When you first start playing Fallout Shelter, the game provides your initial starting dwellers, most of them arrive during the starting tutorial. A few arrive after that, but soon any new dwellers will stop appearing and more dwellers will rarely come to your vault door after you have 20 dwellers. So how do you get people to come to the vault?
How do I attract more Dwellers?
When your vault has 20 dwellers, you can build a radio station. The radio station will attract new dwellers from the wasteland.
The attraction rate is low, and effectiveness will depend on assigned dwellers’ charisma (the C stat in SPECIAL). With max charisma and max dwellers you may attract a dweller in 4 hours, however with lower stats it can take days. No dwellers will be attracted with minimum dweller charisma.
Get Dwellers the old fashioned way
If you don’t have 20 dwellers yet, or you don’t want to wait for each dweller to appear, then breeding is a more reliable method. Place a man and a women dweller in the living quarters, eventually they will do the thing and a pregnant lady will emerge.
Pregnancy last three hours, and then the child takes another three hours to become an adult. The advantage is, an adult is guaranteed within a certain time frame and you can have multiple pregnant dwellers at the same time.
A word of caution to not over do it. Don’t gain too many dwellers too quickly, as you will not have enough food, water, and power to supply them. Gain dwellers slowly and get more bottle caps for building and upgrading rooms.