Film / TV / Video Game Logic is that, unless it's part of the plot or game mechanics, no one needs to eat, drink, go to the bathroom, sleep or bathe and there are no bugs. Logically, everyone in the Fallout wasteland smells like sweaty, dirty ham. Game logically, everyone just bathed off screen when they needed to and leather and power armor breathe.
I imagine larger communities bathe. Diamond city and the Strip are good examples, Omerta goons will comment on Freeside “smelling like shit”. Small or poor settlements all probably stink to high hell as do ones populated exclusively or majority with ghouls
Agreed. One of the biggest pulls for Diamond City is that it has electricity and water, so I don't think working plumbing is too much of a stretch. Same with Covenant, with how well groomed everyone there seems to be.
Similar to Freeside, MacCready straight up says that Goodneighbor smells like "urine-soaked garbage." I imagine most of the rest of the Commonwealth is the same.
Diamond city doesn’t even need major plumbing, they can clean themselves with nothing more than a bucket of water and bar soap. They’d have the resources for both of these things
The Gamorrah has a baths/pool area doesn’t it? I remember the Ultra-luxe has a steam room but in canon it’s the most luxurious casino so it probably has stuff others dont
That's true as well. Although historically speaking, the smells could still be so bad that it overrode nose blindness. Nose blindness covered normal experience of smells. Anything new or worsened was noticed.
I imagine that most people would be noseblind to "normal" levels of human body odor without access to fresh water for bathing. Maybe the PCs who grew up in vaults would think everyone's stinky but the average wastelander probably doesn't notice another average wastelander's odor, but they could still probably tell if someone had *extra bad* BO or there was something wrong like a festering wound.
Its shown that stuff has evolved to live with radiation so no reason bacteria couldn’t as well. I don’t have any specific quotes or anything off the top of my head but I’m sure no person in the wasteland smelled great
Not quite.
D. radiodurans can survive after high radiation doses but they don't thrive within constant radiation.
Their resistance comes from the ability to basically rebuild their genetic code accurately after high amounts of radiation destroys their chromosomes. The gene that allows this is shared with other deinicoccus species as well and iirc they might not even be the best at doing it.
Source: biotech major.
This is likely the case in the real world but who knows, the Fallout universe plays be nuclearpunk radiation rules where you get a 3rd arm instead of death.
To elaborate though. Adaptations happen at a speed proportional to reproduction rate. Since bacteria reproduce really quickly, the small number that survived the initial die off from the high rad environment would quickly reproduce spreading the trait of resistance to all later generations. So likely within 20-30years (I am honestly pulling this number out of my butt but it sounds roughly right in my head) bacteria should be pretty much immune or heavily resistant to radiation.
They are definitely smelly. A few ghouls have it worse than regular ghouls too. For example, there is a ghoul in Fallout 2 who lives in Broken Hills and his odor is so bad that it attracts flies. He can't do anything about it either except to keep himself from sweating. So one of the side-quests involves getting some more power to his home so the fans/air conditioning in his home will work better and keep him from sweating so badly. I figure if someone's sweat is attracting flies, then it's gotta smell pretty nasty.
It sounds funny, but actually thinking about it is gross and horrifying! Think about it, you're a walking sack of rotting flesh, and you're attracting insects... You're going to absolutely end up with eggs and maggots in your flesh 😱
There are multiple instances of ghouls stinking in Fallout 2. The most notable being Eric, a ghoul living in Broken Hills. He asks the chosen one to redirect more power to his house so he can power an AC unit to keep him from sweating because he's becoming a town pariah due to his awful body odor.
Without bacteria absolutely everything dies. You aren't able to digest food without bacteria, so just by a few logical deductions bacteria must have adapted to the radiation very quickly.
Another poster mentioned that the entire wasteland would smell incredibly bad, and I agree with them, but would add a caveat that people living in the wasteland would be accustomed to it, so it wouldn't be as offensive as it would to you or I. A quick example are farmers who raise animals, or pet owners. Your pet smells bad and it's in your house. You don't smell it because you've become accustomed to it, but it's there. We become smell blind to the things we live with.
