YMMV / Fallout Shelter

• Annoying Video Game Helper: Vault Boy pops up to give a brief animation to warn you of imminent problems with the Vault, which includes you being low on storage space. However, these warnings occur based on the relative free space you have, not absolute values. This means that if your total storage space is sufficiently large, he'll tend to regularly appear to prompt you to expand your storage more even if you still have room for hundreds of items.
• Better Off Sold: Once you've gotten past the Early Game Hell, 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.
• Breather Level: Quest chains will occasionally contain a quest that involves little to no fighting, contrary to what you're usually forced to do. One for instance sends you to a newspaper office and has you talk to the reporters without getting into a single fight.
• Contested Sequel: Fallout Shelter Online, the sequel/remake of sorts by Shanda, has higher emphasis on Loot Boxes, power level gated areas, and PvP aspects do not appeal to many traditional players who expected a tamagotchi-like simulation game as Behavior Interactive's Fallout Shelter. On the other hand, resources are treated as currency instead of perishable, so leaving the game unplayed for days wouldn't have an adverse effect toward the Vault Dwellers.
• Demonic Spiders: Deathclaws and Radscorpions will severely test the survivability of your vault and its inhabitants.
  • Deathclaws are just as dangerous in the main series, Lightning Bruiser enemies that deal a ton of damage and take a lot of damage to kill. Even dwellers with high stats and good weapons will struggle to stop them and they'll almost always survive at least three or four rooms of battle before they're brought down. Also, they're set to be possible to spawn when the vault door opens, which means they'll often hit after you just sent dwellers on a quest or into the wasteland, so you'll be low on Stimpaks and probably some of your best characters. Finally, to add insult to injury, deathclaws give no loot.
  • Radscorpions are a form of infestation, but while radroaches and molerats spread to adjacent rooms, radscorpions will tunnel to random rooms in the vault. Thus players need to act fast to find out where they've gone and mobilize dwellers to attack them before they tunnel away, making it a "Get Back Here!" Boss. They rapidly inflict large amounts of damage and radiation damage, and if they appear in a room of under-levelled dwellers can simply shred them. Finally, while they're active, radscorpions drain your vault's power reserves, which is a great way to shut down every other room in the vault, putting further pressure on you to bring it down quickly.
    • On quests, you can encounter glowing radscorpions. Aside from naturally having higher stats than normal radscorpions, they have a pounce attack that deals massive damage; even a Level 50 dweller with high Endurance will probably lose around half their health. Seeing a glowing radscorpion rear back is your visual cue to quickly heal their target to max HP, unless you want to watch them drop to the floor momentarily.
• Designated Villain: The Wizard of Water, the Big Bad of his eponymous questline. He's selling water to people claiming it has magical powers like curing illnesses and boosting crops, but of course it's false advertising and you have to put an end to his grifting. Except everyone, including the people you talk to who are aware the water isn't magical, speak highly of the Wizard's product as exceptionally pure, clean water, and in the Fallout universe that's a precious resource. And considering that most people in the wasteland are drinking dirty water that's probably lightly irradiated, purified water is going to be better for their health and would produce better crops. The questline treats the Wizard as a scammer running an old-fashioned snake oil scheme, but even if he's lying, he's still selling a rare and high-quality product that people need and appreciate.
• Disappointing Last Level: "Journey to the Center of Vaultopolis" is one of the longest questlines in the game and centers around finding the fabled "Vaultopolis", a Vault said to be a utopia. Of course, due to the limited art assets, it turns out to look no different than any other Vault you visit in quests, and it doesn't have particularly notable loot in it either, just some caps and Shop Fodder, a few Quantums, and a random Legendary weapon which may turn out to be something useless.
• Fridge Brilliance: When returning to the Vault from an expedition, Dwellers will face no encounters. While this is for convenience, something like it already exists in the series; Fast Travel, which allows you to instantly transport yourself to a chosen marked location on the Pip Boy's map, if already found, all while avoiding the inconvenience of enemy encounters or navigation, in exchange for time passing in accordance to how long it would take to get there normally. When the Dwellers are done with their expeditions, they don't just walk back to the Vault, they Fast Travel there.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The "Negative Time" glitch, which tricks the game into thinking your Dwellers exploring the wasteland have been out much longer than they actually have been. The likelihood of finding high quality loot rises the longer a Dweller explores, but there's a limit to how much a Dweller can carry before they have to come home. With this glitch the player can ensure a large loot bag full of rare goods
  • The Legendary pets grant absurd bonuses, including 50% damage reduction, 4x faster return speed from quests and wasteland exploring, and 50% decrease in crafting time.
