PTSD, Depression and Sex Slaves

Current Vault 551 Status

Population: 124
Overall Happiness: 89% 
Benny Happiness: 100%
Wealth: 25,762 caps

I haven't posted in several days now because there hasn't been much to post about.  I had started to wonder if we were reaching a boredom equilibrium in Vault 551, bringing the entertainment factor of this blog to an unfortunate end.  Population was growing more slowly, and we have a quarter of the Vault population in school and training up nicely.  Things have been stable.

But I suppose that as long as these guys are around, nothing stays stable around here for very long.

"Pardon me, good sir, but could you please direct me to a nearby source for fine wines?"

Nearly every time we open that damned Vault door - letting someone in, letting someone out - we get assaulted by a fresh round of Deathclaws.  The constant tension in the Vault is getting to people, and the chipper smiling attitudes are getting harder to fake for the Overseer's cameras.


Deathclaw Derby

The week started with a crisis.  Two Deathclaw assaults, one right after the other, and the second one came through before we had a chance to recover from the first one.  We lost eight good people in an unholy bloodbath, crippling the Vault's water and power production.

In the past, we've bitten the bullet and just cleared the bodies.  Now, however, we have more backup facilities and people, so it was decided to leave the bodies where they fell and instead evacuate the first two levels of the Vault.  This would get the survivors back into productive areas, allow them to recoup some happiness and make some much needed money.  We'd revive as we could afford it.  It was a calculated risk, but many of the dead were reasonably high level and otherwise that would be a lot of training time down the shitter.

So, emergency relocations.  Radio station shut down again - we couldn't afford to get hit by Deathclaws again, not yet - and we sealed the door.  It was a dark time in Vault 551.

Diana Newton at 94% happiness, passed out drunk in the bar.  Of despair.

Misery Loves Misery

Father Benny himself had sunk into a deep depression, first dropping to 95% happiness due to the shutting of the radio station and the temporary reassignment of CoDC staff to emergency shifts in production rooms.  In accordance with the tenets of the Church of the Divine Copulation, this required a Newton Girl summoning for a sacrament, and Olivia Newton was chosen.

Diana Newton did not cope with this well, and retired to the bar to drown her sorrows.

A radroach attack knocked Father Benny's outlook down again to 86%, however, as the week from hell chugged on.  So Diana was roused from her drunken stupor, told in no uncertain terms to get some damned happy going on, and brought to his quarters for some much needed further sacramenting.  Both Father Benny and Diana are doing better now.

The gradual recovery from the dual Deathclaw catastrophe was slow and tedious, but eventually successful.  A few of the early power and water units were repurposed for use as training and defense areas.  Overall happiness went up.  Money accumulated.  Dead dwellers were revived.

And yet, spot issues lingered as a few dwellers struggled with PTSD.

I didn't even know it was POSSIBLE to be zero percent happy in this game.

Sharon Mitchell had been killed recently, and was one of the bodies left to rot for a long while as the Vault recovered.  Prolonged death left an impression, and Sharon apparently went full on emo, spending her time listening to Bauhaus vinyls and hanging black curtains in her room.

And she wasn't the only one.  Bruce New-Cooper, CoDC Initiate, was stuck at 1% happy, aimlessly wandering around the Vault quoting Sylvia Plath and getting all existentialist.  Even after the bodies were all cleared and operations were starting to get back to normal, a few like Bruce remained in an unshakeable depression that began to represent an ongoing problem.

Nowhere was this a bigger concern than at the Vault's front door.  Gary Mitchell, junior door guard and emo Sharon's brother, had been torn apart by Deathclaws and reassembled several times now, and his post traumatic stress was BAD.  He was stuck at 0% happiness no matter what we did to cheer him up, which is an unfortunate situation when the dude in question is armed with a large laser gatling gun.  Healthed him up, nothing.  Move him to another room to take a break, nothing.  Stuck at 0%.

He was also doing strange things up there.  Such as leaving the Vault door wide open for extended periods of time, just staring mindlessly out at the sun.  Mind closing that door, Gary?  Huh?

"Isn't the sun beautiful?  The voices, they call to me and say, lo, GARY GARY GARY."

