Fallout Shelter is a free-to-play mobile game that recently made its debut on Playstation 4 and Nintendo’s Switch console on June 10th 2018. As a fearsome Overseer, it is your responsibility to ensure your own Vault flourishes in the post-apocalyptic Wasteland. Easier said than done. This guide aims to assist you with a few Top Tips that can make or break your Platinum Trophy experience. Having finally achieved 100% recently, I’m using my own experiences in order to give you a glimmer of hope that you won’t confuse with an irradiated Radroach! I would like to point out, this guide has been designed for PS4 and has not been tried and tested by myself on the Switch. Fortunately, the vast majority of trophies are a breeze if you put in the time!
Time Exploit – The time exploit is a wonderful short-cut to make sure you aren’t spending your whole life stuck in a haze of Vault Dwellers and Deathclaws. Simply go to your PS4 Settings, select Date and Time, select Manually and then change the time to any point in the future. Try to avoid going backward in time as this can lead to your game crashing. This nifty workaround tricks your game into thinking a day, week or month has passed. Don’t worry though! Your PS4 is a clever soul and will reset the date and time back to normal when you turn your console off and then on. It will not affect the times shown on your trophy list whenever you get any trophy. My main recommendation is to remember what date you had fast forwarded to before you shut down your game. When you load it back up, after a much needed rest, make sure to fast forward to that same date. Your game will not give you your weekly rewards and your dwellers will not continue collecting things in the Wasteland until this is altered.
Leveling from 1 to 50 – This trophy seems extremely daunting at first. However, there is no need to fear! As a rule of thumb, I will always suggest that you have at least one of all the training rooms available. By this I mean the Weight Room for Strength, the Bar for Charisma and so on. The easiest way to obtain this trophy is to take a level 1 dweller and place them in the Endurance Training Room. After several days, using the Time Exploit explained above, your dweller will train to Level 10 Endurance. Endurance is key in ensuring your dweller is almost immune to radiation poisoning. Once this is done, give them the best weapon you have, 25 stimpaks and send them out into the Wasteland. The average Dweller can withstand 3 days in the Wasteland before they inevitably die. Simply revive, this costs caps, and recall them. You should only need to send them out once, maybe twice before the level 50 trophy pops! Happy leveling!
Crafting an outfit, a weapon, and a theme – You’d think the title of the trophy was self explanatory but in a way, it’s almost too literal. Once you’ve saved some caps and are pretty much self sufficient, its time to start building the ad-hoc buildings. There are an outfit station, a weapon station and a theme station for purchase. If you are going for the Platinum Trophy, you may have already built these rooms as they are imperative for at least 5 of the 35 trophies. Try to use them at regular intervals to avoid a grind later on. For this particular trophy, you need to craft all three items at the same time. My recommendation is to get them all crafting and wait until each one has come up as an icon to be completed. The trophy will not pop if you craft one of each throughout your whole time playing… it needs to be at the same time or in the same day window.
Increasing caps – If your piggy bank is looking a bit empty, it may be time to farm some caps. The best way to obtain a decent number of caps is to train up your dwellers and send them into the Wasteland, at this point, it might be against their will, because of the amount of time they can spend out there without you worrying. First, ensure as many dwellers as possible are maxed out on all stats. This means, whenever they’ve maxed out a skill in a training room move them to somewhere else until all S.P.E.C.I.A.L perks are at level 10. This greatly increases their durability when exploring whilst Luck increases their chances of finding a number of goodies including caps. Once you have dwellers who fit these criteria, equip a decent weapon (craft if you need to, which can help your ‘Craft 10 Weapons’ trophy), equip some gear (‘Craft 10 Outfits’ can be helped here) and give them 25 Stimpaks. I’d recommend having two Medbays leveled up to max to make a decent number of Stimpaks at a steady rate. I started out sending 3 dwellers at a time but by the end of my game, I had 6 exploring. As mentioned previously, dwellers should be able to withstand 3 days of exploring before they kick the bucket so merely revive and recall. I had dwellers bringing in at least 11k caps every time! Not to mention the goodies they bring back which can be sold ONLY after you’ve completed the ‘Scrap 500 items’ trophy… you’ll wanna get that out of the way first!
