Pro tips- switch it good. And other tips

[test]

This applies to a number of different things, here are two off the top of my head that I know of. I may edit more in latter on.

Most of this is related to achievements as one of the most important part of the game as lunch boxes, pet carriers and robot box are great to get so you will want to focus on cycling through them.

1. If you have a achievement that say requires X amount of equipment equipped. Go to each dweller that has any equipment already, unequip it, requip it. Do not switch from one equipment to another. Note that each dweller only counts for one. If you switch from one equipment to another, even if you unequip it and reequip latter, that dweller may never give you credit for that accomplishment.

Also, not only is it generally limited to one dweller one equipment, but it may also be limited to one equipment piece per count. So unequipping and reequipping makes sure you keep to the count, if you go putting equipment already counted on a dweller not counted or visa versa, you can make a mess of things for yourself I believe.

One odd exception to this rule is, if it asks for a very specific equipment piece, like equip X scoped weapons, you seem to be able to use as few as two of that type unequipping and reequipping on different dwellers.

2. If you have a dweller suffering from happiness below 75%, give them a different job. I think what I thought before that the highest stat is a happiness job is correct, I have sent dwellers to jobs that use a stat lower than other stats of theirs and still gotten happiness. Well just send them over anyway, look for lots of tiny green smiles floating around their body when they move over to indicate a job they like. But even if you don't see that, don't panic, look at their happiness, is it starting to tick up? They should gain a point of happiness no longer than say 15 seconds upon getting the new job, maybe even before they get there. This happiness will tick up slowly for awhile, don't send them back to their old job (if you need them there or their stat is higher for their etc) till this stops, either because they reached 75 happiness, or it just stopped. If you send them back earlier the happiness increase will stop.

If it does stop and it's not at 75, switch them over back to their old job or some other happiness job and it should start to climb again. (note that it goes up moving back if it stopped early, but doesn't move up going back if doesn't stop early, hopefully this isn't too confusing to read)

3. If you get a accomplishment to do, to make X amount of dwellers 100% happy, there are a number of ways to accomplish this. One easy way to do is get a dweller present, both will hit 100% happiness even if they were 10% before. But if you don't want too many dwellers pregnant, there is other ways.

One thing to note here, dwellers already at 100% happiness, don't count, so don't go mating those at 100% happiness.

What you can do though is drop them below 100% happiness, like forcing a incident in a work place, then increasing it again, Like stacking for a successful rush or mating them.

And of course you can simply just put some lucky clothes on and move a bunch of folks to a room that's at it's lowest risk state since you haven't rushed for while, rush that room. Then if successful move everyone to a new room (since each room has its own rush risk timer) and do it again till you reach 100% happiness. I think you get 10% per rush? So three successful rushes in a row from there you'll get 6 people to 100%. Note that the rush happiness boost does not happen immediately, it ticks up at the same speed as the job one except not limited to 75%, so give it time to climb before sending everyone over to the next production room.

Note I believe the rule of a dweller only counting once still applies, you might consider renaming them after you've gotten them to count towards the achievement to indicate you've used them.

And if you get a accomplishment of selling X amount, it can be worth making lots of crap that uses 1 of junk you have extra of for selling off to meet the goal. Just learn which junk you need for the good stuff.

From nonrigerous personal observation with the blueprints I have received (plus glancing at wiki info) I think fans a pretty important material for a good common weapon and alarm clock is needed for both some of the best common weapons and needed a bunch in some of the best rare weapons too. Globe also comes up a bunch for top rare.

I've not rigorously tested any of this so please don't take as absolute fact and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought I'd share what I have perhaps learned.

4. Something others already know but a pro tip for new players. Each level only gives HP based on endurance at time of level including clothes. So eventually you will want to train level 1s to max endurance and put on endurance boosting clothes and then leveling.

Also from what I am told level does nothing but increase HP and allow units to do quests. But there is one other effect, increasing difficulty, so try not to level units if you can help it, besides you might get a achievement that requires it.

5. Floor layout. You will want a line of elevators right where the first one is, 3 room spots and then a second line of elevators. That will leave you two room spaces at the end. Make sure the first and maybe second floor is filled with rooms that need to be constantly manned, food/water/electricity production rooms, and put your best weapons there, especially the first room, which I make a three room restaurant because agility is used for food. Agility may not help with range weapons at vault though so meh, but rooms with people always in them to receive raiders anyway. Raiders go left to right, top to bottom, like reading English. Empty rooms are ignored.

