Show Your Fallout Shelter -- and Tips!

Welcome!

Hello, my fellow Giant Bomb Duders! Like many of you, I have been addicted to Fallout Shelter since its announcement/release during Bethesda's E3 2015 press conference. Due to it's relative complex nature and mechanics, there much frustrating trial-and-error. However, there can be a lot of reward and great feeling of accomplishment, seeing your shelter grow and develop into a well-oiled machine of an underground city.

It will be good to have a place where all of us can post pictures of and experiences with our personal Fallout Shelters, as well as any tips you have learned along the way about how to maximize the development and efficiency of a shelter.

Community Tips

I will read through all of the posts in this thread and provide a concise, but thorough and informative collection of helpful tips covering all aspects of Fallout Shelter. Know of a tip that isn't listed? Or perhaps an already listed tip that can be expanded upon or better? Post them in the thread, and I will add them to the main post!

Dwellers

The citizens of your Vault are called "dwellers". They are the key to the success of your Vault!

Health

• If a dweller is stricken with radiation - either through water shortage or while exploring the Wasteland - a red bar will appear on their health bar, meaning their max HP is decreased by the size of that red bar. Give them RadAway packs to get back your max HP. They also seem to lessen radiation level very slowly over time.
• Dwellers will regenerate health gradually over time, if there is enough food, and fully regenerate when they level up.

Food

• Have the requirement level at about a third, or half at most, of the bar. Raider attacks will deplete your resources quicker than you realize. (@dudeglove)
• If your food levels fall below the requirement, your dwellers' HP will start depleting gradually.

Water

• As with food, have your requirement level at 1/3-1/2 of the bar.
• If your water resources fall below the line, your dwellers will start developing radiation sickness, decreasing their overall max HP.

Happiness

• Building a radio station now only allows outsiders to find you, but it also increases the happiness of the dwellers stationed in all parts of the Vault. Just make sure to have at least 2 people manning the radio station - and that they have high Charisma levels - one for operating the outside broadcast and another for playing/singing music for your inside dwellers.
• If you have male and female dwellers with low happiness levels, get them into a barracks and have them "knock boots". Both the pregnant female and male will then automatically have 100% happiness. (@dudeglove)

Earning Caps

Just as in the rest of the Fallout universe, bottle caps are the currency you use to expand and upgrade your vault. There are many ways of earning caps:

• Depending on the total Luck value of the workers in a room, there is a % chance that the room will reward you with caps. (@dudeglove)
• Successfully rushing production in a room will earn you extra caps. (@dudeglove)
• Every time a dweller levels up, you will be rewarded with the number of caps relative to their new level. Example: a dweller leveling up to Level 20 will reward you with 20 caps. (@dudeglove)
• Every time a dweller increases a S.P.E.C.I.A.L. skill when in a training room, you will be awarded caps. (@dudeglove)
• Caps can be earned if you receive a Caps Reward card in lunchboxes. (@dudeglove)
• The game gives you a daily report that rewards you caps based on the overall happiness of the dwellers in your Vault. (@dudeglove)
• To earn a lot of caps, send dwellers with high Luck levels out into the Wasteland. In about 24 hours, a dweller with 9 Luck can rake in 3,000-4000 caps. (@dudeglove)

Expansion of your Vault

• When expanding your Vault, make sure to do so in this order: Power -> Food/Water -> Population Cap. You will first need power to run the rooms making your food and water, which you need both of to keep your dwellers alive and happy. (@excitable_misunderstood_genius)

Merging Rooms

• Always make 3x merged rooms. The Vault grid only gives you 8 slots across (2 of the 10 slots you should use for elevators), so fill the 2x slots with storage and population rooms. (@excitable_misunderstood_genius)

Outfitting Your Dwellers

Along your journey, you will receive different outfits and weapons by either acquiring lunchboxes by completing quests or by sending out dwellers to explore the Wasteland. You can equip these outfits and weapons to any dwellers in your Vault.

