Once Human Territory and Base Building Guide

Your Once Human base is where all the slow stuff happens. Smelting ore, cooking meals, cranking out ammo, turning cortexes into Starchrom. Drop the Territory Core in a bad spot and you pay for it every session, because now you're hiking to the iron, hauling water in your backpack, and squeezing benches onto a plot that can't grow. Put it somewhere smart and the place more or less runs itself while you're off shooting things.

Here's how to pick the spot, what to build first, how to wire power and water so the automation actually kicks in, and how to keep the whole thing standing when a purification drags a horde to your door.

Picking a Territory Location That Scales

What the Territory Core actually does

The Core marks your buildable ground. Anything you place has to fit inside that footprint, full stop. Press B to open build mode and drop it, and later you can pick the whole base up and move it by pressing B and then Z at the new spot. Relocation runs on a ten minute cooldown, and your structures travel with you, so a rough first pick isn't the end of the world.

That said, hauling a mature base across the map is still a chore you only want to do once or twice. Getting it close to right on day one saves you an evening later.

The checklist before you commit

Three things matter, and you want all of them within a short walk:

• Water. A river, a lake, or a shoreline. Water feeds your pump, your purifier, and your crops later on, and boiling seawater is also how you make salt for the better recipes.
• Resource nodes. Trees and ore right on your doorstep. Nodes respawn pretty fast in this game, so a base sitting on top of them means you grind, walk ten seconds, and dump it all in storage.
• A settlement or two nearby. Settlements are where the junk comes from, and junk is what feeds your Disassembly Bench. Being near one also keeps you close to quest hubs and vending.

Space is the fourth thing people forget. You want flat, open ground with nothing crowding the edges, because expansion eats outward in every direction and you don't get to pick which way.

Spots that tend to work

The community has more or less settled on a few reliable areas. Coordinates below are from the Game8 and IGN maps, so punch them into your map screen and go stand there before you commit.

• Dayton Wetlands shoreline, around 6756, -5928. Copper and trees on the beach, salt water right there. Classic starter spot.
• Broken Delta beach, around 6680, -6302. Same deal plus tin, which gets you into Bronze Ingots and the intermediate benches.
• Iron River roadside, near 5788, -3602. Iron ore, trees, flowers, animals, and a settlement close by. This is where you want to be once steel matters.
• Chalk Peak roadside, around 3319, -4740. Fishing, animals, and a pile of ore nodes, with several settlements in range. Good mid game home base.
• Red Sands. If you're constantly starving for ore late in a season, the mountain areas here are thick with it and there's a river for water.

One warning about the good spots: they go first. Beaches and roadside plots get snapped up fast on a fresh server, so if the exact tile you wanted is taken, scout the ground around it rather than settling for a bad plot two zones over. Switching worlds through a Teleportation Tower is another way out if yours is packed.

Leave room to grow

The Territory Expansion memetic sits in the Building branch of your Memetics tree, and it's a straight upgrade you can grab without unlocking anything else first. Game8 lists the footprint going from 14.4 square meters up to 32.4, so call it a bit more than double.

Here's the catch. The expansion can't eat roads, water, or another player's buildings. If you wedged yourself between a highway and a river because the view was nice, the upgrade will refuse to fire and you'll be relocating instead. Boring flat grass with empty space on all four sides beats a cliffside vista almost every time.

Core Structures Every Base Needs

The first five benches

A handful of stations carry your whole early game, and they should go down before anything decorative:

• Disassembly Bench. Turns junk into raw materials. This is the engine of your early economy.
• Supplies Workbench. Ammo, medicine, tools like pickaxes and fishing rods.
• Gear Workbench. Guns and armor.
• Furnace. Ore into ingots. Build two if you can, because smelting is slow and you'll always want more steel than you have.
• Stove. Cooking, and boiling dirty water into something safe to drink.

One mechanical gotcha: most facilities need to sit on a foundation before they'll place at all. Foundations live in the first tab of the build menu under Structures and Frames, so lay floors first and place benches second.

Almost everything past this point requires Memetics. The Logistics branch covers resource generation, farming, and power. The Building branch covers stronger structures, furniture, and defense. If you're investing in your base, those two tabs are where your points go, and the deeper nodes are the good ones.

Storage before decoration

Boring advice that saves hours: build crates early. Every hunk of scrap you disassemble has to live somewhere, and if it's living in your backpack, you're walking around overencumbered instead of playing the game. Keep crates next to your benches so the drop-off is one step. Large Crates show up later, plus a Fridge once you have power, and there are dedicated weapon and gear crates if you like keeping things sorted.

Sorting as you go takes thirty seconds. Undoing a junk pile that's been dumping into one crate for two weeks takes an afternoon.

