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s.wbones

AUTHOR'S INTERLUDE: Compound Hierachies

Okay so on a player level, I really enjoy the settlement system in Fallout 4. Game design? Yes. Exactly my shit.

On an intellectual level, there's a lot of problems with it - especially as I sit down to write this fic. So many questions. Like, nobody wants to farm, right? Farming fuckin' sucks. It's thankless, back-breaking work. For the record, I quite enjoy gardening - gardening is different. Farming is like, you have to live off what you grow. It's so goddamn stressful, you would not believe.

So. Nobody wants to farm.

Farming sims, tho...

In Fallout 4, we have a settlement system. Vanilla game, maxed out Charisma, you have 23 settlements with up to 20 settlers each. So 460 people - call that the realistic average, because Starlight could almost certainly fit more, and Hangman's would be lucky to squeeze in 10.

Let's say Ozzie does his 'dirt' thing at every settlement capable of growing crops (not all of them can), thus increasing topsoil yield to something closer to a pre-war farm. Let's also assume the farmers are using best practices: e.g. not tilling the soil (ugh), cycling crops, composting waste to remove pathogens. And let's assume constant rainfall (unlikely), good weather (very unlikely), and that all food stored does not spoil (very, very unlikely).

What we need to do is work out a system of government for our settlements that will allow everyone to eat and be comfortable.

So: Capitalism is off the table. Bye, caps!

It's impossible to talk about farming without bringing up the fact that most modern farmers are in debt. This is not a country-specific issue: Silver Spoon, by Hiromu Arakawa - a manga about Japanese farming practices - bears striking similarity to my personal experiences to partially growing up on an Australian farm, and from hearing stories of family members who were farmers. Everyone's in debt, everyone's looking for technological advancements to make the work less back-breaking. The more environmentally sustainable you are, generally, the more time and money you're putting into your farm. Even farms that aim more to be financially stable, however, are never exactly millionaires.

The old joke goes: a farmer wins the lotto: a billion dollars. The reporter asks them, What are you going to do with all the money? And the farmer says, Keep farming until it's all gone.

If the purpose of a system is what it does, Capitalism is not designed with 'feeding people' as a goal.

Maybe I'm phrasing that wrong, but you get the idea, right? It's broken.

So Capitalism isn't going to save us: big surprise. What are our other options?

The first thing I wanted to research was Native American hierachies and social structure. It's the system that worked in America long before it was called that - so it was sustainable, right? But oh my god, the resources were abysmal, and what I did find was depressing. So many tribes just... gone. So much history wiped out. I assume it's partially due to the spoken nature of Native American culture - no physical records - but on so many occasions, white people just fully fucked them over because they could.

Anyway. What I could find pointed to a tribal structure based around hunting.

There's an ongoing debate in Australian academia as to whether Aboriginal peoples 'farmed' and shaped the land. 'Dark Emu' is the book to read if you're interested in learning more. It's a relevant debate, for some people, because 'farming' is a culturally white practice, one that isn't always environmentally sustainable - but it's one that white people culturally consider a mark of 'civilisation'. So if white people learn Aboriginal Australians were also farmers, their perspective on them becomes more positive. But the culture's not about that, it's about living in harmony with your environment, giving back to it, taking care of it so it will take care of you.

Now, I'm a white person who's talked to a few people, and read a few books. I'm still looking from a white perspective. I basically know just enough to know that I don't know anything. Sovereignity was never ceded. This is stolen land.

But we're here for a Fallout 4 fanfic, so let's get back to that. The thing that Aboriginal Australians and Native Americans had in common, culturally, is that they were usually nomadic. They never stayed too long in one place, because that would stretch the resources in that place too thin.

Exactly the opposite of what we're dealing with for the 'settlement system'; in our fanfic. The game seems to be mimicking the Wild West, a bit: frontier farms, each run more or less by one family, trading and selling crops to buy things they can't make for themselves. For some reason, though, looking up this exact system brings up something called 'settler colonisation'.

Huh. I wonder why the most common enemies of settlements in the game are 'Raiders', a uniform gang whose members seem to attack 'settlements' randomly? Surely, in this nostalgic cultural fantasy of 'working the land', there's no real world equivalent to random groups of lawless, warlike people, who attack the good, honest, hardworking folk just trying to make a living...