Clothes

• Dress your dwellers in outfits that will enhance the specific skill for their jobs. Get your radio staff in nightwear, food staff in jumpsuits, water staff in armored vault suits, science staff in lab coats, and power staff in military fatigues. (@excitable_misunderstood_genius)

Weapons

• Arm every dweller as soon as you can, and upgrade their weapons when you bring in new ones (either through lunchboxes or Wasteland exploration). Once you have all of your dwellers armed with your best weapons, start selling off any unnecessary weapons (unless you are planning on a population boom). (@excitable_misunderstood_genius)

Population

• Prepare for population booms. If you are going to have a multitude of pregnant dwellers before you go to sleep at night, they are all going to give birth when you turn the game on again after you wake up in the morning. So, you will want to be sure to have the food and water resources necessary to sustain them. (@excitable_misunderstood_genius)

Raider Attacks

• Take two of your best dwellers, armed with the best available armor and weapons, and place them at your Vault Door. They should take care of at least 2 of the raiders before they leave the room. The Raiders will always go to the next available room, so arm the dwellers in the next adjacent room with the best available weapons. If any raiders survive past the Vault Door, they will be quickly mowed down in this room.

Room Assignments

• Since all rooms have a specific S.P.E.C.I.A.L. skill designated to it, assign the dwellers with the highest level of the skill specific to that room (Strength for Power Generators, etc.). The higher the specific skill level of the dwellers in the room, the more efficient that room is at production.
• Do not place too many pregnant women in a room at one time. Pregnant women (along with children) run away from crisis situations, resulting in the crisis spreading to other rooms or the dwellers left in the room to possibly die. (@excitable_misunderstood_genius)

Rushing Production

If your need, or just like to have, more resources immediately, you can choose to "rush" production of any room, except radio station rooms, giving you the resources immediately.

• Each room has an Incident: __%, meaning that there is that percent chance that rushing the room will fail, causing an incident in that room - either a fire or radroach infestation.
• Consecutive rushes, successful or failed, steadily increase the rush failure %. Let the some time pass before trying to rush the same room again, so that the success/failure rate can cool down to it's normal levels.
• The happiness of the dwellers in a room affecsts how successful that room can be rushed. Repeated successful rushes decrease the dwellers' happiness ratings, adding into the already increased new success/failure rate of the room after rushing production. (@dudeglove)

Training Rooms

• Get your six 3x training rooms up and running and cycle your dwellers through as needed. They train more quickly the higher level they are and the more people that are in there. For the most effective training, move through them in 6x dweller waves. (@excitable_misunderstood_genius)

Wasteland Exploration

The easiest way to acquire new outfits and weapons (as well as more caps!) is to send out your Vault dwellers into the Wasteland to explore.

• While it's not a requirement, it is always good to send out explorers with a high level. A dweller's level determines their HP, and there are plenty of dangers lying out in the Wasteland!
• Make sure that your explorers have a decent outfit and weapon to survive and fight. If an dweller dies out in the Wasteland, they cannot be revived and the loot they accumulated will be lost.
• Equip your explorers with as many stimpaks and RadAway packs as possible. With enough of each, even your lower equipped/leveled dwellers will survive for a while.
• Your explorers' S.P.E.C.I.A.L. levels affects how the outcomes of the encounters in the Wasteland. Though, as of now, it is not known which skill affects which encounter you will find in the Wasteland. (@excitable_misunderstood_genius)
• The only S.P.E.C.I.A.L. skill known to have an affect in the Wasteland is your explorers' Luck level, which determines the amount of caps you will find while exploring. (@donbert)

Giant Bomb Duder Vaults!

Here will be a gallery to show off all our of our Giant Bomb Fallout Vaults.

This game looks so good, I hope it will come also for android.

It should be, eventually.

Game moves way to slow, for me to get into it.

Because it's a mobile game that you're meant to play for small chunks of time, put down, and then come back to in a few hours.

@citizenkane: So in one of the initial lunchboxes from missions I got a dweller called Billy Jenkins with really high charisma. So I've just been cycling all of the women in the vault through his apartment and killing off all the men. Eventually I got another male dweller with high charisma and after I realized I can't breed children with their parents I decided to keep 2 males around in order to have a breeding rotation.

Basically what I'm getting at is that everyone in my vault is called Jenkins or Sanders.

I must be glitched because a few of my dwellers haven't given birth in like three days (real time).

I've tried moving them back to the barracks and not sending out any dwellers to the wasteland but they just stay pregnant no matter what I do or how much time passes, it seems.

Do you have enough living quarters to fit the kids? You might be at your population limit.

@combustion_man said:

@citizenkane: So in one of the initial lunchboxes from missions I got a dweller called Billy Jenkins with really high charisma. So I've just been cycling all of the women in the vault through his apartment and killing off all the men. Eventually I got another male dweller with high charisma and after I realized I can't breed children with their parents I decided to keep 2 males around in order to have a breeding rotation.

