Fires in survival mode

[Clionerd]

Vault fires are kicking my butt in survival mode, even without rushing failures. At one point I went from 18 people to 4 and had to just run away from the fires until they burned out.

What I've noticed -- do I have this right?
1. If not fought, fires burn upward or sideways from room to room, but never downward. The rooms below a room on fire don't catch fire.
2. The front door room never catches fire.
3. The more updated the room, the worse the fire is.
4. The larger the room, the harder to put out the fire.
5. Rooms never re-ignite once the fire has passed through.

Anything I'm missing? Any tips?

[Dschinghis Pan]

If rooms never re-ignite... it would be possible to ignore a fire to death, by just leading it spread and evacuating dwellers into rooms that no longer are on fire.

[Clionerd]

That does work, but it's a desperate move. Production comes to a halt, and in really crowded vaults it's hard to escape the flames. If you're already in the red on food or water, it just postpones disaster a little bit.

What I just discovered works well is using only small, basic rooms at first. No upgrades and no mergers means a lot less danger. I was too impatient and too greedy.

[JPMcMillen]

Upgrading rooms makes any in-vault emergency stronger (fires, RadRoaches, Mole Rats, RadScorpions). If you have the manpower it's usually better & safer to build another needed production room than upgrade one than you have.

[Clionerd]

Just realized 10 minutes ago the drawback to having only small rooms: harder to stop the raiders when only 2 dwellers at a time can shoot at them. A raider made it all the way to my bottom room, jumped for joy, and then went back through the vault out the front door. Not the end of the world, but no production at all until the raider left the screen.

[nozwizard]

1 - fire goes next room in every direction. ( lleft right below up)
6 - if there are 2 or 3 room above or below of burning room, fire goes to the left one.

fire is the most damaging event in survival vault. the populated floors must use handyman (max end trained 6 people doesnt die to the fire even they populate 3 wide 3 level room with handyman)

tips: arrange vault layout according to the incidents (when developing stage use tight rooms at top floors -whose are populated rooms- and the rest unpopulated rooms in checkerboard style.incidents doesnt pass to the next room in that way.). at late stage of vault (when you use all the available space) use some populated rooms between blocks but do not level them up (if you dont wanna attended them). those rooms are used for stopping incidents room. ie. one floor populated after 5 unpopulated floors. incidents doesnt pass that populated rooms. with this layout you can use +completition pet remporarily to pick missions applicable if related incidednt exists.

[Clionerd]

You're right, fires do burn in all directions. I don't know why I thought they didn't. Unlike mole rats or radscorpions, they only go to adjacent rooms, though. They don't skip around.

[MŀØĐẎ KΩ]

no no

[Clionerd]

Originally posted by Dschinghis Pan:

If rooms never re-ignite... it would be possible to ignore a fire to death, by just leading it spread and evacuating dwellers into rooms that no longer are on fire.

I've done that before, when low on stimpaks. It works (mostly). The word I like for that is "harrowing". For some reason, some rooms stay blackened for a long time afterwards.