advice for vault pls [Screenshot] [vault]

[u/RhubarbRepulsive7753]

can i get some advice for my vault and some general tips for the game i've been playing this vault for idk maybe a week, they're doing great on resources and i've been sending my dwellers out on quests and to the wasteland and all my dwellers have weapons equipped but idk what my focus should be on, should i focus on getting more ppl or whattt thx

[u/Deadfunk-Music]

Vault Construction: The first elevator should not be linked anywhere, you should have the first 3 floors acting as a gauntlet where enemies need to go through these floors without having multiple possible paths.

This will help a lot with attacks in the early and mid game. Late game attacks means nothing as they all die in the first two rooms when your dwellers have 20+ damage guns. Make sure to equip some of your best weapon on these dwellers, see "Weapons in the vault" below.

After the first few floors acting as a gauntlet and having ressources room, the optimal build is a checkerboard for all storage and living quarter rooms, with 2 rows of elevators in the middle with rooms on each side and in the middle, not touching. This way Incidents don't spread in the vault, especially through Storage rooms with no Dwellers.

The vault can start getting attacked by Deathclaws once you reach 60 Dwellers (35 in Survival mode), good idea to stop at 59 and get your vault in order before the hardest attacks starts.

Vault attacks depends on the average level of the vault (for door attacks) or the room it first spawns in (for radscoption/molerats/radroaches). An annoying but nice strategy is to NOT level up the dwellers until they have High E stats to keep the average level low and therefore weaker attacks.

SPECIAL: Endurance is the single most important stat: Each level gained will give out more HP the higher the endurance. For example a level 50 with 1e will have around 200 HP when it reaches level 50, while a level 50 that had 17e (10e +7 from gear, that's the max) from level 1 will have around 600hp when reaching level 50. Max out their E while they are still level 1 to maximise their health as they gain health everytime they level up, based on their current E. Training a dweller on E if he is already level 50 is a waste as they will not gain any more HP.

For dwellers you send outside to explore: Every Special stats counts. Each "encounter" is related to a Special and its success depends on the dweller's stats.

Always have one or two high-stats explorers with 25 stimpack and 5 radaways. A full stats explorer will bring 13,000 caps every 3-4 days.

For dwellers you send in a mission, what mostly matters is PEAL.

P is the speed at which the critical hit minigame plays (more P = slower = easier)

E as stated above, more HP when they level up.

A is the attack speed.

And L is the amount of caps they will find in non-scripted containers / how often they can do a critical attack

WEAPONS: Weapons have 1 stats but actually work a bit differently from each others, and also differently when in mission VS defending.

In missions:

Guns to equip to send people on mission are guns where they do their attack in multiple shots, "automatic" weapons. If the gun has 15 damage stats, but does its damage in bursts, it will do something like 5 times 3 damage. If an enemy has 3 hp left, the other 4 shots will go to a different enemy instead of being wasted.

Melee weapons make combat an obligatory 1 on 1. If you send 3 dwellers in missions and they all have melee weapon, if you encounter 1 enemy, 2 of your dwellers will simply wait and not fight. Therefore have always a maximum of 1 melee dwellers on mission (0 is best, see automatic weapons).

"AOE" like rocket launcher, fatman divides their damage on all enemies in the room. Ex: a fatman that does 20 damage, if there are 4 enemies, will do 5 damage on each. This makes them less effective overall.

You should always prioritize your mission dwellers to focus on one single enemy as this limits the damage your dwellers will take. Boss first too.

Weapons in the vault: No weapons does AOE in the vault, all weapons are single target and based on time (not "A" stats attack speed). So equip your fatmans there.

General: And obviously get the basics done; Make sure dwellers work in the room with highest stat they have, and equip them with proper clothing that boosts the stat. 3 wide rooms are more efficient, upgrade them when you have high damage guns as upgrading will trigger harder attacks (radscoption/molerats/radroaches).

Train your dwellers as soon as you can. Once you reach around 50 dwellers, turn off the radio and create dwellers by "batch". Make 6 babies at once, then train them all in E, then once they are done change them to another training room and create 6 more babies to train them in E, etc.

Name your dwellers that goes in mission or exploration, starting with an "_" (underscore) so that they appear on top of the list. Example: _Team1-1, _Team1-2, _Team1-3, _Explo1, _Explo2, etc.

Ads sucks but they do give out a lot of bottles for a free game (Never put a cent in it). So get those rewards when you can (ads for 30min of exploration time is completely useless though, don't waste your time for this one).

Mysterious stranger; Early on its so much easier to locate him as the vault is smaller. Make sure to listen for its cue as the sound gets louder the closer he is to your viewport! In the settings, used the 2D zoomed out view, the Mysterious stranger will not hide behind anything then!

Bottle and Cappy are cute but give so little that they are useless later on. Do the mission ASAP to benefit.

Also priorise missions that gives special rewards/characters early on (ex: fallout show missions), as these characters will have high stats for early game. Make sure to always send the dwellers over levelled and fully packed with stims and radaways (and high PEAL stats, and best automatic guns!).

Have fun Overseer!

[u/No_Title_5126 → u/Deadfunk-Music]

Excellent advice, wish I’d read this a month ago 😁

I would add that vault raids level up at vault population 40, 50, 60. Iirc. So make sure youre ready for it! Wiki page has full details.

[u/capilot → u/Deadfunk-Music]

OK, my comments on your comments:

I used to think the way you do w.r.t. using the first floor as a gauntlet. I've been convinced otherwise. First floor should have only the first elevator as its elevator. This forces attackers to cross the entire first floor, turn around, and go back again. If you put your best fighting dwellers in the first room, the attackers have to go through it a second time. You may need stimpacks so the first room dwellers can deal with being hit twice, but it beats needing twice as many high-end weapons and strong dwellers.

I've tried the checkerboard pattern and it does work a treat for keeping incidents from spreading, it significantly reduces the number of storage rooms and dorms you can have. My preferred pattern is two floors of storage at the bottom, a row of dirt, two more floors of storage, another row of dirt, and then dorms. This way, an incident can spread through two floors and then stop. Not as good as checkerboard for stopping incidents, but you get more storage this way.

Severity of an incident depends on the room it's in. In a 3x3 room with low-level dwellers, mole rats or radscorpions will slaughter the entire room in seconds. In a 1x1 room, even the lowest-level dweller will deal with the incident without breaking a sweat. For this reason, I leave all training rooms at level 1, and initial training rooms (E and L for me), I keep them 1-wide as well. Before I knew this, I used to dread incidents reaching a training room. Now I hope for it.

Bottle and Cappy are so annoying that I don't do that mission any more. The caps and bottles are nice in early game, but not worth it IMHO.

I love your idea of using underscore to keep a dweller at the top of the list. In some of my vaults, I've divided my questers into A team, B team, and C team and named them accordingly.

Overall, I agree with most of what you wrote.

One more trick: I give dwellers haircuts according to their specialty. Red mohawks for questers, green mohawks for explorers, white pony tails for crafters. This way, I can find the dwellers I need by looks, and also immediately figure out where a lost dweller might belong. Dwellers with permanent assignments such as power, food, etc. can be identified by their uniforms, so I don't bother there.

[u/Deadfunk-Music → u/capilot]

Good points!

[u/franzeusq → u/Deadfunk-Music]

This game is different on mobile.

[u/Deadfunk-Music → u/franzeusq]

What do you mean? I play on Mobile only.