With regret, I write to VaultTech HQ with a plea for assistance from the staff experts to rescue my poor vault from it's predicament!

As of three weeks ago, every time I attempt to load my one and only vault, it reliably will crash out of the program around 45 seconds after finishing the loading screens and showing me my poor vault denizens.

I had hoped waiting for a patch, arrived and installed today, might save me from the fate, but tests this afternoon have continued this same sad result.

Things I have tried:

1) rebooting the ipad (several times) (ipad Air generation 1, fully updated ioS software)

2) forcibly terminating the software (double click button, scroll to program in active memory, 'raise' it up to close-down)

3) throwing bottle caps at the screen

4) praying

5) closing my eyes tightly while it loads

I had ~170 vault dwellers, about 12 of them out in the wasteland on various explorations, and approximately 95 of them in training rooms, the rest in production facilities to maintain the population.

I wouldn't be thrilled at restarting the vault as I've invested about $120 US in lunchboxes since release day as I'm a fallout nut and wanted to cheese my vault into awesomeness so I could play with the layout and social structure. If I delete the vault and try again, all that $ goes poof. But as it is, I can't open the vault or make any progress any more.

Appreciate any help you can provide.

Sincerely, Vault Overseer of the broken vault

Many people seem to be having this issue. Has there been a solution posted anywhere?

gren03 you have company unfortunately. My story is identical to yours and unfortunately the only solution seems to be hoping that Bethesda will fix this in their next patch. I have not seen 1 post from Bethesda helping on this bug/crash issue let alone even acknowledging this issue. I'm now in day 6 since my vault broke/won't load and have stopped receiving message notifications about my vault. Thankfully I received a full refund from apple but this of course does not compensate the time or emotional drain that this whole fiasco has taken on an overseer . For now I'm keeping my broken vault until I hear it cannot be fixed or hopefully once a patch restores it.

Here's my next question, will my entire vault be nothing but ghouls by the time I am able to get back into it?

I haven't applied for my money back yet, as I'd hoped this would get fixed somehow. I had submitted a help request and the reply said effectively post as many details as I can on the forums. I've done that. And heard nothing from Bethesda subsequently. Bit of a sad camper. I will keep hoping but really unhappy at losing the time invested and losing the $ happily spent on lunchboxes before the vault became inaccessible.

Ditto. Have a brand new i6 and vault won't load. Have 170 peeps in it. /sigh.

Sigh. Sadly, I have also had this issue. I've tried restarting, tapping as usual, leaving the game for 30-45 seconds - it crashes at the same point, every time. I'd like a fix for this, or to get my lunchbox purchases credited so I can at least use them in the new vault I've had to open.

Edit: I upgraded to iOS8.4 as I thought that *might* fix the issue, but it didn't. I had 200 dwellers, several rare characters and guns from hard-earned (and purchased) lunchboxes, and was eagerly awaiting the update!

Guys, I think Bethesda made this game cool but they went a bit cheap - there ar no 'Fallout Shelter Servers' of any kind. It's a standalone app on your phone. Lunchboxes are just numbers in the .sav file, and if the file wasn't encrypted there would be nothing stopping you from editing it to gain as many lunchboxes as you want. At some point someone will make that .sav file editor because there are nuts out there who like doing things like that. For me - no point in cheating at a game, because the cahllenge is what makes it fun.

What I really mean to say though is - Bethesda painted themself in a corner by making the game totally standalone.

I suspect that may be exactly the problem. But I'd hope they could figure out what they did wrong with the save files and write a fix. Barring that, the politeness of at least saying "we can't fix it, we're sorry, we'll contact apple and have them send you a duplicate pile of lunchboxes for a new vault" or anything customer-experience/customer-consideration focused would be much better than silence.

I didn't mind that my support ticket forwarded me to make a post on the forums.

I do mind that having done what they asked of me, all I get is silence. I'm a pretty loyal and long standing Bethesda customer, and even if they screw me over on this I'm still confident I'll be buying Fallout 4 and enjoying my wasteland romp. But I'll always remember that my customer service experience was dreadful. I wish that weren't the case. It may put me on the fence the next time I have an impulse purchase option instead of just saying "wow, I love these guys, /buy, /buy, /buy". Meh.

I feel the exact same way. At least tell me that you effed up the game and give me all the lunch boxes I've bought and earned so I can start over. This limbo of silence from bethesda is embarrassing for them. Comcast literally has better support than bethesda. Comcast.

YES gren303 could not have stated it better. Thank you for the growing support against Bethesda's silence. I've supported them to an extreme (always the one preordering their games plus buying a second collectors edition copy)! I have always tried supproting my favorite company but this has definitely left a bitter taste that hopefully will be washed away with an apology on the silence and a patch to fix this mess.

Maybe they're trying to simulate VaultTechHQ being lost in the early days of the war, so our pleas for assistance are accurately being handled by the corpses and mad ghouls which now roam the halls of Bethesda in place of the once beloved programmers, designers and TPM-report generating drones. If this is the case, I do applaud the diligent attention to immersiveness.

I can only imagine the chaos going on within my poor inaccessible vault in my absence. As I had so many of my dwellers in mandated educational or training activities I can only imagine the sort of odd stratified society that awaits my return, as the bookworms and weight lifters are most likely in some sort of civil war with my nukacola factory workers and their brethren from the nuclear power plants. I only pray that my Col Austin and Lt Col Austin (I demoted the second one to show up at my vault for lack of originality!) have somehow risen to the occasion and seen fit to keep peace and order in my long forced sojourn here on the surface wasteland.

