How to put dwellers to the right room

After choosing your very own Vault number you’re thrown right into the management with a handful of new vault dwellers.


The key aspects that you need to manage are food, power, and water purification. If you run out of food and water, people start dying, and if you run out of power, you can’t produce those resources. The rooms will just go dark. The S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stat system of Falloutfame makes a return here. That’s Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck, for those not in the know. Each dweller has these stats and each stat is used to increase the efficiency of certain rooms.

• Strength: Power Generator, Nuclear Generator.
• Perception: Water Treatment, Water Purification.
• Endurance: Storage Room, Nuka-Cola Bottler. Staffing the storage rooms doesn't seem to have any effect on the vault, but may effect staffed dwellers happiness.
• Charisma: Living Quarters, Radio Studio. Very important for baby making and drawing new vault dwellers from the outside world.
• Intelligence: Medbay, Science Lab. Used to make Stimpaks and RadAways. Extremely important.
• Agility: Diner, Garden.
• Luck: Dwellers with high Luck are more successful at rushing rooms and potentially getting Caps bonuses whenever collecting resources.

Learning SPECIAL and keeping track of where each dweller should be can be a bit complicated at first, but it’s a pretty easy system to learn. As you drag a dweller from room to room, you’ll see what letter that room utilizes AND what stat number that dweller will contribute. Likewise, whenever looking at a dweller’s stats, even without blowing it up to see the exact numbers, you can tell which stat is which by quickly spelling and counting it out in your head. The tab in the top left lets you easily sort dwellers by status, SPECIAL, name, level, job, and happiness, only from largest to smallest. This makes it easy to find the right people for any job. If you see someone on a 'Coffee Break' that means they're wandering aimlessly, and should be assigned somewhere or sent into the wastes.

Each room can be upgraded twice to increase efficiency. You can also build larger rooms, up to 3 cells long, by merging the same room-types together. The rooms have to be of the same level to merge, however, if you’re wondering why they aren’t. A single cell room can be staffed by 2 people at a time, and naturally it’s 4 for 2 cells, and 6 for 3 cells. The cost of a new room increases based on how many you have, but the upgrade costs remain constant. The main balancing act of the game is re-allocating people as things change. The game makes this easy for you. As you drag someone over a room, if it’s already full, a plus or minus will show up next to the stat number, showing whether it’s a positive or negative gain, automatically replacing the lowest stat person.