Firstly - its neigh on impossible without buying lunchboxes to get stocked up with good Dwellers and good weapons. I tried it without buying anything and the moment I hit 20 dwellers, I got hit by 2 raider parties straight after each other, followed by a molerat attack on the same room and they wiped out all my power dwellers, there's no way back from that. You don't stand a chance against Raiders with only lever action rifles and a shotgun, let alone those damn molerats. It would help if the dwellers came to the shelter armed with more than BB guns that can actually do less damage than simply arming them with their fists!

You simply do not have the time to send people out before around 20 dwellers in the hope to get some decent weapons.

Which brings me onto my biggest bug bear...

Agreed. The game is too aggressive from the onset. As a game programmer, I can tell you that doing a sum total average of all metrics can easily determine what pains can be mediated by the players, and which can't. Game companies are so hell bent on the monetary objectives, they forget that a great game, regardless of how easy will drive micro-transactions forever. Clash of Clans proved this.

Hard mode is supposed to be hard. If you want a safety net play normal mode.

I like the added challenge. Already faced things like 5 raider attacks in a row without stims available. Lost dwellers (and equipment) to critters and me being stupid.

I wish there were a hard mode that wasn't also hardcoe. I want the challenge but not permanent losses.

Question: If a Mr. Handy blows up in survival, is it repairable?

I don't have a problem with it being hard, but it needs to be fair at the same time. Losing someone because they start hitting hard creatures and quickly burn through stimpacks and then die before you have a chance to bring them back is simply annoying.


Put simply, you don't play a game that annoys you, you play one that you enjoy. Loosing good dwellers and worse, good kit through a flaw in the game design is not on. Not everyone can check on their vault every hour and the game shouldn't turn into a "check every 30 mins" type of game.

Is hardcoe mode only available with a new vault or can you switch an existing vault to hardcoe mode? I would like to try it out, but I dont want to delete any of my three vaults

only on new Vaults

I tried the survival mode but the incident rate seems way too high. I played an hour or two so I only had the basic rooms plus second water plant and a second power plant. I got spontanious fires like every 15minutes! All my dwellers died already except the two women who were pregnant!

I have 30 dwellers in S-mode now. The raised incident chance was hard in the beginning as your only way to heal your dwellers are level ups. But once the stim pack production is running you should be fine. Only heal badly wounded (below 50%HP).

Don't upgrade rooms and don't level up just because. The incidents will level with your dwellers gaining you nothing in the end.

Be careful when exploring. Don't let dweller out unsupervised. But explore for more than an hour does't make sense as you get most stuff from raider incursions, it levels the dwellers (which you don't want) and costs you the stim packs you need to survive all the hazards befalling your Vault.

Do the objective to earn lunchboxes, I got my legendary weapon by opening lunchboxes and no I didn't pay any cent on that Survivor Vault, just play normal if this mode is hard for you, you should have play it super safe, but you obviously didn't, sending a Dweller early game.... smh

How often do you need to check up on things, if you play survival mode? Are there still time for work/friends/family ??

its not like I can sit everyday 3hours playing.

Resource depletion and production run for a few minutes after you log off, and then the game basically goes into stasis until you come back. The clock still runs on training and exploration, but otherwise Fallout Shelter will patiently await your return from real life.

Just be careful with your exploration people. If they die out there, they're dead. Send them out, check in on them in a few hours (or longer, if you think they can survive) and then recall them when you're going to be away for a long period, such as overnight.

And therein lies the problem. You can only get decent stuff when the dweller is out for a long time. If you can't leave them overnight, it means having to bring them in early, wasting stimpacks and knackering your chance of getting any good stuff. I'm trying to decide whether to risk it with one of mine now, she's got 15 packs left, so should be OK until the morning - hopefully.


The dwellers really do need to a) auto apply stimpacks in the vault before they die and when outside they need to return automatically when they get low on health.


Auto applying inside the vault is important thanks to the issues with the UI in a) seeing the health bars and selecting the right dweller.


Steve

I started a new vault in survival mode, but now dwellers can be revived. I suspect my vaultimate glitches back to normal mode, and there's no way to check. There should just be a checkmark box option for survival mode.


If this is the case, I think I'm done with the game. Normal is too easy, and I'm not investing another two weeks in a new Survival mode vault only to have it glitch back to normal again.

When 5 out of 6 people 2 with legendary armor, all with legendary weapons (Fat man, Hardened Minigun, Mean Green Plasma, etc) die during a raider attack that is crap. They are running around so *@&^!(@^@ much you can click on them to heal them. Have them auto-heal if there are stimpacks available.

Your survival vault should have a little casino gambling chip on it with an S in it. You should see it when you are looking at your vault list. Not sure if this helps.

I love the challenge of survivor mode, but you are correct without lunchboxes it is impossible, and the incident rate goes from zero to a thousand in a matter of seconds and always happens when sim packs are running out or when I send someone to the wasteland. Al;so at times it is impossible to grab a player and move them, I can not tell you how many people I have lost because I am trying to move them to another room and it wont grab them.

Somehow my survivor mode vault went from survival to normal...after a few weeks of building it up.


I think I'm retiring this once fallout 4 comes out.

