So survival mode really is a challenge and anyone that has tried it can agree with that. Fire>fire>raiders>molerates>raiders>fire oh only 5 minutes have gone by.

Yea, it's difficult. So I'm going to compile some tips to try and make it a little more bearable.


1) DO NOT LOOK AWAY FROM THE SCREEN. The second you do Murphys Law will kick in, something will happen and you just lost a few dwellers.

2) Map layout. This little trick has been saving me a ton. Aside from raiders and deathclaws, incidents only pass on to connecting rooms. I've laid my vault as such:

[.....][VD][VD][EV][SR][SR][EV][.....][.....][.....] Space is empty spot-EV is elevator

[PR][PR][PR][EV][.....][.....][EV][PR][PR][PR] PR is power-LR is living room

[.....][.....][.....][EV][LR][LR][EV]

[WR][WR]WR][EV][....][.....][EV]

With a layout like this, if my power room catches on fire, it won't pass on to another room due to the gaps. Also, I can hurry and evac my dwellers to a living room to save them and the fire,radroaches,etc will die out on their own.

3) Expand SLOWLY. I'd recommend not building a room till you have enough dwellers to fill it. Have a 3 tier room with 4 of 6 dwellers in it is asking for a fire to overrun and kill them.

4) Have an empty storage room or living room. Like step 2, you can always evac dwellers to in during fire,roaches, and rats.

5) People are reporting deathclaws at 35 dwellers. Be sure to have most of your dwellers leveled up and decently equiped before passing this number.

6) Sadly you shouldn't leave your explorers out if you can't check on them within a few hours (depends on level, time already out, stimpacks remaining)

7) Explote immunity. Leave dwellers outside the door, run room to room, vault door is safe from all but raiders/DC's and prego women (take care on this one as populating to fast can lead to breaking the 35 dweller threshold, spawning deathclaws and being possible under level/prepared for them.

8) Level up strength and agility first. Followed by endurance and luck seem to be a good route.

9) Normal mode you can get away with 1-2 med bays. While you still can in survival, you need to be on you A game of keeping dwellers safe. Consider having a few just so you have a constant healthy supply.


This is all I can think of at the moment.

If you have any other tips feel free to add them and share with us your progress and strategies.



**bonus question for the survival elite. Anyone know if you can repair a Mr. Handy yet?

In addition to your tips, i would suggest keeping your rooms level 1, at least until well advanced, otherwise the events are too hard to handle.

Checkerboard layout helps a lot, you can always have your people flee from room events and they will burn themselves out without spreading.

I posted a bunch of effective strategies just yesterday in another thread. But really, the best thing you can do is to exploit the living hell out of incident immunity conditions, because incident frequency in Survival is WAY up, and especially early on you won't have the resources to effectively fight them all. Better to be immune and then be free to ignore them.

There are a bunch of circumstances in which dwellers take no damage at all from incidents:

1. Pregnancy (and being a kidlet, but they're useless anyway)

2. Assigned to the Vault Door (except against raiders and DCs, but they're easy to dodge)

3. Moving from one room to the next

4. In Coffee Break mode (child grows up and unassigned, explorer collected, etc.). You can easily send someone out and collect them immediately, and they'll just wander immune in Coffee Break. Great for safe healing.

5. Standing outside the Vault's front door

Best I can tell, dwellers left standing outside are basically in stasis: they don't take damage, but they also don't heal. Not sure if they consume resources or not. Coffee Breakers inside do heal, but they get in the way when you need to quickly evac people.

What I try to do is severely limit my male population, while keeping females pregnant and working production rooms. If things get messy and I have too many vulnerable dwellers happening at once, I send a bunch of them outside and recall them to the door, where they can sit and stay out of trouble while I figure out what to do with them. Ironically, much of the time they're safer outside the vault than inside.

My deaths are pretty rare now. Permadeath and longer leveling cycles changes everything in Survival Mode.

I've also been trying to be good at popping in game to collect stimpacks and then popping back out before all hell breaks loose. That way when you do get hit with raiders and such you don't run out of stimpacks.

