Fallout Shelter

[Garacesh]

As someone that has too been playing a lot of this.. I'll expand on some of your stuff.

 

You really want at least 1 high stat dweller and 1 really good gun (ideally 20+ damage) out of the first few easy lunchboxes you get. If you don't get this then restart and try again. My GF didn't get any good guns at the start or high stat dwellers and it took her ages to get everyone in the vault armed as nobody could survive for over 12 hours in the wasteland. I got a decent stat guy (stats all around 4/5) and a fatboy mini nuke launcher at the start and this really helped bring in a lot of items at the start as I could just send him out for ages to collect stuff.

It actually doesn't matter too much, because you don't get raided at the start. The game is super easy in the beginning and if you don't get anyone good, it's fine, because you can still just have babies. It only takes around 6-7 hours to go from "Put two people in the living quarters" to "Fully grown adult that can work in a room." But a vault dweller with a decent stat (I got a guy with good Agility, so lots of food) is probably better than 500 caps, so it's worthwhile to restart if you want to. If you don't, though, it won't be much of a detriment. You can train people's stats later.

 

Don't upgrade rooms until you need to. The higher the room level the stronger the incident encounter (hence why you get super touch molerats or fires that seem to take days to put out).

I didn't have a problem upgrading rooms. In fact, I pushed them to L3 as soon as I could, because they can store more and create more resources. It's a tradeoff of caps for resource generation. If you're not upgrading rooms, you need to be building more of them, and that requires more dwellers. Inbreeding doesn't work, so there's only so many people you can have without attracting more doods.

 

If you are planning to have rooms without people in (storage rooms, living quarters and probably medbay/science bay) then build them lower that the main rooms so they are not touching other rooms. This way when in incident happens in one it wont spread.

This is good advice, and something I wish I'd have learnt earlier. However, rooms cost more the more of them you have. So elevators, for example, will cost you more and more as you build down to create isolated rooms. Also, removing rocks gets more expensive the further down you go.

 

Don't expand to quickly. The game difficulty scales based on your vault population and room levels. At around 30 dwellers you start seeing mole rats, at 60 dwellers you start getting attacked by deathclaws. Raider attacks get stronger as well (better weapons, more raiders). Lots of people get put off the game as they build upgraded rooms really quickly, get a ton of dwellers in the vault and then get owned by the incidents because all there dwellers are low level and unarmed.

I've been sat at 50 vault dwellers for a while now, because I'm training up their stats. So far, no deathclaws. But I do have mole rats occasionally. And raiders. Raider attacks don't get past my first room, though (Med bay) because it has 6 guys in there with high powered weapons and high perception. Perception increases your hit chance inside the vault, apparently, so you want to train that up ASAP.

 

You can put in some "population control" by building what I like to call a murder room. Just build a single room of any type that can be rushed. Make sure when you build it that it is not connected to any other rooms so events wont spread out from it. Now remove all the items from the dwellers who's services are no longer required put them in the room and keep rushing it until you fail. After enough fails they will eventually die and then you can just remove them. I used this quite a bit when I kept getting "deliver babies" type objectives but was trying to keep my population cap below 60.

If you build a murder room, you don't even need to remove the bodies. They'll just sit there until you remove or revive them. (They might still count towards your population, though? I'm not sure..). Whatever you do, don't use the room to actually produce materials. Dead bodies - for perfectly understandable reasons - have a bit of a negative effect on morale. Happiness drops to 5% with corpses around.

 

Train 1 person up with Luck and Int. This is your rush guy for making stimpacks and radaways. Early on you might need people working in the medpay 24/7 to keep a good supply in but once this guy gets his stats up you can just rush them. My int/luck 10 guy (with extra int/luck armor on) can rush the medbay 3 times before the fail % gets above 20. I have 2 triple roomed fully upgraded medbays which means this guy can crack out 62 stim packs in less than a minute.

As a note on stimpaks and medbays, you can only give your explorers a maximum of 25 stimpaks and 25 radaways, no matter how many you have. Not that an explorer will ever use 25 radaways..

 

Children inherit stats from their parents. Try to use your highest stat people for breeding. It doesn't make a massive difference, even breeding two 10Perception stat parents doesn't seem to give more than 3 stat points to the childs Perception but that's still better than it being 1 (especially if it gets 3 to all stats, that saves quite a few hours of training).

Spitting in the face of nature, 'children get the highest stats' also works for training. So if you train up your vault dwellers, then breed them, they get the trained higher stat. Armour doesn't seem to have any effect (apart from armour with charisma, which makes them bone quicker)

 

Triple merged rooms are much better than double rooms. Merge rooms before upgrading as it costs less.