Right, I've just lost another explorer, this time with a missile launcher. I'm sorry, but until this is patched so that explorers auto return, I'm not wasting anymore time or money on this game. Losing the dweller because you can't log into the game (some of us do work and can't play games during the day) is one thing, losing the weapon is the galling thing as they are do hard to get.


I'm really annoyed now. Games that piss their players off, don't tend to last long.

Despite saying I wasn't going to continue to play, I have albeit I'm not sending any explorers out until the game is patched so they auto return. However another issue had sprung up. I've spent the past week increasing the special stats of everybody I can. I finally get some up to max A, E and L and assign them to the room. Low and behold the first deathclaw attack that comes in wipes them out.


So, question. How on earth can I rank them up if I can risk them not being wiped out by a death claw attack.


Of course the UI issues don't help here, the health bars weren't showing and thus I didn't know they were about to die. But even if they were showing, all the dwellers were stacked on top of each other so I wouldn't have been able to click on them anyway.


It just all goes to reinforce that dwellers, especially in Survivor mode MUST be able to auto apply stimpacks. I appreciate it may dull the challenge a bit, but choosing between a slightly dulled challenge and being totally frustrating, I'd take slightly dulled every time.


It doesn't help that it feels as if the game attacks the cards against you anyway and this deathclaw attack was particularly annoying as it was within 2 secs of loading the vault.

Just trying to add to this topic so maybe it will be addressed. I just lost a dweller who I had fully upgraded their strength. I lost them because their health bar was not showing up, and even though I was clicking the 6 dwellers in the room with the raiders at random and applying stimpacks even if they BARELY needed them, they were behind another dweller and I could not click on them. I had 55 stimpacks starting and I had probably used 8 or 9. Had plenty of stimpacks, just no way to use it. Change it to where they can either use stimpacks automatically, we can assign stimpacks to them like a gun or suit or where they don't hide behind each other and the health bars show up.

I've found there is a way to survive way longer in survival mode, even if it complicates a bit the management.

1st : Don't build touching rooms. Only one room per level. One on the left of the elevator, the one below on the right, then the next below on the left again, etc. This protects you from contamination of rooms when fires, radroaches and other monsters comes from the ground. It also allows an easy escape for the dwellers towards safer rooms before their life drops too much from fighting the threat, and it protects your other rooms. Plus it's the only way to avoid a high use of Health Paks.

2nd: Send as many dwellers as you can outside early on. Even if they don't collect a lot of items, they will find some that will still be useful for your dwellers when they come back.

3rd : When the dwellers return, do not collect them immediately. Even if they are heavily wounded / irradiated, as long as you don't collect from them, they are in an immortal zone where they also don't consume any food or water, thus you don't jeopardize your valut.

4th : One dweller comes in, one goes out : To keep the precarious economy of your vault running, replace one dweller that you collect from by one dweller that is in the vault working somewhere. Switch the equipments / weapons and then send them immediately out. This is necessary as long as you don't have Health packs and Radaways. Then, you can always send the same ones outside.

5th : Don't check too often on your vault because attacks comes IMMEDIATELY when you open your vault. Wait for your dwellers to recover from their sustained wounds while the app is running in the background.

6th : Keep the most powerful weapons inside of your vault. They are more than necessary to protect it from all the bad guys coming and can save you a whole room getting wiped out.

7th : Accept that you will have a lot of losses, because the UI is stupid. It's frustrating, but it happens.

8th : Call back your dwellers when you go to bed, especially the important ones.

9th : Aim for the objectives to complete to get as many Lunchboxes as possible.

10th : Grow your population as slow as possible after you hit the 20 dwellers mark, to avoid as long as possible the really nasty creatures to attack your vault.

With these rules and a lot of patience (seems like a second work sometimes), I've managed to climb my vault population to 34, having lost only 5 dwellers in the process, till the bloody thing bugged and crashed (after 2 weeks ).

^- Those tips up there. That's pretty much what I do.

Especially #10. My 34-dweller survival vault is nice and boring. Molerats, roaches and fire run rampant in the catacombs but I don't care 'cause no dwellers are down there. The occupied rooms are fully occupied, so disasters get squashed quickly. Raiding parties are fun to watch interacting with my vault guards: 5 raiders enter, 1 raider leaves -- to do a death limp across my power station. I'm hesitant to reach 35 dwellers, not because my door guards aren't up to Deathclaws but because they friggin run side by side back and forth across the entrance room and I can only reliably Stimpak one of them.

On absolute rule that I have recently discovered, is to make sure you rank up the special skills correctly. Rank up 'E' first (or at least as early as practical) and make sure you have some E+ bonus clothing to equip them with once you put them out into the production room - doesn't matter if you haven't ranked up the other specials yet, E is the important one.

Why?

Because as they level up to level 50, their E ranking gives them a health bonus PER level. The difference at level 50 can be huge if you do this. In survivor mode, health points are key to exploring and key to surviving monster attacks.

btw, checkerboard room layout is expensive due to the number of lifts you end up with - I tend to build them adjoining, but any that are likely to be empty (i.e. Living and Storage areas) I leave a row between them and the other rooms, so any fires / molerats etc.. just spread to the adjoining (empty) rooms and not to the rest of the vault.

Issue #124 - Mr Handys eventually break for good. Sorry Bethesda, if I buy a Mr Handy, I expect it to be able to be fixed indefinitely, they should not be a money pit, especially with survivor mode as they are actually very useful.