Otherwise, I've been taking the evac approach on a checkerboard vault layout.

I've noticed that a big part of the challenge of Survival is simple population control. Because room type availability is tied to dweller count, you naturally want to grow fast to get a medbay, science room, etc.. but then you have more people than you can effectively handle in incidents. I'll have to try the checkerboard layout though.

Another alternative to checkerboard is simply to leave a row's gap between rooms that are staffed and those that aren't, such as Storage and Living Quarters. I've got a row gap in mine and anything that happens in storage or living quarters stays there, spreads to adjoining rooms, but doesn't get into a populated room. Down side is that molerats can take a chunk of resources whilst they spread until they've hit every room, but its probably a bit more efficient than checkboard (and better if you use Mr Handy's to harvest resources per row).

The startup approach I take is to get the basics going, i.e. Power, Water and Food and as soon as I can get a couple of spare dwellers out in the wasteland. Often not for long to start with as I don't have any stimpacks, but its often long enough to get a couple of bits of clothing and perhaps a gun or two. Both are important, but for gawd's sake, don't let them die out there!

As soon as you can build a clinc and start pumping out stimpacks - you'll need them. By this time you'll be around 30-35 dwellers. Next priority are training rooms for S and A as these are the two resources you'll need most. As soon as you've got a dweller up to level 8/9/10 (with clothes if possible), get them into the room and start leveling up others. Don't build another room until you have these ranked up. If you find yourself getting close on power consumption, build another 1 or 2 cell room to get the storage, but don't bother to staff it. Ideally build it in a place away from the rest of the rooms (see point 1) - at some point you'll remove it, but for now you'll need the storage rather than the production.

Expand slowly, try and resist the temptation to boom as you'll only end up stressing the production. The next goal is 50 dwellers and the game room, so you can start training your S A (and probably P by now) dwellers so you stand a chance of getting a nice chunk of cash sometimes when a room produces.

But expect to buy a few lunchboxes, I respect anyone who plays this mode without buying some at some point.

Just don't do what I did, get a hardened minigun in one and then let the dweller die out in the wastelands whilst equipped with it. Now that's annoying!

I agree totally with the go-it-slow approach to building. The times I get truly screwed are the times when I build something before I have the manpower to exploit it fully.

I have to disagree about the paid lunchboxes, though. The mode is completely winnable without paying a cent, cheating or resorting to start-over-until-cool-gun-appears tactics. You just have to be very careful with how you place your dwellers. I'm finding that a big part of the Survival Mode challenge is that in vanilla, I've been trained to rely on making good weapons the core of the game strategy - a mindset that doesn't serve me nearly as well in Survival.

Aside from arming explorers (and so letting them stay out longer, and find better stuff), I'm finding in-vault weapons to be almost irrelevant in Survival Mode. Outfits matter a lot more, as uninterrupted production is a much bigger problem than in vanilla. Most of the rest is build planning and maneuvering.

Then again, I've been playing it in much the same fashion that I play Civilization. To each their own.

Okay, I just verified it. Dwellers parked outside the front door do not heal and they do NOT consume food or water. Coffee breakers do both.

So when your production goes south (and in Survival, it will), don't leave anyone in non-production areas. Med bays, training, whatever: if they're not lending strong points to critical areas, send them out to explore and bring them right back to the door. Leave them there, and that'll take the excess consumption load off your infrastructure. Then gradually bring them in one at a time to heal in Coffee Break as the vault gets back under control.

So far in Survival, I get the most screwed when I take a population growth jump (esp. 12 to 20, or 24 to 32). New enemies and incidents start slicing through my vault like a hot knife through yogurt, and production goes to hell and pretty soon everyone is 50% irradiated and starving. Shunting excess consumption outside helps with that a lot.

Oh, and about raider attacks. In Survival, I'm getting them in bands of five, but it seems that only the first raider death ever yields a gun or outfit. The middle three raiders yield very, very low caps rewards, and then there's a modest cap reward (100-200?) for killing them all.

