Section 8: Pets - therabidsquirel/The-Fallout-Shelter-FAQ GitHub Wiki

8.1

Q: Where can I find a list of pets?

A: The Fallout wiki has a good list of all the breeds and their legendary versions, plus the possible stat variance for each pet. You can check out this post (TheUndeterredAstral) to see what the completed VDSG looks like for version 1.18 (minus the Rollerbrain). Version 1.18 has 102 pets, version 1.13 has 99. The pet type Alien Drone and the legendary pets CX404 and Rollerbrain are the three exclusive to 1.18.

8.2

Q: What's the best pet?

A: Like with outfits, that depends what the dweller is doing. There's definitely some subjectivity to it, but here's how I'd break them down, with their highest possible bonuses in parentheses. Should you get rid of terrible pets? I actually wouldn't, see 8.5.

S Tier:

  • Objective Completion (x3). Lets you grind out objectives much quicker, meaning more chances at rare rewards like pet carriers and Mr. Handy. See 8.8.
  • Child SPECIALs (+3). Just one pet lets you easily give all babies born in your vault a significant boost to their starting SPECIAL, saving a lot of training time. See 5.3.
  • Wasteland Junk (+100%). In survival with legendary junk being much more common in exploration, this pet massively increases how much explorers bring back. In normal it still increases legendary junk yields overall by a significant amount, just not as much compared to survival. See 10.12.

A Tier:

  • Wasteland Return Speed (x4). Excellent on explorers and quest groups and can save a lot of time.
  • Damage (+6). Can add a significant amount of damage, which can help in the vault and quests, but is also a huge help in exploration. Even more useful in survival where everything is deadlier. See 8.9.
  • Health (+100%). Makes dwellers much tankier. Great for high-risk dwellers like explorers, questers, and anyone in the immediate path of external incidents in the vault. Even more useful in survival with perma-death.
  • Damage Resistance (+50%). Same reason as Health pets.
    • Note that at their maximum bonuses, and considering that stimpaks always restore 50% of a dweller's HP, +100% HP and +50% DR are effectively the same thing. Say we have a 400 HP dweller. The HP pet raises it to 800. If they take 400 damage they're now at 50% HP. With the DR pet though it would reduce their HP from 400 to 200, also leaving them at 50% HP.

B Tier:

  • Crafting Time (-45%). Can help a lot with very long legendary crafting times, but once you've maximized SPECIAL in your crafting rooms and can drop legendary time down to 6-7 hours, the pet isn't doing much at that point.
  • Crafting Time & Cost (-30%). Just a combination Crafting Time and Crafting Cost. Notably though the bonus is generally less since it's doing both.
  • Twins Chance (+75%). Can be useful when aiming for rare or legendary children, as their chances are low, so this pet can significantly increase the amount you get. It's a pain to use if mass breeding though, otherwise I'd probably rate it a tier higher. See 5.2.
  • Training Time (Continuous) (+30%). While boosting one dweller's training time isn't as useful a lot of the time, considering mass training is something very worth doing, this pet does automatically raise the dweller's stat while out of the game. It can be useful to throw a dweller in a room, forget about them, and come back to them at 10.

C Tier:

  • Wasteland Caps (+50%). Very useful on explorers in early to mid-game, but falls off hard in the late game where caps become a non-issue.
  • Crafting Cost (-45%). Same story as Wasteland Caps, useful until the late game. Mass legendary crafting is almost always bottlenecked by legendary junk, not caps.
  • Wasteland Weapons & Outfits (+30%). Can be useful if you get one early game when you need whatever you can find. It otherwise bogs an explorer down and causes them to hit the carry capacity much quicker, significantly reducing the amount of good loot they'll bring back. See 10.11.
  • Training Time (+20%). Reducing one dweller's training time can definitely help early game when you likely won't have many training, but when you've got mass training going this pet is a drop in the bucket.

D Tier:

  • XP (+45%). Dwellers don't get much XP in the vault or on quests, so this pet won't add much. Explorers on the other hand get ludicrous amounts of XP, so boosting it further usually won't matter much.
  • Happiness (+100%). Only works on one dweller, and requires the pet to be left on the dweller. Removing it sets the dweller back however much the pet added. Could be useful if you happen to get an objective to raise dweller happiness, otherwise it's terrible.
  • Stranger Chance (x7.5). The pet doesn't increase the frequency of Mysterious Stranger visits, that would make it better. Rather, when he does appear, it affects which room he's more likely to appear in. Despite being able to get quite a high value on this pet, it doesn't seem to have much effect. See 11.7.

