Fallout Shelter Guide

Fallout Shelter may be pretty casual as far as city builders go, and it's really hard to lose. However, it can be hard to do things well. Take a look at this guide to get a sense of how to really live in the post-apocalyptic world.

1. Plan Ahead

As soon as you boot the game up, you'll notice that there are two elevator shafts. Don't build ahead until you know what you're doing. First, you need to remember that copies of a room next to each other will combine that section into one giant area. This is highly recommended, as the bonus outweighs the space it takes up. Therefore, three-room combinations are very much recommended. At the very least, you must have three room copies of each resource center. The production and other ones are a lot less critical.

When you first start off, you don't have the money to build a three-room version of all these rooms. Accounting for the opening elevator, you can build one three-room area, an elevator, a three-room area, a two-room elevator, and another elevator.  It's very much recommended that you have two elevators, as there will be transportation issues down the road if you don't do that. This is the basic layout of your base, with a few exceptions.

Up to about thirty dwellers, you can get by with a three-room water treatment plant, a three-room power generator, a three-room diner, and a three-room living quarter.

2. Specialize your dwellers

In the beginning, your dwellers will have very pathetic statistics. However, you'll notice that most of the time, their statistics aren't perfectly even. Allocate them to the best of your abilities. Here's where you should put them -

Strength: Power Plants (Nuclear facilities down the line)

Perception: Water plants (Filtration plants)

Endurance: Explorers and bottlers

Charisma: Radio shows and babies

Intelligence: Make Radaways and stimpaks.

Agility: Food and gardens

Luck: A generally good stat - can go anywhere.

If you put them in a place that they're not at, their happiness will be at a disadvantage. If there's a tie, then pick one place that needs staff and slap them in there. If their happiness is constantly decreasing, they probably have been exposed to radiation! Give them Radaway and watch their happiness go up instantly.

Later on, you'll be able to upgrade their stats, but that takes up a lot of time and takes them off the production line for a bit. Be sure to have backups.

3. Don't expand your population until you upgrade.

That means no babies. While the urge to play a eugenics god may strike you, you should calm down a bit until you get your infrastructure in place. If you have a sudden population boom and don't have the resources to support said boom, you can quickly spiral into a deficit that will take ages to come back from.

4. Use the clipboard to manage your population

It may be easy to manage everybody's jobs when you're just starting off, but when you get over twenty, it can get hard to keep track. That's where the clipboard function is a godsend. Click on any room, and click on the small clipboard icon in the lower left. 

Tapping on a dweller from there will compare their primary statistic for that room against every other dweller in the vault. Using this, you can manage everybody's job and make sure they're in the best place they can be.

5. Use outfits to augment, not patch up.

Outfits give different statistics. Generally, you want to improve on their primary statistic - unless they go over the maximum cap (10), it will still have a full effect. Make sure to improve people's abilities to do their job over being a well balanced competent joe.

And that's it so far! The basic tips that will let you succeed in Fallout Shelter.