If you're right around the 15 pop mark, need outfits for production boosts and are getting hit by lots of raiders, focus on taking out the first one and then run like hell. You don't need to kill all five just to get a shiny new merc outfit.

Ed. Okay, I was wrong about the raiders. First one yields an item (weapon or outfit), and the others pay out either very meager (2-5c) or modest (100-200c). But the modest payout isn't necessarily the last one.

I just hit 44 dwellers. Had a good string of lunch box dwellers though. Although still no deathclaws for me. I went with a water room as my first room raiders encounter and loaded all my good guns in there (got a fat man in a box (lucky me)). Standard perception clothing. I haven't had a raider pass the room in awhile. Checkerboard design is working wonders but as I expand the early game costs of elevators prices rising is starting to take a toll.

I just started playing the game a few days ago. I've started up a few different vaults to get experience with the mechanics, so now I'm taking a shot at survival mode. Right now I'm at 15 dwellers. All of them came from the Wasteland, I haven't had any vault dwellers breed yet. I also haven't reinforced the vault door, but based on previous vault experiences, I know reinforcing the door isn't the trigger for raider attacks because they started before I reinforced the door on a vault at normal difficulty. I've been biding my time and working on building a 3-block Clinic, then upgrading it to max potential so I can start hoarding Med Paks before I add to my population. 3 hours and 41 minutes of play time and the incidents are still limited to radroaches and fires. No raiders yet, so I'm guessing raider attacks don't start until the player starts breeding and/or the population rises above 15.


I also have some basic questions about the mechanics for more experienced players. Does SPECIAL enhance damage to weapons when used by vault dwellers INSIDE the vault or are SPECIAL stats only relevant to the job being performed? Do any of the other combat mechanics from other Fallout games translate onto this game? For example, does it help to give energy weapons to the dwellers in my water treatment plant because they have high P and to give guns to the dwellers working in the diner because they have high A? Or is damage based flatly on the weapon damage rating and otherwise equivalent, regardless of role?


-edit- I got Star Paladin Cross from a lunchbox which made me hit 16 dwellers. Groups of five Raiders started attacking immediately after. I survived one wave, then lost a dweller on the second wave. When my dweller count dropped back to 15, the raiders stopped coming. Seems like you're safe from Raiders if your population is below 16, so one could potentially build up their population to unlock certain rooms, then triage a bunch of them back down to a population of 15 and wait to rebuild the population until after they've pumped up the stats of the remaining dwellers.

When getting your women pregnant, you don't have to stay logged on. Just move the cople to the LQ and log out. This way you don't risk having multiple incidents while waiting for them to get it on.

Unless you have a high SPECIAL guy to impregnate all the ladies, cycle through everyone, starting with those who have the lowest happiness so you can keep the vault as happy as possible.

Okay, so the checkerboard build pattern (or some variant thereof) is definitely the way to go in early game.

I started a new Vault and intentionally built all rooms at diagonals from each other, with dirt gaps in between. As fire, roach and molerat incidents only spread at 90-degree angles (up/down/left/right), doing a checkerboard pattern effectively keeps all of those incidents isolated to their starting rooms. If you pull those people out, the incident quickly burns itself out and just ends. I'm finding that it makes a gigantic difference in managing production in early game, when dwellers are lightly armed and you can't make stimpaks yet.

Yeah, that type of build pattern is essential for the beginning of survival mode, IMO. It's really probably the optimal design layout for starting a normal game, too, but the higher incident rate in survival mode makes it crucial. You can avoid raiders, molerats and deathclaws in the early part of the game if you intentionally keep the population low. If you hold off on attracting raiders, you can eventually get the same gear from sending dwellers into the wasteland (although the higher stakes make it a longer process than a normal game). That strategy limits the early threats to only radroach infestations and fires. Once your dwellers have stronger weapons, they can sometimes kill all the radroaches faster than you can move everyone out of the room, but there's no way to really gear up to make them put out fires faster than you can move everyone out of the room. Radroaches are basically a non-issue for any single-block room inhabited by two dwellers.


