Ultimate Fallout Shelter Walkthrough
Have you started playing the latest hit Fallout Shelter game? Are you stuck and keep on having failure bases? If so, this complete walkthrough guide will help you advance through the game while having happy and Vault full of effective and efficient dwellers.
Please note that this guide will walk you through the starting of the game, what to do during mid game, and steps to take to land on end game collection. This walkthrough is basic and general in essence is only written with the intend to help newcomers to break into the Fallout Shelter game easily.
We have linked more detailed information about specific parts of the game within this complete walkthrough guide for Fallout Shelter. You should also consider checking out the in-game help for some basic ideas on how things work in Fallout Shelter the game.
Beginning of the Fallout Shelter Vault Management
When you first start the game, you go through some simple tutorial to help you understand how the game works.
Before you start building anything, simply know that all rooms can be “merged” into a bigger room with a maximum space of 3. This means that you should not “block” any potential merges by mixing all the tutorial resource buildings next to one another.
Then you will need to put Dwellers to work by placing them into “right” rooms based on their SPECIAL stats. In the beginning you only really need to know about these three categories.
S = Power
P = Water
A = Food
After placing all the dwellers in the right places, make sure you check the objectives tab to see which quests that you can take. Your goal is to focus on completing those quests first. Since some quests reward you with “Lunchbox”. Lunchboxes are like card packs that reward you with resources, stronger weapons, and better dwellers. Throughout your game play, you should always check to see which objectives you can complete. You can “delete” or “abandon” 1 objective per day, so make your choice to delete out the ones that seem impossible.
In the mean time, make sure that the economy of your Vault is sustainable in terms of key resources in Power, Water, and Food. Consider checking out the Fallout Shelter Vault Building guide and Dweller Happiness guide for more details.
Your next step is to start explore ASAP to find useful weapons to arm everyone within your Fallout Shelter vault.
First Explorations
Your first exploration runs will be tough as most of your dwellers are low level. However, below are some of the key points to remember when starting to explore the Wasteland in Fallout Shelter. You basically drag out the dwellers out of your base to start the exploration process.
Later on when you have Med Bay and Science labs, you also want to equip those to your explorers to increase their survival capability.
There are a couple of stats that seem to make a difference with your initial exploration run.
Strength = Increases “Fist” damage.
Endurance = Increase survival ability in Exploration.
Luck = Increase the amount of “Loot” found during Exploration.
When you first start to explore, you want to send out Explorers with the highest amount of luck. The reason is that your explorer will not be able to survive for a long time, and thus you want him or her to find weapons or outfits as soon as possible.
Keep a close look on the HP of your exploring dwellers to make sure that you “recall” them before they die in the field. Consider cutting their exploration short too if they were able to find a weapon pretty early in the run.
Make sure that you equip your exploring dwellers with the best weapon possible and preferably outfits in Luck > Endurance > Strength.
After a few runs and having roughly half of your population geared with weapons. Also remember to switch on outfits on those dwellers that specialize in different professions. For example, placing “+S” gears on Power generation workers. You are now ready to expand your vault’s dweller population.
Quick Tips and Notes on Exploration
There are three key points about exploring in Fallout Shelter.
First is that your explorers on the run do not consume your Water or Food resources inside the Vault. Second is that your dwellers while waiting outside the Vault do not consume your resources until you click on “collect”. Combine these two factors together, when your Vault’s economy is running badly, consider sending them out to explore, and simply have them wait outside the Vault.
Lastly, dwellers can be “revived” with CAPS if they die on the run. This means that it can be helpful if you stash some CAPS points to handle emergency deaths.
Defending Against Raiders and RadRoaches
First, the strength in HP and attack power of raiders is dependent on your progression in the game. The more rooms that you have built, the stronger that they will become. You will start to see raiders wielding guns and big roaches that seem invincible and impossible to kill.
