Commuter Gamer: Crafting Comes to ‘Fallout Shelter’

Fallout Shelter just got a major update that includes new room types, more pets, crafting, and more!

So the biggest addition in this update is crafting! I don’t know about everyone else but I find that I spend more time than I should scrapping junk, tweaking weapons and armor, and crafting stuff in Fallout 4. Bringing crafting to Fallout Shelter was an obvious choice. Maybe it will even satisfy enough of my crafting addiction that I can finally make decent progress in Fallout 4.

You get a couple of pieces of junk right off the bat with the update, but you can also find junk in your lunch boxes and recover junk out in the wasteland. In addition to junk, you’ll find recipes for new weapons and outfits in the wasteland as well. While all common items are unlocked from the beginning, rare and legendary items will need to be unlocked through exploration. And the longer your dwellers explore, the better junk and recipes they will find. As a nice bonus and tie-in, a lot of the new craftable items are styled after ones found in Fallout 4 (like pipe weapons and Brotherhood of Steel clothing).

So you have junk, you have recipes, how do you actually make the things? There are two new room types specifically for crafting–a Weapon Workshop and an Outfit Workshop. Both rooms benefit from dwellers with high agility. The higher agility and more dwellers you assign to the room (up to six each), the faster your build time.

The nice thing about these rooms compared to others is that they are always three spaces wide and don’t require combining to build them up. Each one does have three levels of upgrade–the base room can craft common items, then rare, then legendary.

After assigning dwellers, you tap the Craft icon and the crafting menu pops up. You will see the entire population of craftable items, which ones you have unlocked, which you have the materials for, how much an item costs to craft, and how long it will take. Once crafting is complete, the item will be available to dole out to a dweller. I had hoped assigning multiple dwellers would allow parallel crafting but it only speeds up the production of a single item at a time. If you want to craft more than one item at a time, you’ll need more workshops.

The last new room is the Salon where you can customize hairstyle, hair color, and facial features of dwellers. The Salon only has two levels–the base level and one upgrade that unlocks the facial features. There are 27 hairstyles, 20 hair colors, and 26 facial features for females and 24 hairstyles, 20 hair colors, and 43 facial features for males I’m still not sure why these as well as outfits are sometimes gendered. Since many outfits work both ways and have slightly different looks for each sex, I think all of them should have this. Why can’t I have a female ninja?! The addition of things like scars in the facial feature category or the ability to make some of the headgear permanent is a nice touch.

You assign a character to the salon and use the tool to select the desired style change. Cost and time are shown before you choose and there is a randomizer. Once you confirm, off the auto-barber goes. When the salon is done, your character has a nice Eye of the Beholder facial wrap until you tap on them to reveal their new look.

There are even more pet options now with the addition of more flavors of cats and dogs as well as parrots! I’m still only playing with the original freebie pet from the last update, but I inch closer and closer to unlocking another pet delivery every day.

One small change I noticed that is really nice is that the icon over a dweller training will change to a “MAX” icon so you know they are done training that stat. This is nice for quickly finding who needs to be moved somewhere else to continue their training.

Lastly, just as a nice touch, the time of day out in the Wasteland matches the time of day in real life (though apparently does not take your particular latitude into account).

If you’re already playing Fallout Shelter, you’ll get the update anyway, I’m sure. If you’ve grown a little tired of the same old tasks, these new features might be enough to bring you back in. I’ve been neglecting my vault quite a bit since Fallout 4 was released, but now I’m managing my vault again. Crafting on the go has never been more satisfying. If you haven’t tried Fallout Shelter yet, what are you waiting for? Download it for either iOS or Android.

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