Being in charge of an entire vault is not easy: you have to manage your population, fend off attackers, and you have to take the time to explore the wasteland. Itâs a lot to juggle! But Iâm here to help.
Iâve been playing the game obsessively over the past week, and have learned a few things about being a good overseerâbecause, yes, such a thing is possible. Here are my tips for getting the most out of Fallout Shelter.
Get To Know Your Vault Dwellers
The people in your vault arenât just ant workers. They have dreams and ambitions! They have personalities! You should get familiar with everyone by tapping on them and checking out their stats, like so:
Everyone has a SPECIAL spread, and these numbers determine what the dweller will be good at. The quick and dirty breakdown is as follows:
Strength: High Strength makes a dweller a power specialist; best placement is the power plant.
Perception: High perception makes for a discerning dweller; best placement is water treatment plants.
Endurance: High endurance makes dwellers durable; best role is exploration, or Nuka Cola production.
Charisma: High charisma makes dwellers charming; best placement is radio station.
Intelligence: High intelligence makes dwellers smart; best placements are medical bay or science laboratory.
Agility: High agility makes your dwellers nimble; best placement is the diner.
Luck: High luck makes your dwellers #blessed; high luck means better ârushâ chances, and also gives you better items while out in the wasteland.
Always pay attention to a new dwellerâs SPECIAL, and place them accordingly.
Once you start building up a lot of dwellers, it can get overwhelming to keep track of them. Do note that when you look at your roster, you can tap on the words on the top of the menu to sort them accordingly.
More importantly, make sure to check up on the dwellers from time to time. You never know what they will say.
Have A Good Layout
Donât just make rooms willy-nilly. Strategize! Putting two of the same type of room next to each other will combine the rooms, allowing you to place more workers there and thus up your production. (Three-room combination is also possible, though it can be hit and miss with regards to better production).
I find that devoting specific sections of the vault to one specific purpose works best, as it helps me keep things organized.
Upgrade
Once youâre happy with your layout, spend some caps to upgrade your rooms. This can be costly, especially when dealing with med/science labs, but it is worth it. Youâll produce more resources, and increase your capacity. Just make sure you donât expand too quicklyâyour vault dwellers will hate you if their resources run low. Pace your expansions, be deliberate about them.
If youâd like some hard data on room efficiency, check this out.
Keep Everyone Happy
The happier everyone is, the better theyâll work/produce resources, and the more your approval rating goes up. High approval ratings net you daily rewards from the game, as it evaluates you constantly. You should aim to keep your vault at a perpetual 90-100%
There are a few ways of doing this. First, make sure that people are assigned to jobs theyâre actually good at. Second, always make sure that they donât work too hard. If a vault dwellerâs happiness slips, you might want to consider letting them hang in the recreational areas, so they can socialize with others. Specifically, members of the opposite sex. Thereâs actually a big benefit to letting dwellers get it on with each other. Sexually active dwellers have their happiness rating shoot to 100, and pregnant women maintain the 100% happiness rating throughout their pregnancy. Itâs weird, but itâs totally a thing in this game, so roll with it.
You should also let dwellers explore the wasteland from time to time. Some dwellers are happier out on the road than they are stuck in a vault. And finally, itâs important to make sure your dweller is in good health, as that affects happiness too. Use the radaways and stimpaks!
Train Your Dweller
You are not stuck with the stats that the game gives you. You can build special rooms, where dwellers can go and up their stats after a set amount of time. I suggest cycling your entire vault through different training rooms from time to time, so that they become better at their jobs. SPECIAL beyond 10 can and does affect your stats!
Rush
Why wait for the timer to finish when you can press a button and quicken the entire process? Rush is your friend, especially when you run low on resources. I personally donât like to Rush if the chances of failure are higher than 40%, but anything lower than that is game. Fallout Shelter even gives you a little bonus if you pull it off. Just donât do it too often, as the chance of failure rockets exponentially on every retry.
Play Dress-Up
As you play, youâll find outfits and weapons. Use them! Ideally every dweller in your vault has a get-up and a gun. Weapons are useful for when rushes fail and suddenly you find yourself overrun with radroaches, or for when your vault is under attack. Outfits all have bonuses to SPECIAL, so ideally you give dwellers clothes that improve their major stats. Someone working in a lab would benefit more from a lab coat than a mercenary outfit, for example. But most of all, dwellers out on the wasteland need gear: it helps improve their chance of survival. You donât want to get into a situation where a dweller wearing noting but a jumpsuit suddenly comes across a Deathclaw. Bad news!
