My Fallout Shelter guide tips and tricks article is mostly for intermediate and advanced players. There are plenty of tips for new players too, but I do not explain the mechanics I am writing about. This means if you have not encountered something yet, such as “Random Wasteland Quests” then you will have no idea what I am going on about. If you would like to see the video version of this article, then follow this YouTube link:
78 Fallout Shelter Tips and Tricks
1 – There is No Correct Way to Play Fallout Shelter
Fallout Shelter is a make-your-own-fun game. How you play is up to you. For example, you can train everybody in your shelter to be ultra-dwellers with top stats. You can play for the special rewards that appear via your objectives, or you can play with a focus on quests. You can work towards getting 100 dwellers, or you can try to create a self-perpetuating base that can run on its own without your interference. Don’t get bogged down with ideas of playing it perfectly or speed running because it is not that sort of game.
2 – You Only Get the Free Pet Once
When you download and install Fallout Shelter for the first time, at some point you will receive the free pet carrier. This is a one-time occurrence. You do not get the free pet again. Even if you uninstall the game and then re-download it, you do not receive the free pet. Don’t worry too much about it when you start a new vault, since you can find pets in numerous other places. The game offers up pets randomly during quests and in-game objectives anyway. You can even find them in lunchboxes too.
3 – Pet Bonuses Do Not Stack
Many of the pet bonuses affect a single dweller, but some have perks that affect an entire room or even the entire vault. However, if you have two or more of the same pet, then the benefits do not stack. The game simply picks the pet with the highest numbers and uses that to determine your in-game perks.
Let’s say you have something like the greyhound that lowers crafting time by 15% and another pet called Coco that lowers crafting time by 9%. If you put them both in the same crafting room, the crafting time will only go down by 15% and no more. You could put the 9% pet in another room if you like and it would work in that one instead.
4 – Mr Handy Can Go Exploring
You can send out a maximum of twenty five dwellers out into the wasteland. You may also send out an additional five Mr Handy robots. They will collect caps, they can take damage, but many times they do not. If it survives long enough to collect 5000 caps and will then automatically return home.
They only collect a tiny number of caps per hour. In fact, after two days and 17 hours, the one I sent out had only collected 1660 caps. Ergo, I would only suggest you send Mr Handys out into the wilderness if you have too many Mr Handys and they are just milling around the vault doing nothing.
5 – Levelling Up Replenishes Your Health
When you level up on a quest, it replenishes your health. It doesn’t affect game play too much under most circumstances, but if you are running low on stimpaks, a splash of extra health may help you push through to other rooms where hopefully you will find more stimpaks.
6 – Rushing Rooms in the Early Game
Don’t be afraid to rush your rooms and then rush them again and again. The more times you rush them, then the less chance there is that you will succeed. However, the caps reward is higher if you succeed. The amount you get is equal to the incident failure rate.
Before you rush a room, make sure your characters each have a weapon so they may more easily kill the creatures that appear out of the ground. Give your characters clothes that increase their luck. It will lower the chances of an incident happening if the room is full of characters with a high luck statistic.
Let’s say you have a dweller with high luck, who has a luck stat of ten. When you rush that dweller’s room for the first time, there is only a 21% chance of failure. If you have a dweller with low luck, such as with a luck stage of one. Then, when that person’s room is rushed, there is a 36% chance of failure.
Very small rooms may be rushed frequently because the failure conditions do not last as long. Pests are killed more quickly and fires are extinguished more quickly in smaller rooms, and in rooms that have not been upgraded. The bigger the room and the larger the upgrades, then the more difficult the room incidents become.
7 – Make Friends in the Wasteland
You will come across objectives that ask you to make friends in the wasteland. Your dwellers will make friends out in the wasteland without any input from you. If you read their diaries as they go by, you will see what they have been up to, and you will see they make friends as they go.
If you get a quest that goes something like, “Make 3 Friends in the Wasteland.” Send out somebody with a high charisma stat, preferably wearing an outfit that makes them more charismatic, and watch them make friends in the wasteland more efficiently.
8 – Use W S A D on PCs And Laptops
When you play Fallout Shelter, and you move your mouse cursor to the edge of the screen, you see the screen move in that direction. However, with some machines, movement detection is too keen. You only need move your cursor near the edge and viewer veers off. It makes playing more difficult, so stick with using W S A D on your keyboard to move up, down, left and right.
If you wish to stick with using your mouse to navigate, then try adjusting the cam zoom speed and the cam scroll speed. The cam zoom speed dictates how quickly you zoom in and out when you use the middle mouse wheel. The cam scroll speed controls how quickly the camera moves when you put your mouse pointer near the edge.
9 – Isolate Your Rooms to Stop Certain Incidents From Spreading
Let’s say your vault is looking at little unhealthy. Perhaps you have a few lower-level dwellers who don’t have much health left. If you start rushing rooms, there is a chance the incidents will start killing your dwellers, sending your vault into a spiral of failure.
Isolate your rooms to stop Mole Rats, Radroaches and fires from spreading. Radscorpions will burrow to any random room they wish, so if your dwellers are significantly weakened, do not rush any rooms if you have over fifty dwellers.
Just to prove it. Here I build a power generator that is not touching the wall of another room. It is isolated.
I put the lady in the room and rush it. Mole rats appear, and I have her run away. The Mole Rats hang around for a little while and then they go away and she returns because the crisis is over.
10 – Leave Your Best Weapons in the Vault After You Reach 50 Dwellers
How many dwellers you have in your vault determines what sort of attacks you experience. At 51 dwellers you will start to see Radscorpion attacks in your vault and Ghouls will attack from outside. Though, Ghouls may attack at 45 dwellers, but they are pretty rare. You will see Deathclaw attacks at 61 dwellers, and the count is very specific. If you evict a dweller and go back to 60 dwellers, you will not be attacked by Deathclaws.
- 45 Dwellers – Ghouls
- 51 Dwellers – Radscorpions
- 61 Dwellers – Deathclaws
If you have upgraded fully upgraded a large three-segment room, and you have 51 dwellers or more, then even a Radscorpion can cause significant death in your vault. That is why, when you get to 50 dwellers, you should start leaving your very best weapons in your vault. Equip them to people in the rooms that are being attacked.
11 – Manipulating The Dweller Population Numbers for Objectives
Attacks from Ghouls, Radscorpions and DeathClaws are dependent upon how many dwellers are present in your base. It is not judged by your dweller count, only by how many dwellers are physically present in your base.
Let’s say you are tired of Deathclaw attacks, you could evict your dwellers until you are back down to sixty dwellers. Or, you could send your dwellers out into the wasteland. So, let’s say you have sixty two dwellers, and you send two out into the wasteland, you will not receive any further DeathClaw attacks until they return. This sort of thing can be used to manipulate the objectives a little, especially when objectives rely on a certain number of attacks happening.
Take these as examples. They want me to survive six DeathClaw attacks with no casualties, for which I will desperately need lots of dwellers with lots of guns. Then, there is the objective saying I should kill twenty raiders without a weapon, which means I need lots of dwellers with no guns.
This presents a problem because I will need to stay on edge all the time, waiting for attacks so I know if I need to quickly equip or quickly de-weaponize my dwellers. Since I only had 62 dwellers anyway, it was easy for me to send two out into the wasteland. After that point, my attacks consisted of ghouls and raiders. I left my dwellers unarmed so that they could tackle the Raiders when they arrived, and eventually complete the objective.
Then, once the raider objective was completed, I equipped all my dwellers with weapons, brought back my dwellers from the wasteland so there are at least sixty one people in the vault, and waited for the DeathClaw attacks.
12 – Play a Little and Come Back Later
The only thing I can say for sure is that this is not a game you should play in long chunks on a regular basis. You may find the game easier, and perhaps more interesting, if you play intermittently. The game is far easier and far more interesting if you play a little while, then come back to it later, then play a little while, and come back to it later. Playing in long chunks is okay occasionally, but intermittent play offers the best benefits.
When you come back, you find that babies have grown up, dwellers have learned abilities, things have been collected in the wasteland, and all your rooms are ready be harvested.
The longer you play during a single session, the less there is to do. You often find yourself waiting for something to happen, or using Nuka Cola bottles to speed things along.
As counter-intuitive as it sounds, the game is brilliant for people who lead busy lives. It is great for kids and workers alike who can check in on their vault quickly during toilet visits, lunch breaks, and trips home on the bus. It is ideal for people who are working at their computer where they can check in on their vault every hour or two, click a few rooms, do a quest, and then get back to work.
13 – There Are Times When Playing For Longer Periods is Recommended
My previous advice is true, but there are certain times when playing over a longer period is recommended. In fact, Mr Handy robots exist so you can leave the game running and play in a passive way, such as while doing other things on your computer or phone. Plus, random Wasteland encounters only happen if you have been sat playing the game for a while.
