all the vaults in new vegas

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Mojave's Social Experiments

Vault 3: The Tragedy of Open Doors

Vault 11: The Mandate of Sacrifice

Vault 19: Schizophrenia in Sepia and Orange

Vault 21: The Ultimate Gamble

Vault 22: When Botany Consumes All

Vault 34: The Armory and the Flood

Conclusion: The Legacy of the Vaults

Scattered across the Mojave Wasteland, the vaults of New Vegas stand not as shelters, but as monuments to a chilling pre-war ideology. Unlike simple bunkers, these facilities were designed by Vault-Tec as controlled social experiments, their true purposes hidden from the inhabitants who believed they were securing humanity's future. The story of New Vegas is inextricably linked to these subterranean laboratories, each a unique case study in human psychology, societal engineering, and catastrophic failure. Exploring them reveals the dark heart of the old world and provides critical context for the power struggles of the present.

Vault 3 presents a heartbreaking counterpoint to the typical vault narrative. Its experiment was remarkably benign: to observe a community living in a fully functional, ideal vault environment with all systems operational. For generations, it succeeded. The residents thrived, maintaining technology and culture. Their downfall came not from internal madness, but from external contact. When they opened their doors to the Mojave in a spirit of cooperation, they were brutally massacred by the Fiends, a gang of chem-fueled raiders. Vault 3’s tragedy underscores a core theme: in the post-apocalyptic world, innocence and trust are fatal vulnerabilities. The vault’s pristine condition, juxtaposed with the skeletal remains of its people, serves as a grim lesson on the dangers of unprepared idealism.

If Vault 3 is a lesson in external threats, Vault 11 is a descent into internal horror. Its secret mandate required the annual sacrifice of one resident to a supposed "overseer's computer"; failure to comply would result in the vault's annihilation. This engineered a cycle of forced elections, political manipulation, and eventual civil war. The final, terrible revelation is that the computer required no sacrifice at all. The experiment was to see how long a society would obey an unjust, lethal authority before rebelling. The residents' eventual collective refusal to sacrifice anyone triggered a recorded commendation, but by then, almost everyone was dead. Vault 11 stands as the purest example of Vault-Tec's cruelty, a study in the psychology of obedience and the devastating cost of blind compliance.

Vault 19’s experiment investigated paranoia and segregation through a seemingly mundane method: color-coded psychology. Inhabitants were divided into two groups, one residing in sectors painted a disturbing orange, the other in a calming sepia, with both administered different, unknown psychoactive drugs through the air filtration. The goal was to foment distrust and discord between the two factions. The experiment succeeded catastrophically, leading to violent conflict. By the time of the Courier’s visit, the vault is occupied by powder gangers split along the same color lines, proving the enduring nature of engineered division. Vault 19 demonstrates how easily group identity can be manipulated into hostility, a relevant commentary on the factional strife plaguing the Mojave surface.

In stark contrast to the hidden horrors of other vaults, Vault 21’s experiment was openly declared to its inhabitants: all conflicts, from minor disputes to major policy decisions, were to be resolved by games of chance. Dice, cards, and roulette wheels were the legal and social framework. This created a strangely functional, if chaotic, society where everyone accepted the rule of luck. Its story in New Vegas is one of assimilation. After opening, most of Vault 21 was filled with concrete by Mr. House for his casino strip, with only a small section preserved as a hotel and museum run by former resident Sarah Weintraub. Vault 21 represents the only successful integration of a vault experiment into the New Vegas landscape, its ethos of chance perfectly mirroring the city's core industry.

Vault 22 shifts the focus from social to biological experimentation. Designed as an agricultural vault, its experiment involved genetically engineered plants and pest control. The result was a runaway ecological disaster: the plants evolved into hostile, spore-releasing organisms that infected and transformed the human residents into feral, plant-like creatures known as Spore Carriers. The vault is now a dense, overgrown jungle teeming with lethal flora and fauna. Vault 22 serves as a classic tale of scientific hubris, a warning against tampering with ecosystems without regard for consequences. Its infestation also directly threatens the Mojave, showing how a single vault's failure can spill out to endanger the wider world.

The chaos of Vault 34 stems from a combination of overcrowding, a massive armory, and a critical engineering flaw. The vault was stocked with an extensive arsenal but given insufficient water purifier maintenance protocols. When the water chip failed, radiation built up, and tensions between residents who wanted to leave and a security force intent on holding the armory erupted into civil war. The ensuing conflict damaged the reactor, flooding lower levels with radiation and trapping many. Today, it is a radioactive maze filled with ghoulified former residents and guarded by automated systems. Its legacy, however, lives on in the surface world: the vault's armory supplied the weapons that allowed the formation of the formidable New California Republic Army, directly impacting the geopolitical balance of the entire region.

The vaults of New Vegas are more than dungeons to be looted; they are the foundational tragedies of the setting. Each one provides a piece of the puzzle explaining why the Mojave is the way it is—a land of fractured societies, deep-seated paranoia, and cyclical violence. From Vault 11's commentary on authoritarianism to Vault 34's direct armament of a nation, their experiments never truly ended. The surface world, with its war between the NCR and Caesar's Legion, its opportunistic greed of the Strip, and its struggling settlements, has become the unwitting continuation of Vault-Tec's work. To understand the struggle for New Vegas is to first descend into these buried laboratories of human nature, for they hold the dark, twisted blueprint for the world above.

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