The type of rooms recommended for the end space that only has room for two are.... Mission control, since that's just automatically two long. Radio rooms, because longer rooms can actually mean less reward if you only play ever so often. And storage rooms, because having 3 long storage instead of 2 is not that great of an improvement. You might consider also putting training rooms in that space, training rooms are best filled with 6 in 3 long, but you can't always afford to have so many dwellers training. Endurance training is especially important but some of the other types, a one or two room length trainer isn't so bad.

Don't put robots in the first floor, it will lose health too fast.

You might consider staggering your rooms so no room is next to another, always ground between them (aside from elevators which don't count with incidents) Empty rooms that have incidents spread the problem to rooms next to them on either side or up and down (again elevators don't count) Even if you got units to receive them this is allot of time wasted with incidents spreading all around and messing with production. But if a empty room has no rooms next to it, the incident just goes away after a short time. For a similar reason try not to have big rooms with few people in them.

Know pregnant women (and children), never fight or die. Try not to have many pregnant women in your first rooms because of raiders.

One problem with staggering spaces between rooms is it makes it harder to find Mysterious stranger who is a raincoated character that appears with a three tone sound and gives you 5-10 seconds to find him and click on him for random amounts of money (max of just below 5k, I read) before he goes away with a different sound. If you got head phones that can give you a clue where to find him.

But if you stagger rooms it becomes mildly harder to look around to find him. If this is your concern, then stagger busy rooms with sometimes empty rooms.

[etassist]

Originally posted by myconv:

Most of this is related to achievements as one of the most important part of the game as lunch boxes, pet carriers and robot box are great to get so you will want to focus on cycling through them.

From nonrigerous personal observation with the blueprints I have received (plus glancing at wiki info) I think fans a pretty important material for a good common weapon and alarm clock is needed for both some of the best common weapons and needed a bunch in some of the best rare weapons too. Globe also comes up a bunch for top rare.

Don't put robots in the first floor, it will lose health too fast.

These are all great tips (the reposted ones either I want to expand on or may have small disagreements about); a few comments of my own:

I think by achievements you meant objectives (?) - yes cycling through them to get your lunchbox, pet, etc ones faster is a fun mini-game. One thing I would stress is don't forget to use your free skips you get every 24 hours to clear out annoying objectives.

Mr. Handys: I consider them to be only moderately exciting because:
- you can only have one per floor (hard limit on number you can use)
- sending them out to collect caps is completely unexciting (if you value caps a lot I would gander you may be over-upgrading rooms. Upgrading a room to level 3 (max) gives you a small increase in the resources rate but also increases the timer, while also hugely increasing the difficulty of any incidents there. A radscorpion in a 3x3 room is an absolute killer even on normal mode - yes some rooms you must go 3x3 like the weapon and outfit crafting room but the rest not really).
- you don't really need them to collect resources but its a welcome luxury.
However, one thing they really shine at is incident control. Mr. Handy sucks at fighting but what he does do is stop monsters and fires when they spread, giving you precious time to reinforce the spread room with dwellers. He is also immune to rad damage from feral ghouls. It is for this reason I disagree with not putting it on the 1st floor, in fact, I say if you only ever got 1 Mr. Handy ever he should be on the 1st floor. In my current survival playthrough, I have only 1 Mr. Handy and he's on the 1st floor. He has been repaired at least 20 times so far, worth every penny.

Junk/weapons/outfits:
normal - best weapon is rusty laser pistol (7 damage) and enhanced sawed-off shotgun (6-8 damage). In early game I try to get all dwellers equipped with these and scrap/sell the rest. Later you can keep them stored for later scrapping to get alarm clocks and desk fans for future rare crafting. best outfit is *wasteland gear* (+3 END, really great) and leather armor (+1 STR and +2 END). Wasteland gear, see a dweller with a lvl icon? equip this and then click the icon for big max HP gain. Leather armor, put them on your power staff and when you misclick a level or have to do it to avoid them dying in a incident, at least they got 2 END out of it and the +1 STR helps your power generation rate, and it looks cool to boot. Later, store your wasteland gears for scrapping down to magnifying glasses for future rare crafting.

rare - best weapon is hands down a plasma rifle (17-18 damage) - needs alarm clocks, microscopes, and globes; scrap down your old rusty laser pistols for alarm clocks. Keep your eyes sharp for early game quests that give globes/microscopes. Scrap rare scoped .44's (useless) for microscopes and rare shotguns (not combat shotguns, those are good) for globes. best outfit is sturdy wasteland gear (+5 END, wow). Train a promising level 1 dweller to 10 END, then out to the wasteland with the sturdy wasteland gear and a plasma rifle... they come back high level with an impressive max HP.

legendary - eh. yeah really good, whatever. I hope I don't get bored again when I reach this. In any case the conventional wisdom is Dragons Maw because it has the best raw damage. However IMO it is a plasma thrower weapon which like flamethrowers suck because they have a horrendously low rate of fire and are single-target with no overflow damage. I would never use these types of weapons on a quest, ok in the vault though. Heavy Wasteland Gear outfit (+7 END) is shangra-la because you can finally make 17 END, max HP level 50 dwellers and stop obsessing about who has maximally efficient HPs.

