A good base forces the raider to spend time and explosives before it spends your life. The goal is not to be unraidable — it is to make the raid cost more than the loot inside.
Airlock: the cheapest defense
A single entrance door leaves you exposed every time you open it and invites door-camping. An airlock is a small two- or three-door vestibule: the inner door protects you while you close the outer one. Nearly free, and it removes the most common cause of death.
Honeycomb: multiply the wall
Honeycomb is sealed cells added around your core walls, so a raider must blow through several walls instead of one. But every extra cell raises upkeep — honeycomb only your weak sides, not everything.
Deep honeycomb can raise upkeep 5-10x. Scale it to your online time and how much you gather.
Upkeep: keeping the base alive
The Tool Cupboard (TC) drains a percentage of the base's total build cost per in-game day (24h). As the base grows the rate scales in tiers (~10%/day for small, up to 33% for large). Upkeep is paid in each tier's own material: stone walls burn stone, sheet metal burns metal fragments, armored burns HQM. Twig has no upkeep.
If the TC runs dry the base starts to decay. Rough destruction times:
| Material | Wall HP | Decay (TC empty) |
|---|---|---|
| Twig | 10 | ~1 hour |
| Wood | 250 | ~3 hours |
| Stone | 500 | ~5 hours |
| Sheet Metal | 1000 | ~8 hours |
| Armored (HQM) | 2000 | ~12 hours |
Raid costs: what breaks what?
To defend well, know the price of attacking. These are the widely accepted figures; rocket ranges reflect the soft (interior) vs hard (exterior) side of a wall.
| Structure | HP | C4 | Rockets |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sheet Metal Door | 250 | 1 | 3 |
| Garage Door | 600 | 3 | 3 |
| Armored Door | 800 | 4 | — |
| Stone Wall | 500 | ~2 | 3-4 |
| Sheet Metal Wall | 1000 | ~4 | 8-11 |
| Armored Wall | 2000 | 8 | 11-15 |
A garage door is 600 HP and opens to 3 C4 (not 2). Some calculators show 2 — that is wrong.
Avoid one failure point
Do not keep TC, explosives, weapons and valuable ore in the same room. Split loot so even a successful raid does not take everything. With the shell ready, read the electricity guide for automated defense; if you play solo, see the compact-base logic in the solo guide.