The Fallout timeline has a quirk worth knowing before anything else: the earliest entry in the series is Fallout 76, released in 2018, and the latest is the TV series, which premiered in 2024. Play in release order and you spend the whole time jumping back and forth across two centuries.
This is every fixed point from 1945 to 2296, with each entry placed in the year it happens. What separates it from most timeline round-ups is the section near the end: where the official sources contradict each other, we lay out each number and where it came from, instead of picking whichever answer looks tidiest and putting it in the table.
The full timeline. Amber markers are entries with no fixed date, or with sources that disagree
The three questions people ask most, answered up front: the show is set in 2296, 219 years after the Great War — nine years after Fallout 4 and fifteen after New Vegas, which makes it the furthest point the series has reached. Season 1 opens in the ruins of Los Angeles; Season 2 moves into the Mojave. And yes, it is canon: Todd Howard’s words to Vanity Fair were “we view what’s happening in the show as canon.” That is the position it holds on the timeline below.
The divergence: Fallout is not our world with one thing changed
The usual assumption is that Fallout works like a standard alternate history — somebody made a different decision in some particular year, and everything follows from there. Approach it that way and the obvious question is which year.
There is no such year. Neither Interplay nor Bethesda ever named one.
What does exist is one hard constraint, and it comes from the history of technology. The transistor was built at Bell Labs in 1947. In Fallout, the transistor does not arrive until 2067 — barely a decade before the bombs. That gap of a hundred and twenty years is the technological floor the entire setting is built on.
Without the semiconductor revolution, electronics never miniaturized, and vacuum tubes got pushed as far as they could go. That is why a terminal in 2077 is monochrome green text on a machine the size of a wall, in a world that has already built power armor and fusion cells. The two things look contradictory. They are not — they are opposite ends of the same technology, taken to its limit.
Co-creator Leonard Boyarsky put it in more fundamental terms: Fallout is not a world without transistors, it is the future as the 1950s imagined it. What diverged was not an event but the whole set of assumptions about where the future was heading. Atomic power as a household battery. Round-headed robots serving coffee. A private fallout shelter behind the suburban house. None of this is retro decoration — people genuinely expected it. Fallout took those expectations, built them for real, and then dropped the bombs on them.
Get that distinction straight and a lot of the other questions stop needing answers.
Pre-war: from dry wells to two hours
April 2052 The Resource Wars begin. European forces move into the Middle East over its oil reserves. Prices spiral, smaller nations go bankrupt, and the United Nations collapses three months after the war starts.
2054 The United States launches Project Safehouse with the Vault-Tec Corporation. Construction begins late that year. The contract is for 122 Vaults. Only 17 of them are the controls the advertising described; the other 105 each run an experiment on the people inside — a subject we have covered Vault by Vault in a separate piece. Several individual Vaults have their own write-ups: Vault 76 (one of the 17 controls), Vault 81 (the only experiment shut down from the inside), and Vault 4 and Vault 33 from the show.
Winter 2066 China invades Alaska and the Anchorage Front Line takes shape. That war is still being fought on the day the bombs fall.
October 23, 2077 The Great War. The nuclear exchange lasts roughly two hours. It is also the day the door of Vault 111 closed on people who would not open their eyes again until 2287.
That last number deserves a pause. Everything in the series — every stretch of wasteland, every mutated species, two centuries of political rebuilding and collapse — comes out of an event shorter than a morning. Who fired first has never been confirmed. In-game sources contradict each other, and that blank is deliberate.
