On To Sustainable Slavery-Based Theocracy

Current Vault 551 Status

Population: 180
Overall Happiness: 96% 
Benny Happiness: 100%
Wealth: 124,426 caps

In recent days, Father Benny of Vault 551 has loosened his theological grip on his flock somewhat, as practical considerations had taken priority. Population growth, regular demoralizing assaults by Deathclaws and molerats, the ongoing challenges of simple keeping production numbers up. But the time is coming now for the Father's vision and leadership to transform us from mere post-nuke survivors to a Vault unified with true purpose.

Our population has stabilized into a range between 175 and 190 Dwellers, depending on our current Deadmeat live count.  As Father Benny's new "sex for everyone, kids for no one" edict has found immense popularity in our Vault, sustained happiness - now pretty solid at 96% - has made actual babybirthing a rare and usually unnecessary activity.

Which is good, because honestly, those creepy Deadmeats really get in the way.

"Hi!  I'm Debbie Deadmeat!  Anyone want to play CHECKERS?"

We've figured out recently that child happiness doesn't seem to factor into the overall Vault happiness average until they become adults.  Even so, we can't get them into the Incident Room fast enough.



Holy Babies: The Accidental Scion

We did have one unfortunate baby accident.  Due to a scheduling mishap during a routine shift change and job transfer, Judith Jenkins and Harry New-Cooper (son of Father Benny and Emily Newton) found themselves alone in a Living Quarters - a breach of Vault procedures.  By the time anyone realized that they were missing, they'd already transgressed and Judith was pregnant.

Given our current population predicaments, this was an issue.  If it had been anyone else, the baby would have been Deadmeat-ed.  However, as this involved Harry New-Cooper, this made the baby an official member of the Holy Bloodline, planned or not.  The baby was named Kathleen New-Cooper and she has now been inducted into the training program.

Judith has been relocated the hell away from Harry, and Harry has been given a harsh talking-to by his privately disappointed parents.


Rethinking Vault 551 Architecture

When the Fallout Shelter game begins, you don't give too much thought about what goes where.  You simply have better things to focus on, such as keeping your people alive and not glowing.  But as the game progresses and your economy stabilizes, your needs start to change.  Now that we're banging against some upper limits on the Vault design, it's time to rethink some layout decisions.

The first two levels were initially put into place for production count, mainly water and power.  Now that Vault 551 extends fifteen levels under the earth, the two surface levels are more important for their defensive capabilities against raiders and Deathclaws.  We now have about a dozen level-50 senior Dwellers (and a large number of Dwellers in their 40s), as well as powerful weapons and armor.  We've been able to put down raider attacks in the front room and Deathclaw assaults halfway through the second level, usually with no fatalities.

To be fair, though, raiders generally aren't very smart.

"When do you think those raiders will notice that they're shooting at an open door?"

The Deathclaws, on the other hand, are a different issue.  They come in threes, are vicious and tough, and will just rip their way through room after room until they're put down.  They proceed left to right on the first level, break through the elevator shaft on the far right, then move room by room to the left on level 2.  They zig-zag in this fashion, slaughtering anything in their path, until they're killed.

Higher level Dwellers can absorb more damage before dying, so our level 50s are all stationed in the top two floors.  The actual production output in those areas represent only a small fraction of overall power, food and water production, but those rooms are three units wide.  This means that Deathclaws have at best two or three rooms to pass through before hitting the elevator shaft.

To improve those defenses, we decided to annex those floors - the first one especially - and replace most of the large production rooms with one-unit training rooms.

The Deathclaw Gauntlet.

When a Deathclaw pack hits, they initially assault the front hall (offscreen in above image, to the left) and meet our two best warriors and their laser gatling guns.  Then they hit these top four rooms one at a time, left to right.  In each training room they meet two more level-50 Dwellers armed with badass guns.  They have to stop at each room, fight each pair the best they can, and then proceed to the next chamber once they give up.  The Deathclaws take a lot of damage, mainly from lasers and heavy duty flamethrowers.

Surviving Deathclaws hit the last warehouse room on the top far right, where they meet four Dwellers ready to take the kill shots.  Since installing this room sequence, not a single Deathclaw has reached the elevator shaft, or the reactor and barracks on the second floor.  We have also not had a single fatality, so that's a problem that I think we can declare solved.


