I recall the IGN reviewer commenting that after the early stages in the game, once you hit critical mass in your vault, the game becomes almost too easy. The reviewer lamented the absence of an “end game”, as I recall. I assume the Deathclaws were patched in as a response.

They’re an endgame alright.

I can see how the occasional Deathclaw attack might add some interest for people with 150-room vaults and hundreds of fully-levelled dwellers, but did you test the Deathclaws in early-game, nascent vaults?

I only ask because yesterday morning, my vault was at 93% happiness. I had carefully built up enough power, food, and water production to house the children my 30 pregnant dwellers would soon unleash on the vault. I had enough resources to arm four dwellers near the door and the elevators with some guns in reserve for others and, for the first time, could send out more than one dweller at a time without compromising production.

Then, the Deathclaws came. They rampaged through the vault for what felt like five minutes, working their way down, then up again trashing everything and evading the armed dwellers I sent after them. I was patching dwellers up as the fight went on, cursing the resilience of the things as I did so. Finally, my dwellers killed the last one. I recall thinking “WTF? That was awful.” Tonally, it seemed out of place in the game. I didn’t have a lot of time to dwell on it, because that was when the second set of three Deathclaws arrived. Yes, seriously.

The carnage was worse this time; I ran out of medpacks to patch dwellers with. This time, one of the Deathclaws escaped in his own good time. I turned the game off. I had had enough of Fallout Shelter. When I decided to survey the carnage later that night, the game pulled me to the wasteland to see the new dweller finally brought in by my radio station. Then he started running. I was still wondering why he was running when the third set of three Deathclaws appeared. That’s three sets of three Deathclaws in about 20 minutes of gameplay. At this point, I think I actually shouted “you’ve got to be f*&%in’ kidding me!”

All three of those Deathclaws escaped unharmed, leaving 41 dwellers dead and 49 dwellers injured badly enough that they’ll take two medpacks each to heal fully. Only 3 dwellers are unscathed. Happiness level is at 23%, but it will drop. My medpack supply is gone. My power reserves are gone. My food supply is gone. My water supply is at about 20%. Because so many dwellers are dead and injured, my output is down. Power supply is now 75% of my requirement and my food and water generation are less than 50% of my usage.

Your patched-in Deathclaws, with their speed, power, and, worst of all, poorly managed spawns, smashed my carefully nurtured ecosystem in 20 minutes and left my vault in ruins.

You folks at Bethesda know games are supposed to be fun, right? Challenging? Sure. But fun.

Fifteen hours learning systems and managing resources, to have them undone in 20 minutes? It would take me a week to or more to try to limp to half of my vault’s prior output, and I will have to earn 12,000 to 15,000 caps just to revive the dead dwellers. Of course, because some of my highest-level dwellers were among the casualties, I’m earning fewer caps from levelling now too. If I decided to do all of that, what would be the point? Make more Deathclaw fodder?

Not an end game I’m interested in, thank you. This is not fun. I won’t be buying anymore lunch boxes.

I play an average of 20 hours of games a week on PC and console. I’ve been angry at games before, but I don’t recall ever feeling so betrayed playing a game before. The rules and systems I spent 15 hours learning and mastering are all thrown out the window, and players get to watch as progress is undone.

It’s not good for the brand, either. As I was building my vault and sending my dwellers out into the wilderness, I was thinking I need to finally play the copies of Fallout and Fallout 2 I bought on the Steam sale. After last night’s debacle, I can’t think of Fallout without getting pissed off and wondering what the hell the dev was thinking.

I don’t know what team conceived/coded/tested the Deathclaws in Fallout Shelter, but please keep them well away from Dishonored 2.

RIP Vault 411.

?

If that makes you feel any better, Bethesda did not make Fallout 1 and 2.

Unfortunately you probably should not have gone past 60 dwellers until you had your top row appropriately fortified to stop deathclaws so they don't get past the first few rooms - it's a live and learn situation - I can imagine if you had a vault full of pregnant women there probably wasn't a whole lot you could do as they are pretty useless. If you decide to rebuild make sure you get your defences up before you add the 60th dweller and the deathclaws start coming.

If you don't have the caps to revive all dwellers before their dead bodies automatically disappear (can't remember how long that is... a few days?) remove them yourself. Don't leave them there.

Why? I have a similar tale to yours with the deathclaws going on a rampage. I revived a few as quickly as caps allowed and then one morning the bodies were all gone!

But they were not gone according to the dwellers. Now I have the well known "ghost corpse" situation where the dwellers are all extremely unhappy (i.e. 10-15%) complaining about the corpse in multiple rooms. The only "fix" (and I use the term lightly) apparently is to destroy the room and rebuild it from scratch.

Since each three row, fully upgraded room could cost you 10's of thousands of caps in the first place, you'll just have to wear it unless the fix it. How's that for adding insult to injury?!

Now imagine a player like yourself deciding to start out on survival mode, all your dead dwellers would not be dead for good and you would have lost any items they had aquired...even items from lunchboxes!


