A small set of guides I play by just because I thought it was a good point to help others with my experience.

If you have problems with molerats, make a vault with elevators on the outside (left, right and bottom). If you don't have the money yet, go for the sides first, that'll reduce the number greatly. It should look something like this:

This works, because molerats only invade rooms that have dirt next to them. This goes for every room, except the top floor for some reason.

http://i.imgur.com/APioR0H.png

Bear in mind that underneath the horizontal (bottom) row of elevators there has to be a free space between the elevators and the next room, otherwise it does seem to spread from the room below the row to above.

Another great advantage of building like this is that you can remove any room when you want(except the top floor) if you want to change what resources you produce or what your dwellers are training. Quite handy I must say.

However, the game does require that it'll be saved/loaded in order for it to register a space as a room (instead of dirt).

To be able to have enough items, just go with elevators down and put item-rooms there (barracks, storage, extra medbay/science lab), with space in between, so the incident won't spread to other rooms

http://i.imgur.com/lfBNp9y.png

To get rid of raiders fast, have a 3 unit wide room next to the entrance and fill that up with 6 dwellers with good Strength and/or Endurance and equip 6 descent weapons to them. When your weapons become good enough, they shouldn't even get through that room. If you don't have enough weapons and they make it through, just unequip the weapons and put them on the dwellers in the next room ASAP.

Sick of deathclaws?

Let's start by not telling you to "just get 3 rooms filled with lvl50 legendary dwellers with 20+ damage weapons". This frustrated me quite a bit when looking for help.

Keep your vault under 50 population. It might be 60, but somewhere around that number they start showing up. For me (at 125-ish) nearly every time I send out a dweller it will trigger deathclaws, and luckily I already got some weapons. If you're not ready for them, you're gonna have a bad time....(/insert SouthPark meme)

If you only have a limited stock of good weapons, you can unequip them when they leave the room, and leap-frog to where they are going to be in 2 rooms and put the weapons on those dwellers. This is a hassle and you'll have to be quick, but it's effective. Be sure to know where you put your weapons and don't forget to collect and put them on the first guys again.

If you're already above that, you can send out dwellers to the wasteland and let them die. Cruel, but an effective way to reduce numbers. Don't feel tempted by the "get x dwellers pregnant" or equivalent to raising your vault numbers just yet.

Deathclaws will go through 1 room twice if you only have an elevator shaft straight down below the original (next to the vault door room) and rooms (plural) to the left/right. This will wreak havoc on the stimpack collection, or caps for reviving.

If there's no elevator on the end they'll go back again (through a room they already went through) and get to the next floor. From what I've found is that you want:

-elevators either on the far sides (as described in the no-molerat vault)

-OR an even number of vertical elevators on the right side (because if there is an odd number, they'll go through a previous room..)

-OR have a vault built around a single shaft with 1 room on each side (so they'll go left-right-down if I'm not mistaken)

This way, each room will only be "visited" by these unwelcome guests only once, saving on stimpacks and/or caps.

Deathclaws are no fun in the beginning, especially so when you don't have really great gear. If you do acquire some, be sure to equip the dwellers in the first rooms with the best weapons. Take note of how the deathclaws move in your vault and assign weapons, armor and rooms accordingly. Use the previous mentioned leap-frog method if necessary.

Passive alternative to fighting deathclaws:

Let them get though your vault as fast as possible. Once they reach bottom, they will go up through the nearest elevator and out the vault. Do this by "evacuating" everybody out of the room they're in. After an alert the game should put them back in the original.

But, you ask me, what if I actually WANT incidents?

Then, I say, you need to get a single (lvl1) room seperated from your vault and put two high-levels (preferable with good Endurance) with good guns. To save caps, this can be the cheapest you got (power plant, diner, water).

Just keep rushing.

http://i.imgur.com/L0HsT6g.png

But but but what if I only want fires?

Fires are difficult. You want a room surrounded by others, so the game only has a choice between radroaches or fire (because the room isn't touching dirt anymore).... or succes obviously.

Again, put two higher levels in there with higher Endurance. This seems to be a winning combination when taking damage. Make sure it is an un-leveled, 1-space room, so it won't be too difficult. Keep rushing.

http://i.imgur.com/2XKwPw5.png

This should be a single room, not upgraded. If you want the off chance to be gain in stimpacks or radaways, obviously build a science bay or medlab

I need to rush....

Well this is a test of patience usually. Go rush each room, but don′t rush it when the % gets higher than 20/25 percent (whatever you're comfortable with... personally I don't go over 15 anymore).

To help the rush chance, I found that not necessarily the luck, but the skill required for the room help greatly to reduce the percentage and to get/keep the numbers down faster/lower again.