I feel that fires are the most underestimated threat for survival mode (especially at the beginning) because there is no smart way to boost efficiency in eliminating fires. The natural method in boosting efficiency against fires (sending more dwellers to fight the fire) just increases the overall damage done by the fire. The best option against fire will always be to just let it burn out in a room that isn't adjacent to any other rooms, regardless of gear, dweller level or number of dwellers in a room. Trying to fight the fires (in rooms that aren't adjacent to any other room) is just a waste of time and precious stim-paks, since it usually takes longer for six dwellers to extinguish a fire than it takes to move all six of them and let the fire burn out. The checkerboad pattern should primarily be a way to reduce the threat of fires, but of course works for radroaches and molerats as well.


The one exception to the checkerboard pattern is with storage spaces placed next to living quarters. Since you'll rarely use the living quarters for anything besides breeding, they'll generally be empty most of the time. Most of the time, that just means a storage room outbreak spreads to an empty living quarters. As long as the living quarters isn't connected to any other rooms besides the storage room, you should be fine. On the off-chance you do have a couple trying to make babies when an incident strikes the storage room or living quarters, just move those two into the adjacent room. Then as soon as the fire/roaches/molerats follow them into the adjacent room, just move them back to the first room. Incidents that spread can't relocate to the room they originated in, so your dwellers are safe in the original room once the incident switches rooms.


I also agree that it isn't essential to buy lunchboxes if one is patient enough to re-roll vaults until they get a legendary dweller from the first lunchbox they unlock from rewards. Dwellers trump weapons and outfits because the legendary dwellers come equipped with legendary weapons and outfits, so it's a three-for-one. Most of the dwellers have SPECIAL stats that are so high that their legendary outfits put them over the cap on one or more stats, so you can usually swap their outfit with one of the noobs early on and still cap their primary stat with basic Wasteland gear. The benefit to going for a Legendary Dweller right at the beginning is that it doesn't take very long to complete the first objectives, so you don't have to spend much time on a vault before you know if you want to keep it or not (maybe 10-15 minutes at most).


Before my current Survival game, I rolled three previous vaults. First one got me a Missile Launcher. Re-rolled and got Mr. Burke the second time. Made some early building mistakes so I re-rolled a third vault but got nothing good from lunchboxes. On the fourth one, I got Star Paladin Cross in the first lunchbox and Preston Garvey in the second lunchbox. I'm not telling this to brag about my luck, I'm just showing that you can get great rewards from lunchboxes at the very beginning if you're willing to start over a few times. Across all the vaults I've built and all the lunchboxes I've opened I've unlocked 5 Legendary Dwellers. Each of those dwellers was found within the first three lunchboxes I got for each vault. The way my luck trends, the longer I spend building a vault, the quality of my lunchbox rewards drops. Particularly on survival mode, I'd rather have bad luck over and over and keep starting fresh until I get a Legendary Dweller from a lunchbox than start putting a great amount of time into a vault with average dwellers and crappy lunchbox rewards.

Honestly, I don't think it's ever necessary to buy a lunchbox or reroll in Survival Mode. The game's totally manageable without them.

I went into this mode initially with the attitude that it should be winnable with the parts and mechanics readily available, and that if it proved impossible to play without very lucky initial draws and helpful microtransactions, then screw it. Not worth my time. And so, while I've certainly fubared a good number of experimental vaults this way, I've never rerolled or bought lunchboxes. It was either play it as it lies, or go find something else to play. And, sure enough, there were a ton of tricks and loopholes for getting around the nasty bits.

The one thing you absolutely need, though, in Survival Mode is patience. If you build too fast, you're going to lose. If you breed too fast, you're going to lose. If you overestimate your ability to fight incidents, can't generate production to offset new dweller consumption, or if you send a lot of people out into the Wastes before you're ready.. well, you're going to lose. No special weapons or paid lunchboxes are going to change that.

