A tips and tricks guide to the new mobile app game ‘Fallout Shelter. This website is supposed to be about living in Thailand, but a secret nerd-out page won’t hurt.

Most guides out there right now focus on basics like how matching strong dwellers with the proper job, the power plant. Matching dwellers to jobs is obvious. Here are some tips that aren’t as clear:

Problems Snowball

Production shortfalls can quickly become game ending hells. Falling short on food results in all players loosing health. Falling short on water results in all players getting radiation poisoning, so same end result, health lowering. But these shortfalls have unexpected secondary effects:

The players become less happy when they aren’t well. That’s a big problem because unhappy players reduce your ‘happiness productivity bonus’, (upper left corner, that little smiley face with a % next to it). The snowball effect begins…
It gets worse, because unhappy players take lots of coffee breaks, scrolling into other areas of the shelter. Some appear to take permanent coffee breaks. Result, productivity falls even further. Then health gets even lower. The cycle is painful to watch.
This is the cherry on top. To most tempting solution to shortfalls is to hit that “rush” button. But think twice. See, low food/water leads to low health and so if everyone is almost dead and your rush fails the fail causes fire or rad roaches, then people actually die. Then you throw your iPad across the room.

Average Joe & Jane is Your Friend

When I first started playing, I cursed the dwellers with no specific talent (average stats across the board).

However, these people are your ‘jack of all trades’ to prevent shortfalls. Move them around a lot, making sure to prevent shortfalls. At first, I named them insulting names because they pissed me off but now I need them all the time and thanks to their degrading names, they’re easily recognizable.

Big Rooms Are Risky

You can combine three smaller rooms of the same type, to make one big room. The incentive is to save caps, because upgrades are cheaper this way.

The problem is, if you have 2-3 people in a 6 person room, you hit “rush”, and it fails… you may be in trouble. The failure accident will be proportional to the room size and your room is far from fully staffed. Fires never cause me trouble but rad roaches do. A handful of rad roaches can kill an understaffed room pretty quick if you don’t get them help.

Plan for the Worst with Small Power Plants

When you fall behind in power, the rooms further from the power plants loose power first. If the furthest rooms are water and food rooms, things get ugly quick. Avoid it.

When you use smaller power plants, you have better damage control. Falling below the bar only closes one power plant and because your small plants are scattered everywhere, very few rooms will loose power.

Sex Makes People Happy

Have someone who’s not very happy? That’s killing your productivity. Try sticking them in the bunk room with someone of the opposite sex and high charisma. If you have nightwear, put that stuff on them. It’ll very likely be baby making time before long, no joke. Sex turns frowns upside down and babies become workers, so everything works out.

Pregnant Ladies Don’t Wear Fire-suits

You might think “I’d like some med packs pronto” and then hit rush for your med bay. If it’s staffed by women and they’re pregnant, that was an error on your part.

First of all, don’t be telling pregnant ladies you want anything “pronto”, in a game or real life, that’s dangerous. But in this case if the rush fails you’ll get fire/roaches and both women will run from the room. Inferno. Same goes for staffing the closest room to the vault door, if you get invaded by raiders, they run.

First time I played I’d given a pregnant woman the best gun and a minute into a raid I couldn’t figure out where the hell she’d gone. She was hiding, people died, it wasn’t my best moment. I think everyone starved… kind of her fault too, I mean if you’re gonna run at least leave the gun.

Lengthy Adventures

My most valued room, that isn’t a necessary utility, is the med facility. Having lots of med packs allows me to equip one dweller with 5-6 packs and send them out into the wasteland to explore overnight, while I sleep. It’s great because you wake up and check their inventory and it’s filled with guns, armor, other outfits and caps.

Example after only 4.5 hours…

I spend lots of caps upgrading the med bay, I keep it fully staffed, and often try to rush production. Lots of armor and outfits give great bonuses and it’s certainly cheaper to increase productivity with outfits than with 3,000 cap room upgrades.

A peripherally benefit of having lots of med-packs on hand is the obvious, to keep dwellers from dying during raids and other events.