Guide:Bases

A base can be loosely defined as an area that contains a player's NPCs, crafting stations, and storage chests, all housed together for convenience. It can be built as crudely or as lavishly as you see fit, as long as it contains those three essential elements.

In singleplayer, it is recommended to build your base near the world's original spawn point. This allows you to easily respawn or teleport to your base before you have access to Beds.

NPC Houses
A NPC house is an enclosed structure which NPCs will move in. As houses can share walls, floors, ceilings and doors, multiple NPC houses usually become rooms within a larger building.

NPC houses can be built from any obtainable Blocks, as long as there are no more than 250 Corruption or Crimson blocks nearby.

NPCs might have trouble defending against enemies, so players will need to make sure that enemies cannot access NPC houses. For example:
 * You can place a furniture item against the inside of your doors to keep enemies from breaking in.
 * Building NPC houses at least 7 tiles above the ground is the easiest way to defend NPCs from Wraiths at night during Hardmode.

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Bedroom
A base should also include a room containing a Bed in which the player will spawn in upon death or when using a Recall Potion, Magic Mirror, Ice Mirror, or Cell Phone. You can also transform this room in a NPC house for the Nurse if this room is located near to an arena, which allows the player to quickly restore their health and remove debuffs during major fights, or to restore health completely once you respawn after death.

It is also important to be able to quickly exit a bedroom, as it is in your best interest to lure bosses away from the Nurse and your other vulnerable NPCs.

Crafting Area
A base should also include a crafting area in which the Player can craft items. This area should contain the most-used crafting stations like the Work Bench, Furnace, Anvil, Placed Bottle and Tinkerer's Workshop. Additionally, it's useful to assign the Guide to the crafting area, as this will allow the player to look up recipes for items.

Please note that putting all crafting stations together has the downside of forcing the player to scroll through every potential crafting option to find the one that they need. You can check the expanded table instead (by pressing the Hammer button in ).

Storage
As you gather loot from your adventures, you will eventually exceed your inventory capacity, which will require you to use Storage items like Chests. Using a variety of different containers can help you recall where you stored certain items, as can using decorative items, statues, signs, or renaming them. Usually players put similar types of items into the same containers (for example: "Building Materials", "Crafting Ingredients", "Ammunition", "Potion Ingredients", "Ores and Gems"). Some players may even wish to integrate their crafting area to provide a sort of structure. It is wise to avoid assigning NPCs to your storage area, as you cannot right-click chests when NPCs are standing in front of them.

Players may wish to organize their storage items the same way between all worlds so that they don't have to remember a new pattern for each one.

Putting all the containers near each other allows the player to use the "Quick Stack to Nearby Chests" feature to automatically put all items in the player's inventory into the chests they belong.

It may be useful to keep associated items in outposts near their biomes, e.g. make a base close to the Jungle, and store things you would get in the jungle in it. These outposts might include useful teleportation rooms, to quickly gain access to the biome from home and to that storage area.

Garden
A dedicated garden can keep the player supplied with a steady variety of Herbs for Potions.

Roof Access
The player may consider adding access to the roof, usually to gather the that can fall on a large base, or for other reasons, like a Minecart Station or Skybridge.

Teleporter Room
A Teleporter Room may be useful for players who need to get to far outposts quickly. Setting one up, however, will take a long time and will be very expensive to build, considering the current price of Wire and the distances that need to be covered to reach places like the Dungeon and The Underworld. Hoiks make it possible to build a teleporter room where the player can enter a code and it will automatically teleport them there, without need to run along a long line of teleporters. (How to build.)

Outposts
Using similar principles, small mini-bases can be built near certain biomes for the purpose of easy access and farming.

Base Defense
Player-made structures don't come with protection against enemies. Having monsters wandering around plant farms may be no big deal but many would prefer their NPC areas to be protected. If you already built a base on the ground, and don't want to move, move your chest room within your town of NPCs, this will prevent monster spawns. Place Peace Candles around your house if it is large to minimize spawns.

Railway
Minecart Track can be used to make a easy way early to late game to get around your world quickly. It’s especially efficient due to the low crafting cost.

Skybridge
Skybridges can be used for farming Fallen Stars. In versions, you can make skybridges out of Conveyor Belts to automatically farm the stars that fell.

Floating Base
Structures do not need to rest on surfaces when built from materials that do not fall. Once built, the terrain surrounding the base can be dug out to create a moat around it, preventing easy access of most monsters.

Actuator Door
By using actuators and grey, brown, blue, and Lihzahrd Pressure Plates, you can create a player only door that doesn't require you to use your mouse. Set up the door as you would an active stone/actuator door and because grey, brown, blue and Lihzahrd Pressure Plates can only be triggered by the player, mobs are unable to enter (or escape). You can provide defense using super dart traps and spiky ball traps. As of update 1.3.1, where Sensors were added, it is now possible to link the sensor (Player above) to an actuated door, allowing the player to pass by a door without having to step on a pressure plate.