There are certain objectives you cannot fill unless you play for a while. For example, if you have to level up a certain number of dwellers, then you cannot level them up while the game is off. They will level up if they are in the wasteland, but to level up the dwellers in your vault, you actually have to have the game running.
Another examples is if the objective asks you to survive a certain number of Raider, Deathclaw or Ghoul attacks. They only happen if you have been playing a while. This means if you are only checking in for and playing for five minutes at a time, then you will not see many vault attacks or many random wasteland encounters.
Still, to echo my earlier point, this game rewards you for coming back later and checking up on things. It is best played in small portions throughout the day rather than in large five hour chunks.
14 – You Can Save a Critical Hit For Later
If you are out on quests, be they planned missions, or those quests you happen upon when you are out in the wasteland. Remember that you can save your critical hits and use them with another enemy.
There may come a time when you “Can” perform a critical hit, but you do not. Instead, you let your dwellers kill the enemy as usual, and then you go to the next room and perhaps use the critical hit on a boss or on something more powerful.
Take note that critical hits can be saved while on the same mission, but that is all. It will not carry over to the next mission or quest.
15 – Play More Than One Vault At A Time
Fallout Shelter allows you to have three vaults at a time. I recommend that you have at least two vaults running at any one time. This allows you to experiment away with one vault while grinding away with the other.
Plus, there are many times when there is nothing better to do than sit around and wait. When that is the case, simply switch to another vault and see what needs doing there.
Fallout Shelter is a real-time running game, which means things keep happening in the game even when the game is turned off. Vault raids don’t happen, and Mr Handy’s don’t function, but otherwise, everything else keeps running, dwellers collect things in the wasteland, and so forth.
This means that if you have three vaults running, you can exhaust all the activities in one vault, and then switch to another vault and do the same, switching from one to the other when you have done all that is needed with each vault.
If you are the sort of person who doesn’t like having to leave the game and come back later, then this is one way to keep the action going without having to buy Nuka Cola bottles.
16 – What Are All The Things That Nuka Cola Bottles Do?
Fallout Shelter shows you a tip stating what Nuka Cola bottles do, but it doesn’t give you the full story. Here is a quick rundown of all the things that Nuka Cola bottles do.
Speed up Wasteland Travel Times
You can use Nuka Cola bottles to get to quests faster and to return home faster. Remember that one bottle buys you two hours. So, travel time says it has 2 hours and 1 minute left on it, then it will cost you two bottles. If it says it has two hours or less, then it is one bottle.
Craft Items Instantly
Again, a single bottle buys you two hours, so be wary of overspending if you can wait a few minutes and save a bottle. Also, take note of the required dweller stat, and fill the crafting room with the dwellers who have the highest numbers in that skill. Then, dress them with outfits that further improve their stats. This will lower the amount of time required to complete the crafting item, which means you will have to spend fewer Nuka Cola bottles to rush the crafting process.
Skip More Than One Objective Per Day
Every day, you are allowed to replace an objective with another one. If you wish to skip more than one, it will cost you two Nuka Colas. If you wish to skip another on the same day, then it costs three colas, and so on. The more you skip objectives, the more Nuka Cola’s it costs up to a limit of 62 per skip.
Skip Certain Quests
If you would like to change the daily or weekly quest to something that offers better rewards, then you can skip them using a single Nuka Cola. There are also blue quests that can be skipped too, but the blue ones will cycle back if you keep skipping them, whereas the daily and weekly quests are different every time.
Complete Barbershop Customizations Instantly
I would not suggest you spend Nuka Cola’s on dweller customizations, but if you are going to, then equip them with an outfit that increases their charisma because this will lower the amount of time a customization takes. One Nuka-Cola will speed things up in two hour increments.
Unlock a Theme More Quickly
I suggest you do not spend Nuka Cola’s on themes because they are just aesthetic customizations. It costs three Nuka Cola’s per missing fragment, which means in theory it can cost a maximum of 27 Nuka Colas for a single theme.
Instantly Complete a Single Training Point
You can put dwellers into training rooms to bump up their stats. Yet another use for Nuka Colas is to speed up the training process. Things again work on a two hour basis where one bottle buys you two hours. For example, if you have a dweller who has six hours to go and it costs four bottles, as the timer descends below six hours, the cost drops to three bottles.
It is not worth using Nuka Colas during the early stages of training, but they may be useful at later stages when you want to hurry along some of your highly trained dwellers.
17 – Use Your Free Objective Swap Every Day
Every day, you are able to swap an objective for free. You should use it every day, even if you have three seemingly simple objectives to complete. The best objectives are ones that reward you with pet carriers, nuka cola bottles, and lunch boxes.
Do not swap out the best ones. In fact, do your best to achieve them as quickly as possible. You should use your free objective swap every day because every time you swap an objective, or achieve an objective, the random number generator kicks in, and there is a chance your next objective will feature a better reward.
In this example above, I skipped the objective “Equip 4 dwellers with a scoped.44” because I am early in the game, I don’t have a weapon crafting room, and it would take my dwellers days to find four scoped.44 guns in the wilderness. Plus, the objective only offers caps as a reward, so there is no point making the effort when I can freely swap the objective for something potentially better or easier to achieve. Contrast that to this objectives screen below.
As you can see by the pink colored crosses on the left, I can swap one of these objectives for free. However, since they are all such high-value rewards, the free swap should be saved for later and not used on one of these.
Let’s say you have an objective that asks you to craft eight outfits for 1100 caps. This sort of objective would be perfect for swapping out. It would take epic amounts of time to craft eight outfits, and where crafting the outfits may be worth it for Nuka cola bottles, a pet carrier, or even a lunch box, it is certainly not worth it for just over one thousand caps. In the time it took you to craft eight outfits, you could have powered through ten objectives and earned thousands of caps.
18 – Dwellers Return to Old Positions After Incidents and Emergencies
During an attack, or an incident, you can move your dwellers or Mr Handys around. Perhaps putting stronger dwellers into rooms full of enemies, and maybe moving some of your weaker dwellers out of the way of harm.
During an incident or attack, you can put your dwellers almost anywhere, and they will return to their original positions after the incident or attack is over.
Just remember that if your dwellers are killed, or your Mr Handy is blown up, during an attack, then they will not return to their original positions. When they are revived or repaired, you will have to re-assign them to the rooms you want them to work in.
You can send dwellers and Mr Handys anywhere you like during an emergency. It is sometimes a good idea to shift your dwellers around, perhaps putting stronger ones in certain rooms, and removing damaged dwellers when you have run out of healing items.
19 – Don’t be Afraid to Scrap a Vault That isn’t Working Out
The truth is that if you are willing to play for long enough, then every vault can work out, unless you are playing on Survival mode.
With that said, if you are taking my advice from earlier about playing more than one vault, then do not be afraid to scrap the one that isn’t working out very well, especially if your vault is pretty new.
I had a vault where I only had 158 caps. I had no real way of making any serious gains. Usually, I would go to my objectives and earn some caps or equipment, but the first two required an overseers office, which I couldn’t afford, and the last one required at least a med bay for stimpacks, and lots of time, neither of which I had. I had used my free objective swap for the day, and I had no Nuka colas in order to swap objectives.
The fact is that I could have spent my time grinding up the caps over a few days and I could have turned it into a very successful vault, but the vault was still young, and I hadn’t spent any real-world money, so I deleted the vault and tried again. Subsequent vaults had far luckier opening stages, making the early game a lot easier.
20 – Raise Happiness to 100% by Making Dwellers Have Sex
There is an objective where you have to raise your dweller’s happiness to 100%. For example, you may need to raise the happiness of 10 dwellers to 100%.
If you already have dwellers that are 100% happy, then have them fail at a room rush and it will make them sad. You can make dwellers happy using the radio room, and by putting them in the right room for their stats. Having a dweller with high endurance in your store room may not offer any direct advantages, but if your dweller has a high endurance stat, then being in the store room will make him or her happy.
That is all fine, but the easiest way to raise two dwellers up to 100% happiness is to make them have sex. During the sexual act, both dwellers experience a 100% happiness boost. For the objective asking for ten happy dwellers, it simply means having five couples have sex. Do that, and the 10 dwellers happiness objective is complete.
As a side note, if you have a pet, and one of its perks are a boost in happiness, then this objective becomes a lot easier. Even pets with fairly low happiness perks, like those that offer you a 20% boost in happiness, is often enough to help you complete happiness objectives. You just pass around the pet from one dweller to another until the objective is complete.
21 – What to Do When Couples Will Not Breed
If your pair are related, they will not have children. You can tell if they are related by what they say to each other when they are alone in the living quarters. If they are related to each other, they will make generic non-romantic comments.
If they are able to breed, they will make romantic comments. You can see their comments by clicking on the room itself, and then zooming in.
