A17.4 Best PvP Base Designs and Tricks – 7 Days To Die

An in-depth run down of what you should be thinking about when making your base.

Hiding Boxes

If you want to this entire article, this trick is the main trick you want to know. The trick is to paint storage boxes. Simply take a storage box, plop it anywhere you want and paint over it, there’s just one problem with this, the text still shows up for it.

The best thing you can do in this situation is make sure that at any point, a player is 7 blocks away from your box. I for instance make ceilings that are 7 blocks off the ground so that I can place frames beneath me to access it. (yes the image below uses boxes, not concrete).

Keep in mind that with the introduction of Alpha 17, there is the small 2% of the population who maxes out the perk parkour and can jump 9 blocks, so keep that in mind when building.

I personally do not trust making my ceiling 7-9 blocks high as an exact measurement like that makes it exceedingly obvious what you are doing. Look around at what nooks and crannies are around to stash your boxes and you will be golden. Now onto the rest of the guide for an in-depth guide to get you thinking like a top tier builder.

Why not just go for sheer strength of walls?

The basic problem with base building is it just does not take nearly as long to raid a base as it does to build it. I’ve been in raids where 2-5 people spent 12-16 hours on a singular base. People can and will get into any room you build, keep that in mind when you are building.

These are the times it took to break blocks with all perks maxed and an auger with all of the mods. The times WILL change based on the server settings, but the times should be a healthy reference for how easy it is. Steel is a mere four minutes to break open. If you make a singular room in the center with 8 block thick walls, that is roughly an hour to raid for a single person. Even if you take on the monstrous task of making that 16 blocks thick, that’s only 2 hours. To make your base theoretically safe against a singular person putting in 12 hours, you would need your walls to be 90 blocks thick!

Building Smarter

If you want a quick and dirty base that you can feel safe in as soon as possible, I would choose this one. You want to spam Chests and Drawers. Put it in every room, hallways, and nook and cranny you can find.

Chests and drawers are not easy to break open. Unlike wall safes, gun safes, or storage boxes, there is a damage reduction modifier on these two blocks. Where I was doing 55 damage with a steel pick on concrete, a steel axe against a chest did 4 damage. This makes it almost as strong as concrete. What makes this particularly effective is wooden chests are only costs 10 wood and means that you can place bucketloads of these anywhere and waste any raiders’ time effectively and cheaply. Once you start spamming it on each and every single wall, any would be raider will be driven off fast.

Drawers are the premium version of the wood chest. Equally as spammable too at a measly 8 forged iron. They have just as much space and are 3x as powerful at protecting your gear, putting it close in health to a tier 2 steel door. By spamming them you are achieving the goal of keeping the raiders guessing. Remember, raiders will be able to get into any room they want, but they will not know where your gear is.

Tips

1. Never bunch gear up, EVER. If you’re paranoid like I am, you would know that people get lazy and tend to bunch gear up. If you simply poke holes once every 2×2 or 3×3 area you will functionally speed up your search by 4-9 times and be just as effective.
2. IMPORTANT INFO Either put codes on every chest and drawer or never put any on. I’ve seen people spam drawers and chests and not realize you can hold E and see if a code was put on it then break it. This literally undermines the entire design if you aren’t careful.
3. I tend not to fully trust rng myself, so I toss in other shenanigans like hiding gear in walls as I want layers upon layers of confusion for any would be attacker. Let me reiterate, the “meta” of a good base is keeping your enemy guessing as to where your gear is.
4. You can also spam drawers in spammed rooms for extra strength
5. People can easily listen in on what area drawers or chests are being opened so make sure nobody can approach the base walls easily!
6. Any preference to detail like lighting, larger rooms, forges, or build materials will give away where your gear actually is. This can be a strength if you know how to play off people assumptions to your advantage.

Stashing Gear

If you want the simplest answer to a base, literally just put a hole in the ground. Stashes are a great way to hide gear before you hit the level needed for reinforced concrete. You can dig a 1×1 down to a secret farm, chests, and bag. Just be wary, if someone stumbles on you while accessing your stash, all of your gear is lost. It also suffers from vehicles being glitchy where people get temporarily thrown under the ground and can look around for anything hidden. Forge and chest noises are also exceedingly hard to hide and you should start building a base once you need these or put them in a spot away from your gear and hope they don’t get looted.