At the heart of this game is resource economy: produce more than you consume, and protect your ability to do same. Watch your production stats, try to keep a 2:1 production-to-consumption ratio (esp. for power) whenever possible. Put people outside if they're not contributing to your bottom line and get them off the dole. Score CHR outfits as soon as possible and keep your women pregnant and working. Pick up weapons as you find them and gradually level people up.

If you can do that and keep your people alive in the process, simple patience will take you the rest of the way.

I'm currently trying out the Endurance Master Race strategy. First four Level 1s are END 5s and climbing, so I'll let y'all know how well that tactic works out moving forward. I have high hopes.

Do not level up your dwellers.

The game is programmed to offer a "challenge" and incidents will level to match your dwellers level. That's also the reason why dwellers start at level 5 in survival mode. With an average dweller level of 1 the dwellers would't take any damage.

So your idea is to just let dwellers die? You can't possibly keep birthrate up enough to offset the wholesale slaughter.

No, they'll take damage just fine as level 1's, especially when you get up around 15 dwellers and the raiders start showing up. I guess you could also say, "keep your vault under 12 people" and then spend all your time fighting fires, killing roaches and buying lunchboxes. Meh. To each his own.

If all your dwellers are level 1 they take no damage.

If you have 199 level 50 dwellers and one level 1 then the level 1 will die almost instantly if something happens.

Incidents are not matched to population. Only thing that matters is room level and average dweller level in your Vault.

When leveling you also have to consider the HP issue, see http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1536436-endurance-the-real-deal/

So without endurance training and endurance gear your dwellers miss out on bonus HP.

By leveling dwellers in the beginning you get weak high level dwellers and your new dwellers have to face incidents matched to these high levels. You normally view leveling as something positive because the games get easier as you level. This is not the case with Fallout Shelter as the incidents level with you. (And they level to match top gear maximum HP dwellers in the end.)

Thanks for starting this thread. For me, survival mode has breathed new life into the game. My first attempts at survival were so frustrating... the tips posted here helped so much!!


I never knew starting over could be so much fun.

I didn't read the whole thread but I've found stacking the rooms to be the best. I go in to collect then stay out as much as possible when my dwellers are recovering. I also take advantage of the incidents. Since they will have one anyway, I rush my medbay for stimpacks constantly. I keep four pregnant women in there and rush, rush, rush. The worst that can happen is the room catching on fire or roaches which they run away anyway so no one gets hurt and if the incident is there, it can't be in rooms I need resources from. My rooms are stacked so it doesn't spread either. Eventually it comes out adding up. Your bound to have success sometimes and you don't loose anything if you don't. The ladies come back and I rush it again. I stock up on stimpacks big time and heal all my dwellers with this strategy.

I've been stuck at about 16-17 population for 3 days now. Everyone has Lever Rifles or better, and about 4-5 have Sawed Off Shotguns. I have one good weapon from a lunchbox, a Railway Rifle. What happens is that about the time I hit 17 population, I get multiple raider attacks. Each one burns about 4-5 stimpacks, and when I run out, I lose 2-3 of people before defeating a raid, knocking me back to population 14 or so.

It's been an endless cycle no matter what I do. I've tried rotating the healthy people to the front of the vault, I've tried devoting 4 dwellers to making stimpacks, nothing works. I've had as many as 25 stimpacks stored and had a string of raids burn through them all.

Normal mode is easy, and I'm pretty bored with my maxed-out starting vault. Survival mode feels completely unreasonable, and I'm thinking seriously about chucking the game.

Yeah, survivor Mode has the potential to be a good challenge, but it just ends up frustrating you. If it's not the cycle of raider parties, it's the clusterfu*k of multiple deathclaw attacks. If somehow you survive that you need to be wired into the game so that you return the explorers before they die.


And if all that doesn't get you, the dodgy dweller selection during an attack will and you'll lose dwellers you've spent weeks ranking up because the sodding game won't let you select them and administer a stimpack in time.


Basically, as it currently stands survivor Mode is a device breaker, as it gets so frustrating you throw the device against something or end up tapping the screen like a modern day equivalent of the 100 sprint in 'Summer Games' on the c64.