Introduction
As a player who loves base-building, I've always been passionate about creating the most comfortable and elegant home possible. This guide shares my extensive experience building bases at sea—both in solo play and with friends. Each of these ocean bases typically lasts for hundreds of in-game days and has proven to be extremely comfortable and practical.
Of course, there's no one-size-fits-all approach. While this base-building strategy offers many advantages, it might not suit everyone's playstyle, priorities, or aesthetic preferences.
In this guide, I’ll explain why I’m so enthusiastic about ocean bases and why most of my friends end up convinced of their benefits after playing with me.
Overview
When choosing a base location, players usually consider a few key factors:
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Accessibility and transportation.
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Seasonal adaptability (e.g., protection from summer heat or winter cold).
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Monster threats and defense.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the advantages and disadvantages of ocean bases:
Advantages:
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Protected from spring lightnings, and spontaneous combustion in summer.
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No need to worry about base-destroying bosses like Bearger, Deerclops, or Antlion.
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No hound attacks or frog rain.
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Modular design makes it easy to reorganize or expand.
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No snow buildup in winter—everything stays clearly visible.
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Can be combined with other good locations (e.g., building near Pig King waters allows you to enjoy both advantages).
Disadvantages:
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High resource cost—boats require extra logs, grass, and rocks.
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Requires growing a giant tree.
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Sometimes you might fall into the water while jumping between boats—though this is rare and the penalty is minor.
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Easier to miss seasonal bosses that spawn on land.
A Closer Look at Key Features
Snow in Winter
On land, players often use turf to divide different areas of the base, making everything feel clean and organized. However, during winter, heavy snow covers the ground and makes all turf look the same. This can make it harder to distinguish different areas and sometimes causes confusion.
At sea, this issue doesn’t exist. Even after a heavy snowstorm, each boat module remains clearly visible and easy to navigate. Snow never affects the readability of your layout.
Modularity and Mobility
There are always some imperfections when building a base, especially early on. But because we tend to be resource-conscious, we rarely tear things down and rebuild. If we do, it usually hurts to waste those materials.
Ocean bases solve this elegantly. Typically, I divide my base into many small, functional modules—such as: kitchen module, storage module, firepit module, wardrobe module, alchemy engine module, tent module, magic module, birdcage module...and more.
Each module is compact and well-designed. If I later find that certain modules aren’t ideally placed, I can simply row them around to fine-tune the layout—no need to dismantle or rebuild anything.
On land, we usually manage tools, weapons, and armor by dropping them onto a specific turf tile, since they’re not very suitable for storage in chests. On the ocean, we use individual boats to organize these items instead. This not only keeps things tidy, but also prevents important items from being eaten by lureplants.
In one memorable game with friends, we first built our ocean base near the shore. Later, we realized the location wasn’t ideal. So, we moved the entire base to a different coastline—like a mobile aircraft carrier! The flexibility was incredible.
The image below shows an early-game moment with friends, when we were relocating and reorganizing our ocean base.
Monster Management
About Hound Attacks:
Even after we’ve outgrown the panic of our early days—facing Deerclops or hounds—we still experience some annoyance. For example, imagine cooking or chatting around the fire with friends at night, when suddenly hounds appear. Sure, we can handle them easily now, but having to interrupt what we’re doing and rush outside is still frustrating.
Here’s the trick: if you’re already on a boat before the hound attack is triggered (not just before the barking starts), the entire attack is skipped.
Other bosses like Bearger or Deerclops
I don’t even bother responding to them. All my structures—pig houses, bee boxes, everything—are on the ocean. I don’t like interruptions, and I still remember one world where I didn’t fight Deerclops for over 400 days. I just missed him each time. That said, this isn’t always good—because the eyebrella is incredibly useful.
Things like frog rain also become much easier to handle. As long as you stay on your boats, frogs won’t be a problem. Of course, if you really want frog legs for food, you can always head to land to farm them.
Comparing Common Base Locations
Pig King Base
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Friendly to beginners. Early hound attacks are easier to handle with the help of pig guards, though full moons may turn pigs hostile.
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Pigs can help with chopping trees early on, but this becomes less important with stronger characters and once Bearger arrives in year two.
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Easy access to pig skins, meat, and gold (via Pig King), as well as Glommer.
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Pig King is often discovered early while exploring, allowing for a quick, convenient starter base.
Overall, this is a great temporary base location for early game progression. However, gold trading is not needed frequently—often just once every few years—so it’s usually not worth settling here long-term unless transportation is especially convenient.
Lunar Grotto Base
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Using the Celestial Champion staff grants a small area of permanent light and cooling effect.
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Often located near MacTusk camps, which is useful for winter hunts.
However, I don't recommend this location as a permanent base for a few reasons:
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The staff is difficult to obtain.
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The permanent light and cooling have limited benefits. The cooling can even cause problems by making your character too cold.
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After acquiring the walking cane and tam from MacTusks in the first two winters, there's little reason to hunt them again. Having them near your base can become a nuisance in later winters.
Savanna Base
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Chosen mainly for the beefalo and good connectivity. Friendly for beginners and useful for hound defense.
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In spring, beefalo become aggressive while mating, so distance must be maintained.
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Beefalo can be relocated or split into separate herds.
Overall, the advantages and disadvantages balance out, making this a decent but not exceptional base choice.
There are many other base location strategies, but I won’t go into all of them here.
To be honest, I haven’t played much in the past couple of years—just a few hours every few months. Today, I suddenly felt inspired to write down this topic that I’ve always found interesting.
There are actually many more details and experiences I haven’t covered yet, but this post is already getting quite long, and I’m feeling a bit tired while writing. So I’ll leave it here for now and might add more later.
Sadly, many of the most interesting moments and the ones that best showcased the strengths of our ocean base weren’t properly captured in screenshots. Maybe next time.
If you have any questions or want to discuss this topic, feel free to leave a comment!