At the beginning of the game, you pass ladies in dresses, dudes in shirts & slacks, and people in various uniforms on your way to the vault entrance. When you wake up 200+ years later, you find skeletons in those exact same vault suits, military uniforms, shirts, dresses, etc. In many other places, you find more remains that are nothing but bones and clothes.

This establishes that clothing (in this universe, anyway) can somehow survive over 20 decades of exposure to sun, wind, rain, radiation, and animals.

So what is up with all the plain old skeleton-ass skeletons? Are we to assume that there's some significant percentage of people in the Commonwealth that were running around butt naked (or were naked at their time of death at least)?

I thought about the possible explanation of looters and scavengers swiping clothes off of the bodies, but I've run into several cases of bare skeletons by themselves in rooms locked from the inside. What's up with that?!

*note: This isn't a serious concern, just something I thought was kind of funny

Maybe the bare locked-up skeletons were wearing clothing made out of degradable materials.

I mean, if you were locked in a room and the world was going to end, wouldn't you get naked? No? I was joking...

And maybe moths ate the leftover clothes.

Maybe they panicked and ate their own pants.

Atom bombs drop at the worst times. Talk about coitus interruptus!

Those skeletons were there before the bombs dropped because it was halloween

Btw does anyone else have the naked dead raider respawning at the bridge near santuary?

What are you talking about? I've been tirelessly data mining the games files since release to find the answer to this specific phenomenon. Are you saying I've been wasting all this time?

I don't have the knowledge or skills to do that sort of thing so I shouldn't seriously concern myself with the investigation. But you should keep on fighting the good fight and report back if you discover anything!

Seems plausible that scavengers (read: People) stole the clothes that were mostly intact for various purposes. That includes bedding, bandages, clothing for themselves, patching clothing, making crude shelters or hobo bags, there's a hundred things you can do with an old shirt if you're desperate. Even strangle someone to death.

I totally understand. You also have to accept some canned food and Sugar Bombs lasted 200+ years, and many other items. As well as seemingly stabbing yourself in the heart with a Stimpack will cure gross trauma to your body.

It's part of the game, and it is worth a laugh just the same.

I still choose to believe that canonically, roughly (complete guess) 1 in 4 people in the Commonwealth were ardent nudists.

I imagine at least some of those clothed skeletons died somewhere in the 200 years between the bombs falling and the present.

Regarding the ones in the vault, maybe radroaches like meat, but not polyester or bones.

Also, nothing wrong with nudists if you ask me. I'm probably naked more often than not when I'm in my home with the doors locked.

Isn't like half of that game stealing clothes off dead people?

Yes and it pisses me the hell off that it respawns there even when I move it to a place far away. WHY WON'T YOU LEAVE

@bbalpert: Yo I think I'm onto something.

What bothers me more is when I enter a locked up room or area that, presumably, wasn't touched since the bombs were dropped and I find some raider armor, post-apocalyptic drug, or taped together pistol. Maybe some weary wanderer entered those areas, abandoned their shit, locked up, and moved on? I don't know. They are hit and miss with their environmental storytelling.

It's frustrating because sometimes I'll run into a small area that has this rich history decipherable only by the evidence left behind, then the next room over is a computer locked safe full of caps. Who the fuck was locking up bottle caps in a safe before they were a currency?

They want you to think it was left there...what you didn't know is that it was LEFT FOR YOU ALL ALONG.

#CAPILLUMINATI #FollowTheMoney

FALLOUT IV has come to.

*People knew they were living under a very real threat of nuclear apocalypse so those with the money invested in radiation/decay proof clothing, these were also the people who were probably going to get into vaults. In real life people were spared from nuclear blasts by wearing lots of clothing. So all the nude skeletons are the literally poor saps who wasted away without any decency. It's basically Bethesda's commentary on the plight of the worker under an entitled class system.

The entire game is so full of retarded logical inconsistencies and narrative failures that by all means some missing clothes is like the least of it's asinine world building faux pas. I know you aren't being serious, but felt it worth mentioning.

Bethesda has taken some tiny steps of logic from the truly amazing brain aneurysm that was F3 but they still have about a mile to run before you can walk around in their version of the Fallout universe and say to yourself "oh that makes sense" at least more then half the time.