[Updated: Nov. 13] Fallout Shelter abnormally long cool down timer for ad rewards issue acknowledged, fix in the works

New updates are being added at the bottom of this story…….

Original story (published on August 16, 2021) follows:

If you are a gamer, you must have heard about the Fallout franchise at some point in time.

Fallout Shelter is the mobile version of the game and is totally different from its PC counterpart. It is a base-building game where the main objective is to build a large number of underground rooms that are filled with vault dwellers.

The developer of the game, Bethesda, is the same studio that brought us the likes of Fallout 76, a game criticized in the gaming community for its number of bugs and issues.

As expected, there are some hilarious bugs that make their way to Fallout Shelter as well. Like every other mobile game out there, players are able to gain additional rewards by watching ads.

The latest bug concerns the ad timer when trying to collect these rewards. Players are reporting for quite some time that the ad reward timer has a long cool down.

And by long, we mean a couple of hundred hours for some players while for others the cooldown lasts thousands of hours.

@bethesda @BethesdaSupport Hey Bethesda, is it normal for the cooldown on my optional ad boost to be over 15,000 hours? Seems excessive. Fallout Shelter developers have also pinned a thread on the game’s subreddit telling users how to fix the ad reward timer bug.
(Source)

[Vault] I always played the console version of this game, so not used to these optional ads. But why is this cool down so long?
(Source)

Bethesda has also posted a solution in the Fallout Shelter official subreddit that involves backing up the save on the cloud and reinstalling the game.

Nonetheless, the fix is reported to be not working for the majority of users.

Players say that even though they back up their progress to the cloud, they are losing progress when they re-install the game.

Just had it happen to me too. I saved my game to the cloud, deleted and re installed. It fixed but I lost a bunch of progress, at least a day or 2s worth and honestly don’t even feel like playing anymore.
(Source)

Yea, it happened to me. The best way to fix it is to have the game installed on a couple of devices, phone, tablet. (Happened on both my devices by the way). Have the game running on one, delete and reinstall on the other, then load from the cloud. That way you won’t loose any progress.(Source)

We want to remind you that this is not the first time the bug has made an appearance.

Bethesda has officially acknowledged the bug three times to date, with reports dating back to October 2020, followed by an acknowledgment in January this year.

The developers also updated the support page in April 2021. Since then, Bethesda has not fixed the bug and has again acknowledged the issue. The company says they have no idea when the bug will be fixed.

Players seem to be really angry with Bethesda’s ignorance. We hope the game developers find a solution to the Fallout Shelter ad reward timer bug once and for all.

09:35 am (IST): Many players are still reporting (1, 2, 3) the ad timer glitch with Fallout Shelter where ad timer is showing a long wait time.

Bethesda Support has again acknowledged this issue and said that they aren’t able to adjust the timer. Also, there is no ETA provided by the support as to when it will be resolved.

Meanwhile, there’s a workaround that can temporarily help the affected gamers to resolve this bug.

If you have two different android devices and one of them has glitched so that you have some ridiculous amount of time on your ad timers, simply save the game to the cloud, then start it up on the other device. Once you have the same game up on the other device, reinstall FOS on your main device and then reboot the same vault from the cloud. This should also sort of allow you to do three ad timers in a row, which is sort of an exploit, however inconvenient. (Source)

Note: We have more such stories in our dedicated Gaming Section so be sure to follow them as well.

Featured image source: Bethesda

PiunikaWeb started as purely an investigative tech journalism website with main focus on ‘breaking’ or ‘exclusive’ news. In no time, our stories got picked up by the likes of Forbes, Foxnews, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, Macrumors, and many others. Want to know more about us? Head here.