Deathclaws: the Wasteland's Deadliest Predator, Explained

Deathclaws are huge reptiles with horns, armoured hides and claws long enough to cut a person in half, and they are the most dangerous animal in the Fallout wasteland. They aren't natural mutants. They were engineered before the Great War as living weapons, got loose afterwards and spread across the continent. Every main game has them, and season 2 of the TV series finally brought them to the screen. (Fallout 2; Fallout 4; Fallout, "The Demon in the Snow")

Where do deathclaws come from?#

Deathclaws are a made species. In Fallout 2 Joseph, the herbalist who doctors the deathclaws of Vault 13, identifies them as mutated Jackson's chameleons, the horned kind. The Enclave later tried to restore them to their original purpose as weapons, which is how the game's talking deathclaws came about. (Fallout 2)

The TV series dates them to before the war. During the fighting in Alaska, Marine Cooper Howard's power armour fails as Chinese soldiers close in, and a deathclaw kills every one of them, studies him and walks away. Robert House watched it happen through the suit and took it as proof that a hidden player was preparing for the war, the Enclave. In Fallout 76, Enclave scientists in Appalachia who capture one after the war can tell it was engineered but don't know whose it is. (Fallout, "The Demon in the Snow"; Fallout, "The Strip"; Fallout 76)

Deathclaws in the first two games#

In the original Fallout, most people in New California think deathclaws are a myth. They aren't: a mother and her young have taken over a warehouse in the Boneyard, and the Gun Runners want them gone. (Fallout)

Fallout 2 goes further. The Enclave raised a pack of deathclaws with intelligence close to a human's, able to mimic speech, and sent them into Vault 13 to cover its abduction of the Vault's people. The pack broke away from its makers and made a peaceful home in the Vault. The Enclave then had them exterminated. Goris, a scholarly deathclaw who can join the Chosen One, is one of the few survivors. (Fallout 2)

How do deathclaws behave?#

Deathclaws live and hunt in packs. Each pack has an alpha male and a mother, the strongest male and female, and the rest follow them. They pick territories away from people but will move into empty buildings, and once settled they are very hard to dislodge. In New Vegas, the miners of Quarry Junction were driven out when deathclaws nested there, and the Courier is told that killing the alpha male and the mother will break the pack up. (Fallout: New Vegas)

They lay eggs and guard their nests fiercely. Young ones are smaller, without the full horns, and the hide darkens with age. Loading screens describe them as the danger that best represents the wasteland, able to rip prey apart in seconds. (Fallout: New Vegas; Fallout 4)

Deathclaws in Fallout 3, New Vegas and Fallout 4#

In Fallout 3 they haunt the ruins of Old Olney and the Deathclaw Sanctuary, and the Enclave fits some with control collars to send them into battle. New Vegas has the largest nests in the series at Quarry Junction and Deathclaw Promontory, plus a near-blind variety in Dead Wind Cavern. In Fallout 4, one bursts out of the ground in Concord in the opening hours, the Sole Survivor's first big fight in power armour. (Fallout 3; Fallout: New Vegas; Fallout 4)

Deathclaws in the Fallout TV series#

Live deathclaws first appear in season 2. At the end of "The Demon in the Snow", Lucy MacLean and the Ghoul walk onto the empty, irradiated New Vegas Strip and find a deathclaw living there. More appear, and the two only just escape into Freeside. The bartender at the Atomic Wrangler says the deathclaws came up from Quarry Junction. (Fallout, "The Demon in the Snow"; Fallout, "The Wrangler")

The Ghoul needs to get past them to reach the Lucky 38, so he trades Maximus weapons and power armour for the cold fusion diode. Maximus fights the pack on the Strip, and the battle spills into Freeside while the locals bet on him. He ends up fighting on out of his armour until NCR troops arrive and kill the deathclaw. In the finale House claims the hidden enemy, the Enclave, set the deathclaws on Vegas. (Fallout, "The Handoff"; Fallout, "The Strip")