For a while now, it’s been evident that Fallout 4’s Workshop and Settlement features are pretty popular. They can be impressively capable if you put in the hours. But Bethesda has decided that its current content isn’t enabling creators quite enough. The studio is bringing the capability to create your own vault to all platforms on July 26 with Vault-Tec Workshop. And it’s promising “tons of new items,” and control over your very own vault, “just like a proper Overseer.”
Vault-Tec Workshop revolves around a series of optional quests concerning Vault 88. Only players of Level 20 or higher will be notified of its location via a distress beacon. Players of lower levels will still be able to access Vault 88, but because of its difficulty level, Lead Designer Kurt Kuhlmann advises against it:
“The reason we don’t lead you to it before you’re level 20 is that the space itself is minimum level 35, so if you stumble into it when you’re below 20, it’ll be really difficult. If you go in at level 5, you’ll probably just get killed.”
The vault itself features a narrative involving an Overseer-turned-ghoul. Despite two-hundred years of desolation, she is still committed to Vault-Tec and its infamous tests. She provides players with optional quests and opportunities to perform cruel and abstract experiments on unsuspecting settlers. These quests present players with important decisions that affect the outcome of their chosen experiment and, ultimately, the Workshop item it unlocks.
However, if enacting a no-good ghoul-ridden Overseer’s errands isn’t for you, you can always just kill her. Either that, or force her to leave. Apparently, after performing one of the above actions, “you’ll still be able to build a basic version of each experiment item.”
The phrasing seems to imply that specific experiment items will only be available after certain quests are completed – whether or not choosing one quest path over another will prevent you from obtaining all experiment objects is unclear.
Regardless, Fallout 4’s Vault-Tec Workshop add-on has a lot to offer. According to Vault-Tec Workshop Lead Artist Ryan Sears:
“Hallways, atriums, rooms, stairs, bridges, Vault doors. It looks like the stuff you see when you explore a Vault in the game. You can use all that to lay out your Vault however you want.”
Vault-Tec Workshop items include furniture (clean furniture – which must be worth tons of bottle caps), Vault Boy and Vault Girl statues, “experiment-related items you create during the quest part of the add-on,” and even Barber and Surgeon chairs that will provide free hair-cuts and facial reconstructions for players.
Once Vault 88’s questline is completed, players are free to use Vault-Tec objects in any other buildable area.
While exact details about Fallout 4’s Vault-Tec Workshop items and objects remain a mystery, players will have the chance to discover them for themselves when the add-on releases for Xbox One, PS4 and PC on July 26.