Power Problems, Because Bigger Isn't Always Better

The other main architectural issue that we've encountered lately has involved our power generators. We'd started out with cheap gennies, upgraded them to full generator plants, and then started replacing them with nuclear facilities.  Eventually we'd upgraded those to much more expensive nuclear super reactors, thinking that we'd have all the juice we could possibly ever want.

What we're finding is that the Big Ass Nuclear Reactors (BANRs), aka the Super Reactors, aren't all that great for power generation.  They're very expensive, for one thing.  When fully upgraded and staffed by our straight-fives Dwellers, they put out 85 energy units every 3.5 minutes.  The older generation power generators, meanwhile, produce only 66 energy units per cycle - but their cycles are only 2 minutes long.  The older, cheaper generators are producing more juice for the time.

So why should any Overseer invest in BANRs?  Because they have giant freakin' HUGE storage capacities, 1200 energy units for a Super Reactor versus 300 units for a standard generator plant.  The nuke plants aren't power sources - they're BATTERIES.

Faced with an ongoing inability to meet energy demands with our growing collection of BANRs, we finally decided to bite the bullet, take the cost loss and replace a few of them with standard generators.  We still have heavy duty energy storage from our remaining Super Reactors, and the standard gennies are keeping them full.  So we seem to be good there.


Hunger Games, Vault 551 Edition

As new immigrants arrive via the radio station, most of them are being shipped right back out to the Wasteland for our own entertainment.  We gussy them up in tuxedos and pretty dresses, give them whatever rusty revolvers we happen to have sitting around, kick them out and tell them to make us proud.

The rules are pretty simple.  They go out and explore.  They fight and kill and survive.  They hopefully find guns, equipment and caps along the way.  Eventually - probably pretty soon - they die. If they happen to have found enough caps to pay for their own revival, or got really lucky and happen to stumble on something particularly rare or valuable (which hasn't happened yet), they get revived and recalled to the Vault.  They get de-radiated and patched up, and then sent back out again.  If they did not make their quotas, they're left to rot out there and forgotten.

If one of them makes it to becoming a level 10 Dweller, they formally become a Vault 551 Explorer, given proper armor and weapons and medical supplies, and are trained just like any other permanent member of the family.

Most make it through their first round, only to die in their second.  Angela Simmons survived her second round with exactly one more cap than necessary for revival; she was a scrapper, barely getting through before finally dying for good as a level 7 Dweller. Brittany Richards also pulled the just-one-cap-to-spare trick, and is still alive as a level 3.

Of the eight or nine contestants thus far, only one has successfully reached the level 10 prize: Jerry Armstrong.  He scored a lucky find in his first round with a rusty laser pistol and thereafter managed to claw his way through each successive run.  He's now heralded as a Vault 551 hero, outfitted in Battle Armor and now on a deep Wasteland exploration mission.


On To Father Benny's Higher Purpose

We're pretty close to sustainability in Vault 551 now.  Thanks to our dedication to the institution of slavery, most of our Dwellers are deliriously happy.  At least, the male ones anyway - our least happy workers are the many women stuck at 75% happiness.  We've chosen to deal with this by including a few men in our sex slave lineup, to keep some of the ladies happy.

"Hi.  I'm Lance.  Lance, uh, FURY.  That's right.  My name is Lance FURY."

Now that we have our basic survival, defense and overall morale needs met, and we've grown Vault 551 about as far as we comfortably can, are we approaching the end game for Fallout Shelter?

Not quite yet.  There are still a lot of weapons, outfits and Legendary Dwellers out there left to find, each new discovery allowing Father Benny to further spread his message of good cheer and copious copulation in a tragically depopulated world.  Now that all of our Dwellers have reached a basic standard level of education, the next step is to increase specialized education (Strength training for power plant workers, etc.) and to bring more Dwellers up to level 50 experience maximums.

Beyond that, our next priority is to restructure Vault operations in favor of exploration and acquisition.  Get out there en masse, find the good stuff, preach the word and get back home for some well deserved and righteous time in the Holy Brothels.

Our ultimate goal: to be a beacon of light to the blighted wastes, and to lead the lost to the carefully decided-upon occupations that best fit Vault 551's personnel needs at the time.

Ever the literalist, however, Rebecca The Wise just wants to live in a lighthouse.