How to make a megabase?

[kNichael]

Megabases are something I have never tried and I really want to make one but I want to know what everybody does before making a megabase and when to make a megabase, as well as some designs and things that you guys might know.

[Majestix]

I will always set up a few mass productions first: a decent-sized gecko farm for grass, twiggy trees for twigs, bunny spider farm for silk, automatic volt goat culling via anenemies for a steady supply of weather pains, which allow me to farm tons of wood quickly, some avocado trees for stones and manure, a well-placed small base in the ruins, and a well-oiled ruin-clearing-and-resetting machine for lazy foragers (e.g. to easily pick up the loot from the volt goat butchery), thulecite walls, deconstruction staves (to multiply shroom skins and scales, the former for lights, the latter for scaled chests), etc. Usually I will have all of this set up and will have killed all the bosses, including misery toadstool, by day 400 at the latest (note that you only need to kill toadstool once, provided it is the misery version; with deconstruction staves that solves all your mushlight needs for a megabase). At that point you have a steady supply of materials, and then you can let your imagination run wild.

There are lots of ideas in the screenshot threads on these forums, and also in the mega bases that famous youtubers/twitchers make (there is a whole thread here about streamer suggestions), so just browse that and watch a few streams to get ideas.

[kNichael]

This information is actually really helpful. What I didn't understand about megabases is did said dstubers start a world and began building straight away or did they first do some things to prepare for megabases. As a Wurt main, resources will be the least of my concerns, so is there any other use for volt goat farms rather then weather paines and meat for hambat? Also I'm very interested so see your megabase (if you want to ofc) since I could use more sources of inspiration. Also also, is there a build that everybody starts at first because I don't know what the middle of the base would be and if everybody has some builds in common. Thank you very much, now I understand the concept megabases.

[D7X]

With my current base I started by making a temporary base and gathering a ton of resources and set up some farms for things like geckos for grass (using chester to scare them automatically) I used the reanimated skeleton for wood gathering in the caves during summer, and petrified forests gave me more stone than I knew what to do with. But when it came to setting up the actual base it was a huge pain to move everything over from the temporary one so I would suggest deciding on what will be the centre of your base first and working out from there. You can definitely start your "megabase" from the get go but I think you need a good plan for what your centrepiece will be. Mine is a huge ring of normal and scaled chests with a firepit/glow cap and tents in the centre and some werepig & hound moonstone statues decorating it, whilst making that I also worked on an incredibly over the top arena for fighting the shadow pieces which is lined with glass castles and 16 or so identical pose werepig statues lined up perfectly (that was a big project with very little functional use but it looks pretty at least). I also worked on a big kitchen area alongside this and various other farms. I didn't move into the main base area until a little bit before day 2000 because I spent so long hoarding resources and building things elsewhere like a moon altar pig farm and boss arenas.

Something I did fairly late that really helped was to make a second copy of the same world and test build things in that world using console commands and then when I was happy with the layout/design I'd build it for real in the proper survival world. Really saves on resources when you're as indecisive as me but I'm sure some people wouldn't like the idea of building everything twice.

[Majestix]

It's still early, and very much a work in progress, but just a few small pieces:

Chest area:

Spoiler

Farms:
 

Spoiler

Little Christmas shrine:

Spoiler

Little Halloween shrine:

Spoiler

Moon rock farm:

Spoiler

 

[sosiskaKi]

Step one: build small base.

Step two: gather resourses.

Step three: get creative and make something pretty.

Step four: if you run out resourses, repeat step two.

[Duck986]

Step five: be disappointed with how few decorating items are in vanilla DST and use this.

[Articestone]

Step six: Accidentally stay above caves during summer without ice flingomatic and let it all burn down or forget to build lightning rod and lighting struck ur megabase and burn it down 

Step seven : scold yourself for being stupid, laugh at your own pain and misery and lastly rollback or use commands and pretend everything was fine the entire time

[Maxposting]

make a huge base that spans the entire world
???
profit

[wigfrids hat]

i make a backpack as fast as possible and pick up every resource i can as fast as possible(and when i run out of room i leave a pile of full stacks somewhere i can find them again) while looking for a sinkhole. once i find that sinkhole i head down to the caves and look for an outcropping/island that is a decent size/shape then throw all my stuff on the floor. the next couple days is spent just bringing down every last resource i can find(without chopping/burning/digging things if possible) and when i have a fair pile i dig/chop/burn/break all the resources in the place i plan to base and then build until i am about to starve at which point i go up top and fill my inventory up with everything i can get my sticky hands on x''D repeat the last two steps until you are finished or bored, haha

[MagzUnleashed]

1. Settings

If I am planning a megabase the first thing I do is adjust the world settings. I turn off disease as it would be too much to bother to replant all the stuff I have meticulously placed every few hundred days or so. I would probably spend a season or two just doing that. I also remove wildfires in the summer to avoid having to plan my base around flingos, unless you plan to spend summers in the caves but that's not what I want to do every summer. Then there are other things such as world size, branching etc.

2. Map

Once that is sorted I set upon discovering the map. I don't stress with megabase during the first year, I take my time to scout and discover a nice spot, while gathering resources meanwhile. There is also and addon that reveals the map for you but that's a personal choice, I like the aspect of discovering. I like to find a place that is somewhere in the middle and I can travel easilly from there. I check if nearby wormholes connect to useful points like beequeen or moon rocks, antlion or whatever else you consider to be useful. Also keep in mind if your world regens, you may want to avoid forest areas as they will also spawn trees all around and in your base. I don't mind it too much, I try to be careful then with fires from lightning or other sources. But if someone doesn't want to deal with that I suggest maybe rocky area or grass area. It is an added bonus if my map has a set-piece, that always makes your world more interesting.

