Made it to over 100 dwellers in Fallout Shelter and now you need tips for advanced vault management? This is the post for you! We talk everything from nuclear reactors to longer endurance in the Wastelands, training rooms strategy and more.
So it’s been nine days since I started playing Fallout Shelter and I’m back with more tips, tricks and strategy for advanced vault management. With nearly 150 dwellers, I have unlocked all my special rooms and managed to keep my population at a relatively high level of happiness. I am pretty sure I’m nearing the end game, and a part of me hopes Bethesda will release an update so that we can all enjoy this post-apocalyptic Sim City just a little longer.
At any rate, for those who are just getting started on playing Fallout Shelter, this probably isn’t the best article for you to read, as the tips are definitely geared towards the player in the advanced stages of vault management – 75 dwellers or more. For those with less than 30 in the vault here’s a good beginner’s guide to surviving in the game. If you are at the intermediate stage with about 30 – 80 dwellers, this guide will be useful, as well as this one on surviving Deathclaw attacks without losing any dwellers. For everyone beyond that, keep reading.
In this post I’ll mainly be discussing the following: more strategies for longer survival in the Wastelands; how to gain the best weapons and outfits while in the Wastelands; tips and tricks for training Specials; How and why to use Nuclear reactors, gardens and other advanced resource rooms; Miscellaneous other happiness and vault management tips for large populations.
Fallout Shelter Game Tips For Advanced Vault Management
Tips Set #1: On Wastelands Survival And Finding The Best Outfits And Weapons
How long can a dweller last in the Wastelands? OK, so this answer is really difficult because I’ve seen people saying some crazy amounts like 3 ½ days (I’ve personally only had one out about a day). At any rate, here are some things I’ve figured out to help your dweller survive longer amounts of time in the Wastelands
Experience level affects endurance – Ok, so I started to notice a trend with more experienced vault dwellers. It seemed they were able to survive a whole lot longer in the wastelands than a guy with just a little experience. For example, take a guy who is at a level 30 or 40, he can last probably about a day in the Wastelands with the proper gear, stimpacks etc. Take a guy at level 10 though with the same gear and medical supplies and he’ll only last half that time. I’m not sure the exact correlation but if you want people who will last longer, send out your most experienced. As your dwellers stay out in the wastelands longer they do encounter more dangerous enemies who can deal greater damage, but on the flipside of that, it’s deep in the wasteland you’ll find your most valuable weapons and rarest outfits. Another thing I noticed about experience levels is that if you send out a dweller with little experience and one with a lot of experience for the same amount of time, even if they are trained with the same specials, equipment and medical supplies, the more experienced will always come back with better weapons and outfits – and usually more of them.
Maxed out specials help too (any of them) – While endurance is probably the best special to send your dwellers out with for longevity, any special at a level 10 or higher makes your dweller very capable of surviving in the wastelands a long time, so make sure you are training dwellers in their strong areas to max them out – somewhere in the 10-12 range. Training dwellers high in Luck rooms can be particularly useful if gaining more stuff I a shorter time is your goal. Endurance and strength however also help you survive longer in the Wastelands increasing your chances of getting further.
As a general guide for surviving 8 hours in the Wastelands and getting some good stuff, I recommend sending:
- A dweller with 20 + experience
- At least 5 RadAways and StimPacks
- Weapon with at least 7 damage power
- Strength or Endurance Enhancing Outfit
- Strength Or Endurance Level of 5 or above
- Luck of 5 or higher.
Tip Set #2: Advanced Resource Rooms: What Are Nuclear Reactors Gardens and Water Purification Systems Best For? Should I Build Them?
Ok, so anyone with over 100 dwellers should have seen some of these advance production rooms become unlocked. But when you look at the price tag on Nuclear reactors and such, you may have thought to yourself, “Do I really need it? How will it help me?”
The main advantage of resource rooms like the Nuclear reactors, gardens, etc. is storage. For example, a 3 room wide power plant, upgraded to level 3 produces 49 power and has 300 storage. A 3 room wide nuclear plant at level 3, however, produces 59 power and has 1,200 storage. When you get into these advanced levels you are going to start to notice you are producing more product than you can use or store so taking the time to replace old resource rooms with the upgrades as you have the caps to do so is a good idea. The only annoying thing about replacing rooms is you have to start replacing rooms furthest from the elevator first, so it’ll take some thinking about before you start destroying old rooms to build the updates. You also have t evacuate the people in those rooms first before you can destroy them. As much of a pain as it may be, at some point upgrading to the advance storage rooms like the nuclear reactor and gardens will be a necessary evil.
As a side note, I noticed a few people asking if nuclear reactors throw off radiation in Fallout Shelter. The answer is no, so don’t worry about doubling your RadAway production.
Tips Set #3 – On General Happiness And Vault Management When Population Gets So Huge You Don’t Think You Can Manage
Baby Making: A Time To Explode And A Time To Slow Down - So, in the early stages of the game baby making is a big priority. The reason is because 1) It increases non-sick dwellers up to 100% happiness and 2) It increases your population! As long as you are well prepared, making tons of babies is a great idea on the early stages. I kind of made it my goal to keep every woman pregnant for a while. The guys and galls are super happy and in a few hours you have babies everywhere. Then, a day later you’ve got some awesome new worker bees. Around the 50 -75 dweller point, however, I began slowing down the baby making because honestly, it starts to get insane in the vault with all these buggers running around and your food, water, power production become more of an issue. Now at 140 dwellers, I make very few babies. Pretty much I reserve that for just chronically sad dwellers that just won’t cheer up. If you need to cheer up a dweller but really can’t afford to be making any babies right then, you can actually let your folks just get to the dancing together stage and then send them back to their assigned rooms before they run off for the happy green smiley face time. They’ll usually have raised their happiness level at least to 75% or more.
