It’s no secret that Fallout Shelter has become the newest addiction of choice for iOS users, myself being one of them. Since the moment it was announced at the close of Bethesda’s E3 showcase, the little resource management game has not only become my new favorite bathroom companion but is also the first game I have ever been able to convince my best friend to try, a feat that is seriously impossible to downplay.
Sadly, my first shelter, Vault 666, succumbed to tragedy recently after some idiot decided a good way to inflate the population would be to get all the lady dwellers knocked up. As many of you are already aware, those dwellers who are expecting will run around screaming and busy themselves by being useless in the event of an incident, which is exactly what happened. Invaders took over my vault slaughtering the menfolk entirely and I was too broke from expanding the radio station to revive my little tribe. A smaller, but no less ridiculous, misstep became evident in the wake of their murders when the ladies all started giving birth.
Once these little miscreants were old enough to breed I immediately tossed them into living quarters to get acquainted and hopefully produce some diner workers. This is when I discovered they all had the same father and, as such, would not reproduce. So, good job on Bethesda for making sure accidental incest wasn’t making an even worse situation out of these already irradiated dwellers.
To my credit, I didn’t panic. Instead, I caved to what we all resist with free-to-play games, the purchase of in-game add-ons to help me along, this time in the form of lunch boxes that would hopefully have enough funds in them to allow me to revive the fallen heroes of Vault 666. However, this was not meant to be, as for reasons I still don’t understand, the purchase option is flawed in my account and does not complete the connection to the server and refuses my purchase. Rational being that I am, this lead to some cussing and me demanding a phone screen take my money. This is an emergency. People are dead. Sell me a damned lunch box.
It eventually became obvious that this wasn’t going to work and in my quest to figure out if other people had run into the same problem purchasing lunch boxes for their own shelters, I came across some rumors that sounded too good to be true, a way in which to get unlimited lunch boxes. Well, my friends, it is true. And if you can stomach feeling like an asshole playing this way, it totally works.
The method is simple, though it will only work for early or new shelters. If you want to start over and try this, don’t worry about the investment you made in your previous shelters as you’ll catch up incredibly fast. It goes as follows: When you begin your shelter you are given a set of objectives that you can cash in for different prizes, usually an extra lunch box or some caps to help you along your way. Two of those early objectives are “Equip 1 Dweller with an Outfit” and “Sell 1 Weapon or Outfit.” Once these two appear in your mission log, leave them there and never claim their prizes. Instead, just do the additional third objective.
This will push you into a loop of three or so of the same objectives that you can just keep doing over and over again as long as you leave the previous two alone. In my case it turned out to be collecting 50 water, 50 food and leveling a Dweller. Easy peasy and it gives me two lunch boxes per cycle. You’ll expand incredibly fast this way as not only are you equipping your Vault’s occupants with what they’ll need to have high production and weapons to defend themselves, but boxes often contain stronger Dwellers which you can add to the mix. I’m sure different loops will be harder than the one I ended up with, but if you find you don’t like the objectives loop you end up with, it happens so early in the game you can always start over.
Like I said, you might feel a bit like a jerk playing this way, but I choose instead to think of this as honoring the dead of Vault 666 and my people’s stalwart conviction that never again shall the menfolk be slaughtered by radroaches and Furiosa. Also, never again shall I use the same dude to knock up the whole shelter, no matter how high his charisma.