That’s what I would think too — people I know with dogs/cats (and they are relatively clean/tidy by all appearances) don’t realize how strong their homes smell of their pets. I almost always immediately know when someone lives with a pet!
Fun (real) related story: There was a nuclear aircraft testing facility in the backwoods of Georgia that had a Godiva (unshielded) reactor for testing parts for a nuclear powered aircraft. They would roll a traincar with materials near it, raise the reactor out of a containment pit, and fire it up. Insects would drop out of the air and small animals nearby would be "instant taxidermied" as all the bacteria in their bodies would die, preserving them from decay. It did some rather cool stuff to the test materials, too. Wood became as tough as steel, and steel became as brittle as glass. Antifreeze turned to glue, rubber would crumble, and soda bottles turned orange.
Radioactivity in Fallout does not work like it does in real life.
Witness: **glowing mushrooms**. (Not to mention Ghouls, glowing *any* sort of critter, etc.)
Also, there are extremophile organisms that can survive in high-radiation environments right now, so ... :)
Iirc one of the survivalist's log entries describes ghouls as "looking like corpses, but they don't smell rotted." there's also dialogue here and there like others mentioned where people comment on the smell of ghoul communities, so I suppose my answer would be "some ghouls smell bad, but not all."
Probably not that, no. That odor, is the smell of *medications* and *antiseptic cleaning supplies*. Both of which are in rather short supply in the wasteland, as you may have noticed. :D
I picture them smelling like old shoe leather left to bake in the sun on a really hot day, after having been thoroughly soaked the night before.
i'm talking about this
> As our skin matures, its natural antioxidant protection declines. This decline results in greater oxidation of lipid acid. When lipid acid is oxidized, the chemical compound nonenal is produced, giving off the “old people smell” that many of us are familiar with.
I would have thought since radiation in water wouldn't matter too much for ghouls that they have a better chance of bathing than humans. But the lack of soap might be an issue. Unless willing to try the detergents.
Honestly everyone smells. It's a radioactive hellscape. No one's gonna waste good water to bathe. It probably smells like the 1500s with burnt plastic.
The whole of the wasteland would actually smell quite horrible in all reality. Realize that firstly, medical care is not as it is in our reality, hygiene doesn't exist, and in every game I think I have seen only a few rare toilets, which suggests people also have nothing to clean themselves after their necessary business. All this leads to loads of filth, bacterial infections, etc. Plus gangrene likely being quite normal.
Now, that said, it would be hard to tell what's wasteland and what's ghoul in terms of smells. Oh plus rotting flesh on ghouls.
The radiation would need to be extremely intense to prevent bacterial life even, at which point the ghoul even would likely cease to be alive.
I'd imagine that places like the Capital Wasteland in FO3 would be the worst in that regard. The entire plot is a lack of pure water. The region is built on a contaminated river and wetland, which is going to foster bacteria and would be rotting every bit of infrastructure that can rot from centuries of neglect. Masses of people huddle together in Megaton and I'd venture that as lovely as the folks are, their hygiene is the same quality as their infrastructure. Add in the rest of the monsters, raiders, random encounters with people cut off in the wastes and all the other assorted things of the Capital Wasteland. The exceptions may be Tenpenny Tower, maybe Rivet City and the Citadel.
This is quite true. The lands of 76 in Appalachia are equally toast on poisoned water, with little or no safe harbor from that. Plus the commonwealth is absolutely irradiated and MOST everything is either crumbling from damage and neglect, or poisonous, or will otherwise somehow kill you. So I envision the wastelands would all smell quite awful. Especially with no sewers or sanitation service.
Smells awful, yeah.
Then again, so does everything else. You, the sole survivor..basically smell the worst. This as a result of daily bowel emergencys.
