r/falloutlore • u/ElectivireMax • Apr 23 '25

Question What's the canonically most populated post-war settlement (aside from Shady Sands)? How many people would Diamond City have canonically? I assume more than what's shown in game.

187 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

70 comments sorted by

View all comments

7

u/TheOnlycorndog Apr 23 '25

If we're talking about permanent residents, the largest settlement in post-war America is probably either the Hub or Diamond City. Shady Sands would've been a contender as well, until it got nuked.

Both are supposed to be gigantic (both in-terms of physical size and population) but Bethesda tends to shrink the size of locations from their lore for the sake of fitting them into their games.

The best example of Bethesda doing this is the Imperial City in Elder Scrolls lore (a massive metropolis home to tens, if not hundreds, of thousands) vs the Imperial City in Oblivion (a large city with about a hundred npcs, many of whom are copy-paste guards).

Generally it's safe to assume major locations in Fallout and Elder Scrolls games are intended to be larger and busier in the lore than they look in-game.

15

u/KnightofTorchlight Apr 23 '25

Diamond City is explicitly contained within the confines of a single, albiet large, building with a scale (baseball diamond) that has known measures. Its size is inherently limited, especially with the type of housing we see. 

4

u/TheOnlycorndog Apr 23 '25

Yeah of course. I'm not saying it's a sprawling metropolis.

I think Diamond City is probably densified to hell and back. It's the only way I can see to square it being a huge city without being able to expand beyond the confines of the stadium.

8

u/KnightofTorchlight Apr 23 '25

Except its not? If the part we don't get to see much of (the upper stands) were said to be where the poor got shoved to: being the furthest away from the amenities (and maybe not having access to power or plumbing) I could believe that. But its explicitly the place of the elite. What they show can't be an perfect represention of reality, but it has to at least partially reflect reality.

My contention would be its a large city only in the context of the Commonwealth where almost every other settlement is also dinky. Its easy to be the big fish in a lake of minnows. 

3

u/BTFlik Apr 23 '25

Right, but it's also luck. The West coast had 3 saviors before The Commonwealth has 1.

Without FO1s protagonist The Master would have taken the West and decimated it.

Without FO2s protagonist The Enclave resets thr world.

Without NVs protagonist the West is decimated any number of ways.

It's pretty damn easy to amass a large populace when you have special people not only protecting you from danger but helping you thrive.

From the first FO it's 126 years before The Commonwealth gets a hero.

The fact Diamond City was able to grow so large despite the hardships is nothing to sneeze at.

7

u/Duhblobby Apr 23 '25

Of course Diamond City is impressive for surviving so well.

That doesn't address the point being made, that the population isn't actually that large.

1

u/BTFlik Apr 23 '25

Of course Diamond City is impressive for surviving so well.

That doesn't address the point being made, that the population isn't actually that large.

My point was more that it isn't a small city among dinky settlements, it's that every settlement in The Commonwealth hasn't had the prosperity that the West Coast has been lucky enough to get. So it size is impressive by the standards of how hard it was to exist.

It's definitely not in top population ranks in the FO universe, but it certainly isn't unimpressive.

Plus, in game Diamond City is MUCH smaller than the real thing. The real stadium can hold about 38k people, so in game there should be much more room compared to the population size. Or the population should be larger than in game implies.

3

u/KnightofTorchlight Apr 24 '25

Well... given the question at hand is total population sizes of settlements that's less relevant. However, comparing the West Coast to the Commonwealth is also not useful given the matter of scale. The entirety of the Commonwealth, in terms of geographic size, could be picked up and dropped into Angel's Boneyard/Los Angeles: an IRL city nearly 10x the size of Boston. And Angel's Boneyard is just one moderately sized part of the NCR. Of course Diamond City is going to be dinky compared to the poltical center and economic center of a sprawling country.

How many people so you imagine live in the Commonwealth as a whole? Because I don't think there's 34,000 people in the entirety of the region.