Fallout Shelter is a free-to-play simulation game that lets you manage your own vault in the Fallout universe. Initially released in 2015, the game has since been updated with new features and rolled out to more platforms.

Whether you're just starting out or have already played the game and want to improve your strategy, here are some Fallout Shelter tips and tricks to help you succeed.

Fallout Shelter Tips for Beginners

The following are some basic Fallout Shelter tips for those just starting out playing the game.

1. Plan Your Layout Ahead of Time

Most rooms in Fallout Shelter can be expanded and merged, while elevators provide your dwellers with access to different floors. However, traveling between rooms can become slow if you create a maze of disjointed areas.

It's best to know what layout you want to use as soon as you start building. Each row in your vault has space for two elevators, two three-block rooms, and one two-block room.

You should make sure all your elevators form a straight line downwards—like a traditional elevator shaft. This makes sure your dwellers can get around easily. The exact layout is up to you, but most people opt to either have their elevator shafts down the sides of their vault or elevator shafts on either side of a three-block room in the middle.

To keep everything aligned, leave room for future expansions and build downwards instead of sideways if you need to add a new type of room.

2. Don't Expand Your Vault Too Quickly

Each new room in your vault consumes extra electricity, so you don't want to needlessly add rooms that you're unable to use just because you've unlocked them.

Rather focus on expanding when you have enough electricity capacity. You should also make sure that you have enough dwellers to utilize these extra rooms, otherwise they're a waste.

3. Use Spare Weapons to Equip All of Your Dwellers

You may be tempted to scrap and sell weapons that your explorers aren't using, but you'll find better use out of them by equipping your vault dwellers. These weapons can help prepare your dwellers for vault incidents and attacks.

Only salvage or sell low-damage weapons when you've equipped all of your dwellers. You should also make sure to keep some backup higher-damage weapons handy to equip any new dwellers.

4. Use the Dweller List to Manage Dwellers Easily

As your vault grows, it becomes more difficult to track your dwellers. However, your dweller list, which appears as a cog in the top-left of your screen, includes an overview of all your vault's inhabitants.

This makes it easy to check the level, health, and skills of your dwellers. You can select a tab to sort dwellers according to their stats, their happiness, their job, or their level.

5. Use Outfits to Optimize Dweller Productivity

In your vault's early stages, most of your dwellers won't have impressive skill sets. And since you don't control the stats of dwellers who show up to your vault and training rooms only open up after 30 or more dwellers, outfits are a great way to boost their skills.

If you have dwellers with lower-than-average stats, use an outfit to boost the relevant skill for their assigned room. When you unlock training and can boost the stats of your dwellers, outfits can still provide a few extra points to help with productivity.

6. Keep an Eye Out for the Mysterious Stranger

Every now and then, you'll hear an ominous three-note sound effect in the game. After a few seconds, another sound plays. If you are playing the game on mobile, the sound is accompanied by your phone vibrating.

This prompt, which occurs every few minutes, signals the appearance and disappearance of the Mysterious Stranger. The character appears randomly in your vault while you're in the game and disappears a few seconds later. You can recognize him by his trenchcoat and hat.

If you find the Mysterious Stranger before he vanishes, click on him for extra caps. Sometimes this only awards you around 60 caps, but other times you can get thousands of caps.

If you have HD Zoom Out turned off in your settings, you will also be able to zoom out to bring the Mysterious Stranger to the foreground and make him easier to spot.

7. The Most Important Stats for Quests

If you're sending out dwellers on quests, the most important SPECIAL stats are Strength, Perception, Endurance, and Agility. So choose dwellers with high stats in these areas or train up quest dwellers in these stats.

Strength determines damage, Perception determines critical hit cursor speed (and therefore accuracy), Endurance determines health, and Agility determines attack rates. Perception also allows dwellers to find more quest locations in the wasteland, find more items, and find better quality items.

If you want to gather more caps, train Luck.

8. Don't Exceed 60 Dwellers Until You're Ready for Deathclaws

The incidents that affect your vault become more challenging as you gain more dwellers. After you gain 60 dwellers, Deathclaw raids begin appearing in the game.

Since Deathclaws are the most challenging enemy, make sure that your vault is ready for them before you exceed 60 dwellers. This way, you won't be unprepared as they break into your vault.