Basically what I'm getting at is that everyone in my vault is called Jenkins or Sanders.

Congratulations, you made a vault that could actually fit in the Fallout lore. I envy you.

Nah I've got more than enough space, I'm at 21/40. I decided to get another one of my dwellers pregnant and they gave birth before the glitched dwellers did so I'm not really sure what to do with them at this point.

Is there a way to stop explorers just dying when I stop playing for a day? Why is this game so needy? I assume they auto use med pacs they have on them but no idea.

I too have some permanantly pregnant dwellers, which is a real bummer considering they are useless for events.

Still nice stat buffers for rooms though. Just make sure you don't have a water room full of high perception pregnant women or something though.

If you're sending them out, and they're not above ~level 30, you should either only send them out for a few hours or be sure to load them with a significant amount of stim packs and rad away. They do use it automatically. Also, most of the time the revive is worth it because they're carrying more caps on them than the cost of the revive.

They really need to figure out why some pregnant dwellers just never give birth. One of my dwellers has been pregnant since the game launched. I moved her to do work right after she came out of the room so I think that could be the issue.

Just wanted to stop in here to vent and say FUCK RADROACHES. Wiped out the entire population of the Vault I spent a week building in about two minutes. Rage deleted the app and don't intend to go back.

Initial Tips:

1) Always make 3x merged rooms. Always. The board only gives you 8 slots to work with though so fill in the 2xs with storage rooms and population rooms as needed.

2) Arm and outfit every single dweller as soon as you can. Upgrade their weapons when you bring new ones in. Dwellers with enhanced sawed-offs will do way better against a radroach infestation than Dwellers with a rusty .32. Once you have your dwellers outfitted with your best stuff start selling the unnecessary items.

3) Make a 3x radio room and staff it with 6 high charisma dwellers in nightwear as soon as possible. The happiness bonus is really helpful. You want that boost to production.

4) Prepare ahead for population booms. If you are going to have a bunch of pregnant dwellers before you go to sleep at night they are all going to give birth when you turn the game on again in the morning, and you'll want to be sure to have the food and water resources ready for them.

5) Expand in this order: Power>Food=water>population cap. You need the power to keep the rooms making food and water running, you need food and water for the dwellers.

6) If you are trying to expand your population in ways beyond getting your dwellers to knock boots then you are looking at incredibly long time frames. Your radio room might bring one or two in a day, and I've never seen an explorer bring a dweller back. I don't recall more than the initial ones simply wandering up to your vault either. Get your dwellers to gettin it on. It also has the bonus effect of being a great way to raise the happiness of your more bummed out dwellers.

7) Don't stack a room with pregnant women. They and children run from crisis situations, either leaving the problem to spread to other rooms (not a big deal) or leaving one or two people behind to get killed by the crisis (much more of a bummer).

8) Dress the part. Get your radio staff in Nightwear, get your food staff in jumpsuits, get your water staff in armored vault suits, science staff in lab coats,and your power staff in military fatigues.

9) Get your six 3x training rooms up and running and cycle your dwellers through as needed. They train more quickly the higher level they are and the more people that are in there. For the most effective training move through them in 6x dweller waves.

Things I don't know:

The effect of SPECIAL stats on almost anything besides room production. Leveling a dweller increases their HP, but does E have anything to do with it? What about combat stats? Does P factor into weapon damage? Do S, C, I and A factor into the calculations for successful results for exploration events? Does L factor into anything besides cap generation? What stats factor into room rush chance?

Luck definitely affects the amount of caps you get when you send someone out to explore the wasteland.

I wonder if it affects the success% when rushing.

If you want to cheat or run experiments you can change your system date/time to speed things up.

I successfully had a baby with Anderson Cooper and Katy Perry.

Since I now have 50 dwellers (2 females are pregnant), I stopped working towards expansion and instead now focusing on getting all of my dwellers maximized in the skill that applies to their job. I already have abut ten or so dwellers that have a 10 in their respective job skill. Once I get everyone to 10, I will begin expansion again.

@donbert: The Luck of the workers definitely affects the Success % of rushing production.

I really want to know if any of the stats affect how much damage they do to enemies, how much damage they can take (apart from levelling up). I see no reason for anyone to have more than 1 high level skill, except for luck.