The higher the charisma values the couples have, the quicker they will breed. However, there are times when the game bugs out and they will stand there talking for ages. If this happens, move them into other rooms and then move them back into the living quarters to try again. Or, turn off the game and go back later, and when you restart the game, you will see them run off to do some humping.
Also, check out their avatars when they are having sex. It is a cute little detail, but you can see them doing happy wincing motions.
22 – Completing The “Assign Dwellers to the Right Room” Objective
Sometimes, you are trying to assign people to the right room as per instructed by the objective, but you experience a little trouble. You have tried certain dwellers in a bunch of rooms, but the objective doesn’t register them as assigned to the right room.
If this has happened to you, then build an ability training room, and assign the dwellers to them. For some reason, this objective recognizes training rooms as the right room. For example, you have put your dweller with a high strength stat in the power generation room, but the objective didn’t register it. So, you build a strength training room, put the same dweller in, and the objective will probably register it as putting the dweller in the right room.
If you are really struggling to complete this type of objective, as a last resort, you can build a training room and try putting dwellers in it to see if it completes the objective.
23 – What Happens if Raiders Attack When Nobody is Home
Nothing happens. They just arrive, run around a little, and then leave. All you lose are a few energy, food and water resources during the emergency. Even if you have children or pregnant women still in your vault, it doesn’t matter because they are invulnerable. If you want, you can empty out your base, send your dwellers into the wasteland, and your base will be fine when you get back. Nothing can be damaged by raiders. All they can do is steal a few of your resources before they run away again.
24 – Do Not Upgrade Your Door
Your vault door can be upgraded to make it stronger. It means that enemies need to bang on it for longer before they can enter your vault. This may seem like a good thing, but in the later game it becomes annoying.
During the early game, you may want the extra time to prepare yourself for the attack. But, in the later game you are already set up and waiting for the enemies to hurry up and get in so you can kill them off as quickly as possible.
When you have upgraded your door, you end up making attacks last far longer, which means you are sat around, bored and waiting to win the attack. You would much rather the enemies burst straight through the door so you can kill them off as quickly as possible.
If you upgraded the door in the early game, you cannot downgrade it later. It is far better if you never upgrade your door. You will be thankful you didn’t later on down the line when you are wiping out enemy attacks as efficiently as possible.
25 – Protecting Your Door Is Pointless
Don’t leave people at your door to protect you from raiders. A two dweller team will often suffer a death or two when facing three armed raiders. Even when they don’t die, having them stood there is a waste of a dweller’s time. Search out the room that the raiders will hit first and give your dwellers guns in that room.
For example, if the first “Manned” room is your power generation room, then kit out the dwellers with your best guns. When the attackers break through the door area, they will engage with this team first and will hopefully be destroyed before they are able to reach other rooms.
Keeping people in your temple’s door room offers no benefits. Your resources still flash red, which indicates they are being stolen, and the dwellers do not receive any sort of fighting bonus. In fact, the not only are you wasting two dwellers who could be producing resources, but the fact there is only two of them to take on a minimum of three enemies puts them at a direct disadvantage.
26 – Training The Perfect Dweller
If you want the perfect dweller with full stats in every area, then you need give birth to a fresh dweller, let it grow up to level one, and then put that dweller straight into the endurance training room, called the fitness room, and train that person so he or she is maxed out on endurance.
Train your new dwellers to ten in endurance because the Fallout Shelter tips screen says, “Dwellers with high endurance gain more health when they level up.”
Therefore, to get the best results, you need your dweller with a maxed out endurance stat before you start leveling that dweller up. After that, you can do as you wish with your dweller.
If you are looking to max out every stat including your dweller level, then I would suggest that after endurance you rank up the dweller’s intelligence. Intelligence will not help your dwellers max out their stats, but it will help them level up more quickly.
Once you have your super dweller who has every stat maxed out, and you are at level 50, then your dweller is as efficient as can be, especially in the wasteland and on quests. However, I would actually advise against filling your vault with super dwellers because not only does it take a lot of grind to get there, but it also removes all challenge from the game.
Creating super dwellers can be fun, and I suggest you try it, but remember that your game has a shelf life. It is only fun for as long as you make it fun.
27 – Does Luck Help You Out In The Fallout Shelter?
Sometimes, when you harvest the resources in a room, you receive a random caps bonus. If the dwellers in the room have high luck stats, then you are more likely to receive this caps bonus. You will notice how sometimes you click a room to harvest it, and caps comes out as well as the resource. This is the random caps bonus.
Luck helps you out in other ways in the vault. Higher luck statistics will increase your chances of success when you rush a room. For example, take a power generator room where rushing as it is has a 28% failure chance. If you improve the luck statistics of the dwellers inside, such as by putting formal suits on them, then the overall luck of the room increases, and the failure rate goes down to something like 20%.
Luck is averaged out among all the occupants of a room. This means that if your dweller is maxed out on luck, then that person will dramatically improve things in a small room, but will only add a mild benefit to larger rooms. If you get an objective such as, “Successfully rush X amount of rooms,” then load the rooms with very lucky people and you will have a much easier time.
28 – Does Luck Help You Out During Quests and in The Wasteland?
While on quests, if you have a higher luck stat, then you are more likely to receive critical hits. For example, if you took out two dwellers with a low luck stat, and one with a very high luck stat, then at the end of the quest, the dweller with the high luck stat will have enjoyed more critical hits.
Some people say that a high luck stat will help you find better items in the wasteland, but my experiments have not found that to be the case. I have found that dwellers with higher luck stats will typically find more caps in the wasteland, which makes sense since luck helps dwellers earn more caps in the fallout vault.
According to my experiments, when a dweller is in the wasteland, what he or she receives is still pretty random. However, If you want your dwellers to pick up rarer junk, outfits and guns, then you stand a better chance of getting them if you give your dwellers better guns and outfits to start out with. Give them plenty of Stimpacks and RadAways too so that they may them stay out longer.
As you can see in the image above, this dweller is perfectly suited to find the best loot in the wasteland. Every stat is maxed, he has the expert jumpsuit, which is the legendary item that gives him an additional 7 stats in agility so that he shoots even faster. He has the Dragon’s maw, which is the most powerful gun in the game, and he has a parrot that adds six points of weapon damage. The dweller is also at level 50, making him the most powerful a dweller can possibly be, and ergo most suited to find the best loot at the most efficient rate.
29 – Max Out On Luck And Another Stat
If you are training dwellers for certain jobs within the vault, then train them on Luck and whatever stat they need to complete their job. For example, if you want to train up a power worker, then train him or her up on strength and on luck. If the dweller works in the water processor, then train him or her up in perception and luck.
That way, your dwellers work in each room very efficiently, and when rooms are harvested, the increased luck stats means you are more likely to receive random rewards in the form of caps.
30 – The Single Room Mr Handy Money Farming Method
Set up single rooms in a line, put two dwellers in each, and have a Mr Handy patrolling them. Try to ensure that the dwellers have a high luck stat. While your game is running, this line of single rooms can act as a cap production line.
Take what I have done in the image above. I have alternated between medibays and science labs. I chose them because if I keep the game running with a Mr Handy harvesting them, they can keep my stimpaks and radaways topped up. While my healing items are getting topped up, my vault is earning caps from random caps rewards when rooms are harvested.
The goal is to have each room complete as quickly as possible. Medibays and science labs require dwellers with a high intelligence stat, so I put intelligent dwellers in there and I give them suitable intellect-improving outfits too. The rooms complete quickly, and Mr Handy harvests them and randomly triggers the free caps reward for rooms.
Should Each Room Be Fully Upgraded?
In my opinion, no. I think each room should be a basic room with no upgrades. The point of this cap farming method is to have each room complete as quickly as possible, and upgraded rooms take longer to complete.
For example, a fully upgraded medbay will take an in-game hour to complete (not a real-world hour). Whereas in the basic non-upgraded room, it only takes 36 minutes to complete (again, that is 36 minutes in-game not real world time).
Also, your rooms will suffer random events from things like Radscorpians, fires, mole rats and Radroaches. If you only have a small room with no upgrades, then the events are far weaker and are quashed far quicker. This is especially true for creature attacks if your dwellers are holding stronger weapons. The quicker your dwellers deal with the problem, the quicker they can get back to making you caps.
This actually changes if you are using resource rooms. For example, your resource rooms (power, water, food) will harvest/complete at the same time no matter how highly they are upgraded. So, if you want to farm caps with upgraded resource rooms, then that is okay if you do not mind the more powerful fires or creature attacks.
Do Upgraded Rooms Give More Caps?
Yes. The amount you receive is randomized, but the randomized figures are within certain boundaries. For example, lets say you have a single room like a diner that has no upgrades. If you get money from a harvest, it will come to around one hundred caps on average. With the first upgrade, it goes up to 150 caps on average, and up to 200 caps for a fully upgraded single room.
31 – Are There Fewer Random Attacks When You Are Offline?