Post-war: when each entry takes place
| Entry | Year | After the war | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fallout 76 | 2102 | 25 years | Appalachia (West Virginia) |
| Fallout | 2161 | 84 years | Southern California |
| Fallout 2 | 2241 | 164 years | Northern California |
| Fallout 3 | 2277 | 200 years | Capital Wasteland (Washington, D.C.) |
| Fallout: New Vegas | 2281 | 204 years | The Mojave |
| Fallout 4 | 2287 | 210 years | The Commonwealth (Boston) |
| TV series, Seasons 1 and 2 | 2296 | 219 years | Los Angeles, then east toward New Vegas |
The Commonwealth, 210 years on. Two centuries later the skyline is still the one that came down in 2077
Two things people commonly get wrong:
Earliest does not mean start here. Fallout 76 is the only entry where the wasteland has almost no established factions yet, because only 25 years have passed and most of the organizations the other games assume you know do not exist. That makes it a clean starting point for a timeline and a poor one for a player — there is nothing to measure anything against.
Season 2 is not set years after Season 1. Both seasons take place in 2296, and Season 2 opens days after Season 1 ends, with the characters continuing from exactly where they stopped.
Three places where the official sources disagree
These three come up in any serious reading of the timeline, and most round-ups skip all of them.
1. What year Shady Sands was destroyed
This is the biggest open dispute in the setting right now, and it started with a chalkboard — the one in the Vault 4 classroom.
The Vault 4 classroom in Season 1. A model of Shady Sands on the left, the town’s history on the board at the right
The board is headed Our history: the rise and fall of Shady Sands, and under it runs a full chronology:
Four close-ups of the same board. 2142 founded · 2189 the NCR is created · 2198 it becomes the capital · 2241 the NCR becomes the largest power in California — and at the far right, 2277 beside a mushroom cloud
The problem is that last box: the fall of Shady Sands, 2277, with a mushroom cloud drawn next to it. Fallout: New Vegas takes place in 2281, and in that game the New California Republic is not only intact but expanding east.
Three different years have been attached to this one box, each from a different kind of source:
2277 — the chalkboard as aired. This is the only one of the three that actually appears inside the fiction, which puts it at the top of the evidence hierarchy.
2283 — derived from the script. Maximus is 19 in 2296, and six years old in the flashback to the destruction of Shady Sands. That is a gap of thirteen years.
2291 — a version that never aired. The World of Fallout, a promotional site for Season 2, published a behind-the-scenes photo of the same classroom in which the final box reads 2291, labelled The Fall. The date was clearly still moving during production.
Bethesda’s own position comes from Todd Howard, speaking to IGN: the bombs fall on Shady Sands after the events of New Vegas. He was explicit that everything in the previous games, New Vegas included, happened.
Put all of that together and there is exactly one reading that accommodates every primary source: treat the fall and the bombing as two separate events. 2277 is a political fall — the point where the NCR’s decline begins and Shady Sands stops being the centre of it. The nuke comes later, sometime after 2281.
That reading is a reconciliation, not a confirmed chronology. What Bethesda has confirmed is the order of events, not what the number 2277 specifically refers to. So on our chart this entry is marked as disputed rather than given a year.
2. Whether the Fallout Bible counts as canon
The Fallout Bible is a set of design notes Chris Avellone compiled at Interplay around 2002. A large share of the timeline detail circulating online traces back to that document.
Two things have to be said about it. It never held any formal canon status — it was published as supplementary material. And its author has since said publicly that it should not be treated as canon.
So the rule here is: anything that appears only in the Fallout Bible, with no in-game text behind it, stays out of the main chart. Where it has to be mentioned, the sentence says so. A timeline that quietly mixes Fallout Bible entries in with in-game sources is lowering its own reliability without telling you.
3. Which New Vegas ending is canon
New Vegas has four possible outcomes for the Mojave — the NCR, Caesar’s Legion, Mr. House, or an independent Vegas (where each of the four came from is covered in the guide to Fallout’s factions). None has ever been designated canon.
Season 2 takes the story into the Mojave, which in principle forces the question. As of now, Bethesda has issued no statement of any kind declaring one ending canonical.
Which means every article you find asserting that the canon ending is X is drawing a conclusion on Bethesda’s behalf. It may turn out to be right. It is not a citation.