Also, I've been starting vaults over and getting the first 4 or 5 easy lunchboxes, then deleting and starting over if I don't get anything good. Orange cards or better!

There's a loading tip that says that stats influence various events when an explorer is out in the wilderness. It of course didn't say WHAT those effects were, but i assume it at least influences success rates in the automated encounters (Int for bandaging an escaped slave? Agility for picking a lock? Perception for hiding from raiders?).

I've at least tried to make sure everyone I send to the wasteland doesn't have a stat below 3, and I've been giving them gear with more varied bonuses than simply the formal wear luck bonus.

New Tip:

The Nuka Cola Bottling plant scales on Endurance, so be prepared for that with your expansion plans.

Bummed about the number of +3 end gear I've sold.

@excitable_misunderstood_genius said:

Yeah, luckily I learned about that very early on, so I have been preparing some dwellers in the Armory.

@excitable_misunderstood_genius: I added your tips to the main post.

Also, do you know that if you take a dweller who is in a training room and take them to a new training room of the same kind, will that reset their leveling progress? I want to move move my training rooms so I can make 3x merged rooms instead of the 2x I have stuck to the right side of the Vault right now.

@dudeglove: Thanks! Now I can start building 3x training rooms and moving my dwellers over to them.

I'll add your tips to the main post soon!

I'm addicted to this game. Thankfully I haven't spent any money. A loading screen tip said that all stats affect the wasteland but I really wish they were more specific. I'm annoyed that on my first vault that I got the MIRV, the most powerful weapon in the game, from my first pack of cards. In this one the best I can find is a rusty assault rifle. I did get Eulogy Jones though, and now every child is black and has the last name Jones. It will be the vault of Joneses.

Oh, here's a tip. Luck can heavily sway the rush chance, so keep formal wear or high luck gear in storage if you are playing for a stretch and monitoring rooms. Depending on the number of rooms merged, and the luck skill of the people inside I've had one +3 luck gear shift the chance from 32% to 26%. You can put it on someone, rush, then take it off and put it on someone else in a different room. Smaller rooms with less people require less luck (not sure about upgraded rooms), so luck gear will make a much bigger difference.

@dudeglove: yeah I learnt about incest early on in my first vault. I was hoping it would be Viva Pinata rules. Even though it's pretty racist in real life, I just use a colour code. I send the white women to breed with Eulogy Jones because chances are any black female in the vault is a Jones. I hope to end up with a vault of 200 Joneses.

@dudeglove: Thanks for clearing that up about dwellers dying in the Wasteland. The website I got my misinformation from acknowledged the mistake as well.

I will add your tips to the main post as soon as I can!

The total number of stimpaks and radaways you can keep in Vault inventory is limited by the rooms that produce them (number of rooms/size and upgrade level?). These rooms will continue producing stims/radaways, and you can continue to "collect" them, even if you can't store any more.

Does anyone have recommendations on how many stimpaks/radaways to give vault dwellers when you send them into the wasteland? I suppose it depends on their level/endurance and how long you want to keep them out.

@wraithtek: For dwellers going into the Wasteland, the easy answer for Stimpaks is to give them 25 if you can. And that's simply because they can't take 26. As for Radaway, I give my guys 15 just to be safe, but 10 would probably be more than enough since it seems like they often come back with plenty. But you're millage may vary based on how long they can survive and their stats. It may also be that the longer they are out, the more likely they are to have events that result in radiation damage, but so far I've recalled them after they've used 20+ Stimpaks and less then 10 RadAway.

From what I've seen, Stimpaks will always heal 50% of their hitpoints. So Vault Dwellers with higher levels and higher Endurance will have a larger HP pool, so Stimpaks are used less frequently since they are more effective. This means they can be out longer, getting more and potentially better stuff. And of course, higher SPECIAL stats and better weapons can mean they are less likely to fail the random events in the Wasteland and take less damage (and therefore slow the rate of Stimpak use, extending their trips).

At this point, I've got 4 guys with high quality weapons and gear running exploration rotation. And if I expect someone to return, I make sure I let them back into the Vault, get their loot, heal them up, and send them back out with a fresh stack of 25 Stims & 15 RadAway BEFORE I collect the new ones from my Med Bays so they don't get wasted. And at this point those guys have leveled up to the point that they can often go around 24 hours, with my highest currently on a 36 hour run and he still has 8 Stimpaks so I think I'll let him go longer and recall him before I go to bed.

