Fallout Shelter: Introduction

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Getting started

The first release of Fallout Shelter is in English for Palm OS. We will follow it up with other languages, other operating systems, and more features. If you have any preferences, let us know.

We wanted the first release to be for handheld computers so that you could easily have Fallout Shelter with you at all times. The Palm and Palm-compatible computers are cheaper than Pocket PC devices (there are Palm models under $100), and the batteries last weeks instead of hours. This guided tour will focus on the features that Fallout Shelter has on Palm OS. The other versions will have similar or greater capabilities.

Whenever possible, we leverage what you already know from using the built-in Palm OS applications. If you're new to Palm computers, don't worry; a lot of sweat went into making them easy to learn and easy to use.

The Palm Address Book presents a list of addresses. When you tap on an address, you're switched to a read-only view of that address's details. Since Palm felt that you'd be looking up addresses far more often than you'd be changing them, they added an extra step (tapping on Edit) before you can edit the address.

Fallout Shelter differs from this approach in a couple respects.

First, instead of just one list, there are four major lists of items — weapons, targets, locations, and attacks. Therefore, the first screen shown is a table of contents. Tap on the list you want to see. They appear in the sequence in which you'd likely use them, followed by Effects. You can work in a different order if you like, but the later steps are dependent on information from earlier steps.

In a list view, items start out sorted in a default order. You can change this order with Edit | Sort. With Options | Font and Options | Preferences you can further customize Fallout Shelter's appearance and behavior.

By default, a list view shows all records. As in the Address Book, you can restrict which records are shown by choosing a category from the dropdown in the upper-right corner of the screen.

Tap on a record to edit it. We dropped the extra step of the read-only view that the Address Book. We expect that most of the time you are accessing the details of a record because you want to change them.

Another place we veer from Palm OS standards is in our help system. It's more comprehensive than the minimal help that Palm programs usually have.

Accuracy

Fallout Shelter is intended to assist you in preparing your family, business, or community for the consequences of a nuclear attack. However, it should not be relied on exclusively. While we are committed to delivering quality software, all software has defects. (If you find any in Fallout Shelter, please let us know, especially if you believe you have found a bug that affects the product's accuracy.)

Moreover, even if our software could be provably bug-free, it is limited to the data that is publicly available on nuclear weapons effects. And even the best classified information available to the U. S. Government has significant limitations. There are many factors that affect the precise weapons effects you might experience, including (but hardly limited to) precise wind direction and velocity, humidity, temperature, air density, and visibility at all points in the atmosphere between you and the blast, the exact terrain and soil composition, the precise construction of all objects and structures, the accuracy of guidance systems, the effectiveness of any defensive measures taken, the weapon's composition, the enemy's targeting strategy, and your exact location, body position, health, gender, age, and clothing.

So why bother? We believe that, potential inaccuracies and all, conservative use of Fallout Shelter may save lives — maybe yours — by alerting you to the specific hazards you might face, so you can take steps to safeguard against them.

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