Fallout Shelter bugs

This page describes and lists any known fixes for known issues and bugs on the iOS and Android game Fallout Shelter.

Guidelines
Please place any bugs found here with appropriate details on how they occur, and if any known fixes are available.

Android
This is caused when a player advances the phone's timer ahead. After the amount of time that was jumped ahead passes, the explorers should start encountering creatures and collecting loot again.
 * If your phone battery life runs out and your phone turns off while playing Fallout Shelter, your vault that was being accessed will be deleted and all progress destroyed.
 * If a Mr. Handy dies when you're zoomed in a room the whole screen is going to stay with a white layer on top.
 * Crippling performance issues and performance leaks with any action. Lag spikes can become unbearable after less than 10 minutes of heavy activity, so bad as to even make quitting the game difficult.
 * Tasks randomly stop counting towards objective completion when returning to the game after a crash or even after a proper exit.
 * Crashes when heavily using the room assignment list. Often the game will crash when using the room assignment list to assign dwellers to rooms.
 * Frequently moving dwellers around causes some major kind of performance leak, along with doing just about everything else. Reset the game frequently.
 * Sometimes deselecting a room or a dweller will not change the interface, the interface will remain until you select and deselect another dweller or room.
 * Objectives cannot be removed each day on Android Lollipop version.
 * The first tutorial that has you building the power plant. After that it tells you to select a dweller to assign to the power plant and the dweller cannot be selected.
 * All dwellers have blacked out faces.
 * Sending out an explorer sometimes results in an absurdly large return time when recalled.
 * During raider attacks if the game crashes, upon reloading the vault is still in "under attack" mode but there is nothing to attack, the raiders are already gone. Resources no longer produce, nothing progresses. The room that was being raided still has dwellers with HP bars ready to fight, but nothing to fight. All other rooms look like they are operating normally but do not produce any resources.(Try quitting the game and coming back through the main menu).
 * When you unequip armor and weaponry from a dweller before they enter the vault the game will crash and, while restarting it crashes when trying to load the vault,
 * When in loading screen after choosing vault number, the game will crash and sends back to phone home screen.{{verify|verified}
 * The game will eventually get stuck on the "Loading..." screen when loading your Vault.
 * The only known fix is to force stop the game then clear its cache.
 * If this doesn't work, reset your device as well.
 * Occasionally when dwellers are sent to explore, they will end up exploring for an infinite amount of time without accumulating items or experiencing events.
 * Supposedly if they're out for longer than 60 hours, they never get any events or items beyond that.
 * Constant crashes when opening objectives screen. Game restart does not fix the problem.
 * Fix : reddit fix
 * Game crashes on "Please stand by" screen if the cellphone shut down while playing previously.
 * The only known fix currently is to completely reinstall Fallout Shelter, as the crash destroys any existing saves.
 * When assigning Vault Dwellers to a new room or when two couples go to have a baby at the same time (overlapping themselves), occasionally they will become invisible and unable to be selected. To fix this close down the app completely.
 * Another fix that works sometime is to make the invisible dweller go through an elevator by assigning him to a room on a different floor by using the asignment list menu.
 * If your phone's batteries run out after opening a lunchbox and unlocking the cards, the cards will disappear once your game has restarted.
 * In radroach incidents, sometimes the workers will animate as running around uselessly or continuing their work task instead of assisting with exterminating the radroaches if they are unarmed.
 * XP earned while your vault dwellers are exploring the wastes doesn't seem to increase their level.
 * Stimpaks cannot be applied to dwellers.
 * Invisible Corpse - When reviving dwellers there's a chance that an invisible corpse will remain and upset anyone working there. The only known ways to fix this so far is to delete the room and rebuild it or have some other dweller die in the same room and deal with the corpse.
 * Attacked / dead dwellers - it seems that there is a bug during raider attacks where dwellers from other rooms take damage although raiders are not present. The dwellers in the room where raiders are do not shoot.
 * This seem to happen when assigning someone to an empty room raiders are about to leave, they'll look like they're still in that room while actually fighting somewhere else, explaining the dwellers in the room where the raiders nor dweller seem to be shooting and dwellers in another room taking damage (and thus actually damaging the raiders).
 * When opening the mission tab the game closes without notification.
 * Fix : reddit fix
 * Occasionally fires will not be put out, resulting in an inability to collect resources from any other room.
 * When Explorers return, attempting to collect the items results in the failure to collect all the items despite having plenty of storage space for them.
 * When a selected dweller dies from an emergency, the game doesn't deselect them and it is still possible to use a stimpak on them. Despite this, the dweller will still die, maintaining a normal facial expression.
 * When switching between apps while a vault is on fire upon return the fire cannot be extinguished.
 * Radroach Armageddon - During a radroach infestation, it is possible for the radroaches to be invincible and eventually kill all of your dwellers.
 * Time travel - The core gameplay can be drastically altered by messing with the device's internal clock. Should one set one's clock backwards, all incidents cease unless triggered by the player, and all production rooms gain whatever amount of time that the player went back to added to their next production time. The production rooms can be reset by rushing, allowing a player to collect resources risk-free for as long as the clock has been set behind. This can also be used to manipulate the time Dwellers spend in the Wasteland, but they won't collect anything until the clock has been caught up. The altered time will affect their enemy spawns and loot drops, however, and can also be used to bring them home prematurely by recalling them after setting the clock back and then rolling it forward. Changing the clock or getting to the point in time the clock was changed to originally should fix this highly exploitable bug.
 * If a room is rushed immediately prior to setting the device's clock backwards in time to exploit the time travel bug, upon having set the clock backwards, the failure rate of a rush for the room in question will have skyrocketed. This is likely because the game gauges rush failure rate based partially on the time since the last rush, and it decreases with time. Since the previous rush is read as having been in the future, the failure chance is elevated accordingly.
 * An exploring dweller will occassionally find an item, and subsequently have it not appear within their inventory. The happens randomly but often on the first item found.
 * The game may crash on certain devices, versions of the Android OS and runtime (Dalvik/ART) if Google Play games service is running.
 * The service may be uninstalled as a possible workaround, but it renders add-ons unable to be purchased.
 * If running on a KitKat OS, use Dalvik runtime as a workaround.
 * On a rare occasion an elevator may become indestructible. While attempting to destroy it "the elevator is in use" message shows. This happens even if there are no other rooms or elevators connected to it (apart of its parent one) and no dweller is moving berween any rooms/levels.

