If you are playing Fallout Shelter and cannot seem to get your vault working together, you may find this guide useful. The purpose of this vault building guide is to help any new and beginning overseers getting control of their vaults while keeping everyone healthy and happy. Advanced players will most likely utilize these tips on their own.
Fallout Shelter Resources and Economy
Early on in the game you are given little clues about how resources impact one another. While more clues are given with the in game help file, there is not enough to teach you how to advance and fully built out a successful and safe vault.
There are three main resources in Fallout Shelter – Power, Food, and Water.
All of your buildings require Power to be run.
Excessive food will heal your dwellers over time while lack of food will decrease their HP overtime.
Excessive water will heal radiation damage over time while lack of water will deal radiation damage.
The radiation damage is marked as “red” on your HP bar.
The goal of the managing game for a successful overseer is to keep everything in the green. And in this vault building economy guide we will give you tips on how to do just that to run your vault efficiently.
In terms of importance, you should always rank Power as your priority above both Water and Food. Without power, none of your buildings can function. It should be noted that the building farthest away from the power generators will be shut down first when you lack power.
Plan First and Merge Resource Buildings
Planning ahead in your Fallout Shelter vault building is super important. You should ALWAYS merge your resource generation buildings to at least double and preferably triple.
The only buildings that you should left as a single or a double are the MedBay, Science Lab, and Storage. Storage buildings are made to house weapons and outfits.
Resource buildings get HUGE resource production boost when merged to double/triple and upgraded to the max.
There are a few studies and test to check the efficiency of double vs triple merged buildings. The result is that double grants better production rate if you play nonstop sessions, however the total return per “node” is more or less the same for double and triple buildings. Double node buildings still provide slightly better returns, however it can take more work to manage as you will have to at least staff it with 1 or more dwellers for each complete buildings.
It should be noted that the buildings must have SAME upgrade level before they can be merged. If you construct the buildings without meeting the upgrade level requirement, they will remain as separate rooms until you bring up the weakest link.
One optimal building setup includes a Triple – Single (Elevator) – Triple – Double, Or 3-1-3-2 or 3-1-2-3.
SPECIAL Points and Effects on Production Time
Different resource buildings correspond to one of the SPECIAL stats that your dwellers possess. It should be noted that correct placements will also boost the Happiness rating.
Power = Strength
Water = Perception
Food = Agility
Dating (Baby and Pregnancy) or Radio = Charisma
Med Bay (Stimpak for HP) or Science Lab (RadAway for Radiation) = Intelligence
More stats will reduce the amount of time that it requires you to collect the resources. There are two major points about how stats work to reduce the production time.
1. The collection time is determined by overall stats by all dwellers working in a building. This means that 1 +6 Strength worker can beat 2 +3 Strength workers.
2. The collection time reductions has diminishing returns. For example, a skill different from +1 to +2 is significantly higher than from +19 to +20.
Based on these two pointers, you can come up with two major strategies:
During Early Game, you must place the right worker in the right building to ensure decent resource output. You determine the “right” worker by placing the strongest relevant stat into the room, for example High Strength = Power Generator.
In mid to late game, use training facility to train your “weakest” link working in a particular building. Since the higher stat values will take exponentially longer to train and grant you with much less potential returns.
In end game vault setup, you should fully staff the resource buildings with +10 in the particular stats for maximum resource production reduction.
How to Take Advantage of Training Facilities
Fallout Shelter offers a few training facilities and they are as followed:
Weight Room = Strength
Athletics Room = Agility
Armory = Perception
Classroom = Intelligence
Fitness Room = Endurance
Lounge = Charisma
Game Room = Luck
The Fallout Shelter training speed is increased when you have more than 1 dwellers in a training session. This means that you should always merge the training facilities to maximum triple and fully upgrade it, then place all of the Vault dwellers into the training buildings.
In general, you should skip all of the training building and go for straight Fitness Room (Endurance) and Game Room (Luck). The reason is that you want to improve your Wasteland exploration team as fast as possible before all the other stats.
If you can choose, consider training for Luck before all other stats. Since lucky vault dwellers can grant you much faster CAPS generation rate. The second best stat for training is Endurance since it improves your character’s HP pool, which is useful for all the on base incidents and exploration purpose.
You can check the amount of time that each individual receive their stats upgrades by zooming into the training room.
Occasional Resource Collection vs Nonstop Playing Sessions
In a nutshell as the Fallout Shelter is currently built, it rewards players who do occasional resource collection over nonstop playing sessions. However, you will advance and level up faster if you do nonstop playing sessions. The reason is that when you are playing nonstop, you have much higher chance to trigger incidents such as Roaches or Raider Attacks. Raiders will steal your resources that make your play sessions non worthwhile.
You generally should at least place 1 dweller into a building so that you can collect resources after X amount of offline time.
Hold Off Building Expansion
As you advance through the game and advance your buildings, always upgrade your existing buildings with CAPS instead of expanding into more floors.
The reason behind this strategy has a few reasons. The first is that the difficulty of Raiders and Roaches are based upon number of buildings that you have. The more buildings you have, the stronger enemies that you will face. Without decent weapons in the beginning and middle of the game, you can be paired up with nearly impossible raiders and roaches that will wipe out your entire community.
The second reason is that more buildings require more Power to run, you can readily run into power issues if you expand too many buildings without having the necessary infrastructure.
In addition, you may not have enough Dwellers to fully staff all of your resource buildings. So play slowly and safely, make sure all of your resources are caught up before expanding into new floors.
Avoid Vault Building “Rush”
Lastly, you should almost never get into a position where you have to “RUSH” to stay afloat.
Rushing buildings is great for leveling up faster with bonus EXP, but they are bad at keeping yourself alive. Rush’s risk level decreases over time, but if you have to continuously rush to keep up with the resource consumption, you will lose your base fairly quickly.
Wait on expansion and build a solid foundation is key to a successful Vault in Fallout Shelter.