Nuka-Cola

Item from Fallout by Interplay / Bethesda

America's favorite soft drink survived the apocalypse better than America did — the iconic curved blue bottle is everywhere, and its caps became the wasteland's universal currency.

Finding a bottle is finding a coin purse and a caffeine hit in one. The caps are money, the liquid is a mild stimulant, and an unopened bottle in good condition is a collector's piece. Nuka-Cola Quantum glows in the dark and is mildly radioactive — people drink it anyway because the wasteland recalibrates what counts as dangerous. A crate of the stuff can start a trade negotiation or a bar fight with equal probability.

Appearance

Curved cobalt-blue glass bottle with a faded red rocket logo and silver cap. The liquid inside glows faintly in the Quantum variant, an unsettling isotope blue. Regular bottles are flat and warm after two centuries but the carbonation clings stubbornly to the glass.

Also known as: Nuka, Nuka-Cola Quantum, Cola

What They Know

• Bottle caps from Nuka-Cola specifically became post-War currency, backed originally by the water merchants of the Hub
• Nuka-Cola Quantum contains a mild radioactive isotope that makes it glow blue — it restores more but irradiates the drinker
• Seventeen fruit essences in the original formula, created by inventor John-Caleb Bradberton
• Pre-War Nuka-Cola had a manufacturing empire rivaling any modern corporation, with its own theme park — Nuka-World
• Moira Brown in Megaton has a particular research interest in Nuka-Cola's chemical composition

Connections

• currency_of — diamond_city
• currency_of — megaton
• caps_become — bottlecaps
• studied_by — moira
• found_throughout — capital_wasteland
• built — vault_76
• stocked_with_by — red_rocket

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