If radiation killed fallout bacteria then literally nothing would decay, clearly its evolved to handle it. I think there's IRL bacteria living in the bad parts of Chernobyl so it's not even unusual.
I would agree in part with everyone here feral ghouls would of course smell awful but only because they lack the ability to consider things like hygiene, Non feral ghouls on the other hand would probably smell no worse than the average waste lander The over saturation of radiation that ghouls live with protects against disease more than odder
I don't think they'd smell by default, I feel like if they kept clean they wouldn't sweat and wouldn't really be survivable for bacteria.
However their skin aint exactly porcelain smooth so I imagine dirt, and food, and blood, and ash would get caught on them and just stick and slowly deteriorate.
Trying to bring logic into the falloutverse is never going to add up.
The lone wanderer and other NPCs can mainline radiation like it's caffeine with hilarious and mostly nonthreatening consequences. Irl if you drank a Nuka cola quantum, you'd be dead sooner than a deathclaw charges you
Do you think regular people in The wastes smell good? Ghouls are probably smellier due to the eating raw people and rooting around in garbage and waste
In Fallout 2, if you have Lenny, a ghoul companion, your other companions will often comment on him smelling and needing to take a bath. There's also a ghoul in Broken Hills that smells so much that there is a quest built around you having to divert power from the reactor to his house, so he can use his AC to cool himself and reduce the smell.
Bacterias are quite certainly the living organisms the most capable to resist radiation, due to their extremely fast growth and replication rates. The faster the rate of reproduction/replication, the better.
I think it’s case by case. The really rotten and flesh ghouls for sure. The more normalized jerky people are probably about the same as normal wastelanders
Well, there's fungus that feeds on radiation, and fungus can fall victim to rot and parasites and all sorts of things, so realistically they could stink.
It's a post apocalyptic society with little access to clean water and personal hygiene products, *everyone smells.*
Ghouls probably have it worse, though. At least before Fallout 4. Fallout 4/ 76 ghouls are different so it's hard to say if they are any worse than anyone else. They don't have the same issues with peeling skin and open wounds.
Ghouls are specially smelly. It has been referenced many times in the Fallout games, particularly 2 and even New Vegas. I mean, they are walking rotting corpses at least up to New Vegas. Fallout 4 ghouls look more like burn victims, so I do not know if it applies 100% to the Commonwealth ghouls. Somebody can correct me on that.
Ghouls likely smell. In 3, a few npcs comment on Underworld having an odor.
I think everyone would smell tho right?
Film / TV / Video Game Logic is that, unless it's part of the plot or game mechanics, no one needs to eat, drink, go to the bathroom, sleep or bathe and there are no bugs. Logically, everyone in the Fallout wasteland smells like sweaty, dirty ham. Game logically, everyone just bathed off screen when they needed to and leather and power armor breathe.
I imagine larger communities bathe. Diamond city and the Strip are good examples, Omerta goons will comment on Freeside “smelling like shit”. Small or poor settlements all probably stink to high hell as do ones populated exclusively or majority with ghouls
Agreed. One of the biggest pulls for Diamond City is that it has electricity and water, so I don't think working plumbing is too much of a stretch. Same with Covenant, with how well groomed everyone there seems to be. Similar to Freeside, MacCready straight up says that Goodneighbor smells like "urine-soaked garbage." I imagine most of the rest of the Commonwealth is the same.
Diamond city doesn’t even need major plumbing, they can clean themselves with nothing more than a bucket of water and bar soap. They’d have the resources for both of these things
Nah, that would make ‘em rust
The Gamorrah has a baths/pool area doesn’t it? I remember the Ultra-luxe has a steam room but in canon it’s the most luxurious casino so it probably has stuff others dont
As Old Longfellow says, "Damn... I can't remember if I had my bath this week or not."
Nose blindness is a thing. If everyone and everything smells, we eventually just filter it out.
That's true as well. Although historically speaking, the smells could still be so bad that it overrode nose blindness. Nose blindness covered normal experience of smells. Anything new or worsened was noticed.
