In rural areas where there were no ATMs but there were 2G cell phones (and no internet at that time), people could buy credits with cash and stores in rural areas would accept phone credits as payment (and could resell or trade them). When people had to be paid long distance, did you send cash hundreds of kilometres and hope the person transporting it wasn't a thief or got robbed? Or send credits instantly and securely by phone? Banks in developing countries got pi$$y about this and whined about phone companies treading on their territory. Fortunately some were smart enough to realize this was a way to do banking in places without bank infrastructure.
@@bahhumbug5467 - Not really. Bottle caps are mostly made of aluminum or tin along with having plastic (or cork back in the day) linings, which would not only make them hard to melt down and forge, given all the impurities, tin and aluminum is also a very weak metal, meaning it’s not ideal to use for tools or weapons. Some bottle caps are made of steel, but considering Nuka Cola is a portrayed as a greedy monopoly, I’m betting they went with the cheaper route in materials to save cost.
Funny thing to me is, at least US dollars are basically printed on denim. So it'd end up as a common cloth source (and it's green on your clothes the color of being poor) post civilizational collapse I think.
That's one of the many problems associated with a fiat currency. It's based entirely on the faith of the government that issues the currency. It also allows for far more manipulation and corruption, hence why modern governments strongly prefer fiat currencies over precious material backed currencies (and they use dishonest arguments that going back to a gold standard is dangerous when I never mentioned going back to only gold as the currency backer - I always thought it should be a diverse backing, not just gold).
@@ALE199-ita I think you overestimate how much a well-handled person sitting on a bottlecap press in their basement can spread around the caps so it doesn't break the economy... If you get a looooot of people trying to run that thing to the max? Yeah, totally, yeah um... you're well and truely fucked.
@@AenVegra Have you played Fallout New Vegas? Specifically have you done that mission? Are you seriously telling me that Raiders are smart enough to not hyper inflate the economy by printing a huge of bottle caps and as such, causing the value of bottle caps to become worth less than the NCR dollar.
The Nuka-World theme park (complete with bottling plant) in Massachusetts also became a trading center post-war, much like Barstow, California turning into the Hub, further explaining why we see bottlecap money on the east coast.
@@driftersforge4962 And a mod to use it yourself. IRL the absolute best solution would not be to ruin it but to drag it home to the NCR who could keep it under guard and use it sparingly to replace worn-out caps like the US Mint actually does today.
The lack of Water Merchant's on the East Coast pretty much negates the logical reasons for using caps in that region. The fact that they backed the caps with water is the primary reason they were a strong currency. Their portability and durability are also factors, but those could be achieved with other materials/objects as well. The fact that they are used on the other side of the country is almost entirely a result of thematic continuity on the part of BGS. Caps are the main currency in Boston for the same reason that the Brotherhood of Steel and Super Mutants are in Boston, because they reinforce existing IP.
@@davidfrancisco3502 travel doesn't have much to do with it. Because BGS wanted you to be able to drink from a toilet, which is fine mechanically, the narrative implication is that the east coast still has at least some functioning waterworks. And since the events of Fallout 3 result in a working water purification system at the Jefferson Memorial, there is clean water for basically anyone that wants it. This would destabilize the value of caps on the east coast, at least around DC. All the reasons to use caps on the east coast are just backtraced excuses to continue using the iconic bottle cap. If Fallout 1 and 2 had established glass marbles as the currency for the game, then the robots in Fallout 76 would be running a promotional event that asked for marbles instead of caps.
I think it makes decent sense. A lot of early civilizations used cowry shells for currency just because they were rare yet common enough, looked nice, and were easy to transport and trade. I think it makes sense for something like bottle caps to essentially act as post-war cowry shells, something extremely common yet also not varying in rarity since there's generally a fixed amount, and are able to be traded and kept easily. Not to mention that, in lack of fresh water, other drinks, usually pre war, would be the next best source of water, and while soda is generally not good for hydration, it could be good enough for most, leading to bottles being valued, and eventually transitioning to caps in the same way the western water merchants did.
@@tylerp.5004 Sure, but the fact that they independently chose bottle caps for completely different reasons stretches believability. The east coast could have just as easily settled on marbles, existing coinage, or even seashells as with older civilizations. Rarity isn't even a reasonable parameter for bottle caps, as it would take very simple equipment to stamp bottle caps. It's fine that caps are used across the nation, but let's be real, the reasons are almost entirely down to recognizable IP consistency.
@@thegoggle823 They could, but I think Caps make just as much sense as those other forms, especially since pre-war inflation probably made it so that not many people had coinage anymore, and probably wouldn't be as common as caps, since they were as common as Nuka Cola, which was extremely popular and one of the most common products pre-war, whereas other items wouldn't be nearly as common, since you'd need coast for shells (provided that sea life is still thriving enough) and marbles would be something extremely niche and not even close to the availability of soft drinks. And as for forgery, as McCafferty said, it's not that easy to make perfect cap replicas, mainly because they take an amount of technical knowledge and skill, along with machine tools, which are much more likely to be used for other reasons than just making caps, and which would be very rare except for gunsmithing and armor making, and in the developed East Coast. And honestly, when you have much more immediate problems and sources of income, not many people, except for a select few, would even think of trying to make more caps.
I asked my older brother this question when I watched him play fallout 3 on Xbox 360. His guess was that bottle caps were useful for capping bottled water lol
In reality the same thing would happen that happened in 90% of collapses through history. They would use the old money, at least the coins only with different values. Currently in Somalia many areas are still using the old bills of the former Somalia government.
Until industrialization, gold had no real value other than the desire for it. It was only when electricity came into usage (because it is an excellent conductor) that gold took on physical worth.
Not quite. I use them for mixing small amounts of epoxy in or cyanoacrylate glue. Mixing different shades of paint, or oils. I build models, they come in handy. Years ago I worked in a brewery, and took home a small box full. They are gradually being used up that way.
@@guessundheit6494 Did you actually attempt to say that gold had no value before industrialization? Someone go to South America and let the Inca's know they didnt actually die from the Spanish Conquistadors looking for the CITY OF MOTHER FUCKING GOLD...
@@floridaman-pc8nv thats why fallout 2 introduced actual NCR money. and new vegas tried to implement multiple currency system. but bgs being bgs, they wanna ride the train of popularity and the idea of caps as currency in fallout is just part of the brand. as much as 2's and fnv's different currencies make way more sense.
It makes sense to use bottle caps. They're not readily available, not easily to forge, and they're sturdy, easy to carry, and can last a long time. Obviously it would start with one person who had a lot of bottle caps and just decided that would be the currency. From there it would build up like normal currency systems started. I give you this thing, you give me that thing. The problem with pure barter, is there isn't necessarily a way to completely divide what's worth what, and a person might not simply have the full amount to trade. For example, if someone wants a singular item, like a tool, and needs to trade a non singular item, like a bag of rice, but doesn't have exactly enough rice for the amount, you lead to an impasse in trading. It also clearly helps by not having to trade for things you don't even want. For example, if someone wants a tool, but doesn't have quite enough rice to trade for it, they might have to throw something else in to make up the difference.....but what? Maybe a small pocket knife for example. But if the pocket knife is crappy, it might still be an underpayment and pretty useless, and if it's a nice pocket knife, it might be an overpayment. So money is really about more easily balancing the scales of trade. There's also the recognition that some goods are perishable. If I buy a bag of rice, I can't store it somewhere forever to trade later. That's the biggest issue with a pure barter system. So I'm forced to trade that rice at some point, before it goes bad. But what if the only thing I can trade it for is also something that will go bad, and perhaps go bad even sooner? That's the problem. So maybe I trade some rice for some stale jerky that might be on the verge of molding. Have I really gained anything in the trade? Maybe not. What a barter system actually does, is promote a lot of deception in the quality of goods, because goods that are stored as currency, eventually go bad, which makes it difficult to amass wealth to do much of anything with at a single time, because a big chunk of your wealth could be in perishable items, and a big chunk of what people are willing to trade could also be in perishable items. With money, you can trade a perishable item for money, and then later trade that money for a perishable item. And technically everything is perishable on a long enough timescale. So money got around that problem, by ensuring that if you traded something, you didn't only need to trade for what was readily fresh. So someone could get a fresh bag of rice today for some money, and that person can then later trade that money for something else that is fresh at the time they spend the money. Same with work. If you work on a ranch and have hired help, if you're only paying them in readily usable goods, like food, that causes a lot of issues. Firstly, they might be doing more work than the amount of food they can even eat before it goes bad, and if they have to trade the excess food they earned, they might not find anyone that wants that specific type of food before it perishes, leading to waste and loss of income. Which means even though they were paid, they did a lot of extra work for essentially zero pay because it went bad before they could use it. If I do enough work on a ranch to earn a whole cow's worth of meat....I can't exactly eat that whole cow before it goes bad. No maybe the rancher could promise me they'll honor is by giving me like 1/20th the meat of 20 different cows over time, so I can consume the meat but not have it go bad before I can consume it. But that then is a delayed long term payment, which means even though I've amassed "wealth", I can't use it all at once so readily. Of course we could be talking about other goods too, but the point is, it's not conducive to have people either stuck with trades they can't offload, nor stuck with trickles of payments in barter that take a long time to pay out. For example, with that 1/20th of a cow agreement over time, you essentially have to stay nearby waiting for payment to be fulfilled over weeks/months or even years. That forces you to stick around in one place in the meantime, while money allows you to take payment and move on to other places for work and living. That was one big problem with the barter system....once you were established, you were kind of stuck, because you might have a big farm setup, but without money, what could anyone trade you for all of it if they wanted it and you wanted to move on somewhere else? You'd either have to abandon it all to move, or trade it for very little....and it also gave incentive for people to just take it from you if they wanted and could. So barter systems are ok in some instances in the short term, but not for the long term. Money gives people a lot more options on how to spend the fruits of their labor, either over time or all at once, and corrects a lot of social issues that the barter system causes. For example, say someone has the biggest farm in the area and people need food, and the farmer says he's only accepting sex in trade. So you either let them sleep with your wife, or they're not trading. So you end up either having to do that trade, or not eating....or there's a conflict, and either the farmer gets killed so they can take the food, or the farmer kills whoever tries to kill them. That's another inherent problem with the barter system: People can be very specific about what they're willing to trade for, and it might not be something you're able or willing to trade for. So the person with abundance of food sits on what they have, and you get nothing....or there's conflict. Money removes a lot of that as an issue, because if that farmer accepts money, he can then just take it to a brothel and get laid instead of demanding peoples wives as payment. Money is about creating liquidity/interchangeability in the trade of goods. There are downsides, but the benefits far outweigh them. In fact, without money, a civilization really couldn't advance much. It is necessary for advancement by creating that liquidity/interchangeability in trade of goods, that allows people to have more options in doing things.
It makes sense to use bottlecaps in a specific area because it was backed by water (i.e. NCR terrirority and slightly past), the cap eventually changed to the dollar from NCR which was still backed by water. Bottle caps still make sense in FNV as they are what people have been using, everyone in the Mojave accepts it, and it causes the dollar to cost less because it's less stable with less NCR government that way to enforce the value. It does not make sense to be in the commonwealth, D.C., or in the Carolinas because they are not backed by a single thing causing the use of mass trade (such as water).
lol It only 'makes sense', if you ignore the existence of cents. Prewar coins would have been the obvious choice; thin pieces of stamped steel/aluminum are neither particularly durable or hard to make.
It doesn't make sense. New nations would want to use their own money, not bottlecaps. It is ridiculous that people still use them after hundreds of years. Fallout 2 adressed this and then Fallout 3 unmade it again because it is "Fallout".
