Little bases everywhere

[Uncrushed]

Now that I'm typically surviving more than a year, base location and setup is becoming more important.  Rather than make one megabase, I tend to make mini-bases near resources and places I end up hanging around, then add more to the ones I hang around the most.  They are all different shapes and sizes:

• Mini is just a firepit at major intersections.  They are such a flexible way to provide cooking, warmth, and light.  Toss in a twig, pine cone, old log suit, or whatever.  Roast berries, carrots, or meat.  Recover from wetness/freezing.  I often pickaxe the nearest sinkhole to make sure I'm a couple tiles out of bat range before building.  Ditto moose-goose spawn points, frog/mosquito ponds, MacTusk, etc.
• Small involves a single crock pot and maybe a chest, sometimes a drying rack or two, occasionally a science station.  This typically happens:
  • Above a key sinkhole to the caves
  • Near a major food source like a good pig village with berries or a swamp
  • Next to a touchstone
  • Next to a safe-ish pseudoscience station or close to banana trees by the ruins.
  • On a boat
• Medium usually has an Alchemy Engine, 2-4 crock pots around a fridge, 8-10 drying racks, a lightning rod, and an ice flingomatic if I have gears.  I just discovered fig trees and tree jam, which might be better than flingomatics on shorelines.
• Full-size is just a medium with transplants, a garden plot, salt box, more chests, a shadow manipulator, and maybe an endothermic fire pit (those things are expensive!).  I haven't made megabases yet (though I love making roads).

MacTusk gets a mini or small base which is often abandoned after the first winter.  Barring accidents, in single player, I only ever need a maximum of 1 tam and 2 tusks, but I need them BADLY!  The oasis is another temporary location for me: fish for the beach toy, give it to Antlion, and generally only ever return for the volt-goats.

The catch-22 (and kudos to the game designers for this), is that you need to explore most of the map and some of the caves before you can choose the ultimate base location.  But you need a base in order to do this.  In my current world, there are two amazing wormholes right next to each other and to pig-king and a good sinkhole, but it would mean basing in a swamp (where mosquito ponds are never super-far away), far from lunar island.  It still might be my first megabase location.

Do you have a formula for your base growth or location?  Do you commit to one location, such as the oasis?  Do you have different bases for different seasons (I usually summer in the caves)?

[DinsdaleP]

Nowadays, I pretty much always start in the summer, because a season that really wants to kill if you're unprepared is fun (and it turns into a second autumn once you have mooncaller's staff + thermal stone anyway), so generally I just build a mini cave base, consisting of a single alchemy engine, crock pot, and fridge (or if the world gen really hates me, endothermic fire or fire pit), then go ruins rushing, with probably another mini base there (crockpot, fridge, chest for gems).

After I got my ruins stuff, I just dump all of it at a convenient location, then go exploring the map proper for a long-term base location.

I don't think I've built fire pits now for irl years, throwing down dwarf stars and/or a scaled furnace is just so much more convenient 

[Uncrushed]

Where do you base in the caves for your ruins rush?  

Dwarf star is sweet for sure!  I need to try gardening by it.  Banana Shakes are awesome.  I tend to hammer all the monkey houses, kill all the monkeys, and mini-base right there.

[DinsdaleP]

4 minutes ago, Uncrushed said:

Where do you base in the caves for your ruins rush?  

Since I tend to have limited time (summer will kill you after day 2 on the surface without a thermal, and even on day 2, you take ~70 overheating damage), it depends on what sinkholes I can uncover in my limited time.

If I can find one of these, then either in blue mushtree forest biome (for easy living logs from mush gnomes in lunar grotto) or if a sinkhole is near a good wormhole, there - since blue mushtrees often generate with two sinkholes, I've found locations that fulfilled all these criteria multiple times.

If not, whatever, it's no big loss hammering down 3-4 structures.

For the ruins itself, it's a bit trickier... Easiest is with Wigfrid, multiple ponds (for fishsticks), nothing nearby that'll harass me? Base time, sans chest. With others, alchemy engine gets built at a safe-ish location for a quick moggles, then begins the hunt for a pseudoscience station in a safe space so I can throw my things down in the same spot... if it comes to the worst, you can always hammer down and move everything during a return trip.

[Mike23Ua]

Something a lot of people forget is that you can quite literally build a base and never place it down, like I mean just have the items already built and in your inventory to throw out like Pokémon from a pokeball, this is my number one way to counter griefers, they destroy my base.. and unbeknownst to them I had a spare of everything they destroyed prototyped and ready to place down again.

Because of this I don’t EVER build a Mega base and rather just build a bunch of spots all over the map to visit when needed.. but my playstyle adapts well to just always traveling the land exploring- if Sailing was actually any fun in DST.. I’d have a small boat base and a spare on me at all times to place when I get where I wanna explore.

When I DO build a large base it’s only to fill it with the silly mini game shenanigans such as the Midsummers Cawnival games or Carrat Training courses.

For me (and for anyone who played Solo DS’s Adventures Mode..) The franchise was NEVER about building a map wide base.. at least when it came to solo DS Adventures mode you were always pushing on a quest to reach the end.

And building a giant base and surviving for 15,000,000 days is only something that really came about when the franchise abandoned its roots and went more into being an open Sandbox.

But to answer your question- my base is in my pocket. Literally..

[Duck986]

but why not just make a world your base...

[Uncrushed]

1 hour ago, Mike23Ua said:

Something a lot of people forget is that you can quite literally build a base and never place it down, like I mean just have the items already built and in your inventory to throw out

I should do more of this!

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my playstyle adapts well to just always traveling the land exploring

Ditto.

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if Sailing was actually any fun in DST.. I’d have a small boat base

In my latest game, this is what I found I could fit on a boat:

Not sure about the bird, and I wanted even more chests and/or the scaled chests which have more room.  NOT excited about fighting dragonfly.  The malbatross bill was amazing while it lasted.  I guess the battle paddle might be a more easily renewable alternative.  You could make separate versions of these for summer and another for winter, and substitute 2 drying racks for one firepit and the birdcage.  IDK.

Anyway, I'm experimenting with making spots on the map where I can plug the boat into a larger base with an ice flingomatic, various plantings (7 trees on each side of the boat for Walter's sanity), and anything else that doesn't fit on the boat.  Paddling gets boring tho, and Malbatross eventually takes out your sails.  Also I think the giant fig trees eliminate the need for the flingomatic, so experimentation is needed there.

Also, for planting the fig trees, there's an advantage to having pinch-n-winch on the very edge of the boat so you can drop them where you can fertilize them from land.  A throw-away grass boat might be the best way to handle that, IDK.

 

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For me (and for anyone who played Solo DS’s Adventures Mode..) The franchise was NEVER about building a map wide base.. at least when it came to solo DS Adventures mode you were always pushing on a quest to reach the end.

 

I loved the Solo DS!  "Hey Pal, you don't look so good..."  And Adventure Mode.  I played it 200 hours before getting the idea that other players had moved on to DST.  The original game felt more special.  Gameplay was at least as good and it was much simpler (making it kinda better).  I'm still not super excited about all the new giants to defeat or the difficulty of gardening or the number of crock pot recipes.  I like the idea of teleporting Klaus to take out the Celestial Champion for you.  Make monsters fight monsters, don't fight them directly.  That's a great theme for the game that I hope remains.