10+10 Tips for Fallout Shelter

I've been playing for roughly 3 weeks now, and on my third vault I've figured everything out. In just under two weeks I'm at 84 occupants in my third vault, and roughly a day from reaching 100, which will grant me access to built the Nuka-Cola Bottler, the highest level space in Fallout Shelter. At that point there's little incentive to continue. I'm just left with writing down my strategy tips for the game.

So here are my 10 long tips:

1. When your population reaches certain milestones, the game is rigged to screw with you and destroy your population back down with an improbable event; if you try to rebuild it rapidly, it'll crush you again. It's happened to me three times in two vaults. I figured out how to stop these issues -- see #9. If you hate these sorts of cynical setbacks, don't start playing -- see #2.
2. When you get past 60 occupants, the Deathclaws start raiding your vault, and are extremely difficult to eradicate. They will descend upon multiple levels and several rooms, before you can kill them off. Before you hit the 60 occupant level, make sure that you've built enough labs to store 40+ stimpacks. Three times now, the game has tried to screw with me and send two packs of Deathclaws in 15 minutes, making it practically impossible to survive unless you've stocked up on Stimpacks. You can sort of cheat the storage limits, by first maximizing the number of Stimpacks you've got in storage, then holding off on redeeming the newly produced Stimpacks -- a 2-room merged lab fully upgraded will produce 9 Stimpacks at a time.
3. There is a way to rapidly build up your Caps, fuel, food and water: flip to the game and collect your rewards, then quickly turn your device off, wait a minute, turn it back on to the game, and collect your rewards, etc. This is useful when you're in the red in any given resource. When you run low, it's easier to "Rush" the production of a resource, if you've raised the level of a room's occupant's Luck. Game rooms build Luck abilities of your occupants.
4. Don't send people out to explore the wasteland until you have two guns and two sets of wasteland gear or some sort of armor. You will always want to keep at least one gun and armor in the vault at all times, in the beginning.
5. If your explorer dies out in the wasteland, you can restore them, but it costs a bit, so make sure you have caps on hand -- budget for 500 caps if your explorer is at a high level; just 150 if they're on the lower levels. The stimpacks and radaways are used so that your explorer can stay out in the wasteland for longer periods of time. You need roughly 5 Stimpacks for every 1 Radaway, allowing you to stay out for 8-10 hours at a time (in real time). The longer they're out, the more stuff they collect -- I send them out with 10 Stimpacks and 2 Radaways, allow them to die, then revive them and recall them, thus maximizing their collection of stuff. The higher the Endurance (the "E" in SPECIAL attributes), the longer they'll last.
6. Vault door upgrades buy you extra time to react to the warning that raiders or Deathclaws are coming your way. Ridiculously, the raiders somehow still steal your resources even though you successfully kill them. The warning time for Deathclaws, even when your door is fully upgraded, is very short, so I use a nearby room to stock it with two occupants with the strongest weapons and armor.
7. There is an ideal configuration for elevators: Space them apart by 3 rooms in-between -- anything less is inconvenient and anything more limits the number of rooms per level. You will destroy many rooms as you move up, but you can minimize this by making sure that you keep the portion of your structure that isn't between the two elevators, planned for two of the same types of rooms -- upgrading merged rooms is cheaper than multiple individual rooms. For instance, if two single rooms cost you 9,000 Caps each to upgrade, when they're merged they cost you just 13,500 Caps to upgrade.
8. For safety reasons, you will want to keep most living quarters as single units, upgraded to the hilt, one on each level, in between the elevators. This is the room where pregnant occupants will flee to, when the raiders come or a Radroach invasion, etc. If you place them on a dead-end section, the pregnant women will endure some damage before they're able to flee.
9. Ideally you should keep one man in each room that is used to replenish water, power, food, Stimpacks and Radaways. All pregnant occupants run away to the living quarters when there's an invasion or a fire; this makes it tough to defeat a fire if you have to enlist a next door occupant. If you take too much time trying to get another occupant to the room that is affected, the invasion or fire will spread.
10. In the beginning, keep the closest room to the vault's entrance stocked with one occupant wearing armor and carrying a weapon. As you gain more weapons and armor, arm and clothe more of your occupants. When all of your occupants are armed and clothed in specialty clothing, don't stop; you want to keep sending out people to the wasteland to collect better clothes and weapons. Once you've armed everyone, you can start selling the least powerful weapons to try to keep your storage size requirements in check.

+10 short tips:

1. Aim for those Lunchboxes, which contain Cards with lots of goodies.
2. Select a group of occupants to raise a particular attribute (SPECIAL), then rotate them in and out of the training rooms to raise that attribute.
3. Don't forget to check your Daily Report -- it has Caps to collect.
4. Your Missions are how you achieve big chunks of Caps and collect Lunchboxes (other than buying them); you can dismiss one, per day, if they're too difficult.
5. When resources (water, food) go into the red, your occupants show red in their stats (a reduction in capacity of vitals) -- Radaways reduce this.
6. All new occupants / new adults have 50% Happiness levels; assigning them to a room raises it, but the ceiling is 75% Happiness; to reach 100% requires sex via assigning them to living rooms.
7. If pregnant women seem to take too long to get to births, check the capacity of your living areas; when you don't have enough living capacity, it prevents births from occurring.
8. Don't expand your structure faster than the number of occupants can support it -- patience is a virtue.
9. If you add two people who are related, into a living room to mate, they will let you know by saying, "It's nice to hang out with family".
10. The number on the gear shaped icon is the number of occupants; click on it and all your occupants show up; sort them by clicking on the top of each aisle.

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Update: It took just a day to jump from 84 to 102, via baby boom, and I got to that Nuka-Cola Bottler -- I built three rooms connected together. As a result of reaching the end point (I've decided to continue a bit to see how I can maximize efficiency and organization), I've got 5 more tips:

1. When you reach the upper levels of the game, as you build new rooms, the price goes up.
2. Locate your best weapons and the occupants with the highest levels and highest Endurance, at the top levels -- these are the folks who'll face the Deathclaws first.
3. A handful of times now, Deathclaw raids have come when I had just provisioned an occupant with a bunch of Stimpacks on their way to the wasteland. I've already written about how to maximize your Stimpacks beyond storage capacity, and this is just one more reason why.
4. The Nuka-Cola Bottler requires occupants with high Endurance, and coproduces food and water resources, making them extremely efficient.
5. The importance of SPECIAL attributes changes as you move up in the game. In the beginning, Strength, Perception and Agility matter most; in the middle stages Charisma, Intelligence and Luck matter more; in the upper stages, you've already built up attributes for all the spaces you need, making Endurance the only attribute to matter, as it serves to displace Perception and Agility when you build Nuka-Cola Bottler rooms.

Reached 100 occupants and built my Nuka-Cola Bottler rooms (3) in the middle.