I can’t imagine merchants counting bottle caps if there was an expensive item that cost 500 caps… imagine having to count each one one by one jeez idk how they do it
the point of bullets being not great gameplay wise is why i love metro's implementation, the ammo traded as currency is much more powerful than your standard ammunition, and works in a pinch when you're away from a settlement, but you're not really meant to just use it in any other scenario, other than like endgame battles where there isn't another chance to spend your money. this would've been an interesting thing to see in fallout, but i like the standardized currency, even if the lore doesn't really back up the cross-country value of bottle caps holding up (I find the argument that it "just makes sense as a currency" to be quite weak, as there's no direct evidence of an entity backing the currency with a standard value, or having control over the production outside of ncr territories.), and the fact that caps are almost exclusively nuka cola caps, when all other drinks that have standard caps also work as currency, or even hold higher value in the case of the sarsaparilla star caps.
I dont understand. If the caps are bring backed by pressumably fresh water then wouldn't the value of caps severely diminish in places like the mojave wasteland (where fresh clean water is abundantly available through places like lake mead)? Wouldn't any attempt at procuring fresh clean water like project purity or even installing a water pump in a settlement reduce the value of the cap since the rare commodity it is being backed by is now getting more and more common?
I think that the Water Merchants backing them helped caps get a standard agreed upon value at first but once they became established. The value of caps became ingrained in society so even in places where water is more abundant a cap is worth roughly the same because of everything else you can buy with it. 10 caps may get you a bottle of clean water and if gun is worth 10 bottles of water then the gun is 100 caps. With trade people are still going to want roughly that same price for the gun even if water is actually easily available. Realistically it would vary some but I don't think it would be too significant.
@@Helperbot-2000 In Fallout, the NCR didn't exist yet. Most settlements in the wasteland were independent. It could be argued that the Hub was the most powerful of the independent settlements largely because it was the home of the Water Merchants. The Water Merchants were the most powerful economic entity on the West Coast and they were the ones that established bottle caps as a currency backed by water. In Fallout 2, the NCR was just getting started and it originated in Shady Sands. The NCR eventually absorbed the Hub and it was only then that the NCR became "in control" of the water. Basically, caps became the default currency in the wasteland before the NCR existed.
@@Blox117 caps were the currency in FO1, but not in 2. There is even a conversation option somewhere (my mind is saying with Harold) that mentions how caps use to be valuable but not anymore. Iirc in FO2 it is NCR$, and the icon is gold coins. Edit :Typhon's treasure, a side quest started by a ghoul in Broken Hills
@@everythingponyIn Fallout 1 the image is depicted more as the old age pouch of gold coins. They are still caps but their function is the same, it may be an artistic choice because caps is as valuable as gold coins.
Several years ago when I was younger I’d play the mobile game fallout shelter, and the currency fascinated me to the point of having at least two hundred bottle caps scattered around different boxes in my basement. If the nukes drop I’m somewhat rich
I assumed bottle caps were used as currency because of how valuable intact bottles of nuka cola would be to the average wastelander. Not only do they provide an uncontaminated source of hydration, you can also use the bottles to carry around water in after you drink the soda, an invaluable thing in the wasteland. You could even use the bottles to boil water in to make it good to drink.
@@morgatron4639 The quantum variant is radiated, the others ones aren’t confirmed but it’s Nuka-Cola, if the radiation got people addicted they’d want it to be in all the drinks. Just in a much a lower quantity theoretically. But in the games Nuka-Cola always gives 2-5 rads so even in the wasteland it wouldn’t be considered an uncontaminated source of hydration.
Fallout 2 had gold coins, Fallout Tactics had pull tabs. Funny how only after Bethesda took over did bottlecaps somehow become the universal wasteland currency agreed upon everywhere from west coast to east coast
What other currency would groups of unaligned settlements use? In fallout 1,2, and New Vegas large groups of settlements we're all working and trading with one another, so it made sense they had their own standardized currency when you have 750,000 people in the ncr alone. How many people live in the commonwealth? Or the capital wasteland? Like a thousand? Two thousand each? Diamond city isn't the center of a confederation of all the settlements in the commonwealth, rivet city isn't working with multiple small settlements around them, every settlement stands alone, there's no unity, why on earth would they have their own special currency? I'm not saying bottle caps makes sense but what else would? It wouldn't be fun having to convert 10 different types of currency to buy ammo at rivet city. Fallout is a videogame, gameplay and player fun take priority over lore, bottle caps are easy for the player to understand and it doesn't require much work to implement, and every single town doesn't need its own dumb currency that doesn't matter since it's just converted to something else the second you actually want to use it
@@incoherentrambling3139 the same way it works in new vegas kid... legion money is accepted but has less value with other traders ncr money is accepted but has almost no value in legion territory tactics had brotherhood use printed money and wastelanders used pull tabs you defeated your own argument in fallout 1 none of the settlements were ligned in fallout 2 it was region of NCR and despite taking money they weren't aligned with NCR new vegas uses caps because house took over caps producing factory and both legion and ncr only use their money literally everything else would make sense than every place on earth using bottlecaps
using only coins and no paper money seems to check all the same boxes hard/impossible to counterfit, especially in the wasteland spread randomly in the wasteland easy to transport durable I wonder why a system based on regular coins wouldn't be another good choice
Been watching a lot of your videos lately yaboiii! I really love the interesting topics you pick each video along with the great in-depth explanations you bring everytime. Keep up the great work, you're making great content for the Fallout fandom ❤️🔥
Bullets as currency is used in Metro 2033 universe but only military grade rounds which are rare not ammo created in the tunnels. MGR hit harder doing more damage but they are usually held onto until the end of the game.
You just weigh them to count them. As for hauling them around, yeah, they weigh around a gram a piece IRL, so the same as a dollar bill, so not too crazy. It's the volume that's the issue, and the fact that with few exceptions, there's only one denomination. I could easily conceal a million dollars in $100 bills on my person and that would only be 10kg of bills, so like 22lbs, but they've be compact and quiet. I don't know exactly what volume caps take up, but it's well over a cubic centimeter, probably more like two to three a piece. That adds up pretty quickly and makes it obvious from a distance you're carrying a lot of **something**.
I feel like that one thing that the legion got right was their coins because all the legion coins are made of gold silver copper which have value to society even in the wasteland gold is worth its weight in gold
Gold has no inherent value except as used in electronics. It’s just a shiny rock. Bottlecaps are also shiny. Gold was used as currency precisely because it’s too soft and heavy to have any value. Even “gold” jewelry is an alloy because pure gold sucks for even that
@@Skullhawk13 yes but we see two instances in the wasteland of gold still being valuable the gold bars from Sierra Madre and the gold bars you can find in fallout 4 both sell for a high amount of caps so wasteland society still sees the value in gold
@@Cheese_steak_ the gold bars in dead money weigh 35 pounds. A lot of goods are worth more than their weight in gold, and in fallout 4 it’s value is due to you being a pre-war soldier using it for electronics. The notion of gold’s value is artificial, exactly the same as bottlecaps. However gold is much heavier. Back when gold coins were a thing they were like thousand dollar bills
Bottlecaps are neither durable nor rust-resistant enough to become any form of currency. There's a reason gold and gems have always been the standard of currency til the printing of paper money: because they won't rust, they'll never degrade, it takes A LOT of pressure/heat to destroy them. They can be passed down as inheritance without losing their value over time and they're shiny n' pretty. After 200 yrs, during the events of the fallout stories, bottle caps would degrade and/or rust, losing their value completely.
The value of the bottlecaps isn't based on its material, though. The real value is what it's backed by, which is water. The US dollar was backed by gold and silver until the Federal Reserve took over and turned it into a fiat system.
Diamond will burn at 900 deg C. In real life many things have been used as currency, including animal shells. In the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the refugees from Golgafrincham, used leaves as currency, until spring saw a rise in the number of leaves. The solution, burn the forests down.
In Fallout 1, the cap was also known as the HubBuck, and was equivalent in value to a specific amount of water from the Water Merchants. As everyone needs water to live, it makes sense that people would use the currency that the Water Merchants back. In Fallout 2, the cap has become almost worthless thanks to the NCR growth and their own dollar, which is used in every major location on the periphery. New Vegas has the cap as a sort of intermediate currency for the locals who do not want to use NCR dollars or Legion denarii. While they do not have anything backing the value, they did have a working bottle press to make their own currency with. At least until the player character broke it. It is also probable that the Water Merchants traded that far in the past. Fallout 3 has caps because... Fallout? The only merchants in the area seem to be either serving the town they are in, or one of three guys wandering around with a pack brahmin. Unlike the Hub, which traded with the whole region, the Capital Wasteland does not have a central trading city or group, meaning that those three guys who wander around can dictate what currency they will take and at what value Fallout 4 has caps because... Fallout again? Unlike 3 it does have a central trading city, Diamond City. However, as that used to be a baseball stadium it is just as likely that the currency they would use would be something related to baseball, as that would give them complete control over the local economy and compete with Capitol Hill who also run a trading outfit but are not allied together. 76 again has them just for being Fallout. Heck, before Bethesda put in npcs, the cap was mostly used to pay for fast travel, as there were no living people to trade with.
Very nice summary thanks. And again but now in terms of continuity of their own lore 76 reveals the true nature of Bethesdas intentions. Simplify that complex RPG to the point of silly ness.
id honestly love if fallout 4's currency were baseball cards lol. not entirely sure how well their preservation would be after a nuclear war and 200 years tho. unless there is a factory for them somewhere around boston. which i kind of doubt lol
Wrong, 76 has them due to a prewar promo event with the parent company that owned Nuka Cola. As part of the promo, caps could be used in exchange for a fresh nuka cola at any participating Nuka Cola establishment, including Bubbles the Nuka Cola Counter Jockey at the White Spring. From there the postwar usage picked up due to organized efforts by the responders that was aided by the local bottling plant.
In Fallout 76 we learn after the Great-War the people were trying to get the stuff out of the vending machines and the robot venders. When they ran out of Pre-War Money, they use Bottle Caps to trick the vending machines they were using coins, and they just to keep using the Bottle Caps as currency when they weren't dealing with the vending machines.
My dad plays Fallout 4 and actually keeps a bucket of bottlecaps! XD Most are either coke or beer caps and he just kept them as a joke at first but kinda thinks that they may be good to keep. Now I can tell him to 100% keep them cuz he was right! XD
Legion currency seem like the best option ngl , Gold coin , difficult to mass produce , the meterial itself also hard to obtain. plus you could melt these gold coin to craft tech related stuffs
I worked at a botteling plant a long time ago, and in the addic there was boxes of unused bottlecaps. Millions of them. Leftovers from when designs changed .
So basically people started using caps as currency for the same reasons we started using currency in general. :P Also, since Legion currency is gold and silver it has intrinsic value it should be usable outside of Legion territory. It's just that the only society besides New Vegas with a sophisticated enough economy to deal in precious metals is at war with them. Personally I found the multiple currencies in New Vegas to be kind of pointless since from a gameplay perspective they were no different from pre-war money. I'd have preferred if the player's actions could have affected the relative exchange rates. Or maybe if there were some merchants who dealt exclusively in one kind of currency.
Silver, gold, and other precious metals aren't _intrinsically_ valuable. Value is a nonobjective, secondary attribute, which we as higher-thinking creatures have _projected_ onto precious metals. (This holds true for any item, as per the subjective theory of value.) Precious metals are considered valuable because mankind has generally agreed that they're sufficiently rare and attractive enough to be used as specie standards.
@@AidenRKrone Yes, but that value is derived from properties that are inherent to the material rather than 'because the government says so' like with paper bills. My point was more, gold is gold and silver is silver and it doesn't really matter whose face is stamped on it. If it weren't for the war I could easily see the NCR in a situation where they're desperately trying to get their hands on every Legion coin they can to rebuild their gold reserve.
@@knightgallade8431 Well by that reasoning bottle caps aren't very valuable either. But clearly people still find it desirable to have a universal unit of exchange and for higher value purchases a higher value unit is more convenient since it saves you having to transport 10s or 100s of thousands of caps.
