History VideoGame / FalloutShelter

In the game, you are put in the role of the Overseer of a Vault of your choosing (the number is selected by you), and the goal is to successfully lead generations of Vault Dwellers to survive and thrive in post-nuclear America. Your duties will include acquisition and distribution of resources, development of the Vault complex, multiplying the population, prevention of crises (such as fires and raider attacks), and other similar activities.

So go out into the wastes, spend caps wisely, and make sure that your Vault [[RunningGag is an okay place to live.]]

** You can upgrade the Vault door for higher HP, which makes Raiders and Deathclaws take longer to get in so you have more time to position defenders. However, Raiders are such pathetic opponents you'll ''want'' to get them in the Vault quickly so you can kill them and get the incident over with. As for Deathclaws, well, the upgraded HP isn't gonna do ''that'' much to buy you time before they get in. Overall, upgrading the Vault door is just a waste of caps.
** You can upgrade training rooms to increase the speed at which the dwellers improve, but the improvement is a few minutes, and at higher levels, an hour or so. It takes around three full days to fully train a dweller to a 10/10 in a stat, so saving a sum total of four or five hours across their training period isn't really a noticeable improvement for the fair sum of caps it costs to do the upgrade.

* EarlyBirdCameo: In this case, it's a game mechanic. When Dwellers are exposed to radiation, it effectively decreases their maximum HP. It's an innovative mechanic for this game, because radiation didn't have any immediate consequences in Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Players quickly discovered in Fallout 4 that the same mechanic is used: Radiation decreases your max HP.

* CriticalHit: An important combat feature that takes the form of a reaction-based minigame. Once your dwellers have landed a couple of regular hits on enemies (the required amount depends on their Luck stat), a yellow crosshairs appears over their target. Tapping that pauses combat and brings up four oscillating chevrons that need to be hit when they're as close to the center as possible. How quickly they move is determined by the dweller's Perception. A perfect hit results in a x5 damage multiplier; the outermost position still inflicts x1.25 the base damage. Either way, you win. Critical hits are best kept in reserve for especially tough enemies like radscorpions, deathclaws and, of course, bosses of all stripes.
* CurbStompBattle: Is almost guaranteed to ensue whenever you send well-equipped level 50 dwellers on significantly lower-ranked quests. They'll usually wipe out the entire opposition in any given room without suffering a single hit in return, and even bosses tend to go down in two attack cycles at most. Well-trained Wasteland explorers take this UpToEleven in one OffscreenMomentOfAwesome after the other while they fight through legions of the Wasteland's most lethal monstrosities all on their lonesome before their triumphant return with a backpack filled to the brim with valuable loot.
* DamageSpongeBoss: High-level Glowing Ones, Glowing Radscorpions and Alpha Deathclaws can soak up ridiculous amounts of firepower, but Glowing Ones are arguably the worst offenders due to their ability to heal themselves and their allies by a significant percentage while simultaneously inflicting massiv rad damage on your dwellers. It can become so bad that they heal faster than you can damage them even with top-tier legendary gear and level 50 MasterOfAll dwellers. You better make sure to have three [[CriticalHit Critical Hits]] on standby or else.

* MoneyForNothing: One of the most common complaints among players. The caps do nothing other than building and upgrading new rooms, vault expansion, crafting and reviving dead dwellers.[[note]]Taken UpToEleven in [[HarderThanHard Survival Mode]], where dead dwellers cannot be revived regardless of the caps you have.[[/note]] Even if you spent a lot of caps on renovating the vault, the caps are extremely easy to come by and you will hit the cap mentioned above ''in a few weeks'' when you are at end-game level. Also, the lunchboxes award you 500 caps most of the time.
* MookChivalry: Raiders, Radscorpions, Deathclaws, it doesn't matter. If there are enemies in a quest room, they will never attack until all of your dwellers have made it inside. Instead they and the dwellers wait patiently until everyone is present. THEN they start fighting.

** The [[HorsemenOfTheApocalypse Horsemen of the Post-Apocalypse]] questlines are likely based after the "Four Horesemen of the Post-Apocalypse" random encounter in ''VideoGame/FalloutTactics''.

* HeroUnit: Legendary Vault Dwellers, who generally have much better stats than even the rare vault dwellers one can get out of lunch boxes, not to mention your average vault guy/gal. They also come pre-equipped with legendary gear (both outfit and weapon), the type of which depends on the character. Some are little more than glorified VendorTrash items, others are extremely powerful.

* VendorTrash: Once you've gotten past the EarlyGameHell, common items become this to the point that Bethesda implemented a dedicated button for selling all of them at once when dwellers return from quests or exploration. By the late game stages when you mostly think in legendary terms, even the blue rare items turn into little more than a source of caps or crafting components.