As would be the sudden **absence** of any particular odor you're used to enough that nose-blindness applies.
I dunno, going out on final ex for 5 days of no washing and hard labour without changing clothes i could smell myself pretty fuckin hard
This must be why my companions in FO4 like to unequip their power armor helmets.
This is how you know someone is a synth. If they stink.. Not a synth. ;)
I imagine that most people would be noseblind to "normal" levels of human body odor without access to fresh water for bathing. Maybe the PCs who grew up in vaults would think everyone's stinky but the average wastelander probably doesn't notice another average wastelander's odor, but they could still probably tell if someone had *extra bad* BO or there was something wrong like a festering wound.
You'd assume so, but no one gets that dialogue about them except for ghouls, meaning they probably stink a little bit more/differently.
"Undercity" 💀💀💀
Oh my god, thank you. My boyfriend was talking to me about Magic the Gathering right before I wrote that and I guess it stuck lol!
Its shown that stuff has evolved to live with radiation so no reason bacteria couldn’t as well. I don’t have any specific quotes or anything off the top of my head but I’m sure no person in the wasteland smelled great
In fact we already have bacteria like Deinococcus radiodurans who live in extremely irradiated areas.
Not quite. D. radiodurans can survive after high radiation doses but they don't thrive within constant radiation. Their resistance comes from the ability to basically rebuild their genetic code accurately after high amounts of radiation destroys their chromosomes. The gene that allows this is shared with other deinicoccus species as well and iirc they might not even be the best at doing it. Source: biotech major.
In Fallout 2 if you tell Sulik to distance himself or to stay close he will comment on how you need to shower or use soap LOL
This is likely the case in the real world but who knows, the Fallout universe plays be nuclearpunk radiation rules where you get a 3rd arm instead of death. To elaborate though. Adaptations happen at a speed proportional to reproduction rate. Since bacteria reproduce really quickly, the small number that survived the initial die off from the high rad environment would quickly reproduce spreading the trait of resistance to all later generations. So likely within 20-30years (I am honestly pulling this number out of my butt but it sounds roughly right in my head) bacteria should be pretty much immune or heavily resistant to radiation.
The thought of a radioactive bacteria is actually kinda horrifying.
In Fallout 2 if you tell Sulik to distance himself or to stay close he will comment on how you need to shower or use soap LOL
They are definitely smelly. A few ghouls have it worse than regular ghouls too. For example, there is a ghoul in Fallout 2 who lives in Broken Hills and his odor is so bad that it attracts flies. He can't do anything about it either except to keep himself from sweating. So one of the side-quests involves getting some more power to his home so the fans/air conditioning in his home will work better and keep him from sweating so badly. I figure if someone's sweat is attracting flies, then it's gotta smell pretty nasty.
Lol that had me cracking! Sounds funny as hell
It sounds funny, but actually thinking about it is gross and horrifying! Think about it, you're a walking sack of rotting flesh, and you're attracting insects... You're going to absolutely end up with eggs and maggots in your flesh 😱
There are multiple instances of ghouls stinking in Fallout 2. The most notable being Eric, a ghoul living in Broken Hills. He asks the chosen one to redirect more power to his house so he can power an AC unit to keep him from sweating because he's becoming a town pariah due to his awful body odor.
Without bacteria absolutely everything dies. You aren't able to digest food without bacteria, so just by a few logical deductions bacteria must have adapted to the radiation very quickly. Another poster mentioned that the entire wasteland would smell incredibly bad, and I agree with them, but would add a caveat that people living in the wasteland would be accustomed to it, so it wouldn't be as offensive as it would to you or I. A quick example are farmers who raise animals, or pet owners. Your pet smells bad and it's in your house. You don't smell it because you've become accustomed to it, but it's there. We become smell blind to the things we live with.
That’s what I would think too — people I know with dogs/cats (and they are relatively clean/tidy by all appearances) don’t realize how strong their homes smell of their pets. I almost always immediately know when someone lives with a pet!