For instance, I got 6 dwellers with Strength 10 working in the Super reactor. The rush percentage will drop to 0%, increase to 4% when rushed 1 time and to 12% on the 2nd. Another reason to put dwellers where they belong.

If you get inpatient with the "objective progress bar" in the lower right corner, here's a little trick. Zoom in until you can see dwellers and confidently click/tap them. Rush a room. When the rush is over and the green letters XP will fly up from your dwellers' heads, then click a dweller and the progress bar should vanish. If you do it too soon, it'll only select a dweller and no rush option will come up.

Notes on rushing

From experience and feedback (thanks http://www.gamesas.com/user/575995-dandirk/!), the severity of the incidents in a room depends on:

-If you have the money (or rather, if you have money for it), use a Medbay/Sciencebay room to rush, or one that suits an objective, or one that suits any lack of resources

-Room size (1-2 or 3 wide; the wider the more fire/radroaches/molerats)

-Room upgrade (none, first and second; more upgraded= more HP the enemies seem to have and fires last longer)

-I got feedback saying level is a factor. Not sure yet, so need more confirmation on this one.

Dead dwellers

If under any circumstance a dweller dies, wait until the incident is over.

-Reviving your dweller while in an incident doesn't help you much. Especially against deathclaws, because they have moved on by the time he/she is walking again.

-If you revive your dweller during an incident it will go on a coffee break when the incident is over.

-If you revive your dweller after the incident, he'll go right back to what he was doing, provided he/she didn't leave his/hers "original" room.

"Sometimes it takes unique dwellers or the same dweller... what's the difference?", however wrongfully better know as "the SPECIAL stat raise bug" or "level up objective bug"

I found that the objective states dwellers different. Sometimes it's Dwellers, sometimes it's dwellers... See the difference in the D (or d)?

From my experience:

dwellers :my systems wants unique dwellers (for example leveling up, or raise SPECIAL stat)

Dwellers :it can be the same

Easy obvious check:

If you want to see what it is, just get a low level dweller (with 1 Strength) to the weights room. Level him once, and see if the second time still counts towards the objective. Make sure to keep an eye on which one it is.

If it is levelling up, obviously don't put them in a training room. Get low level (1-10) dwellers to get into production rooms...

Note: Dwellers in the wasteland that level up count towards this too (Confirmed by http://www.gamesas.com/user/956264-xlii/)

"Equip x dwellers with a weapon/armor"

If you only have a small number of dwellers/items this might be annoying. If you have 1 outfit/weapon and x dwellers to do this can be solved by equipping it on a dweller, unequipping it and going to the next dweller.

If you have plenty of outfits/weapons to go around just switch outfits/weapons on the dwellers.

This is different if the objective states the weapon/outfit.

For instance. If you have 1 Gauss rifle, and the objective is to "equip 2 dwellers with a gauss rifle" you cannot switch the weapon in between dwellers to complete. It has to be 2 different Gauss rifles on 2 dwellers.

This directive says "put x dwellers in the right room" HOW?!

Had a good difficult time with this myself.

I used to just breed new dwellers and see if one had a certain SPECIAL stat that was 3. That stat was corresponding to the right room. Effective, slow and tedious.

Until a user on this forum (http://www.gamesas.com/user/958278-negativity/) had a great tip: When you drag a dweller over a room, you'll get brackets in the 4 corners of the room to indicate which room you're over. Sometimes they're yellow sometimes green. Usually when the brackets are green, that's the right room. It's not failsafe, but at least 50% of the time it's accurate.

If you, like me, have a descent vault and everybody is pretty much in the right location to begin with, here's another way. This will also work well if you have a small vault with good power and descent caps, or a vault that only has production...

You'll have training rooms filled with potential. Use that and get those dwellers moving! "But where? All rooms are full" you say. Well, build the cheapest ones (1 unit, no upgrades) away from your vault and use the bracket-system to see where they like to go best. Go by each training room and put them back before you go to the next training room and try those. This way you'll lose minimal progress and where your dwellers came from.

Usually I put these rooms somewhere:

-(S) Power generator

-(A) Diner

-(P) Water treatment

-(E) Storage room

-(I) Medbay

-©Radio studio

To illustrate, http://i.imgur.com/noPl7BR.png

This objective is always unique dwellers. You can't go back and forth continually.

http://www.gamesas.com/user/953702-fallout50327/ came up with an entirely different strategy I got excited about, because it seems both like a crazy vault experiment and it works!

You basically always have a room (or all rooms) staffed with the "wrong" personnel. That way, when you get this objective you only have to shuffle them once, without looking very hard where they need to go.

Personally, I'd get 2 or 3 rooms (3 wide, 6 dwellers) staffed like this if your vault is big enough, so the rest can produce resources at maximum rates so you don't run out of those..