3. Makeshift base

I personally like to be near a swamp while I am planning all this to help me with hounds if they get too many. I set up a makeshift safe spot for myself with a science machine, a campfire, a crock pot and a fridge, perhaps a chest or two and that's enough to survive the year. 

4. Enjoy

Once I have made up my mind and I am happy with my current map I start building science area, chest area, a kitchen of sorts and farming places such as geckos, bunny farms, spiders and volt goats (I just keep these cuties in a pen without man-eating plants :D). And that's that I think, later things just get easier and you can focus more on aesthetics.

[BeeClops]

start a regular base and expand, see where it takes you

[ArubaroBeefalo]

make every farm, zone or pen huge and fill with decorations

at the end it will look like a megabase xD

 

[ryvrdrgn14]

Depends on how you define one? I don't think a base is a megabase unless it has parts that are just meant to look pretty after meeting all the requirements for survival. In otherwords, you gotta be good enough that surviving is a piece of cake and you have all the time to spend turfing up and crafting non-useful resources for your base to look good.

[Pimenteroo]

On 11/8/2020 at 6:30 PM, Majestix said:

Farms:
 

  Hide contents

 

How do you place the farms in a perfect circle like that?

[sinisterrkid]

7 hours ago, Pimenteroo said:

How do you place the farms in a perfect circle like that?

I believe it is through this mod:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1898579516

Bonus information cause why not : the required resources for the whole thing is 480 grass, 288 poops, 192 rocks

[Majestix]

1 hour ago, sinisterrkid said:

I believe it is through this mod:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1898579516

Bonus information cause why not : the required resources for the whole thing is 480 grass, 288 poops, 192 rocks

This is correct.

The resources are really not so bad. The grass is easily gathered from geckos, and the poop and rocks all came from stone fruits. To be explicit: after you hammer the stone fruits open, gather the avocados, convert a pig into a were pig, and feed it all the avocados.
I don't like digging up stone fruit trees, because I never want to have to think about the disease mechanic (hence geckos and twiggy trees). But if your first trip to the moon island was reasonably successful and you end up with 3 or 4 stone fruit saplings from the stone fruits you bring back, then you will have these farms up and running very very quickly.

[kNichael]

18 hours ago, Majestix said:

This is correct.

The resources are really not so bad. The grass is easily gathered from geckos, and the poop and rocks all came from stone fruits. To be explicit: after you hammer the stone fruits open, gather the avocados, convert a pig into a were pig, and feed it all the avocados.
I don't like digging up stone fruit trees, because I never want to have to think about the disease mechanic (hence geckos and twiggy trees). But if your first trip to the moon island was reasonably successful and you end up with 3 or 4 stone fruit saplings from the stone fruits you bring back, then you will have these farms up and running very very quickly.

Disease is turned off in my current world, since I heard it can be a pain to deal with when you make a mega base. I don't really know the point of having farms besides decoration, because once you set up 20 merm florts near BQ, the main healing source will be Jellybeans, which are one of the best healing sources if I'm not mistaken.

[thegreatJash]

I always make large bases, but no megabases. I'm assuming you mean huge bases that cover one fourth of the surface kind of base, like the ones Glermz makes. The kind of base I make is pretty small compared to megabases, but pretty large. I use something I like to call "the fort design", and I have no idea whether anyone else has used it before. A base with this design is made up of 5*5 or 5*6 wood tile areas surrounded by stone walls, with openings on each side, some leading to the wilderness and some leading to other rooms. The first autumn I make a basic area for survival, corckpots, a fire pit, alchemy engine, shadow manipulator, and the normal stuff. Then I put wood turf down and stone walls up. Then I make a storage room with tons of chests next to the previous room, with the same turf and wall layout. Then the third room, often next to the storage room, I like to make a statue room, with statues of all the bosses I've killed. I usually only put three rooms in a row before I make another room on top of one of the previous three, usually being a Koalefant pen, because Koalefants deserve to live in luxury. The grass farms, berry farms, and twigs farms also cover the area above the other two rooms. This current design I call the "L 5*6 fort", since each room is 5*6 tiles of space, and the rooms make a "L" if you turn the camera a certain way. I usually put drying racks around the outside because why not, and lightning rods, flingomatics, and mushllgihts in all corners of the rooms for light and safety. Here is an image.

It could be a start, but if you do what you want, it's fine.

[Majestix]

46 minutes ago, kNichael said:

Disease is turned off in my current world, since I heard it can be a pain to deal with when you make a mega base. I don't really know the point of having farms besides decoration, because once you set up 20 merm florts near BQ, the main healing source will be Jellybeans, which are one of the best healing sources if I'm not mistaken.

Disease is a non-issue for me because the only plants I transplant are a few dozen grass to make a gecko farm. Once that farm is done, I dig up the remaining grass and have no transplanted plants left in my world.

For me, the main purpose of farms is to get peppers, in order to speed up some boss fights. After that it's just for decoration.

[kNichael]

1 hour ago, Majestix said:

Disease is a non-issue for me because the only plants I transplant are a few dozen grass to make a gecko farm. Once that farm is done, I dig up the remaining grass and have no transplanted plants left in my world.

For me, the main purpose of farms is to get peppers, in order to speed up some boss fights. After that it's just for decoration.

Yeah I guess it's necessary for Warly (if that's what you were referring to as a use for farms) but for other characters, not as much, unless I would want to switch characters then switch back.

[Majestix]

46 minutes ago, kNichael said:

unless I would want to switch characters then switch back.

Yes, that's what I do: I collect ingredients, switch to Warly, cook up a storm, mostly spiced volt-goat jelly, then switch to an easier character. I love playing Warly as a challenge character, but on a solo mega base world survival is not an issue anyway, so one might as well play as the most efficient character for the tasks at hand.