Fallout Shelter (the iOS game)

Where do you see what room likes which attribute?

It’s one of the SPECIAL letters in a circle. I believe it’s visible from the main screen. At the bottom of the room when the room is highlighted. If not you can get it from the gear icon in the upper left

You can see it in the Build menu (by clicking the hammer) under the description of each room.

How long do I let explorers roam? Are they supposed to run for hours before they find something?

To raise Happiness of a dweller, send them to make babies!

Take the basebuilding from XCOM, layer that up with some tired f2p game mechanic, and voila… you have this game that is good for marketing I guess?

Further they get out, the more dangerous it gets, and the jump can be significant (if you’re leaving them out when crashing for the night, for instance, expect them to be dead). They can be revived without loss though - just bottlecaps. At the beginning I’ve just been keeping them out long enough to snag 3-4 weapons or armor, to equip more of the dwellers.

Upgrade your Vault door.

I sent out a dweller I got from a lunchbox, my highest level guy at the time, with a pretty decent shotgun. After about four hours he’d accumulated a couple outfits and pistols and around $500 caps. I was gonna leave him out long enough to find one more piece of gear but he died when I checked in about 30 minutes later. It was only about $300 to resurrect him though, with no other penalty I could see. He still had all the stuff he’d found, so it still came out ahead on caps and got some gear too.

I sent him out again today for about four hours again, this time I actually gave him two stimpacks and two rad-x. Around four hours and he’d found about the same stuff, some gear, guns, and $500ish caps. He’d used one each of the stimpacks and rad-x, so I sent him home with that. That seems like a decent strategy to repeat for now. I don’t know if successive revives cost more money though, since he’s the only dweller I’ve had die.

Dweller happiness is also affected by doing something in the vault that takes advantage of their better “SPECIAL” stats, I think. A guy doing something he wasn’t good at was at 75% happiness and then slowly went up to 100% after I moved him to an area that used his highest stat.

O.k., I’m pretty bored now. It’s cute, but there doesn’t seem to be much gameplay or challenge. It’s more of farmville than FTL in terms of challenge. Have about 40 dwellers and nothing has really happened - just random raider raids, fire outbreaks, and radroach outbreaks every few minutes. Starting to improve all the stats of my dwellers, have everyone near the doors well equipped with weapons (and not pregnant, as pregnant ladies flee danger) to exterminate the raiders, so I don’t even bother moving for them now.

Of course it’s a free gift, but time is worth more than the $10 or so a game like FTL or Baldur’s Gate goes for on ios.

Cheating:

spoiler tag used to hide cheating method

It seems you can change your phone date to jump a few hours and get the result of productions, etc…

This is a pretty decent dumb, stereotypical mobile pay treadmill game, but that is still all it is.

There is zero reason to pay for anything, unlike standard mobile freemium games. Even in casual play, it seems like you can progress to get everything within a couple of weeks, if not less, and progress constantly.

I’m still enjoying it, and it’s certainly been a timesink, and it’s fun to see the higher level weapons like plasma rifles and how they shred raiders, but I keep expecting new events or variety and being disappointed. Also, my ipad3 is starting to have memory problems with the game after 50 or so dwellers. Things slow down and act wacky, and I sometimes can’t pick up dwellers after playing for a while.

I do love the atmosphere though, which makes me appreciate how much Fallout 3 did to expand upon “Vault life” in the franchise - it’s the one aspect of lore that Bethesda really pushed forward.

Having played through Fallout last year for the class games club, I’m really feeling the need to play through Fallout 2 again now, in part because of this game and the F4 announcement, and it also just seems due after so many years.

Does anyone know if your stats affect exploration? Or is it just the gun? It kind of seems like the later but the game isn’t good on explaining things.

Is there any reason to keep a pregnant woman in the living quarters after she becomes pregnant, or should i just send both the father and mother to work the second the deed is done? I suppose the father can make another female dweller pregnant though.

Is there a good way to deal with raiders? It seems like even though i have a vault full of 30 dwellers, all using some manner of weapon, only two can be assigned to the vault door. They then fight the bandits after they break in, killing 2-3 of them. The remains wander around my vault until killed. My two vault guards dont follow them and i think it would just mess up assignments if i tried to drag them around.

