Base Building
Designing a base that survives horde night, not just looks nice
Location matters as much as design
- Elevated or water-adjacent terrain reduces how much building you need to do to be defensible.
- A base near the edge of a biome you like (e.g. Forest/Desert border) can give access to two resource sets without constant travel — see World & Biomes.
- Leave yourself an escape route. A base that traps you in with the horde if defenses fail is worse than no base at all.
Core design principle: the kill lane
A single, narrow, obvious entrance that funnels zombies into a corridor you control beats a sprawling open structure every time. Zombies path toward the shortest route to you — use that against them by making the "shortest route" run through a corridor lined with traps, turrets, or a fighting position, not through your storage room.
Traps aren't obstacles — they're speed bumps. A single-height trap (one row of spikes, a blade trap at floor level) doesn't register as a "wall" to zombie AI at all — they walk straight through it and take the damage, they don't stop to fight it. Only genuine walls (or a trap stacked to two-plus tiles) actually block a path. That means a trap line by itself will never hold a horde back on its own — it only softens what gets to your actual wall. Plan traps as damage-over-distance, not as the wall itself.
Material progression, with real durability numbers
| Material | Block HP | Notes |
|---|
| Wood | 500 | Cheap and fast, but won't hold past the first few horde nights. Fine as a stopgap, not a plan. |
| Cobblestone | 1,500 | A real jump once you're mining regularly — three times wood. |
| Concrete | 5,000 | Needs a cement mixer. More than three times cobblestone, and where most solid mid-game bases land. |
| Steel | 10,000 | The top tier — double concrete and twenty times wood. Prioritize it wherever the horde hits hardest. |
These are the values for the building blocks you actually place and upgrade in 3.0. The game files also contain older block materials with different numbers (including reinforced concrete and stainless steel), but those aren't part of the 3.0 building upgrade path, so the real progression is these four tiers. Want to plan a base before committing the resources in-game? The Base Designer uses these exact numbers with every real shape, and the 2D wave simulator can throw a horde at a simple layout.
Defensive layers, with real numbers
- Wood Spikes — 33 damage per zombie that walks over them, but they wear out fast: 300 total durability across their three visible damage stages, so roughly 9 zombies before a row is gone for good.
- Iron Spikes — same 33 damage, but 600 total durability — about double a wood row's lifespan for the upgrade cost.
- Blade Trap — 20 damage per pass, 2,000 durability in one continuous pool (no stages), and genuinely takes up a real 3×3 footprint, not a single tile — plan the space accordingly. It also needs 20 power to run at all; without a generator or battery bank feeding it, it's just decoration.
- Turrets (once unlocked) can hold a lane on their own but need ammo and power — don't rely on them exclusively.
- Fall damage traps (drops onto spikes, moats) are a low-maintenance way to damage zombies passively.
The Demolisher is the one thing worth over-building for. Its charge detonates when it's hit directly — typically by your own gunfire — with a 5-block blast that deals 5,000 block damage, enough to erase a concrete block outright. The game files disable its low-health explosion, so a Demolisher that dies to your traps without its charge being hit doesn't detonate. That makes it a positioning problem: shoot the charge while it's well away from anything you need, and don't let one reach your walls intact. It also flattens spike traps it walks over. As of V3.2, hits from non-host players on a dedicated server reliably trigger the charge — before that patch they sometimes didn't.
If you're playing multiplayer
A Land Claim Block (LCB) protects your build area — but be clear on what it actually does before counting on it for horde night. Its durability bonus and offline protection are specifically about other players raiding your base, not zombies, and its zombie-spawn suppression explicitly does not apply on Blood Moon night. A claim keeps griefers and randoms out; it does nothing to make your walls survive the horde any better. See Multiplayer & Servers for how claims work and how many you're allowed on our server.
Common mistakes
- Building the whole base out of one material tier and never upgrading — mix in your best material at the specific point a Demolisher is likely to hit, even if the rest is still cobblestone.
- Treating a trap line as the wall itself, then being surprised when a horde walks straight through it. The trap slows and damages; the wall behind it is what actually stops them.
- Placing a powered trap (Blade Trap, turrets) with no generator or battery bank nearby — it just sits there doing nothing until it's wired up.
- No escape route. If the base is compromised, you want a way out that isn't through the horde.