Best Fallout Shelter layout: Tips, design ideas, more

Aakrit Sharma
Vault with all electricity producing rooms in the right column

In Fallout Shelter, dwellers’ happiness as well as productivity are largely reliant on how the vault is designed and managed. If you want to progress faster, here are the best vault layouts in Fallout Shelter and how to make them.

The main goal of Fallout Shelter is to construct and manage a vault for your dwellers. However, the design of your vault isn’t merely about aesthetics; it significantly influences how fast you progress. Factors such as your ability to fend off raiders, how your dwellers handle resource shortages, and the ease of vault management are all determined by your vault’s layout.

As you progress in the game, your vault’s layout will evolve and expand due to the increased number of rooms and dwellers to manage. However, without a strategic plan for your vault’s layout, you may end up with an inefficient setup.

That’s why we have some tips for you to follow to create the best vault possible at every stage of the game.

Vault design in Fallout Shelter
A good vault layout reduces the time it takes to finish the game.

How to make the perfect vault in Fallout Shelter

Best way to protect your vault from raids in Fallout Shelter

To easily survive Raiders in Fallout Shelter, you must equip the topmost rooms with dwellers with the highest Strength and Endurance stats as these rooms should be the ones producing food, water, and electricity.

The dwellers in the topmost rooms should have guns and armor. Pregnant women and children do not fight, so avoid having them in the topmost rooms.

It is important to remember that Raiders and incidents such as fire, molerat infestation, and radroaches spawn and spread through rooms connected by dirt. To avoid this, you can place the most important rooms vertically and use elevators to connect them.

Unlocking Mister Handy and putting it on the initial floor is another tactic that can help you stop invaders with ease.

Best place for storage rooms, labs, and living quarters in Fallout Shelter

Storage rooms, science labs, and living rooms should constitute the lowest layer of your vault. This is because unlike the rooms for food, electricity, and water production, storage rooms, the former rooms are quiet and largely unused.

In case you face an electricity shortage, the rooms in the lowest layer are affected the most. That’s why it is wise to form your vault’s base with unused rooms and place the most important ones at the top.

Vault design in Fallout Shelter
The right side of the map can be used for additional Medbay or Science Labs as these are perfectly suited to the smaller space.

Fill the rightmost column with rooms that are used temporarily

Rooms like the Overseer’s Command Office, Athletics Room, Armory, Classroom, Game Room, and Barbershop should be on the rightmost column of your vault. Since these rooms have occasional use and dwellers the time taken to reach them isn’t a glaring issue.

If you’re planning to revamp your vault, you’ll most likely need to remove the rightmost rooms first. Hence, it’s better to place the ones that aren’t integral to the vault’s functionality.

Place production rooms close to each other

You can place production rooms like the Nuka-Cola bottler and the Nuclear Reactor close to each other. This way, dwellers will quickly move between them, and the ones with the best stats will be together during invasions.

Separating production and training rooms will not only make your vault look better but will also help you manage things easily.

Vault in Fallout Shelter at night
Production rooms should be placed away from non-production rooms to prevent incidents from spreading to them.

Best Fallout Shelter vault layout

Based on these tips and tricks, this is what an ideal vault in Fallout Shelter would look like:

Top Layer:Least important rooms such as Storage, Medbay, Science Lab, and Medbays.
Middle Layer:Rooms with occasional uses like Barbershop, Radio, Learning, Fitness Room, Weight Room, and Lounge. You can leave some additional slots for resource production rooms here.
Bottom Layer:Least important rooms such as Storages, Medbay, Science Lab, and Medbays.

Well, we hope this guide helps you make the perfect vault in Fallout Shelter. For similar content, have a look at:

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About The Author

Aakrit is a games writer with over 2000 published articles for EssentiallySports, Sportskeeda, FortniteINTEL, and CharlieINTEL. Currently, he writes guides on Minecraft, Roblox, Pokemon games, Genshin Impact, and Brawlhalla. Aakrit loves playing shooter games and in his free time, you can find him queued up in Valorant, Fortnite, Apex Legends, or Halo Infinite. You can contact Aakrit at [email protected].