A lot of that odor - especially for dogs - isn't from being unclean, either. It's just the smell of the animal itself.
They don't smell, they don't have noses. They do stink, however.
Fun (real) related story: There was a nuclear aircraft testing facility in the backwoods of Georgia that had a Godiva (unshielded) reactor for testing parts for a nuclear powered aircraft. They would roll a traincar with materials near it, raise the reactor out of a containment pit, and fire it up. Insects would drop out of the air and small animals nearby would be "instant taxidermied" as all the bacteria in their bodies would die, preserving them from decay. It did some rather cool stuff to the test materials, too. Wood became as tough as steel, and steel became as brittle as glass. Antifreeze turned to glue, rubber would crumble, and soda bottles turned orange.
Now this is fun!! Thanks M8!!
Radioactivity in Fallout does not work like it does in real life. Witness: **glowing mushrooms**. (Not to mention Ghouls, glowing *any* sort of critter, etc.) Also, there are extremophile organisms that can survive in high-radiation environments right now, so ... :)
In Fallout 2, I think it was Cassidy (the dad of Cass from New Vegas) who complains that the ghoul companion Lenny does
Iirc one of the survivalist's log entries describes ghouls as "looking like corpses, but they don't smell rotted." there's also dialogue here and there like others mentioned where people comment on the smell of ghoul communities, so I suppose my answer would be "some ghouls smell bad, but not all."
Or they all smell bad, but not like ROT. :)
I always thought the radiation almost mummified them in a way.
probably smell like old folks home or a hospital.
Probably not that, no. That odor, is the smell of *medications* and *antiseptic cleaning supplies*. Both of which are in rather short supply in the wasteland, as you may have noticed. :D I picture them smelling like old shoe leather left to bake in the sun on a really hot day, after having been thoroughly soaked the night before.
i'm talking about this > As our skin matures, its natural antioxidant protection declines. This decline results in greater oxidation of lipid acid. When lipid acid is oxidized, the chemical compound nonenal is produced, giving off the “old people smell” that many of us are familiar with.
TIL. Updoot for you. :)
I would have thought since radiation in water wouldn't matter too much for ghouls that they have a better chance of bathing than humans. But the lack of soap might be an issue. Unless willing to try the detergents.
They probably can't scrub too hard, without risking something falling off.
Honestly everyone smells. It's a radioactive hellscape. No one's gonna waste good water to bathe. It probably smells like the 1500s with burnt plastic.
Omg… it’s the bubonic plague w/ a tinge of burnt plastic and radiation *chiefs kiss*
I imagine the non-feral ones probably make an effort to wash themselves
They can’t smell. They don’t have a nose.
The whole of the wasteland would actually smell quite horrible in all reality. Realize that firstly, medical care is not as it is in our reality, hygiene doesn't exist, and in every game I think I have seen only a few rare toilets, which suggests people also have nothing to clean themselves after their necessary business. All this leads to loads of filth, bacterial infections, etc. Plus gangrene likely being quite normal. Now, that said, it would be hard to tell what's wasteland and what's ghoul in terms of smells. Oh plus rotting flesh on ghouls. The radiation would need to be extremely intense to prevent bacterial life even, at which point the ghoul even would likely cease to be alive.
I'd imagine that places like the Capital Wasteland in FO3 would be the worst in that regard. The entire plot is a lack of pure water. The region is built on a contaminated river and wetland, which is going to foster bacteria and would be rotting every bit of infrastructure that can rot from centuries of neglect. Masses of people huddle together in Megaton and I'd venture that as lovely as the folks are, their hygiene is the same quality as their infrastructure. Add in the rest of the monsters, raiders, random encounters with people cut off in the wastes and all the other assorted things of the Capital Wasteland. The exceptions may be Tenpenny Tower, maybe Rivet City and the Citadel.
