Fallout 4 Story Explained: Plot and Endings

Fallout 4 came out in November 2015, made by Bethesda Game Studios. It starts on the day of the Great War and then jumps to 2287 in the Commonwealth, the ruins of Boston, ten years after Fallout 3. A parent wakes from two centuries of cryogenic sleep to find their baby son stolen and spends the game looking for him. This page covers the whole plot, every ending and the two big story add-ons, so it has full spoilers. (Fallout 4)

Before the story begins#

The Commonwealth had its own history. The Institute, descended from scientists at the Commonwealth Institute of Technology, had hidden underground since the war and built synths, artificial people, some of them indistinguishable from humans. Wastelanders feared them as the bogeymen who replaced people in the night. The Minutemen, a volunteer militia that protected settlements, had collapsed after a massacre at Quincy. The Railroad, a secret group, smuggled escaped synths to freedom. (Fallout 4)

The Brotherhood of Steel of Fallout 3 had been reunited by its young Elder, Arthur Maxson, and was preparing to come north. (Fallout 3; Fallout 4)

Vault 111#

The Sole Survivor lived in Sanctuary Hills outside Boston with their spouse, their infant son Shaun and a robot butler, Codsworth. On the morning of 23 October 2077, a Vault-Tec representative signed them up for the local vault. Within the hour, news broke that nuclear attacks had begun. The family made it to Vault 111 as a bomb hit the area. (Fallout 4)

Vault 111 was an experiment. The residents were told they were going through decontamination and were frozen in cryogenic pods instead. Some time later, the Survivor woke briefly and watched through the glass as two strangers opened their spouse's pod. A scarred man shot their spouse and took Shaun. The Survivor was frozen again. (Fallout 4)

Waking in the Commonwealth#

When the Survivor woke for good, every other pod had failed. They left the vault, found Codsworth still keeping house in ruined Sanctuary, and learned it was 2287. In nearby Concord, they saved a small band of settlers led by Preston Garvey, one of the last Minutemen, and pulled on a suit of power armour to fight off raiders and a deathclaw. (Fallout 4)

Preston pointed them to Diamond City, a town built inside the old Fenway Park baseball stadium. There a reporter named Piper Wright and a synth detective named Nick Valentine helped track the kidnapper. He was Kellogg, a mercenary working for the Institute. Shaun had been taken in 2227, sixty years earlier. (Fallout 4)

Kellogg and the Glowing Sea#

The Survivor found Kellogg at Fort Hagen and killed him. Kellogg had a cybernetic implant in his brain. At the Memory Den in Goodneighbor, a scientist named Dr. Amari let the Survivor walk through Kellogg's memories, which showed Shaun as a boy in the Institute and the name of a man who might know how to get in: Virgil, a former Institute scientist hiding in the Glowing Sea, the radioactive crater where a bomb had landed. (Fallout 4)

Virgil had escaped the Institute and turned himself into a super mutant. He explained that the only way in was by teleport, and that the Survivor would need a chip from a courser, one of the Institute's synth hunters. The Survivor killed a courser and took its chip, which the Railroad's tech expert, Tinker Tom, helped decode. With help from one of the factions, the Survivor built a signal interceptor and teleported into the Institute. (Fallout 4)

Father and the Institute#

Inside, the Survivor met a boy who looked like Shaun. He wasn't. He was a synth. The Institute's Director, Father, revealed the truth: he was Shaun, now about 60 years old. The Institute had taken him because his pre-war DNA was untouched by radiation, and used it to create its latest synths. Father was dying of cancer. He wanted the Survivor to help run the Institute and, in time, take over from him. (Fallout 4)

By then the Brotherhood had arrived over Boston in its giant airship, the Prydwen. Elder Maxson saw synths as a threat to humanity and wanted the Institute wiped out. The Railroad wanted the synths freed. Preston wanted the Commonwealth safe for ordinary people. The Survivor could work with several of these for a while, but each faction's final missions made them choose. (Fallout 4)

The ending explained#

There are four main endings, one per faction. The first three end the same way: the Survivor reaches the Institute's reactor, says goodbye to Father on his deathbed, can order the scientists to evacuate, and sets the reactor to blow. On a rooftop outside, they press the detonator and watch the Institute go up. (Fallout 4)

The Minutemen ending. Thrown out of the Institute, the Survivor defends the Castle, the Minutemen's fort, against a synth attack. The Minutemen engineer, Sturges, works out a way back in, and the Minutemen teleport in, fight through the defenders and destroy the Institute. The Railroad and the Brotherhood can both survive this ending. (Fallout 4)

The Brotherhood ending. The Survivor carries out Maxson's orders, including wiping out the Railroad, and helps restart Liberty Prime. The giant robot marches to the old C.I.T. ruins and burns a hole down into the Institute. The Brotherhood storms in and destroys it, and Maxson promotes the Survivor to Sentinel. (Fallout 4)

The Railroad ending. The Survivor works undercover in the Institute while helping synths escape. When the Brotherhood attacks the Railroad's headquarters and kills a heavy named Glory, the Railroad decides the Brotherhood has to go. The Survivor plants explosives on the Prydwen and destroys it. Then they start a synth uprising inside the Institute and blow it up. (Fallout 4)

The Institute ending. The Survivor carries out Father's orders to destroy the Railroad, then the Brotherhood, by sending a synth to infect Liberty Prime with a virus that makes it destroy the Prydwen. Father dies, and the Survivor becomes the Institute's new Director. (Fallout 4)

In every ending the Survivor can take the synth Shaun home or leave him. All four close on the same speech: the Survivor remembers the life they lost and accepts that the world they're in now, ruined and dangerous, is home. (Fallout 4)

The question the game keeps asking is what makes someone a person. Synths think and feel, and the Institute treats them as tools. Father tells his parent the truth only when he's dying, and asks them to carry on the work that took Shaun from them in the first place. (Fallout 4)

Far Harbor and Nuka-World#

In Far Harbor, the Valentine Detective Agency takes a case from a family whose daughter, Kasumi Nakano, has run off to an island off the coast of Maine to join a hidden colony of synths. The island is split between the fishing town of Far Harbor, the Children of Atom and the synth refuge of Acadia, led by DiMA, an early synth model like Nick. DiMA's locked-away memories reveal he killed the town's leader, Captain Avery, and replaced her with a synth to keep the peace. The Survivor decides whether to keep his secret, expose him, or let one side destroy another. (Fallout 4: Far Harbor)

In Nuka-World, the Survivor travels to a pre-war theme park taken over by three raider gangs, kills their Overboss, Colter, and takes his place. With Colter's lieutenant, Porter Gage, they can lead the gangs to raid the Commonwealth, or turn on them and free the park's traders. (Fallout 4: Nuka-World)

What later games treat as canon#

Bethesda hasn't named a canon ending. The TV series, set in 2296, has a Brotherhood airship marked Prydwen in the air over the West Coast in its first episode, which fits a Brotherhood victory in the Commonwealth, but Bethesda hasn't named a canon ending, and the series hasn't said what happened to the Institute or the Sole Survivor. (Fallout, "The End")

What it sets up#

Fallout 4 is the latest point in the games' timeline. The TV series, which picks up nine years later, carries the Brotherhood's story onward. For how everything fits, see the Fallout timeline, the Fallout TV series explained and the Fallout story explained. The prequel online game Fallout 76 goes back to 2102. (Fallout 4)

Test yourself: think you know the Commonwealth? Try the Fallout 4 quiz, twelve questions on the story above. (Fallout 4)