Fallout Shelter Tips for Success: Part Two — The Art of Breeding

To ensure the survival of the human race, you must force your dwellers to breed. And you, as the Overseer of your Vault, must be very smart about who mates with who. Forget about love, forget about age differences. Selective breeding is in full effect. All ethical issues are out the window. Survival of your vault, and the survival of the human species, is the only objective in the new mobile F2P, Fallout Shelter.

Yes, children are the future…but only if they’re useful and productive.

This is Part Two of the Tips. For Part One, click on this link.  For Part Three, go here.

Since outsiders come very rarely after the initial phase of the game, breeding is the only way to add to your Vault’s population. And the breeding game is surprisingly complex in Fallout Shelter. I had to learn by trial and error.

First of all, here’s how you make a baby: put a man and a woman in the Living Quarters. Eventually, they will start talking and then they will get friendly, and then more friendly, and they’ll kiss a little, and then hug a little, dance a little, and eventually, after several minutes, they will disappear to boogie-woogie. In a few short seconds, the dude will come running out, and the lady will slowly follow already in her third trimester.

Use strong characters to breed. A professor and doctor will make one bright kid.

After a few more minutes, and if there’s extra room in your Vault, the baby will be born.

New baby, but sadly, this one will never know her father because I had to kill him off since he was useless.

Easy-peasy? Not as it seems. The folks at Bethesda definitely invested time in developing the breeding game. Here are a couple tips to help you become a Master Breeder.

1) Don’t breed useless dwellers

Since the more valuable dwellers were busy working, I had the useless ones making babies. By valuable, I mean dwellers with high S, P, or A skills, and the useless ones have C, I, E or L specialties or no specialties at all. (For detailed explanation of skills, check out Part One.) I kept these dwellers in the living quarters mainly because I couldn’t employ them elsewhere. They bred like rabbits. One baby after another.

The problem is that the babies take after their parents. And so parents with high Charisma had children with high Charisma. In other words, useless folks making useless babies. I had an entire generation of dwellers that couldn’t be used for anything other than making babies (and maybe the radio room). Sadly, to make room for other more valuable dwellers, I had to kill some of these guys off (by having them fight RadRoaches and Raiders without weapons, or sending them off to explore the wastelands without gear).

2) Use different couples to breed

Another mistake was having two couples do all the breeding. I had the same pair of parents in the Living Quarters making baby after baby. When these babies grew up, they didn’t breed with each other. No in-breeding in the Vault, apparently. Basically, I had an entire generation of brothers and sisters who refused to sleep with each other. That’s one way to extinct a species.

3) Use studs to breed

If you have dwellers with high useful skills (again S, P, or A), then breed them together. If you get special dwellers from the lunch box, even better. I got super-stud Harkness from a lunch box. He’s my Number One Explorer. He can be out in the Wasteland for hours at a time and brings back awesome goodies each time. When he returns to the Vault, his only job is to make love. I give him a quiet room and a lady with high skills, some Barry Manilow perhaps, and he makes super-stud kids like the Harkness himself. And then he’s off again on his adventure. It’s good to be the Harkness!

It’s good to be The Harkness!

Do the same with other high-skilled dwellers. Use them as breeders. You’ll need to take them out of their normal routine for a while, have them mate before sending them back to work. Eventually, you’ll create a new generation of good-looking useful kids.

This is Harkness’s first born. He’s strong as an Ox and cocky as Kanye West.

Oh, and breeding always increases the happiness of your dwellers. So if someone is down, let them do a little loving. Happy times in the Vault!