@@knightgallade8431 gold and silver both have intrinsic antiseptic and antibacterial properties. I think they would be quite important in an post apocalypse.
I’d love to see in the next fallout game a community that rejects the idea of using caps and uses a different random object as currency instead like poker chips, lottery tickets, trading cards, etc. and the player can choose to try to make them switch over to caps or deal with converting their money every time they interact with them.
IMO this is best given an out-of-universe answer, which I feel is mostly because bottle caps kind of look like coins. That and it's become a brand icon.
Adam Smiths mythical “land of barter” was finally found in the waste lands of fallout. What’s interesting is that barter as a form of trade his never been supported by the historical record.
Question: Why are bottle caps the currency of fallout? Answer: Todd Howard. Mf decided they would be the default in FO3 despite FO2 having a different currency.
@@CommanderTK9091 Bruh can you not fuckin' read? I just said in fallout 2 it was different and same with fallout tactics. It was A currency not the main one of every game like it is today.
@@Retroholic not once did you mention Fallout Tactics in your original comment, bird brain. They probably decided to stick with bottle caps as a knod to the first Fallout and keep it original to that instead of continuing with something different like FO2. It’s not like Bethesda just randomly decided to use Bottle caps. What a failed, pathetic comment on your end. Always dumbed down individuals like yourself trying to be witty and funny and fail miserably.
and then there's Chicago who used pop can ring tabs, I liked that idea from Fallout Tactics. I wish Bethesda went with a similar Idea for Fallout 3 and used a different type of currency
In hyper inflating Hungary in 1946 the currency became worthless, people started using eggs nationwide. Eggs became the standard units, since you couldn't just print eggs from nowhere, so there was a limited, but slowly increasing supply, but it was decreased by the used eggs. However people slowly stopped using eggs, because they realized there were eggs in circulation for so long, they got rotten inside. But if they didn't break it, it still had the standard value. From this point of view, bottle caps are pretty good money.
@@ryszakowy well, my father was in the commie hungarian army. They shot out good decade expired canned foods from artillery. Some of them were not edible at all.
Why bottlecaps? For the same reason we use coins now. They have an intrinsic value (steel), are very portable, can easily represent value, and everyone agrees on their value. The questions you should be asking are what happened to all the coins, and why haven't people been minting new ones?
I don't know why people don't mint new coins though I suppose in a way the Legion does but I would assume the US stopped minting coins. With inflation being a huge problem in Fallout there's no real need for coins. If a loaf of bread cost 100 dollars then what could you possibly buy with just a few cents? It's probably not worth ot for the US to keep producing them, heck in the real world a penny costs more than a penny to make in America. As for what happened to previously minted coins I would assume they're all locked in collections or had been melted down to use in other materials by the government.
@@Pegasus54321 It does make some snese, but there should be tons more coins out there still. The only coins I've seen are subway tokens and gambling chips, but I don't really count the latter as coins, since they're weren't government recognized currency.
What is the value of a dime? To you and me, we'd say 10 cents. That's because we have a central government and banking system to tell us that that is what it's worth. What coins have you seen recently that are made of steel? Heck, even the penny isn't made of copper anymore. The currency we use today is only possible because of our central government. Failing that, we'd all be using regional currencies like the states did before we recognized the federal government's authority to print money. Look up Ben Franklin's $8 bill. Massachusetts specific currency. No, regional specific currency would be the only way to exchange value post apocalypse. Bottlecaps in the southwest because of the water merchants/tradition, Pelts/furs in the north because of how cold it gets, in the east, maybe scrap metal because of the ruined buildings and vehicles. Maybe we could use bullets or medical supplies like stimpacks or Rad-X/RadAway for a nationwide currency, but that would require each region to be able to facilitate trade between each other and that would require rail or air travel. Yes, the BOS have vertibirds, but they're not interested in trading.
@@LifesGuardian People 100% trade in the Fallout games. Maybe not a direct route from the east coast to the west but with intermediate trade just like the Silk Road between Europe and China for thousands of years. People rarely traveled the entire trade route but instead sold their goods from on merchant to another in various cities along the route. Same thing would be happening in post apocalyptic America. Those regional currencies you mentioned fell out of favor not just because a federal government said so but also because they had the inherent problem of being worth less the farther away you were from the bank that issued them. The people of Fallout's world didn't have to start from scratch. They would know the benefits of a standardized currency and it would benefit them to try and reestablished one. Bartering works sure but standardized money works better. If you traded pelts that's complicated. Is a beaver pelt worth the same as a deer pelt? Size of the pelt, the quality it's in all would effect the price. Scrap metal is the same. What kind of metal? What's the alloy like? Is it rusted to hell? Do you have the means to melt it back down or do you not have a hot enough furnace available? Or you could just all agree to use caps because they've already caught on in California and in West Virginia.
@@Pegasus54321 Yes, eventually a standardized currency would be beneficial and helpful. When the NCR/BOS/Enclave or whoever takes over, their currency will dominate and will eventually overtake any regional currency. We see this in the NCR/Legion in NV. In the areas where they're weak, bottlecaps still flourish. Where they're strong, NCR money takes over and becomes more valuable. That being said, the vast, and I mean vast, majority of wastelanders, up until now, have had little or no communication with the outside world. So, the idea that some random guy who walked "the silk road" is going to tell them that this little hunk of junk is money and is valuable, is laughable. Nevermind the fact that any travelers of "the silk road" would have to be super heavily armed just to make one leg of the trek. Some outfits probably could, BOS, gun runners, Caesar's legion, maybe The Crimson Caravan, NCR possibly could send scouts. See what they all have in common? Organization, support, and means. They're centralized, or are working with those who are, and can back their currency within their territory. It's possible that the communities they visit might keep a small stash of caps specificly for their visits, but the majority of their trade will be with each other in regional specific currency. We might not know the value of pelts/furs, but those with a vested interest in having them, lest they freeze to death, certainly would. Scrap metal could be extremely valuable, as if you have enough of it you can make a shelter/fence/whatever regardlessof alloy or rust. It's valuable even without having to smelt it because it's useful. With a furnace it becomes infinitely more useful, thus more valuable, in places like The Pitt. Besides, you'd be more likely to trust your neighbor than that one guy who stops by every other week simply because if your neighbor screws you over, you know where he is and can retaliate. There's no guarantee that trader will ever come back. Think of it this way. You've been tending a meager farm to keep yourself fed your whole life. Rarely ventured far from it to keep vagabonds from stealing your stuff. Just you and your gun have fended off raider/feral ghoul/animal attacks. I come out, and meet you. I tell you that the gun you're carrying is worth 3 sheets of paper. I tell you that 3 sheets of paper is a king's ransom 700 miles away. You gonna take the trade? What good is paper? Kindling, written records of things if you have a writing utensil. Otherwise, it's not that big of a deal. Without a central government in the area backing it's value, it's just paper. Without a central authority in the surrounding area, like the water merchants in the west, backing bottlecaps value, they're just colorful hunks of metal. Maybe you could use it to make a rudimentary weapon, but otherwise they're useless. West Virginia wouldn't use bottlecaps either, that's the point. With as much water as they have, water merchants would be too decentralized to establish them as currency. If anything, raider scripts would be the currency out there with no real towns to speak of. Honestly, bullets/medical supplies/scrap seem to be the best form of currency for bartering as they're small, useful, and deflationary as they keep being used. Those make way more sense outside of California/New Vegas than bottlecaps.
Gold and silver coins are still the best game currency in my opinion. The only thing bottlecaps have over them is they're unique currency not used in any other big game other than fallout. But other than buying things with them, they're not satisfying to have, they're just useful trash.
Metro used ammunition as currency and it worked pretty well, by making pre-war ammunition currency specifically, you get a choice of using premium money as ammo when you're desperate, or conserving it for trade. It was a good system IMO
I would have liked a pure barter system or a bullet based system. Especially a bullet based system. It would have made the survival aspect of the game be very realistic. You would be careful with your ammo and when you get in a real mix up and are forced to just throw caution to the wind and use your bullets in vast quantities those encounters would become bitter sweet.
The problem I've got with them is after a certain point they are bloody useless. Like okay maybe I don't want to every pick up anything other than mission stuff so I'd need about 1000 caps for that maybe I want to buy everything from the shops? 10,000 caps maybe. I have 30k caps in my current fallout playthrough and I use water as my currency each 1 being worth about 16 caps and I make 1,000 water per day and I regularly buy everything a shop has.
Exactly the point of caps. You're providing a valuable commodity. You just became like the guys in the west. You're providing everybody water, which they will pay a lot for because you only have one competitor (that kid in diamond city that runs the purifier)
@@shithappens6887 Yeah but my point was there's nothing to spend those caps on after a certain point. The most expensive item in the game recon marine combat armour is about 20k per piece and there are 4 pieces so 80k I'm earning about 16k per day from 1 settlement so that'd be about 5 days worth of water for a 1 of purchase. It's also worth pointing out you can make that much without ever leaving sanctuary hills and while you wouldn't be level 1 as construction gives you xp you could be under level 10 easily but then you buy the recon marine armour, the big boy, buy a house in every settlement and while that makes combat easier it doesn't make the annoying task of helping settlements easier. Imagine if you could spend your money hiring mercenaries to help these settlements or to clear out areas or even to do simple quests like if you are high up in the railroad, the brotherhood, institute maybe sending out some missions to help people would be good or maybe You can pay for 1 of the cars or motorcycles you see everywhere to be repaired so you can use it. Maybe you can pay caps and have your base look as nice as the institute base looks. Like in the real world if I have a lot of money I can pay someone to do any task I don't want to do and have someone build anything that is physically possible and obviously I'm not expecting that in game but would it be too much to say have a legendary weapons smith who will take 200k and I can make a weapon with exactly the legendary features I want. Sorry that was a little bit ranty
@@matthewtalbot-paine7977 i get you, more things to do with your money would be fun. But I mean part of being so rich you can't spend it all falls on you.
caps were only money in fallout 1 because the watertraders in the Hub were so powerful and controlled the local region. in fallout 2 they used gold coins already. then bethesda came around and turned fallout into this quirky themepark bs that just took the most surface elements no matter if it made sense or not. like supermutants in Washington dc.
@@user-gd1no3gf6d its stupid. the masters army (from fallout 1) was detroyed decades ago and thousands of miles away at the other end of the country when fallout 3 took place. it's kind of like having vietcong show up in the USA decades after the vietnam war ended just because some writer remembered them from an american movie he once saw and thought they belong in the setting because of that. in short they should have come up with something new and original that makes sense.
@@professorkatze1123 ah but that's just supermutant in general not just in fo3. I think there are some in FNV but only the invisible ones which makes a bit more sense but is still weird, they probably have a background I don't know about
@@capin8067 kind of true but not much. the 2 main fractions, BoS and Enclave, were recycled from the first two Fallouts. New Vegas shows how it's done right. loads of new fractions, few old elements where it made sense like the BoS hiding in a bunker being irrelevant
I’m pretty sure nuka world had some sort of bottle cap event in Boston area too I can’t remember properly if this is true but it would make sense for people to collect them post war
Bottle caps as currency was literally explained in Fallout 1, it was popularized by the water merchants that spread across the wasteland coast to coast. Clean water was such an important resource, but really heavy and difficult to carry around in large quantity, so instead they used bottle caps to represent the water, 1 cap being 1 bottle of water. Eventually they would run out of water bottle caps so every cap from alcohol bottles to Nuka-Cola were being used. In addition, plenty of pre-war companies ran campaigns that used tokens or caps as a way to encourage brand loyalty, like the Sunset Sarsaparilla star caps in NV. The NCR and other factions actively seek out and destroy bottle cap presses to ensure a limited supply of caps. I genuinely have no idea how people don't know this, it's referenced often.
