verb (used with object), cheesed, chees·ing.
1. (in a game, especially a video game) to win by using a strategy that requires minimal skill and knowledge or that exploits a glitch or flaw in game design:
He cheesed the fight by trapping his enemy in the environment and attacking without taking damage.

I am a simple man - I enjoy Fallout, idle games, and achievements. When I saw Fallout Shelter in my discovery queue I thought to myself "now that looks like a game for me". And in the interest of fairness, it was - I think this is a very good and enjoyable game for what it is, which is a PC port of a mobile game. I had a lot of fun with it when I first started playing. However, after a few weeks I took a look at my achievement progress to get a feel for where I was at and immediately noticed something amiss. Although I had made pretty decent progress on the achievements for legendary weapons and legendary outfits (roughly halfway there on both), I had only found two legendary Dwellers, one of which was a guaranteed drop from a starter pack. At this point I had sunk around $40 into the game, so I'd opened quite a few crates already. Was I doing something wrong? Was there another way of getting legendary Dwellers that I had overlooked?

Wanting to get to the bottom of things, I did some research online, and I discovered that not only was the only feasible way to get the 20 legendary Dwellers required for the achievement getting them from lunchboxes, but it was also taking people 500, 600, even 700 lunchboxes to get all 20. That means that even if you were buying the lunchboxes on sale, it would cost a minimum of $125 to unlock the achievement. Either that, or play every day for years to grind them out for free. Luckily, there was another way.

So, we know now that this game was designed so that 100% achievement completion would take years of time investment or the judicious application of hundreds of real life dollars in order to complete. Personally, I think that is incredibly scummy - I don't mind MTX in games, especially free to play games, but real money should always just contribute a convenience factor, it shouldn't be essentially required for game completion, and definitely not in such large amounts. If you had to sink $20-40 dollars into it for a more optimal experience, fine, but to expect people to spend hundreds of dollars is not cool, which is why I have prepared a guide to show you how to spend exactly zero dollars instead.

The key to cracking open these achievements is to realize that most of the achievements in Fallout Shelter are somehow time-gated, and that it uses your system clock rather than a server clock to calculate said time. That means we can abuse the date setting on our machine to skip all of the time/money obstacles in the game. To start on the path to a cheesy 100%, we are going to begin by starting a fresh vault, going through the initial tutorial, and then using our system clock to move forwards and backwards a week at a time in order to claim the free weekly lunchbox around 500-700 times, as shown in the gif below.



Now, this is a pretty miserable process, but it does go pretty quickly. When I timed myself I was able to get around 200 in half an hour, so it shouldn't take more than two or three hours to go through the entire process. That said, I still recommend breaking it up into smaller chunks. It's a good idea to do this on a fresh vault because you will get fewer status messages, loads will be faster, and the process will be a lot more streamlined in general. You can even kick all of your starting dwellers out of your vault for this part (you won't need them). Once you have your lunchboxes ready, you can start working on the actual achievements.

All of the achievements in this section you will get in the process of opening your lunchbox bounty.

IMPORTANT: one thing that will be an issue during this initial process is storage space. If you get too many items you will be prevented from scrapping anything until you are under capacity again, costing you valuable progress towards the Scraptastic achievement. Scrap as you go and sell the junk, you will have no shortage of items and materials down the line so don't worry about saving them now.

First off, achievements for collecting caps. You will already have these first two achievements from the daily caps reward you get that leads to the lunchbox at the end of the week.



As I mentioned above, you should also be scrapping weapons/armor from the boxes as you go in order to unlock the following achievement.



Lastly, we have a trio of achievements related to collecting legendary rewards, including the achievement that motivated this entire guide for collecting 20 legendary Dwellers.



As you work through this initial section, feel free to recruit the Dwellers (legendary and otherwise) that you get from the boxes and slowly start to expand your vault with extra living quarters or storage rooms as you accumulate more money. You will eventually need 100 Dwellers to unlock the final room type, so it doesn't hurt to start now. By the time you get the last achievement in this section, you should have tons of caps, a good roster of Dwellers, and plenty of resources to go forward with. Hopefully you also managed to finish with some lunch boxes to spare, so if you need an extra boost down the line you can get it easily. Also, if you are at all interested in playing the game legitimately, you could easily stop following this guide at this stage and just play normally. Blast from the Past is the only achievement that really is just too annoying to get in ordinary play, so you could treat this whole preamble as just a nice starting boost for enjoying the rest of the game and achieving completion more casually. If you want to cheese it all the way though, by all means keep going.

The next group of achievements are all related to building up your Vault and taking certain actions inside of it, which will mostly be pretty straightforward but you may want to use some system clock trickery here to speed up a couple time-gates.

First things first, you are going to want to set up some decent food, water, and energy production for your vault. You should be swimming in cash from all of the lunchboxes you opened and junk that you sold, so money shouldn't be an issue for the rest of your play through. Build a three-width diner, power generator, and water treatment plant and upgrade them to level 3. You'll unlock the following achievements.



Next, just start going through the list of rooms and building all of the ones you have unlocked as well as upgrading them to level 3, adding additional facilities for water/food/power as needed. Certain rooms like medbays and science labs are also worth building as larger merged rooms so you have plenty of stimpacks and rad-away for later.

As you build out your vault, keep an eye out for easy objectives you can complete to start making some early progress towards the 100 objectives achievement. Use your free cancels whenever you can to get rid of long and annoying objectives. You'll be glad you did in the long run.

