Hey, remember Fallout Shelter? That free iPhone game that everyone played the week it came out and then slowly stopped mentioning after that? Yeah, that one.
I still play it now and then, mainly as a way to make myself wake up in the mornings. It’s more effective to open Fallout Shelter than hit the snooze button. I’ve gone through several vaults by now, one of which I played through to absolute capacity.
Unfortunately there’s no real end game. Even after you’ve filled up every inch of space under ground, the game keeps suggesting you add more elevators to give yourself more room. It’s like the developers never expected you to be obsessive enough to finish the game.
In the months since the game was first released, there have been a few updates, including Deathclaws that race through your vault and kill swaths of dwellers; a Mysterious Stranger who appears in a puff of smoke to the sound of dramatic chords, then disappears just as quickly, but will give you a random amount of caps if you click on him in time; and a method of collecting junk and turning it into weapons or clothes. It also now allows you to skip the tutorial and to evict dwellers from the vault without needing to go through the macabre steps of sending them into the wasteland to die. You can build a barbershop and change the hair color and styles of your Dwellers. Mildly interesting, but not game changing.
ANYWAY. I made a vault, as you do, and after a while, an infestation of rad roaches killed off just about everyone. I rezzed six of them, which was all I could afford, not realizing that bodies disappear after 24 hours if you don’t get to them in time.
But there was a problem: all of the dwellers I had left were female, which meant I couldn’t expand the population of the vault and get any further in the game. I was too far along in the game to get new dwellers just wandering in, so I had to rely on getting new dweller cards in lunch boxes. I got one lunch box for every seven days of logging in, and very occasionally would get one as an objective reward (except most of the objectives that give you a lunchbox require you to have more than six dwellers).
But. After ten weeks, I had gone through maybe fourteen lunchboxes and had NOT A SINGLE VAULT DWELLER CARD. Not even the most common ones. Not even female ones. I had more caps than I knew what to do with, and I got extra food and water constantly, even though my dwellers barely needed any. But dwellers? Nope.
Sure, I could spend money to get a boatload of more lunchboxes, but that’s boring. I could also just start a new vault, but that’s missing the point. The game is only interesting when it’s difficult.
Finally, after what must have been months, I got a card:
And immediately afterward, I got two more. Finally my vault was on its way to a baby boom. And boom it did. I decided to keep the men as breeding stock and only keep the girl children, to keep in the spirit of the early days of the vault. Everyone else got tossed out on their asses.
Nowadays, Vault 781 is doing quite well for itself. We had our first Deathclaw attack today and everyone survived. Everyone is very happy.
So…I guess it’s time to start a new vault.
Bennett North 