I often imagine how funny it would look carrying around 30.000 bottlecaps like my characters always end up doing.. 1 bag wouldnt be enough, 2 bags wouldnt be enough.. suddenly the image appears in my head of a fully geared dude carrying around 10 big bags of bottlecaps... Bethesda should have re-invented the monetary system to be a bit more "realistic" in my opinion.. because i cannot answer my own simple question: where do you put 30.000 bottlecaps, i can hardly fit 50 bottlecaps in the pocket on my jacket 🤷
caps have superior material properties: strong and tensile while completely weightless. Ability to melt them into weightless metal structures makes them extremely desirable, and they are way more scarce in terms of volume than pure water.
Ive been saving my bottle caps ever since i think before new vegas even, now that im adult i also have lots of guns and bullets. Im ready just need to get into a vault
All the soda bottles I drink from have plastic caps. On a plastic bottle. I have consumed beer in glass bottles with metal caps (either screw-off or pry-off type), and actually *purchase* caps to put on bottles refilled with my homebrew beer -- but it's been quite a while (I don't drink enough beer now to brew my own and craft beers are cheaper in cans).
because of an old carl banks comic, where Scrooge McDuck travels to valley that have no money and they end up using bottle caps. That is it is a joke ,that they were afraid to back out of later
3:50 I actually quite frequently use bullets as currency in Fallout. Being a creature of habit, I typically stick to certain guns, and by extension, certain types of ammo. This makes any other ammo type I pick up barter fodder. This results in me having a large amount of unused caps. Primarily because I might need those caps later. And I am sure many people know how the "I might need it later" cycle goes.
Back in the day Fallout 1 actually taught me(teen) how currency works. In school the term "backed up by gold" never made sence to me. But the "the cap is just a token that stands for water in the Hub" made something click in my head.
I think a game that did currency as ammo/resources was Horizon: Zero Dawn. You use thev"metal bits" as both money and to craft items like arrows and to upgrade weapons/armor. And it fits well in the universe too.
My favorite game currency outside of fallout has to be the camp credits from Days Gone. You get them from slain zombies( you turn in the ears). Each standard freak is about 3 credits. The variants get you more. You can also sell animal meat and plants. These 'bounties' you are collecting also earn you trust with the camp you sell them to.
the other great post apocalyptic game series metro uses military grade ammunition as currency, you can shoot it instead of makeshift ammo for extra damage but you’ll loose trading opportunities by doing so
There’s a sidequest in Fallout 2 where you recover someone’s stash of treasure, only to find, it’s all bottlecaps, which are worthless in the NCR.
Time to move to the eastern coast where they are still be used
You should still be able to exchange them like any other currency
@@MarcTelang Well, it wasn't currency anywhere according to Fallout 2, since The Hub joined NCR and stopped backing the caps decades prior.
The fact that Fallout 3 and later games have bottle caps is one of the many retcons / oversights that happened when Bethesda acquired the franchise.
@@havcola6983 That doesnt matter, the Hub is in the far west even if they stopped backing the caps others might have started to back it once it´s established some worth and far away area´s like the capital wasteland in Fallout 3 should be pretty unaffected if the Hub in California backs NCR money or caps now. In New Vegas it makes actually even more sense since its a neutral intermediate currency between the faction currency of NCR and Legion gaining worth through being acceptable for all parties.
NV has dead money dlc and the big encompassing joke is you went through all that to get the "treasure of the sierra madre" and inside the vault is all these gold bars, which really would have no value in the wasteland, but on top of that, they are so heavy, you can only carry a few out with you and can never go back and get the rest.
i mean, they are worth a good amount of bottlecaps, if you can get them out, but by then, you probably have so many caps, you don't even need it
If you play a melee only character you use ammo as currency.
The Metro currency
Pre-War Military Grade Rounds ✨
a melee only person would last about 5 minutes in the wasteland unless they stayed in Diamond city, or traveled surrounded by the brotherhood of steel.
@@DVankeuren in fallout nv melee builds are sometimes better than gun builds
@@ididntmeantoshootthatvietn5012 if it was realistic, and you're running around post apocalyptic America with a melee weapon you're getting dropped in one shot by some guy with a milsurp rifle like a mosin or getting sprayed down with some garage made direct blowback subgun. In the game, melee builds can be strong, irl there's the expression "don't bring a knife to a gunfight"
An elderly man I work with told me about when he was a child they would trade bottle caps in at the store for a chocolate bar.
Since then it’s been my head cannon that the children that survived in Fallout grew up and had this memory of using bottle caps as currency
Would make sense because there’s only a finite amount of bottle caps out there after the nuclear ☢️ war 🤷♂️ so and with money 💵 becoming obsolete 🤷♂️ then the bottle caps would be worth more. ;) 👍
@@venomau5speedz emoji abuse over here
That’s…genuinely the cutest headcanon for this franchise 😭 Idk I like the idea of kids being able to be KIDS, yknow? If the kids irl these days can’t be kids anymore, I hope they can still have that in a fictional universe
When I was a kid my school in prince George did can tab drives. They didn't want the cans just the tabs. They would trade 25 for a chocolate bar. I used to go door to door in my neabourhood to get then and I would return the cans use them torent Pokémon movies and turn the tabs in at the end of my school day for snacks to watch the movie with
there was a point where pennies and metal US currency were actually worth more separated than as a coin. also back then recycling was actually a valuable thing to do. now? well, the industries admitted most stuff, whoops, the majority of stuff, isn't recycled. what so ever. recycling bin? same stink pit at the next been not labeled recycling.
I think it would be interesting if bottle caps from different beverages acted as different denominations of money with more common beverage, bottle caps like nuka cola being worth less than rarer caps like vim
100 Nuka Cola Caps to 1 Sunset Sarsaparilla
100 Sunset Sarsaparilla to 1 Blue Star Sunset Sarsaparilla.
their "durability" will not include their printing, as it will soon be scraped off from their sharp edges while being carried in bulk in bags and boxes. like sand in the desert is a round corn.
You would need some bits of information that would be almost impossible to obtain. In order to give the different values to various company's bottle caps dependent on their rarity, you would have to know how many of each were ever made, how many had survived to the point where they became currency, what had happened to the machinery that made them, and if that machinery could, if destroyed, be reconstructed.
No-one sensible would ever choose to base a currency on bottle caps, of course. Forgery was almost the next invention to come along after coinage, and people got so good at it that nations spend millions, even billions, on designing coins and banknotes that are as inordinately difficult and expensive to fake as possible. Their entire economies depend on it.
.
sunset sassperilla caps were used too.
I didn't know Vim was anything but a text editor lol
In an alternate reality where bullets are the currency: "It costs me $400,000 dollars to fire this gun for 12 seconds."
Metro games use Bullets as currency
I hear this 400,000 line so much like stfu
@@Seven-p7s it took you 5 seconds to make that post, so no. I won't.
@@Seven-p7s no one cares shush
some big video game companies tried to make this a reality. . charging microtransactions to reload your ammo, in exchange for real world money. . .
What's weird to me, well one of many things lol, is finding caps in safes that appear (due to situation they're encountered in) to be pre-war, untouched by subsequent events. Why would anyone put bottlecaps in a safe pre-war? Maybe they saw this video? And don't get me started on bullets and weapons in trashcans...
To me, weapons and ammo in odd places like that seem like post-war dead drops, which were never picked up. It certainly wouldn't explain every instance of stuff like that, but it's my headcanon.
I've seen people hide money in a corncob, put it in a hollowed-out doorframe, fill the space with sunflower seeds and glue, sand it down, then paint it to look like the doorframe again.
I ain't questioning shit.
@@JoMcD21 true enough, and if it were pre-war money I’d think little of it. I try to be prepared, but I’ve yet to start squirreling away bottle caps lol.
Collecting bottlecaps and stamps were popular hobbies in the 1940s and 50s, where much of the pre-War culture comes from in Fallout.
Fancy Hairbrush in mailboxes 📬
In 76 the concept was a nukacola promotion for bottle caps that never ended. Allowing nukacola bottlecaps to directly exchange for goods like food
It started off at select locations like the Whitespring Nuka Vendor, only to be adapted to other vendors through the efforts of the Responders tinkering with the station bots.
Nice lore
That’s in the video, did you finish?
@FEVRobertcry about it
@FEVRobert Cope harder
I think a modern version of this could be soda tabs. Even lighter than caps, with holes for carrying them, and a very complex design to “forge” in a wasteland.
Ring pulls were used in Fallout Tactics by the non-brotherhood (savage) factions.
Nah they would be too easy to fake
@sethrawbass a proper soda tab would be considerably harder to fake that a bottle cap.
Soda tabs can also be used in a variety of other ways
Surprised that Iguana-bits weren't used as currency
I'm not accepting human chunks for this
They probably are in andale or the ultra luxe.
where are they come from anyway? i haven't seen an iguana in any fallout game
@@kikosawa that's because they're all turned into Iguana-bits or Iguana on a stick already
@@kikosawa lol play fallout 2 and you’ll know. (There were never any iguanas)
In ancient Sparta currency was in the form of iron rods. It had a two-fold benefit: (1) They were hard to steal in large amounts, so theft of money was a waste of time, and (2) when Sparta went to war weapons became more expensive so it encouraged Spartans to melt down their currency and turn them into weapons.
Eventually, currency itself was made illegal in order to reduce the accumulation of wealth, and bartering was used instead.
It also meant that hoarding a lot of currency was a lot harder to do
I wonder which group do this ... kicked out of 109 countries for it...
Spartan citizens didnt need to steal because they were given land and slaves for free once reaching adult hood making them a wealthy landed aristocrat from birth. Of course this was if you were a Spartan citizen but helots were completely subjugated and the proletariat were very subdued.
@@RedwolfDogrocketoh you nazis aren't even trying to hide with a dog whistle like this be more creative
as kids, we used to play this hopscotch game where you needed a "token" to throw to move. we used to all just get rocks. then one day, one of the kids found a bottle cap and stuck mud in the hollow side and used that instead. we all thought it was so COOL. we all went scavenging to find the coolest bottle caps to make our own bottle cap tokens and show off how much cooler our cap was. the coolest caps were beer caps and the more exotic it was, the cooler you were. Coors and Budweiser were everywhere, but anything else and you'd be the envy of the group and could exchange it for stuff from other kids.
Bro made a black market
The Heineken cap is cool
An IRL example, wow!
Don’t even get me started on Pogs.
@@GrumpyGrobbyGamer I was literally thinking about POGs while reading bvbxiong's comment lol
3:55 interesting that the Metro series was able to implement this idea pretty well, imo. Dirty rounds vs Pristine military grade ammunition. Use the cheap dirty rounds for combat or use your very valuable military grade ammunition, that doubles as currency, to do much MUCH more damage than the cheap rounds.
I do wonder if Dmitry Glukhovsky read about Fallout's initial concept on clean bullets as currency and perfected it, after all he stated that he drew inspiration from the Fallout series.
I think it's because they have very different vibes. It's been years since I played a Metro game but I remember them being much harder and I would assume the books have a darker tone. Having to weigh the pros of cons of shooting your money is good for a darker setting like Metro, less for the wackier vibe of Fallout. Both are good it just depends on what kinda game/story you want to make.
Ammo would never make a good currency. A barter item, sure, everyone needs ammo, but not a currency.
@@DVankeurenyou know what they meant
@@lucadibattista4864 he didn't need to. In the Chechnya Vs Russia war ammo was used to be the currency between Russia military and the locals
Kinda odd how, despite it being one of the factors that lead to bottlebaps being chosen, we never see strings of bottlecaps in game.
At least as far as I remember, they always are depicted as singles or unseen within a boxes inventory.
missed opportunity
I mean, technically we see a necklace of sunset sarsaparilla caps.
Because putting in a hole would ruin the protective capability of the enamel coating.
somebody had a star bottlecap necklace in new vegas.
