Fallout 4 fan raised an odd question – how many years of cleaning would it take Codsworth to turn the Wasteland from a dump into a decent place to live
The Mr. Handy robot butler series was built for suburban household chores – mowing the lawn, wiping down countertops, cooking dinner. Sending one of these things to clean up a ransacked amusement park where three raider gangs have set up camp, and the ground is soaked in blood and radioactive gunk, is basically asking it to repaint a bridge that never stops needing repainting.
That's exactly the question one Fallout 4 fan decided to tackle (guess they had some time on their hands). The thought experiment is simple enough. The Sole Survivor becomes Overboss, brings Codsworth into Nuka-World, and grants him VIP status, a ban on interfering with raider business, a guarantee of safety, and the authority to put raiders to work on cleanup duty. The only question is how many years it would take before the park stops looking like a dump.
Nuka-World itself turns out to be the least messed up spot in this scenario, since the raiders kept it at least somewhat livable. Clear away the trash, blood, corpses, and spiky barricades, leave the bus barriers alone, skip draining the lake by Fizztop Mountain, and about a month and a half of round-the-clock work should do it.
That's where the real nightmare begins. Dry Rock Gulch needs roughly two months, the syrup-soaked World of Refreshment takes three to four, and Safari Adventure isn't really about grime so much as overgrowth and an abandoned roller coaster construction site that a robot with limited carrying capacity would take forever to clear out.
The genuine multi-year projects are Galactic Zone and Kiddie Kingdom. At first glance Galactic Zone looks mostly intact, but walkways have collapsed, tunnels are blocked, and there are multi-ton chunks of ride debris that can't be moved without a cutting torch and a crane.
Kiddie Kingdom is worse: King Cola's Castle is falling apart, the funhouse has been turned into a deathtrap, and the misters have been spraying radioactive sludge over everything for years, adding mold and rot on top of the usual garbage. Even after taking down Oswald, a hazy fog still hangs over the whole park. Figure three years for each, and that's before any painting, restoration, or attempt to bring back the pre-war look.
Add it all up and you're looking at close to a decade, which raider manpower could cut in half – assuming they're willing to mop floors instead of doing what they normally do. That's where things get complicated beyond simple logistics. Codsworth hates slavery and cruelty, and the "don't interfere with ongoing operations" condition means he'd be polishing railings while prisoners get tortured nearby.
He wouldn't last long like that – he'd drop the rag and go save people before finishing out a shift. On top of that, one or two gangs would inevitably try to take him apart for scrap along the way, forcing the Overboss to follow through on that promise to wipe out whoever's responsible.
There's a certain irony in all this, since the butler spent two hundred and ten years alone in Sanctuary and still couldn't keep the place from falling apart. In the game itself, he flat out admits that polishing rust is pointless, and Piper jokes about a Mr. Handy, a feather duster, and a hundred years being enough to make everything good as new.
You can't polish away rust, but it's still hard not to feel for the robot who spends a hundred years trying anyway.