Hello Dwellers! I am here today to report yet another crash and I even made a video on it (Latest video on the channel : fane babanu ) where I explain and show my issue .. Just like most people I spent quite some money on the game. I had a decent vault with about 60 dwellers but it kept crashing ... Now I can't even start a new vault!

P.S.: I tried all the common solutions : tried rebooting device , I freed a lot of space on device , reinstalled the app..



Regards , DariusKillo

Thank goodness I'm not the only one. I don't even remember how many vaults I've made before the one I have currently on my iPad mini because of all the crashing and crap. One of the last vaults I had had Elder Lyons, power armor, and some other legendary equipment that had to be lost thanks to crashing and deleting. Another vault before that also had Eulogy Jones and other legendary gear, only to have the same disaster befall them. Now this vault I have (Vault 112) has the legendary Victory Rifle, Railmaster, Lone Wanderer 10MM Pistol, Eulogy Jones, two different kinds of Brotherhood of Steel power armor, many different rare Dwellers that don't show up on the survival guide (like the wrestler, the mayor-guy, and a few others), two Blackhawks, and a ninja outfit I got for the very first time since I first downloaded the game.


At almost 60 Dwellers, about 95% of all the rooms I have are maxed (in the top 5 rows because I can't go any further, you'll see why) because if I try to keep adding and do everything else the game offers, the game will lag consistently and ultimately crash. A lot of caps and time went into those rooms (some being the 3-long Game Room, and every other training room before that) so I hope that ANOTHER update comes out that's at least dedicated to purging all the crap that we're dealing with now. The update that came out recently allowed me to continue playing the damn game (after uninstalling the app for like the second time) only to have it AGAIN crashing and not letting me play anymore (this started yesterday after adding a single 3-long Armory...seriously one room addition made it to where I can't even play anymore? Wow).


Anyways, I just hope they do SOMETHING soon, and even though I've spent nothing on the game, the luck of me getting all those items (to me) is pretty damn awesome. I even have my best Dwellers exploring the Wasteland (one of them being Eulogy Jones and two having my Victory Rifle, Railmaster, and the BoS power armor) which will ultimatley reach their unavoidable death once their Stimpacks and RadAways run out because of the reoccurring crashing.

What's sad is that I still love this game. I believe Bethesda can do a lot with it if they add more items and fix all this, heck they might get more money from it than they originally thought at first. But until then they need to fix the stability of the game.

What is so odd is that the people reporting this issue have loads of dwellers + buildings. The game requires a lot of RAM and continues to use it, which could be the reason but this is just an idea.

Bro , I have 7 free GB on my iPAD and I can't even start a vault...

Are you talking about your Data storage?

My vault has many rooms and 150+ dwellers, and I also noticed that it got quite laggy after a while of running it as if the memory usage started to get out of hand. I would have to exit and restart to resolve it, and I'm on a 5S with plenty of memory. Game has also been crashing on startup for 1 week plus, so idk if it has to do with general instability or something from the most recent patch.

So, there are reports of the game crashing at all sorts of Vault Dweller numbers, but the specific type of crash you're having (I have a similar one, though it crashes right before I see my dwellers... sometimes I get a brief half-a-second glimpse of them and that's it) seems to happen once you have 170+ Dwellers. That's when I started crashing, too. Hmmm...


Also, how many Dwellers did you have out exploring and returning to the vault when it crashed? I have a theory that it might have something to do with too many people waiting in line to get back in.

I will confirm this...My vault permanently crashed unfortunately when I had about 4 dwellers in line each carrying 100 items.

My last successful load was just before my vacation, so I intentionally didn't have anyone out exploring. My game will not even load to the menu screen to select a vault or create a new one. However, if I double tap home to bring up the active apps, FS shows as running and I can see my vault in the smaller window. If I try to load that way, it still crashes. So it seems to me that my save data is fine, but there is something bad in the starting boot up.

I'm right here with ya. Having same problem, and you accurately describe how I can also so the game is running, but the second I access it - crash.

Pretty frustrating, especially since Bethesda doesn't seem to respond to the many people having this issue. Some kind of lifesign would be nice. A confirmation of the problem, a little "we're working on it" or something. Hell even a "it'll take a few weeks" report would be nice, as long as we know they're on it.

Thanks to hundreds of users on multiple devices (new and old) complaining of the same issue on here, you can pretty much bet that bethesda knows about the issue. given the multiple updates, and absolute dead silence on the issue, you can assume they do not care and that they expect that svckers like us will keep feeding quarters into the machine. my advice - one star and email itunes support to remove the app from editors choice. they are not going to fix an issue that only affects late game players - you are less likely to spend money when your vault functions, and what good are you then? they want you to delete the vault and try to get where you were with the new death claws - impossible without spending money. shameful.

Still no feedback.

For everyone still struggling, please take the time to read http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1534650-how-to-retrieve-your-savegame-if-you-got-the-permanent-crash/. I think it might be of good use for you guys.

I managed to retrieve my vault savegame from my iPad Mini 2, and transferred it to an Android device. Now I'm not saying you all should be transferring your vaults to Android devices, but in my post I also included a way of how you -might- be able to place your existing savegame in a newly installed Fallout Shelter environment on your iOS device. I haven't tested it yet, but I will try it this evening and I'll post my results in my original post.

I just thought I'd share it here, so at least you can get your savegame and store it somewhere safe just in case you do decide to reinstall the game.