What??????
imagine if season 2 opens with a flashback of nuka cola becoming a huge corp then it shows the factory which they are being bottled in and a bottle cap falls on the ground and while a employee is picking it up it transitions into the ghoul or lucy in the present time picking up a bottle cap they found on the ground
It's shame you didn't go over the most important currency the charge card
Well only the guy in Far Harbor accepted it
chojj cod
Chaje cad
I just met that guy; when I passed on it, he called me a "Retahd"!
i like to think that, because of the influence of fallout and it being a widely known and popular game, that if something like that happen in the real world some people may accept caps in trades and for currency lol
Holy shit, i just thought about that and instantly after i see ur comment
I was going to say this seems likely but it's very rare I encounter bottle caps in my country. The drinks mostly come in plastic bottles and cans. So maybe something else would be better. Honestly in the UK 1 and 2 pound coins are tough, made out of metal and are already currency.
Pull tabs on soda or maybe plastic caps heck even things like ceramic poker chips or circuit boards would probably be precious enough
Its nice to have different currencies in games rather than the standard "Credits or dollars" most tend to use. I once played an MMO where the currency was poker chips. (Fallen Earth) it was a unique take on what people would be able to get their hands on because there was no central banking system anymore.
Battletech uses what's called C-bills
Also, proper poker chips are made of ceramic and are pretty damn durable. The paint might wear off but the impressions would remain. You can use a regulation ceramic poker chip as a whetstone to sharpen steel.
In the early 2000s, credits on cell phones became currency in the Philippines and many African countries. In rural areas where there were no ATMs but there were 2G cell phones (and no internet at that time), people could buy credits with cash and stores in rural areas would accept phone credits as payment (and could resell or trade them). When people had to be paid long distance, did you send cash hundreds of kilometres and hope the person transporting it wasn't a thief or got robbed? Or send credits instantly and securely by phone?
Banks in developing countries got pi$$y about this and whined about phone companies treading on their territory. Fortunately some were smart enough to realize this was a way to do banking in places without bank infrastructure.
Ive always likened it to the hackmetals that were used as money in many old cultures. The weight and type of metal is what's carrying the value.
Huh.... I guess for all Caesars wrong he at least understood how to restart the world's coinage system.
The difference is that those "hackmetals" also had their value as metal, to be smelted into weapons, tools or accessories.
@@FirstDagger bottle caps could be used the same 😂
@@bahhumbug5467 ; I don't see the metal value of sheet metal in the modern world, where metals are abundant.
@@bahhumbug5467 - Not really. Bottle caps are mostly made of aluminum or tin along with having plastic (or cork back in the day) linings, which would not only make them hard to melt down and forge, given all the impurities, tin and aluminum is also a very weak metal, meaning it’s not ideal to use for tools or weapons. Some bottle caps are made of steel, but considering Nuka Cola is a portrayed as a greedy monopoly, I’m betting they went with the cheaper route in materials to save cost.
Seems to be a common theme when it comes to post-apocalyptic scenarios.
Money becomes so worthless, it's not even good enough to wipe your arse with.
Funny thing to me is, at least US dollars are basically printed on denim. So it'd end up as a common cloth source (and it's green on your clothes the color of being poor) post civilizational collapse I think.
That's one of the many problems associated with a fiat currency. It's based entirely on the faith of the government that issues the currency. It also allows for far more manipulation and corruption, hence why modern governments strongly prefer fiat currencies over precious material backed currencies (and they use dishonest arguments that going back to a gold standard is dangerous when I never mentioned going back to only gold as the currency backer - I always thought it should be a diverse backing, not just gold).
@@Dominasty this guy gets it
I've collected bottlecaps as a hobby for the past 11 years. I turn them into magnets. If nukes drop though, I'm an instant millionaire haha.
Technically if you secure a Nuka Cola bottling factory you’re set for life in the post apocalypse Fallout universe.
Until the Crimson caravan hires a disgruntled mailman to seize your assets.
Thats not true, you would hyper inflate the economy, thats a quest in new vegas where you need to destroy a raider controlled Bottling camp
@@ALE199-ita I think you overestimate how much a well-handled person sitting on a bottlecap press in their basement can spread around the caps so it doesn't break the economy...
If you get a looooot of people trying to run that thing to the max? Yeah, totally, yeah um... you're well and truely fucked.
@@AenVegra Have you played Fallout New Vegas? Specifically have you done that mission?
Are you seriously telling me that Raiders are smart enough to not hyper inflate the economy by printing a huge of bottle caps and as such, causing the value of bottle caps to become worth less than the NCR dollar.
True
The Nuka-World theme park (complete with bottling plant) in Massachusetts also became a trading center post-war, much like Barstow, California turning into the Hub, further explaining why we see bottlecap money on the east coast.
I'd really like to see fallout 4 have a bottle cap making machine, and have the option to have it produce the caps one by one or in boxes
There is a quest in New Vegas to specifically stop this from happening
@@bigguy6570 never knew that
@@driftersforge4962 And a mod to use it yourself. IRL the absolute best solution would not be to ruin it but to drag it home to the NCR who could keep it under guard and use it sparingly to replace worn-out caps like the US Mint actually does today.
The lack of Water Merchant's on the East Coast pretty much negates the logical reasons for using caps in that region. The fact that they backed the caps with water is the primary reason they were a strong currency. Their portability and durability are also factors, but those could be achieved with other materials/objects as well. The fact that they are used on the other side of the country is almost entirely a result of thematic continuity on the part of BGS. Caps are the main currency in Boston for the same reason that the Brotherhood of Steel and Super Mutants are in Boston, because they reinforce existing IP.
Travel between the west and east coasts exists in Fallout. Kellogg was born in California and he eventually ended in Boston.
@@davidfrancisco3502 travel doesn't have much to do with it. Because BGS wanted you to be able to drink from a toilet, which is fine mechanically, the narrative implication is that the east coast still has at least some functioning waterworks. And since the events of Fallout 3 result in a working water purification system at the Jefferson Memorial, there is clean water for basically anyone that wants it. This would destabilize the value of caps on the east coast, at least around DC.
All the reasons to use caps on the east coast are just backtraced excuses to continue using the iconic bottle cap. If Fallout 1 and 2 had established glass marbles as the currency for the game, then the robots in Fallout 76 would be running a promotional event that asked for marbles instead of caps.
I think it makes decent sense. A lot of early civilizations used cowry shells for currency just because they were rare yet common enough, looked nice, and were easy to transport and trade. I think it makes sense for something like bottle caps to essentially act as post-war cowry shells, something extremely common yet also not varying in rarity since there's generally a fixed amount, and are able to be traded and kept easily. Not to mention that, in lack of fresh water, other drinks, usually pre war, would be the next best source of water, and while soda is generally not good for hydration, it could be good enough for most, leading to bottles being valued, and eventually transitioning to caps in the same way the western water merchants did.
@@tylerp.5004 Sure, but the fact that they independently chose bottle caps for completely different reasons stretches believability. The east coast could have just as easily settled on marbles, existing coinage, or even seashells as with older civilizations. Rarity isn't even a reasonable parameter for bottle caps, as it would take very simple equipment to stamp bottle caps. It's fine that caps are used across the nation, but let's be real, the reasons are almost entirely down to recognizable IP consistency.
@@thegoggle823 They could, but I think Caps make just as much sense as those other forms, especially since pre-war inflation probably made it so that not many people had coinage anymore, and probably wouldn't be as common as caps, since they were as common as Nuka Cola, which was extremely popular and one of the most common products pre-war, whereas other items wouldn't be nearly as common, since you'd need coast for shells (provided that sea life is still thriving enough) and marbles would be something extremely niche and not even close to the availability of soft drinks. And as for forgery, as McCafferty said, it's not that easy to make perfect cap replicas, mainly because they take an amount of technical knowledge and skill, along with machine tools, which are much more likely to be used for other reasons than just making caps, and which would be very rare except for gunsmithing and armor making, and in the developed East Coast. And honestly, when you have much more immediate problems and sources of income, not many people, except for a select few, would even think of trying to make more caps.
I asked my older brother this question when I watched him play fallout 3 on Xbox 360. His guess was that bottle caps were useful for capping bottled water lol
Yep they do have a practical use unlike IRL coins; keeping a bottle of drinkable water/booze/etc. closed from the elements and spilling.
It was meant as a joke take on how our current currency is actually worthless. A bottlecap also has no actual value at all.
In reality the same thing would happen that happened in 90% of collapses through history. They would use the old money, at least the coins only with different values.
Currently in Somalia many areas are still using the old bills of the former Somalia government.
Until industrialization, gold had no real value other than the desire for it. It was only when electricity came into usage (because it is an excellent conductor) that gold took on physical worth.
Not quite. I use them for mixing small amounts of epoxy in or cyanoacrylate glue. Mixing different shades of paint, or oils. I build models, they come in handy. Years ago I worked in a brewery, and took home a small box full. They are gradually being used up that way.
@@guessundheit6494 Did you actually attempt to say that gold had no value before industrialization?
Someone go to South America and let the Inca's know they didnt actually die from the Spanish Conquistadors looking for the CITY OF MOTHER FUCKING GOLD...
Not totally true. They have a worth as scrap metal. You need a lot of them, though...
Yeah the cap is a weird idea for currently but hey the idea that sheet metal could last over 200 hundreds years is funny but a nice thought
You do realize paint can and does prevent rust. Especially clear coated paint such as bottlecaps
@@riddell26 true but the paint on a cap when exposed to elements and in the hands on hundreds will disappear
More durable then paper money 🤷🏽.
@@jordanandino3882 your not wrong but the caps is just a weird long term currency
@@floridaman-pc8nv thats why fallout 2 introduced actual NCR money. and new vegas tried to implement multiple currency system. but bgs being bgs, they wanna ride the train of popularity and the idea of caps as currency in fallout is just part of the brand. as much as 2's and fnv's different currencies make way more sense.
Your fallout vids are top notch. Thank you for making such quality content. I sincerely appreciate it. 🙏
Thank you!
i mean he just covers things that haven been done over a dozen times with people on actual insight into WHY specifically but yeah sure top notch lmfao
@@afedorchak77 🤡
I think if it were to happen now, we would use ring pulls since cans are so common
That’s already a thing in the non canon spin off FYI
That's the currency in Fallout Tactics.
It makes sense to use bottle caps. They're not readily available, not easily to forge, and they're sturdy, easy to carry, and can last a long time. Obviously it would start with one person who had a lot of bottle caps and just decided that would be the currency. From there it would build up like normal currency systems started. I give you this thing, you give me that thing. The problem with pure barter, is there isn't necessarily a way to completely divide what's worth what, and a person might not simply have the full amount to trade. For example, if someone wants a singular item, like a tool, and needs to trade a non singular item, like a bag of rice, but doesn't have exactly enough rice for the amount, you lead to an impasse in trading. It also clearly helps by not having to trade for things you don't even want.
For example, if someone wants a tool, but doesn't have quite enough rice to trade for it, they might have to throw something else in to make up the difference.....but what? Maybe a small pocket knife for example. But if the pocket knife is crappy, it might still be an underpayment and pretty useless, and if it's a nice pocket knife, it might be an overpayment. So money is really about more easily balancing the scales of trade. There's also the recognition that some goods are perishable. If I buy a bag of rice, I can't store it somewhere forever to trade later. That's the biggest issue with a pure barter system. So I'm forced to trade that rice at some point, before it goes bad. But what if the only thing I can trade it for is also something that will go bad, and perhaps go bad even sooner? That's the problem. So maybe I trade some rice for some stale jerky that might be on the verge of molding. Have I really gained anything in the trade? Maybe not.