Plus, dressing up your dwellers can make things way funnier:
Get More Dwellers
The entire point of the game is expansion and repopulation. There are a couple of ways you can do this. You can play matchmaker. This means putting dwellers of the opposite sex in the living quarters, and keeping them there until they get to know each other. Iâve found that, without fail, even the most unhappy of couples will get it on within minutes (unless youâve unwittingly tried to pair up relatives).
And I thought I was bad at flirting pic.twitter.com/LMWqFVbAAb
â Patricia Hernandez (@xpatriciah) June 18, 2015
Donât get too carried away, though. Every new baby is a resource drain. Iâve heard tales where players get lots of women pregnant, only to have a baby boom that completely cripples the vault. So, pace yourself. Only have a few of pregnancies at a time, to ensure that youâll actually be able to handle it. And always be careful of putting dwellers of the opposite sex in the same rec room, because they WILL start fucking right away.
Worth noting that pregnant women can continue to work just fine. They will not be able to use weapons/attack, nor will they drink, however. Kids, on the other hand, do nothing but take up space. Youâll have to wait to be able to do anything with them.
You canât game the breeding system very much, but Fallout Shelter does take the highest average stat between both of the parents to determine what the childâs highest stat will be. This doesnât mean you can make babies with straight 10âs on their special, but it does mean you can make babies with the occasional 3 on a stat.
Another way of getting more dwellers is to build a radio station. Every so often, it will send out a call which may or may not be answered. If youâre lucky, it will call a cool new character to your vault.
The last way of expanding your population is to spend money: lunchboxes sometimes contain dwellers. I wouldnât reccomend this approach unless youâre hurting for more people, though. Since itâs a random draw, thereâs always a chance your lunchbox wonât have any dwellers in it.
Beware of Radiation
In the main games, having a bit of radiation is not a big deal. In Fallout Shelter, radiation can be the silent force that brings you to your knees. Always, always, always make sure that nobody in your vault has any radiation. That shit spreads, and will slowly kill your vault. Worse, any dweller with radiation will also have offpsring with radiation. Radiation babies are straight out of Benjamin Button:
Your only means of combatting radiation are science stations, so make sure to make at least one of those for your own protection. Youâll also want to keep your water resources high, because if they drop too low, your dwellers will start suffering from radiation, too.
Prepare For Raiders
Every so often, your vault will come under attack by raiders. You want to deal with raiders quickly and efficiently. Iâve found that keeping my strongest characters (in terms of stats + gear) near the entrance of the vault helps with this, as they donât have to travel very far to get into combat. You can even station people right at the vault door.
Worth mentioning that you can actually upgrade your vault entrance so it has higher defense. This gives you more time to get your dwellers to the frontline.
[Hot tip: children are useless when it comes to defending the vault.]
Donât just put dwellers with weapons in the same room as raiders. Help them! Your dwellers will get hurt, but you can administer stimpaks in real time. Chances are good that the dweller wonât be able to off the raider on the first go, so you need to be prepared to follow raiders into whatever rooms they bust into. Once the fight is over, your characters should automatically return to the rooms they work in.
If youâre playing the update, that means youâre probably also getting attacked by Deathclaws. Theyâre really tough. Observe:
The only advice I can offer is to prepare for them. If youâve got any Power Armor, or powerful guns, give those to the people near the front entrance! Otherwise, be prepared for havoc. Deathclaws make raiders look like a joke.
Explore
There is an entire world outside of your vault. Send people with high endurance (HP) out into the wildâmaybe theyâll find something good out there (though do note that other SPECIAL stats affect timed events that happen while exploring, so in general, the better stats your dweller has, the better theyâll do in the wild/the better gear theyâll find. But, as a baseline/at the start of the game, they should at least have a decent HP bar). Youâll want to make sure your explorers are properly equipped, of course: this means good gear, and a decent supply of items. I like to send off people with at least 2 stimpacks and 2 radaways; this is typically enough for a day trip.
