Overview
How to make survival mode a bit easier for your vault dwellers.
Introduction
My first attempt at survival mode failed miserably. There were so many disasters right from the start that my dwellers didn’t have time to recover. After a couple of attempts I tried to design a vault room layout that minimized the impact of disasters and made it very easy to avoid them.
Vault layout
The layout of your vault can actually make it easier to deal with disasters.
When starting a new vault delete all the elevators. Then begin to build your vault so that no rooms are adjacent to eachother. That way roaches, rats, and fires won’t spread throughout the vault. Now dwellers in a disaster can be quickly moved to another room if needed.
First build a double room next to the vault entrance. Next an elevator going down one level and a single room on the bottom to the right. To the right of this single room another elevator, which will serve as the vault’s main elevator shaft. Adding rooms in a staggered layout along the shaft will provide disaster isolation to the whole vault until the dwellers are strong enough to handle everything without having to flee.
Example starting layout of living quarters and the first three production rooms.
At first you might not have enough caps to get this far at once. I was lucky to find lots of caps in the first lunchbox so I could just keep building according to specs. You may have to build a couple of temporary production rooms next to eachother before acquiring sufficient caps to begin building isolated rooms. But dwellers should be able to handle the disasters until you get this far.
The vault is wide enough to fit two elevators shafts and four double rooms per level. So just keep going down until you hit rock bottom and then build four storage and/or living quarters across the bedrock to the left. Then start building the second main elevator shaft upwards in the same manner. Since these storage and living quarters don’t need to have any dwellers, any disasters will just die out without any dweller intervention.
There is one disaster that this layout can not contain and that is the rad scorpion. It will jump around rooms randomly so keep an extra eye out on rooms having low level dwellers. Weak dwellers will die very fast when trying to fight the rad scorpion.
Getting stronger
Now that dwellers won’t have much trouble from disasters it’s time to work towards making the vault strong enough to handle all those pesky assaults. As the dweller count increases, the vault will come under attack from increasingly tougher enemies.
At 35 dwellers the endurance training room will become available. This room is vital to get those tough dwellers capable of defending the vault without getting killed. So go ahead and start making babies. Don’t go above 35 too soon though or deathclaws will decimate the vault if dwellers can’t be shuffled around quick enough.
But it’s not too big of a deal if they all should die. The dwellers so far are weak anyway. The trick to get strong dwellers is to first train their endurance to max (lvl 10), then equip them with endurance gear, and finally start leveling them up. Endurance points DO NOT retroactively give dwellers more health.
Example:
- Dweller A has 1 endurance.
- Dweller B has 10 endurance and +7 E gear (total of 17 endurance).
- Send them both off to level up to 50 in the wasteland.
- Each level up will add 1 endurance worth of health to A.
- Each level up will add 17 endurance worth of health to B.
- Assign them to protect the vault door.
- Dweller A will get ripped to shreds in seconds.
- Dweller B should have plenty of health left.
So all the dwellers up until the endurance training room unlock are weak. Replace them with new dwellers that have trained to endurance 10 at lvl 1 and then leveled up with good endurance gear. Assign these new to the first three or four rooms and the vault will be raid proof.
From now on the only thing to keep an eye out for is that pesky rad scorpion. But only until all 200 dwellers have leveled up with 17 endurance.
Other miscellaneous tips
- Don’t level up rooms until dwellers have become tough. Disasters grow stronger in leveled rooms. Leveled up training rooms will probably kill off lots of low level dwellers in training.
- Dwellers can be unassigned from rooms by sending them to the wasteland and recalling them at once. They will wander around your vault and be unaffected by disasters and raids.
- Pregnant dwellers are also “immune” from raids and disasters.