Fallout Shelter: How to Keep Dwellers Happy
By Nick Tylwalk
As an Overseer, you do all you can to make life inside a Vault pleasant for your Dwellers. You find interesting work for them, provide them with power, food and water, and even give them opportunities to
risk their lives
explore the great outdoors. Other than turning back the clock and preventing the apocalypse, what else can you possibly do?
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Actually, there are a few things you can do to ensure the Happiness level of your Dwellers stays high. And that’s important, because not only do the Dwellers just look cuter with smiles on their faces instead of frowns, keeping the average Happiness score of your Vault (which you can see in the upper-left corner of the main screen) high gives you production bonuses for all resources.
Yes, happy workers are more productive, even after most of the Earth has become a radioactive wasteland. Go figure.
In any case, here’s some advice on what to do to keep your Dwellers happy and that Happiness score high.
Take care of incident as quickly as possible. Shockingly, Dwellers don’t really enjoy being roughed up by raiders or snacked on by Radroaches. Fires, too, can be a bummer. Often this is just a case of strength in numbers. Six Dwellers working together, for instance, can almost always handle a fire pretty quickly. Other times, you might need to take action, like if Radroaches attack a room where no one is armed. Drag in some weapon-toting Dwellers and don’t let those problems fester.
Get rid of corpses. Sometimes you’ll have Dwellers die. It happens. That doesn’t mean you have to let the dead bodies lie around. You’ve got two choices; either pay some Caps to restore the dead Dweller to life or chalk them up as an acceptable loss and clear them out. Corpses are bad for morale. I think this pic, courtesy of
EIC Jim Squires, says it all:
Rushes can help, but they’re also risky. You’ve no doubt noticed the risk/reward dynamic inherent in rushing production already, but it also extends to Happiness. Successful rushes make the Dwellers happy, I guess because they came through under pressure. Failed rushes bum them out. Consider that carefully.
It’s never a bad idea to schedule some, ahem, adult time. There’s not a whole lot to do for recreation in the Vault, especially before you have the Weight Room, Game Room and Lounge unlocked. If you have one male and one female Dweller who are stubbornly refusing to be happier, drag them both to the same Living Quarters, put on some Barry White music and let nature take its course. Even low Charisma couples will eventually give in to their baser desires, though it might take longer. But getting some guarantees increased Happiness, unlike in real life. Of course, coupling also leads to pregnant Dwellers, which leads us to …