image taken from http://bethsoft.com/en-gb/games/fallout_shelter
Bethesda’s Fallout Shelter is a brilliant mobile game to keep you occupied when you’re waiting in line somewhere, at lunch alone or even as a game you can leave open next to you as you work.
If you are, like me, an Android user, you’ll be waiting impatiently for the launch of the games in August. Well, at least, I WAS, until I hijacked my boyfriend’s iPad.
I’m not going to go through the basics of the game, like the game play, or explaining what SPECIAL is, there’s plenty of those guides out there. What I’m going to do, is share VERY PRACTICAL ADVISE, and if you’re the kind that enjoys wiping out your population a few times while testing limits (like I do), then I suggest that you don’t read this article any further. This is more for those who have played the game and want to just… play it better?
So, here are my tips and tricks from a few days of playing the game.
1) impregnate your women.
Keeping many women pregnant is a great way to ensure you build your population. This is highly abusable once you realise that they don’t give birth if there are insufficient living quarters available. So, regulating the number of living quarters you build in relation to how much resources you’re producing gives you immense control over the game. For example, if I have insufficient resources, I can not let them give birth yet by not building any living quarters, and concentrate first on upgrading my resource producing structures and making sure I have a steady stream coming in before I build living quarters. Then the women will all magically, suddenly give birth at once.
Children remain children for pretty long. So remember to take this into consideration too.
Oh, and pregnant women are totally useless in incidents. So you might want to mix up your rooms with non-pregnant women, and men, especially if you want to rush that room often.
2) building similar rooms next to each other saves on the upgrade fee, but compromises on the efficiency
You’ll just have to figure out which one is more important to you, and whether you have enough high stat people to make it worthwhile. The discount in the upgrade fee is pretty substantial though. I put all my highest stat people into the larger rooms because that makes it more efficient eventually.
3) assign rooms function
If you cannot find the right dweller you’re looking for, click on a room, and there will be a little clipboard on the bottom left that pops up. It’s arranged by alphabetical order and you can scroll through looking at their stats there. I don’t really use this much, but I figured it might be worth highlighting because there are a few occasions when I’ve needed to use it.
I do prefer tapping on the top left number of dwellers and sorting them – you can click on the headers to sort accordingly. The selected header (LVL, SPECIAL, :), STATUS, JOB) will be highlighted.
4) choose the lowest happiness level to mate with each other
You can sort the dwellers according to happiness. They are happier when you assign them to a room that requires their highest level SPECIAL stat. But should your people get unhappy, no matter how low the happiness level is, just let them procreate and it will bounce right back up to 100% after they’re done with the deed.
5) unequip your items immediately after use
This is the most useful thing I’ve realised. Once you get more and more dwellers and you’re running them from room to room to fight incidents, or just to change their jobs, you’ll lose track of them. So I recommend ensuring all items are unequipped from the start, and only equip them when needed. Immediately after they are done with the incident, unequip the weapon so that you can equip it on the next person during the following incident. Nothing sucks more than having a room full of radroaches and being unable to find your weapons to kill them.
Similarly, for costumes and such, I unequip my dweller’s night wear as soon as they start running to the back of the room. This is because it won’t affect whether they complete the deed, and also, pregnant women all change to a yellow top and blue pants, so you can’t see that they are wearing a costume unless you click on them.
6) zoom out all the way to locate skivers
It’s nice to double tab and view each room close up, but now and then, its good to zoom out totally so that the whole map becomes 2D. When children grow into adults, there is a notification which is pretty easy to miss, and sometimes they’ll sneak into becoming slacker adults that just wander the halls doing nothing. If you want to ensure that all your people are earning their keep all the time, try zooming out totally. You’ll realise that the only people who still move around in 2D mode are the slackers and children. From there, it’s easy to identify them and drag them into a room to work.
Other useful tips
– you can see the dweller’s contribution to a room when you drag them over and hover. If it’s a + number I generally release the hover and the lowest stat person will run out and make way for the new guy to come in. If you change your mind about letting the dweller go into the room but cannot remember where you plucked him out from, just pull him out into the rocks (not out the vault door!) and release the hover and he will remain in the room he was in.
– If you’re sending people out into the wastelands, try to equip them with more stimpaks and radaways. Better weapons and outfits will help too. But most importantly, the higher the level, the longer they last out there. And the longer they last outside, the better the items they manage to find.
– as you’re loading the game, read the tips that pop up on the screen. Some are pretty useful.
– There will be objectives to fulfill, but not all of them are suitable to be fulfilled immediately. For example, sending 5 dwellers out into the wastelands early on when they are low level is just wasting your man power and resources.
– Raiders will break into your vault room, try to locate more men in the rooms near the vault door, or non-pregnant women. This makes it easier to activate your defenses as the people who are able to defend the vault are located nearer the door.
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Well, that’s all the wisdom I’m imparting tonight… so… GL HF, and share in the comments if you’ve got a super tip!
