Blog 101: No One Ever Enters, and No One Ever Leaves · 4:26am Aug 15th, 2015
No blog this week. Too busy playing Fallout Shelter! 
art by VinylScratchCooler
Okay, maybe a small one. 
Fallout Shelter, the much lauded surprise gift from Bethesda at this year's E3, finally became available for Android users yesterday after two months of agonizing wait. Naturally, I spent every available minute playing this game. My first real attempt at a vault (after an aborted initial attempt) is still very much a work-in-progress at this point. For those of you not playing it already (I'm sure there is at least one of you... isn't there?) but who plan to grab this game and start soon, I can provide a few useful tips. Nothing that a few Google searches can't provide, but things not readily apparent when starting out the game.
That will be below the break. Sadly, I forgot to take the screenshots that I intended of my own vault, so I'm going to feature a few from reviews and similar sources. It doesn't make a lot of difference, since vaults will all vaguely resemble each other. The strategy for building a good vault is pretty straightforward.
a fairly typical early vault
Fallout Shelter is a great little time-waster for any Fallout fan. There isn't a whole lot to the game, so as a serious sit-down game, I'm not seeing any real replay value. But it is ideal as an enjoyable way to pass the time during that trip, or in that long convention line, or waiting in the dentist's office. Like any good rogue-like game, Fallout: Shelter doesn't let you reload and try again. If you make a mistake, you either have to live with it, or start over. But even those who don't like rogue-like games shouldn't have an issue with this one (so long as you aren't pouring real money into lunchboxes), as the game plays fair. Fallout: Shelter can have dull stretches, and it can become really challenging at times, but it is never truly hard.
Now, for those just starting your first Vault, here are a few things you need to know:
Building Your Vault: Rooms can be both upgraded and merged. Rooms of the same type and the same upgrade level that are side-by-side will merge, to a maximum of three. You will want to build larger rooms first and upgrade later. The cost/benefit ratio of expanding a room is much better than upgrading one. Furthermore, you can upgrade larger rooms for less than upgrading individual smaller rooms of the same net size.
Assigning Dwellers to Rooms: Anyone on "coffee break" is someone that hasn't been assigned a job yet. Obviously, you want to assign Dwellers to jobs that are suited to them. That means assigning Dwellers with higher Strength to power-generating rooms, Dwellers with higher Ability to food-generating rooms, etc. However, I find that the number of Dwellers in a room is more important than their statistics for speed of general output. High S.P.E.C.I.A.L.s (the room's key S.P.E.C.I.A.L. and Luck) are critical for "rushing" production. A winning strategy is to put one person with the appropriate high S.P.E.C.I.A.L. in a room along with a bunch of mediocre-statted Dwellers. When you want to "rush" the room, pull everyone but your specialist out, and have that Dweller rush production alone.
Population Growth: While you will get a small number of new residents showing up at your door at the beginning, increasing your population is mostly reliant on procreation. There are a few other methods (lunchboxes and the radio station) that can bring others to your Vault, but they are rare and cannot be counted on. As awkward as it may feel, early on the winning strategy is to keep all your Vault's women constantly pregnant. (Edit: this turns out to not be such a winning strategy after all. Careful population management will let your Vault go a lot longer with less demands on resources.) More population means more workers for faster production, as well as more level-ups which generate money. Eventually, however, you will find your population outpacing your food and water supply production. Mid-game, you might want to slow down Vault growth and take time to optimize a bit while your resources aren't in danger of strain.
Pregnancy and Babies: Pregnancy lasts approximately three hours of real time. During this time, the pregnant women can work, but cannot assist in dealing with invasions or other incidents. (For this reason, I recommend arming your male Dwellers first.) There is no timer to indicate how long before the baby is born, and no special steps needed (such as activation or being in a particular room) to cause the birth to occur. Once a baby is born, there is another real-time period that you will have to wait before the child becomes an adult. During this time, the child cannot be activated in any way. This means that you cannot give the child RadAway or Stimpacks. So make sure you have plenty of water and food resources, because you can't use medicine to save your children from starvation or radiation poisoning.
You can choose each baby's first name at birth (the last is randomly chosen from one of the two parents), but since you won't know their S.P.E.C.I.A.L.s until afterwords, you might find yourself with an "Applejack" who has a Strength of one. Don't fret. You can change the entire name later by clicking on the character. (I'm waiting until mid-game before altering character names.)
