Haven & Hearth – How to Make a Secure Base

Guide to Making a Secure Base

As just discussed, you need a palisade and a personal claim to make a secure base. This requires you to get the will to power, hearth magic, farming, and yeomanry skills. For the personal claim, you’ll need 1 beautiful dream, 4 bones, 4 stone, and 5 blocks of wood.

You also need to gather 10 leather (time gated), 2 bone glue, 5 rope, and 100 blocks of wood to construct the initial foundation of your palisade. After you’ve crafted that, you can expand it as large (and complex) as you like, only using blocks of wood. For the purposes of this guide, we’ll assume you already know how to get bones and stone, as they were covered previously.

Personal Claim Basics

For a personal claim, gather 1 beautiful dream, 4 bones, 4 stone, and 5 blocks of wood. Please refer to the earlier sections if you need help gathering bones, stone, or blocks of wood. In order to craft a beautiful dream, you’ll need to build a dream catcher. To build a dream catcher, you can gather 4 tree boughs from appropriate tree species. Combine them with spindly taproots, or stinging nettles, you’ve gathered through foraging. If you’re unfamiliar with foraging for string, please refer to the foraging section.

Once you’ve gathered the materials, simply construct your claim in the build menu. The claim will be constructed, and you’ll have a new item in your study desk called a “Bond of Blood and Soil.” Leave it there for now. Once the claim is active, you’ll be able to set rights to give friends the ability to interact with or remove items from it. Others will commit crimes, leaving scents, if they steal from you. Further, the claim will stop the decay of items within it.

The personal claim will be inactive until the three following conditions have been met:

1. 8 hours have passed.
2. You’ve visited the claim after 8 hours.
3. You’ve earned some learning points after 8 hours.

You can expand the claim by incrementally pressing “extend north,” etc. “Buy” will spend LP at a rate of 10 learning points per tile, and locks in the spend once pressed. You can set colors for your friends on your kin list, and use the claim to UI to give anyone corresponding to those colors permissions to trespass (enter the claim and interact with objects), rummage (look through your containers), theft (remove items from containers or liftable items from the claim), vandalism (destroy items and buildings, interact with farm animals, terraform, etc).

Keep in mind that “White” permissions are public permissions. They apply to ANYONE, including those you have not met. If you give white vandalism permissions, for example, anyone has the right to come onto your property and destroy your house.

Palisade Basics

To make a palisade, gather 10 leather (time gated), 2 bone glue, 5 rope, and 100 blocks of wood to construct the initial foundational corner post. After that, you’ll only need blocks of wood to expand the palisade, construct gates, and make further corner posts.

Gathering the leather is going to be the most difficult, and represents the major milestone of your first few days of gameplay. It is the first semi-complex material you’ll be making, and the crafting process has a timegate of at least 34 hours.

However, the actual gathering and crafting actions your character need to perform are not arduous – The time gate is waiting for hides to dry, and for prepared hides to tan into leather in tanning tubs. While you wait for your hides to dry, or the prepared hides to tan in the tubs, there are always other things to do. If you ever find yourself lacking purpose, chalk it up to unfamiliarity – There are many ways to progress in parallel.

Once you’ve built your first cornerpost, you can right click it and extend it in any cardinal direction (N, S, E, W) with the right click context menu. However, be aware that you’ll need to “prepare for gate” and have two cornerposts at appropriate distances to properly build a gate. You’ll be able to choose between a “Gate” and a “Visitor Gate.” You should always select visitor gate (unless you know exactly what you are doing), and you must have a visitor gate at ALL entrances to a claim, including into and out of any mineholes and/or caves.

Visitor gates will stop people from committing any crimes even if they gain entry to your base, and are the best form of protection. You can safely leave them open (although you can’t enter them in combat) as long as you have no entry to your base that isn’t through a visitor gate. However, be sure to lock it (and you can leave it open) – Otherwise, anyone can lock the gate from the outside and seal you in. A wooden lock is sufficient – Gates, Snekkjas, and Knarrs are immune to lock picking.

Once they are locked, as long as you leave the master key in your base, they can’t be stolen and you are more or less completely secure (so long as you haven’t made a mistake, like leaving a minehole or cave entrance in your base without surrounding it by a palisade with visitor gates.) Never take the master key outside of your base under any circumstances, as it can be used to change your locks and steal or seal your base. You can use the same key on multiple gates, by selecting the key and right clicking newly crafted locks with it before applying the lock to an object.

Common Base Security Mistakes

1. Leaving a minehole OR cave entrance that isn’t surrounded by visitor gates.
   • Players can dig to gain access to your minehole from below, or cave entrance through another cave entrance. Passing through a cave entrance removes a visitor debuff, so you should treat any minehole or cave entrance as “outside” space.
2. Taking a master key from your base or not locking gates
   • Players can lock your gates if they aren’t locked, and they can remove your locks if they gain access to your master key.
3. Making non-visitor gates.
   • Visitor gates stop visitors from entering your claim and committing crimes. If they enter through a non-visitor gate, they can commit crimes.
4. Not claiming all of their base.
   • Even if you have a visitor gate, if you a portion of your base is unclaimed, a visitor can step off your claim into the unclaimed portion and lose the visitor debuff, then commit crimes within your base.
5. Not extending a claim at least 1 tile beyond their base’s walls.
   • If you are living in a city where there is a village claim, this isn’t an issue. However, if you’re living as a hermit, you need to extend your claim 1 tile wide otherwise a trick can be used to damage your walls more easily by enemies building a wall that collides with yours.