Fallout Shelteris a construction and management simulation game set in the Fallout universe. In a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by nuclear war, your task is to build and manage a massive underground Vault as an Overseer. The Vault is a self-contained shelter that houses the last of humanity’s survivors.

To make sure your Dwellers stay happy and healthy, you need to gather essential resources, like power, water, and food. However, resources drain over time, and keeping a steady supply can be a constant challenge. This guide will equip you with the right strategies to keep your resources flowing and your Vault flourishing.

The diner room menu in Fallout Shelter displaying current and upgraded production and storage levels, with an option to upgrade.

What Are Resources?

Resources are the lifeblood of your vaultin Fallout Shelter and directly impact the well-being of your Dwellers. The three main resources you need to manage arepower, water, and food.

Without a steady flow of essentials, you will have to face certain consequences.

The menu of the Power Plant room in Fallout Shelter displaying a fully upgraded room, along with its production and storage capacities.

For instance, alack of power will leave rooms non-functional. This halts resource production, water purification, and food generation.

Consequently, without enough purified water and food, Dwellers will suffer from radiation poisoning and their health will deteriorate respectively. If food stores run dry, Dwellers will eventually die of starvation.

Dwellers working in the Power Plant in Fallout Shelter.-1

To avoid these disasters, you need tokeep the big three resources in ample supply. Here are some ways to boost your resources in Fallout Shelter.

While it’s easy enough to balance your production, if you want to keep your resources high, you’ll have to be on your A-game and ensure everything is running as efficiently as possible, this comes down to a few main ideas:

Dwellers standing outside of the Vault waiting to return in Fallout Shelter.

We’re going to cover the best way to do this right here.

Make Your Resource Rooms As Efficient As Possible

Upgrade Rooms

There are a few important things to note about making your rooms as efficient as possible:

Size/Merging Rooms

Bigger rooms are more efficientso you want to ensure each Production room is as large as it can be bybuilding three of the same room next to one anotherthat will merge into one large room. Moreover, upgrading the merged rooms costs less than the cumulative upgrade cost of the same number of unmerged rooms.

If your rooms are at different upgrade levels, they won’t merge until they are all at the same upgrade level.

The Water Treatment room in Fallout Shelter, showing one dweller and an option to RUSH.

Upgrade Your Rooms

Upgrading rooms is a key part of keeping your vaultrunning smoothly and as efficiently as possible. It costs Caps to upgrade each room, but it’s a worthwhile investment.

Higher-level rooms producemore resources per cyclebutfeature tougher incidents, like fires and Radroach infestations.

The Dweller’s menu displaying its level and other stats in Fallout Shelter, with an option to explore

Advanced Production Rooms

As you progress and expand your vault, collecting more followers,you will unlock better Production roomsthat can produce a larger number of resources. Here are the rooms and when they unlock:

60 Dwellers in Vault

The lunchbox tab in Fallout Shelter, showing one lunchbox ready to be opened.

70 Dwellers in Vault

80 Dwellers in Vault

Water + Food

100 Dwellers in Vault

While the Advanced Rooms areexpensive, but they are more efficientso you will eventually want to switch over to these, or at the very least use a mixture of basic rooms and advanced rooms, to ensure you are keeping your resources as high as possible.

Assign The Most Efficient Dwellers

You want toassign Dwellerswith the highest relevant stat for each specific roomto ensure it’s as efficient as possible. For example, you’ll want Dwellers with high Strength stats working in your Power Generators. Here are the stats you need for each room:

Water Treatment

Perception

You canimprove some dweller stats in training roomsand equip them with armor that improves specific stats to make them even better.

Actively Play To Manually Top Up Resources

Your vault is always going to tick over by itself and for the most part, be absolutely fine. If you want to ensure you’re keeping all of your resources high,it will involve you being a little more hands-on.

For example, resources must be collected before the room produces more, so if you are actively playing and collecting the resources, you’ll have more and more stored up!

There are some other things you can do to store up as many resources as possible, so let’s go over what else you can be doing while actively playing.

Use The RUSH Command

You can RUSH a room toget its resources immediatelyinstead of waiting for the normal production cycle. Depending on the probability given in the game, a room can instantly yield resources, experience, and a number of Caps equal to the percentage of the chance taken.

It’s arisky gamble, but it’s effective at ensuring your resources stay high. Worst case scenario, you trigger an incident, so just make sure your room occupants are healthy and prepared to deal with an attack just in case.

Thechance of triggering an incident RUSH increases with each RUSH attempt, regardless of whether the RUSH was successful, so it’s best to use it while percentages are lower for all your production rooms. Thenwait 30-60 minutes for the percentage to decrease againand then repeat your RUSH practice on rooms again, rinse and repeat again.

You can get a guaranteed successful RUSH by watching ads on the mobile version of Fallout Shelter, so using RUSH for the lower risk percentages and then switching to the guaranteed successful RUSH when the chance of an incident is higher.

Send Explorers Out Into The Wasteland And On Quests

Sending Dwellers out to explore the Wastelandis arisky but rewarding venture. It allows you to gather resources and find new equipment, likeweapons and armor. You’ll want the better armor to ensure your Dwellers are at their best when working, butyou can earn resources while exploringtoo!

Dwellers can’t survive forever out in the Wasteland, which is why it’s important to do this while you’re actively playing so you cankeep an eye on their progress.

As Dwellers die if left out overnight, you can send them to the Wasteland first thing in the morning and call them back before going to sleep at night.

You can equip any Dwellers you send out withOutfits that boost SPECIAL statsto help them survive the Wasteland. The most important stat for survival in the Wasteland isEndurance.

It’s a good idea to load Dwellers up with RadAways and Stimpaks to help them stay alive in the Wasteland as long as possible.

you may alsosend your Dwellers on quests from the Overseer’s office. It’s not often you’ll get resources from Quests, but you will get better gear to make your Dwellers and Vault better overall, and might be rewarded with a Lunchbox!

Open Lunchboxes

While it’s not a long-term solution, opening Lunchboxes is aquick way to gather power, water, food, and other resources.You can earn Lunchboxesbycompleting difficult objectives or by purchasing themfrom the Shop tab.

Lunchboxes are not a reliable way to farm resources but provide a quick boost when you’re in a pinch.