Bases & Raiding — Build Smart, Raid Smarter

There Is No Claim Protection

Let's get the most important thing out of the way first: CivSMP has no land claims. No /claim, no plot permissions, no protection plugin standing between your chests and a determined raider.

If someone finds your base, they can break in, take everything, and burn what's left. That's the game. Your base is only as safe as you make it — and the players who thrive here are the ones who plan for the day they get found, not the ones who assume they won't.

The only protected areas on the server are spawn and staff-designated safe zones — and even spawn has Warzones where PvP is fully enabled. Everything else is fair game.

Choosing a Base Location

Location does more for your survival than any amount of obsidian.

• Go far. The single best defence is distance. Use /rtp and then keep walking — most raiders search the first few thousand blocks and give up
• Avoid round numbers. Bases at 1000, 1000 or directly on an axis get found by people idly following coordinates
• Get off the beaten path. Don't build near spawn roads, portals, popular biomes, or anything marked on Dynmap
• Mind the nether. A nether portal is a shortcut for you and a map to your front door for everyone else. Hide it, or don't build one
• Watch your trail. Long strip mines, block trails, cleared forests, and stray torches all point straight at you

Building a Base That Survives

Assume the raider is patient and has TNT.

Hide it

The best-defended base is the one nobody finds. Underground bases, cave bases, and ocean-floor bases beat fortresses on the surface every time. No lighting visible from the outside, no cobblestone spire, no floating water source.

Layer it

Wrap valuables in blast-resistant material — obsidian, ancient debris, or reinforced deepslate shells. A raider who has to spend twenty minutes on each layer usually leaves.

Split it

Never keep everything in one room. Spread your valuables across multiple stashes in separate locations. A successful raid should cost you a portion of your gear, not your entire account.

Decoy it

An obvious "base" on the surface with a few junk chests satisfies most raiders. Your real storage sits three hundred blocks away with nothing pointing at it.

Keep an escape route

Water drops, ender pearls in a wall slot, and a second exit are worth more than another layer of obsidian when someone's already inside.

Traps Are Allowed

You are fully allowed to defend your territory with traps. Redstone, lava, TNT, falling anvils, mob grinders aimed at the entrance — if you can build it, you can use it.

Trap type	How it works
🔥 Lava curtains	Dispenser-fed lava over the entryway — cheap and brutal
💥 TNT floors	Pressure plate wired to TNT below the walkway
🕳️ Pit falls	Trapdoor over a long drop, ideally into lava
🐝 Mob rooms	Release hostile mobs into a sealed corridor
🚪 Maze entrances	Slow raiders down long enough for you to log in and respond

Trap killing is legal on CivSMP, and so is TPA trapping — if a player accepts a teleport into your base and dies to your defences, that's on them. Trust wisely.

Raiding Other Players

Raiding is allowed and encouraged. You may break into any player base, take anything inside, and destroy whatever you don't want.

How raiders find bases:

• Following players home after a fight or a trade
• Tracking nether tunnels and portal networks
• Sweeping Dynmap for lit-up, terrain-altered chunks
• Watching where players /rtp to and heading the same direction
• Simply exploring far out and paying attention

Raiding etiquette that keeps you out of trouble: take what you want, but don't grief spawn, public shops, event builds, or any staff-protected zone. Those get rolled back and the person responsible gets punished.

What Staff Will and Won't Do

Situation	Outcome
Your base got raided	No reimbursement — that's intended gameplay
You died in a trap you walked into	No reimbursement
You accepted a TPA and got killed	No reimbursement
Spawn or a public build was griefed	Rolled back, offender punished
You lost items to a confirmed server bug	Open a ticket — we'll look at it

Staff do not police raiding, PvP, theft, or trapping. The one thing we do police is griefing protected areas and abusing bugs.

Lag Machines Are Banned

Anything built to damage server performance — lag machines, chunk-breaking redstone, entity floods, infinite loops — is removed without warning and gets you banned. Defending your base is fine; taking the server down to do it is not.

Tips

• Rebuild faster than they can raid — the fastest recovery beats the strongest walls
• Don't flex in chat — announcing your netherite stockpile is an advertisement
• Trust nobody with coordinates, including friends, until they've earned it
• Keep spare hearts in mind — defending a base is easier at 15 hearts than at 3. See the LifeSteal Hearts guide
• Use /backpack for anything you can't afford to leave in a chest
• Join a guild — shared bases are harder to raid and someone's always online to respond. See the Guilds guide

Final Thoughts

There's no safety net on CivSMP, and that's the point. Every chest you fill is a chest somebody could take, and every base you build is a bet that you hid it well enough.

Build paranoid. Stash everything twice. Good luck.