(And capacity is 5 each by default and each room adds +10 to your capacity for the type of product they produce, regardless of upgrades or merging. Upgrades & merging Med Bays & Labs only increase the number produced at a time.)

As for my Vault, I'm now getting 12 levels deep and can't fit in one screen cap:

And while I'm not sure what the original Vault-Tec experiment was for Vault 023, but at this point it is running under the guidance that the 2nd Amendment is too soft. "You say it's a 'right'? Well in Vault 23, gun ownership is a REQUIREMENT!" We basically got hit with a bunch of random Radroach infestations starting in my training rooms on the left that would basically spread to EVERYWHERE (at the time, I didn't have enough people or guns to spare to be training, so they were all empty). But now we have a solid breading program (two rooms with 6 high Charisma dwellers each) to keep the training rooms occupied and using four explorers constantly out to bring back TONS of guns.

Oh, and while I did sometimes have people standing guard in the Vault Door, they would never be able to finish them off (which is why I've got 4 explorers instead of just 2). So instead, I've got the "2nd Amendment Diner" where our highly skilled waitstaff will gladly seat you in our "Smoking" and "Get Smoked" sections. It seemed much easier to just load them up with high damage guns and good gear and have a 6v3 fight since they were always getting past the guards anyways.

I stopped production of new dwellers after unlocking all the stat training rooms and I'm making an army of Full Stat people to send out into the wasteland. Hopefully I'll be able to leave them out longer without having them die that way. The game is fun but I feel like I'm losing if I'm not constantly attentive to the game. Make me miss having to wait days for stuff to finish in that Simpsons tapped out game I used to play a while back.

seeing everyones pictures just made me realize how much I fucked up. I didn't really see the point in combining training rooms, but if combining them makes training go faster then im ultra fucked. I will probably have to restart or do some serious cleaning up once I get the caps and population.

Sigh.. I wished this existed for PC :(

@wulfbane: That is a serious Vault that you have there!

Yesterday evening, I ran into the problem of not stockpiling enough water before I exited, so I came back with near empty levels and everyone radiated. I only had a 3x water treatment plan, though while maxed out, still took a while to bring the water level back to always being above the minimum. Luckily nobody died and I eventually got enough RadAways to heal everybody (I didn't have a Lab built beforehand, which was my first mistake).

Everything is all back to normal now.

@dudeglove: Yeah, I found that out shortly before your post. I was sending a dweller out with 15 stimpaks when a group of raiders attacked. After the fight ended, I sent her out again but saw that she had 0 stimpaks. I thought that they were just sent back to storage so I gave her 15 more. Then when I went to check my storage and I was all out!

That is a good glitch to have, especially when you have more than enough Stimpacks/RadAways.

As you can see, it's a bit of a mess but it looks like everyone is going with the elevator straight down in a line. Once I feel comfortable with everyone not dying, I'll likely destroy the upper levels and replace them with the newer facilities you unlock. Right now I'm working towards 80 people (I have several pregnant women but taking their time to give birth it seems) just to unlock the better water production. Even with 75 people, I have most workers at level 9 or 10 with outfits so I can keep production going very quickly (I have this set up for my main rooms). I do wonder, does Endurance even really do anything? You can build storage rooms and put people in them but as far as I can tell, they don't do anything. Am I missing something? I read Endurance can help when sending Dwellers into the wasteland but it seems like the least useful outside of that. My lunchbox rewards have also been pretty awful too. On my first vault, I received Butch who had an amazing gun and he was high levelled with great stats but shit went real bad so I abandoned that and started again. This time around though, my rewards have just been dire. 2 lunch boxes contained things like 50 caps, 50 food, low damage gun and 500 caps. That's useless to me at this point.

@combustion_man: I did the exact same thing. I just happened to have someone with a higher charisma level than everyone else (it wasn't much higher mind) and put an outfit on him to raise it further. I'm now at a point where I don't know who's who so I'm getting a lot of awkward standing around with them saying how nice it is to spend time with the family.

@mrcraggle: Endurance is needed for the Nuka-Cola Factory, which you will unlock at 100 dwellers. It produces both food and water at the same time, so you would want to have some high Endurance dwellers that you will assign to it once you have it unlocked.

@dudeglove: Since I had plenty of food/water, I increased my population until I was able to build a nuclear power generator, which I placed right next to the Vault Door. I never ran into a power problem.

This is my Vault now, with the 4 highest armored/powered dwellers out as explorers.