Tips

1. NEVER place a land claim block down. People can use them to find your base
2. Try to keep your base close to the surface as long winding tunnels and rooms will help the glitched survivors find your underground hut, I do suggest placing your hidden vault under a lake as it will help with the noise problem and potentially glitching if you do it right.

The Issue with A17’s Land Claim Block Limit

If you stash your gear in painted storage boxes, and spammed your 3000 drawers, you should be 100% safe from almost any raider. In A16 all you needed to do was make sure you had as many land claim blocks as you can painted in your walls, but in A17 the math has changed. If you followed this properly, you have now made your base so impossible to raid, it is now easier to mine out your land claim block and take over your base than it is to try and take your gear normally. If your server limits you to one land claim block, CONGRATULATIONS! You are on a server where the strongest you could ever make your base is 254 steel blocks. Assuming you made a tower from bedrock to sky and in trying to mine it out they literally ♥♥♥♥ up so hard that the VERY last block they mine is your land claim block. That is the BEST case scenario.

A raider can easily triangulate where your lcb is through simple math and the only obfuscation you have at your disposal is at what Y coordinate your lcb is at.

There really is not an easy solution to this. The best ideas I have come up with to solve the issue are viable, but not ideal. Here are the four solutions I have theorized, but have not extensively tested.

1. The first idea I had to stop someone from barreling through my blocks was to put water every few blocks are so, I tried doing it every 6. This means you reduced the amount of blocks a raider has to take to find your land claim, but I wanted to force someone to gradually build up water as they mine to force them to dig outward to release the water theoretically making it harder to raid.
2. Electrical lines can run through walls and people can only travel down, so I’ve thought of just putting up turrets along the same x,z coordinate as the land claim block. If someone is doing a 1×1 dig down they’ll fall onto the turret and die faster than they can mine it. I like the idea, but every base I have ever raided never has their turrets running and frankly I do not like constantly refilling my engines and would forget long before a raider came a knocking.
3. Place as many drawers as you can in the path of the would be raider. Drawers are the hardest to remove block in the game. Stronger than steel and polished steel. As long as you force the raider to actually dig through it and not inadvertently just reduce the amount of blocks your lcb could be in this is a strong and somewhat time proven method.
4. This trick is the end all of land claim block protection as well as base protection and is discussed in the next section.

Best base feasibly possible

I cannot stress how utterly evil this trick is. You swing everything so heavily in your favor that I rarely build this design for this reason. Build a base in the desert on the rad-zone border. You want to put your land claim in the radiation zone. Assuming the server bans dropping bases, you can build a skinny lcb tower covering it up. If done, there is no way to raid this before you log on.

This can and will be the death of you a hundred times over, but makes it so raiders will have to die tens of thousands of times to raid you. Raiders will be forced to mine while under the constant threat of radiation damage and will die many more times than you did building it. Keep in mind, it is impossible to outlast radiation as it starts at 1 damage then 2 and increases by one at a set interval of time. It is impossible to stay in there forever as the damage never stops increasing. Dying while raiding you also applies the Death penalty debuff which removes a lot of their perks linked to raiding. If they simply disregard death and throw themselves at your base, the constant dying forces them to spend more time walking than dealing damage. This is the ultimate trump card of base design assuming you applied all of my other tricks with drawers and storage.

I will state this though. Although you die significantly less than raiders in trying to build your base up, you will die a lot. It took me 110 deaths to just get my lcb tower from bedrock to 20 blocks above ground. If I were to do it again I would only make it out of concrete as steel was simply too much of a hassle to deal with.

If you also take my advice of putting your gear in the rad zone, prepare to have a lot of medical supplies as every time you want to take out gear you will be perpetually hit with damage and could even die if you’re not careful.

HIDDEN UNDERWATER PVP BASE in ALPHA 17:

Original Link – Continuation of discussion