Read all the interesting things that can and possibly will frustrate you with this game even more...like having a vault no longer load, just continually crash.


Back up often, will save you from lots of frustration.

Deathclaws happen too abruptly, too soon. Once you learn how to deal with them, they're not so bad, but that learning process is way too painful. It's surely caused many players to simply quit in disgust. The devs should have been more careful about how they were implemented. How about starting with a single Deathclaw, at 60 dwellers? at 80, bump that to 1-2, and only 1-3 at 100? Mix it up a little, so they aren't always full power.

On survival mode, it's 5 deathclaws. At 36 dwellers. Killed almost everyone, the first time it happened, because I had no clue what to expect, and wasn't even remotely prepared. It just happened out of the blue, so much harder than anything the game had thrown at me, so far. It mostly just needs to be more gradual than that, to give players time to learn.

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When it happened, I just deleted the vault, but wish I hadn't done that. I knew I'd lose everything I'd gotten from the lunchboxes I bought, but was too much of a newbie to know what to do about it. Now, I realize the smart thing to do would have been to remove all but a few dwellers. A mix of male and female. Delete all rooms, and start over - except, without losing all your items. Keep just enough storage space to hold onto anything of value. Throwing all that away is pointless.

The only way I was able to survive my first death claw attacks was by spending money on lunchboxes. I regret every single one of them too and wish I'd never downloaded this darn game.

Guys... If deathclaws are a potential threat (especially in survival mode) then simply move your dwellers to another room. The deathclaws will go trough your vault and leave the vault after they visited the last room. A few resources lost, everything else is good.

Why would you even try to fight survival deathclaws when you have only 30+ dwellers and no decent equipment

You say that like the interface allows you to. Try quickly moving them all out when the deathclaws are attacking them, the deathclaws move that quick, you never get a chance to catch up.


It's also why I've been at 34 dwellers in my survival vault for a month. The one time I got attacked by deathclaws (due to a bug, one of my dwellers died in the wasteland so I let another in, the game said 34 on the screen, but must still count dead dwellers whilst the pet is returning), despite having what I thought were good defences, they killed 6 of my best dwellers. Thankfully I didn't get another attack as I removed the dead dwellers and it went under 35 properly.


The thing with deathclaws is that they're only deadly for so long, in my other vault I have a row of leveled 50 dwellers and the deathclaws are always dead by the 3rd room, needing no stimpacks.


What this game needs is a proper end game, not an ill thought out game mechanic that leaves you feeling done over and violated.

I wonder if it would be feasible to use the top row as storage and then along the far right run an elevator all the way down several levels to another unattached empty room - would the deathclaws essentially go in one door and out the other? Also I was under the impression that if you didn't kill them they just hit you with another attack. IDK - haven't played with the mechanic that much as I just fortify the top row to stop them in their tracks.

Yeah, I was at 34 dwellers and got 2 lunchboxes in a row once. Of course, they both gave me a rare dweller, and while I was deciding who to evict, got hit with deathclaws. All happened in the span of about a minute and a half.

So I remembered reading a post about this, and tried moving them out of the way as fast as I could. Lost 5 or 6 that I had trouble clicking, but I guess that's better than losing 15 or 20. Sure can't go through that every time I play though.

Don't think so. They seem to eventually hit every single room, no matter what layout you use. They'll double back, circle around, whatever they have to. At best, you can slow them down, to give yourself more time to prepare (but the more you slow them down, the more food you'll lose, so have to be careful of that, too)

Well said.

Are you saying that you only had about 10 guns for 60+ people? I'm probably reading that wrong, even molerats pretty much require that all dwellers have some decent weapon.

No, you interpreted that right. When mole rats invaded, I'd deploy my "ringers", such as they were, and arm the others in the room with the stored weapons.


Worked for molerats. Not so effective for Deathclaws.


Still get pissed off thinking about this game.

I played that way at first too. What I eventually learned though, is that this is a MUCH slower paced game than I'd realized, and I was supposed to be a whole lot more patient.

Now I play about 15 minutes a day, but I've been at it for months. All 50 of my dwellers have rare weapons and outfits or better. "common items" are just trash. Even the enhanced sawed off shotguns. My entire upper row of rooms are level 45-50, 10 endurance, and equipped with 14+ damage weapons.

I might be playing it a little too patient, but I can finally handle deathclaws without curling up in a fetal position and crying.

Oh. Okay. I'll pretty much parrot what vzur said then. Fallout Shelter is a slow-build game, rather then a quick one. If you expand to fast and take on end game content with beginner dwellers, the game will smack you down hard. On the other hand, if you can get everyone 10 endurance and a blue weapon, it's possible to move on.

Thing is, I think the devs made poor call, in designing such a slow paced smartphone game. It feels like a great formula for a AAA PC game, with all sorts of bells and whistles. but on a phone.. I don't know that many players are willing to take smartphone games all that seriously.

To top it off, I'm now getting deathclaw attacks with 34 dwellers the last attack didn't claim a dweller, but did claim nearly 30 stimpacks... needless to say I closed the game immediately afterwards.

Double post, mod please delete.