Bonus journal entry 1: Fallout for lunch

I recently picked up a new phone.  My old one eventually died after two years of abuse, during which it was fully immersed in water twice.  Say what you like about windows phones, that Nokia was hardy.  Maybe "Nokia" should have been the clue.

I digress.

I'm on Android now which means I get to play games.  After hearing plenty about it, I picked up Fallout Shelter and started playing around with Vault 64.  As it turns out, this game is quite a rich seam of out of context hilarious shenanigans.  Well, for a mobile game.

So to start, we need a gimmick.  I know that almost every vault has a gimmick.  Something like "every 5th child is taught to speak exclusively in Cantonese" or "there is literally no entertainment and arousal-inducing pheromones are pumped into each room on the hour".  That kind of thing.  Now I'm not going to go for one of those pansy-ass control vaults where people are actually just allowed to live normal lives, oh heavens no, so it was time to choose a theme.  I have chosen happiness.  These people shall be as happy as I can force them to be whether they are ready for it or not.

The more I progressed down this path, the more I realised I was making a weird variant of Alpha Complex, just without the colours and the lack of ability to go outside.

A few people queued up to get in.  The first odd thing was that it's clearly set after the bombs have dropped because going outside results in meeting raiders and getting rad poisoning and the like while staying inside results in radroach and mole rat attacks.  Deathclaws are a thing but I have yet to meet one.  I started with an empty vault with no rooms, suggesting that mine was the only vault which was uncompleted before the war started.  Considering the cash I started with, it was probably due to budgetary constraints as I was provided with the equivalent of a can of beans and a warm handshake.  Vault Tec are not planning to assist any further, it seems.

According to the lore, this may in fact be a "vault simulator" and not an actual vault.  I don't care about that, if I'm to be given control of the lives of many, many people, I'm expecting my simulation to be spot on.  They wouldn't give me shoddy tools when there are lives at stake.  There'd be fewer people to terrorise and while I believe that Vault Tec are, at best, mad scientists, I don't think they have genocide in mind.  Not for most of the vaults, certainly.

The gist of the game is like Sim City on a very small scale or The Sims on a larger scale but with more radiation and gun crime (unless you played The Sims like my mother does).  People enter your little bunker, you build rooms to provide food, power and water.  They have no facilities for entertainment, nor do they sleep, poop or otherwise disengage from their assigned tasks, yet they like to hold little conversations about their night time activities, plans for evening meals and spending time with family.  Judging by the gestation period of the children I have created (more on that later), an hour in real world time is roughly a month of vault dweller time.  Perhaps what I see is kind of the highlight reel but that wouldn't make much sense because if that were the case, raider attacks would last for 3 straight days at least, most of which being spent as they attempt to make it through my empty guard post.

You don't need a guard post, you see.  You just need to give everyone on the top floor a lot of guns.  That invasion problem soon sorted itself out, I don't mind telling you.

Other needs must be catered to, mostly by building the relevant room and putting someone in it.  Building a room and putting someone in it fixes almost everything apart from the problem of "I mde too many babies, now we need to go gun shopping" because there isn't a machine shop where you can make guns.  You can, however, do things like make stimpacks, make radaway, contact other survivors by radio to entice them to live in your utopia or train their stats.  Stats matter in two ways, they make you better at combat and wasteland survival and they make dwellers better at their assigned tasks.

I don't know where the equipment for the stimpacks is coming from.

For some reason, the power plant is operated entirely by strength.  They must be splitting atoms by hand in there.  Similarly, the water processing plant runs on perception (can you see which of the tanks contains the clean water and which the dirty?) and the restaurant on agility (I can't work that one out yet.  Maybe how many plates can you stack on top of each other?).  The restaurant assures me that it makes food but I have yet to see any.  People talk about snack cakes sometimes, which is a prepackaged food from before the war, and they talk about steak which doesn't exist.  This is a mystery to me.  People can make this imaginary food so well that they level up, yet actually training your stats does not accrue EXP in any way I can see.  Again, this is confusing.

Gear is generally gathered by going outside for a few hours and not getting messed up.  That holds true with what I know already.  It's also relatively true to life when you really get down to it, unless you get all your goods on Amazon.com.

Happiness is the problem.  The goal and the problem.  I've dedicated myself to it so I'd better define it.  We get attacked a lot, so I think people are generally going to be glad to have firearms.  I've therefore embarked on a scheme to arm every adult and that's going well.  Especially the pregnant women, they need very big guns.  People also seem happy when they're put into a role they excel at, so I like to have their stats trained as well as I can so they can be very good indeed.  Again, especially the pregnant women.  After all, they're pregnant, I want them to enjoy the experience as much as possible.  I therefore tend to have the pregnant ladies committed to 8 hour physical training regimes, normally weightlifting but sometimes athletics.  You may argue that this is unethical, disgusting and very immoral.  I argue that it's my vault and I have a lot of guns, so nobody's in much of a position to criticise.

Next, sometimes people just don't like their job.  I've noticed that breeding is a kind of career.  You put people into the bedroom and if they're of opposing genders, they'll get freaky after a while which results in a 100% conception rate, unless they're related, in which case they just chat.  That a world with so much radiation can be so fertile is fascinating.  The problem I have is that breeding tends to result in 100% happiness immediately, so I've been using it as a kind of... anti depressant.  If people are a bit upset in their day to day lives, it's off to the bonkatorium with them.  Of course, you want healthy offspring who can benefit the vault in the long term, so it's a good idea to pick a male with good stats for a better chance of good kids.

It's at this moment that you realise that you're practicing eugenics.  Furthermore, I had one guy employed for over a year doing nothing but having sex.  After this, I set him to work in my radio station and he hasn't been 100% happy since.  He's bred so many times that very few of my dwellers will ever breed with him again because they're all his children.  He's like the brood mother now and if he dies, I fear I'll discover a hive mind had developed and everyone will die.  I've never trained his endurance so I don't know how he kept having sex without a rest for that long.  Maybe that says more about me than about him but I can't do anything for more than 12 hours without wanting a nap, not even things like watching Netflix and eating crisps.

You can force people to rush what they're doing.  If successful, it negates the cooldown timer on generating resources for the room and if not, a bad thing happens.  Bad things being radroach attacks, mole rat attacks or fires.  Problem is, the bad things generate EXP and the successes somehow generate more money so I'm not sure why you're not just going to rush all the time to generate more useful stuff.  The nuclear reactor's on fire?  Great, that just makes us better at fighting cockroaches!

Sometimes I send my favourite guy out to collect guns.  There are guns all over the wasteland and he brings me them.  While he walks, he talks about how he's feeling but I don't know who he thinks he's talking to because I usually send him out while I sleep.  Maybe this is why there are so many recordings in the wasteland, because everyone thinks it's normal to record audio logs of their every thought and action.

Finally, I'm on the verge of being able to afford the charisma training room.  It's just a bar where you drink beer.  While I feel like I've become better at talking to people since I've started popping to the pub once in a while for a few pints and a chat, you can put people in a training room alone to train.  I can have one guy sat there, drinking beer after beer for months, talking to himself the entire time.

If this vault isn't consumed in cleansing fire within the next month, I'll consider it a roaring success.