In my experience, there are the same number of internal incidents, such as fires, creature attacks, or appearances of the mysterious stranger. But, attacks from outside, such as from raiders, ghouls and Deathclaws seemed to be significantly less frequent. I didn’t test this thoroughly, so it may have simply been the luck of the draw since the incidents are randomized. However, from my anecdotal experience, I encountered fewer attacks from outside when I was offline.
32 – Just Press The Stimpak and RadAway Icons
When you send a dweller out into the wilderness, or on a quest, you can carefully tap out the number of Stimpaks and RadAways you want that dweller to take. Or, you can press the Stimpak and RadAway icons to give that dweller the maximum amount he or she may carry.
33 – Send Dwellers into the Wasteland to Save on Food and Water
If your water and food supplies are very low, and you are having trouble getting things back in the green, you can save on food and water by sending dwellers out into the wasteland. When you send them out into the wasteland, your requirements for food and water go down.
Being in the red for too long is bad because dwellers lose life when you do not have enough food, and they gain radiation if you do not have enough water. If you are perpetually running low, just send some dwellers out to the wasteland until your supply outweighs your demand. You can bring them back when you are back on top of things.
34 – Keeping Dwellers Out of the Way For a While
Taking points from the previous tip, let’s say your vault is really suffering because you have too little water and food. Your dwellers are losing life and gaining radiation, so you send them out into the wasteland. But, the trouble is that they have already lost a lot of life and will not survive very long in the wilderness, so what can you do?
The most common advice is to let them die and then revive them later when you have the money. The benefits of this is that you do not have to support them with food or water in your vault. However, there is a less costly way of doing this.
Simply send them out to the wasteland, and then recall them while they are still alive. They will stand outside your vault indefinitely without taking any damage. While they are stood there, they do not cost you food or water. This means you can get back on top of things and then bring them in slowly, one at a time, and you do not have to suffer the expense of reviving them.
35 – Dwellers Come to No Harm When They Are Returning From the Wasteland
If your dwellers are wondering around or getting themselves killed by Radroaches, Mole Rats, and whatever finds its way into your vault. Simply, send them out to do a little caps and junk finding. You do not have to worry about kitting your dwellers out with great gear, you don’t have to give them a gun, and you don’t have to give them Stimpacks.
Send them out to go and find a few things and keep an eye on them from time to time. If their health starts becoming too depleted, then recall them because they cannot be harmed while they are returning to your vault.
Doing a little wasteland walking will get useless dwellers out of your vault for a while, and they will collect a few caps and common items while they are out. It is a very useful tactic nearer the beginning before you build a quest overseers room.
It is up to you how long you leave your dwellers out in the wasteland. If they are strong enough and have enough Stimpaks and Radaways, then they can last for days. Just remember that when you recall them and they start returning, they cannot come to any harm. This means you can let them use up all their Stimpaks before you recall them. It also means you can recall them and go to bed, safe in the knowledge they will be fine and will probably be waiting at the vault door when you wake up.
36 – Earning Experience in the Wasteland
Dwellers level up faster in the wasteland if they have a stronger weapon. The stronger the weapon is, then the less likely it is that your dweller will run or hide while in the wastelands. Since dwellers only receive a tiny bit of experience for running and hiding, it is something you want to avoid.
Here’s Steven, who is unarmed.
He ran away from the Yao Guai, suffered two damage and earned no experience. He also hid from raiders and only earned 35 experience points.
On this occasion, I gave Steven a rare weapon with a minimum damage stat of 14.
In this case, he fought and kills the Yao Guai for 915 experience, but he still hid from the raiders and only earned 35 experience points.
If you want your dweller to start taking down raiders and deathclaws in the wasteland, then you have to wait for them to level up a little because lower leveled dwellers will hide from them even if they have legendary weapons equipped.
37 – How Long Should I Leave Dwellers in the Wasteland?
I have noticed that dwellers with lots of items in the Wasteland will pick up fewer as time goes by. What is picked up and when it is picked up is pretty random, but still works to a scale. The longer a dweller is out in the wasteland, the fewer items he or she picks up, but the rarer the items tend to be. Again, this is random, so there is still a small chance a dweller will pick up a legendary item early on, but it is very unlikely.
If your dweller survives through having a strong weapon and enough Stimpaks and Radaways, then a dweller may collect so many items that he or she auto-returns. The most a dweller can carry seems to hover around 100, with items like plans not counting as part of the hundred.
38 – Breeding With Stronger Dwellers Does Not Matter
If you breed people with high special abilities, then their kids are more likely to start out with similarly higher abilities. But, the sad truth is that the effects are pretty random and fairly minute. For example, if you breed two people with level 10 strength stats, you will be lucky if the child has more than three or four strength stats when born.
For example, if you had a strong woman with ten strength, and strong dad with ten strength, their child will only be born with a slightly alleviated strength stat of about four points in strength.
In addition, if you breed two dwellers that are maxed out with all their Special stats, the child’s intelligence is the only stat that is higher than the others. I would say it is a bug, but perhaps it was put there to stop people filling their vaults with super babies.
If you breed two dwellers who have stats that range between the 9s and 10s, then the resultant baby has a regular stats with a few cresting a little higher into fours. However, two dwellers with fully maxed out stats only produce intelligent babies where all the other stats are small.
39 – Speeding Through the Room Incident Objectives
There are room incident objectives. They will often tell you to extinguish a certain number of fires, or survive a certain number of creature attacks. You can speed through these by repeatedly rushing the same room and creating incidents through failures.
To do this most efficiently, put two of your higher leveled dwellers into a single Medibay, and equip them with the best weapons and clothing you have. Obviously, if the objective is to kill a certain number enemies without a weapon, then do not give the dwellers a weapon.
Make sure the Medibay is a single room and do not upgrade it. A single room with no upgrades will spawn the weakest incidents. In such a scenario, things like attacks from Radroaches will be taken down almost immediately. In fact, some of the longest attacks will be fires because they are not affected by weapon strength.
Rush the room, and you will cause incidents. Keep rushing the room until all the incidents you need are fulfilled and you have completed the objective. Your dwellers will take damage, but you are in a Medibay, which means every time you succeed with a room rush, you get Stimpaks to use on your injured dwellers.
Also, if you need mole rats or Radscorpions to spawn, then have soil touching at least one side of your room. The soil can exist above, below, or to the side of the room. Mole rats consider elevators to be rooms, so you can create incidents all day in the room next to an elevator and nothing will happen. Rooms surrounded by other rooms or elevators will not receive Mole Rat attacks.
Radscorpions will appear when your rooms are surrounded by other rooms, but not as frequently as when you have soil touching at least one side of your room.
If you are looking for Radroaches and fires, then surround your room with other rooms, and remember to keep your strongest weapons equipped in case any Radscorpions decide to turn up. Do not upgrade your rooms if you want fires because they occur less frequently in upgraded rooms. This is especially true when with the final three rooms, the garden, water purification and Nuka-cola bottler. Just one upgrade for their rooms, and fires will become very rare incidents.
40 – What To Leave Running Overnight
As mentioned earlier, this game runs in real time, which means the best things to leave running overnight are the things that take a long time to charge or complete.
For example, while you are sleeping (in real life), leave dwellers in training rooms, in craft rooms, and set dwellers off on those quests that take hours and hours to reach. Prioritize the sorts of things you would normally have to rush with Nuka Cola bottles.
To be clear, you still need to leave dwellers in regular rooms when you turn off the game. But, if you were planning on making a weapon, training a few dwellers, and so forth, then doing it before you go to bed and turn off the game is a good idea.
In addition, if you leave somebody in a radio room to recruit people, then there is a good chance that when you wake up and turn on the game, the radio room will be charged and ready to offer a new dweller.
As for babies, try to get all of the courtship out of the way and have the dweller pregnant before going to bed. If you put two dwellers in the living quarters and then turn the game off and go to bed, when you start the game in the morning, they will hug and go have sex.
However, if you wait around for them to have sex, and the woman is pregnant, then when you wake up in the morning the dweller will be ready to give birth. On a similar note, if you give birth just before going to bed, and then turn off the game and play in the morning, your child will be almost ready to grow up, if not having grown up already.
41 – Generators or Reactors May Offer a Trickle of Free Power
It is either that power generators and reactors give out a little free energy by simply existing, or there is some sort of power storage to capacity ratio that rewards you for having more power generation rooms.
I had a scenario where my energy was in the red and I was having troubling keeping things in the green. I placed a power generation room, and not only did I jump into the green, but I stayed there. I didn’t put a dweller in the room, but for some reason, my current power production was adequate to keep me in the green.
In short, if you are really having trouble keeping your energy supplies in the green, and you cannot add dwellers into your power generation rooms. Then, before you start deleting your rooms, try adding a power generation room or two. It may give you the edge you need to keep your power supplies in the green.
