Fallout’s Radiation Zones: The Most Dangerous Places | Full Lore Explained

Fallout’s Radiation Zones: The Most Dangerous Places | Full Lore Explained Somewhere on the continent a crater has been glowing for two centuries, and the wind coming off it kills you before you ever see the light. It started on October 23, 2077, when the war ended in about two hours and the fallout drifted, letting geography sort clean ground from lethal ground. In this world radiation is a number that stacks, climbing until the sickness sets in, and a rare few don't die at all, they change into ghouls, then glowing ones. RadAway and Rad-X only buy minutes, which is why every deadly place gets sorted into four sources: the direct hit, the leaking reactor, the deliberate weapon, and the buried experiment. The tour runs coast to coast. California opens on the Glow, the West-Tek crater where the FEV, Mariposa, and the Master's Unity began, past Necropolis, Vault 12, Gecko, and the Toxic Caves. The Capital Wasteland stacks the White House crater, Megaton and its Children of Atom, Vault 87, Project Purity, Old Olney, the Pitt, and Point Lookout. The Mojave adds man-made poison at Camp Searchlight and Vault 34, plus Big MT, the Sierra Madre's Cloud, and the storm-torn Divide. Then the road turns east to the Commonwealth, where Mass Fusion, Nuka-World, and Far Harbor's Crater of Atom all point toward one place. That place is the Glowing Sea, the impact crater in the southwest Commonwealth where the counter stops climbing and just screams, guarded by giant radscorpions, deathclaws, and crowds of glowing ghouls, with the exiled Institute scientist Virgil hiding at its heart. Appalachia shows the younger version, a Glowing Sea in the making, where the Scorched Plague, the fissure sites, and the scorchbeasts spread contamination like a disease across the Cranberry Bog, the Ash Heap, and Toxic Valley. Across every map the same wound keeps reopening, a place built to be unlivable and then abandoned to hold the receipt.