Perhaps the most iconic thing about the Fallout series is the Vault-Tec Vaults, the last bastions of humanity where people took shelter when the bombs first fell. Well, Tim Cain, co-creator of the first game, has a new theory on why there are so few Vaults around.

As spotted (and transcribed) by PCGamesN, Cain released a new video where he explained why he thought there weren’t many Vaults present in the Fallout games and TV show.

When an artist asked Cain how many Vaults there were and therefore how many digits the Vault suits needed to be able to show on the back, he answered with 1,000. Starting from zero and going up to 999, that meant “the original design for Vaults was that there were going to be 1,000,” Cain explained.

He added that although the America of Fallout is made up of 13 commonwealths, there are still the standard 50 states we know of today. So, “there are 50 states, 1,000 Vaults. That means every state should have about 20 Vaults. Bigger states would have more, smaller states would have less. I’m sure it’s not distributed evenly, but we’re looking at about 20 Vaults per state.”

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In California alone we’ve already seen around 10 Vaults, Cain says. Four to six from the original game and Fallout 2, and another four in the TV show. It’s a big state, we’ve explored most of it, and there are only half the number of Vaults there should be.

“Vault-Tec, they didn’t build all 1,000 Vaults. They didn’t even come close,” Cain theorised. “I know some of the Fallout games show Vaults still under construction when the bombs fell, so you could argue they were planning to do all 1,000 and they just never made it – they never got there.”

Throughout the games and the show, Vault-Tec is shown to be a corrupt, incompetent and downright evil company. It is already established that it was severely underbid when proposing to the US government that it would build the Vaults, so it makes perfect sense that it never actually managed to finish them.

Cain added that this is all just him spitballing, none of what he said is canon until Bethesda confirms it.

In other news, Xbox Game Pass is about to get more expensive and more confusing.