42 – Gather a Resource in Under a Minute Objectives
There are objectives where you have to gather water, power or food in under a minute. During the early game they are pretty easy, but they become more and more difficult as your vault progresses. They can actually become very frustrating, so here are a few tips on how to power through the more difficult ones.
Build several rooms with your desired resource. You will probably destroy most of these rooms later, but do upgrade the ones you intend to keep. Preferably, assign dwellers who have a high luck stat and/or who are wearing luck-boosting outfits. Having the right stat for the room in question is a big help too.
Each room doesn’t have to be fully staffed. In fact, in my vault, most rooms only had two people in them. Once this is done, leave the vault and either turn off the game, or go and play one of your other vaults for a while. If you leave the game long enough, then when you come back, all of your rooms should be charged, even the rooms with just one or two people in them.
This is when you do the big harvest and collect most of the resources you need. However, you are probably still going to have to rush some rooms. Try to rush the rooms that are upgraded so that you get more resources. Hopefully, your dwellers and their high luck stats will help you succeed with each room rush.
Sadly, if one of your room rushes fails before you reach the objective, then you will have to deal with whatever incident comes along, and then leave the game again to allow the rooms to recharge and to allows the incident success rates to reset. This is one of the reasons why these objectives are so frustrating because you rely on the room rush function, which means you need to rely on luck to complete these missions.
43 – Dealing With Pregnant Women
Send them back to work while they are pregnant because they will work just as well as they did before. Do not bother giving them guns because they will not use them. Give them outfits because the specials modifiers will still work, even though their outward appearance only shows them wearing yellow and blue.
Kids and pregnant women are invulnerable because they will go and hide, so do not worry about trying to shift them away from danger because they will run away from it and hide in their residence.
44 – Windowed View is Easier on Your CPU
In the options menu is the “Windowed” toggle. There were times when I played full screen and my PC’s fan was buzzing like a motor scooter engine. It usually happened when I had other programs running in the background. When I clicked the “Windowed” option, I noticed my fan stopped buzzing. If your computer is struggling a little, consider playing in the windowed view for a while.
45 – Revived Dwellers Can Still Complete Explore the Wasteland Objectives
Let’s say you get a quest that says something like, “Explore the Wasteland for X Amount of Hours.” You can still achieve the mission even if your dweller dies and is revived. Let’s say you need to explore for five hours, but your dweller dies before reaching the goal. If you revive the dweller, and leave the dweller out in the wasteland, the objective can still be completed.
A revived player can still achieve this objective. In my case, my dweller was supposed to explore the wasteland for six hours. She was on four hours when I went to bed. I woke up, and she had been out in the wasteland for seven hours, but was dead. Once I revived her, the objective was marked as completed.
I had another situation where I sent out a guy for an eighteen hour objective. At 17 hours and 32 minutes, he died. I revived him, and the 17 hours and 32 minutes was counted as part of the objective completion. Later, the guy completes the eighteen hour excursion and I receive the reward for it, even though he died and was revived part way through completing the objective.
46 – How To Find The Mysterious Stranger In Your Vault
As you know, there is a musical sting that occurs whenever the mysterious stranger is around. If you happen to be zoomed in on your vault, then the musical notification can be heard louder if you are closer to the mysterious stranger. However, since most people are zoomed out during most of the gameplay, this rarely helps you find the mysterious stranger. Still, some people claim they can use the volume of the musical sting notification to determine where the mysterious stranger is located. It is a sound effect, so you need only keep your sound turned up and not the music slider.
Look for the hidden guy in elevators. He is very easy to spot in an elevator because the green light is on, but the elevator is not moving up or down.
If you have an objective where you need to find the mysterious stranger a certain number of times, then you are better off playing the game windowed on your PC or laptop, and then do something else while you wait for the musical sting. If you are playing on a phone, then keep the game active so you can hear the music when it plays, but find something else to do while you wait.
On average, while the game is running, an event happens every three minutes, which may extend to up to ten if you interrupted by a random wasteland quest. This means that roughly every three minutes, one of three things will help. Your vault will be attacked from outside, your vault will suffer an incident inside, or you will see the mysterious stranger.
On very random occasions, two events can cross over. For example, you may hear the mysterious stranger music, and then seconds later a vault attack happens. However, it never works the other way around. You will never be under attack, or undergoing a vault event, and have the mysterious stranger show up. On a similar note, if you are rushing rooms repeatedly and causing incidents, you will not see mysterious strangers until things have calmed down.
One objective asked me to find the mysterious stranger eight times, which is usually an automatic skip for me because finding the stranger just once is tricky enough. But, it was offering a pet carrier, so I had to knuckle down. In the end, I equipped my dwellers with all my outfits and weapons, and I sold most of my rooms, keeping the most vital ones. Luckily, I was able to do this because I was still pretty early in the game. I did it so I didn’t have as many rooms to look through whenever I head the music sting. I left the game windowed on my PC and did something else, only running back to catch the mysterious stranger whenever I heard the musical sting.
47 – Understanding How The Training Rooms Work
If you have somebody in the training room and the timer is slowly counting down to them gaining a special stat, the dweller doesn’t lose his or her progress when you take put that dweller into a different room, just so long as you do it within the same play session.
Even if you take the dwellers out and have them do an unassociated task, such as having sex, then they still do not lose their training. Even if you move a dweller out of one training room and in to another, she or he will not lose his or her training progress.
48 – Revived Dwellers Lose Their Training Progress
The previous tip showed the ways that dwellers keep their training progress, but there are two ways they may lose it. The first is if you put them into a new room and then quit out of the game. The second is if they die. If a dweller dies during training, then all of his or her training progress is lost upon revival.
49 – Accept Every Random Wasteland Quest
Sometimes a random quest will appear and you may be attacked, or there is a vault incident before you can accept it. It doesn’t really matter because the quest will wait for the incident to finish, so you have a few more moments to click it before it expires.
Sending out dwellers into the wasteland is a good idea if they are getting in the way, or if you have no rooms for them to work in. It is also handy for picking up a few extra caps and junk. However, sending them out unarmed or with poor quality weapons runs the risk of them coming across a random encounter they cannot handle.
Even if that is the case, you should always accept and try every random quest. The first and most obvious reason for this is that you may still end up winning. The creatures you encounter may be very weak. Another reason is that you may have an encounter where there is no fighting at all. For example, there is a random quest where a person simply wants to join the vault. Plus, if you accept every quest the worst that can happen is that you have to pay to revive your dweller if he or she dies.
50 – Control The Direction of Enemy Attacks On Your Vault
I set up my vaults with barracks and residences at the top and only one elevator at the end. It makes it so that the enemies only ever attack in one direction.
Since I know the direction they are going to take, I can place my best fighters with their strongest weapons in the rooms that are hit first. The enemies rarely make it off this floor unless I have understaffed the level.
Building the vault in this manner takes a little planning from the beginning. Start your vault normally, and earn three thousand caps. Once you have done that, send your dwellers out into the wasteland and delete all your rooms (including the elevator at the start of the vault). Then, you can build a vault with elevators on the far right (like in the image above).
Why place a residence at the top and not something like a power generator, diner, or waterworks?
With this setup, the rooms at the very top cannot be deleted without first deleting every room and elevator in the vault. Rooms like the power, food and water rooms will need to be deleted later and upgraded. Such as the generator room being replaced by a reactor room. Whereas the residences stay the same the entire way through the game, so I stick them at the top.
51 – Scrapping Weapons is Often Better Than Selling Them
The ideal goal is to work towards a vault where you only have legendary weapons, but even in the early game, most of the weapons should be scrapped rather than sold.
Junk is more difficult to find than the caps you get for selling your gun. Unless you are short on storage space, you should probably scrap your low powered weapons and use the junk to craft new items later in the game.
Rarer weapons are worth more caps, but you also get better crafting items when you scrap better weapons. Do not worry too much about caps because by the later game you will have more than you know what to do with. Whereas it is time-consuming trying to get rare junk from the wasteland and quests.
I realize that when you scrap an item that there is a risk of not getting any scrap at all, but it is often a risk worth taking simply because finding rare scrap any other way takes a very long time. Plus, there are many rare and legendary outfits/weapons that you will never use, so you may as well turn them into scrap.
52 – Failing Quests Becomes a Problem
It probably goes without saying that you should prepare pretty well for your quests. Making sure to give your dwellers the best outfits and plenty of Stimpaks and Radaways. Do not give them your best weapons because at least the top six should stay in your vaults.
If you fail a quest and die, you will need to pay to revive your dwellers, and you cannot give them extra gear or Stimpaks, you can only re-do the mission the same way you started it. If you do not have the required caps right now, you can leave your dwellers dead and go back to your vault to grind up some more money.
If you want, you can revive your dwellers, start the mission, and then abandon it. Go home, and the quest will re-appear in your quest screen. You may then pick it later when you have better dwellers or better equipment.