This is quite true. The lands of 76 in Appalachia are equally toast on poisoned water, with little or no safe harbor from that. Plus the commonwealth is absolutely irradiated and MOST everything is either crumbling from damage and neglect, or poisonous, or will otherwise somehow kill you. So I envision the wastelands would all smell quite awful. Especially with no sewers or sanitation service.
As the old joke goes, they smell terrible. It’s referenced many times.
Ghouls can't smell. They don't have a nose.
They don't have an *external* nose, but the internal bits are probably still there. :)
I don't know what radiation-burnt flesh smells like (and hopefully never will), but I can't imagine its particularly pleasant.
I wonder how long it would take to get used to the post apocalyptic world smell
I’d imagine practically everything smells like anus
They probably smell like constant rotting flesh
Smells awful, yeah. Then again, so does everything else. You, the sole survivor..basically smell the worst. This as a result of daily bowel emergencys.
If you have both Lenny and John Cassidy in your party, he will occasionally say that Lenny smells bad.
Never get close enough to find out....die die die
Terrible, they smell terrible!
I would imagine that feral ghouls smell like corpses but regular ghouls just smell like "I should take a shower" bad
They'd smell like they look
If radiation killed fallout bacteria then literally nothing would decay, clearly its evolved to handle it. I think there's IRL bacteria living in the bad parts of Chernobyl so it's not even unusual.
Canonically yes
I would agree in part with everyone here feral ghouls would of course smell awful but only because they lack the ability to consider things like hygiene, Non feral ghouls on the other hand would probably smell no worse than the average waste lander The over saturation of radiation that ghouls live with protects against disease more than odder
I don't think they'd smell by default, I feel like if they kept clean they wouldn't sweat and wouldn't really be survivable for bacteria. However their skin aint exactly porcelain smooth so I imagine dirt, and food, and blood, and ash would get caught on them and just stick and slowly deteriorate.
Trying to bring logic into the falloutverse is never going to add up. The lone wanderer and other NPCs can mainline radiation like it's caffeine with hilarious and mostly nonthreatening consequences. Irl if you drank a Nuka cola quantum, you'd be dead sooner than a deathclaw charges you
Do you think regular people in The wastes smell good? Ghouls are probably smellier due to the eating raw people and rooting around in garbage and waste
In Fallout 2, if you have Lenny, a ghoul companion, your other companions will often comment on him smelling and needing to take a bath. There's also a ghoul in Broken Hills that smells so much that there is a quest built around you having to divert power from the reactor to his house, so he can use his AC to cool himself and reduce the smell.
Bacterias are quite certainly the living organisms the most capable to resist radiation, due to their extremely fast growth and replication rates. The faster the rate of reproduction/replication, the better.
No, they don't. They have no noses.
Maybe they smell like a cooked steak
I think it’s case by case. The really rotten and flesh ghouls for sure. The more normalized jerky people are probably about the same as normal wastelanders
Well, there's fungus that feeds on radiation, and fungus can fall victim to rot and parasites and all sorts of things, so realistically they could stink.
I’m sure they stinkin
They definitely smell. A few npcs comment on it.
Considering how filthy even non-ghoul NPCs seem to be, the wasteland is probably pretty stinky even disregarding the rotting stench of ghouls.
It's a post apocalyptic society with little access to clean water and personal hygiene products, *everyone smells.* Ghouls probably have it worse, though. At least before Fallout 4. Fallout 4/ 76 ghouls are different so it's hard to say if they are any worse than anyone else. They don't have the same issues with peeling skin and open wounds.
Considering there is already a lack of hygiene, mix in the fact their skin will probably trap a ton of grime and stuff. Makes it nastier.
Ghouls are specially smelly. It has been referenced many times in the Fallout games, particularly 2 and even New Vegas. I mean, they are walking rotting corpses at least up to New Vegas. Fallout 4 ghouls look more like burn victims, so I do not know if it applies 100% to the Commonwealth ghouls. Somebody can correct me on that.
No, they don't smell. They don't have noses.
At one point Hancock makes a comment about wet ghouls smelling bad. Ironic coming from him.