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.