[test]

Yeah I meant objectives, I couldn't remember what the game called them and was too lazy to load up the game and check(and I thought just perhaps I did remember the right word), and now I'm feeling too lazy to go and change my post, maybe latter.

If you checkerboard your rooms, that's alot of floors to man with robots, even with restrictions of one per floor. And objectives is the only way to get them for free that I know of. Sure latter when you got plenty of caps put your robot there, but not when you don't have enough to go on all the floors you want it anyway and still need more caps instead of spending it on reviving.

Another tip,
Possibly don't make your second elevator reach the very top floor(or put it right next to the first one if that allows more characters through at a time? I doubt it makes a difference though), that will make raiders stick around in that first room much longer and thus really get the most out of having all your best weapons there.

Another tip
There is a way to check how much time left to next stat in a training room. Click on the room so it is highlighted, then zoon in till you see the time counters. Frustratingly in this mode you can't actually properly access the dwellers. But you can pay bottles to rush training if you want. To get out of this mode zoom out and select another room.
tip And while we are on the topic, training progress is remembered if the dweller leaves and comes back latter.

One thing I would stress is don't forget to use your free skips you get every 24 hours to clear out annoying objectives.

On the flip side, if you are cycling through alot of them, you'll find some annoying and some just gruelingly long.(like 5 wasteland quests and only caps as a reward) So don't dismiss them too easily, you might just find one much worse and wishing you still had your free dismiss.

[etassist]

Originally posted by myconv:

Another tip,
Possibly don't make your second elevator reach the very top floor(or put it right next to the first one if that allows more characters through at a time? I doubt it makes a difference though), that will make raiders stick around in that first room much longer and thus really get the most out of having all your best weapons there.
.

The conventional wisdom is to have the only elevator access to 1st floor be the elevator you start with and your 2nd elevator line starts on floor 2 but doesn't connect to floor 1 (like you said I think). My 1st floor goes: vault door -- elevator -- storage (2x1) -- power (3x2), mainly to control deathclaws. So they get softened up by the door guards, softened up some more by the (temporarily assigned dwellers) in storage, 0-2 kills in power, then they return to storage for the remaining kills (all while Mr. Handy stops them in each room so they can't bypass). About the storage room, I used to run either diner or living quarters there but diner makes me feel like I have to keep dwellers permanently assigned there, and living quarters is too annoying because if you want 4 dwellers in there at any given time you need 2 men and 2 women. A lot of the reason I finally chose storage is, I layout my 1st 3 floors for "roleplayey" rather than efficiency reasons; the poor dwellers assigned to the 1st floor need a place to keep their stuff and sort through incoming goods, have a diner, card room, and bar on the 2nd floor for relaxation, etc. lol.

[Loserman]

About happiness, it's possible to get 100% happiness inside living quarters, without making more babies. Once the couple starts dancing, the happiness boost will kick in. Just send the dwellers out of the room right after that, if you don't want more babies in your vault. But well, happiness doesn't seem all that important. Edit: Once your dwellers are capable of successfully rushing rooms, having high room stats and luck, happiness won't be an issue. Been staying around 95% average happiness without trying hard.

[test]

The happiness is for the objectives that require it. Though there is a happiness factor which changes production levels, that should make you want to avoid dwellers with 10% happiness or something.

It can be very hard to pull them out between dancing and sex. Especially if you got them loaded with charisma clothes, and if you don't, then it takes a super long time and you can miss it out of boredom of just waiting for it. Also I have had it where they don't get the happiness from the dancing and need the sex for the happiness.

[Loserman]

Originally posted by myconv:

The happiness is for the objectives that require it.

I don't seem to get those objectives very often (currently ~35h vault). Once in early game definetly, but later on not so much.

Originally posted by myconv:

there is a happiness factor which changes production levels, that should make you want to avoid dwellers with 10% happiness or something.

Unless they died, or running around with loads of Rads, happiness doesn't seem to go down a lot. Putting dwellers in wrong rooms is also rather unlikely to happen, if you've played the tutorial...

Originally posted by myconv:

I have had it where they don't get the happiness from the dancing and need the sex for the happiness.

Yes, i think raising happiness without making babies, only works once per couple. Not sure if that is reset after they've made a baby.