Section 16: Known Bugs and Glitches - therabidsquirel/The-Fallout-Shelter-FAQ GitHub Wiki

16.1

Q: I haven't logged in for weeks or more and my dweller(s) in the wasteland have all this good gear and are still alive. Are they superhuman?

A: This is what I refer to as the long exploration time glitch. See 1.2 for details.

16.2

Q: Why are my dwellers complaining about a dead body in a certain room despite there clearly being none?

A: This is a glitch that happens if a dweller dies, and you exit the game without dealing with the body (removing or reviving). When you log back in, there's a chance the body will be gone so that you can't interact with it, but the dwellers still know it's there. To deal with the invisible body glitch, demolishing the room and rebuilding it will fix the issue. If it's in the vault entrance, well, that's a lot harder to deal with. You'd have to do some magic with editing your save file. I won't put specifics here because I don't know, but if someone lets me know I'll add it.

16.3

Q: Why do my objectives keep resetting?

A: This is a common glitch that has been in the game since day one. People have done all sorts of speculation as to the cause, but nothing conclusive has been found so far. There's no real fix either. Regularly manually backing up your vault and restoring whenever a reset occurs might help (see 15.1), and keeping track of the objective yourself and using an editor (see 15.2) to mark it as complete when you would have normally gotten it works well.

16.4

Q: Why have my achievements stopped tracking progress?

A: This is another common glitch that has been in the game since day one, and another glitch that has no known conclusive cause or fix. To clarify, achievements are different from objectives. Objectives are the tasks that give you rewards for completing them, while achievements are for Google Play Games (Android), Game Center (iOS), Xbox One and Steam achievements, and PS4 trophies (Bethesda Launcher and Switch versions have no achievements). Just keep playing the game and hope you eventually get them.

16.5

Q: Why don't I get all the items an explorer had when I collect them?

A: It takes a little while to load the explorer's inventory, so if you collect them as soon as you open the explorer UI you'll do so before it loaded everything, and it will cut itself short and not give you everything. To get around this, wait for their explorer log to load in. At that point the items have for sure loaded, so you won't lose any when you collect them. I talk about it here in an old post of mine.

16.6

Q: I opened up the explorer UI to look at someone I just sent out, and they have tonnes of stuff already, are they super awesome?

A: No. It's unknown what triggers it, but sometimes when you open the UI an explorer with nothing in their inventory (someone just sent out) will have a duplicated inventory from one of your other explorers that's further out. You can tell it's duplicated because they'll have exactly all of the same items in the same order. If you close the UI the new explorer loses the duplicated items and their inventory returns to normal, but if you stay on the screen and have them return and collect them, then you can successfully receive potentially a lot of duplicated items. This is an exploit, so if you consider that cheating for your vault or not is up to you.

16.7

Q: During a quest a raider my dweller(s) fought died and has the crosses over their eyes, but they're still standing and fighting and are invincible now. Am I screwed for this quest?

A: Heal up your dweller(s) first to ensure they have good health, then try totally exiting and closing the app. After a total restart of the app most people report this being fixed.

16.8

Q: I just lost all sound in my game, what happened?

A: This appears to happen when a notification with sound occurs. After the notification occurs, sound is lost in the game until you completely exit the app and restart it. If it's bothering you either restart the game when it happens or mute your notification volume but leave media volume at the desired level.

16.9

Q: I'm on Android/iOS and the game keeps crashing, can I do anything?

A: I've seen a great deal of people saying disabling cloud saving fixes it, so try that. If you were relying on cloud saving as your only means of backing up your vault, I'd take a look at other means of doing so (15.1).

16.10

Q: My explorers aren't using any RadAway, so their health bar fills with rads and they die while still holding stimpaks and RadAway. What gives?

A: This has been posted about many times on the game's subreddits. While I haven't confirmed this, it's possible it happens when an explorer enters a random quest, takes rad damage, and you send them exploring again without first healing their rads. If true, you just have to make sure to use RadAway after clearing the location. If not, or you just want to work around it, you can make sure they have at least 11 endurance for exploration rad immunity. Even if you haven't experienced this glitch, preparing for it with E11+ explorers is never a bad idea.

16.11

Q: I'm on Android and the game won't go completely fullscreen, are there any fixes?

A: Some people have run into this issue, and report that changing from swipe navigation to button navigation helps somewhat. For more information and pictures see here.

16.12

Q: I'm playing a mobile version and my ad timer is ridiculously high. Why do I have to wait hundreds or thousands of hours for the next one?

A: This is an incredibly common glitch, and has been posted about many, many times on the game's subreddits. I have yet to see a definitive cause for it, though it might be related to another glitch of quests failing to load. While some people report the ad timer fixes itself randomly sometimes, I know of two potential fixes.

The first is as you're loading into your vault, repeatedly tap the area the ad play button is in. There's a small window as the game loads where you can hit the button regardless of the ad timer. It should hopefully be back to normal after watching an ad.

If you can't get that to work, the other fix is reinstalling the game. You'll have to ensure your saves are backed up before uninstalling. A word of caution though, I've seen reports from multiple people that they weren't able to get their vaults back from cloud saving after reinstalling. I'm not sure it's something you'd want to rely on, I wouldn't. If this has happened to you try restarting the app a few times after reinstalling, see if that causes things to finally load. Otherwise if you can make manual backups that would be far better (see 15.1). If not, it might be better to live with it than risk losing your vault.

16.13

Q: Sometimes when I open the wasteland UI there are graphical glitches, like explorers/quest groups being tinted red or counts of stimpaks and other things being overlaid. Why does this happen?

A: I don't know why it happens, but they are just graphical glitches. You can try closing and reopening the UI, and if that doesn't work then closing and reopening the game probably will.

16.14

Q: Why can't I delete a room or elevator that I definitely should be able to delete?

A: Sometimes the game just glitches and gets confused. If deleting that room or elevator for sure won't cut off any other room or elevator from the vault entrance, but you can't delete it, then restarting the game fixes the issue.

16.15

Q: Why do some of my dwellers in power armor not wear helmets?

A: Some just don't, I'm not sure on the cause of this glitch or what you can do to fix it. At the very least it was introduced in one of the mobile-exclusive updates, so only Android and iOS are affected by this glitch.

16.16

Q: I thought the single stage blue quests were finite, why am I seeing repeats?

A: One of the mobile-exclusive (Android and iOS) updates appears to have glitched two of the blue quests, Animal Rescue and Wonders of Technology, causing them to repeat infinitely. Other quests may be affected, I only know for sure that these two are.