What do you think the exchange rate is between pre-war money and bottlecaps?

What do you think the exchange rate is between pre-war money and bottlecaps?

Well, according to Fallcraft 4, a single wad of pre-war money is actually about $100. In Fallout 3 and New Vegas, you can sell a stack for 10 caps.

So, if my basic math is right,
1 Cap = $10 USD

10 caps per stack.

It's literally in the game you fucking moron.

Right, but we didn't know how much money is in a "stack" until Fallout 4 came out.

And it's not like you could blame someone for not playing Fallout 4.

So by following that line of thought, we can agree that during the early post apoc, 1 bottle of water was worth 10$?

But how much was a comic book?

I blame retards who can't look at a fucking wiki that's autistically maintained and is the first result in a google search.

$29

Probably. Of course, by this line of logic a piece of bread in the later post-apoc is worth about $50. Of course, it's likely most wastelanders aren't conscious of the relative value of pre-war money vs bottlecaps because nobody's used paper money in 200 years.

For extra math fun, the wiki states that a single legion Denarius is worth 4 caps, while a single NCR dollar is worth 1.5 caps. This would mean the Denarius is valued at about $40 USD, while the NCR dollar is about $15 USD.

Why are the caps considered universal currency anyway? It'd be more interesting if there werent any and all trades had to be done with commodities. This way players wouldnt be able to hoard weightless money which makes all expenses trivial half way through the game.

Caps are backed by water. One cap represents one bottle of water.

Then why are they weightless and you gain one by drinking Nuka-Cola?

What the fuck is this nigger shit?

You can fill empty bottles with any liquid you want. The game represents currency very poorly to be honest. I don't know why caps are used in the Bethesda games though, they have no connection or proximity to the Hub.

Incorrect.
That's how much they cost now.
t. Holla Forums


I'm not well versed in FO, but doesn't that mean if you buy and drink a bottle of water for 1 bottle cap, you effectively have another bottle cap and lose no money?


Why would pre-war money hold any value? Value is determined by the government and economy.
Why would bottlecaps hold any value outside a single settlement who decided to use bottlecaps? Was there a giant meetup between every single settlement across the world to declare bottlecaps the one true currency?
What's to stop me from making my own bottlecaps by smacking some scrap metal with a rock for a while?

TODD, WHERE IS THE LORE!?

NCR had an economic collapse due to the BoS destroying their gold reserves and whereas their money used to be worth more it's basically toilet paper now

Water merchants started using them as currency since they were difficult to reproduce and relatively scarce in the wastes. Anyone who traded with water merchants kept bottle caps around to make it easier to trade with them. Eventually bottle caps developed as a currency backed by water similar to how currencies used to be backed by gold. Ie. The bottle cap is merely a voucher for a certain amount of water. This of course only developed in California. The fact that Fo3 and Fo4 uses bottle caps currency as well is due to Bethesda's laziness

NV explicitly has a quest dealing with counterfeit and newly made bottle caps. The answer is the same as why you can't print your own money today.

In Fallout, merchants in The Hub used bottle caps due to their finite amount and difficulty to counterfeit, and therefore became the standard currency. They were supposed to be phased out by NCR dollars, but I Bethesda doesn't give a shit about lore and thought buying stuff with bottle caps was cool and wacky.

Also

The basic shape is relatively easy to make but good luck silkscreening the nuka cola design onto your cap. Also the Crimson Caravan and water merchants actively seek out people "counterfitting" bottlecaps en mass and shut them down to keep the supply limited

Why is Fallout 4 so perfect?

Because it just barely works.

Yep, and iirc it was done because they needed a reason for bottlecaps to be in game due to them being in Fallout 3, so the Brotherhood war with the NCR caused it.

It started out as a de-facto currency that only became official legal tender in the wasteland when banks were set up to deal with and produce more caps. And like what's been said, NCR dollars would eventually replace caps even in non-NCR territory had Bethesda not taken a complete shot on the lore

Metal twist-off bottlecaps (which can't be put back onto the bottle they came from) aren't generally used on bottles of water. They're mostly used for beer bottles and sometimes old-fashioned glass soda bottles.

Maybe as a novelty? Or because it's an already-existing object that's tailor-made to serve that role, even if the government that created is no longer around. It's not unheard of for multiple types of currency to be used in parallel. Cigarettes are money among prisoners and soldiers, for example.

Bottlecaps hold value because the merchants at The Hub decided to use them as currency, and back them with water. There's no good reason for them being used in Fallout 3, though, since it's in a vastly separate part of the country and, as far as we know, doesn't have the backing of any major governmental or mercantile institution there.

