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.

There are a few special considerations for what blocks to use in your base:


 * Use of bare dirt blocks may result in the occasional Blinkroot plant spawning atop them, and nearby grass can spread onto the dirt. This also applies to mud in the jungle biome.


 * Grass will spawn "tall grass" plants on it.  Jungle grass will also spawn larger jungle plants and perhaps Mahogany Trees.  Either may also spawn herbs or dye plants according to the biome.
 * If grass blocks are exposed from below (such as a roof/ceiling) they will also grow vines beneath them, which may be unsightly. Putting blocks or platforms beneath a grass layer will prevent vine growth.
 * Using Snow or Ice blocks can cause snowflakes to fall nearby. This is a purely visual effect.
 * Sand requires support, and even with that support, it makes building and rearranging things difficult. It can also spawn cactus.

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.

NPCs might have trouble defending against enemies, so players will need to make sure that enemies cannot access NPC houses. See "Base Defense" below for more details.

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

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. Note that the bed must be actually chosen as the player's spawn point, merely placing it will not make it work. This room can also double as an NPC house (the bed counts as a "comfort item"). Placing the Nurse here is a popular option, especially if you have an arena nearby; this allows a player to teleport home for healing or buff removal in the middle of a fight. The Merchant or another vendor NPC is another option.

Unlike regular NPC houses, it is important to be able to exit a bedroom once you spawn there -- especially if the Nurse is in there, you may need to quickly lure bosses away from her 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. Nearby landscape can also be used to grow Trees or (later) Pumpkins.

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.

Travel and Access
Small mini-bases can be built near various biomes for the purpose of easy access, fishing and farming. Minecart Track can be used to make an easy and cheap way to get around your world quickly. Even for a Large world, less than two stacks of iron bars will make enough tracks to span the entire world (and the tracks can also be found and collected underground). If the tracks are laid atop platforms or blocks, the railroad can double as a skybridge for collecting Fallen Stars. In versions, once reaching Hardmode you can also make skybridges out of Conveyor Belts to automatically gather the stars that fell.

Once the player has reached Hardmode, a Teleporter Room may be useful for players who need to get to far outposts quickly. Setting up the teleporter network is a fairly lengthy and expensive project, but can be done by stages as time and money allow. Hoiks and other advanced techniques can allow rapid choice of destinations.

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. In a Normal mode world, the presence of NPCs will itself suppress ordinary spawning of enemies; each NPC on-screen will reduce the spawn rate, and 3 NPCs on-screen will completely suppress enemy spawns, even at night or when Raining.

However, Events are another story: While on most platforms NPCs can defend themselves, individuals can easily be overwhelmed by even Blood Moon enemies, especially in Hardmode. In Expert mode, even ordinary night spawns can be an issue. Once the Mechanic is rescued, actuated blocks can be used to block off entrances and uncover lava pits during events, then switched back to normal afterwards.

General points

 * By far the easiest way to defend your NPCs is to build a floating base above the ground, with Ropes or flight as the only means of access. This will not prevent NPCs from living at your base, as they can teleport to houses they cannot otherwise reach (while offscreen). Structures do not need to rest on surfaces, unless built from the few materials that obey gravity (sand, silt, and slush).   Once built, the terrain surrounding the base can be dug out to create a moat around it, preventing easy access of most monsters.
 * This is the only way to defend your base against enemies that can pass through walls, such as Wraiths. Wraiths can move upwards while passing through blocks, but cannot float upwards through empty space.
 * Flying enemies like Demon Eyes can still reach floating bases, but cannot open Doors. They are not a threat if your base is sealed off.


 * Enemies cannot break open doors if they are unable to stand in front of them. Elevating a door at least two blocks above the ground will grant absolute protection against enemies that can open doors.
 * You may additionally guard the entrance with a pit to trap enemies, though your NPCs may also fall in.  See "Offensive Traps" below for details on using lava to automatically kill enemies that fall into your pit(s).
 * Enemies also cannot force open doors if a piece of furniture, like a Chest or platform, is directly against the inside of the door. Players will have to face away from the house to open the door from the outside.


 * You can place platforms in the floor or ceiling of an NPC house, or your base, instead of using Doors. This will stop NPCs from moving outside their houses and endangering themselves. However, flying enemies can pass through such platforms, and some enemies can jump or fall through.   A layer of actuated blocks can be used to seal off your base for events.


 * Every base should have at least some chests, which will prevent Meteorites from falling within 35 blocks of them. Meteorites also will not fall within 35 blocks of an NPC, nor on-screen for any player..  See the Meteorite page for more details on protecting areas from Meteorites.
 * Once the Mechanic is present, you can use actuators (or active stone) and appropriate Pressure Plates, to create a player only door that doesn't require use of the mouse. Simply actuate a section of wall and link it to some type of pressure plate that can only be triggered by the player, so that enemies are unable to enter, and NPCs cannot escape. You can also add defenses using traps as discussed below.   Once you reach Hardmode, a Sensor can let the player pass through such doors without even having to step on a pressure plate.

Offensive traps
Generally, placing lava and wired traps near the area where your NPCs are housed is risky, but can be effective if the NPCs are well-contained. Offensive traps can provide a bit of aid during invasions, but generally, the best practice in the event of an invasion is to fight somewhere other than your base. Nevertheless, the following tips may be useful if you want to set up a structure that can automatically kill enemies with little to no danger to yourself.

Lava Pits

 * Pits can be lined with a thin layer of lava to quickly kill most enemies.
 * Lava pits should be covered over with actuated blocks to make them safe for normal passage; they can be quickly "switched on" for an invasion or other event., and switched off afterwards.
 * Players will normally want a tunnel beneath the lava pit, so as to safely collect drops from the slain enemies.
 * Lava will not destroy valuable items of any Rarity higher than white.
 * Lava destroys items only if they are submerged to higher than the midpoint of their sprite, so a thin layer will not destroy larger items. Note that the sprites for coins are progressively larger for higher denominations; if you want to collect coins along with other drops, you should fine-tune the depth of your lava so as to destroy copper coins, but not silver or higher.   In practice, this translates to one bucket of lava per 6 to 8 blocks of pit length.
 * The reason for letting copper coins burn, is that there is a global limit of 400 loose items in each world. If this limit is exceeded, the oldest loose items in the world will despawn, with no consideration for their value or rarity.  Stacks count as a single item, but even so, copper coins are dropped in such numbers that most events can easily reach the limit.

Other Traps
Note that Spikes and Hellstone can only damage players, not monsters. However, after rescuing the Mechanic from the Dungeon, you can wire traps to deal damage in more versatile ways:


 * A very simple mechanism is a buried Geyser wired to a single Pressure Plate.
 * Dart Traps can be wired to a Timer to fire continuously without further input.
 * Fire rate can be staggered by using a "rainstick" mechanism, as shown to the side. The mechanism is activated by manually falling through the platforms with the pressure plates on them. Note that the Traps must be moved into the background with Actuators, and the Actuators must be removed after doing so. 28 Dart Traps are required for continuous fire if the rainstick is set up in a Γ shape, and 21 if set up in an L shape (as shown).
 * Super Dart Traps, Spear Traps, and Flame Traps can replace the Dart Traps in the above mechanism once you have access to the Jungle Temple. Use a hammer to rotate them as you see fit.
 * Spiky Ball Traps are the easiest to set up; they need only be attached to a 1 Second Timer to work. Dropping the Spiky balls from a great height is not necessarily advantageous, as you want to maximize the time the balls spend bouncing near the ground to damage groups of enemies. Instead, embed the traps in the ground and hammer them twice so they roll out the spiky balls more gently.