What a barter system actually does, is promote a lot of deception in the quality of goods, because goods that are stored as currency, eventually go bad, which makes it difficult to amass wealth to do much of anything with at a single time, because a big chunk of your wealth could be in perishable items, and a big chunk of what people are willing to trade could also be in perishable items. With money, you can trade a perishable item for money, and then later trade that money for a perishable item. And technically everything is perishable on a long enough timescale. So money got around that problem, by ensuring that if you traded something, you didn't only need to trade for what was readily fresh. So someone could get a fresh bag of rice today for some money, and that person can then later trade that money for something else that is fresh at the time they spend the money.
Same with work. If you work on a ranch and have hired help, if you're only paying them in readily usable goods, like food, that causes a lot of issues. Firstly, they might be doing more work than the amount of food they can even eat before it goes bad, and if they have to trade the excess food they earned, they might not find anyone that wants that specific type of food before it perishes, leading to waste and loss of income. Which means even though they were paid, they did a lot of extra work for essentially zero pay because it went bad before they could use it. If I do enough work on a ranch to earn a whole cow's worth of meat....I can't exactly eat that whole cow before it goes bad. No maybe the rancher could promise me they'll honor is by giving me like 1/20th the meat of 20 different cows over time, so I can consume the meat but not have it go bad before I can consume it. But that then is a delayed long term payment, which means even though I've amassed "wealth", I can't use it all at once so readily.
Of course we could be talking about other goods too, but the point is, it's not conducive to have people either stuck with trades they can't offload, nor stuck with trickles of payments in barter that take a long time to pay out. For example, with that 1/20th of a cow agreement over time, you essentially have to stay nearby waiting for payment to be fulfilled over weeks/months or even years. That forces you to stick around in one place in the meantime, while money allows you to take payment and move on to other places for work and living.
That was one big problem with the barter system....once you were established, you were kind of stuck, because you might have a big farm setup, but without money, what could anyone trade you for all of it if they wanted it and you wanted to move on somewhere else? You'd either have to abandon it all to move, or trade it for very little....and it also gave incentive for people to just take it from you if they wanted and could.
So barter systems are ok in some instances in the short term, but not for the long term. Money gives people a lot more options on how to spend the fruits of their labor, either over time or all at once, and corrects a lot of social issues that the barter system causes.
For example, say someone has the biggest farm in the area and people need food, and the farmer says he's only accepting sex in trade. So you either let them sleep with your wife, or they're not trading. So you end up either having to do that trade, or not eating....or there's a conflict, and either the farmer gets killed so they can take the food, or the farmer kills whoever tries to kill them. That's another inherent problem with the barter system: People can be very specific about what they're willing to trade for, and it might not be something you're able or willing to trade for. So the person with abundance of food sits on what they have, and you get nothing....or there's conflict. Money removes a lot of that as an issue, because if that farmer accepts money, he can then just take it to a brothel and get laid instead of demanding peoples wives as payment.
Money is about creating liquidity/interchangeability in the trade of goods. There are downsides, but the benefits far outweigh them. In fact, without money, a civilization really couldn't advance much. It is necessary for advancement by creating that liquidity/interchangeability in trade of goods, that allows people to have more options in doing things.
It makes sense to use bottlecaps in a specific area because it was backed by water (i.e. NCR terrirority and slightly past), the cap eventually changed to the dollar from NCR which was still backed by water. Bottle caps still make sense in FNV as they are what people have been using, everyone in the Mojave accepts it, and it causes the dollar to cost less because it's less stable with less NCR government that way to enforce the value. It does not make sense to be in the commonwealth, D.C., or in the Carolinas because they are not backed by a single thing causing the use of mass trade (such as water).
@@thelorddarthvader7264 bro just wrote a huge essay explaining this problem
Schizo
i aint readin allat
@@yummyprovolone7867da fukk?
lol It only 'makes sense', if you ignore the existence of cents.
Prewar coins would have been the obvious choice; thin pieces of stamped steel/aluminum are neither particularly durable or hard to make.
yeah that's what i was thinking about
even ncr issued it's own money
Plus there'd be a lot fewer mints (4?) to secure than bottle cap presses. And they'd be a lot more secured to start with.
It doesn't make sense. New nations would want to use their own money, not bottlecaps. It is ridiculous that people still use them after hundreds of years. Fallout 2 adressed this and then Fallout 3 unmade it again because it is "Fallout".
I can’t imagine merchants counting bottle caps if there was an expensive item that cost 500 caps… imagine having to count each one one by one jeez idk how they do it
it makes that old cartoon joke where a guy drops an entire jar or box of coins to annoy the cashier a daily occurrence in the post apocalypse.
Never worked retail huh? Wait til a customer buys a bunch of stuff then pays only in coins...
Then makes sense to use a scale... Same as when you want to buy screws, nuts etc.
Or maybe they can push together 10, 25, 50 or 100 pcs of caps for easier exchange.
the point of bullets being not great gameplay wise is why i love metro's implementation, the ammo traded as currency is much more powerful than your standard ammunition, and works in a pinch when you're away from a settlement, but you're not really meant to just use it in any other scenario, other than like endgame battles where there isn't another chance to spend your money. this would've been an interesting thing to see in fallout, but i like the standardized currency, even if the lore doesn't really back up the cross-country value of bottle caps holding up (I find the argument that it "just makes sense as a currency" to be quite weak, as there's no direct evidence of an entity backing the currency with a standard value, or having control over the production outside of ncr territories.), and the fact that caps are almost exclusively nuka cola caps, when all other drinks that have standard caps also work as currency, or even hold higher value in the case of the sarsaparilla star caps.
I dont understand. If the caps are bring backed by pressumably fresh water then wouldn't the value of caps severely diminish in places like the mojave wasteland (where fresh clean water is abundantly available through places like lake mead)? Wouldn't any attempt at procuring fresh clean water like project purity or even installing a water pump in a settlement reduce the value of the cap since the rare commodity it is being backed by is now getting more and more common?
The issue is the NCR controls the water sources in the Mojave because they have run out of purified water in California
I think that the Water Merchants backing them helped caps get a standard agreed upon value at first but once they became established. The value of caps became ingrained in society so even in places where water is more abundant a cap is worth roughly the same because of everything else you can buy with it. 10 caps may get you a bottle of clean water and if gun is worth 10 bottles of water then the gun is 100 caps. With trade people are still going to want roughly that same price for the gun even if water is actually easily available. Realistically it would vary some but I don't think it would be too significant.
@@botobop yeah, its a big part of the story how the ncr is in controll of the water
@@Helperbot-2000 In Fallout, the NCR didn't exist yet. Most settlements in the wasteland were independent. It could be argued that the Hub was the most powerful of the independent settlements largely because it was the home of the Water Merchants. The Water Merchants were the most powerful economic entity on the West Coast and they were the ones that established bottle caps as a currency backed by water.
In Fallout 2, the NCR was just getting started and it originated in Shady Sands. The NCR eventually absorbed the Hub and it was only then that the NCR became "in control" of the water. Basically, caps became the default currency in the wasteland before the NCR existed.
If you look at the prices in games, the value of caps is significantly less in NV than it is in FO3
What's weird is in fallout 1 and 2 gold coins were the currency. The NCR made their own bank notes and Caesars legion use their own gold currency
Gold coins?
@@everythingpony i think he remembered wrong
@@Blox117 caps were the currency in FO1, but not in 2.
There is even a conversation option somewhere (my mind is saying with Harold) that mentions how caps use to be valuable but not anymore.
Iirc in FO2 it is NCR$, and the icon is gold coins.
Edit :Typhon's treasure, a side quest started by a ghoul in Broken Hills
@@everythingponyIn Fallout 1 the image is depicted more as the old age pouch of gold coins. They are still caps but their function is the same, it may be an artistic choice because caps is as valuable as gold coins.
So…do you need a bottle cap to buy a Nuke Cola, to get a bottle cap? Asking for a friend.
You'd likely have to pay for Nuka Cola + Cap
Several years ago when I was younger I’d play the mobile game fallout shelter, and the currency fascinated me to the point of having at least two hundred bottle caps scattered around different boxes in my basement. If the nukes drop I’m somewhat rich
Not really.. maybe a 10mm with ammo and some supplies
@@jplayzsfsandmore3173 He was talking about currency, not equipment...
@@WowBlankpage that's how much that many bottle caps will get you, isn't it
@@dzanderallison Honestly, I think you'd need plenty more.
I do appreciate that New Vegas helped explain this with the _Pressing Matters_ quest dialogue tree
I assumed bottle caps were used as currency because of how valuable intact bottles of nuka cola would be to the average wastelander. Not only do they provide an uncontaminated source of hydration, you can also use the bottles to carry around water in after you drink the soda, an invaluable thing in the wasteland. You could even use the bottles to boil water in to make it good to drink.
Nuka-cola IS radiated. Pre-war, by design
@@luvmefoolme Just the quantum variant though right?
@@morgatron4639nah all of it
@@morgatron4639 The quantum variant is radiated, the others ones aren’t confirmed but it’s Nuka-Cola, if the radiation got people addicted they’d want it to be in all the drinks. Just in a much a lower quantity theoretically.
But in the games Nuka-Cola always gives 2-5 rads so even in the wasteland it wouldn’t be considered an uncontaminated source of hydration.
@@luvmefoolmethats why Sunset Sarsaparilla is the superior beverage
One homebrew campaign TTRPG post apocalyptic setting we drew inspiration from this and used spent shell casings as currency
Fallout 2 had gold coins, Fallout Tactics had pull tabs. Funny how only after Bethesda took over did bottlecaps somehow become the universal wasteland currency agreed upon everywhere from west coast to east coast
What other currency would groups of unaligned settlements use? In fallout 1,2, and New Vegas large groups of settlements we're all working and trading with one another, so it made sense they had their own standardized currency when you have 750,000 people in the ncr alone. How many people live in the commonwealth? Or the capital wasteland? Like a thousand? Two thousand each? Diamond city isn't the center of a confederation of all the settlements in the commonwealth, rivet city isn't working with multiple small settlements around them, every settlement stands alone, there's no unity, why on earth would they have their own special currency? I'm not saying bottle caps makes sense but what else would? It wouldn't be fun having to convert 10 different types of currency to buy ammo at rivet city. Fallout is a videogame, gameplay and player fun take priority over lore, bottle caps are easy for the player to understand and it doesn't require much work to implement, and every single town doesn't need its own dumb currency that doesn't matter since it's just converted to something else the second you actually want to use it
@@incoherentrambling3139 the same way it works in new vegas kid...
legion money is accepted but has less value with other traders
ncr money is accepted but has almost no value in legion territory
tactics had brotherhood use printed money and wastelanders used pull tabs
you defeated your own argument
in fallout 1 none of the settlements were ligned
in fallout 2 it was region of NCR and despite taking money they weren't aligned with NCR
new vegas uses caps because house took over caps producing factory and both legion and ncr only use their money
literally everything else would make sense than every place on earth using bottlecaps
using only coins and no paper money seems to check all the same boxes
hard/impossible to counterfit, especially in the wasteland
spread randomly in the wasteland
easy to transport
durable
I wonder why a system based on regular coins wouldn't be another good choice
Been watching a lot of your videos lately yaboiii! I really love the interesting topics you pick each video along with the great in-depth explanations you bring everytime. Keep up the great work, you're making great content for the Fallout fandom ❤️🔥
This topic has been covered before by another UA-cam channel. This whole thing is basically plagiarized.
except he's quoting from bethesda's book of ruined lore giving bullshit explanations or straight up saying "it makes sense"
Bullets as currency is used in Metro 2033 universe but only military grade rounds which are rare not ammo created in the tunnels. MGR hit harder doing more damage but they are usually held onto until the end of the game.
Can you imagine the logistics of paying for something big in bottle caps or even having to count them all
Why do you carry those bottlecaps, they jangle like crazy ~ Follows-Chalk Fallout New Vegas honest hearts.
