Fallout Shelter

Once again, a mobile game has creeped into my life. It's "Fallout Shelter", and it's a lot like Tiny Tower, which you'll remember consumed me for a hot minute. Only it's way better than Tiny Tower.

You are the Overseer of a Vault. People are coming for shelter and you have to build rooms for power generators, dining, living, and water treatment to keep them happy and not riddled with radiation. You have to staff those rooms with your dwellers, who each have their own personal degrees of aptitude with Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck. Those who are very strong work well generating power. Those who are agile work well in the dining room. Placing people where they'll be the most useful with their skillset will make them happy and your production of that resource quicker.

This is the way in which Tiny Tower and Fallout Shelter are the same. There's a waiting game associated with when resources are ready to be harvested. You can attempt to rush them to finish, but that can be hazardous, leading to fires, radroach infestations, and loss of time. The benefit is gaining resources quicker, getting some moneys in the form of caps, and everybody involved gets an XP boost, so it's worth it sometimes.

Your dwellers gain XP over time, increasing in level. Higher level dwellers are more difficult to kill, which comes in handy when raiders come a knockin. And they will come a knockin. They run through your Vault shooting or stabbing whoever they come across. Your best bet is to throw anybody you have equipped with a gun to stop them.

However, weaponry and armor are kind of hard to come by. I've mostly gained them by earning lunchboxes. However, lunchboxes are a rarity. I've only gotten a few from completing little objectives, like putting out 15 fires in the vault or collecting a certain amount of water, etc. This rarity is obviously intentional because you can buy lunchboxes with real world money. Not gonna do it... You'll get resources sometimes, caps, a gun, a set of armor here and there, and occasionally a new dweller. Lunchbox earned dwellers are usually high level with lots of skills, making them very useful.

I've gotten attached to my little dwellers. The ones I like most are outfitted with the best guns and armor I can find, which sadly isn't much. These slightly better equipped dwellers are good for protecting the homestead and also for sending out into the Wastes to explore. This is quite stressful. You send them off, and you can see their little journal log. As they come upon more and more dangers, I always want to recall them quickly. However, if they don't stay out there and explore, they'll not have time to bring anything of use back to the rest of the Vault. But it's hard to risk the one of three sets of armor you have and one of four guns people are carrying. I need those things for shooting intruders in the face.

I also tend to get attached to any of the babies that were born in my Vault. When you put two capable fornicators in a living quarters together, they'll get a little chummy, and after a while they'll go in the back, and the lady will come out preggers. After a while she'll have the baby, and you can name them. After they dick around the Vault as a little kid for a while, they'll grow up, and you can put them to work as an adult. I've actually kept track, writing down whose kids were whose. I'm trying to keep shit monogamous in my Vault and avoid accidentally Jaime Lannistering anybody. #nosisterfuckin

All the mechanics work rather well, and it's consumed a lot of my time the past couple days. The only thing I really dislike is that there's no way to pause it, and while I'm gone, shit keeps happening. I can't check my phone every 5 minutes to keep this ship sailing, though my brain keeps telling me it really wants to. I resisted checking on my peeps all today, and when I came back all my pregnant ladies had grown ass adult children, all my resources were low, everybody was irradiated, and my 100% happy people were all bummed out, sitting at like 9%.

Dammit Fallout Shelter! I can't quit you, but for the time being, I don't want to.