  • Playing the game on mobile includes a simple but effective Game Breaker mechanic — ads. If you're willing to sit through an ad for 30 seconds or so, you get free stuff, which can include caps (possibly a couple thousand), Nuka-Cola Quantums (possibly a dozen or more), and rarely, a Pet Carrier or Lunchbox. And you can do this every 4 hours, allowing you to stockpile a ton of resources even in the early game.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • Some overseers who have bought lunchboxes claim that some of their purchased lunchboxes only had common weapons/outfits and some resources and caps. This despite the game's promise on the store page that every purchased lunchbox contains at least one rare weapon/outfit and/or a legendary dweller.
  • 1.1.0 spawned immortal radroaches in some cases. The only way around them is to evacuate the infested rooms and hope the disaster plays out it's course naturally.
  • Crosses with Porting Disaster: The initial Android release appears to not support all Android devices fully. Apparently the most common problem is that the game crashes after running a few minutes at a time on lower-end devices (indication of a poorly written garbage collection routine) to downright game save corruption if the player quits the game in a way the game did not expect (i.e. device shutting off due to dead battery, or in the case of Android TV boxes, accidental unplugging of the wall wart, or even neighborhood power failure). Adding salt to the wound is that the game isn't released on appstores other than Google's, so if you have a Kindle, Nook, Android-compatible Blackberry or even a lesser brand Chinaphone (ie a Huawei, or a device that has been changed over to Replicant or CyanogenMod), you can forget about playing it properly. ^note You can try sideloading, but it will probably start demanding for the Google Services Framework, which depending on your device, may be blocked from installing.
  • Sometimes Dwellers will act as though there's a dead corpse in a room even after the Dweller is revived. This will cripple a Vault's happiness. The only surefire way to fix this is to demolish the room entirely. If this happens in a merged room (likely, since they're the most dangerous) or a room with other rooms built off of it, this will take a ridiculous amount of caps for most players until they're extremely well established.
• Goddamn Bats:
  • Raiders. By the time you get to the point your dwellers can be equipped with decent weapons, raiders probably won't survive to descend to the second floor of the vault. Once you get the end game weapons, two dwellers stationed at the vault entrance will kill raiders before they even get to the second room.
  • Radroaches and Molerats. Deathclaws and Radscorpions are tough enough to pose a threat; Radroaches and Molerats can be killed easily enough with even a basic weapon. They're only a threat if they're lucky enough to spawn in an unoccupied room, giving them time to spread to other rooms.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The Rusty Fat Man's flavor text becomes quite literal after the 1.6 update, as you can now, indeed, drop down a Radscorpion with a Rusty Fat Man.
  Even old and beat up, this thing can still drop a Radscorpion.
  • Bethesda’s lawsuit over Fallout Shelter Co-developer Behaviour Interactive’s unauthorized use of assets in a Westworld mobile game, is made funnier when it announced that Westworld producer Kilter Films will be producing the Amazon Prime Fallout TV series
• Junk Rare:
  • Lunchboxes sometimes contain cards for +50 power/food/water. An efficient vault will easily produce more than it consumes, making those cards worthless. You'll also occasionally get 500 caps as a Rare card, but money is no object once you transition to the midgame; aside from the Mysterious Stranger, Cappy and Bottle, and quest rewards giving you plenty of caps, you can get 500 caps by just selling a few items you don't want.
  • A number or Rare and Legendary items are inferior to much easier to obtain Common items.
    • With weapons this mostly applies to low damage weapon types which have a Legendary variant that is still worse than the basic versions of more powerful weapon types. For example the Red Rocket (a legendary BB gun) does 0-6 damage, compared to the common-rarity Rusty Laser Pistol which does a flat 7 damage.
