What Happens After 1000 Years in Fallout 4?

Fallout 4 takes place in 2287, over 250 years from now. Time passes rather quickly in Fallout 4 with each day only taking 72 minutes. Through the power of console commands, we can manipulate time itself. So, What Happens After 1000 Years in Fallout?

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What Happens After 1000 Years in Fallout? (in text form)

To get things started, you should know that there are two console commands we can use to answer the question. The first command is “sgtm” which can be used to change the game speed. 1 is the default value. Setting sgtm to 2 makes everything happen twice as fast. Character movements, gun fire, dialog, pretty much everything. My first thought was to use this command to speed things up until 1000 years pass. But once I set sgtm to 15, things got weird. And then the game froze. Not a big deal. I figured there were just too many characters, lighting effects, and things going on in Diamond City. Lots of moving parts. Let’s head back to Vault 111. There’s no weather or alive NPCs down there. If you mute the audio and don’t move, you can’t even tell that the game speed has seen a 1500% increase. Until you try to open the console command window and it doesn’t work because the game crashed again.

Okay, the sgtm command clearly isn’t going to work. The other command we can use is “set timescale to”, which effects the game time, but not the actual gameplay. The default timescale is 20, which means that 1 minute in the real world is 20 minutes in-game. So 1 day would take 72 minutes. First I set the timescale to 150, just to show how little impact it actually has. It’s 7.5 times faster than the normal timescale, but you can still barely tell that the sun is moving if you look at it. Cranking it up to 500 is much more noticeable, but still not nearly fast enough. If you just want to watch the world, I think 2500 is the sweet spot. The skyline changes quickly but not so quick that you can’t appreciate it. Now it’s time to get serious. 25,000 is the next step up. Things are getting fast. Before we go any further, if you’re sensitive to flashing lights, don’t go any further in this video. By this point, 7 days have passed since we left Vault 111. It’s not fast enough, not by a long shot. Timescale 100,000. We’re starting to get a strobe light effect. Now almost a month has passed. Timescale 500,000 makes the entire day last less than 1 second. Within a few seconds we’re almost into February of 2288. Timescale 1,000,000. It’s starting to get a little absurd now. Timescale 10,000,000. At this point, 2 in-game years pass in about 5 seconds. It’s fast, but not fast enough. I see no reason to not speed things up.

Back to seizureville, the timescale is up to 1,000,000,000 (1 billion). When I opened my Pip-Boy to check the date, it was January 91, 2402. It was about this time that things started getting weird. I let it run for a few more seconds then checked the date again. It wasn’t. Instead of the date, there was a decimal number that changed after I re-opened the Pip-Boy. A few tries later and we got a date back. January 74, 2455. After a quick save, it was time to increase the timescale yet again. We’re now at 10 billion. The decimals were still there. Eventually I got the date back, which was now January 52, 2566. As expected, we’re getting closer and closer to the end goal.

However, playtime is over. No more single digit increases. Timescale is now 1 trillion. With the timescale now marching us rather quickly towards the eventual heat death of the universe, it was time to take out a gun and fire a few shots. Gun works. So does the flashlight. The year is now 2718. Timescale 10 trillion quickly pushed us over the 2999 threshold. And… the date broke again. Now it’s November 29, 21,054. We missed the mark by almost 18,000 years.

[MittenSquad]

To all the people saying I didn't give a warning about the flashing lights, I did, at 2:33. So you can stop with the "give an epilepsy warning next time" comments now.

[Rain-dztf]

The dude literally took 200 years to draw his gun

[bitarmory]

"I let it run for a few seconds, then checked the date again. It wasn't."

[loganstafford]

>fixes time
>game crashes
>re-open fallout 4
>load in a wagon
>"hey, you, you're finally awake"

[sooners]

Preston Garvey: There is a settlement that needs saving

1000 years later: There is a settlement that needs saving

[thHour]

My prediction: nothing will be different after 1000 in-game years because war, war never changes.

[paulk]

7:25
‘You could see the pistol firing faster than it normally does’
My math may be wrong, but isn’t that gun firing at one shot per 10000 or so years?

[zoator]

For 2 generations, over the span of nearly 100 years, onlookers would gather around the seemingly frozen airborne bullet in wonder and amazement. Traveling at a blistering 3.33 meters/year it took nearly 90 years for the bullet to reach the tree that it was fired at.

[Bullett]

Garvey kicks his coffin door: “Hey, there’s another settlement in help, I’ll mark it on your map”.

[RapnuzeI]

Preston: "Another settlement needs your help. Here, I'll mark it on your map."
*1000 years later*
Preston: "Did you help out that settlement yet?"

[brunovaz]

I can't believe you didn't fade the screen white when approaching 1000 years and lost the opportunity to make a Skyrim joke

[mavericksantana]

5:34
>holds gun for 200 years in the same spot
>randomly starts shooting
>shoots 1 bullet per 40 years
>NPC's really confused about that weird guy on a rock who shoots after every generation

[Spencer_]

Rest in peace Paul. Your content was such a great escape for me to indulge in. May your legacy not be forgotten in the fallout community

[MSOPMODII]

January 91st is my favorite day of the year.

[MarcoBMark-rtke]

**games crashes**

**screen goes white**

“Hey, you’re awake, how about that?”

[StaySafeStaySoggy]

This reminds me of that futurama sode where they went into the future but couldn't go back in time so they just kept going forward until a new earth was made

[cornboi]

this was the first vid of his i ever saw. thanks paul, I'll hold a special place in my heart for this one. rest in peace

[GoBIGclan]

play this video at 2x speed and you open up a rift in the universe

[grosslyoffensivelizard-man]

>it’s 1000 years after the events of fallout 4

>the world has reverted entirely into a permanent technological dark age

>guns and the knowledge needed to make them have long since faded into history

>mutant sub-humans and talking animals are the norm

>you awaken to find yourself a prisoner on his way to being executed

>the opening text appears... It reads “Fallout: Skyrim”

>Todd did it again, that ingenious bastard!

[garretpremo]

As a developer, I'd like to note that the year counter increments in an interesting way but makes sense if thought about as a string concatenation. The reason you see 21000 instead of 3000 is because the game's year counter at the start of the game is NOT 2287. The year at the beginning of the game is 287. Why? Because the game concatenates the year counter onto "2".

This ultimately gives you the representation of the year at the beginning of the game as "2" + "year" or "2" + "287" or 2287.

Once you get to what we would naturally consider the year 3000, and the game's "year" counter reaches 1000, we are given the same formula for the representation: "2" + "year" or "2" + "1000" or 21000.

As for why Bethesda decided to record and display the game year this way, I cannot say. I am simply trying to shed some light on how it is done.