Fallout: What Is Vault-Tec?

With the arrival of the series Fallout on Prime Video, viewers who discovered the franchise for the first time asked themselves many questions. The role-playing game universe from which the adaptation is inspired is extremely vast and dense. Although Bethesda and Amazon have done their best to adapt the complex lore that players know by heart to the screen, certain details may escape newcomers.

Among the most important story elements is Vault-Tec, the company behind the famous fallout shelters. You will have understood: this entity plays a crucial role in the future of society, its impact on the scenario is all the more important. While season 2, the first episode of which is available this December 17, puts the series back in the spotlight, here is everything you need to know about the company, its work and its secrets to get off to a good start.

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The Safehouse Project

In the game archives FalloutVault-Tec appears publicly for the first time in 2031. The company then bought Morgantown University to transform it in its image and found the “Vault-Tec University“. The investment in this place, which players can notably visit in Fallout 76, marks the beginning of the success story of the group. Following the first nuclear conflicts that occurred between Europe and the Middle East in the 2050s, the United States decided to launch the Safehouse Project (or Project Shelter) in 2054 in order to prepare for a possible escalation of tensions.

Vault-Tec was proactive in recognizing the situation and had already begun developing technologies to protect citizens from such a nuclear disaster. After having built a first demonstration shelter, convincing to say the least, in the Los Angeles area, Vault-Tec wins government favor and enters into an official contract with it.

Lacking funding, the United States will only order 122 shelters with a capacity of 1,000 inhabitants, therefore protecting less than 0.1% of the total population. Places were therefore sold at a high Price, while a few lucky people were selected to join certain specific shelters. But behind this wish to save a fraction of the citizens in the hope of repopulating the Earth were hidden in reality much darker goals.

Shelters as a giant playground

While the world was slowly heading towards ruin, the big heads of the government and the elite of the nation founded the Enclave, a secret political and military organization, self-proclaimed as the legitimate continuation of Humanity. Acting in the shadows, the entity took care to use Vault-Tec as a cover to organize a series of sordid experiments. The two worked hand in hand to transform the shelters into truly massive laboratories.

17 so-called “control” shelters would have the sole aim of protecting its inhabitants, while the other 105 would serve as full-scale social experiments. On the one hand, Vault-Tec wanted to develop a new vision of society within the shelters, in order to influence the world of the future. Certain underground communities then became a sort of scientific factory, responsible for developing new technologies to influence the world after.

On the other hand, the Enclave tasked Vault-Tec with organizing various and varied scenarios, in order to collect data on the adaptability and survivability of small communities of survivors. The goal was to be able to avoid errors made during the experiments, in order to ensure the future of the members of the Enclave who had taken refuge in secret locations.

The shelters all responded to different scenarios: some were programmed to malfunction and open earlier than expected, others displayed malfunctions in the water purification system or lacked food resources. However, some experiments were more eccentric, such as bringing together only men, only one woman for a group of men or even slipping a panther among the inhabitants.

The last hope of humanity will ultimately have served two elite entities to carry out their own agenda, to the detriment of human lives in the midst of extinction. In some cases, Vault Supervisors were aware of the experiments being conducted and had to respond to orders from Vault-Tec and the Enclave. Was this the case for Lucy’s father in the series?