The Fallout TV show's got a big vault map, and it's now been turned into an interactive Google Earth overlay

2 weeks ago 50

If you're big into Fallout lore, this'll be right up your irradiated and possibly ghoul-filled alley.

Some vault 33 residents in the Fallout TV show. Image credit: VG247/Bethesda/Amazon

Warning: Spoilers for series one of Amazon's Fallout TV show lie ahead.

So, unless you delibrately taking this slowly or have been really busy, odds are you've had a chance to sit down and watch Amazon's Fallout TV show by this point. As you'd expect, it's got a lot to offer in terms of cool background details and references for your friendly neigbourhood Fallout nerd, with one of these being a big map of vaults that you can now check out in interactive form.

Yep, nestled amid the array of little homages to the games that inspired the series, and the array of potential little homages to the games that inspired the series we might not even know are supposed to be that, there's big lure for geography lovers everywhere. And naturally, the fandom's keen cartographers have already done a lot with it.

Kicking things off, Fallout content creator Nikki, who goes by the handle Tunnelsnakesfool and is currently studying a masters degree in geography, quickly decided to turn the big map of US vaults, which you can see in the background of an important meeting at Vault-Tec during the show's final episode, into something folks could interact with a bit easier. So, she took a screenshot of the map, added georeferences to all the vaults it shows, and then pulled it into Google Earth.

Thanks to her hard work, you can now download a KML file that'll add the vault map to Google Earth as a handy interactive overlay that you can play around with and use to really get an idea of just where each vault shown is located state and city-wise. Once you've grabbed the file from Tunnelsnakesfool's Discord server, you might have a bit of fun getting the images to show up in a way that matches Nikki's Twitter thread, but the points will be plotted regardless.

As you might expect, Tunnelsnakesfool isn't the only person that's picked up on the map, with Adam Whitehead - who goes by the handle Werthead - having used it to revise a very detailed map of Fallout's vaults that he made a while ago. This map also includes all of the other vaults either confirmed or hinted at in the games and either semi or non-canon sources of Fallout info so far, with the TV Show map's vaults having been added in blue, since for many nothing beyond their planned construction has been confirmed as of now.

While it looks like he's still got to go back and re-do his map's version of Florida, there are still some interesting conclusions to draw, such as this updated map showing something very close to the 122 vault locations cited in the non-canon Fallout Bible. Mexico and Canada also look to have gotten at least one vault each too, which is pretty thought-provoking.

If you're interested in more fun fallout things, make sure to check out the huge feature we recently put together exploring where the Fallout fandom is at as the TV show arrives.


Continue reading