Now is a good time to work on your baby-making since you will need to get up to 100 Dwellers to unlock the last room. Similarly to how we got the lunchboxes, we can again abuse the system clock here to keep skipping forward a day so that Dwellers inside living quarters get pregnant faster. Once 25 babies have been born in your Vault, you'll get this achievement.



On your way to building all rooms, you should unlock the following achievement naturally.



And, if you've been good about upgrading as you go you'll probably get this one, too.



Depending on how exactly you build out your Vault, you may not hit 50 total rooms by the time you unlock the last room, so if you have the Nuka-Cola bottler unlocked and you don't have this yet, go ahead and finish it now.



Finish building the last unlocked room, and you should unlock the following achievement and be finished with building out your Vault.



Now that you have all of your rooms, we can use the workshops to get the crafting-related achievements. You should have more than enough Nuka-Cola Quantam to unlock a single theme recipe to craft, the rest you can get later from quests. Use the system clock to skip the waiting time on crafting items.



Just a couple more tasks to do and then you are in the end game. First, you need to do 50 room rushes - these get substantially easier if you have sufficiently skilled Dwellers. Using the same day skipping method we used for lunchboxes and babies, you can rapidly level up Dwellers' S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats. Train 3-4 Dwellers to maximum intelligence and throw them into a two-room medbay, they should be able to rush with only a 10% chance of failure, allowing you to quickly earn this achievement.



Lastly, send ten Dwellers to the barber shop to get the last achievement for this section.

Okay, you've come this far, now for the longest and most tedious part - doing quests. You'll need to do a total of 100 quests in order to earn all of the achievements, and they are a bit of a slog. Even going quickly and skipping wait times with your system clock (time skipping is going to be your best friend here if you don't want to play daily for at least a month), you are looking at probably a 10-15 hour time investment to knock out all the quests you need. Brace yourself, and find a few good videos or movies or podcasts to see you through.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves - quests have level requirements associated with them and they can get pretty tough if you don't have competent teams, so before we do any quests we are going to want to go ahead and get 9 of our Dwellers up to max S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats using training rooms and time skipping with the system clock, and then power level them up to 50 by sending them into the Wasteland with 15-20 stimpacks and skipping forward a day at a time. With a fully upgraded Overseer Office, you can have three quests at a time active, each with a team of up to three Dwellers, hence why we are training up 9 elite residents to be our questing workhorses. The first one you get up to 50 will unlock an achievement, as well as a couple prior achievements if you haven't got them already.



A couple more things to keep in mind before we start for real: first, some quests require specific outfits or weapons in order to attempt. If you've already scrapped everything you need for Scraptastic (and you should have a long time ago by now), try to keep as wide of a selection of weapons and outfits as possible so you don't get locked out of taking these quests.

Second, alongside 100 quests we also need to complete 100 objectives. A lot of the possible objectives are a huge pain, so when you skip ahead in time to skip waiting for quests, use your free daily objective cancel to get rid of annoying ones. You can also use Nuka-Cola Quantum to skip objectives, but the cost to do so goes up rapidly, so make sure you don't use it more than once or twice between time skips. Hopefully you've already got some objectives completed while getting to this point, so if you stay on top of it, you should be able to finish around the same time you finish your quest rush.

This is your life for the next several hours. Send out three teams of Dwellers on quests, skip forward a day to get to the quest destinations instantly, do the three quests, skip forward another day to get them back, repeat. Every time you skip a day, check your objectives, do the easy/short ones and skip the long/hard ones. While you are on quests, make sure to loot as many enemies and containers as possible for another passive achievement. Eventually, you will earn the following achievements.



And if you've been doing your objectives, this one shouldn't be far behind.



You'll also get a bunch of achievements passively just by doing the required quests. Quest boss kills will come naturally and relatively early on.



Ditto enemies, you will routine encounter double digit enemies within a single quest.



This one is a little more questionable in terms of whether you are guaranteed to get it in 100 quests, but if you end up being short, the weekly quest Game Show Gauntlet can be repeated to rapidly get however many dialogue choices you are missing.



And to finish off the questing set we have another one that you should just get naturally as long as you are good about looting containers and enemies while on quests. This one is helped by having Dwellers with high intelligence, so it's another good reason to have all of their stats maxed out before starting to do quests.



Almost there, and now the hardest part is done. Time for a victory lap to mop up the last few achievements.

All right, let's wrap it up.

In the process of slogging out 100 quests, you should find most of the theme fragments you need to craft them all. Anything you haven't found yet you can just buy with the rest of your Nuka-Cola Quantum. Again, use the system clock to skip the wait time on crafting the themes. Once you have made them all, you will get your achievement.



All right, we're almost there. One more achievement and you are done. For this, you are going to want to evict all of your Dwellers except for your 29 highest level/best equipped. This is because the number of Dwellers in your Vault is what determines what kind of attacks and incidents take place. Attacks from ghouls or deathclaws don't count towards progress on this last achievement, it has to be raiders, and by getting your vault down to 29 Dwellers you will only ever get raider attacks. Once you've kicked out most of your residents, let the game idle overnight or while you are at work. Your remaining Dwellers should wipe the floor with any attackers, and you will stop 50 attacks no problem.



And that's it. You have officially gotten 100% achievement completion in Fallout Shelter the cheesy way, and if you followed along correctly it should have only taken you a week tops without you ever having to crack open your wallet. If you found the guide helpful, make sure to rate it. Happy hunting.