"Send x dwellers to the wasteland"

If you have a small amount of dwellers available or don't have enough stimpacks to go around this can be frustrating, because it seems easy doesn't it?

Send out a dweller (no gear, no weapon, no stimpacks/radaways... he/she won't need it)

Press the vault button (top left) of your screen and sort by job.

If you're fast enough the on you just sent away should be on top with his/her status being "exiting vault". When it changes to "exploring" just select the dweller and tap "recall" to return him to the vault.

Just stay on his screen, this won't take long

When he returns, you can "collect", do so.

Your dweller will start its slow stroll into the vault. Here's where you select it and drag its outline into the wasteland again, and click "explore"

Do this for as many times as you need, but be prepared for raiders/deathclaws. However I found that low levels (lvl1, no SPECIAL to speak of) tend to not draw as much attention as the higher levels with good stats.

"Have x couples dance"

Get 2 dwellers with high Charisma (or more if you're bold enough) and drop them where they go bump uglies. The fornication station. The humpbunker. *sigh* okay living quarters/barracks.

It helps if they are 50-50 divided male-female.....

Just wait. The instance they start to dance, drag 1 of them to a different room.

When he/she starts running drag him/her back again so they'll stand together again. Then wait again. Repeat.

"Merge/upgrade x rooms"

Pretty self explanatory, but seen some around the forum that use the 1-day delete on this one because their vault is at max, or like they want it to be...

Go down your vault with an elevator and build a room. The cheapest you can build. Then build a room next to it or upgrade it. Destroy. Repeat.

Leveling up your dwellers, HP and Endurance.

Same as with the SPECIAL, but I wanted to make a side note here.

Every time you level up, the game looks at how much Endurance you have and you get HP based on this. Basically this means, that if you level a guy up with low E from 1-50 he'll have less HP then a guy with high E. Outfits that buff E also help.

So basically, you want lvl 1 dwellers to stay lvl1 as long as possible, training in the Fitness rooms untill 10E is achieved.

Personally, that's when I give them wasteland gear (or anything with +3E or higher) and move them over to the game room for luck.

If your dwellers have high Luck, then when you collect you have a higher chance of cap drops. If that is your main concern, you'll want to train Luck first, then another training or job.

From there to any other training room/job.

This basically means that these dwellers last longer and die less, both in and out of the vault.

If anybody has some remarks, or other tips/questions, let me know! I'll test them and add them in here, so people will only need to look at the first page..

Dwellers that level up in the wasteland do count for the level up x dwellers objective. Confirmed this yesterday.

No further suggestions or remarks? Any mistakes? Tell me people, I'm not Yahweh...

Everything looked like good tips form what I can tell.

The only thing I would add is a single med bay is a very good room to do the extinguish X fires challenge. If you fail you get a chance for a fire, if you succeed you get stims to med your guys in the room. I also believe the difficulty to those are based on average level and room level. Though I think it has more to do with room size+level, single room and 1-2 level radroaches are pretty easy. Level 2 will get you 2 stims which worked pretty well for me with INT 10 level 20-30 workers with shotguns. I basically could rush indefinitely.

The 'Put X Dwellers in the right room'. It helps if you have dwellers wearing the wrong outfits for the room they are in.

When the objective comes up, you just drag them to the 'right' room for the credit ,then back.

For example, I have 6 dwellers in a super reactor room, all with various lab coats making their Intelligence their highest score.

The objective comes up, I move them to the Hospital. Boom. 6 Dwellers in the right room.

I have 6 dwellers in the hospital, all in Radiation suits (Endurance boosts) (Outbreak 2: Hemorrhagic Boogaloo).

The objective hits, they all go to the Nuka-Cola factory. 6 more in the right room.

The key is to have them in the wrong room to begin with. It doesn't appear to work just by switching outfits once the objective is assigned.

Thanks for the feedback! I'll get on it tomorrow when I'm less intoxicated.

Mentioned, updated and some minor spelling mistakes edited. Thanks guys/girls!

Great tips thank you! I never knew about mole rats and dirt being the problem have I got a lot of rearranging to do lol. And for death claws what works for me is having all single rooms on the top floor. And my 4 strongest dwellers with my strongest weaps (2 MIRV vengeance and hardened missile launcher) and I just have them follow the death claws room to room and they never make it to the second floor. I have everyone on the second floor just in case I slip.

After 20 minutes and over half a million caps I moved all my reactors over one elevator space and closed everything in an elevator box to prevent mole rats and it works great thank you again!

Exactly why I wrote this You're welcome!

Great feedback, thanks!

Did a minor update on the guide again. Nothing big, just an issue with the horizontal elevators and deathclaws.

PS I'm terribly sorry there are a lot of mistakes in grammar (usually it's or its). I'll try and fix that when I have the time.