Oh America, how we despise you.

If you don't know what I'm talking about here, maybe that's okay. It's just speculation. At the end of the day, we are dealing with a fictional world... and thus, the most interesting thing to say is what hasn't already been said.

We're limited. I don't have all the information to depict an accurate cultural return to Native American practices, as much as I'd like to - I'm half the world away from any useful in-person resources, and the stuff online is elementary at best. At the same time, though, I don't want to re-hash the tiring, hollow shell that is the frontier system, even if that's what we have the most experience with. In-universe, we don't have the resources to address the 'Raider' issue with any degree of nuance, and that's what we'd be doing, if we were to use the frontier system.

If it even worked, which is it's own question, really.

So what are we after? An environmentally sustainable culture that will allow everyone to eat and be comfortable, based around sedentary areas of farmland, essentially operating in a constant warzone.

Okay, okay. Christ on a cross.

The walls, then, become invaluable. Walls aren't the only way to provide security, but given the specific dangers of the Commonwealth - and the specific resources of the average resident - they're the most effective. We can see this in Diamond City, which is the closest to 'pre-war' civilisation in the Commonwealth, and is able to exist where it does because of the walls around it.

So: walls. Culturally, we're in the Neolithic stage.

Okay - okay. What if we were to use 'human limits' in order to farm sustainably? Like, nobody likes farming, right? So you don't want to do very much of it. Is there some kind of system that uses laziness to ensure the land is never over-farmed...?

Fuck, farmers must want to pack it in like ten times a day, and call quits on civilisation as a whole.

The in-fiction answer is robots. The problem is - they're not sustainable. Machines break down. Culture, theoretically, continues. Unless it's a culture based around robot labour, including the care and maintenance of them... but even then, it's just reinventing the slave class. And slaves are cheaper than robots, in the wasteland. We absolutely can't base our fictional culture around the assumption that robots will do all the dirty jobs, because that implies a caste who exists to do those jobs.

Hence why the mini-handies aren't sentient, in this fic - they are automated machines, reliant on directions and programming to function. They are closer to tools than people. On a meta level, they exist to explain the apparent level of construction possible at the settlements.

But we're still stuck with the problem: how do we farm sustainably when limited to a single area, in-game?

Time to do a bit of scary napkin maths.

The recommended adult daily intake in Australia is 8700kj. We're gonna use that as a guideline - some people will eat more, some less. Call it an average. Okay, so that's daily. We have in our system, a theoretical maximum of 460 people. Some of those are robots, who do not need to eat, but we're counting them anyway because they still cost resources and energy to maintain, and we can say that the allotted food to them is instead being traded for petrol or such.

8700 x 460 = 4002000 kj worth of food, daily, to ensure everyone is comfortably fed. Not scary yet. Let's keep going.

Let's go over the basic crops in Fallout 4 to see what we're working with to hit that goal. Carrots (Carrot), Corn (Corn), Gourd (Pumpkins), Melon (Melon), Mutfruit (???), Razorgrain (Millet/Wheat), Tarberry (Cranberry), Tato (Potato/Tomato).

The game treats all of these as though they're constantly generating resources: in real life, food takes time to grow, and usually is only available at certain times of year, or in certain climates. Sometimes you grow too much of one thing, and way less of another. E.g., our chilli plant is constantly pumping out the chillis, and our sweet potatoes are enormous, but the sad little strawberry plant can't figure out how to make strawberries bigger than peas. To say nothing of how many get eaten by insects and birds.

But let's say that everything grows perfectly. Let's work out the numbers.

It is helpful to remember that I am insane.

Okay, so now we work out how many kj per each of those above mentioned, on average. Ideally we'd work out nutrients, too. Looks like the easist way to do this is by 100g servings, since that's what the data exists for, and then by seeing how many grams the average plant can produce per harvest.

Fuck me, I am glad I had Ozzie study at an agricultural college to explain how the fuck they know all this. Farming is so hard! The 'dumb farmer' stereotype is so so wrong, oh my god.

Average grams per square metre of planted crop / per year.

Okay, now buckle up: here's where the maths gets scary.

There are 365 days in a year. Which means that the yearly energy goal we need to hit for 460 people, 8700kj per person, daily, is 1460730000 kj total.