Securement units and your Deviant crew

Isolated Securement Units are where your captured Deviants live and work. You start with a limit of 5 units. The Securement Unit Expansion memetics in Logistics push that to 10, then to 20, and the first node is a prerequisite for the second.

The ones worth penning early:

• Digby Boy for passive ore. You get him from a Lowe side quest after reaching Deadsville, and he also drops off Tin Ore mining.
• Logging Beaver for wood. Found around the docks south of Meyer's Market.
• Flame Essence to speed up furnace production. He's at Sutherland Chemical Plant or Hearts Industries, and he'll run from you, so expect a chase.
• Electric Eel for generator output. He comes from fishing.
• Paper Figure for base repair. Big quality of life once you're running purifications, since stuff breaks every week.

Deviants have moods, and a grumpy one works slower. Give them a proper room, feed them, and toss in a toy if you've got one, rather than cramming them into a corner as an afterthought.

A layout that saves you steps

Build tight and build up. Cluster your workbenches with your main storage right beside them, and put the slow processing stuff (furnaces, refining) near where the raw materials land. A compact two or three story base beats a sprawling one story ranch on basically every axis: fewer steps per session, cheaper to wall, easier to cover with turrets, and it wastes less of your territory footprint.

Vertical also means your valuable storage can sit on an upper floor, behind more walls, which matters more once you're defending the place.

A couple of build mode helpers while we're here. Press ~ in build mode to fly, which makes placing roofs way less annoying than jumping around on top of your house. Pressing CAPS toggles grid snap off if the fixed 45 degree rotation is fighting you.

Power and Water Systems for Automation

This is the part that turns a shelter into a factory. Once Human automates a ton of the grind, but only if you actually connect everything. A facility sitting next to a generator is not powered. That's the number one thing that stalls new bases.

Your first generator

The Solar Generator is the starter power source, unlocked in the Logistics branch at tier 3. Building one costs 15 Steel Ingots, 8 Copper Ingots, 5 Glass, 4 Refined Parts, 4 Fireproof Plastic, 8 Electronic Parts, and 3 Fuses. It has to go outside where daylight reaches the panel, so don't wall it into a room.

You can run 4 generators to start, and certain memetics and specializations push that cap up. Electrical Expert adds a generator slot plus a couple extra watts of output, and there are equivalent nodes for the other generator types.

Every powered facility shows its watt draw right in the build menu. Add up everything you want running, then make sure your generators cover it with room to grow, because turrets are hungry and you'll be adding them.

Other options as you go: the Biomass Generator burns biological tissue, so it needs constant feeding. The Hydraulic Generator needs flowing water. The Advanced Generators memetic node unlocks upgraded versions of all of them, and the Advanced Solar is a straight upgrade over the basic panel.

Wiring, terminals, and switches

Hover the generator in build mode and press X to start a wire, run it to the facility, press X again to finish. That's the whole mechanic. From there:

• Terminals (ground, wall, and suspended) and pylons keep wires tidy instead of draping them across your yard like laundry.
• Switches are the real win. Route all your turrets through one switch and your production gear through another.

Why switches matter: turrets drink a lot of power, and early grids can't run turrets and furnaces at the same time. When a defense kicks off, you flip production off and guns on, so the entire grid feeds your defenses. Just remember to flip it back when you're done, or you'll log in tomorrow to an empty water tank.

Water, done right

Early game, a Rainwater Collection System outside gives you dirty water, which you boil on the stove. It works, but it's slow and weather dependent.

The real setup is the Water Pump, a Logistics tier 3 unlock that costs 5 Ciphers and 700 Energy Links, and you need the Water Filters memetic first. The pump goes directly on the ground, not on a foundation, and ideally right in the water. Bonus uses: drop it on an oil field and it pulls crude oil, drop it on a beach and it pulls salt water for making salt.

The chain is pump to purifier to tank:

1. Pump sits in the water and pulls dirty water.
2. A purifier (Compact Water Filter, or the Osmosis and Stardust versions later) turns dirty water into pure water plus impure acid. That acid is a nice side income, since acid feeds fuel crafting.
3. A Water Tank stores the output. Go into build mode at the purifier or tank, pick Connect Pipe, and run the pipe across.

Gravity is real in this system. Put the tank at the same level or below the purifier, never above it, because the moment your power cuts out the water runs back downhill and drains out of storage. Ask anyone who's logged in to an empty tank how that feels.

Both the pump and the purifier draw watts, so budget for them when you're sizing your grid.

Let Deviants feed the grid

The Electric Eel, from fishing, boosts generator output just by living in a securement unit. The Flame Essence cranks furnace speed. Neither costs you power, they just sit there making everything around them better. If you're building an automation base, these two are basically free money.

