We all knew that Fallout 4 was going to be a big deal at E3 2015. What we didn’t know was that Fallout Shelter, a standalone mobile game for iOS and most recently Android would be announced, then released only a few short minutes later. As far as pleasant surprises go, this one was pretty far up on our E3 list.
Of course, we immediately took to our iPads and Galaxy Notes and dove in to see what all the fuss was about, and we must admit, the fuss was warranted. Fallout Shelter is an extremely fun game that is sure to kill some time, and ease the pain of having to wait for Fallout 4 to release this November 10, 2015.
After a couple of hours of building, managing, and sending our dwellers out into the wastelands, here are a few tips we’ve jotted down that you’d be wise to keep in mind.
Adding Rooms
The first thing that Fallout Shelter will do is teach you how to add a couple of essential rooms, Such as the Power Station and water Treatment. You don’t have a choice in the matter, but it’s easy to get room happy as soon as the game hands over full control. We learned this the hard way, biting off more than we could chew with the limited amount of Dwellers at our disposal. You see, adding more rooms requires more power, and if you don’t have Dwellers assigned to that room, some of your other facilities will go dark. It’s best to make sure that you always have enough Dwellers to staff your Power Station. It is by far the most important of all the rooms you’ll add.
Dweller Skills
When you touch and drag a Dweller to a particular room, you’ll get a number popping up on your screen before you drop them. This indicates their productivity in that particular area. If you get a zero, it means that adding that person to that room is completely useless and you’d be best to find somewhere else that they fit in better. We’ll again use the Power Station to make our point. If you click on hammer icon in the top right of the screen, you can see that the Power Station is associated with Strength. Before you add a Dweller to that room, tap them and view their stats and skills. If they have a high Strength rating, they will most likely flourish in the Power Station.
Completing Objectives
It’s not always clear what your Objectives are, but you can find them by tapping the Pip-Boy icon in the bottom right of your screen. Once you know what you’re tasked with, see if there’s anything easy that you can knock off. For example, we had to assign one of our Dwellers and Outfit. In this case we simply tapped the Dweller to bring up their character menu and assigned them something to wear. This completed our Objective, and doing so can often reward you with either Caps or Lunchboxes, with the latter being one of the best way to get yourself all kinds of goodies. Earning Lunchboxes is free, but if you really want to speed things up you can buy them with in-app purchases. It’s completely optional.
Earning More Caps
In Fallout Shelter, Caps are your currency. You will get some early in the game just to help you get started, but after that you’ll need them for things such as upgrading facilities, removing rocks, or even expanding with more rooms and features for your Dwellers to enjoy. Just like earning Lunchboxes, the best way to get more Caps is by completing objectives. You can even find Cap rewards in Lunchboxes, making it even more vital that you check in with Pip-Boy frequently to see what you can do to help your cause. Just don’t get too spend happy – there’s nothing worse than needing to add a Power Station, only to find that you spent all your money on Water Treatment.
Making Some Babies
One of the more effective ways to increase the number of Dwellers you have is to populate the Living Quarters with people. You need to ensure you have enough folks working away in your Power Station, Water Treatment and Dining Hall, but if you find yourself with some spare bodies, toss them into the Living Quarters. If two Dwellers get to know each other well enough, they’ll sneak off into the back room for some privacy, and suddenly you’ll see some smiley faces floating around in that area. When they emerge, one of the Dwellers will be pregnant, and soon after you’ll have another body to your population count. This is important because the number of Dwellers you have is directly tied to what rooms you unlock. For example, the Medbay is only unlocked after you add 14 Dwellers to your vault, and the numbers only go up from there.
That’s not all there is to Fallout Shelter, but it should be enough to hold you over until we can spend some additional time with the game and deliver some extra tips.
Now download Fallout Shelter for your favorite Apple device! On Android? No problem. You can download Fallout Shelter for Android too!