The good news is that if you revive your dwellers and retry the quest without going home to the vault first, then the game area doesn’t change. Enemy locations stay the same, as do the locations of room items. This means that if you die during a quest, you can revive your dwellers and try again and you can do things like avoid some of the enemies and run straight to the boss. Or, perhaps harvest up some of the empty rooms first and then take on the enemies.
53 – The Easiest Quest in the Game
By far, the easiest quest in the game is mission four in the “Journey to the center of Vaultopolis.”
It only takes thirty minutes to get there, and you receive rewards that includes two Nuka colas, and a pet carrier, which are two very valuable rewards. When you get there, the vault is just one room, and you have three options for your reply. No matter what your reply, the mission is complete, you cannot get it wrong. Click the items in the room, collect your prizes, and then breeze on home. It is the easiest quest and probably the quickest too.
54 – Dwellers Do Not Level Up in the Radio Room
No matter what you have the dweller doing in the radio room, he or she will not gain any level progress, unlike in other rooms where dwellers gain leveling experience for working.
To test it, I had a lady dweller spend three and a half minutes in the radio room and her experience doesn’t rise at all. Whereas a different lady who was also at level 22, was left in a power room, and after a minute it was obvious that her experience had grown a little.
Also, as a side note, when a room is ready to be harvested, the dwellers stop working inside it. This means that while a dweller is in a room that is waiting to be harvested, the dweller is not earning experience points. They also do not earn experience points for guarding the vault door.
55 – Mr Handy Does Not Count as a Weapon or a Casualty
You are going to come across missions that tell you to kill a certain number of creatures without using a weapon. This means your dwellers cannot have any weapons equipped. Even if you take the weapon out of the dweller’s hand before he or she shoots, it is still considered use of a weapon. Every room that the enemies enter needs to be filled with dwellers who have already been stripped of their weapons. However, even though Mr Handy has a flame thrower, his use in battle is not considered the same as using a weapon.
Does it Count As “No Casualties” Too?
If Mr Handy dies during an attack, it does not count as a casualty. If you have objectives that tells you to kill enemies/attackers without taking any casualties, it is okay if your Mr Handy dies. You will still get the objective completion notification.
56 – Perform a Number of Perfect Critical Hits
Take some of your higher leveled players to a quest that only requires lower level dwellers. Equip weak hand guns and take the maximum amount of Stimpaks and Radaways. Try to send dwellers with a higher perception rate, or at least dress them in outfits that increase perception because this will slow down the critical hit feature. If you can also send in dwellers with a higher luck statistic, then that is good too because it will generate more critical hits.
The point of all this is to take on the quest where your dwellers shoot as many shots as possible. That is why you take lower powered weapons because each enemy will require more shots before being killed. You take higher leveled dwellers on lower-leveled quests, and you take plenty of healing items, because you do not want your dwellers to die while they are chipping away at enemy health. Higher leveled dwellers have more life, and so are less likely to die during the mission, which is a real possibility since the enemies will also get many chances to hit back at your dwellers.
57 – Timing the Critical Hits
Different tipsters offer different methods. My favorite method is to count five oscillations before hitting, which I feel helps me get the rhythm. When I have a run of bad luck with the critical hits, I just look away and will sometimes hit a perfect critical by chance.
To make things easier on yourself, use players with a high luck stat because they get more critical hits. Players with high agility will shoot more frequently, which may help you generate more critical hits in a shorter space of time. Also, dwellers with high perception have slower critical hit meters, which may be helpful if you have an objective asking you to get perfect critical hits.
58 – The Size Of A Training Room Doesn’t Directly Alter Its Effectiveness
The size of the training room doesn’t appear to change how effective it is. For example, if you were to take a room with four people inside. Then you increase the training room to a full-sized three segment room, you will notice that the completion times do not change. Upgrading your training room will affect how quickly people train up, but the size itself will not. However, as you see in the next tip, there is a way to make training room sizes work for you.
59 – How To Make Training Rooms More Efficient
The first and most obvious way to make training rooms more efficient is to upgrade them. The more upgraded the room is, then the quicker the dwellers are trained.
You can also make your training rooms more efficient by creating full sized training rooms with three segments. As stated in the previous tip, the room size does not directly affect how efficient the training room is. But, the more people you put into a training room, then the less time it takes each dweller to level up one special stat. The most efficient way to train people up is to merge three rooms, fill it to capacity with six people, and upgrade the room to level three.
60 – Crafting Legendary Weapons
In the weapons factory, you can craft common weapons. Upgrade it once, and you can create rare weapons. Once you have 75 dwellers, you may upgrade your weapon’s factory so you may create legendary weapons. The problem is that you also need 60,000 caps, which is not easy to come by.
Getting the legendary weapons factory upgrade should be a bit of a priority because your time is better spent crafting legendary weapons than crafting rare or common ones. However, since the price is so prohibitively high, I wouldn’t suggest rushing all the way up to 75 dwellers until you have close to 60,000 caps.
61 – Put Pregnant Women in Training Rooms
During the later stages of the game, when enemies become very strong, it may be worth putting pregnant women into training rooms. They are non-combatants, which means they will abandon a room whenever it is attacked, leaving whomever is left to fight alone, which may become a problem during Deathclaw attacks.
Let’s say you have a room with four people in, and two of them are pregnant. If there is a dangerous attack from Deathclaws or Radscorpions, the two pregnant women will run off, leaving just two behind to fight the battle. You can always send other people in during the attack to help out, but your two dwellers may be dead before backup arrives.
62 – Arranging Your Dwellers For Better Efficiency
If you are getting into the game, and are planning on spending a long time going hardcore on the game, then make arranging your dwellers easier by naming them based on what they are best at doing.
For example, dwellers with a high strength rating could be named “Power” because they work best in the power generation rooms. The great thing is that you do not have to name them Power 01 and Water 02 because the game doesn’t mind duplicate names. If you pick up these dwellers to do other things, like go on a quest, you know by their name where to put them back, which makes using the clipboard function a lot more efficient.
63 – Merge Two Rooms Objective
The cheapest way to complete this mission is to buy the cheapest room, and buy another next to it to merge the rooms. Destroy the double room you created and repeat the process until the objective is complete.
Whenever you buy a room, its price goes up for the next time you buy it. When you destroy the room, prices return back to what they were. This makes the build and destroy method the cheapest and fastest way to complete the merge room objective.
64 – The Craft a Number of Outfits Objective
Pick the quickest outfit to create and then increase the stats of each dweller to make it go even quicker. The pre-war suburbanite or Polka dot dress takes very little time. For example, pick the Polka Dot sundress, and fill your workshop with dwellers with high intelligence because that is the stat that makes polka dot dresses manufacture more quickly. Give the dwellers outfits that increase their intelligence too, such as the lab coat, and you can produce outfits fairly quickly.
65 – Survive X Feral Ghoul Attacks With No Casualties
Have 6 people in the first utility room with 7+ damage weapons in order to slaughter all the Ghouls in one go. Have at least 35 people in your vault, not just a population of 35 people, there needs to at least 35 dwellers present in your vault. Having over fifty people in your vault will increase the frequency of attacks.
Luckily, Feral Ghouls attack in groups of six, and each one you kill counts towards your objective. This means if you have one of the “x2 objective completion” or “x3 objective completion” pets equipped to somebody in the same room as the killing, then the mission can be over in just one attack. However, the objective completion pets are notoriously difficult to get.
66 – Kill X Radscorpions Without A Weapon
Keep your in-vault population to above fifty dwellers. Build a small single medbay with no upgrades. Put two dwellers in there and a Mr Handy. Give them your most powerful weapons, and keep rushing the room until you have completed the mission. If your dwellers are having a hard time taking out the RadScorpions before they move on, then put in some higher-leveled dwellers.
67 – Even Dwellers With Maxed Out Stats Should Be Outfitted
Even if a dweller has a maxed out special stat, you can still give that dweller an outfit for extra stats. Give your dwellers outfits even if said dwellers have full special stats already.
As you can see from the image above, even if the dweller has a full ten stat in something, an outfit can bump that number up by another seven. Plus, this is not a ghost number or inactive addition, you will actually notice a difference between dwellers with a 10 stat and those with a 17 stat.
There is an online rumor that says your dweller becomes immune from radiation if he or she has 11 Endurance, but this is untrue. There is some rumor that it makes them immune to radiation in the wasteland, but I was unable to test that theory to my satisfaction.
In the vault, there is no stat, from 1 to 10, or 10 to 17, that makes dwellers immune to radiation. Inside the vault, all dwellers are susceptible to radiation either from not having enough water, to being attacked by radiated enemies.
Oddly, dwellers with a higher level also have a bigger health bar and radiation bar. This means if you were to put a level 1 dweller with 17 stats in endurance, in the same radioactive environment as a level 27+ dweller with 1 stat in endurance, the level 1 dweller would die first.
