No matter if in the games or the Amazon-series: In Fallout, you don’t pay with cash or coins, but with the bottle caps from simple bottles. There are three good reasons for this.
What are bottle caps for in Fallout? In short: As currency. In the wasteland, people don’t pay with dollars and cents, but with the bottle caps from bottles. This is the norm in almost all games. Fallout 2 is an exception. Here, the bottle caps were replaced by a new dollar of the NCR (New Californian Republic). But let’s take it step by step.
In our real world, we usually throw bottle caps into the trash after opening a bottle. They are worthless to us. In Fallout, it’s different. There are three simple reasons why people established bottle caps as the new currency after the Great War in 2077:
The first reason: Bottle caps already existed in large quantities. The most popular and widely spread ones were those from Nuka-Cola. The vending machines that were scattered across the USA served as a kind of ATM.
The second reason: The technology to produce these bottle caps was lost due to the war. This meant that it was simply not possible or only extremely rarely possible to produce new bottle caps. This ensured that the existing currency hardly lost its value. Inflation was no longer a problem.
The third reason: Because it was very difficult to produce new bottle caps, it also reduced the risk of counterfeiting. The new currency was tied to a specific shape, metal and color. Most bottle caps came from Nuka-Cola, but in the Mojave wasteland of New Vegas, payments are also made with those from Sunset Sarsaparilla. In Fallout 4, bottle caps from other manufacturers are also common.
The story of bottle caps in Fallout, however, was not without incidents. Not all factions agreed with it in the long term.
The NCR wanted the dollar back
What happened to the bottle caps? The origin of the currency was in New California. The idea came from wealthy water merchants who wanted to tie the price of water to a physical object. Thus, each bottle cap was worth a certain amount of water.
In 2093, 16 years after the Great War, bottle caps became the new payment standard. Initially in the western USA, and about three years later also in the east.
In the west, this changed when the faction New Californian Republic, short NCR, came to power. They wanted to restore the old order in the country and also bring back the dollar and secure its value through stored gold.
However, the plan ultimately failed: The Steel Brotherhood carried out a series of raids on the gold supplies of the NCR and destroyed parts of it. Soon the new dollar could no longer be backed. Desperately, the NCR tried to introduce so-called fiat money. This has no intrinsic value but serves only as a means of exchange and is not backed.
Accordingly, people trusted the new currency very little. Many merchants soon returned to the bottle caps, which continued to be based on the value of water.
They then tried to either prohibit or strictly control the production of bottle caps. This was successful, and both counterfeiting and inflation remained largely in check.
In the end, the bottle caps became absolutely dominant in the wasteland, although alternative forms of payment like the NCR dollar are accepted here and there. As a player of Fallout, you should collect every single cap, because who knows what powerful new weapon or armor the next merchant has in stock. Or you might come up with ideas like the following: A gamer once sent 2,240 bottle caps to Bethesda and received a legendary role-playing game in return