You overestimate your ability; they'd be shit, and easily identifiable as counterfeit. Besides, Fallout: New Vegas has an entire quest that deals with bottlecap counterfeiting–it's no different in principle than any other money's susceptibility to counterfeiting.

Stop asking stupid questions.

They explain this in Fallout New Vegas. Basically the Nuka Cola company had anti-counterfeit measures out into their caps before the war even started just to stop pre-war bootleg bottles from appearing on the market. This also helps explain why it became an ideal currency

I wonder why counterfeiters don't just take a sifter and splash some dirt on their caps after the paint's dry.

See

I've always wondered why there wasnt any quests in Fallout 3, New Vegas, or Fallout 4 where major factions or gang factions warred for a bottling factory. If they could get it up and running again and supply the required ingredients, they could start making empty nuka cola, and just harvest the bottlecaps for a money making industry.

Get the fuck out of here.

Please play Fallout New Vegas because it's obvious you never have. They already do have banks making their own caps and all banks control the cap supply. Again, this is why caps became legal tender from a de facto standard. If you're wondering why they aren't being fought over them I implore you to please read about the history of the oldest banks in the world. Banks are already generally serving all territories so it would be foolish to wage war over them.

My guess is that they make paper out of it, especially out west. Currency paper is extremely durable (meaning it can be recycled multiple times) and on top of that it's not like there are many trees or textile crops around in the arid west. That said, if people in Bethesda games were making textiles from cloth and/or paper scraps then pre-war clothing and books would also be hot commodities and they're worthless. But for even more fun, "cloth" is a craftable item in FO4 so apparently making cloth is common knowledge in a world where there remains an abundance of textiles after 200 years of scavenging by people still wearing centuries-old rags and homemade bondage gear.

If we're going off of FO4 logic, then you also require certain knowledge to make a wooden merchant stand while knowing how to make an electricity powered water purifier with your bare hands.

Fallout is trash kill youself

I've beaten New Vegas several times. Get that stick out of your ass and accept people missed certain things or forgot others. I also mentioned Gang factions as one of the possible quest options.

You know what's funny, you come across the Sunset Sasparilla factory in New Vegas and it is completely bare. Even with the blue star cap hunt going on, absolutely nobody in that twenty mile or whatever radius thought to head for that factory and open all the soda bottles for cash.

For people who say Bethesda is bad, Obsidian is even worse.

Don't worry, there's a theory for it A GAME THEORY

True. Especially when considering the black guy who tells you about festus says people have met him, plural, so more than one person has been to the factory and left bottles there when they've probably been searching for star bottle caps as well.

FUCK YOU

A 10 oz gold bar in New Vegas is 301 caps. The price of gold is currently $1,248 an ounce, so that 10 oz gold bar is worth about $12,480. So it can be said that a bottle cap under current conditions is worth about $41.46 USD

Wait no, Im an idiot, thats per carry pound. They have 10 ounce written on them but they weigh much more in game. Each one is worth 10,539, so thats $1.17 USD, which makes much more sense.

Fails to account for the relative scarcities of gold between our world and Fallout's. It would be better to use a commodity with supply and demand schedules that are justifiably closer to those in our own. (Though I don't know how you could do this.)

Bethesda was a mistake.

There's a quest that the Crimson Caravan woman gives you to go and shut down a bottle cap forging machine.

Well obviously but those kind of figures are impossible to find but it gives you a pretty decent ballpark figure

I was going to suggest maybe finding the price of clean water, but the Majove wasteland is probably not the best place for those comparisons.
Anyway, it's neat that you figured that out. I always imagined a bottlecap to be around $1; now we know for sure.

And from there we can also use it to find out that Legion Denarius is worth about $4.68 and NCR dollars are $.40 each

Did the NCR's push for paper money fail all over its territory, or only on the frontier? I can't remember.
Also, I have an autistic desire to see an open world RPG that actually deals with prices well. Like, if you sell a hundred hammers to the city blacksmith, the price of hammers goes down. Or if you buy up a thousand pounds of mutton, the price of mutton rises. It could even serve an in-game purpose, by discouraging players from hoarding vendor trash.
Just a thought.

The reason NCR money is so shit is becuase it was backed by the NCR gold reserve, which was destroyed by the Brotherhood at the Battle of Redding

Cute. Shame the NCR doesn't seem to have any economists.