    • For Outfits this mostly applies to Power Armor. Each model of Power Armor is Legendary rarity, but in terms of stats they're tiered like other outfits. This means that many suits of Power Armor have stats on-par with Rare outfits, and some Rare outfits are still better. Particular note to the T-51a Power Armor, which give +3 Strength and +1 Perception, just one point higher than the Battle Armor and Military Fatigues, Common outfits.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • A Rush attempt succeeding.
  • The three notes heralding the Mysterious Stranger appearing in the Vault. Cue the Overseer dropping whatever they're doing to seek him out and claim that cap boost.
  • The Nuka-World jingle that announces Cappy & Bottle's arrival. It'll take some minutes of your time while you follow the two of them through your vault, but tapping them while they're dancing awards a lot of caps and - more importantly - up to five Nuka-Cola Quantum bottles per visit, if you're lucky. Even if not, you win. Unlocking Cappy & Bottle requires completing their respective quest chain, but this is easily done and completely worth the hassle.
• Padding: Many of the multi-stage quests are much longer than they need to be, worsened by the travel times stretching into several hours that, including the half-time return trip, make them take a full day to complete.
  • "Journey to the Center of Vaultopolis" is 15 quests long as the Dwellers search for Paula and hints to the location of Vaultopolis. This includes a Fetch Quest from Vault 333 that takes up 4 individual quests, even though the 3rd is just saving Vault 333 from raiders and the 4th is then searching the Vault for clues. The 12th stage of the questline is your dwellers going to a Super-Duper Mart to resupply because supplies are low, even through dwellers return to the Vault after every quest, and if you've made it to the 12th stage, you almost certainly are self-sufficient and are sending them out with the best equipment you have and all the Stimpaks they can carry.
  • "The Search for Jobinson's Jersey" is 15 quests long. Almost every single quest in it consists of your dwellers trying to track down the elusive "Coach" that owns the fabled Jersey, and even though they know Coach has it, they'll stop to examine items in random rooms at their destination looking for the Jersey. And to add insult to injury, most of the quests end with your dwellers getting a message from Coach taunting them (and you). The questline only finally ends because Coach gets tired of running and basically says "fine, come and get me."
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • For some reason, the build area is only large enough to accomodate eight rooms and two rows of elevators, meaning that on each floor you'll have two three-wide rooms and one two-wide room, limiting the latter's efficiency. It also means that if you want to use themes in your Vault, you'll have to either leave those extra two rooms out or have them in their default appearance, since themes can only be applied to three-wide rooms.
  • Random room failures such as fires or radroaches can spring up even if one never touches the rush button, and can wipe out an unprepared Vault very quickly if the Overseer hasn't obtained many weapons or armors yet. And don't relax even if your dwellers are well armed, as an outbreak in an unoccupied room can cause it to infect several other rooms before you can get it under control, and soon the entire Vault could be at risk. However, as long as you have one vault dweller fighting off the problem, it can't spread to other rooms.
  • The first Vault you build has a Forced Tutorial that pretty much bottlenecks you into a specific layout of the Vault by forcing you to build certain rooms in a certain order. Fortunately only the first vault you start has this.
  • When you build the Overseer's Office, you're immediately given another Forced Tutorial to teach you how quests work. The Office is unlocked at 20 Dwellers, a very low bar, and by this time it's very plausible your Vault is still growing with low-level Dwellers with poor equipment and few Stimpacks. While the tutorial quest is easy, it's still possible you can fail it because you weren't ready for it. Making it worse is that the game provides you with some Quantum to skip the travel time, but if you have to retry the quest you aren't getting that mercy again, the travel time is twenty hours plus a ten hour return trip.
  • You can only bring up to 25 stimpaks per quest, regardless of the size of the party or the difficulty of the quest. The high-level quests tend to have lots of deathclaws and radscorpions, sometimes with boss or glowing variants, in every room; even with high-level, well-equipped Dwellers with high stats, those 25 stimpaks won't last long. Better hope you find more looting the area!
  • The game doesn't let you build living quarters if you already have enough to support the maximum 200 population. However, if you have too many people that destroying a living quarters would make your vault overcrowded, you're not allowed to do that either. The result is the placement of your living quarters is forever locked in stone, because you can't build more and you can't destroy the ones already built. The only solution is to kick out enough dwellers that you can destroy a living quarters without overcrowding the vault, which obviously has a whole set of other problems attached to it.