Next big way to earn caps is by doing Quests! The time exploit definitely makes doing this so much more bearable as it completely eliminates the time it takes to get to the Quest and the time to return. Quests give cap rewards as well as pets, weapons, outfits, dwellers and more! Pets can help massive amounts when attached to someone who is out in the Wasteland depending on benefits. I recommend leveling up the Overseer’s Office to max as this enables you to do 3 Quests at a time. Quests are worth 8 of your 35 trophies so be sure to do them regularly! 100 Quests, 500 enemies on quests and 100 stimpaks/radaway seem grindy at first, but they will come as you play along accompanied by a boatload of caps!
My final thoughts on increasing caps are putting dwellers in the correct rooms so they work to their optimum level. They will level up faster and each time they level up, you get some caps! So ensure someone with high Intelligence goes in the Medbay and not in the Diner! Furthermore, training rooms will give caps every time the dwellers level up a skill point! If you have over 100 dwellers it’ll be raining caps, I promise you!
50 Raider Attacks – Saving the worst until last. This is by far the hardest trophy and will require a lot of patience and a stiff drink. First, I recommend you leave this trophy until last. You may get a few raider attacks when you’re setting up your Vault but its easier to get all the other trophies out of the way and focus your attention on this one. You will need to have under 40 dwellers. This is SO important. Anything above 39 will cause Feral Ghouls and Deathclaws to attack your Vault and you really don’t want that! After all other trophies are obtained do not start again on a new Vault! Your stats do not carry over. Merely evict all dwellers until you only have 39. To evict all you need to do is drag them outside of your Vault and click the red cross.
Make sure you do not reinforce the Vault door, this can diminish the frequency of a Raider Attack. Accidents, as they are called, are most commonly triggered by the opening and closing of the Vault Door. The most effective way to make this happen is by completing the Quest to obtain Bottle and Cappy from Nuka World. The Quest does have their names in the briefing so you will know the correct one to do. Bottle and Cappy visit the Vault and also leave the Vault so you have 2 chances for an accident to happen. Sometimes they will even split up so it’s doubled again to 4 chances. Unfortunately, you will still have fires, Radroach infestations, and other annoying inconveniences but at least you won’t have Deathclaws killing half your dwellers. I found that if you skipped forward 1 day and minused about 4 minutes in the PS4 Date and Time screen after an accident had happened, I had a 50-60% chance of something happening again. Sending out dwellers into the Wasteland will also keep that Vault door opening as they will also return.
There are certain pets that you can obtain which give ‘x3 Objective Bonus’ and ‘x2 Objective Bonus’. You can get pets by completing Quests which you will be doing anyway to achieve your other trophies. These particular pets work wonders for decreasing the amount of Raider attacks you need. As long as the raiders die in the same room as the dweller with the pet, it will help you massively. I set up two of my strongest dwellers in the same room as the Vault door. I gave them both pets that did an objective bonus and the best weapons I had. The Raiders did not get past this room and I achieved this trophy at 31 attacks rather than 50.
Having a large number of caps can attract Raiders so keep on sending people out to the Wasteland, doing Quests, selling items you don’t need and leveling up dwellers for a lovely cap haul. Building a radio tower not only attracts new dwellers (but please don’t let them in if you are at 39) but will also attract Raiders. Last but not least, pregnant women in your Vault can slightly increase the frequency of the attacks but not by a massive amount. You don’t need to give birth, just leave them with the baby icon above their heads. Other than that, it’s a waiting game. If you are confident with your dwellers and they are all leveled up and with the best kit, you can leave the game overnight and let it do its thing!
There you have it! My quick guide to help with the Platinum Trophy for Fallout Shelter. Although this is free-to-play and there are options to purchase Vault lunchboxes, pets, Nuka Cola Quantum and more, you do not need to use these in order to get the Platinum. With the Time Exploit, you can skip forward a week to obtain your bonus lunchbox which gives chances for legendary items! Good luck on your journey fellow Overseers!