I fucking hate bottlecaps so fucking much. Another shining example of how much Todd fucked up Fallout.

gets me everytime someone mentions it

Theres that and the fact that the NCR is weak ass cucks who got outplayed by a fucking computer program and (potentially) a rag tag band of Holla Forumsfags in skirts. They are a government through military might (which time and time again they have been proven to have none of) and their money isn't even accepted outside of their itty bitty pieces of land that they miraculously haven't lost to radroaches yet.

Your money is worthless if nobody wants it. That is the true reason.

The Legion may be lots of things but rag-tag is not one of them; an autistic adherence to discipline and organization is the bread and butter of their success.

Holy fuck why didn't I think of this.

Pip-girl images are his only work of any value and they are on model so he can't fuck it up with his retarded shading.
There is nothing to complain about there.

How would you compare the two? One is a post fallout world currency, the other is a fully developed 1st world country currency. What the fuck is there to compare
Also, I get from this thread half of Holla Forums hasnt played NV. What a shock

Remember folks; in-game video game economies rarely even try to make any sort of sense. It's best to assume that at best, the economy exists from the player character's point of view, and that only.


There is one non-quest location with a counterfeiter's shack. I think the issue is probably that caps are hard enough to forge that it's not really worth it on a larger scale; if you're a big enough faction then, like the NCR and Legion, you might as well just mint your own currency.


The NCR in FNV seems to be quite well-developed at least within its territories, the problem is that they're overextended in the Mojave and the current leaders are all idiots. (Plus they're also waging campaigns in Baja apparently, they had to transfer the Veteran Rangers from there)

Otherwise, they have better infrastructure, civil society and technology than about everyone else, there's a reason House basically set up New Vegas to greet them as customers and intends on trading with them. (On far more favourable terms to himself, of course) Even if they lose at Hoover Dam, the Barter victory over Lanius is basically convincing him that they won't be able to sustain advancement into NCR territory while keeping the Legion's existing territories. (Of course, pretty sure Caesar doesn't care about the current Legion territory, he wants to conquer and reform the NCR)

They still look bad.

Tictacs get out.

Whatever the buyer will pay for it, obviously. It depends on your CHA and other perks.

Caps shouldnt even be a currency after Fallout 2. Bethesda never played the old games.

Why are bottlecaps used as currency in the post nuke world anyway?

muh water backed currency lol

Denarius 4 lyfe

Play the games


No shit. In nv it makes some sense since it's mostly caravan/gun runner territory economically speaking, they need to be able to trade with non ncr (legion and jsut people outside the ncr) But they should have given ncr cash more importance
fo3 and 4 are a mess dont even try to make sense of it

I know for damn sure that your image is animated. The inquisitive overlay is animated. Why do you not post an animated version? You are swine!

Wasn't Skyrim supposed to do exactly that?

One thing I think is worth pointing out, when it comes to the general debate, is that America's economy was likely pretty bad considering the scarcity of resources that motivated the world ending war in the first place.

Good chance that $100 stack of bills was barely enough to buy a weeks worth of groceries.

That Giddy-Up Pony for example, pretty elaborate toy but it sure as hell wouldn't cost $16,000 if the pre-war economy was at all comparable to the real world America.

They're too small and light, which'd make them easily lost. Don't seem like they'd be that hard to counterfeit either, their shape and design are simplistic and the metal they're made from is relatively malleable.

It's been explained, read the fucking thread.

Caps still don't make sense as a currency.

You dont make sense as a currency.

Well no shit nobody would want to pay to fuck him, he's too ugly.

Whoa, who said anything about fucking?

What you never hear the phrase 'sell your body'?

[really autistic post about how bottle caps don't work as a currency system in a post apocalypse alternate-universe game]

Selling your body doesn't turn you into currency

Your body can be a currency if you trade sex for goods.

No, the currency is sex. You're trading the sex.

Oh user, I wasnt complaining.

And you have to use your body for the sex itself.

You have to use your body to do everything

I think they said so in the marketing, but in reality, no, Skyrim didn't do that.

You can use your credit card to transfer money as well, doesn't make it currency

Currency is a medium of exchange, fam. Maybe in some weird fucking Mad Max world a person could be currency, but sex never could (because it's an act, not a tangible object).

True. Sex is bartered.

Kill yourself, dyke.

lol, good goy.

Oh, it's this retard again.

>>>/4chan/

The user who got cucked by a dyke?

Well, you can't even respond to the correct post, so you're not doing a great job of defending yourself.

I don't know about that, but I do know that yuri triggers the ever-loving fuck out of him.

That’s weird. Also reported.

...

bottlecaps is such a shitty form of currency. you'd think they'd make something more practical, something they could produce and regulate, or simply resort to rudimentary barter and trade.

Did this nigger really just post about how he's reported some one?