Best Base Locations by Biome
Each biome has its own vibe tbh and the trade-offs between resources and safety and how easy it is to defend are kinda wild depending on where you settle down I've tried building in all of them and some are way better than they look on paper while others will just get you killed in the first 24 hours no matter what you do and honestly the biome you pick completely changes how you play the game from that point on.
Easy start honestly you get all the basic stuff like fiber and stone and berries basically right at your feet and you won't get murdered the second you spawn which is more than I can say for most of the map, but also it's kinda boring ngl and other players will spot your base from a mile away so don't get too comfortable here because someone WILL find you eventually and take all your stuff while you're offline and you'll come back to nothing, great for learning the game though and that's what matters when you're brand new.
So much wood and thatch and berries and hide you literally won't know what to do with it all but the trade-off is the raptors and carnos lurking around every corner and I've been jumped more times than I can count farming in the forest like you'll be chopping a tree minding your own business and suddenly a raptor is on your face and you're dead. And that's not even mentioning the carnos that hide behind trees and ambush you. Still one of the better spots for a midgame base imo especially if you find a clearing with natural rock walls that funnel attackers into a single approach and give you at least some warning before things go bad.
Honestly my favorite spot for PvE because you get water obviously plus metal deposits nearby and plenty of stone and the rivers give you natural barriers that most creatures won't cross which is kinda like having a free moat around your base, you can set up water pens for aquatic tames too and the fishing is decent for food, pretty much the sweet spot for building a long-term base that won't get wrecked overnight by a random giga wandering through the neighborhood looking for trouble.
All the high-tier stuff you need for late game like metal crystal obsidian is just sitting there waiting to be mined but the cold will kill you fast if you're not prepared with proper fur gear and rexes and gigas patrol these areas way more than you'd think, great for PvP because of the natural elevation advantage and it's hard to siege a base from below when you have turrets pointing down at the only approach route, the PvE experience here is pretty brutal ngl and I've frozen to death up here more times than I'm comfortable admitting.
Rare flowers and cementing paste are the main draws here tbh. But honestly the swamp just sucks to live in like leeches everywhere snakes in the water kapros jumping you from absolutely nowhere I've died in swamps so many times it's not even funny and every death is some new horrible surprise you didn't see coming. PvP players sometimes build here because nobody checks swamps and you can hide a base in the dense trees pretty well but man the constant threats are exhausting and I can only handle swamp living for a few days before I rage quit and move somewhere nicer with less things trying to kill me every five seconds.
Oil and silica pearls and organic polymer are abundant up here and that's what makes it so good for endgame PvP but the cold is absolutely brutal and direwolves hunt in packs and yuties will scare your tames and then everything goes wrong in like five seconds flat when your mount panics and runs straight into a giga, definitely bring fur armor or you'll freeze to death before you even place your first foundation which I have literally done and it's not a fun way to learn that lesson, but if you can survive up here the resource access makes all the suffering worth it.
PvP Defense Design Principles
I've been raided more times than I'd like to admit and honestly these are the techniques that actually work when someone is trying to blow through your walls at 3am while you're sleeping, tried and tested through multiple wipe cycles and server transfers and stuff like that, and I've watched these strategies hold off raiders with way more resources than the defenders had.
So the idea is you just keep adding layers of walls inside walls inside more walls and honestly it sounds dumb and tedious but it works because every layer raiders have to blow through costs them more C4 and more time and more resources and by the time they get to your actual loot they've probably already spent way more than it's worth or at least that's the theory anyway, I've seen a well honeycombed base hold off a full alpha tribe raid for like two hours while the defenders logged back in and counter attacked which basically saved everything.
You want every angle covered with overlapping fields of fire so there's literally no blind spot anywhere around your base and mix heavy turrets with tek turrets and set them all to Survivors and Tamed Creatures mode because that catches everything that might try to raid you including rocket runs and soakers and suicide c4 runners and all that jazz, and if you leave even one spot uncovered raiders will find it I promise you that they always find the weak spots somehow it's honestly impressive and infuriating at the same time.
Place two walls with a tiny gap between them like just enough space to squeeze through and when raiders blow the outer wall the inner one is still completely intact and now they have to spend twice the explosives and probably didn't budget for that. So they either give up or they waste way more resources than they planned. It's such a simple trick but so many people don't do it and then wonder why their base gets wiped in like ten minutes flat when a raider with one rocket launcher rolls up, I've used this on basically every PvP base I've ever built and it's saved my stuff more times than any other single technique.
Building inside natural terrain features like caves or those underwater bubble spots is honestly one of the best defense strategies in the entire game because your footprint is tiny and flyer scouts just fly right over you without ever seeing anything and you can go weeks without anyone even knowing you exist, I've had hidden bases last for literal weeks on competitive PvP servers while my main bases got raided in days and that's not an exaggeration tbh, the hardest part is finding a good rathole that isn't already taken or blocked by some alpha tribe's foundation spam.
Put your vaults in the absolute dead center of your base in the most honeycombed area and spread your loot across multiple vaults so raiders have to fully commit to breaking through everything to get all your stuff. Because honestly nobody wants to blow through 20 layers of walls only to find one vault with half your stone tools in it. And maybe by the time they're halfway through your turrets or tribemates have killed them or they just run out of explosives and give up, plus having your best loot in the hardest-to-reach spot means that even if they get through 80% of your base they still might not get the really good stuff which is a nice little insurance policy you get the idea.
Base Building FAQ
Stuff people ask me all the time about building bases on Discord and Reddit and in game chat, some of these questions I've gotten like a hundred times and I've answered them from actual experience not just regurgitating wiki info or whatever.