Why are Bottle Caps the Currency of Fallout? 

If you play a melee only character you use ammo as currency.

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

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.

In an alternate reality where bullets are the currency: "It costs me $400,000 dollars to fire this gun for 12 seconds."

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

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.

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.

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...

In 76 the concept was a nukacola promotion for bottle caps that never ended. Allowing nukacola bottlecaps to directly exchange for goods like food

Surprised that Iguana-bits weren't used as currency

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.

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.

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.

It was meant as a joke take on how our current currency is actually worthless. A bottlecap also has no actual value at all.

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.

Technically if you secure a Nuka Cola bottling factory you’re set for life in the post apocalypse Fallout universe.

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

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.

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.

It's shame you didn't go over the most important currency the charge card

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.

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

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

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

I think if it were to happen now, we would use ring pulls since cans are so common

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.

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.

Your fallout vids are top notch. Thank you for making such quality content. I sincerely appreciate it. 🙏

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.

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.

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

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

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?

Can you imagine the logistics of paying for something big in bottle caps or even having to count them all

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.

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 ❤️🔥

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

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.

One homebrew campaign TTRPG post apocalyptic setting we drew inspiration from this and used spent shell casings as currency

In the original fallouts bottle caps were only supposed to be a regional currency. There were other currencies.

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 do appreciate that New Vegas helped explain this with the _Pressing Matters_ quest dialogue tree

So…do you need a bottle cap to buy a Nuke Cola, to get a bottle cap? Asking for a friend.

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

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

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 .

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

Love this channel!!!! The professional way of it explaining and the tone of voice it makes the video very real. Like a history channel. Or a research report.

Very informative. Loved it

Because why tf not?

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.

Well I have a bucket full of Corona caps so guess I should lock it somewhere safe

The lore is that actual pre war bottlecaps were impossible to fake and could be tested for authenticity. There are even plots about people finding old bottle cap presses and how bad it ends up going for them

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.

As a competitive Pokémon player I don’t see anything unusual about using bottle caps as currency.

I always raid the banks & tills in fallout 4, and use that mostly as their worth a few caps each

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.

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 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?

Which is also why in Fallout Tactics, an alternative to caps is the pull-tab of canned drinks.

Yet would be funny on one hand, to see quest of Nuka Cola corporation being happy that their caps become most valid 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-

Fallout: "We won't use bullets as currency" Metro 2033: "Hold my 7.62"

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

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.

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.

this video is cap

I had no idea how true this was until i learned what fractional reserve banking was

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.

you've done NCR and Legion videos. I know it's not as loved as New vegas. But please Do same topics with MINUTEMEN.

It honestly doesn't make sense cause a bartering system in a wasteland would make allot more sense since in different places some items would be more valuable like others for example:a town that has had many raider attacks and they are in desperate need of ammo and stimpacks but they have a huge supply of chems and Radaway so you'll get paid more and they'll sell their surplus at a cheaper price

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

In elementary school, we’d use plastic bottle caps from the milk containers as currency. They had different colors too, so thet each had their own value depending on how rare the cap was lol

When I was a 6-7-year-old kid growing up on the East Side of Detroit in the 60s, we collected bottle caps and played as it was currency. The rarer the pop, the more it was worth. I had a lot of toys but the games we created were more fun.

= Bethesda doesn’t understand Fallout.

It never felt like lazy writing, but it did feel like they wrote themselves into a hole

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

when you find and clean up bottles... its difficult to store anything in it like water or milk without a cap or a cork...

This man describing the point of currency

I need to invest a lot of time into this series. I've never played a fallout game but it sounds interesting.

During the war war bonds were a big thing and nuka was a major share holder in us markets and with a deal they made with us government allowing for the caps to used as water ration tokens essentially I cap is one unit of water which at the end of the war had a price of like 1.75 per unit and when bombs hit any automated nuka cola related tech that survived accepted caps for units of water so ie nuka world.

I have been wondering this for years!

this meeting could've been an email. but its a video

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

The only thing I find particularly odd about the bottlecap thing from a practical standpoint is that while paper money would be fragile and subject to decomposition over time (the average lifespan for a modern US bill is just a few years) coins are themselves even more resilient and more abundant, so they should still be around, even just as reserves to back caps. On the other hand, a bottlecap's relative fragility and neglected status at wartime would mean that fewer would be hoarded, and their condition would degrade over time, resulting in a deflationary currency, which has benefits and detriments that I won't get into. They're reasonably durable, but even now they are made of steel, which, you know, rusts, which would further contribute to their rarity and status as a deflationary currency. The weight, really, is the thing that makes it make sense. When paper is no longer an option and you have to walk around with your bankroll, caps weigh almost nothing. The volume is the real problem. They're like uncrushed aluminum cans - mostly air - but smashing them down flat to help compact them would be in effect defacing them. Need that paint and those ridges. I do kind of wish there was some lore about where all the coins went. In a society where electronics still exist, copper and other conductors would retain value as commodities. I get the point of having one in-game currency from a design perspective, and NV tried out different currencies (even though hardly anyone would ever refuse any and exchanging for the "correct" currency was about as exciting of a side quest as going to a pawn shop or the bank is in real life) but really, old world coins should have been everywhere, and valuable, if only for their metal content.

The funny thing is that the Barter Economy as people have been thought never existed. We went from gift economy with barter as an added thing for strangers or a mutual exchange connection between two or more tribes (one tribe does the fishing, another does the hunting etc). The same would most likely happen in a real life fallout event. People wouldn't just murder everyone they meet as labourers would be to valuable as they can make sure that you all have enough to eat while tending farms and so on.