Bottle cap

Bottle caps, also referred to as caps for short, are the standard currency in Fallout, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel and Fallout Shelter. Fallout 2 is an exception, with bottle caps being an archaic currency supplanted by the NCR minted dollar, while Fallout Tactics uses Brotherhood scrip and ring pulls.

Background
In New California, the relative scarcity of bottle caps made them a perfect currency for Hub merchants to adopt in the post-nuclear world. The adoption took place rapidly, as within ten years of Hub's founding in 2093, caps became the standard currency of the wasteland. The widespread use by Hub merchants leading to the nickname Hub bucks, Hubbucks, bucks, Hubscript, or just script.

The Hub merchants supported bottle caps because of two factors: First, the technology to manufacture them and paint their surfaces had been mostly lost in the Great War, which limited any counterfeiting efforts: The paint used, machining, and metal type all have to be very specific in order for a bottle cap to be genuine. Second, there is a limited number of bottle caps, which preserves their value against inflation to some degree. Finally, the Hub merchants in New California could support it as a common unit of exchange by backing it with water.

For similar reasons the East Coast merchants also recognize bottle caps as a currency. Their earliest recorded use by survivors originates in Appalachia as of 2096. An advertising campaign the Nuka-Cola Corporation was testing out allowed the exchange of bottle caps with robotic vendors at the Whitespring Resort due to the release of Nuka-Cola Quantum.

While caps were the de facto standard currency in the West, the rise of the New California Republic (NCR) led to the widespread adoption of dollars, backed by gold reserves, which displaced the water-backed caps.  However, during the Brotherhood War the Republic's gold reserves out in the frontier were destroyed by Brotherhood raids to the point where the NCR was forced to stop minting new gold coins so as to put an end to the raids completely. An act that indirectly resulted in Republic paper money no longer being properly backed with gold. NCR citizens panicked and rushed to reclaim the listed face value of currency from NCR's remaining gold reserves. Since the NCR was unable to realize these withdrawals, particularly towards the frontier, faith in their currency considerably dropped. In order to contain the financial fallout that would be caused by the inevitable inflation to come, the NCR government abandoned the gold standard and established fiat currency, not payable in specie. Since then many wastelanders lost faith in it as a medium of worth, both as a result of it not being backed by anything but the government's word and the inevitable inflation. In response to the loss of faith, merchant consortiums of the Hub established their own currency, the veritable bottle cap, backing it with water (exchanging a standardized measure of water for caps).

It was not a random occurrence: The merchants conspired to reintroduce the bottle cap as a currency, out of frustration at NCR's ineptitude in handling the currency crisis. Furthermore, since Hub bridges the NCR core region with the Mojave and lands beyond, the cap could bridge the gap between NCR and Legion territories by providing a neutral form of money. In the time leading up to the introduction the merchants laid the foundations for bottle caps as a currency, establishing control of or destroying facilities that could fashion new bottle caps and seizing excessively large caches of old bottle caps (smaller ones in private hands were left alone, as their owners would readily embrace the returning bottle cap).

To protect their monopoly on the currency, Republic merchant companies, particularly the Crimson Caravan Company, aggressively sought to control all bottle cap production and ensure that no one can mass produce them and inflate the currency. Controlling bottle cap presses also allows them to replace worn out and damaged bottle caps, keeping the pool of currency stable. Due to the challenges of the bottle cap production process, small scale counterfeiting is ignored, as it's impossible to manufacture enough caps by hand to truly upset the balance.

Bottle caps, NCR dollars and Legion currency are all considered legal tender by the various caravan companies and on the New Vegas Strip. Mojave merchants also accept nonstandard variants, such as Sunset Sarsaparilla bottle caps.

Nuka-Cola bottle cap


Standard Nuka-Cola bottle caps featuring 21 crimps and ridges, used as the basic form of currency throughout many of the American wastes. Their value differs throughout the games.

Counterfeit Nuka-Cola bottle cap


Physically they appear identical to standard Nuka-Cola bottle caps and are presumably intended to be used for trading in place of actual bottle caps. They are produced by unknown persons, have no trade value, and cannot be used for any monetary purpose.

Sunset Sarsaparilla bottle cap


This nonstandard variant, taken off Sunset Sarsaparilla bottles, is used in the Mojave Wasteland alongside Nuka-Cola caps.

Sunset Sarsaparilla star bottle cap


A rare variant of the Sunset Sarsaparilla bottle cap, featuring a blue star on the underside of the cap. These can be traded in to Festus at the Sunset Sarsaparilla headquarters for a reward.

Alcohol bottle cap
In the Commonwealth, Nuka-Cola bottle caps aren't the only type accepted by merchants. Certain alcoholic beverages, like beer, which use crimp caps similar to Nuka-Cola, are also used.

Vim bottle cap
This nonstandard variant, taken off Vim bottles, is used on The Island alongside Nuka-Cola caps.

Bawls bottle cap
Bawls is a real-world energy drink with a guarana flavor that replaced Nuka-Cola as the main post-nuclear soft drink of choice in Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. This special type of bottle cap is valued as 100 times that of a Nuka-Cola bottle cap.

Behind the scenes

 * Developer quotes