9. You Can Assign Dwellers to Your Vault Door

Speaking of vault security, you can assign two dwellers to guard your vault door. While this may seem like a waste of potential dweller productivity, it prevents raids and attacks from interrupting your production rooms.

If the two dwellers you assign are max level with max stats and high-damage weapons, most incidents won't make it past your vault door. This includes raider, alien, and feral ghoul attacks. Meanwhile, Deathclaws are significantly damaged before they enter your vault, preventing them from disrupting your production rooms too much.

10. Level Up Quickly by Exploring the Wasteland

If you want to quickly level up a dweller, just send them out to explore the wasteland with some stimpaks and radiations packs. This is the fastest way to gain levels besides questing, but requires little input from you.

Fallout Shelter Tips for More Experienced Players

If you know the basics but want to add an extra layer of strategy to your gameplay in the long-term, here are some Fallout Shelter strategy tips you should keep in mind.

11. The Best Ways to Earn Caps

Caps are the currency of the Fallout game universe, including Fallout Shelter. Naturally, players want to know the best ways to earn caps in the game.

According to Fallout Shelter's own in-game hints, the fastest way to earn caps is by rushing rooms. However, rushing rooms comes with the risk of incidents. Furthermore, if you only have a few rooms, you won't get a significant number of caps through rushing.

Other great ways to get caps in Fallout Shelter include:

• Completing daily objectives.
• Completing quests and missions from the Overseer's Office.
• Exploring the wasteland and completing any popup quests.
• Finding the Mysterious Stranger whenever he appears.
• Watching in-game ads.

Focusing on earning caps this way can help you avoid micro-transactions. Which can make Fallout Shelter one of the best free mobile games to play.

12. Train Endurance First

Unlike other SPECIAL stats, Endurance determines the health points that your dwellers gain as they level up. This means that a low-level dweller with more Endurance will get additional hit points when they level up versus a dweller that levels up with low Endurance.

This means you should train Endurance early on with your dwellers. A dweller with 10 Endurance at Level 1 will end up with more health points as they level up than a dweller that only trained up Endurance from Level 40.

13. Complete Quests That Award Legendary Dwellers

Most legendary dwellers in Fallout Shelter are collected from lunchboxes. But there are four legendary dwellers that you can receive from quests.

The quests lines with legendary dwellers include:

• Horseman of the Post-Apocalypse Part 3 (awards Three Dog)
• Climbing the Ranks (awards Sarah Lyons)
• A Settler Needs Your Help (awards Preston Garvey)
• Searching in the Dark (awards Ed the Ghoul)

14. Try Breeding Legendary Dwellers With Max Stats

Breeding legendary dwellers with the maximum number of skill points increases the chance of producing a rare or legendary dweller child. This isn't feasible at the beginning of the game when you will rarely find or have legendary dwellers. However, in later stages of the game, this is possible.

Producing legendary and rare children will reduce the amount of training you need to do, since they will have higher stats than the average new dweller.

15. Outfits Increase Stats Past 10 Points

While stats appear to max out at 10 points, production rooms and encounters actually count the additional points granted by outfits.

So feel free to equip dwellers with maxed out Strength with a soldier's uniform as well. You can see the additional points when you select your dweller and then tap on their SPECIAL stats.

16. Dwellers Train Faster Together

If you have the choice between an empty training room and a training room with other dwellers, send the dweller you want to train to the room with others in it. This is because training together speeds up overall training time, according to the in-game tips.

Bonus: Fallout Shelter Cheats

Over the years, players have identified a couple of easy cheats to help you succeed at the game.

Re-Enter the Vault and Rooms for Objectives

Certain daily objectives related to your dwellers can be completed simply by letting your dwellers in and out of your vault. This includes objectives that count a certain type of dweller—such as "Have five bald dwellers in your vault."

You can send the same dweller to the wasteland and then return them immediately to your vault. When they re-enter, the objective counts them as an additional dweller with the required trait.

Exploit Time to Aid Progress

A popular Fallout Shelter cheat is the time exploit. Players change the time settings on their device when their game is open, which fast-forwards progress on certain timed quests and other time-dependent rewards.

However, this exploit has been known to cause the game to freeze and isn't a foolproof way to trick the game. In other words, use it at your own risk.

More Free Games to Play After Fallout Shelter

By using this Fallout Shelter tips, tricks, and cheats, you should succeed at the game in no time. And once you've mastered Fallout Shelter you're probably start looking for other free games to play.