Deathclaws Just Wrecked My Fallout Shelter

They don’t call them ‘Deathclaws’ for nothing, you know.

Fallout Shelter got a new update today, and with it came a bevy of new features. These include some gameplay tweaks, some bug fixes, and a fancy new robot butler known as Mr. Handy. Oh…and Deathclaws. Those are in there too.

Players who have experienced Fallout Shelter probably know just how easy it is. After you accumulate some good gear, raider attacks on your vault become nothing more than a nuisance. I’d say it it usually takes me about 30 seconds, if that, to get rid of raiders. Tops. Deathclaws, of course, are famed for being one of the scariest enemies in the Fallout universe. I was curious: would they live up to their name in Fallout Shelter? So I booted my game up today to see, and boy howdy, can I confirm that Deathclaws are on an entirely different level from raiders.

You can watch my first Deathclaw attack in full in the video below, though I’ll provide a play-by-play right after that too:

After turning on Fallout Shelter this morning, I made my way to the lunchbox section. I wanted to buy a Mr. Handy, a robot servant who can collect resources, be sent into the wasteland, and be used to defend against vault attacks. While I’m sure you can find him in a random drop, I wanted to beeline to the new stuff right away — I didn’t mind spending .99 cents on him.

So I was inspecting my brand new Mr. Handy, when suddenly…

DAMN. What you have to understand is, it’s been a while since I’ve played Fallout Shelter. While I did want to duke it out against Deathclaws to see what they are made of in this game, I also wanted to, you know, actually prepare for it. In my mind I was going to buy a Mr. Handy, and then outfit everyone on my top floor with my best gear. Power armour, sniper rifles, exotic guns, the works. Instead I was caught with my pants down. Great! Just great.

Scrambling, I tried to send the first dwellers I could toward the Deathclaws…only to find that the Deathclaws decimated my vault door within seconds. Worse, the pricks move damn fast between your vault rooms, too. My dwellers could only get a few shots in before the Deathclaw pack dug further into the vault, toward dwellers that didn’t even have weapons equipped yet. Not that it mattered too much anyway. Unless the dweller was packing some serious heat, most weapons do laughable damage against Deathclaws.

It was, in short, a complete nightmare. I couldn’t even get excited about Mr. Handy’s flamethrower weapon, because, as cool as it is, it was doing pitiful damage against the Deathclaws. If my vault had an emblem for this moment, it would be a giant YOU TRIED gold sticker.

It wasn’t long until the Deathclaws found themselves on the second floor of my vault. While this was bad news for me — I had never had an attack on my vault reach the second floor before — my first-floor vault dwellers were pretty thrilled about the whole thing:

I’m not a doctor, but I imagine my vault dweller’s sudden pain relief is related to detaching his face from Deathclaw fangs. Just a guess.

Meanwhile, the fact that the Deathclaws were on my second floor made me panic even more. You see, some of the dwellers on the second floor have even worse gear than the ones in the first floor! I watched somewhat helplessly as the Deathclaws tried to murder my scientists and radio hosts, characters who were equipped with things like lingerie and a Pope suit. Stuff that makes for hilarious screenshots, but is kind of useless against the toughest enemies in Fallout.

To make matters worse, throughout this entire attack, the rest of my vault kept churning on as usual. Which meant that the dwellers required basic things like food and water.

Feeding dwellers requires tapping on the resource buttons. To do that, I had to find the appropriate room. Scared of accruing radiation, I took away my attention from the Deathclaws and started feeding my vault. This was a mistake. While I took care of business, the Deathclaws continued to dwindle the HP of my radio host. She was dead within seconds, all because I forgot to give her a Stimpak. RIP, lingerie radio girl. You brought so many new dwellers into the vault. You had to die so that everyone else could live.

Eventually, my dwellers got rid of the Deathclaws. It was a team effort that took a few minutes, which is ages in Fallout Shelter time. I used up almost all my Stimpaks, and suffered my first and only death in Fallout Shelter. It was a traumatic experience which will probably haunt my dwellers for the rest of their lives. You can tell, because this is what the dweller who landed the finishing blow did right after getting rid of the Deathclaw menace:

A crossword. Never change, Fallout Shelter.

And there you have it. Deathclaws are genuinely scary in Fallout Shelter, and, unless you are prepared for them, they will wreck you. Kind of makes things in Fallout Shelter a bit more exciting, which is great. Hopefully I’ll deal with Deathclaws a little better next time around. Radio girl must be avenged.