Just when you thought the wasteland couldn’t get any more challenging.
Surviving in Fallout Shelter is anything but easy, but with some careful planning, you can have a vault filled with happy dwellers. It's an overseer's dream to have smooth sailing throughout the nuclear wasteland struggles, but maybe you've grown tired of complacent vault dwellers who've lost their sense of danger.
Survival mode is intense, and it truly captures the essence of the unforgiving wasteland. If you want a challenge in Fallout Shelter, this is for you. We'll break down how Survival mode works and how to enable it so that you can demonstrate your skill at surviving the wasteland's dangers in your vault.
How To Access Survival Mode
If life in the wasteland has been too easy for you, a new challenge is just the way to shake things up. Survival mode is an optional difficulty you can select, and it will test your abilities to be a capable overseer of a new vault.
You can only select Survival mode by creating a new vault. When prompted to select a vault number, check the box above the numbers where it says "Survival Mode."
Only experienced Overseers should attempt Survival mode! Once this difficulty is selected, it cannot be changed later.
What's Different In Survival Mode
Survival mode makes living in a vault more challenging. Right away, you'll notice that each of the dwellers from the wasteland comes equipped with a BB Gun to defend themselves, rather than entering your vault unarmed.
Several features are different when playing in Survival, as the wasteland is a cruel and unforgiving place. You'll find that:
- Resources deplete much faster.
- Objectives have better rewards, but demand more from you.
- Quests are more difficult to complete.
- Incidents deal more damage and happen more often.
- Deathclaws can attack starting at 35 dwellers instead of 60.
- Vault dwellers cannot be revived, no matter where they are.
With this in mind, we have a few tips to help you succeed in Survival mode.
Tips For Surviving
As punishing as Survival mode is, there are ways to build a healthy vault without sacrificing too much. It's about planning for the long future ahead, and making it easier for future generations of vault dwellers.
- Go slow. The fastest way to kill a vault (especially in Survival mode) is to expand too quickly. Build a stable foundation for resources and work your way up one room at a time.
- Train Endurance. Dweller's SPECIAL stats improve how efficient they are at they jobs, but Endurance impacts how much a dweller's maximum health increases each time they level up.
- Breed better dwellers. Stop growing your vault at different intervals, like at 14 and 35 to keep incidents manageable. Regardless, you'll need more dwellers at some point, and breeding vault dwellers improves the odds of better stats.
- Improve your gear. From clothing to weapons, you'll want to find or craft better gear. Sending dwellers into the wasteland can be fatal, but expanding your vault enough for workshops can transform your game.
In Survival mode, it's about quality over quantity. Dwellers who aren't very SPECIAL will become a burden, so it's important to either train them to be better or breed vault dwellers capable of surviving on their own.