Starting and Upgrading S.P.E.C.I.A.L.s: A baby's starting S.P.E.C.I.A.L.s will be influenced by the parent's. So mating two characters with good Agility, for example, will produce a baby with a higher starting Agility. Fortunately, the game has no inbreeding mechanic, so continuously paring off your best Dwellers is a winning strategy. (Clarification: Mothers won't breed with their sons and fathers will not sleep with their daughters. There are no negative ramifications for related individuals who are willing to sleep with each other doing so.) Increasing level only increased a character's health. Increasing S.P.E.C.I.A.L.s can be done through clothing or through various ability training rooms. The training rooms take a long amount of real time (again, with no available timer) to train up a S.P.E.C.I.A.L. (Edit: I have learned that there is a timer for training beneath Dwellers in these rooms, but it is only visible if you are fully zoomed in on the training room.) The size of a training room seems to have no impact on training times. (Edit: although I am told having more people training together will give a time reduction, I have not witnessed this to be the case.). The upgrade quality does; but even at the highest levels, the difference is so negligible that I recommend never spending the upgrade costs.
Wandering the Wasteland: The most important S.P.E.C.I.A.L.s for your wasteland adventurers are Endurance and Luck. Other statistics matter for how particular encounters play out. Armor has no impact on survivability beyond any Endurance boost it might give; there is not DT in the game and no weapons skills. Give your best Endurance/Luck Dwellers your best weapons and send them out. Wandering happens in real time. And returning takes half the amount of time that your adventurer has been out exploring.
Downtime Is Your Friend: With so many aspects of this game occurring in real time, it becomes very beneficial to play the game to the point where your resources are solid, then shutting the game down. When you come back to it a few hours latrer, your wasteland adventurers will have explored, pregnancies will have advanced, and training times will have completed. However, invasions and other incidents will not have occurred, and resources will only slightly have depleted (as that aspect of the game continues to run a few minutes after shutting down). The game essentially rewards you for not obsessively playing it. (Be sure to recall your wasteland adventurers before you go to bed though!)
Bugs and Other Issues: I haven't run into too many bugs, but I have noticed a few. Sometimes, characters will become un-selectable. This is particularly common when a character becomes pregnant. If this happens, log out and back it. The problem will be fixed. Another and more egregious issue is that while the game is supposed to stop running a few minutes after logging out, I have found that I have to actually turn off the power to the Android tablet that I'm playing on in order for the game to not continue to consume resources while I'm not playing. (Edit: this may be an problem with Android rather than the Fallout Shelter -- I know people who have struggled with Android not properly shutting down apps. It is definitely an issue to be aware of either way.)
Well, there are my hopefully helpful hints. Have fun playing!
art by D0ntst0pme
I'm going to wrap up with a tiny bit of unrelated news that some of you might appreciate. If you are like me, you've spent time scouring the internet for information about the upcoming Fallout 4. If so, you may have stumbled across a voice in the crowd called MrMattyPlays, a YouTuber providing fairly decent Fallout 4 speculation and news reiteration, which has garnered a small group of fans. Several of these fans are (or were) bronies, so they were quite disappointed to see him horribly mocking and ridiculing bronies, especially brony fans of Fallout, in a livestream. But this story has a happy ending. For some, nothing cures like a taste of their own medicine; and while I'm saddened that anyone would have to endure the the slings and arrows of haters, I'm please to say that good things came of it.
Since that time, Matty drew the ire and outright mockery of the larger Fallout fandom (particularly amongst the Reddit community) for his videos and attitude. In reaction, Matty helped form a community dedicated to being a place where gaming fans, particularly those of Fallout, could come together in a spirit of love and tolerance -- a place where everyone would be accepted, sheltered from the hatefulness that permeates much of the internet. Not long after the new site, named Sugarbombed, was established, Matty came to realize that he had treated bronies just as badly as the larger Fallout community had treated him. Earlier this week, Matty offered an apology to the brony community for his unacceptable and cruel behavior. He may not ever be a fan of Fallout: Equestria, but it warms my heart to see him learning and taking the core message of the story to heart anyway: be better.
You can read the apology here.
art by FD-Daylight
I love Fallout Shelter so far, but it keeps crashing.
You know, I would be playing Fallout Shelter with you, but the only android device my family has was taken on a trip to Guam literally the day before Fallout Shelter finally came out on android.
I would play this, but my I reset my tablet to factory settings and have found that I am unable to download apps now,
I will be contacting ZIKI or Android about it soon so I can return to iFunny, they all probably think I am dead, 
!