* IncestIsRelative: Averted with one exception. Actual brother-sister/parental incest is blocked and attempt to mate two dwellers with the same family name will fail. The exception happens to be from the legendary dwellers Elder Lyons and Sara Lyons. You get them individually, so the game programs them as unrelated to each other. They have no problem with doing the deed.
-->"It's nice to spend time with the family."

* DumpStat: Charisma. Every other stat in the game is needed to run a specific production room and/or is useful for general gameplay (Luck or Endurance). The only things that Charisma speeds up are the time takes for two Dwellers to have a baby, the time it takes for the Radio Tower to contact a new Dweller, the time to finish customizing a Dweller's appearance in the Barbershop. Thus, if you aren't currently expanding the Vault or customizing Dwellers, Charisma is useless, and you can just change their outfit to something that boosts Charisma when you need to do those things. The addition of item crafting helped a little, because each item is tied to a specific stat that lowers crafting time if that stat is high among the Dwellers working the room, but even then no weapons require Charisma to craft, and the outfits that require Charisma are not very good anyway.

* InfantImmortality:
** Children will automatically run and hide when entering a room where a fire, Radroach, or Raider is, thereby not getting themselves killed by it - pregnant women also run and hide, to prevent the ConvenientMiscarriage trope from coming into play either.
** What happens when a pregnant dweller trains her Charisma at the bar? [[DevelopersForesight She drinks Nuka-Cola instead of beer]].

* PlayEveryDay: Log in for 7 days and you get a free Lunchbox full of [[RandomlyDrops neat goodies]]. If you miss a day, [[AntiFrustrationFeatures it just picks up right where you left off]], instead of resetting back to day one.

* ActionizedSequel: ''Fallout Shelter Online'' is no longer a vault management life simulation game, but a story-driven auto-battler akin to ''Videogame/PrincessConnectReDive'' with more emphasis on character building and combat. Vault building is still there, but resources are even no longer perishables, but treated as currency to upgrade your dweller and combat teams.

* AllegedlyFreeGame: Averted. Everything doable in the game can be done without spending a dime, allowing you you can max out Vault population, obtain all theme and equipment recipes, and unlock all production facilities. The items you can purchase with real money -- Lunchboxes, pet carriers, Nuka-Cola Quantum, and Mr. Handies -- can be acquired in game on an infrequent basis by doing quests and meeting objectives, but even then those are just perks that improve the efficiency of your Vault and its dwellers, they're not a requirement for anything. The only thing you can't easily obtain through normal play are the Legendary Dwellers, which are acquired through Lunchboxes or specific quests, but Legendary Dwellers are a BraggingRightsReward anyway only needed if you're going for OneHundredPercentCompletion of the catalog. In short, BribingYourWayToVictory is possible, but entirely unneccessary.

Has a sequel in Asia called ''[[https://fosol.gaea.com/en/ Fallout Shelter Online]]'' where the game [[GenreShift shifted genre]] into an [[ActionizedSequel actionized]] auto-battler akin to ''[[Videogame/PrincessConnectReDive]]''.

* ActionizedSequel: ''Fallout Shelter Online'' is no longer a vault management life simulation game, but a story-driven auto-battler akin to ''[[Videogame/PrincessConnectReDive]]'' with more emphasis on character building and combat. Vault building is still there, but resources are even no longer perishables, but treated as currency to upgrade your dweller and combat teams.

Has a sequel in Asia called ''[[https://fosol.gaea.com/en/ Fallout Shelter Online]]'' where the main improvement is you can now partake in [[PlayerVersusPlayer PvP]] raids of other vaults, although there are quite a number of quality-of-life improvements as well.

* GettingCrapPastTheRadar: This dweller conversation is too much for the "Suggestive Themes" content descriptor:
--> '''Dweller 1''': I found a Vault Suit on the floor. What do you think it means?
--> '''Dweller 2''': It can only mean one thing – [[APartyAlsoKnownAsAnOrgy nudie party!]]

* BeamSpam: Laser weapons, plasma weapons and even Gauss rifles shoot various amounts of differently colored beams, so this trope is bound to come into play whenever a bunch of people carry such gear into battle, but nothing does it better than Gatling Lasers and Institute Rifles. The former fires in long burst of about two dozen shots, the latter in two successive three-shot salvoes. Equip your three-man exploration team with nothing but these (''very'' powerful) guns and watch them incinerate the opposition with a merciless hail of FrickinLaserBeams.

** The v1.6 patch made it so dwellers needing a Stimpack or Radaway for healing now have the icon for the item appear over their heads, and tapping the icon automatically uses that item, greatly reducing the need to micromanage dwellers in combat.

* BlackBeadyEyes: Played straight as this game uses the art style of Vault-Tec's Vault-Boy mascot.

* UnwinnableByInsanity: Shortly after beginning a new Vault, if you make the crazy decision to remove all dwellers from it (by death or eviction), you will be stuck in an unwinnable situation if you do not want to pay up for lunchboxes that will be your only way of getting another dweller once you have none left.