My favorite POI for conversion to base

The Swiggin Serum.

It's easy enough to solo clear on Day 1 or 2, has just two wooden stairways to break in order to make the upper floor inaccessible, and the attic becomes quite cozy with just a couple of minor modifications :chuncky:

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Looking good :)

From the old west series of POIs, the Undie Takers is pretty good as well; the cemetery in the back yard works fine for hordes for a few weeks. Small adjustments required of course.

 
I've always been partial to the Cell Tower. Snow a short distance to the north, plentiful clay ridges and a river to the south, a farm not far away for easy access to corn, two biomes to increase the chances for wildlife to be present, decent sightlines, all the iron, chrysanthemum, goldenrod, and cotton you will need in the early game, and a quick and easy conversion to a modern castle.

I also like being able to work directly down from a metal or concrete access building to a mine at the bedrock level for those hard-to-beat hordes. The mine also makes it near impossible for there to be any screamers - the heat is contained too deep to trigger spawns.

 
Somebody in another thread went on and on about the modern Fire Station so we searched one out and took it over as a base. It is definitely a hardened structure (10000K hp steel foundation for 2/3 of its footprint), but that also makes it a PITA to modify. We gutted the ground floor and covered it with spikes. Ramp access from outside to the middle-roof level. Our home is between the big bulletproof glass windows and we have a bridge to the apartment building next door where crafting stations are kept.

Now that all the work is done, it's a fine base, but probably I wouldn't pick it again at least not as a level 10, day 6 character. We like concrete-foundation buildings to start with, but something with a smaller footprint so it takes fewer spikes and other traps to defend the perimeter. Eventually we build a custom concrete horde bunker of course.

The mine also makes it near impossible for there to be any screamers - the heat is contained too deep to trigger spawns.
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Is that how heat works tho? I thought that heat was applied at a chunk level, meaning 16x16 bedrock to sky, with all heat sources within the chunk contributing the the chunk's overall heat value. And so when a chunk gets hot enough it starts triggering screamers at the surface. Is it possible they're spawning, but they can't pinpoint you because you're too far down? And despawning after a while I guess so you never see them?

Or is heat instead a sphere centered on each heat source? That seems expensive to calculate given how many heat sources there are in a typical player-made base. But it would mean, presumably, that you could have heat sources too deep to trigger a screamer spawn because the sphere doesn't intersect a spawnable surface block.

 
Or is heat instead a sphere centered on each heat source? That seems expensive to calculate given how many heat sources there are in a typical player-made base. But it would mean, presumably, that you could have heat sources too deep to trigger a screamer spawn because the sphere doesn't intersect a spawnable surface block.
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Don't know. All I know is that I can run my stone-refining forge non stop and never have a screamer appear. :)

 
I like the small stone church as a base. It's easy to upgrade, easy to limit access points and it has a light already on. Plus there's a bunch of pews for ready to harvest wood. Second favorite is the funeral home for the same reason.

 
Ranger station is #1 for me. Small Bunker is #2.

Bunker has more room, but larger area to defend. Fence already up, not hard to upgrade a bit.

Ranger has 10x10 cobblestone base, 2 floors. Take out the walkway on the bottom, upgrade the wood blocks to cobblestone, then the whole lower to brick and it's a nice starter. Has a light on the second floor too. Walkway on second floor can be slowly converted to bars.

 
Ranger station is #1 for me. Small Bunker is #2.
Bunker has more room, but larger area to defend. Fence already up, not hard to upgrade a bit.

Ranger has 10x10 cobblestone base, 2 floors. Take out the walkway on the bottom, upgrade the wood blocks to cobblestone, then the whole lower to brick and it's a nice starter. Has a light on the second floor too. Walkway on second floor can be slowly converted to bars.
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I've always used the ranger station as well. Works great and you can slowly upgrade to brick > concrete > reinforced. Have yet to face demolishers though. I don't do the whole horde base + living/crafting base; I just find it kind of cheesy. I like to defend what I've got :p

 
I find the big Pass n Gas to be great, I set up shop upstairs in the office/kitchen area. The building is made out of concrete with only some windows that need replacing. I like how it's decorated upstairs, it's not pretty but it feels a lot more immersive than most other POIs I've made bases out of. Tons of bulletproof glass windows upstairs too which is nice, I get sick of having no outside light/view in other bases. I only very, very rarely have a problem with zombies roaming around and agroing me while I"m upstairs, I knock out the staircase and it seems like only every 5-6 days or so will anything agro me even with workstations running. I think the height and large horizontal footprint of the POI works against zombies. There's a garage for your vehicles and tons of roof space that I eventually use for a helipad.

The cathedral can make for a pretty epic base. You have concrete walls that are 2-3 blocks thick and the errie atmosphere of the place is unbeatable on horde night. Put your stuff up in the belltower and nothing will ever agro you. For hordes I once took out the entire floor of the place, the basement is two levels so you have like an extra 30 vertical blocks worth of space which I used to build one huge winding staircase all the way up to the base of the belltower.

The desert fire station is great but I imagine most people know of this already. reinforced steel walls for most of it. The walls of the garage section are only 300hp metal walls and I just collapse that entire section (great way to get early iron if you're making a base there) so that there's less to reinforce and defend. The floor of the entire POI is also concrete which is nice.

The two story lobbys of the three skyscraper POIs are also fun to make a base out of. The benefits are obvious and there's a million different things you can decide to do with them.

 
I like the MAIL building in Departure, Navesgane..

small, easy to clear, easy to upgrade, and being right in the middle of a city, it's just a stones throw from everything.

Easy access to Higashi, Crack-a-Book and Dishong towers

and has a gun safe and 3 wall safes (essential if you happen to be playing a no-crafting run)

I have yet to see it outside of Navesgane (in random gen), though..

 
I'm a big fan of the yellow house in Diersvill, the garage out back with the pre-dug basement/mining vestibule, nice sight lines, easy looting pretty much every direction, nearby farm, all the biomes an easy trot away, what's not to love?

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I've since extended the solid awning above the weak spot out a block so the zeds get little opportunity to climb on each other to attack high; sub in a stack of molotovs and a claw hammer and that base and equipment took me through day 28, gs s/b (36+28)*1.5=96 which matches my memory. The bow was looted, everything else I made. The wedge-tip skirts work great, there's no traps except four fairly useless ones (now that I don't have to lead dogs over them) behind the flower boxes in back. Day 28 I didn't notice some zeds randomly attacking the iron entry door to the garage, once they knocked it down a peg it became the weak spot and the horde broke througyh from behind before I figured out what was going on, drove me up my internal emergency-escape ladder

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until they got bored and wandered off to do random destruction. A few quick club kills and some panicked repairs and I was back in business. Now I keep iron bars in the horde-defense-supplies chest in the corner too, the door opens out so if it happens again I can put down the bars and they can't really go over (awning protection above that door now too).

Found a crucible so now I've got a vault door, which I think means I can upgrade the weak-point wall block (and the rest) to reinforced concrete. We'll see how that does against the beefier hordes when I get solid playtime to play again, but staying ahead of the damage was easy and I did a good bit of horde-night killing with just that club, testing says four molotovs will drop even a rad biker, and I can make first aid bandages and have a little aloe farm going so I'm really liking my chances. flw, right?

Happy New Year to all.

 
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