68 – Some Pets are Almost Game Breakers …And…They…Are…Awesome
There are some pets you can find that are so good they are almost game breakers. If you receive them, you can start jumping around with giddy glee because your game is about to get a lot easier. Here are some that I consider to be game breakers.
The wasteland junk pets are fairly common, but when a pet has a very high percentage, it makes the game a lot easier. Over a full day in the wasteland, and your dweller brings home awesome amounts of loot that will make your future crafting efforts a lot easier.
This one (above) may seem like no big deal, but if you have this pet, plus the Dragon’s Maw weapon, and you have a level 50 dweller with 10 stats into agility and the expert jumpsuit, then you have the ultimate killing machine. As a side note, with Agility at ten, and with the expert jumpsuit, your dweller fires so frequently that fights with multiple enemies can be over in a matter of minutes. On quests, if you have all of this and the Polly Plus Six, your dweller shoots almost continuously, and deals a minimum of 28 damage each time, and up to a maximum of 35 damage each time. The fire hydrant bat is more powerful than the Dragon’s Maw weapon, but is not as reliably efficient since its damage ranges from between 19 and 31, as opposed to the Dragon Maw’s 22 – 29.
Trench, with his four times wasteland return speed is my second favorite pet of all time. He allows you to burn your way through the quests by allowing you to return in a fraction of the time it takes to normally return. Plus, it also means you can send out dwellers for a full day, and have them return with their high-value loot in just a day. However, Trench is only my second favorite. The best pet in the game, as agreed by everybody, is the most coveted pet of them all. It is DogMeat.
Yes, Dogmeat, the Fallout fan favorite and star of ooh so many memes. Dogmeat allows you to complete up to three objectives in just one go. For example, if you need three Stimpaks, you can attach Dogmeat, produce a single Stimpak, and three are counted.
There is a Vault-Tec parrot who also has a x2 or x3 objective completion, and I suppose they count too, but Dogmeat will always be my favorite in this game.
There are many objective challenges that normally take ages, but are sped up considerably by Dogmeat and/or Pip the parrot. Even the annoying ones like equipping people with weapons can be sped through if the is attached to the dweller because every single equip is counted as three.
There is a cat that offers uninterrupted training. It isn’t specifically a game breaker, but it is very handy simply having a dweller training round the clock. It makes the creation of fully maxed out dwellers a whole lot quicker and more convenient.
69 – Evict or Remove People And Their Stuff is Auto-Stored
If you decide to evict somebody, then do not worry about stripping them of their stuff. When you click to evict, their stuff is stored automatically. This is also true if the dweller died while in your vault and you decide to remove the dweller.
However, if somebody dies in the wasteland, and you decide to remove that dweller, then all of that dweller’s possessions will disappear, including the items that dweller had when he or she left the vault.
70 – Give Your Disposable Dwellers a Pet in the Wasteland
According to the Fallout Shelter tips screen, “Pets equipped to dead Dwellers that are not revived during quests will return to the vault.”
That is what they say about quests but, what about when you send dwellers out to the wasteland with a pet? Does your pet return?
I sent out a dweller with a pet. After just over 13 hours in the wasteland, the dweller died. I clicked to remove the dweller, the screen asked if I was sure, and I clicked yes. As I flipped back through the wasteland menu, I saw that the pet cat was making its way back to the vault, and it was carrying all of the dweller’s caps and junk. Later, the cat arrived at a vault, and I was able to collect all of its items.
71 – Provoking DeathClaws to Complete Objectives
If you have an objective that calls for DeathClaws, then make sure you have at least 61 dwellers present in your vault. Also, put people in your radio room and have them calling out for recruits. After accepting a new recruit, there is a high chance that a pack of DeathClaws will attack very shortly afterwards.
72 – Sell Off Green Junk and Weapons
When you are in the late game stages when you have the legendary weapons and outfit workshops, you can start selling off your green junk and weapons. You are going to quickly accrue far more green items than you will ever need, to the point where your storage will quickly become full almost every day. Get into the habit of selling off your green stuff when you are playing in the later game. It saves having to build and support room after room of storage area.
73 – Scrapping Rare and Legendary Weapons and Outfits
Continuing on from the last tip, do not feel obliged to keep legendary and rare outfits and weapons. During the later game when you have the ability to make your own weapons and outfits, you will be crying out for the right type of junk. Scrap some of the legendary items and outfits that you have, and use the parts to make the sort of legendary weapons that you really want. Some of the legendary and rare items are not that great and not that strong, but the junk they offer can help you create some very strong and very useful weapons and outfits.
74 – You Can Scrap Outfits To Get Junk for Weapons
When you get into rare and legendary item crafting, you will be aching for yet another piece to complete your item. Rather unintuitively, the loot you get from outfits is the sort of loot you can also use when crafting weapons. My point being that if you desperately need a piece of junk for a weapon, and you don’t want to scrap any of your current weapons, consider scrapping your rare or legendary outfits.
75 – The Most Efficient Harvesting Method
Let’s say that you have a bunch of dwellers with high stats, and they are in a fully upgraded room. They are probably going to produce at a fairly fast and consistent rate. The most efficient way to collect is to have a single Mr Handy stationed in the room. Watch for yourself when you play and note how quickly the Mr Handy harvests the room when there is just one room on the level.
Compare this with a level that is full of rooms, and look at how long it takes for the Mr Handy to reach the power room that needs harvesting. Though having a single room is the most efficient method for harvesting rooms, you can only have one Mr Handy per level, which means one productive room per level.
This may not be a problem to most because most players have plenty of space under their vault to experiment with. Under normal circumstances, the single-efficient room method is too much of a waste of space. But, the isolated rooms will not allow incidents to spread, except for RadScorpion attacks, and the single Mr Handy harvesting from one room is very efficient, so this playing method may appeal to some.
76 – Build Medical Rooms For Stockpiling Healing Goods
As you may have noticed, when you upgrade your storage rooms, the amount of junk, weapons and items you may store goes up. For example, when you upgrade, you may see your storage capacity go from 900 storage, upgrade to 945, and upgrade again to 995.
However, when you upgrade a medical room like a medbay, it shows the total amount of medical storage for the entire vault. As you upgrade, you do not see the storage amount go up. This is because you gain storage capacity per single medical room that you build, not by how much your rooms are upgraded.
If you want to improve your Stimpack storage capacity, you need to build more rooms rather than upgrading them. In fact, in the late game, you should probably have levels full of medibays. The same rules apply for science labs and Radaways, but I wouldn’t recommend you build similarly large rooms because you will use Stimpaks more than Radaways, so there is no need to store as many RadAaways as you do Stimpaks.
If you are building medical rooms simply to improve your storage capacity, then do not upgrade these rooms. That way, any incidents that spawn in them will be fairly weak and easy to deal with. Only upgrade the medical rooms that you actually intend to use for Stimpack and Radaway generation.
77 – Protecting Areas That Are Exposed to Dirt
Your bottom floor is probably going to be exposed to the dirt, which means you are vulnerable to molerat attacks. As your base grows, you may have trouble kitting out your dwellers with weapons. As the molerats move up through your base, they can cause a fair amount of disruption that makes the game more difficult.
For that reason, I would suggest that your bottom floor has dwellers assigned to every room, and that the dwellers be pretty well armed. With any luck, they will quickly deal with whatever crawls up through the earth, and the rest of your base will go un-MOLE-ested.
I have known quite a few people in forums tout the benefits of building elevators all the way along the bottom to stop molerat attacks from coming through. I may recommend this, but it gets very expensive.
If you do try the elevator method, know that it becomes nullified if you build rooms below the elevators. Let’s say you build your line of elevators, and then build rooms under those. The rooms below are not considered isolated. This means that molerats will attack the lower rooms, and then burrow their way up past the elevators and attack your other rooms.
78 – The Nuka-Cola Bottler Does Not Produce Nuka Cola Bottles
The final room you can unlock is the Nuka-Cola bottler room. But, don’t get excited because it doesn’t give you Nuka Cola bottles. It is a room that produces food and water, and is best operated by dwellers who have a high Endurance stat. You need 100 dwellers to unlock it.
Fallout Shelter is a Good Game
This is supposed to be the part where I heap praise on the game near very end of my article, but, I honestly think there is a part of me that seriously resents this game.
You see, the logic is that a game has to be good, otherwise I wouldn’t have spent months obsessively experimenting to find the best way to play. But, there is something about the game that grinds my gears, and I think, the problem is that the game brushes oh so closely to greatness, that I find it very frustrating.
For a freemium game, it does a lot of things right. There is nothing in the game that you cannot earn with grinding. It doesn’t make you wait to build rooms, it’s waiting times for room harvesting and dweller training are not oppressive, and the game is pretty well balanced all in all.
What frustrates me even more is that the game is perfect for dropping back in and out again during the day, when even if I only spend five minutes on the game, I still feel like I have achieved something.