You just weigh them to count them. As for hauling them around, yeah, they weigh around a gram a piece IRL, so the same as a dollar bill, so not too crazy. It's the volume that's the issue, and the fact that with few exceptions, there's only one denomination. I could easily conceal a million dollars in $100 bills on my person and that would only be 10kg of bills, so like 22lbs, but they've be compact and quiet.
I don't know exactly what volume caps take up, but it's well over a cubic centimeter, probably more like two to three a piece. That adds up pretty quickly and makes it obvious from a distance you're carrying a lot of **something**.
i wpuld imagine they would just weigh it lol
Fallout made me start my own cap collection
I feel like that one thing that the legion got right was their coins because all the legion coins are made of gold silver copper which have value to society even in the wasteland gold is worth its weight in gold
Yep, Coins would be much better, bottle caps taking to much space and are pointy sharp.
Gold has no inherent value except as used in electronics. It’s just a shiny rock. Bottlecaps are also shiny. Gold was used as currency precisely because it’s too soft and heavy to have any value. Even “gold” jewelry is an alloy because pure gold sucks for even that
@@Skullhawk13 yes but we see two instances in the wasteland of gold still being valuable the gold bars from Sierra Madre and the gold bars you can find in fallout 4 both sell for a high amount of caps so wasteland society still sees the value in gold
@@Cheese_steak_ the gold bars in dead money weigh 35 pounds. A lot of goods are worth more than their weight in gold, and in fallout 4 it’s value is due to you being a pre-war soldier using it for electronics. The notion of gold’s value is artificial, exactly the same as bottlecaps. However gold is much heavier. Back when gold coins were a thing they were like thousand dollar bills
Yet would be funny on one hand, to see quest of Nuka Cola corporation being happy that their caps become most valid currency.
Bottlecaps are neither durable nor rust-resistant enough to become any form of currency. There's a reason gold and gems have always been the standard of currency til the printing of paper money: because they won't rust, they'll never degrade, it takes A LOT of pressure/heat to destroy them. They can be passed down as inheritance without losing their value over time and they're shiny n' pretty. After 200 yrs, during the events of the fallout stories, bottle caps would degrade and/or rust, losing their value completely.
So what would you have chosen as the currency of the Wasteland so ?
The value of the bottlecaps isn't based on its material, though. The real value is what it's backed by, which is water. The US dollar was backed by gold and silver until the Federal Reserve took over and turned it into a fiat system.
You dont know how nukecola made their caps lol
@@drharlequinnzel Probably with chromium... Which does not rust. ahahahahaha
Diamond will burn at 900 deg C.
In real life many things have been used as currency, including animal shells.
In the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the refugees from Golgafrincham, used leaves as currency, until spring saw a rise in the number of leaves. The solution, burn the forests down.
In Fallout 1, the cap was also known as the HubBuck, and was equivalent in value to a specific amount of water from the Water Merchants. As everyone needs water to live, it makes sense that people would use the currency that the Water Merchants back.
In Fallout 2, the cap has become almost worthless thanks to the NCR growth and their own dollar, which is used in every major location on the periphery.
New Vegas has the cap as a sort of intermediate currency for the locals who do not want to use NCR dollars or Legion denarii. While they do not have anything backing the value, they did have a working bottle press to make their own currency with. At least until the player character broke it. It is also probable that the Water Merchants traded that far in the past.
Fallout 3 has caps because... Fallout? The only merchants in the area seem to be either serving the town they are in, or one of three guys wandering around with a pack brahmin. Unlike the Hub, which traded with the whole region, the Capital Wasteland does not have a central trading city or group, meaning that those three guys who wander around can dictate what currency they will take and at what value
Fallout 4 has caps because... Fallout again? Unlike 3 it does have a central trading city, Diamond City. However, as that used to be a baseball stadium it is just as likely that the currency they would use would be something related to baseball, as that would give them complete control over the local economy and compete with Capitol Hill who also run a trading outfit but are not allied together.
76 again has them just for being Fallout. Heck, before Bethesda put in npcs, the cap was mostly used to pay for fast travel, as there were no living people to trade with.
Very nice summary thanks. And again but now in terms of continuity of their own lore 76 reveals the true nature of Bethesdas intentions. Simplify that complex RPG to the point of silly ness.
id honestly love if fallout 4's currency were baseball cards lol. not entirely sure how well their preservation would be after a nuclear war and 200 years tho. unless there is a factory for them somewhere around boston. which i kind of doubt lol
@@moonprincess_xoxo laminated cards!
Wrong, 76 has them due to a prewar promo event with the parent company that owned Nuka Cola. As part of the promo, caps could be used in exchange for a fresh nuka cola at any participating Nuka Cola establishment, including Bubbles the Nuka Cola Counter Jockey at the White Spring. From there the postwar usage picked up due to organized efforts by the responders that was aided by the local bottling plant.
@@hiddendesire3076 Thank you for the inside. sadly it's a very thin construction of lore.
In the original fallouts bottle caps were only supposed to be a regional currency. There were other currencies.
Would explain why new Vagas had a few different currencies due to it being made by the original developers
In Fallout 76 we learn after the Great-War the people were trying to get the stuff out of the vending machines and the robot venders. When they ran out of Pre-War Money, they use Bottle Caps to trick the vending machines they were using coins, and they just to keep using the Bottle Caps as currency when they weren't dealing with the vending machines.
My dad plays Fallout 4 and actually keeps a bucket of bottlecaps! XD Most are either coke or beer caps and he just kept them as a joke at first but kinda thinks that they may be good to keep. Now I can tell him to 100% keep them cuz he was right! XD
Why?
@@Ahh828 tis but a joke
I always raid the banks & tills in fallout 4, and use that mostly as their worth a few caps each
Legion currency seem like the best option ngl , Gold coin , difficult to mass produce , the meterial itself also hard to obtain. plus you could melt these gold coin to craft tech related stuffs
I worked at a botteling plant a long time ago, and in the addic there was boxes of unused bottlecaps. Millions of them. Leftovers from when designs changed .
So basically people started using caps as currency for the same reasons we started using currency in general. :P
Also, since Legion currency is gold and silver it has intrinsic value it should be usable outside of Legion territory. It's just that the only society besides New Vegas with a sophisticated enough economy to deal in precious metals is at war with them.
Personally I found the multiple currencies in New Vegas to be kind of pointless since from a gameplay perspective they were no different from pre-war money. I'd have preferred if the player's actions could have affected the relative exchange rates. Or maybe if there were some merchants who dealt exclusively in one kind of currency.
Silver, gold, and other precious metals aren't _intrinsically_ valuable. Value is a nonobjective, secondary attribute, which we as higher-thinking creatures have _projected_ onto precious metals. (This holds true for any item, as per the subjective theory of value.) Precious metals are considered valuable because mankind has generally agreed that they're sufficiently rare and attractive enough to be used as specie standards.
@@AidenRKrone Yes, but that value is derived from properties that are inherent to the material rather than 'because the government says so' like with paper bills. My point was more, gold is gold and silver is silver and it doesn't really matter whose face is stamped on it. If it weren't for the war I could easily see the NCR in a situation where they're desperately trying to get their hands on every Legion coin they can to rebuild their gold reserve.
@@shineyorkboy tbh, gold and silver wouldn't seem too valuable if my top priority is non irradiated water and surviving raider raids and NCR taxes
@@knightgallade8431 Well by that reasoning bottle caps aren't very valuable either. But clearly people still find it desirable to have a universal unit of exchange and for higher value purchases a higher value unit is more convenient since it saves you having to transport 10s or 100s of thousands of caps.
@@knightgallade8431 gold and silver both have intrinsic antiseptic and antibacterial properties. I think they would be quite important in an post apocalypse.
I actually do collect bottle caps for novelty. I have enough for a pretty decent weapon if it were in game along with some stimpaks
I’d love to see in the next fallout game a community that rejects the idea of using caps and uses a different random object as currency instead like poker chips, lottery tickets, trading cards, etc. and the player can choose to try to make them switch over to caps or deal with converting their money every time they interact with them.
Or just have an actual printed metal currency, like precious metal coins.
@@swapertxking like in fallout 2
IMO this is best given an out-of-universe answer, which I feel is mostly because bottle caps kind of look like coins. That and it's become a brand icon.
It has a reason in the West, it´s pop culture in the East...
Adam Smiths mythical “land of barter” was finally found in the waste lands of fallout. What’s interesting is that barter as a form of trade his never been supported by the historical record.
As a competitive Pokémon player I don’t see anything unusual about using bottle caps as currency.
This video is awesome. In reality if this happen I would assume that Gold and Bitcoin may be the standard worldwide currency
Question:
Why are bottle caps the currency of fallout?
Answer:
Todd Howard. Mf decided they would be the default in FO3 despite FO2 having a different currency.
Exactly
Bottle caps were used as the standard currency in the original Fallout. So no, it’s not something that Bethesda introduced.
@@CommanderTK9091 Bruh can you not fuckin' read? I just said in fallout 2 it was different and same with fallout tactics. It was A currency not the main one of every game like it is today.
@@Retroholic not once did you mention Fallout Tactics in your original comment, bird brain. They probably decided to stick with bottle caps as a knod to the first Fallout and keep it original to that instead of continuing with something different like FO2. It’s not like Bethesda just randomly decided to use Bottle caps. What a failed, pathetic comment on your end. Always dumbed down individuals like yourself trying to be witty and funny and fail miserably.
I need to invest a lot of time into this series. I've never played a fallout game but it sounds interesting.
this video is cap
We see what you did here
and then there's Chicago who used pop can ring tabs, I liked that idea from Fallout Tactics. I wish Bethesda went with a similar Idea for Fallout 3 and used a different type of currency
"we can't use ammo as currency"
Metro: -laughs in cheeki breeki as they shoot 4 dinners worth of rounds into a mutated bear-
In hyper inflating Hungary in 1946 the currency became worthless, people started using eggs nationwide. Eggs became the standard units, since you couldn't just print eggs from nowhere, so there was a limited, but slowly increasing supply, but it was decreased by the used eggs. However people slowly stopped using eggs, because they realized there were eggs in circulation for so long, they got rotten inside. But if they didn't break it, it still had the standard value.
From this point of view, bottle caps are pretty good money.
why
bethesda said their canned food never expires and that is instantly better currency
@@ryszakowy well, my father was in the commie hungarian army. They shot out good decade expired canned foods from artillery. Some of them were not edible at all.
Why bottlecaps? For the same reason we use coins now. They have an intrinsic value (steel), are very portable, can easily represent value, and everyone agrees on their value. The questions you should be asking are what happened to all the coins, and why haven't people been minting new ones?
I don't know why people don't mint new coins though I suppose in a way the Legion does but I would assume the US stopped minting coins. With inflation being a huge problem in Fallout there's no real need for coins. If a loaf of bread cost 100 dollars then what could you possibly buy with just a few cents? It's probably not worth ot for the US to keep producing them, heck in the real world a penny costs more than a penny to make in America. As for what happened to previously minted coins I would assume they're all locked in collections or had been melted down to use in other materials by the government.
@@Pegasus54321 It does make some snese, but there should be tons more coins out there still. The only coins I've seen are subway tokens and gambling chips, but I don't really count the latter as coins, since they're weren't government recognized currency.
What is the value of a dime? To you and me, we'd say 10 cents. That's because we have a central government and banking system to tell us that that is what it's worth. What coins have you seen recently that are made of steel? Heck, even the penny isn't made of copper anymore. The currency we use today is only possible because of our central government. Failing that, we'd all be using regional currencies like the states did before we recognized the federal government's authority to print money. Look up Ben Franklin's $8 bill. Massachusetts specific currency. No, regional specific currency would be the only way to exchange value post apocalypse. Bottlecaps in the southwest because of the water merchants/tradition, Pelts/furs in the north because of how cold it gets, in the east, maybe scrap metal because of the ruined buildings and vehicles. Maybe we could use bullets or medical supplies like stimpacks or Rad-X/RadAway for a nationwide currency, but that would require each region to be able to facilitate trade between each other and that would require rail or air travel. Yes, the BOS have vertibirds, but they're not interested in trading.
