Fallout 4 – Become an Overseer with Vault-Tec Workshop

Vaults.

Our home underground. Safe from the radioactive wastelands and the creatures that roam them. (Well… mostly – more on that later.) In Fallout 4, you begin your journey in Vault 111, and throughout the game you can explore several other Vaults. But for the first time in a Fallout game, you can actually build a Vault. With Vault-Tec Workshop – the game’s latest add-on, releasing on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on July 26 – custom Vault living comes to Fallout 4. Now’s your chance to build your very own Vault, complete with tons of new items. You can even perform experiments on your dwellers, just like a proper Overseer.

But it all begins with a cry for help. And in classic Fallout fashion, what you do next is up to you.

Age Required

Welcome to Vault 88

If you’re above level 20, you’ll hear a distress beacon no matter where you are in the world, alerting you to an emergency situation at Vault 88. Once you arrive and take care of some Raiders who are trying to force their way in, you’ll meet the Vault’s rather strange Overseer. The only surviving resident of Vault 88, she’s been trapped down here alone and has turned into a ghoul. In fact, the bombs went off before her Vault could be completed and she has spent the last 200 years waiting to build it. But that hasn’t discouraged her loyalty to Vault-Tec – and she can’t wait to run some experiments on unsuspecting dwellers.

That’s where the Vault-Tec Workshop quest really kicks in. You’ll start off by interviewing some potential new settlers, searching for the perfect subject for all your nefarious tests. From there you will be tasked with running a series of experiments, each with different outcomes, depending on the choices you make. Will you be a benevolent leader? Or a cruel tyrant? Or maybe somewhere in the middle?

Your choice of test parameters will affect the final version of each experimental object, so think carefully. Whatever you end up crafting for your experiment will be permanently added to the Workshop, allowing you to build it whenever you want.

Age Required

“This is the first Workshop add-on that actually has quests associated with it,” says Kurt Kuhlmann, Lead Designer on Vault-Tec Workshop. “Because this one happens in a specific place – you actually have a location, not just some things to play with – we could attach quests to it that really make sense as part of the offered content.”

But you don’t have to complete the quests at all if you don’t want to. If you just want the pure Workshop experience and don’t care about the narrative overlay, you can choose to kill the poor ghoul Overseer, or just tell her to leave when you arrive. If you do choose to kill her or force her out, you’ll still be able to build a basic version of each experiment item.

And if you’re not yet at level 20, don’t worry: You can still access the new quest, but Kuhlmann offers a bit of a heads up. “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.”

Interior Design

Once you have access to this massive new interior space, you’ll need plenty of things to fill it. Good thing the Vault-Tec Workshop has new recipes in spades. “There’s a whole suite of Vault-specific pieces you can build,” Vault-Tec Workshop Lead Artist Ryan Sears tells us. “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.”

Age Required

In addition to the large building pieces, you’ll also have access to clean furniture, new Vault-themed decorations (including a Vault Boy and Vault Girl statue), the experiment-related items you create during the quest part of the add-on, and the newly added Barber and Surgeon chairs. That’s right – you’ll no longer need to make your way to Diamond City when you want to change your look. Now you can simply assign a settler to one of the chairs and get free haircuts and facial reconstructive surgery whenever you want. (Note: These chairs will only work for your character. The NPCs would like to keep the faces they already have.)

If the thought of collecting all the steel necessary to build a complete Vault seems daunting, don’t worry. “This add-on comes with a ton of resources,” Kuhlmann assures us. “The idea is that they were ready to build this Vault before the bombs dropped, so when you arrive there’s already a lot of what you need just waiting for you. You could build a good chunk of your Vault with just what you get walking into this place, even if you don’t link it to any existing settlements. Then, if you scrap everything in the space, you’ll get even more resources.”

Even if you do run low on resources, you can simply expand your search within Vault 88. But be careful: You may find yourself scrapping a wall only to find yourself face-to-face with angry creatures. Once you clear out the critters, you’ll be able to build there as well.

Into the Sunlight

You’re not stuck solely building from the Vault kit in this new underground space. If you want to mix-and-match with barns, warehouses, shacks, cat paintings or anything else, you can do that too.

Once you’ve finished up the questline, you’re also free to spread the Vault-Tec love to your other settlements. Everything you are able to craft in Vault 88 can be used in any other buildable area. You won’t be able to dig underground, but you could build that sky Vault on Spectacle Island you’ve always dreamed about.

“With the variety of pieces you have, I’m pretty sure you could build any kind of Vault you want,” says Kuhlmann. “And there’s no reason why you have to build it in the interior space. We just want to see what kind of cool stuff you come up with when you have access to all these new tools.”

“We’re really excited to see everyone’s take on a Vault,” adds Sears. “We want to know what the community can do with everything they have access to, and how they integrate it with other non-Vault pieces. Even prior to this add-on we’ve seen a lot of really awesome settlements that throw things together in surprising ways. And that’s the cool thing for us as developers – seeing how people use what we give them in in ways we don’t expect.”