Fallout Shelter Cheats on PC: Caps and Lunchboxes

The vault is a file, and the file is the cheat

Fallout Shelter reached PC on 14 July 2016 through the Bethesda launcher and Steam in March 2017, and on both it stores each vault as one save. On Steam the path is %LOCALAPPDATA%\FalloutShelter, and the files are Vault1.sav to Vault3.sav with a .bkp copy beside each, as a Steam guide to save editing lays out. The number is the slot in your vault list, and it stays even if you delete the vaults before it.

The save is encrypted, so Notepad shows you nothing. What exists instead is a set of editors, in the browser and as downloads, that decrypt the file, let you change caps, Nuka-Cola Quantum, lunchboxes, resources, dweller SPECIAL stats and room states, and hand you the file back. You copy it over the original with the game closed.

That works, and it is how most of the internet cheats in this game. It also has three sharp corners. You are uploading your vault to someone’s website. A wrong edit corrupts a save, which is why the .bkp exists and why you should make your own copy first. And Steam cloud sync can push the old vault back over the edited one, which is the reason the Steam forum recommends turning cloud sync off for this game.

What a lunchbox is actually worth

The reason people edit the lunchbox count is the odds. The wiki’s lunchbox page lists five cards drawn in a random order, with the first always caps and one card guaranteed rare or better.

Card	What it can be
1	Caps, always
2	A weapon or armour, 9.2 percent rare or legendary on the weapon side, or a pet at 2.9 percent
3	Water, food or power at about 18 percent each, a Stimpak or RadAway at the same, Nuka-Cola Quantum at 8.8
4	Junk, mostly rare or legendary
5	A rare dweller at 21.2 percent, a legendary at 3.8, caps at 32.5, Mr. Handy at 0.2

The shop sells one for 0.99 dollars and forty for 19.99. The free sources are objectives, quests from the overseer’s office, bodies in the wasteland, and the seventh daily report in a row, which is always a lunchbox. A vault that logs in every day gets one a week that way. That is the pace the game wants, and every cheat on this page is a way of not accepting it.

The trainer, and why every switch is free

The Fallout Shelter trainer lists 20 cheats, and all 20 are free. Of the hundred games we cover, only a handful have a fully free list, and the reason here is the game: a free-to-play title whose only price is patience does not carry a premium tier well.

What the twenty do is the daily report, done at once. Plus 1,000 bottle caps, plus 100 food, energy and water, plus 10 Nuka-Cola Quantum, plus one Stimpak and one RadAway per press, and infinite resources in the conversion screen. The three bars that a growing vault keeps outrunning are three switches.

The rest is the parts of the game that punish you. No rush failure and no room disaster take the two random setbacks off the table. Dweller max stats, dweller godmode, one-hit kills on quests, faster attacks and a fast critical charge cover the fights. Instantly reach quests and instant quest return remove the walk, which for a far quest is real-world hours. Then three spawn cheats that create a dweller and set the gender and rarity of the one that arrives, which is the fifth lunchbox card without the 3.8 percent.

There is no lunchbox cheat, and it does not need one. Everything a lunchbox contains is on the list individually.

Save editor or trainer

The save editor if you want one specific change, once, and are comfortable uploading the file and restoring a backup if it goes wrong. It is free and it is thorough.

The trainer if you would rather change the number in the running game and watch it land, keep cloud sync on, and never touch the save folder. It is also free, all of it.

Either way the vault stays yours. Fallout Shelter has no multiplayer, so the only person you can cheat is the timer.