Fallout 4 fan builds a pyramid so gigantic in the game without a single mod that it should be visible from space

The settlement system in Fallout 4 was meant to bring a little comfort to the Commonwealth after the nuclear war. Almost 11 years after release, it has turned into a proper sport: who can hit the invisible ceiling of the engine first. Sometimes that race produces a pyramid with a throne for the king of a fishing megastore.

That is exactly what one player built at Spectacle Island. Before that, the builder put up a stepped pyramid at the Starlight Drive-in. A classic shape would not have fit within the boundaries of the plot there, but the new location allowed for the largest "true" pyramid possible. The builder first put up a support structure to find the height limit, then worked downward from the peak and kept moving the whole thing around in search of a good spot.

The island terrain turned out to be bumpy, so the pyramid ended up spilling past the shoreline and hanging over the water. The compromise came with a bonus. On the side stretching toward the sea, the height limit is higher, and the builder gained a couple of extra stories compared to the other edge. By the builder's estimate, the new structure is roughly four times larger by volume than the one at the drive-in.

Players were quick to compare the previous pyramid to the Bass Pro Shops Pyramid in Memphis. That building is a former sports arena about 100 meters tall, converted in 2015 into a huge fishing and hunting store with a hotel, artificial cypress trees, a swamp full of fish, and boats inside. The builder took the meme to its logical conclusion: a throne for "King Bass-Pro," with shops set up underneath it like a mall Santa. The explanation was thorough:

I don't know why. It is just what I did.

The cherry on top is hundreds of lights, since the exterior of the previous build had already been compared to shots from Blade Runner. The builder used no mods or console commands. Materials came from merchants, paid for with caps and purified water collected from fully developed settlements. Then came trips to haul junk to the island and scrap it to reset the settlement size meter. That is how the local limit gets bypassed: scrapped items free up room for new construction.

Gigantism like this comes with technical costs. Rain in Fallout 4 still falls straight through roofs if the building has even the smallest gap. One experienced builder also pointed out another quirk of the island. When blocks are snapped together on a grid, the angle of each successive block drifts by about a hundredth of a degree, most likely because of floating-point errors. By the end of the perimeter the drift adds up to around 0.03 degrees, and the last block no longer fits into place, so large grids are better built in a spiral from the center. Owners of weaker hardware responded to the screenshots with nervous laughter:

I started looking at the pics on my phone and my Xbox exploded

Pharaohs built pyramids for eternity, while the survivors of the Commonwealth build theirs for a throne above a sales floor.