Seriously - and yes, it was probably a bug in the game - that door stayed open with Gary just staring out of it for a long time.  Because, you know, screw it.  Deathclaws, come right on in.  Raiders?  Come in and have a drink.  I'm GARY, and I'm DONE with this shit, and just saying that makes me feel SO MUCH BETTER because sometimes I can't stop myself from screaming endlessly during my shift on the Vault door.  But I'm doing fine.  FINE.  LEAVE ME ALONE.

He was giving his fellow door guard Vincent the creeps.  Those eyes.  Those dead, dead eyes.

Eventually we had to pull Gary off the door entirely to do the one thing guaranteed to fix his chronic and somewhat dangerous unhappiness: we got him laid.  Then he had a little rest, did some writing in his diary and talked things out with the bartender (we still don't have a therapist on staff), and Gary is doing much better now.  He's back on duty and hasn't had another of his "episodes" since.


Population Playtime

So now we're almost at 125 dwellers, and while population growth has slowed - due to breeding less and radio-recruiting more - we're fairly stable in terms of growth.  Vault 551 is now 15 levels deep, the bottom four or five levels dedicated mainly to training and educational areas, as we continue to train the SPECIAL statistics of the dwellers and cycle them back into the production rooms.

The catch to all this is that, as I understand it, the Vault has a built-in hard limit of 200 dwellers.  After that, pregnancies stay permanent (which is bad, because pregnant dwellers don't respond to incidents such as fires) and new dwellers from the wasteland stay standing outside the door until space becomes available. We're not at that point yet, but it is coming.

The easy answer is just to stop breeding and shut down the radio station.  Then, no more new dwellers.  However, new Vault Tec objectives are arriving all the time, and many of them involve increasing the Vault population, and most of those have fairly tasty lunchbox rewards (which, in turn, often involve high end guns, equipment and people).  So we're going to have to figure out the best way to make space for people, which basically means that at some point we're going to have to start killing other people.

About a quarter of our population is in training now, and our first batch of graduates have just left to be reintroduced into production areas, bringing up our power and water numbers nicely.  Ultimately, low SPECIAL/low level dwellers aren't going to be of much use, due to the excessive time required to train them on par with older dwellers.  So it's very possible that we're going to end up with a Logan's Run situation: get them born, get them to adulthood and then just execute them.

Because dammit, the game doesn't let you murder kids.  What.  The.  Hell.

We also have new people coming in from the wasteland, attracted with the radio station.  We've been shuffling them straight into the school system for training, but again, they're not of much use due to how far behind they are of the rest of the Vault.

But then Father Benny received another vision from Vault Boy, and spake onto the Overseer: accept new blood with joy, and especially the females, for they shall be good breeders.

Yep.  That's right.  The most logical use for the new female dwellers is to meet our birth rate Objectives goals.  Probably not the most moral or ethical thing, but hey: we all do our fair share here, and would you rather be out there with the Deathclaws and raiders?  Or would you rather be a Vault 551 sex slave, at least until you're trained up enough to be of use in production rooms?

So that's what's happening there.  The Church of the Divine Copulation has sanctioned making entry by new dwellers contingent on their willingness to be immediately knocked up by a complete stranger.  Of course, that still leaves us with the males, but we'll deal with that problem as we get closer to the 200 dweller population limit.  They'll probably have to be executed in the Incident Room.


Status Recap, Now With Much More Caps

And that's where we're at right now.  Our cash situation has significantly improved, at the moment sitting north of 25,000 caps, as more high-luck dwellers are being rotated into work areas and our level-50 explorers return with huge cash piles.  Happiness levels are back to reasonable standards.  Father Benny has not a care in the world.  New female dwellers are pregnant and we're inching forward on the latest Vault Tec birthrate objectives.

I'm going to close this entry on a glimpse at how our front door guards are doing.  This is Gary and Vincent slugging it out with raiders who were quite enamored of their own weapons, until the wasteland idiots broke in to face two big, well-armored dudes with really big and nasty laser guns.

Gary has finally stopped screaming "GAME OVER MAN GAME OVER" during these firefights.

The tough part is mopping up the mess afterwards.  And after awhile, not even bleach gets out the smell of old, sweaty raider guts that permeates the vault door hall room.  But the important thing is that we're all smiling.  The Overseer likes to see that everyone is smiling.

It is very, very important to keep everyone smiling.

At gunpoint, if necessary.