Fallout Shelter: Beginner’s Guide
I usually do not play many mobile games, let alone write articles and reviews about them, but when Fallout Shelter was announced by Bethesda as a kind of game that would help us, poor Fallout addicts, to survive easier until Fallout 4 has been released, I got hooked. I have played Fallout Shelter for a while now and can tell you that even though this is no substitute for the Bethesda’s upcoming title, I am having great fun with it. Writing a guide about it was just another little step.
Starting your Fallout shelter: first steps
At the very beginning of this adventure, you are in charge of your new special vault. A short and precise tutorial will teach you how to best invest your money- bottle caps serve in this game as a currency – to build new rooms in your shelter. And the vault serves its people, the survivors of the apocalypse, and you are their leader, the Overseer.
The vault dwellers are dependent on three resources in order to survive – food, water and energy.
Food production
Your vault produces food in to cafeteria and later in a Nuka Cola factory. The vault dwellers that work in that specific facility/room will benefit from traits such agility. The higher the agility trait of the dwellers in that room, the better results they will have. You can increase the agility of people working those room in two ways. First one is to train them in special rooms that will be focusing themselves on training your people in several different skill sets. This one is known as S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system. S stands for strength, P stands for perception, E stands for endurance, C stands for charisma, I stands for intelligence, A stands for agility and L stands for luck. That is the basic system that Fallout games have been using ever since the beginning of the series.
Water production
Your vault will produce water in special rooms that are designed to actually purify water. If the water is not being purified, your vault dwellers will get radiation sickness which will lower their happiness and use up their health as time goes by. Eventually, they’ll die. Alas, you better make sure that you have enough water to supply your vault on a regular basis, or otherwise you can forget your chance to take the humanity past the nuclear holocaust. There are two tiers of water purification rooms, just as there are for all other production facilities. As your vault grows in size, meaning the more you dwellers you have, you will unlock those more efficient rooms. At some point, you will be tempted to go back, tear down the old rooms and upgrade them with new ones. That is perfectly okay, because you don’t have endless space to extend your vault and it is better to have one room with six perfectly skilled/specialized dwellers then to have three rooms with the insufficiently good workers in them.
Energy production
As with other rooms, energy is being produced in two tier rooms and one of them is nuclear reactor. The main trait of dwellers required here is strength so you better train tracks to your workers and strength and provide them with suits that will enhance their strength.
It is very important to balance the rise in numbers of vault dwellers with the demand on energy, food and water. Each room has three different stages for upgrades, and while some more basic rooms such as living quarters or cafeteria cost less to be upgraded, advanced rooms such as nuclear reactor are extremely expensive.
Rooms in Fallout Shelter
Note: Rooms can be attached to each other up to three in a row. They can also be upgraded twice.
Living quarters – this is where your vault dwellers live and sleep. Well, okay, they don’t actually sleep, they just stroll around, and are willing to work all they long once set to a task. However, if you leave two of them int living quarters, one male and one female, they will eventually fall in love with each other and run off to a secluded area. When they come out, the female will be pregnant. How long does it take to fall in love and produce a child depends on the charisma of both parents, but is usually just a matter of time. So, if you need more people and want your dwellers to procreate, make sure you leave a male/female couple. Also, the grown-up children will not engage in incest with their parents, and should there be like two of them in the same room, the roommate, they will be making comments such as “It is really nice to be with your family!”.
Elevators – elevators have a sole purpose to transport vault dwellers from one level to the next.
Cafeteria – first tier off food producing room. It will hold up to six workers with the agility as the main feature which is being asked.
Greenhouse – second tier of food production facility. Skill required: agility
Water treatment plant – first tear production facility off water production facility. Skill required: perception
Purification station – second tier of water production facility. Skill required: perception.
Power generator – first tear of energy production facility. Skill required: strength.
Nuclear reactor – second tier of energy production facility. Skill required: strength.
Hospital – hospital is being used to produce steam packs. There is no second-tier this room. Skill required: intelligence
Science Center – there is only one tier of this production facility. It is producing rather ways against radiation. Skill required: intelligence.
These rooms provide the three basic sources that are necessary for vault dwellers to survive, namely food, water and energy. However, there are other rooms that are equally important for their survival, and have different purposes altogether, such as training rooms.
Training rooms
Weight room – assign dwellers here to train their strength. Cost 1200 bottle caps.
Armory – assign dwellers here to train their perception. Cost 900 bottle cups.
Fitness room– assign dwellers here to train to endurance. Cost 1050 bottle cups.
Lounge – assign dwellers here to train their charisma. Cost 1050 bottle caps.
Classroom – assign dwellers here to train their intelligence. Cost 750 bottle caps.
Athletics room – assign dwellers here to train their agility. Cost 900 bottle caps.
Game room – assign dwellers here to train their luck. Cost 1050 bottle caps.
There are also rooms such as storage rooms or warehouses which enable you to store weapons and outfits that you will obtain during the game. Unlike most other rooms, storage room doesn’t need workers to operate. The more rooms you have, and the more upgraded they are, more weapons and outfits will you be able to store in them. Also something worth mentioning is vault entrance. This room could be upgraded so that Raiders and Deathclaws have a hard time penetrating into vault. And, at the end, there is the Radio room, which attracts the inhabitants for your vault and increases happiness off your current dwellers.
Happiness of vault dwellers and how to improve it?