  • If you're at max population, pregnant dwellers can't deliver their child because the vault would be overpopulated. This means that pregnant dwellers will remain pregnant forever, unable to go on quests or help in incidents, until you kick someone out of the vault to make room to deliver their baby. This also means by proxy that you have to never have male and female dwellers in the same living quarters, because they will have sex and the female will become pregnant.
  • Many outfits are restricted to dwellers of a specific gender. While many tend to have an equivalent outfit for the other gender, this isn't always the case. In particular, many more of the Rare and Legendary outfits are exclusive to males than ones that are exclusive to females, and have no female equivalent.
  • The "automatically pick nearest dweller" tap mechanic may not seem like it would cause a lot of issues. But have the mysterious stranger spawn in a crowded room between two dwellers, and tapping the stranger becomes an exercise in frustration as the game unhelpfully selects a nearby dweller instead of the stranger, letting him get away scot free and you denied of any bonus caps.
  • There's a rather arbitrary limit on how many pets can be in a room, one pet per two dwellers. If you hit such a limit, dwellers with pets cannot be assigned to that room and dwellers already working there cannot be given pets.
  • During initial launch on iOS, the game would continuously run without allowing you to pause the game, Save Scumming, or even closing the game and not opening for remainders of time, as the app will always notify you about in-game Random Encounters at any time; ignore these notifications and you'll soon find your vault has been overrun.
• That One Boss: Alpha Deathclaws - see That One Sidequest below for details. Glowing Ghouls are also much reviled by players due to the ridiculous amounts of radiation damage they inflict in no time regardless of how sturdy your dwellers are.
• That One Sidequest:
  • "Kill x Deathclaws without weapons". The name itself is self-explanatory.
  • The "Game Show Gauntlet" weekly quest. While it is highly appreciated for rewarding large amounts of caps and rare loot (which can include a large number of Quantum, a pet carrier, or even a Mister Handy), the trivia questions they ask can be rather tricky. Unless you have a guide or have extensively played Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, you'll probably get at least one of them wrong, as some of them are pretty obscure bits of lore, and others are just blatant trick questions. When you answer wrong, you not only lose out on some of the caps you could have gotten otherwise, but you also have to fight the raiders in the room, and the quest can be pretty high level, pitting you against a gauntlet of dangerous enemies.
  • "Provide fire support for Star-Paladin Cross". If your dweller happens upon this quest while exploring the Wasteland and is already short on stimpaks, you better get the hell out of there without even entering the location. The ground floor pits your poor explorer against two to four deathclaws at once, which is bad enough as it is. The basement ups the ante by having you fight a freaking Alpha Deathclaw. Alone. If you're an experienced (or meta-) gamer and gave the dweller in question some high-Endurance gear at level 1 before sending them out to gain experience, the Alpha Deathclaw will take 40-60% of a level 50 dweller's hitpoints with every attack - keep your finger over that stimpak button at all times. If you didn't power-level their health this way before, the beast will probably deliver a One-Hit Kill instead. And gods help you if your guy/gal wields a weapon with an average damage rating below 20. You'll most likely run out of stimpaks before you can kill the damn critter with your little peashooter. On the upside: should you win these battles, you're rewarded with some really nice loot up to and including one of the rare and very handy Mr. Handy robots.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Despite running a Vault, you're never able to have any official Vault-Tec experiments performed beyond what you the player feel like doing as a Self-Imposed Challenge.
• Ugly Cute: In 1.1.0, Molerats, in their 2D form, looks kinda adorable despite being an enemy and one of the more vicious threats to your dwellers.
• Unexpected Character: The game's 2022 update for the franchise's 25th anniversary took players by surprise in general, since the game hadn't received new content in years. Perhaps most surprising among the addition of new quests, outfits, and weapons, was the inclusion of the NCR Ranger outfit, since for its lifespan the game had entirely ignored New Vegas and seemed to go out of its way to not include any direct references to it.^note Some of the weapons and armor are based on equipment in New Vegas, but under different names.

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