Some of that absolutely needs to come from livestock and hunting. It just can't happen otherwise.

Let's take the fact that they live in a constant warzone... and use it to our advantage, since we're basically making up a culture, here. So the laziest way to hunt is to set traps, right? If that becomes a constant practice - teaching kids to set traps, as well as spot and avoid them - that handles both hunting and settlement defence.

In addition, we have dedicated 'sharpshooters' who when not needed for war are just hunters, who go out into the woods every day to check the traps, try to bag game, and come home.

Can say right now though: game meat fuckin' sucks compared to modern commercial meat. Best is boar, maybe unsurprisingly, but birds and fish are sometimes all right too. Don't talk to me about rabbit. Fuckin yuck, bro.

The existence of 'Squirrel Bits' and 'Iguana Soup' does imply that those are staple enough creatures to be hunted regularly. So we know it's possible. Culturally, it's just a matter of backing it up.

Now comes the other maths. Animals like Radstags and Molerats won't come nearby if there's nothing to eat. This is why giving back to the environment becomes so important - you need to make a place that wild animals can live in, so that you can eat the animals. Stewardship. There's a lot of Radstag in the hills up behind Sanctuary and Abernathy, but how much is there really? In addition, they're skittish as hell. You'd have to go on a long-range hunting trip to get anything worth returning with, and how are you going to store and carry that for the journey back? To say nothing of competing predators, like Yao Guai, mongrels, Death Claws, and Radscorpions.

Nevertheless, the existence of such predators implies they do have enough to eat, somehow. Maybe that's humans, sometimes... but still. It's encouraging.

So. Deer. It's the clear Radstag equivalent, and we have the numbers... 437kj per 100g, most of that being protein.

Let's say the deer all suck, and ultimately the only edible stuff is about 50kg worth of meat. That immediately becomes so much food. Holy shit.

Okay... hm. We can work with this though, maybe.

So let's see. If we tried to hit our target number on a vegetarian diet (and planting an equal amount of each crop to simulate getting a good spread of nutrients)... wow, we've gone beyond the kind of maths I can actually do without a piece of paper.

We can't even scale it down, though, because harvest for plants is usually only around once a year. It's staggered, sure, but that's the point I'm trying to figure out - how much storage do you actually need, if you're trying to grow enough food to see everybody through?

The old adage goes: you only learn what you test for. We haven't even touched nutrients, and a balanced diet. I hadn't wanted to - but frankly, it's impossible to avoid. We're just gonna use basic food groups though because I don't want to go completely mad.

PAUSE. I just figured out the upper limit on cranberries. Since we know they're all in the Slog, and we know the Slog has limited space, we can just use the dimensions of the pool where they're grown to work out how many cranberries per year they do. Gonna say it looks like a 6m by 4m pool, in-game. So 24 square metres. So max upper limit of 463680 kj per year.

Great! Only 1459802640 kj to go! Let's do it.

Carbohydrates

Sugars

Fats

Protein

Salt/sodium and potassium

Vitamins and minerals (micronutrients)

Let's take a step back and look at this from an environmental perspective. The more hunting and farming we're doing, the greater the impact on surroundings. So first we need to know how this culture benefits the environment.

Thus, okay... we can do the maths on that.

I... yeah, it's straight up not possible.

It is helpful to remember that I am insane, though. So I am going to make it work.

Somehow.

The problem is space. There is not enough room, in the canon settlements, to grow the amount of food needed. That said, industrial farming isn't the solution either: those vast fields of wheat you see in movies, or the cornfields in the middle of America, those are horrific monocultures, and they're incredibly bad for the ecosystem.

Like fuckin' hell, what do we even do? Where do we even start?

Had a rant to my partner about it. Basically... this was all we could think of.

Like, god. All this is just bandaid solutions.

Okay. I'm gonna do a bunch more maths to work out how many kj per person per year. We're having to start over a little bit, but that's fine. Then I'll get the exact amount of crop space each person needs for that amount of energy. And then we'll know exactly how much room we need for the stuff we need to grow, with tileable calculations. God. What's even the point, you know?

Okay. I'm gonna go for a walk, first. And then maybe I'm gonna do that.

Okay. Back. New goals.