Base building
Players construct and expand a personal or team base from placeable structures, providing shelter, storage, defense, and crafting infrastructure. Rust's raid-vulnerable bases and Fortnite's rapid combat-building both center player-built structures as core to strategy, though for different ends — persistent fortification versus momentary battlefield cover. Designers use base building to give players ownership and a home turf, to create defensible objectives worth fighting over, and to let construction itself become a skill (efficient layouts, defensible chokepoints). Key decisions: placement freedom (grid-snapped versus freeform), structural integrity rules, whether other players can raid or destroy it, and how quickly structures can go up (Fortnite's build-in-combat speed versus Rust's deliberate, resource-costly construction). Pitfall: base building that's purely decorative with no functional stakes (nothing to defend, nothing at risk) loses its tension — the system needs a reason bases matter beyond aesthetics.
- Dev effort: Large
- Timing: Real-time or turn-based
- Common in: survival, battle-royale