PS2 If I may ask, how did it cost you half a million caps? After two shafts straight down the full horizontal only cost me about 40K caps... I'm curious how you got this number so high, or did it include rebuilding and upgrading the rooms too?

As far as I know and as far as I have experienced it, this is true, but only half the truth.

Yes, Deathclaws go back through the room(s) after reaching the end of a floor without an elevator to go to the next level, but they do not seem to do any damage. In fact, this is part of an anti-DC strategy. Making them run through, especially the first, room(s) gives your Dwellers more time to deal damage to them, while the DC seems to be unable to attack during movement.

As an example:


Vault-Door | Elevator | 3-rooms-wide | 1-room | 1-room | empty


If this is your first level, DC will enter through the door, which is guarded, of course, move on to the 3 rooms to the right, move on to the next and the last. When they're done with this level of the Vault, they need to go all the way back to the evlevator next to the Vault door, can't attack Dwellers on their way, but Dwellers can. So the Deathclaws basically gotta walk through a long corridor of blasting guns without being able to hit anything.

That's exactly what I meant by "just stick high levels in there with good guns"... Because that's the only way your dwellers are going to survive. They do stop and do kill people on their way back, which is the entire problem for most.. Thanks for the feedback though!

This is from my personal experience, but from what I read it's all the same. The only time I've seen them run straight back without stopping in every room is when they "finished" the vault i.e. hit the bottom.

PS This will help the more "advanced" vault, so if you lucked out on the first boxes (or lunchboxes in general), or have a good set of weapons/dwellers this setup might be for you.

I have not exp DC's yet, what about putting an elevator shaft at teh end of the first floor and running that all teh way down to the bottom, and putting another lone 3 wide room there, this would force the DC's to go thorugh the first floor taking damage, and then down to a "killing room" ? I wish they would let us build defense turrets and such. Would do this design and fill that room up with everything i gots.

the wall of elevators may reduce mole rat attacks, but it does not eliminate them. Just had a MR incursion in the middle of my vault in an empty production room. The room was surrounded on all 4 sides with other production rooms. Mr. Handy held it down until help arrived, but would have spread out of control otherwise.

Kinda debunks that whole tool tip about dirt and rooms and such.

Cost me alot of money to redesign to this style but I feel it's worth it. Haven't seen any molerats for a very very long time.


Actually starting to miss the little critters lol!

Sorry to hear that!

Honestly, both me and my wife are running vaults like this for over 2 weeks now, not a single MR attack in the "main" vault part.

HOWEVER, if you have just redesigned or removed a room (to replace with another or something) the game might not register yet as there being something built. Let's call it lag. It should be "fixed" when the game is saved/loaded again.

(I'll update the guide on this one, and eagerly await verification on this issue)

OR if that room is on the lowest parts (above the horizontal row of elevators) and you have a room directly below the elevators, then they may spread from outside to in.

You stated that the room was in the middle, so would you kindly do me the favor of trying to keep your "main" completely solid for a couple days?

Because I've been rushing all rooms inside that area until happiness in the vault was about 20% (yes, overall) because of failing the rush in the last day and a half, but still not a single molerat in there...

@Phyber Lol, yep reshuffling does cost quite a penny. Took me upwards of 400,000 caps to get here

@both I've even gone through a "siphon" design so that DC's would be confused. They were but the longer they're in your vault, the more resources you lose, so I opted for this design instead..

I found out that if you make this syphon and you get somethinghttp://i.imgur.com/aivmK3o.png (where the red is entrance) that the DC's don't get into the green rooms.. not sure why that is yet. Stopped with that configuration because as I said: more time=less resources...

You either want them through your vault ASAP (straight down where they turn around and go for the fastest way out) or kill them equally fast (or faster if you have the weapons and population)

EDIT I also abandoned this syphon type of vault because pretty much every room now touches on dirt, so MRs became a bigger problem than the DCs

This guide helped me a lot a while back with the molerat prevention and burying resource rooms that stay unstaffed.

I have one thing to contribute for objectives.

The "Raise x dwellers to 100% happiness" objective is easily defeated using a 1 wide radio station.

If you have someone with a 10 charisma simply drop them on the room and when they just *start* to run the happiness bonus immediately goes into effect and the objective completes instantly.

You can then drag the dweller right back to where they were without them ever even leaving the room.

It's like the equivalent of screaming HALF LIFE 3 announcement! immediately followed by screaming. HALF LIFE 3 announcement in indefinite hiatus!

Everyone gets really happy for a split second then right back to normal.

Thanks! I'll go test this right away as my vault is kind of unhappy at the moment

I'll even put the wife on testing duty as she is otherwise making waaay to much caps ghehehe

Can anybody else help verify? That'd be awesome.

Oh and check the Google. HL3 is getting out in februari 2016...