Before i start i'd just like to say that i have no clue if this will work for anyone else, it could purely be my phone and a fix for me, so i'm sorry if i've given you false hope but i know there's a lot of Fallout lovers out there who are facing the same problem and if there's a 1% chance this works for you then that'd make me happy!

Anyway.. I'm playing using an iPhone 4s and as we all know the game doesn't run too smoothly on older iPhones and iPads. I've been desperately trying out many different ways to fix my problem and in the end i ended up just giving up and playing a vault that had only a few dwellers (I still have to play it somehow for the love of Fallout!)

UNTIL.. One day i went to try my vault that crashes upon opening and i accidentally tapped the home button, i quickly re-opened the app because i knew it'd still be in loading phase and wouldn't restart the game, and whaddya know?! It loaded, my vault of 60+ dwellers finally loaded to my great surprise. I thought it was just by pure chance that this happened but i thought i'd just test it again.. I closed my game, tried re-loading the vault normally without hitting the home button and it crashed, i tried loading it again but this time as soon as i hit "load Vault 800" i tapped the home button and quickly opened the app back up.. and whaddya know?! It worked again.. My vault loaded successfully.

So.. I'd like for you guys who are having problems to try this. It may seem almost too simple but it's worth a try.. As soon as you hit "Load vault".. hit your home button (Do not completely shut down the app) and load the app again so it goes back to the vault loading screen.

This may sound like absolute BS, and again, i apologize if it doesn't work for you. But this really does work for me, i am able to now play a 65+ dweller vault pretty well on my iPhone 4s, every now and then it does crash upon loading but i just repeat the same sequence and it works.

I'll give that a try later. One thing is fit sure though, don't add any more people to your vault, mine died at 50, so you've done very well to get to 61.


I certainly wouldn't buy any lunchboxes anyway, you're right on the edge of an unloadable vault.

My guess is like this: the main screen part of this game uses quite considerable amount of RAM memory. You can see the usage in system utilization.


The memory will be retuned to OS and then reused to load and run the vault. But it is lazy in returning memory used by main screen to OS. So while loading the vault, it will hit out of usable memory condition and crash.


But once you hit the home button Ehile loading, whole memory used by this game will be swapped out and reclaimed temporarily. So when you return to the game again, the memory used only by main screen will be no longer active, so more memory is available to loading and running vault.


Tip to developer: Dispose aggresively the memory used by main screen only, before going vault loaing phase, to make more room to load and run vault data.

Well, whadda you know, it worked!

I'll hook it up to Instruments when I get back home and see if your supposition is correct, but it certainly sounds plausible.

Nice one Simcutie!

Update: Definitely looks like a fix, I just loaded my old vault with 50 dwellers, which failed all previous attempts.

If it really is a case of not freeing up memory, that's a real, real stupid thing and points again to lazy programming and inept debugging - anyone with Instruments and a debugger should have spotted that.

I've run it whilst attached to Instruments and switching back to the home screen and back to the app does free up about 60mb, although in the end of this particular attempt, it bombed out after hitting 350mb!

I'll continue to see if I can get it to load again.

Can't reproduce with trying different timings on tapping out and in. =( But i'll keep trying, now there is hope. =)

But i'm happy you found a solution and thanks for sharing.

Well, i have a dozen games that technically should be alot more hungry than Fallout Shelter, can handle hundreds of units, offer alot more functionality and never crash. It's very common in new games though and often fixed with a few patches.

I formed my opinion on it. No matter what they try to tell us.

This did not work for me after serval attempts.

I have to correct my previous answer: it finally worked, but i had to restart my phone first to free up that little extra memory to get over that peak.

^ Tried this the first time but I tried it again with hope. Nothing. It's didn't work for me again.