Rushing Rooms: If You’re Successful It’s A Great Mood Booster - Another way, albeit a bit risky, to raise the happiness of a particular group of dwellers is to successfully rush a room. Now, up to this point, I’ve found any room with a risk level of 25% or less will generally be successful. However, I have yet to rush a room over 30% that was successful, so proceed at your own risk. The higher the luck of your dwellers in a given room does lower the percentage of risk and increases the caps benefit of a successful rush.
Training Rooms: Who Should I Train And For How Long? So, when your vault gets over 100 you find there’s a lot more dwellers than are really needed to manage the vault – this is particularly true if you’ve honed in on your dwellers strengths and trained or placed them in the right rooms. If I have extra dwellers, I make an effort to focus on training their strengths. There’s a couple of different strategies I’ve heard people discuss with regards to training room assignment and to be honest I am using both.
The first strategy is to make a roster of your dwellers by strength level and then rotate them in and out of a training room as one gains a higher special. For example, if you have 4 dwellers in a power room with strength specials of 4,4, 3,and 5 and 2 dwellers in a strength training room with a level 4 and 3 strength special, I would take out the level 4 trainee and replace him or her with the level 3 one from the power room. This way your power room has the strongest possible players in it, maximizing happiness and efficiency.
The other strategy is to hone in on a few specific dwellers and train them in a given area repeatedly until they max out their special at 10 or more. This would have obvious benefits but takes a LONG time. You can update your training rooms to cut the training time in half but it still will be a while. I’ve actually been placing a lot of my pregnant women in training rooms since they can’t fight in various incidents. It keeps them busy and out of harm’s way for the most part.
I would actually recommend, no matter what a given player’s special is, that you try to rotate as many players as you can through your gaming or luck training rooms. Luck is so useful for everything from successfully rushing rooms, to gaining more and better resources in the wastelands, to increasing the benefits of successfully stopping an incident in a room. Endurance used to seem like a totally wasted skill in the early stages to me, but now I have made that another special that I am rotating my players through to increase their over all heartiness during time in the wastelands, raider attacks, radiation poisoning and more.
Tips Set # 4 On Disaster: Surviving Radroach Infestations, Fires And Raids
Ok, so I have not figured out if there is something I am doing wrong, but in this vault I have had a couple of really NASTY radroach infestations. They didn’t occur until I had about 80 dwellers or so (One of them literally took out half my population!) When disaster strikes and you suddenly find all these dead bodies lying around, I found there are a few things you should do to help prevent major disater damage or recover quickly when it does happen.
During Raider Attacks and Incidents You Can Medicate Your Dwellers – so I haven’t decided yet how useful this is, but I discovered that during a Raiders attack, radroach attack or other incident where your dwellers’ health and well being is lowering quickly, you can actually give your dwellers StimPacks and RadAways. The further along you get in the game, the more aggressive the Raiders seem to get and even if you have a room full of dwellers fighting them, one or more of them may die in the battle. However, if you tap on your dwellers while they are fighting the Raiders or RadRoaches you can give them StimPacks to up their health levels back to 100 percent and help them endure the fight. While this may not be the best strategy if you don’t have many StimPacks, for those who have a huge stockpile, giving the mediation during a fight will save you caps you’d have to spend to revive the slain dweller. You also want to make sure to give StimPacks and RadAways to any dwellers involved in incidents like fires and radroach infestations as soon as the problem is cleared away or they might just keel over when you least expect it.
Evacuate Rooms With Dead Bodies – Ok, nothing kills morale like working in a room with dead bodies. If you don’t have the money to revive a corpse yet and you don’t want to remove them, then remove the living dwellers to another location. If every room is full, arm them ad send them to the Wastelands, but keep them out of the rooms with dead bodies.
Evacuate Rooms Without Power – After a killer incident like radroach infestation, your bound to be low of power, food, everything. Rooms that don’t have power won’t work and your dweller morale will decrease so it’s best just to evacuate dwellers from rooms that go without power for long stretches of time and have them fill in other essential rooms. This will increase the production in those rooms anyway.
Hand Out StimPacks – Everyone will likely need one of these after a major incident, so go through your dwellers administering them until you run out. If the dweller is healthy they won’t take one, so you can literally go room but room and check. Same applies for RadPacks.
Revive Dwellers As Soon As You Can – You have the option to remove dead dwellers if you want, but generally I don’t like to do that since it takes so much effort to get new dwellers. However, the longer you leave them dead in a room, the longer that room remains unusable so revive them as soon as you can by earning caps.
Welp, that’s about all I’ve got for now. As I continue to the endgame of Fallout Shelter I imagine I’ll put out at least one more set of tips for the last few miles. If you have a great tip you think should be included for advanced Fallout Shelter gameplay, please feel free to share in the comments below. We’d love to hear it!
NEW: More Fallout Shelter Tips & Tricks: Exploit These End Game Strategies For Moving Rooms, Upgrading, Surviving Days In Wastelands And More