iOS

 * Using Items from wasteland - When a dweller returns from the wasteland select the Item in the detail screen and hit the collect button.
 * Random crashing - Variable rate by device, game will freeze up and black screen with no discernable pattern; App will not close and can be reopened once the device returns to the home screen. Brief data can be lost in these instances, such as caps gained, objectives removed or completed, and Rooms built. Can also result in the Permanent Pregnancy bug.
 * Permanent crashes - If your Vault is bigger than 20+ civilians, you could maybe never load your Vault again because of permanent crashes at the loading screen of your Vault.
 * Permanent Pregnancy - If the game crashes while naming or after hitting done when naming a baby dweller, The mother may remain pregnant and not leave the pregnant state after rebooting. Another possible cause appears to be deleting or modifying the residence in which the dweller got pregnant, after they've gotten pregnant, although this is not true in all cases.
 * Radroach Armageddon - During a radroach infestation, it is possible for the radroaches to be invincible and eventually kill all of your dwellers.
 * Rush Crash - It is possible for Fallout Shelter to crash when a rush is attempted (in any room, on any device).
 * Event Item Deletion - If a dweller is equipped with rad and stimpaks and is on his/her way to the wasteland but the expedition is canceled by an event such as rad roach infestation, fire or raider attack, the items equipped to the dweller can be lost.
 * Invisible Corpse - When reviving dwellers there's a chance that an invisible corpse will remain and upset anyone working there. The only known way to fix this so far is to delete the room and rebuild it.
 * Undraggable Pregnant - When attempting to move a newly pregnant dweller back to her job she sometimes becomes selectable but undraggable. A restart will fixes this, also dragging other dweller in the living room until the pregnant one is kicked out.
 * Clothing bug - After shelter a random survivor his original outfit is going to continue in his body instead of changing to a vault jumpsuit. This can be verified when going to change her or his outfit appears the name of the clothing with an number in the end, example: Casual01.
 * Post Incident Sound bug - Even after the attack to end the game audio continues with the alarm ringing and the sound of roaches and shots (if every dweller where armed) even life in the vault being completely normal.
 * Objective Reset - Objectives will sometimes reset back to zero, usually overnight. This happens frequently with the longer ones, such as "Explore the Wasteland for 14 hours," "Collect 2300 Power," or "Deliver 16 babies."
 * Dwellers not appearing in collection - When you get rare or legendary dwellers, they don't appear at the collection, though it works properly with weapons and clothes. It can't be solved by restarting and will stay like that for all your shelter life, even if you get all possible dweller cards.
 * Dwellers change outfit in wasteland randomly - Dwellers sent to explore the Wasteland will sometimes change their outfit, seemingly random. Problem is the original outfit will no longer be available.
 * Dwellers can become invisible - Unknown cause but closing the game and reloading it bring them back.
 * Outfits in the Survival Guide - outfits can appear in the Survival Guide as having been found when they haven't yet been found (eg some legendary outfits, though they are not wearable), and outfits can appear as newly-found when they have been in the Survival Guide for some time. This bug has coincided with an outfit being wrongly listed in the text for a dweller on exploration (eg Commander Fatigues - showed in text as such, but wasn't in her collection list). Bug encountered when about 60 different outfits had been identified in the SG.
 * Dwellers walk diagonally through walls and ceilings.
 * Dwellers no longer move unless you double click on their room.
 * Have two bald dwellers - dwellers are only considered bald when babies. When they grow up the number of bald dwellers obtained for the objective goes back to zero. Out of 30 pregnancies with bald fathers only 2 children were also bald (half were female, so 15 male children) but not at the same time. Children take three hours to grow up but pregnancies take 6 hours to finish so this objective is almost impossible to complete unless you make too many female dwellers pregnant.
 * If a pregnant dweller becomes undraggable it seems her pregnancy timer doesn't count down until the game is restarted.
 * If there are two deathclaws left and the first one is killed while entering the next room, the other one will return to the previous room and kill all the surviving dwellers before proceeding to the next room.
 * Tampering with your device's time while the app is active may freeze all the events in your game. You will no longer have random incidents (Fire, pests, Raiders, Death Claws). You will also not get any Daily Report rewards anymore. The resources will no longer run down over time. Your explorer will no longer gather any loots from the wasteland.
 * Game freezes and crashes out when a number of dwellers return at once from exploring. Frame rate starts to drop then game freezes all together. Currently have 5 trying to return.
 * The Game Center achievements do not always count progression, and will sometimes complete upon logging in later. Other times they remain frozen and incomplete.