Fallout Shelter Radio Studio: What It Does & Is It Worth Building?

Fallout Shelter’s Radio Studio is a versatile room that can do many things for your vault. In addition to attracting dwellers, it can also raise the happiness of a vault.

There are a few downsides though.

It can attract enemies when not staffed properly, and the dwellers it attracts will only have 1-2 points in each SPECIAL stat.

Compared to pregnancies, the Radio Studio may not be as useful. And looking at this room overall, the Radio Studio isn’t a beneficial addition for most people.

But if you’re interested in building your dwellers from the ground-up, this could be a great option for you to build.

Upgrading The Radio Studio

When you upgrade your Radio Studio, it’ll only help to ensure that everything we cover in this article is maximized (or minimized, if you choose not to upgrade).

That said, it is recommended to have your Radio Studio fully upgraded.

Here’s the cost for total rooms and the upgrade:

Attracting Dwellers

When the Radio Studio is switched to broadcasting into the wasteland, it can attract dwellers.

If you click on the room, you’ll see a timer. This timer shows when a dweller should arrive at your vault door.

This might not always happen, though. The probability of attracting a dweller is based on the level of your Radio Studio. This means having a fully upgraded studio is always better.

Also, this timer caps at 2 hours at the lowest. It can take longer, but it fully depends on how many dwellers you have in the Radio Studio.

And this perk only works as long as there are dwellers assigned to the Radio Studio.

If you decide you don’t want to attract any more dwellers, you can switch the Radio Studio to only broadcast inside the vault. This will help increase happiness even though it won’t be attracting dwellers.

Increasing Happiness With A Radio Studio

When the Radio Studio is active, it increases the overall happiness of dwellers in your vault. The Radio Studio can be set to either wasteland or vault for this to work.

Having it set to wasteland will help attract dwellers and increase happiness. But if it’s set to wasteland it may also attract enemies.

Having it set to vault will only help increase happiness. This setting will also stop the Radio Studio’s ability to attract dwellers and enemies, so it’s a little safer, but with the tradeoff of no new dwellers coming in.

And just like when you’re attracting dwellers from the Radio Studio, you need to have dwellers assigned to the Radio Studio to increase happiness across the vault (even if it’s set to vault only).

Attracting Enemies

When the Radio Studio is active and set to wasteland, it does have one downside:

In some cases when you reach the end of the timer, instead of attracting a dweller it can attract enemies.

These enemies are most often raiders and deathclaws.

But having your Radio Studio fully upgraded will help decrease this chance.

And having your Studio staffed with high Charisma dwellers also helps to decrease the chances of enemies coming in.

Make sure to have your dwellers armed if you decide to set the Radio Studio to wasteland, just to be safe.

Low Stat Dwellers

The dwellers that do arrive at your vault door will have low stats in each SPECIAL category.

This means that for them to be useful, you’ll have to train them using any of the training rooms.

In some cases this can be beneficial to some players, since it means you have a blank slate to train the stats that you need.

For others, it may be wasteful because you won’t be able to place the dwellers in rooms that are beneficial without training first. Here’s a table you can reference for which rooms train which stats:

Radio Studio vs. Pregnancies

With pregnancies, you only get 1 ready-to-work dweller in 6 hours.

This is because it takes 3 hours for the dweller to be birthed, and another 3 for the dweller to age from birth to adulthood.

With the Radio Studio, you’d be able to get 3 ready-to-work dwellers in those 6 hours.

1 new dweller every 2 hours.

However, you’ll need to train the dwellers that you gain from Radio Studio. If you don’t, they won’t be beneficial to whatever room you put them in.

So using the Radio Room to increase dwellers can increase the total amount of time it takes to have a useful dweller. For example, to train a dweller from Level 2 in a stat up to a reasonable level 6, it could take as short as 14 hours, or as long as 16 hours.

How long it takes fully depends on how upgraded your training room is.

The base rooms will take longer, and full upgrades will reduce that time.

Is The Radio Studio Worth Building?

The Radio Studio offers many beneficial aspects, but the downsides can outweigh these, especially if you compare it to pregnancy (specifically for increasing dwellers.)

If you like to build your dwellers from the ground up, the Radio Studio is definitely a good choice.

If you need a quick fix to get a few more dwellers for an important room, or to staff a few rooms, the Radio Studio could be for you as well.

But if you want to save time and have dwellers start with high SPECIAL stats right away, then the Radio Studio probably isn’t worth it.