@@LifesGuardian People 100% trade in the Fallout games. Maybe not a direct route from the east coast to the west but with intermediate trade just like the Silk Road between Europe and China for thousands of years. People rarely traveled the entire trade route but instead sold their goods from on merchant to another in various cities along the route. Same thing would be happening in post apocalyptic America. Those regional currencies you mentioned fell out of favor not just because a federal government said so but also because they had the inherent problem of being worth less the farther away you were from the bank that issued them. The people of Fallout's world didn't have to start from scratch. They would know the benefits of a standardized currency and it would benefit them to try and reestablished one. Bartering works sure but standardized money works better. If you traded pelts that's complicated. Is a beaver pelt worth the same as a deer pelt? Size of the pelt, the quality it's in all would effect the price. Scrap metal is the same. What kind of metal? What's the alloy like? Is it rusted to hell? Do you have the means to melt it back down or do you not have a hot enough furnace available? Or you could just all agree to use caps because they've already caught on in California and in West Virginia.
@@Pegasus54321 Yes, eventually a standardized currency would be beneficial and helpful. When the NCR/BOS/Enclave or whoever takes over, their currency will dominate and will eventually overtake any regional currency. We see this in the NCR/Legion in NV. In the areas where they're weak, bottlecaps still flourish. Where they're strong, NCR money takes over and becomes more valuable.
That being said, the vast, and I mean vast, majority of wastelanders, up until now, have had little or no communication with the outside world. So, the idea that some random guy who walked "the silk road" is going to tell them that this little hunk of junk is money and is valuable, is laughable. Nevermind the fact that any travelers of "the silk road" would have to be super heavily armed just to make one leg of the trek. Some outfits probably could, BOS, gun runners, Caesar's legion, maybe The Crimson Caravan, NCR possibly could send scouts. See what they all have in common? Organization, support, and means. They're centralized, or are working with those who are, and can back their currency within their territory. It's possible that the communities they visit might keep a small stash of caps specificly for their visits, but the majority of their trade will be with each other in regional specific currency. We might not know the value of pelts/furs, but those with a vested interest in having them, lest they freeze to death, certainly would. Scrap metal could be extremely valuable, as if you have enough of it you can make a shelter/fence/whatever regardlessof alloy or rust. It's valuable even without having to smelt it because it's useful. With a furnace it becomes infinitely more useful, thus more valuable, in places like The Pitt. Besides, you'd be more likely to trust your neighbor than that one guy who stops by every other week simply because if your neighbor screws you over, you know where he is and can retaliate. There's no guarantee that trader will ever come back.
Think of it this way. You've been tending a meager farm to keep yourself fed your whole life. Rarely ventured far from it to keep vagabonds from stealing your stuff. Just you and your gun have fended off raider/feral ghoul/animal attacks. I come out, and meet you. I tell you that the gun you're carrying is worth 3 sheets of paper. I tell you that 3 sheets of paper is a king's ransom 700 miles away. You gonna take the trade? What good is paper? Kindling, written records of things if you have a writing utensil. Otherwise, it's not that big of a deal. Without a central government in the area backing it's value, it's just paper. Without a central authority in the surrounding area, like the water merchants in the west, backing bottlecaps value, they're just colorful hunks of metal. Maybe you could use it to make a rudimentary weapon, but otherwise they're useless. West Virginia wouldn't use bottlecaps either, that's the point. With as much water as they have, water merchants would be too decentralized to establish them as currency. If anything, raider scripts would be the currency out there with no real towns to speak of.
Honestly, bullets/medical supplies/scrap seem to be the best form of currency for bartering as they're small, useful, and deflationary as they keep being used. Those make way more sense outside of California/New Vegas than bottlecaps.
This man describing the point of currency
Fallout: "We won't use bullets as currency"
Metro 2033: "Hold my 7.62"
It's 5.45.
@@Darkness_8163 You're right my bad. I haven't played Metro in a while.
Gold and silver coins are still the best game currency in my opinion. The only thing bottlecaps have over them is they're unique currency not used in any other big game other than fallout. But other than buying things with them, they're not satisfying to have, they're just useful trash.
you've done NCR and Legion videos.
I know it's not as loved as New vegas. But please Do same topics with MINUTEMEN.
what topics? a settlement that requires my assistance?
Metro used ammunition as currency and it worked pretty well, by making pre-war ammunition currency specifically, you get a choice of using premium money as ammo when you're desperate, or conserving it for trade. It was a good system IMO
I would have liked a pure barter system or a bullet based system. Especially a bullet based system. It would have made the survival aspect of the game be very realistic. You would be careful with your ammo and when you get in a real mix up and are forced to just throw caution to the wind and use your bullets in vast quantities those encounters would become bitter sweet.
that's what i do honestly
there's so much shit you don't use in your playthrough you can just barter with that
That sounds terrible
It would be fun but I understand how bartering may be more complicated to pull off
Have you ever wondered what happend with other nations during the nuclear war?
The problem I've got with them is after a certain point they are bloody useless. Like okay maybe I don't want to every pick up anything other than mission stuff so I'd need about 1000 caps for that maybe I want to buy everything from the shops? 10,000 caps maybe. I have 30k caps in my current fallout playthrough and I use water as my currency each 1 being worth about 16 caps and I make 1,000 water per day and I regularly buy everything a shop has.
Exactly the point of caps. You're providing a valuable commodity. You just became like the guys in the west. You're providing everybody water, which they will pay a lot for because you only have one competitor (that kid in diamond city that runs the purifier)
@@shithappens6887 Yeah but my point was there's nothing to spend those caps on after a certain point. The most expensive item in the game recon marine combat armour is about 20k per piece and there are 4 pieces so 80k I'm earning about 16k per day from 1 settlement so that'd be about 5 days worth of water for a 1 of purchase. It's also worth pointing out you can make that much without ever leaving sanctuary hills and while you wouldn't be level 1 as construction gives you xp you could be under level 10 easily but then you buy the recon marine armour, the big boy, buy a house in every settlement and while that makes combat easier it doesn't make the annoying task of helping settlements easier. Imagine if you could spend your money hiring mercenaries to help these settlements or to clear out areas or even to do simple quests like if you are high up in the railroad, the brotherhood, institute maybe sending out some missions to help people would be good or maybe You can pay for 1 of the cars or motorcycles you see everywhere to be repaired so you can use it. Maybe you can pay caps and have your base look as nice as the institute base looks. Like in the real world if I have a lot of money I can pay someone to do any task I don't want to do and have someone build anything that is physically possible and obviously I'm not expecting that in game but would it be too much to say have a legendary weapons smith who will take 200k and I can make a weapon with exactly the legendary features I want. Sorry that was a little bit ranty
@@matthewtalbot-paine7977 i get you, more things to do with your money would be fun. But I mean part of being so rich you can't spend it all falls on you.
when you find and clean up bottles... its difficult to store anything in it like water or milk without a cap or a cork...
caps were only money in fallout 1 because the watertraders in the Hub were so powerful and controlled the local region. in fallout 2 they used gold coins already.
then bethesda came around and turned fallout into this quirky themepark bs that just took the most surface elements no matter if it made sense or not. like supermutants in Washington dc.
I agree with what you said but whats the issue with supermutants and washington ?
@@user-gd1no3gf6d its stupid. the masters army (from fallout 1) was detroyed decades ago and thousands of miles away at the other end of the country when fallout 3 took place. it's kind of like having vietcong show up in the USA decades after the vietnam war ended just because some writer remembered them from an american movie he once saw and thought they belong in the setting because of that.
in short they should have come up with something new and original that makes sense.
@@professorkatze1123they came up with a lot of new shit in that game
@@professorkatze1123 ah but that's just supermutant in general not just in fo3. I think there are some in FNV but only the invisible ones which makes a bit more sense but is still weird, they probably have a background I don't know about
@@capin8067 kind of true but not much. the 2 main fractions, BoS and Enclave, were recycled from the first two Fallouts. New Vegas shows how it's done right. loads of new fractions, few old elements where it made sense like the BoS hiding in a bunker being irrelevant
I’m pretty sure nuka world had some sort of bottle cap event in Boston area too I can’t remember properly if this is true but it would make sense for people to collect them post war
Because why tf not?
Ring pulls (soda can pull tabs) were used as currency in the Chicago area in Fallout: Tactics.
Bottle caps as currency was literally explained in Fallout 1, it was popularized by the water merchants that spread across the wasteland coast to coast. Clean water was such an important resource, but really heavy and difficult to carry around in large quantity, so instead they used bottle caps to represent the water, 1 cap being 1 bottle of water. Eventually they would run out of water bottle caps so every cap from alcohol bottles to Nuka-Cola were being used. In addition, plenty of pre-war companies ran campaigns that used tokens or caps as a way to encourage brand loyalty, like the Sunset Sarsaparilla star caps in NV. The NCR and other factions actively seek out and destroy bottle cap presses to ensure a limited supply of caps. I genuinely have no idea how people don't know this, it's referenced often.
I often imagine how funny it would look carrying around 30.000 bottlecaps like my characters always end up doing.. 1 bag wouldnt be enough, 2 bags wouldnt be enough.. suddenly the image appears in my head of a fully geared dude carrying around 10 big bags of bottlecaps... Bethesda should have re-invented the monetary system to be a bit more "realistic" in my opinion.. because i cannot answer my own simple question: where do you put 30.000 bottlecaps, i can hardly fit 50 bottlecaps in the pocket on my jacket 🤷
caps have superior material properties: strong and tensile while completely weightless. Ability to melt them into weightless metal structures makes them extremely desirable, and they are way more scarce in terms of volume than pure water.
Ive been saving my bottle caps ever since i think before new vegas even, now that im adult i also have lots of guns and bullets. Im ready just need to get into a vault
= Bethesda doesn’t understand Fallout.
All the soda bottles I drink from have plastic caps. On a plastic bottle.
I have consumed beer in glass bottles with metal caps (either screw-off or pry-off type), and actually *purchase* caps to put on bottles refilled with my homebrew beer -- but it's been quite a while (I don't drink enough beer now to brew my own and craft beers are cheaper in cans).
because of an old carl banks comic, where Scrooge McDuck travels to valley that have no money and they end up using bottle caps.
That is it is a joke ,that they were afraid to back out of later
Well I have a bucket full of Corona caps so guess I should lock it somewhere safe
3:50 I actually quite frequently use bullets as currency in Fallout.
Being a creature of habit, I typically stick to certain guns, and by extension, certain types of ammo. This makes any other ammo type I pick up barter fodder.
This results in me having a large amount of unused caps. Primarily because I might need those caps later. And I am sure many people know how the "I might need it later" cycle goes.
Which is also why in Fallout Tactics, an alternative to caps is the pull-tab of canned drinks.
Back in the day Fallout 1 actually taught me(teen) how currency works. In school the term "backed up by gold" never made sence to me. But the "the cap is just a token that stands for water in the Hub" made something click in my head.
I think a game that did currency as ammo/resources was Horizon: Zero Dawn. You use thev"metal bits" as both money and to craft items like arrows and to upgrade weapons/armor. And it fits well in the universe too.
Very informative. Loved it
My favorite game currency outside of fallout has to be the camp credits from Days Gone. You get them from slain zombies( you turn in the ears). Each standard freak is about 3 credits. The variants get you more. You can also sell animal meat and plants. These 'bounties' you are collecting also earn you trust with the camp you sell them to.
the other great post apocalyptic game series metro uses military grade ammunition as currency, you can shoot it instead of makeshift ammo for extra damage but you’ll loose trading opportunities by doing so
That makes more sense.
Basically the creation of "money" concept for human community accounting of convenience and value against inflation, but in Fallout theme