Why the spin-offs are not on the chart
Fallout Tactics has a year of its own, 2197, but its place in the canon was never clearly defined — some of its material has been carried forward by later entries, some of its plot has never been acknowledged. Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, from 2004, sits in the same grey zone.
The rule applied here is simple: an entry goes on the chart when both its year and its canon status are uncontested. Failing that test is not a verdict on the game. It just makes it unsuitable for a chart people will use as a reference.
One related note: the 2102 listed for Fallout 76 is where the main story starts. Its expansions move forward year by year from there, so a later date seen in game is expansion content, not a change to the base timeline.
Common questions
Should I play in chronological order?
Probably not. Every entry stands on its own narratively, and chronological order means opening with Fallout 76, the least welcoming entry in the series for a newcomer. The more common advice is to start with Fallout 3 or Fallout 4, get used to the world, and go back to the first two afterwards.
Do I need to play the games before watching the show?
No. The series was built for viewers with no prior exposure. Season 1 follows a character who has just left a Vault, and everything you need is established on screen. Playing the games lets you catch the references; it is not what makes the plot legible.
Is the Fallout show canon? Does it make New Vegas non-canon?
The show is canon. So is New Vegas. Both hold at once, both are backed by official statements, and nothing forces a choice between them.
Todd Howard told Vanity Fair: “We view what’s happening in the show as canon.” When the Shady Sands question led some viewers to conclude New Vegas had been written out, Bethesda studio design director Emil Pagliarulo confirmed on social media that New Vegas remains canon. Howard’s own framing was that the bombs fall after the events of New Vegas — an ordering, not a deletion.
The firmer statement came later. Howard told the BBC that Fallout 5 will exist in a world where the stories and events of the show have happened or are happening. The show is not simply being acknowledged after the fact; it constrains a game that has not been made yet.
One distinction is worth holding onto: “the show is canon” and “every date in the show is settled” are different claims. The first is official and explicit. The second is not — see the Shady Sands section above.
Who fired first in the Great War?
Never confirmed. In-game sources give contradictory accounts, and the gap is deliberate. Any answer stated with confidence is not coming from official material.
Why is the wasteland still ruined after two hundred years?
The games do answer this: it is not that nothing was rebuilt, it is that things were rebuilt repeatedly and kept collapsing. The New California Republic got further than any other attempt — a congress, a currency, a standing army, territory across several states — and by the time of the series it is gone. The wasteland’s normal state is not stagnation. It is repetition.
How the sources are ranked here
Every claim above falls into one of four tiers, and the article flags which one it is coming from whenever it matters.
Tier 1: text and imagery that actually appears in a game or episode. Highest priority. The chalkboard belongs here.
Tier 2: public statements from Bethesda and the creators. Todd Howard on Shady Sands, Leonard Boyarsky on the transistor. This tier can explain tier 1, and where the two conflict, this article writes the conflict down rather than resolving it silently.
Tier 3: the Fallout Bible and other early design notes. Not used as a basis for the chart.
Tier 4: wiki compilations, fan inference, second-hand retellings. Used as leads only, never as evidence.
Sources
In-game text and environments. Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 4, Fallout 76; the television series, Seasons 1 and 2, including the Vault 4 classroom chalkboard and the Shady Sands material.
Official statements. Todd Howard to Vanity Fair on the show being canon; Todd Howard to IGN on the ordering of Shady Sands and New Vegas; Todd Howard to the BBC on Fallout 5 existing in a world where the events of the show have happened or are happening; Bethesda studio design director Emil Pagliarulo confirming on social media that New Vegas remains canon; Leonard Boyarsky on the transistor and the 1950s vision of the future; behind-the-scenes material published on The World of Fallout, the Season 2 promotional site. The three interviews are press pieces, identified here by outlet and subject; no link is attached.
Other. Chris Avellone, the Fallout Bible (2002), used as a lead only and not as evidence.
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