Defending Your Base From Raids and Deviants

Why any of this matters

The Stardust Resonant Filter is the whole reason to fortify. It's a function facility (build menu, Facilities, fourth tab) that turns Eclipse Cortexes from PvE content and Chaotic Cortexes from PvP into Starchrom, which is the main Starchrom faucet in the game and what funds your weapon blueprints.

The second it switches on, it broadcasts a resonance call and every Deviant in the area sprints at it trying to tear it down. You can purify up to 40 cortexes a week, and running max tier ones for all 40 pays out around 4,000 Starchrom. That's a serious chunk of your weekly budget, so it's worth building around.

A tier 3 purification throws roughly level 35 enemies at you across three waves, with a couple of elites mixed in. The game suggests four players, but a well defended base handles it with one.

Filter placement decides the fight

Enemies beeline for the filter, which means where you put it decides where they spawn and which way they walk. Drop it in the open middle of your base and you'll get hit from every direction at once. Shove it into a corner of the territory instead, and now you know exactly which strip of ground the horde has to use.

Turrets staring at empty ground are wasted watts, so run one cheap low level purification first, watch where things actually come from, then build your kill zone around that.

Turrets, traps, and funnels

Your toolkit, roughly in order of value:

• Rifle Turrets and Shotgun Turrets from the Auto Turrets I and II memetics. Auto targeting, needs power and ammo. Tier II versions hit noticeably harder.
• Gatling Cannons from Close Defense I and II. Hand operated rather than automatic, but they hit like a truck when you're standing there working them.
• Gravitational Grip traps. Slows anything within 6 meters and marks them. This is the MVP, because a slowed enemy in front of four turrets is a dead enemy.
• Fire Traps for burn damage within 2 meters, and Spike Traps for the approach path.
• Dynamic Sensors and Alarms. These wake turrets up and keep them reliable, which matters on busy servers where turrets sometimes doze off.

The shape that works: fence your perimeter so approaching enemies either chew through the fence or funnel around to your chosen gap. Put a Gravitational Grip in that gap with overlapping turret arcs covering it. That's your kill box, and pretty much everything dies in it. Sandbags and stone fences buy extra seconds, and using pillars instead of plain walls on your exterior makes the structure slower to break through.

Tier II and III versions of the traps and turrets are deeper in the Building tree, and Enhanced Support is where the tougher structures live. Grab those before the cosmetic stuff.

You have to shoot too

Here's the part people miss. Enemies killed purely by turrets don't drop loot for you. You need to tag each one with a bullet or two before it dies to get credit. The drops include acid and other useful mats, so standing there watching your turrets work is literally leaving resources on the ground. Even a sidearm popping each target once is enough.

On PvP servers

Running a Chaotic Cortex (the Echo Stone) flags your entire territory for PvP while the purification runs, and other players can absolutely show up mid-fight to wreck your setup and take the payout. Bank your Starchrom before you start one, don't run echo stones while solo if you can avoid it, and expect company.

Common Base Building Mistakes to Avoid

Wedging into a pretty plot that can't expand. If a road, river, or neighboring base hugs your border, Territory Expansion won't fire no matter how many memetics you've unlocked. Check the surrounding ground for empty space before you drop the Core.

Placing benches without foundations. Most facilities refuse to place on bare dirt. Floors first, always.

Assuming proximity means power. A bench sitting right next to a generator does nothing until you physically wire them together with X. Half of all "why isn't the pump working" posts come down to this.

Putting the water tank above the purifier. Water flows downhill the instant power drops, and your storage empties itself. Tank at or below the purifier, every time.

Filter in the middle of the yard. You're choosing to fight a 360 degree defense instead of a 90 degree one. Corner it and funnel.

Building one furnace. Smelting is the bottleneck in this game, and doubling up processing stations is one of the cheapest upgrades you can make. Same goes for stoves once you're cooking for buffs.

Skipping storage crates early. You'll spend a week walking around at maximum weight and dropping things to pick up other things.

Sprawling on one level. Flat and wide costs more walls, more power runs, more turret coverage, and more footsteps. Stack it.

No switches on the grid. Without them, your turrets brown out mid-wave because the fridge and the furnace are still eating watts.

Watching turrets do all the work. No tags means no drops. Shoot everything at least once.

Ignoring Deviant mood. A fed Deviant with a toy in a proper room out-produces a miserable one crammed in a corner by a lot, and it costs you basically nothing.

The last thing worth knowing: that first base is going to be a little rough, and the game knows it. Moving is just B then Z with a ten minute cooldown, so a bad pick costs you ten minutes and some wire, not a full rebuild.