I had my first Deathclaw raid today. Those things are WAY stronger than raiders! They cut through my fortified vault door like butter, not even Gatling lasers and flame throwers were enough to stop them dead.
Fortunately no one died.
3320867 Maybe your device isn't up to snuff? I had it on my iPhone 4s when it came out there, and it kept crashing on me, so I (sadly) uninstalled it. When I went to check on it again, a few weeks later, they had a notice at the top about it needing iPhone 5 or later.
I'm still sad the game has no panthers, white noise generators, or even puppet crates.
Oh well at least vault 69 is still feasable
I would play the game, but apparently my android isn't compatible with the game.
Training rooms have timers just zoom in on the room and there will be a timer above each dwellers head.
I tried it on my ipod, but it is way too small to enjoy. Now I can get it for my massive as fuck screen android. Still, I don't know if I'll like it, because my initial reaction on the gameplay was meh. I like being able to pause my games to think my next moves through, and it doesn't seem like you can do that.
remember to breed people
DEATHCLAW MOUNTS WHEN, TODD?
DEATHCLAW MOUNTS WHEN?!
Good set of hints. There is an inbreeding mechanic: mothers and sons, and fathers and daughters, cannot breed. Daughters get their surname from their fathers, and sons from their mothers, and people with the same surname will not breed.
The benefit of a large training room is that people train faster when there are more people in the room. The impact isn't huge, but eh.
Happiness improves production, and your reward on six of the seven day cycle (the reward on the seventh day is always a lunchbox, I think). Improve happiness by successfully rushing, by putting people in appropriate rooms for their stats, giving them weapons and armour, having a radio station, keeping them healthy, and disposing of corpses.
It's a good idea to reinforce the vault door, and have the people on that level have the best guns and armour. People on other floors can be attacked, but the worst attackers come through the door.
Oh, one other thing: the game appears to track stats above 10, so if you want to get the most out of your dwellers, boost their stats to max, and give them good, appropriate, armour on top of that.
3320968 i have an old ipad i can only get like 30 peeps then it crashes :(
Sadly, this game hates my smartphone. I hope I'll have better luck with BlueStacks (PC emulator of Android). So far it works good, but I still have some troubles with controls.
I... suck at this game, honestly. XD I got to a point where I actually needed to be on constantly to help the resources along.
I'm not playing it.
Don't have a smart phone..... someone needs to bring this thing out for Steam.
I like this game. It's definitely what they said it would be: Xcom-style base with the awesome of Fallout. I will name one of the kids "Bradford", Vahlen, and Charles. (And of course pony names) Good to hear you're enjoying yours, Kkat!
A Fallout game I can play without wrenching a gaggle of 9 year olds off my Xbox and away from Minecraft? Buck yeah! I stopped reading at "android release" to just go download it and play it myself!
Ha! See, that's what I thought at first too, but that isn't really true. There's no inbreeding allowed between blood relatives, but in-laws are fair game. And since there's no marriage mechanic unless I actually take the time to rename dwellers so that they all have one family name (which I didn't think to start doing until later), it's entirely possible to lose track of who's related to who and end up with a severely inbred family.
I got one family of dwellers in my game called the Greens which includes one woman who has had children by two different men who are father and son, and another woman who had a child by her uncle. It doesn't help that the Greens are so big that they run basically everything in the vault. I like to think of them as my vault's version of the Lannisters. In the end, I had to run experiments to work out who was related to who and how, and then I had to draw up a family tree for them on my own. It ended up looking very tangled.
And that's why you shouldn't be careless about assigning dwellers in your vault breeding program, kids.
3320892
Anita Sarkeesian does not care about video games and does all this shit for the attention, so don't talk about her like her opinion should matter to any of us. I'm not even convinced she herself believes half the crazy things she says. It's clickbait, and nothing more, and you, Kkat, and the whole rest of the internet would be far better served by ignoring her and letting her fade back into obscurity. She has zero credibility, so stop giving her words weight. I think you, personally, will probably feel a lot better for it as well. The social justice crowd can make you feel despair for humanity by their mere existence. Take it from someone who's already spent far too much of their life groaning at stupid things on Tumblr.
Wandering the Wasteland: Slowtrot can do that... just after he is done being in a coma.
3320892
I would take issue with the word "sole". Women in the game are just as capable as wasteland adventurers or in any other role. While pregnant, they can still work and do so as well as their male or non-pregnant female counterparts. Instead, birthing babies becomes an additional role. I imagine some might consider putting this duty solely on the women unfair, but I'm not going to call Bethesda sexist because they didn't give men the ability to become pregnant as well.
