Fallout Shelter is an amazing mobile game that allows players to manage and take care of their vault dwellers. Alternatively, players who are really into the Fallout meta can do the whole Vault-Tec scenario and play out their own social experiments on the hapless dwellers who end up in your vault. One way or another, this underground, post-nuclear apocalypse, slice of heaven on earth, high tech paradise is all yours to command and manipulate as you see fit. And we are going to give you some of the best tips on how to run it better.

A Quick Look at What is New

FS now features more enemies, a fully developed crafting system that will certainly require lots of resources to grind for, and now, an all new quest system that will have you being able to check out more of the wasteland. I'm not kidding, players are now going to be able to visit destroyed buildings, Super Duper Mart, Red-Rocket stations, and more. You will not be travelling alone either. Players get to cherry-pick among their best and most qualified vault dwellers as followers for these important scavenging missions.

The new missions mean more NPCs and also, more enemy encounters - and there’s an all new combat system that is far more interactive than anything we have ever seen before. This allows players to be more strategic in facing enemies instead of letting the AI make all the decisions. The good news is that you now have a better chance of surviving tougher enemy fights. Another new feature is the addition of Nuka Cola Quantums - but instead of these rare items being collectables, they serve as new premium currency.

My favourite new thing about FS since it originally launched, however, is the PC version of the game. There's even a fiddly way of moving saved game information from iOS or Android to PC. For Android users, it is a simple matter of plugging your mobile device into the PC and literally transferring the saves. But for iOS users, you will need to download a file explorer program. Do note that the last time I checked only iOS 9.0 supports file explorers - later updates of the OS may need different methods to transfer Fallout Shelter saves. In any case, the desktop version of the game still remains free to play just like its mobile versions. It can be played on any 64-bit system.

All New and Tougher Hostiles

Each new update and patch to the game has seen some performance enhancements for monsters. This means that the molerats, radroaches, deathclaws, radscorpions, and all the other post-nuclear monsters have gotten stronger and tougher to kill. The best way to circumvent this is to always provide your explorers with stimpacks, shift your shelter’s rooms to be non-adjacent with one another, always equip the best gear on dwellers, and most important of all, pay attention to health bars during an emergency situation so that you can quickly use stimpacks as needed.

Regardless of which monster appears, never panic but also stay vigilant. You never know how well your dwellers will fare - and there is no telling which room will be attacked. If you have a group of low level dwellers getting mauled, quickly send them elsewhere before they get killed. As long as rooms are separated from one another, then the attack will not spread to other areas. For this, elevators need to be available.

Better Gear Through Crafting

By the time you reach 22 dwellers in the game, new room options will appear: Workshops! One will be for weapons, the other is for Outfits. Both will require 1,200 caps to produce and as always, you will need energy to have the room ready and functional. Now, you can start crafting thanks to the game’s free junk, and this makes for a good tutorial of how to run it successfully.

But if you want to craft rare and legendary items, you will need to start farming for materials. This is where your wasteland explorers come in handy. Aside from random bits of equipment, the explorers will now be able to bring home various junk and other materials that can be used for the workshops. Other items you need for crafting are the recipes. These are most often acquired from the bodies of dead raiders (which is what you get when you successfully stop a raider attack).

My best tip is to save up your materials for truly powerful weapons. Wasteland explorers do a pretty great job of bringing back low to mid-tier weapons and clothes/armor, so do not waste your resources crafting those too much. Instead, save up those super rare pieces of junk that you get for items that are truly worth it.

Quests: A Brighter Future, Underground, and Above!

As we mentioned, the new update now brings quests to the game - and in the world of Fallout that means visiting NPCs, defeating baddies, and more. You get to do all of these outside of the Shelter - something that was not possible in the game’s previous versions.

This all starts with the addition of a new room, the Overseer’s Office. From here, you can check out the various quests available (or you can check the Pip-Boy Map). Quests are undertaken by teams of three dwellers. Be sure to mind the minimum stat requirements for the quest, equip your team with great gear, give them an ample supply of stimpacks and rad-aways, and then finally send them off. Also remember that it takes a little bit of time before your team can get to locations.

Once you reach the quest area, the map will be blacked out - it opens up as you command the team to explore. Each new room will have an encounter. This is where the new combat system becomes important. You can now assign specific targets to each dweller. We found that having the whole team concentrate fire on a single target is one of the most effective ways of clearing rooms faster with less injuries. Like any combat encounter in the vault, stimpacks and radaways need to be administered manually. Once you finish an encounter, you have to manually check the room for items before moving on to the next part of the map. Eventually, you will clear the quest and get rewards - which often include some Nuka Colas or even a new dweller joining your vault.

A More Interesting Ticker Box

Before, one of the most exciting things about Fallout Shelter was reading your ticker box and seeing what sorts of danger your assigned wasteland explorers have been encountering. It was a nice dose of text-based adventure fare, but it still left players wanting. Now, there’s an all new system in place: random explorer events. You will now be informed if your explorers have encountered a new structure or other thing and you can decide if it's worth risking exploring or not. A good rule of thumb is to simply refuse if your explorer only has a little bit of life left and there are no more stimpacks. On the other hand, if you are feeling particularly confident, you can choose to accept the side quest.

This will start an exploration mode similar to the team based combat of the regular quests. However, since you have only a single dweller engaged in combat, the battles here can be a whole lot tougher.

Using Critical Hits

In Fallout Shelter, you can score critical hits on your opponents - these are basically attacks that manage to hit so hard they do more damage than other attacks. While other games usually present critical hits as a chance attack, in this game, they are eventualities that you can store for a later time. Each time a dweller makes an attack, their critical hit ‘gauge’ rises - once full, you can decide when to unleash a critical hit (there is no visible gauge though, just keep hitting the same target over and over). When the critical hit attack is used, the targeting reticule changes; wait for the reticule’s center to form a solid x mark so that the critical hit damages for 5 times the normal attack damage of your dweller (if you miss the timing, the critical hit will damage for 2x, 2.5x, and 3x depending on how close you are to the 5x mark).

The Cold and Refreshing Premium

Nuka Cola Quantums are now premium cola. This new resource allows players to skip out on waiting for quest travels, barbershop makeovers, and more. Unlike caps, it is a premium currency that is not easily earned. Instead players will have to plop down a bit of real world cash to earn some. The good news is, it is also possible to earn Quantums from completing quests. Each bottle of this glowing irradiated soda allows players to skip two hours worth of wait time, so do be aware that a single bottle may not be enough to help you skip a much longer wait time.