You can upgrade your “front” gate to withstand some additional attacks from incoming raiders. The only way this is helpful is that you have some time to “call” your forces to the top of the vault to start defending and killing the raiders.
One easy way to deal with raiders and roaches is by having a “set” of strong weapons. Unequip and equip them to the dwellers under attack. It is much easier to rotate your weapons to whichever room that the Raiders or Roaches are attacking, rather than calling for reinforcements.
When the HP of your dweller is low, do not be afraid to toss some Stimpaks on them. It is usually much cheaper to use the items rather than having to revive them after death.
Dating, Birth, and Radio Room Call
Before you start expanding your population, it is worth noting that you must first make sure you have the resource production necessary to handle the increase in population. A key rule of thumb is that you should have your “green resource line” at least at the center or to the left.
There are two ways of getting additional dwellers aside from Lunchbox draws. These ways are in-house breeding or Radio room calls.
The basic of giving birth is basically putting a guy and girl with high Charisma in living quarters. After some time they will hit it off, dance, then get pregnant to have babies. For more details and specific strategies about having babies in Fallout Shelter, check the link. It will take roughly 3~4 hours to give birth, and another 3~4 hours for the child to grow into adult. You will need to log into the game for the “sex” and birth to happen.
You can also get new dwellers with Radio room calls, it works by filling the room with high Charisma dwellers. The Radio will make “call” through out the day, and if a new dwellers answer it, you can “invite” the newcomer like you would with resource collection. It should also note that radio room calls can boost your entire vault’s happiness level.
Preparing for Longer Term Explorations
The next step is to start building Med Bay and Science Lab. Both building rooms are run by Intelligence. Med Bay makes Stimpaks which heals HP when used. And Science Lab creates RadAway which cures Radiation Damage (RED HP Bar).
You want to build both of the rooms and start producing some Stimpaks and RadAways. You want to stack all the resources to 1 or 2 explorers with most of the Stimpaks and RadAways with the strongest weapon and outfit possible in your inventory.
The reason for the setup is that exploration loots are improved based on how much time is spent. The “longer” the trips, the better the loot drops towards the end. You want your exploring dwellers to run the raid for as long as possible.
Your goal is to get mid tier to rare weapons and outfits by this stage, you want to at least have weapons that deal roughly 5~10 damage or more. As further expansions with your vault will typically draw much stronger groups of raiders and Radroaches. Without the proper weapon and gears your Vault base can easily get wiped out.
It can work in your favor if you actually “stop” expanding for a day or two, while waiting for your explorer to pick up the much needed weapons. In the mean time you can “upgrade” all your resource buildings to the max. This can help big time with your later setups.
By this time you may also need to expand on “Storage” building, since if you do not have the space while collecting from incoming exploring dweller, the game will automatically sell the outfits and weapons for you.
Training for SPECIAL Stats
With good resource production and stronger weapons in hand, you are now ready to create SPECIAL stats training buildings. You need to be careful about NOT over expanding as the difficulty of incidents scale with the number of rooms that you have.
The most important stat that we think is Luck, since Luck boosts your CAPS generation rate. But since it can take a while before you have enough dwellers to unlock Luck (Game Room), consider boosting Strength and Endurance first.
Max merge training rooms and fill them up with 6 dwellers to get maximum speed and efficiency with the stats increases. You can zoom into the room to see how long it will take for them to gain that one additional stat point.
While training, consider to always place at least 1 dweller inside your maxed merged resource buildings.
End Game Stuff
With the above walkthrough and tips, you should be able to progress pretty nicely. All that is left to do is to collect all the weapons, outfits, and unique rare / Legendary dwellers. There are two more things that you can do to progress through end game much faster.
Consider tearing down the OLD resource buildings and replace with stronger ones.
Rush Building and Power Leveling, Rush is one of the best way to power level your dweller. Simply rotate him or her through all the rooms and rush to gain fast EXP.
Keep more of your dwellers out on explore and raid to collect more gears and outfits.