Yes, those who take on that role give up their roles as combatants and firefighters in exchange. However, while I can understand offense at the suggestion that pregnant women are unsuited for fighting fires and engaging in military action, I wouldn't label it "sexist" so much as "pro-life".
Well it looks interesting.
I wonder if robots play any statistical advantage to the game play? Seeing as a few Vaults did have robots of different kinds in them.
Though I suppose it's probably just as interesting seeing you Vault residents going about their everyday lives doing certain things throughout the Vault.
>>It's finally there<<
Time to play a game.
media2.popsugar-assets.com/files/2014/09/26/975/n/1922283/6ea88834d50eabbe_27/i/Jigsaws-Doll-Saw-Movies.jpg
Thanks, kkat. [you're helpful like a real cat with a fluffy duster tail and tendencies to walk between the furniture during a cleaning]
3321766
Fair enough.
3321341
I take it that it's better not to have a Tumblr account at all then?
3321850
Not necessarily. Tumblr's a big website, so the social justice crowd don't make up the entire userbase. I'm not even certain that they make up the majority. If there's other content on the site that you'd normally be interested in joining up for, I'd say go for it. It's easy enough to avoid bad elements so long as you just follow stuff quietly. I'd recommend against starting your own blog, though, because any innocuous thing you post could be used by some random nutcase as a reason to hate you.
Me, I have an account, but I just use it to follow pony art blogs or whatever. Despite the quote, I don't actually go on the site to look for things to rage at. I just see (or used to see) a lot of screencaps of this kind of idiocy, sent by friends or whatever, and most of the time, it was stuff from Tumblr.
3321944
Thank you for the explanation and advice
To be honest, I'm not sure I'll use Tumblr at all. Among us Russians, this is not a very well-known site (although I may be wrong). And I have seen enough idiocy in our Russian social networks to last a lifetime
Some things by the social justice crowd I had seen before take the cake from them, though.
My second vault was doing real good. I had 38 Dwellers and a steady supply of resources but not enough guns.
Then I had a Dweller run out of the room a pack of Mole Rats burrowed into, and next thing I know, my entire Vault is flooded with the damn things. I went from 38 Dwellers to 2 in the span of five minutes.
Shortly afterwards I restarted.
3322001
It's a good place to go to for fandom stuff. If you're really into Marvel movies, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Doctor Who, Sherlock, Supernatural, or any of that, they have decent-sized fandoms on Tumblr that produce some content, but I'm not really involved in any of it, so I can't speak for what it's like. And as I said, MLP does have some presence there too. But if none of that appeals to you, then yeah, I wouldn't bother.
i was lucky and got power armor on day one! xD
t-51D model, not even t-51B.
I am one of those people with a flip phone, so sadly I won't be getting it.
, even if it wasn't under ideal circumstances.
But, I do enjoy hearing that there is one less hater in the world
3322028
Sorry, but it sounds like my luck if I were to play it.
I've also been playing it for the past 2 days, gotta say its actually really fair in the microtransactions section since you can only buy lunch boxes or mr.handies. It's pretty fun as well.
i.imgur.com/7JEf3N9.jpg
... You might say I've played it a tad since it came out...
I also have another handyman and three people in the wasteland, two women and a guy.
I've only gotten about 30 minutes in, but I do like playing Fallout Shelter. More because I like imagining what my vault would be like if all of my people were ponies following the goofy experiments I'm imagining them following.
Almost makes me want to try writing about silly shenanigans again, but I never really seem to make the time.
3321286 I like X-Com because it is turned based and you have no time limit to decide on your moves. This is not that. It may have the base building mechanic, but other than that it is as different as can be. I am the type of person to over think absolutely everything.
This game is actually getting me interested in the Fallout franchise since I have never even bought any Bethesda games with the exception of Skyrim, and as far as I can tell, in terms of gameplay Fallout is just post-apocalyptic Skyrim with guns, so that sounds awesome.
Also I got super lucky and got a Gatling Laser on like my third Lunchbox,
Also here's a pic of my shelter (Vault 420 lol I'm so mature) just because.
img07.deviantart.net/3f55/i/2015/245/d/4/my_fallout_shelter_by_blabideeblahda-d9861zc.jpg
Got this game when it came out on the iPhone. While my dwellers don't have pony names, they are residing in
StableVault 2.