The Five Tiers
Every building piece is placed as twig and upgraded with a Hammer through four stronger grades. Each tier changes how much explosive a raider must bring AND how fast the piece rots without upkeep:
- Twig: the placeholder state. Just 10 HP, demolishable by anyone, no upkeep cost -- and it decays in about an hour. Only for previews and disposable scaffolds (a one-time raid ladder).
- Wood: wipe-day starter only; a single satchel drops it.
- Stone: the real baseline -- the standard, resource-efficient solo/duo tier.
- Sheet Metal: the common solo/duo wipe tier; tougher, drains metal frags.
- Armored (HQM): the toughest, but HQM-gated -- usually reserved for the TC core and bunker walls because the HQM cost adds up fast.
Never log off with anything load-bearing left in twig.
The Tool Cupboard
The Tool Cupboard (TC) is the anchor of every base -- crafted for 1000 wood, and every base needs one. Placing it does two things:
- Building privilege: you become authorised to build, pick up deployables, and use TC-gated traps (flame and shotgun traps) inside its radius. It's also a no-build bubble (roughly your base's footprint) so raiders can't twig-ladder up and drop a competing TC on your roof.
- Upkeep: it pays a fraction of your base's build cost every 24 hours to stop decay.
Security tip: hide the TC. It's the prime raid target -- seal it in an armored core behind 2+ walls with both a code lock and a key lock, and ring your radius with overlapping external TCs so offline raiders can't claim privilege.
How Upkeep Works
Press E on the TC to see its 24-hour cost. The rules that trip people up:
- The TC must hold the SAME material as the pieces. A TC full of wood will NOT protect stone walls -- stock wood, stone, metal frags, and HQM together to match every tier you've built.
- Each piece has its own daily drain, and foundations cost more than walls (a stone foundation ~8 stone/day vs a stone wall ~5/day).
- Deployables don't count -- sleeping bags, boxes, and furnaces add nothing to upkeep. Only the structure (foundations, walls, doorways, windows, roofs, doors) does.
- High external walls don't decay inside a TC radius and add no upkeep.
Two taxes scale the bill: a base-size tax (roughly 10% of build cost/day, rising toward 30% once you pass ~16 structures) and a fill-rate bonus (keeping the TC above ~50% full uses the minimum rate; letting it run low scales the drain up ~3x). Hoarding mats IN the TC literally makes them last longer.
Decay & Auto-Repair
When the TC runs out of a given material, only the pieces made of THAT material start to decay -- out of stone but flush with metal? Only the stone pieces rot. Decay always moves from the outside in, eating the pieces furthest from the TC first.
Time-to-destruction once upkeep runs dry (vanilla defaults, per the Facepunch wiki / Corrosion Hour):
- Twig: ~1 hour
- Wood: ~3 hours
- Stone: ~5 hours
- Sheet Metal: ~8 hours
- Armored: ~12 hours
Two lifesavers: damaged structures AUTO-REPAIR for free if the TC holds the right material (repair rate matches decay rate, no extra cost -- so light damage heals itself, no hammer needed). And if your TC is destroyed in a raid while still stocked, it absorbs up to 24 hours of upkeep so the base doesn't instantly collapse.
Cutting Your Upkeep
Upkeep is a tax on size and over-building -- trim it with five habits:
- Build compact. A 2x2 with 8 walls costs far less than a sprawling 4x4 with 32. (A solo 2x2 stone base runs ~80-100 stone/day -- about one desert boulder.)
- Don't upgrade everything to HQM. Make the core metal/HQM but keep buffer walls that don't raise raid cost in stone -- same strength where it counts, lower bill.
- Use a sacrificial shell. A small inner armored core behind an outer stone shell roughly halves your HQM cost; raiders waste boom on the stone.
- Watch your weakest tier. A mostly-armored base with one stone wall fails when THAT wall decays -- mixed bases inherit the weakest piece's timer.
- Keep the TC topped up. Above ~50% full means the cheap upkeep rate; let it run low and you pay up to 3x.
(All numbers are vanilla defaults -- modded servers tune decay and upkeep, so verify on your server.)