Celebrating Great War Day With Dead Slaves And Slow Love

Current Vault 551 Status

Population: 189
Overall Happiness: 99% 
Benny Happiness: 100%
Wealth: 555,615 caps

So in case you haven't been paying attention, have been too busy with real life nonsense, aren't particularly a Fallout fan, or just flat out don't care, today is Great War Day. On this date, October 23, in the year 2077, the Fallout story gets underway with a massive nuclear war.

That doesn't really have anything to do with this update, but I would be amiss in not at least mentioning it.

Vault 551 has been very stable as of late. As the population continues to hover just below the 200 dweller limit, we've had to begin pruning back the less important demographics somewhat. First on the chopping block: the slaves. We simply don't need nearly twenty of them, because goddammit, we're a pretty happy vault now at a steady 99% overall happiness. The slaves did their job spectacularly well, and so now we have to kill them. That's just how these things go.

Victoria's secret is that she's going to die pretty soon.

You understand. This is just the natural end result of uncontrolled immigration: slaves dressed up in slutty lingerie, sent out into the nuclear desert to be eaten by radioactive bears. The free market has spoken.


As we clearly no longer have a gigantic need for lots of Charisma training, our collection of drunk tanks is just taking up valuable real estate.  So we shuttered most of the remaining bars and replaced them with Medlabs, shifting that production potential to health-regenerating stimpaks. Our remaining non-dead slaves have been moved to radio station duty or training rooms.

Right now, we're doing our best to avoid building new floors in Vault 551. There are fifteen currently, and still plenty of room exists for optimizing the layout. At over 500,000 banked caps - we've mostly run out of things to spend money on at this point - plenty of wealth exists to pretty much do whatever we want with new rooms. As every room consumes power, the strategy that makes the most sense now is to replace lame duck rooms with high yield production areas, while optimizing power generation and storage as much as possible. Pack more into less space.

Jesus Christ, that sounds boring.

Ah, okay, so screw that. You don't care about room optimization and training stats at this point.  So let's get on to the good stuff.  But first, let's check in on Project Slave Liquidation, where sometimes one's body doesn't get the timely report of one's demise, and so just keeps on trucking. Presumably, with scavenging dogs nipping close behind.

And so, Glori Slave joins the macabre but fit ranks of the Jogging Dead.

It turns out that, in the post nuclear apocalyptic wasteland, survival can be a real bitch even for dwellers who aren't armor-clad, crosseyed zombies.

About a week ago, our good friends at Bethesda released a major update to Fallout Shelter that changed around a variety of important game mechanics. The most significant one - the end of everything good and holy, to hear the Bethesda forums whiners speak of it - is the introduction of a limit to the number of exploration dwellers you can have going on at once.

In the original game, the number was unlimited. With this update, it was limited to 10, then bumped to 20, and now it's parked at 25. And oh my god, the forum geeks have HOWLED over the grave injustice implied by their new inability to have 160 dwellers outside exploring while 40 remain behind to keep the power on. Because, seriously. How is life worth living at that point?

I, meanwhile, have barely noticed it. Vault 551 had 23 explorers going when the update hit, and 20 after. So big deal: it just means that we can't endlessly just keep shoving new dwellers out to die. Okay, moving on.

At least two other important changes to mechanics came with this update. First, raiders drop their shit: when your upstairs defense team perforates the local wildlife with giant laser cheese graters, the invaders' loot hits the floor in the form of outfits, guns, and money. That doesn't do much for Vault 551 at this point, as the aforementioned wealth makes it sort of moot, but it's nice for young Vaults in need of resources. It's also kind of fun.

Our Vault's current door defense squad, known officially as the Vault 551 Fuck You Team.

The second significant mechanic change is the introduction of the Mysterious Stranger. Mr. Strange is a Fallout character who randomly shows up at intervals in Fallout games to kill your enemies for you.

I come to give you money. Mysteriously.

In Fallout Shelter, Strange (in the form of Vault Boy in a trenchcoat) pops up in random locations around the Vault with a little dum-dum-DUM musical mark to play a Where's Waldo game with you for money. When you hear the tone sequence, you have a few seconds to find and click on him. If you succeed, you get some caps.

Again, nice for a young vault. For Vault 551 nowadays, not all that useful.


The Big, Big, BIG Update Diff: SURVIVAL MODE.

There's just no way to exaggerate this. Survival Mode totally changes this game, tremendously extending its shelf life as a source of fun and frustrating distraction. This is Fallout Shelter for Civilization geeks. Dead dwellers stay dead. Production gets tougher. Incident rates go way, way up. Scaling vault growth is a lot harder. This game mode is simply brutal. It's awesome.

DON'T TELL ME HOW TO LIVE MY LIFE.

Alas, you can't simply transition an existing Vault into Survival Mode, so Vault 551 remains (at least for now) fixed in Normal. That means starting a new Vault purely for test driving DEATH MODE.

We've now gone through six or seven iterations of Vault 209 (the Survival Mode vault), each time descending into a death spiral of radiation, starvation, darkness, and madness. What makes Survival so damned hard is that few of the strategies you've learned in Normal will do anything but kill you faster in Survival.

Such as relying on awesome guns. I learned this in the very first Vault 209 iteration, when a very lucky lunchbox reward turned up a Fat Man MIRV, which is - I shit you not - a nuclear grenade thrower.

Yeah, perhaps a touch overkill and certainly not dishwasher-safe.  But effective raider defense nonetheless.  

In any Normal mode Vault, that would have been it right there. Bad ass gun and the rest of the game is a fair weather cruise. But in Survival? No matter how great your gun - even a nuke thrower! - your greatest enemies are still unplanned population growth, lost production quotas, economic imbalances, and presumably irrational exuberance.

Yes, that's right. In Survival Mode, much as in life, no Deathclaw is as deadly as an unhappy accountant.

"You heard him, boys - we're running behind on water quotas today.  LIGHT EM UP!"  

I only stopped getting slaughtered in Survival when I stopped trying to fight every damned incident. Fires, radroaches, raiders, you name it: they come so fast and furiously that standing your ground only means being ground into hamburger.

Instead, move people around. Avoid. Evade. Exploit every condition and game mechanic that makes Dwellers immune to incidents, starting with the big one: pregnancy. So I started shoving men outside to die, while I filled Vault 209 with more and more pregnant women.

No, not a perfect solution. But pregnancies make female Dwellers immune from damage, keep them at work in the production rooms, and generally mean I don't have to worry about them much. Keep 4-5 menfolk around, and I can easily relocate them out of the way of any bad news. Women remain permapreggers as long as living space for a new Dweller is unavailable. So yeah.

The only real trouble with the pregnancy strategy is when it comes time to add a new Living Quarters, which instantly bumps up living space by 8 Dwellers. Then, typically, you get a bunch of babies, un-pregnant women, and Vault vulnerabilities all at once. It takes time to re-preggify the women, and meanwhile you're usually getting consistently slammed by new enemies.

Oh, and each new incident interrupts the happy couple, who have to start their lovin' process over again, which takes time that you don't have, which OH MY GOD JUST GET ON WITH IT.

OFERDALOVAGAWD.  Seriously, could you pick up the pace?  PANDAS ARE EASIER TO MATE THAN THIS.

So yeah.

Survival Mode is definitely worth playing, as long as you realize that you're playing a different game. Otherwise it'll just piss you off. If you do want to try your hand at Fallout Shelter Survival Mode, however, I've assembled a list of strategies that have worked well for me.

Vaya con Dios, fellow Overseers.