Each dweller has his or hers level of happiness that depends on certain factors. When a dweller comes to the Walt for the first time, they will have 50% of happiness. It is up to you to see that they get their mojo up and running! In order to accomplish that, you must not allow them to be subject to many misfortunes, such as fires, mole rats attacks, raider attacks or radiation poisoning. All these things will decrease their happiness. Radio room will help making them feel better and so will a sufficient amount of food, water and energy. Dwellers who do their jobs for longer periods of time get extremely lucky. But if some of these dwellers remain unfortunate, the best recipe to provide them with some happiness is to have them engaged in a romantic relationship. You will achieve that by putting a male and female (who are not relatives) into the same living room and leave them for a while there. They will start talking and flirting, eventually dancing and will end up making love. You do not get to see that part, though! 😉 When they emerge from the back room, woman will be pregnant and both of them will be hundred percent happy. Of course, if you don’t want to have any more new babies in your Walt, you can always separate them whether their happiness reaches a satisfactory level.
Babies will grow into children, wander the vault for a while and will eventually become adult and ready for work.
Exploring wastelands
Wastelands are an important part of the game. Even though you don’t get to actively explore it in the sense of gameplay, you will send your dwellers to investigate on their own and you can follow the progress in the kind of old-fashioned adventure scrolling text adventure. Most important thing for all of your wasteland explorers is to provide them with best possible armor, best available weapons, as many stimpacks as they can carry (that is usually 25 pieces) as well as sufficient rather ways (also 25). Once you send them out into wastelands, you can observe their progress and what is happening to them. They will engage strange creatures, fight them, help others and find weapons and equipment. By doing so they both gain experience and level up as well as lose health and use stimpacks and radaways themselves. Once their stimpacks are close to zero, it would be wisest to recall them from the wasteland. During the time they are returning from wasteland, they do not suffer from radiation poisoning nor can they be harmed by anything around them. Be careful – if you do not call them back in time, they will probably lose all of their health, suffer from radiation exposure and die once their stimpacks run out. Once a dweller dies, you must revive him by spending money. The higher skill level of dweller is, the more money one must spend in order to revive this fallen dweller.
Note: the longer of dweller spends time exploring the wasteland, the better loot will they find. Make sure they have the best possible dwellers of highest level possible (50) as well as have maxed out traits.
Disasters and how to fight them
Your fallout shelter will be struck with different disasters and you will have to fight them to your best abilities. They begin small, with such things like fire, but ranging all the way up to the attack of Deathclaws, the iconic beast of the Wastelands. Forests will sometimes spontaneously erupt in rooms and will, if not for an extinguished, spread to neighboring rooms. Same goes for all other disasters such as rats, rad roach attacks and mole rats attacks. These will find place mostly in the rooms touching the earth (meaning that rats and roaches will appear in rooms that are touching dirt), but fire can break out anywhere. It is important to have as many workers spread out over all rooms as much as possible. They should also be well armed and have decent armor on. You must pay attention to heal your workers while they are combating fire or shooting at roaches and rats. The lower the level of your dwellers, faster will they lose their health in the attack.
Raiders constitute a little more dangerous kind of disaster. They come from the surface, attack the vault door and penetrate inside your shelter. It is the best to have at least two well armed guards at the vault entrance, so they can attack the raiding party right away. Raiders, even though they are dangerous, are not that dangerous and can be killed off fairly fast. In my vault, the entrance door is next to a small area that cafeteria. All dwellers in Cafeteria are seriously armed and they usually put down at least two Deathclaws when these enter.
Deathclaws however are much greater danger. You must really micromanage your dwellers when you have to fight. You need to shield the, you need to transport them from one to another. Set up as watch well on call all and high-level dwellers in their the longer the attack lasts, the more resources stolen from, so it is in your interest to stop everyone, from fires and readers old weight vest calls as false as delete possible
How to get Mr. Handy?
Mr. Handy is the mascot off fallout universe. In this game, she is very useful because she will gather resources in your Walt. She will, however, gather resources only in one level, not all over the shelter. This means that you have to micro manage Mr. Handy to get maximum benefit from. You can gather resources with him, but you can also fight fires, rats and roaches, as well as Raiders and Deathclaws with it.
But how do you get Mr. Handy!? Mr. Handy can only be found in lunchboxes. You get lunchboxes for filling out certain objectives in game, on a daily basis or during your progress. In those lunchboxes you will often find bottle caps, weapons and armor and sometimes even rare vault dwellers or some other unique, special things. The chance to get Mr. Handy from a reward lunchbox is extremely low. I would say that if you want to get him, you will have to buy at least one lunchbox from the games sharp store. There is also an offer to get five lunchboxes for around 5€ or 5$, depending on currency you’re using. It is guaranteed that you will get a Mr. Handy from these specific boxes.
Mr. Handy can be damaged and can be destroyed, but he cannot be killed entirely. Sadly, he (it!) also cannot be healed, so you have to wait until he has been damaged beyond repair falls apart before you can repair him.
Note: as mentioned before, Mr. handy is a part of the game that is tied to your device that you are using to place all. So, if you are playing it on the smartphone issue must be very careful not to lose it, because if you lose it once it is gone forever. There are no backups online.
Some important info on Fallout Shelter.
Maximum number of residents is 200. You can’t surpass that number.
You can’t fix Mr. Handy when he is damaged, but you can fix him when he falls apart.
Chances to get Mr. Handy from a lunchbox are insanely low.
To check what is bothering your dwellers, zoom in and watch what they are complaining about (speech “bubbles”).
Do not leave vault dwellers of opposite sex in the living quarters if you don’t want them to have kids. Assign them to storage rooms instead.
Your installation of Fault Shelter is tied to your device. If you lose your tablet or smartphone, or accidentally damaged the application, you will lose all your progress along with everything you bought in the game.
This fallout Shelter Guide is a work in progress. Should you have any comments, ideas or suggestions, or perhaps see something wrong, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me. Leave all your comments, questions and experiences in comments below, and I will be happy to include the to this fallout shelter guide.
Have a good one!