The problem is that every time I have played, I reach a certain point in the game where there is simply nothing of interest left to do. The moment of realization is always violently abrupt. I will have all the rooms unlocked, most of the weapons unlocked, and a bunch of super dwellers, and suddenly, I hit a wall where the game is no longer fun. The moment the struggle to progress is removed, the game fun grinds to a halt, and it is hard to keep playing.
I think what I am saying is that I give the game a thumbs up, and I do recommend that you download and enjoy it, especially since it’s free. But, I will balance that statement by encouraging you to take it slow when you play because its actually the struggle that is the best part of the game. Once you have the best stuff, the best dwellers, and the best vault, the fun kinda stops. Though, with that said, if they created a paid sequel, then yeah, I would buy it.
Additional – Rumours I Could Not Disprove
These are just a few things that people online have said that I couldn’t prove or disprove with testing. The problem I have is that many of the games functions rely on random mechanics. What some people call the a game’s RNG. In some cases, I can work around this problem, but here are the cases where I couldn’t.
Weapons With Ranges Are Not Random Damage Weapons
Take the example of the enhanced sawed-off shotgun with a damage range of 6 to 8. Most people take that to mean that your gun will do a random amount of damage of between 6, 7 and/or 8. however, some say this is incorrect. Some say that when you are fighting on a quest, if you are shooting somebody next to you, then the damage is 8, and if you are shooting somebody at a distance, then the damage is 6 points.
This brings me to the melee weapons. For example, it seems odd that the baseball bat does between five and fifteen damage. It seems so random, until you consider that you do fifteen damage to the enemy stood next to you, and only five damage to people across the room.
Melee Weapons Do More Damage if You Have High Strength Stats
This I could not prove, but many people believe it was grandfathered in from the larger Fallout games. The wiki also says that people with higher strength stats will get better items from lockers in quests, but I couldn’t prove this either.
Different Weapons Work Better Against Different Enemies
Though I cannot prove this, I do know that if you take three area of effect weapons into a quest, such as three Fat Man weapons, then the bosses seem to take an overly long time to die. I also know that in the vault, the legendary area of effect weapons are very powerful, so consider only taking one area of effect weapon on quests.
Some rumours include whispers that the Rusty fat man is not as effective against ghouls, but works well against raiders. Flame thrower is good against ghouls, focused plasma pistol is okay / bad against ghouls.
The flame thrower is moderately effective against RadScorpions if the dwellers have high agility so they can get more shots off.
Tactical junk jet with 13-15 hit points seems to work better on ghouls than the rusty flame thrower with 15 hit points.
Rusty Weapons Shoot More Slowly
The rumor is that rusty weapons offer more damage per shot than their regular, hardened, and enhanced varieties because they actually shoot slower. I cannot prove this, but it would certainly explain why something like a rusty plasma pistol does more damage than an enhanced pistol.
Playing For Longer Reduces Vault Attack Frequencies
I cannot prove this one, because incidents and vault attacks are so very random. But vault attacks from outside do appear to be less frequent if I have had the game running for a few hours. I will often have it on in the corner of my screen as I am doing something else, and it does seem that the longer I play, the less frequent the vault attacks become. But, as I say, because of the way the game is randomized, I can’t prove it.
The Game Has Poorly Defined Weapon Recognition
Have you ever had the mission where you need to equip a certain number of players with a weapon. The classic method is to strip every dweller of their gun, and then go through each dweller manually and give each a gun.
However, while undertaking this process, have you ever noticed that you give your weapon to a dweller, and that weapon doesn’t register as being equipped by the objectives counter? Some people say this is because of a poor quality weapon recognition function in the game.
For example, let’s say you give the dweller a plasma pistol and it doesn’t register, you can try the enhanced plasma pistol, or the rusty plasma pistol, and the objectives system may recognize different gun variety as an equipped gun.
The Game Clock Stops Counting After Not Being Played For Over 24 Hours
Let’s say you leave the game for a full day and then return, and you notice some of your dwellers in the wasteland are dead and some are alive.
However, if you were to leave the game and then come back in five months, the items in the inventory would still be good, but some dwellers would be dead and some would be alive.
Those alive are not super human. The rumored theory is that the game clock pauses if you leave the game for over a day. This makes sense because the developers are not likely to reward people for leaving game for days and weeks. It is likely they would limit the benefits and negative sides of leaving the game for long stretches.
Violence on Random Quests Gets You Better Rewards
As you can imagine, the randomness of this game makes testing this almost impossible, but it does make a smattering of sense. There are many times in random quests where you can opt to simply leave without conflict, you can become friendly with one or both sets of people in the quest locations, or you can choose an option that starts a conflict–that option often being to insult the people you are talking to. This makes sense because if you are using a dweller with a high level, a good weapon, and plenty of Stimpaks, then choosing the violent option is a justifiable risk.
On the other hand, if you are limping along with little health or a poor quality weapon, a friendly option allows you to either walk away empty handed, or walk away with a bit of loot. This all makes sense, but as I say, it is very difficult to prove. Plus, I cannot be sure other game mechanics are not at play. For example, am I meeting more friendly characters because I have a higher charisma rating? Is my current intelligence level the reason for the high quality loot? It is just too randomized to be sure.
You Can Still Find Legendary Weapons in the Wasteland
I am pretty sure you cannot find legendary weapons in the wasteland, but there are still posts online where people claim they got them. It is possible to get them from random wasteland quests. Is it not possible that people did random quests, forgot about it, came back the day after and saw their dweller with a legendary item and mistakenly believed it was picked up organically in the wild. In the earlier versions of the game you could get legendary weapons in the wasteland without having to do a wasteland quest. I believe it is no longer possible, but I cannot prove it.
Batman Lost His Parents
I rigged the image below to show one of my characters being named Batman and having his parents died within the game.
It actually took me a while to think this one up because I had quite a few ideas in mind for this joke picture. Here are a few other ideas I had for the meme/joke picture.
Luke Skywalker (Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru) Harry Potter (James Potter and Lily Potter) Superman (His real Krypton parents) Cinderella Tarzan Elsa and Anna (Frozen) Nemo (Just the mum) Lion King (Just the dad) Bambi (Just the mum) Spider Man (Uncle Ben)
Should I Spend Real Money On An Anything?
Normally, I would say no because Freemium games are a plague on honest gamers. However, Bethesda has really put a lot of work into this game and it is of a very high quality. If you are gong to spend money on anything, then buy a Mr Handy. You can earn them for free if you play for long enough, but they are real time savers because they save you having to click room after room after room.
All I will say is that you should play the game for a few days first to be sure you don’t get bored with it. Plus, buying things is almost like cheating, and you should enjoy the game before making the game easier on yourself.
Finally, you need to play for a few days and fill your vault with dwellers to see if your game experiences crashes. Some people have complained that when they get over 100 dwellers they have crashes.
I have played on my PC for a few weeks now, and I have known the game to crash when I delete rooms, but everything is okay when I re-load. Your experience may differ, so play it a few days before you start buying things. Mr Handy removes a lot of the grind.
My 2+ Child Specials Experiment
In order to see what the +2 Child Specials pet does, I did a little experiment. I couldn’t put these results in the main area of my article because no matter how many tests I did, I couldn’t be sure the results were not tainted by complete randomness. Below is a short example of one of my tests.
Used Yuki dog that has “+2 child specials” quality. I gave the dog to the woman.
The man was level 4 with these stats:
S1 P1 E2 C2 I2 A3 L9
The woman was level 18 with these stats:
S2 P2 E1 C1 I1 A2 L9
Baby 1
S4 P4 E3 C3 I4 A3 L5
Baby 2
S4 P3 E4 C4 I3 A4 L5
Baby 3
S4 P3 E4 C3 I3 A4 L5
Baby 4
S5 P3 E4 C3 I4 A3 L4
As you can see above, most of the numbers are a little elevated. As you can see, the dwellers both had a high luck stat, and usually they only produce children with L3 or L4, but in this case they created a child and L5 and L4. Also, despite the fact that the parents have Low S, P , E, C and A, they still produced a child with 3s and 4s in those areas. They even created a child with an S5. In short, the “+2 Child Specials” stat seems to bump up dweller’s children’s stats on a random basis, but is still worth having and using.
This Fallout Shelter Tips and Tricks is 16,400 Words Long
Did you know that this article on Fallout Shelter Tips and Tricks is over 16,400 words long? I just realized it as I uploaded it. That is larger than most University dissertations, and is double the size of your average 99c or 99p book on Amazon. I had no idea it was this long. I just kept writing all I knew about the game. Who would have thought there was this much to say about a Freemium game. Also, congrats to you for reading all the way to the end, you a pretty diligent reader, which is a talent all of its own in this day and age.
Anyway, if you would like to get in touch with me, then you will have to do it through the comments section on my YouTube videos. Here is a link to the video version of this article. I used to have comments sections on this website, but I got so much spam that it wasn’t worth it in the end.
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