The longer you keep your agent on the field, the better stuff theyâll find. Itâs still a gamble, though; you never know if something out there will kill your dweller. Death, thankfully, is not a big deal. Reviving characters is cheap! But if you can avoid it, you should. Make sure to monitor your dwellerâs health while out in the wasteland, and if things get dicey, recall them right away. Return trips to the vault take half the time it took to get there in the first place. So a 4 hour trip requires you to wait 2 hours for a return.
I like to check up on my dwellers out in the field oftenâsome of the best writing in the game happens in the adventure logs. Since exploration is the best way of finding gear, I keep at least a few dwellers on the wasteland at any given moment.
Itâs also worth noting that there are specific timed events that happen once your dweller is out in the field for long enough. Your dweller will be successful depending on your SPECIAL spread. Courtesy of the Fallout Shelter Efficiency Data Google Doc, these events include:
You can read more about this data here.
Do The Objectives
Fallout Shelter always has three active quests that you can pursue:
Itâs a good idea to do them if you can; most of them are simple. Every so often, the reward for these objectives is a lunchbox full of items/gear/resources, and sometimes, even special dwellers. Youâll want to complete these quests as soon as you can; lunchboxes are the best items in the game. Better yet, objectives keep Fallout Shelter interesting.
Side-note: there are some exploits for lunchboxes that have spawned from cheesing the objectives in a certain way. If you do this, you may bork up your entire game, so I wouldnât risk it.
Manage Your Gear
Not all gear is made equal. If you play for long enough, youâll acquire a bevvy of useless items, like BB Guns. Sell these. Thereâs no reason anyone should be packing something rusty or weak if you have something better lying around, and you donât want bad gear taking up precious inventory space.
I also suggest going through your inventory on the âSurvival Guideâ menu. Here, you can read descriptions for all your weapons and outfitsâand the flavor text is amusing.
Earn Caps
A few ways of making bank: selling extra gear, exploration, objectives, leveling up, rushing, and purchasing lunchboxes. Iâve yet to find myself low on caps for very long, personally, but every so often Iâll need a few extra caps for an expansion or upgrade.
Perform Experiments
What is the point of being an overseer if youâre not doing some kind of fucked up social experiment? Thatâs why vaults exist, after all!
Some more âcreativeâ players are going through Fallout Shelter with special rules.Here is someone from Reddit that is making a vault with absolutely no resources:
So Iâve created a vault which is semi-stable despite a total lack of food rooms and water rooms. Some things to know:
As far as I can tell, starvation and thirst donât kill you. They lower your health to about 20% and radiation to 50%. This, of course, leaves you highly vulnerable to raiders and radroaches.
Dwellers in the wasteland donât starve or irradiate. They put a drain on your resources, but donât actually suffer if youâre out of them. This includes dwellers who have returned to the vault and are waiting to get back in.
Children, pregnant women, and dwellers in the wasteland are all immune to damage from radroaches, raiders, and fires.
Low happiness doesnât affect the probability of success on a Rush.
So hereâs how it works. Theres nothing in the vault but a power room, residence, science lab, and medbay. All of these are staffed by pregnant women. There are as many men as there are pregnant women standing outside the vault waiting to come back in. When a pregnancy ends, a man comes in and immediately starts a new one. All of the rest of the dwellers spend all their time exploring the wastes. They occasionally come back to briefly partake of the stimpaks and radaways produced by the vault. Low happiness mostly prevents production, but because everyone in the vault is immortal I can rush with impunity. When children grow up, they are sent out into the waste before they can be killed by radroaches.
But the most popular type of playthrough Iâve seen so far goes a little like the following image:
[Source: Shep McAllister, Commerce Team]
Fallout Shelter players seem really fond of having a single dude impregnate the entire female population, sometimes while dressed as something absurd.
Iâve also seen people have fun with naming the characters:
[Source: arcaneAssassin]
And Iâve heard of people doing male only/female only vaults. The point is, have fun with it. You donât have to play Fallout Shelter the way the game wants you to, and role-playing can go a long way.
Play Often
While Fallout Shelter is not the sort of game you can sit down and play for 30 minutes straight, itâs a good idea to check in quickly every so often. The more you play, the more resources you can mine. I like to boot the game up in between other activities, spend a minute or two upkeeping everything, and then checking back during my next free moment.