Always build triple rooms where you can. For optimum vault movement your vault layout should be [TRIPLE ROOM][E][TRIPLE ROOM][E][DOUBLE] all the way down. This allows for your dwellers to be able to respond to crises rapidly - and in your early days you won't have enough people to constantly guard the first room. So you'll need mobility.

 

If your resource bars are in the red when you are turning it on then you don't have enough storage for that resource. Build extra empty rooms to increase your storage capacity of that resource. That way you have more of a buffer of resources, so when the game runs after you turn off, it wont run it into the red. This is still annoying though as you still need to play the game long enough next time to refill your resource buffers (makes turning it on for a quick check hard to do). Mr Handy's do fix this problem and you don't need to buy them (hint, the save file is stored locally on your device and can be edited...). I did buy the £3 Mr handy pack just because they game has given me at least £3 of entertainment but cheated in a couple more for when I expand my resource collection. I don't feel having them unbalances the game as it fixes an annoying problem and doesn't add much else. They also die fairly often and cost 2K caps to revive so not a super powerful addition.

Build extra rooms, then put doods in them. Two rooms, with one guy in each of them, producing resources every 5 minutes is better than one room with two guys producing resources every 2 minutes if you're not checking the game often.

 

Don't bother wasting people to guard the vault door. They don't gain XP or contribute to the vault. Best vault defense is to have a triple merged "guard" room to the right of the vault door with dwellers in it and armed all the time. I have my main power generation in that room and raiders die pretty much as soon as they run in.

Vault door = 2 guys with guns. First room = up to 6 guys with guns. Raiders will run straight through empty rooms. So don't bother with your vault entrance. Upgrade it so you can respond quicker, but then just put lots of guys in your first room.

 

Deathclaws suck. Don't go above 60 dwellers unless you have ample resource storage, a large supply of stimpacks, decent level people and everyone is armed with decent weapons ("guard room" at least should have 10-15+ damage weapons, everyone else a min of enhanced shotguns). Deathclaws run from room to room so it is a good idea early on to set up your top 3 levels of the vault so they have to go from one room to the next on that level rather than having elevators they can go down right away. This way you can get all your best guns nearest the vault entrance and it should take them down before they get to far.

Do deathclaws use elevators? Do they not follow the same pathing as Raiders? I dunno. Haven't encountered any yet. OPENING YOUR VAULT DOOR CAN AND WILL ATTRACT DEATHCLAWS. SO WILL USING THE RADIO. So be careful if you choose to do it.

 

Wasteland exploring is important. Ideally send high strength/endurance people at the start as they will last the longest. Send out every spare person you have to begin with as you want to get everyone in stat boosting armor and armed asap. Even if you are sending them out without any items at the start most of them will survive just fine for a few hours which will get them a couple of items each. Remember they don't take damage coming back so you can leave them out until they are almost dead and then recall them.

Endurance seems to be the most important stat out in the wasteland. HP pool seems to be decided by level. Strength seems to effect how much damage you do. Luck is obvious. Perception is how good you shoot stuff (or see items outside, apparently). I don't know what Agility does outside.

 

All stats are important and will increase the length dwellers survive and the quality/amount of items/caps they find. Items finding events are generated around every hour for all dwellers that are out, so if you look through their logs to when they last found a weapon/armor you will know roughly how long until they find the next one. There are also scripted events that can be effected by stats (found a locker/fridge needs str to open, encountered slave/talon company needs char, etc).

Intelligence and Charisma apparently help with these, but I can't confirm.

 

At around 2 days and 12 to 13 hours exploring they will come across a National Guard Depot. At this place they have a chance to get a legendary weapon (about 1 in 10) or much more common just XP. Once they reach this point it is generally best to bring them back so you can send them out for another shot, there does not seem to be any more scripted events after this point (just the standard once per hour random loot generation).

Level 35+ with decent stats, armour and a 10+ damage weapon will get you 2+ days if you're lucky.

 

Level 16 seems to be the sweet spot for sending out dwellers (if they have a decent weapon and half decent stats). This gives them enough health to start out with and still have enough space for lots of level ups. Every time they level up their health regens which saves them using a stimpack. Most of the dwellers I have sent out at 16 have been level 50 by the time they hit the 2 day mark.

Also, happiness doesn't increase or increase outside. So send out 100% happiness dwellers to keep your average % up!