Can a total modified stat increase beyond 10? IE if someone has max strength, is there any reason to give her a +strength jacket?

The left side of the buildable area seems bugged. I have multiple 2 unit buildings with one more space which goes up the left side barrier. I can build the last room unit that should make the 2 unit building a 3 unit one, but they don’t merge. It remains a 2 unit room and a 1 unit room. Building somewhere else allows me to create 3 unit rooms, but i didn’t realize this until i had made significant progress, so this bug kind of screws up my plans.

The 2 unit issue may be because you upgraded the 2-unit building’s level and then placed the 3rd unit. They only combine if they’re all the same level.

Oh i didn’t know that. i’ll have to try that. thanks.

I don’t think pregnant women fight so I tend to leave them in the living quarters. As for the door, raiders tend to go from floor to floor so I just give the top rooms the best weapons and armor and leave the entrance unguarded. The raiders tend to be badly outnumbered when they hit the first rooms unit filled with angry vault dwellers.

Pregnant women don’t fight but they can work normally in a power plant or wherever.

If you don’t have enough weapons at the start to deal with raiders, it’s faster sometimes to move weapons rather than people.

Yes they do. Luck is definitely worthwhile, in addition to the combat skills. I think there are a few encounters where charisma is relevant, unsure about intelligence, but def seem less important.

Is there any reason to keep a pregnant woman in the living quarters after she becomes pregnant, or should i just send both the father and mother to work the second the deed is done? I suppose the father can make another female dweller pregnant though.

They can work about train attributes - keep them away from the Vault entrance, but otherwise put them to work or training. Leaving them in the living quarters is a waste.

Is there a good way to deal with raiders? It seems like even though i have a vault full of 30 dwellers, all using some manner of weapon, only two can be assigned to the vault door. They then fight the bandits after they break in, killing 2-3 of them. The remains wander around my vault until killed. My two vault guards dont follow them and i think it would just mess up assignments if i tried to drag them around.

No matter what, at least one Raider will get through your first 2 guards (which don’t need to be stationed at the vault door - just move them there when you get the alert. Keep at least 4 good fighters, equipped with your best combat gear, in two production rooms nearest the vault door. Then when you get the raider alert, just move 2 to the vault door, and 2 to the next closest rooms. If you don’t yet have decent guns, you should have 2 more on standby (6 dwellers in total, or you can move the 1st two from the gate, but they’ll need healing, likely) to the third room from the vault - the raiders progress in a linear fashion if you have guys for them to fight. They are trivial with that set up.

Upgrade your door to give you more time to get your guys in position.

Can a total modified stat increase beyond 10? IE if someone has max strength, is there any reason to give her a +strength jacket?

Nope. Other than looking good.

The left side of the buildable area seems bugged. I have multiple 2 unit buildings with one more space which goes up the left side barrier. I can build the last room unit that should make the 2 unit building a 3 unit one, but they don’t merge. It remains a 2 unit room and a 1 unit room
.

Have you upgraded either room? If they are not the same level they won’t merge.

Wait, you can merge rooms up to three “units” wide? I did not even realize this, I thought you could just merge them in pairs. Good to know.

For the training rooms, does making them larger affect their training speed, or just allow more dwellers to train at once?

It seems to me that even when things are going wrong you can patiently keep clicking food and water etc, until you get the coins to upgrade. I have not been able to lose the game from what I can tell. Anyone get into a situation that you could not dig your way out?

One note: take some time to set up you clicks as it can get annoying if you only have one tile at the top right of the board. Trying to click on that tile when it is by the hammer icon makes it hard to accomplish. Make certain to have at least two tiles combined at the top right.

I deleted the game after getting to a 110 people; there really is not any major strategy items or decisions at that point - if there ever were in the first place (YMMV).

Considering its compulsion like game play you do not have to spend a dime on the game so I guess it is fine as a marketing gimmick.

Sounds like I’ve been playing incredibly cautiously, I’m still at ~30 Dwellers, but I’ve never even come close to a crisis on food/water/power beyond that frantic initial impression. I guess I should be expanding faster.