F Tier:

  • Healing Speed (x4). The natural health regeneration in the vault is already very slow, so even x4 on one dweller barely makes a difference. Does nothing in exploration and quests.
  • Rad Healing Speed (x4). Terrible for the same reason as Healing Speed. Also does nothing in exploration and quests.

8.3

Q: How do I get pets?

A: Like with lunchboxes, Mr. Handy, and Quantums, you can get them free from objectives and quests or by buying them from the in-game store. They can also be found as the rare card of lunchboxes, though the chance is low.

8.4

Q: Do pet bonuses stack?

A: No. Most pets affect only a single dweller, but several affect multiple. Equipping two pets with the same effect in the same "area of effect" will not stack them, only the highest bonus will be used while any others will be ignored. These are all of the effects that apply to more than one dweller:

  • The effects Crafting Cost, Crafting Time, Objective Completion, and Stranger Chance apply to the whole room they're in.

  • Wasteland Return Speed applies to all the dwellers in a questing group.

8.5

Q: This is a crappy pet, should I sell it?

A: Some pets you will probably never use for their main effect because they're just plain bad. As a secondary effect though, all pets provide a damage bonus on quests and in the vault depending on their rarity, see 8.9 for more info. Even useless pets can be used as extra damage, so there's no reason to sell pets. Also, if you're in a survival vault pets have yet another use. If you equip any pet on an explorer or quester and they die, they're still dead (perma-death can't be avoided in survival), but the pet will bring back everything they were carrying, including what they had equipped. Obviously giving them a useful pet would be better, but if you don't have any then give them bad pets so that you at least don't have to worry about someone you sent out with good gear dying and losing it.

8.6

Q: Why is the bonus on (insert Legendary pet) worse than a Common pet?

A: There are messed up pet breeds which have no Common or Rare versions, but instead have 3 Legendary versions where 2 of the Legendaries have bonuses consistent with a Common or Rare pet. The affected pet breeds include:

  • Bloodhound (dog - Wasteland Junk)

  • Pit Bull Terrier (dog - Damage)

  • LaPerm (cat - Wasteland Junk)

  • Manx (cat - Twins Chance)

There are correctly designed pet breeds as alternatives to most of the above. These include:

  • St. Bernard (dog - Wasteland Junk) as alternative to Bloodhound

  • Lykoi (cat - Damage) as alternative to Pit Bull Terrier

  • Palla's Cat (cat - Wasteland Junk) as alternative to LaPerm

In addition to the above, there are also some breeds with a Rare version but no Common version, and 2 Legendary versions.

8.7

Q: Is there a limit to the number of pets I can equip?

A: There a couple depending on what we're talking about:

  • Per room you can only have pets equipped to half the room's dweller capacity. A single room can only have one pet, a double two, and a triple three (compared to two, four, and six dwellers respectively). The one and only exception is the vault door, which can have both two dwellers and two pets in it.

  • There is a hard pet equip limit of 100. Across all explorers, questers, and dwellers in the vault you are only allowed to have a maximum of 100 equipped. You can have as many as you want in storage as long as you have the storage space, but only 100 equipped. Here's a picture (DanEngler) of the notification you get when you reach that limit.

8.8

Q: I got an objective completion pet, what do they do?

A: The only current effects are x2 and x3, and they don't stack (see 8.4). When you equip one to a dweller, any objective that dweller contributes to will have their contribution multiplied by the pet's modifier. Collect water? Put the pet in a water room to double or triple how much collecting from that room counts. Survive deathclaw attacks without casualties? Have the pet on a dweller in the room where the attack ends. Stop incidents? Have the pet in the same room the incident is stopped in. Craft weapons? Have the pet in the crafting room when you collect the crafted weapon. The possibilities are endless, and this is probably the most useful pet in the game for this reason.

8.9

Q: I saw a loading screen tip that told me to bring pets on quests for a damage boost, how does that work?

A: Thanks to the huge data mine here from Lasercar, we know how this works. Both on quests and in the vault, any pet gives +2/4/6 damage to the dweller it's equipped to depending on whether the pet is common/rare/legendary. This is in addition to the damage provided by a damage pet, so a legendary +6 damage pet is actually providing +12 damage. This does not apply to exploration, only damage pets provide damage there, and only their listed amount. This means even pets with useless effects can still be put to use as extra damage.