Fallout Shelter, for iPhone and iPad and coming soon to Android, is one of the few resource-management games that actually makes you MANAGE your resources. If you don’t manage your food, power and water correctly, you will get stuck in red-bar hell and end up always chasing your tail, never getting ahead unless you do something to drastically change it. Read on for some tips and tricks for how to load up on resources in Fallout Shelter!
Your resources are used by your vault and by your dwellers just by existing, so your first step is to maximize your footprint. Minimize the amount of rooms that you have, and maximize the amount of upgrades on your existing rooms. Upgrading an existing room will not cause it to use any more resources than before, but it will put out more resources instead.
Place two identical rooms, at the same upgrade level, next to each other for a 2x wide room, and place three identical ones next to each other to make a gigantic, sprawling 3x wide room. These take longer to collect from (relative to the amount of Dwellers who work in them) but they provide more than 2-3 times the resources. You can put just one Dweller in one of these huge rooms and get the same amount of resources. It will just take longer for the timers to count down until you can collect from the rooms.
Want to skip the timers right away? Just set the time ahead on your phone by however long the longest timer goes for, then go back to the game and you will be able to collect everything. Don’t set the time too far ahead though, or else you will end up running your entire vault out of food, power and water by accident. Just set them ahead barely enough so that you can collect from them right away.
Try to avoid doing the rush as much as possible if your goal is resources. Rush can get you resources quickly, true, but if the rush fails you’ll lose a ton of time and Dweller health due to the damage done by the fire and Radaroaches. Better to let the timers count down on their own instead.
Match up each Dweller with the room that is most suited to their talents. High strength is good for the power generators. High agility will help you in the restaurant/diner/whatever they call the particular food room that you are managing. High perception will improve their performance in the water treatment rooms. The higher the specific stat, the shorter the timers for that room will be.