V Rising – How Does a Base Raid Work? PvP Castle Siege Explained!

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Explanation of exactly how a base raid works in V Rising in PvP mode. If you’re preparing to attack another player, or worried about defending your base, this is a quick explanation of how exactly base raiding works in V Rising! Explains the rules, limitations, and mistakes you must avoid to prevent your hard-earned loot being stolen!

Typical Base Raid Process in V Rising:

1. Attackers Scout for Target Base

Scouting is usually done by running around on a horse, or just noticing a weakness in a base while progressing normally. Later on in the game, level 70-80 players can get the Bat form, which they can use to fly around at night to scout.

Screenshot of V Rising Bat Form Scouting

Don’t worry too much about a max level player raiding your early game base. You would have no chance of fighting off the attack, but the loot the attackers would gain would not be worth the cost of a Siege Golem. Players usually raid other players of somewhat similar level. The one caveat to this is to make sure you have a full layer of stone walls as soon as possible, around your whole base so that players can’t cheaply use explosives or sneak in. See the bottom of this article for beginner base building tips.

Soul Shards: Another reason people raid is to steal Soul Shards from the target base. Soul shards are items/buildings that are dropped by the first player to kill specific bosses on PvP servers. They grant the owner powerful buffs. Successful raiders can steal the Soul Shard from a base (once destroyed, it turns into an item they can carry away with them.) Mid to late game, players can build the Eye of Twilight in their base, which lets them see where all the Soul Shards are on the map – even ones inside enemy bases.

2. Attackers May Build a Small Raid Base

Building a Raid Base allows the attackers a respawn point, as well as a close location to stash loot without a long travel time. The raid base will usually be very small, such as 2×3 tiles, built out of stone walls to avoid weakness to explosives. By mid to late game, the cost of building a temporary small stone base is negligible to raiders.

Depending on server settings, raid bases might not be possible. For example, a solo only server that allows only one Castle Heart per player makes raid bases impossible because their only Castle Heart will be used up by their only base. Not all attackers will even bother with a raid base unless they expect online defenders, counter raids, or a very tough defense.

3. Raiders Summon a Siege Golem

The start of a base raid on a stone base will always be summoning a Siege Golem. The attackers craft a Siege Golem Stone in their base, then bring it to the target base. Then they use the item outside the claimed territory of the target base. Depending on server settings, this usually sends a global chat message to everyone in the server that a siege is beginning, and also shows the location on the map. Summoning takes about 2 minutes. Then one of the attackers jumps into the Siege Golem and controls it directly. It has the same abilities as the Stone Golems you’ll see around the starting area: Regular swipe attack, Area stomp attack, and Ranged straight line attack.

4. Castle Breach: Raiders break down first door with Siege Golem

Before any other damage can be done to the rest of the target base, a Siege Golem MUST break a wall or door on the base. Also, until the first wall or door is broken, the Siege Golem will do 25% of it’s normal damage to the base. This gives defenders a chance to fight off raiders and kill the Siege Golem before the attackers gain access.

Once the first stone wall/door is destroyed by the Siege Golem, everything within that Castle Heart’s borders enter “Castle Breached” status for 7 minutes. During this 7 minute timer, walls, doors, crafting stations, chests, etc can be damaged by anything (Siege Golem, normal attacks, spells, explosives.) A bright red glow shows around all walls at the breached base to indicate walls can be damaged. Once the 7 minute timer is up, attackers cannot damage things anymore and the defenders are allowed to rebuild walls.

  • Side note: For servers with a Castle Raiding window (many custom PvP servers have this setting enabled so you can only damage/raid player bases during a 3-4 hour window in the evening.)  — On these servers, once that window ends, you can’t even damage their servant defenders or buildings, even if you’ve managed to get all the way into their base.

5. Siege Golem Wall Destruction Rampage

Siege Golems last for 5 minutes. Destroying the first wall/door takes about 60-90 seconds of constant attacking with one siege golem. In total, a single Siege Golem can destroy roughly 12 stone walls/doors before its timer runs out, if it is left unchecked.

V Rising Image of Siege Golem Destroying Walls

5a. Bat Form Breach Follow Up (Optional)

Some more experienced raiders may use their flying Bat form once the first wall has been destroyed by their siege golem. They can use bat form to fly to any valid landing point in your base. From there usually they use regular weapon attacks to break down a wall and get into your base that way. Players can’t carry explosives or Siege Golem stones in bat form. Depending on their gear and buffs, it takes something like 30-60 seconds to break down a wall with weapons. This is a lot slower than the Siege Golem, but using Bat form allows them to bypass the defenses at your front entrances.

In order to defend against this, the defender should have their entire base area roofed in using stone walls and floors (except perhaps an unimportant area off to the side, used as a garden.) However, at many base locations there are small spots at the edges of the plateau where it is not possible to wall in, but it is still big enough for the bat to land. In those specific small spots, you can strategically place explosives boxes in those areas and this will prevent bats landing. Of course keep in mind that it is possible to use some spells to trigger those explosives from below, but the enemies would need to get close to do so. You’ll have to test this out yourself because every base location is different. To find these weak spots, just wall in your base and look carefully at the outside edges of your plateau–look for any open grass spots that are around the edge of your plateau that look big enough for a player to walk.

6. Siege Golem Encounters Defense

Siege Golems have a limited health of 375 armor that does not regenerate, so defenders can attack it and cast spells at it to destroy it. Vampire Servants and Tomb summons can also damage the Siege Golem, which has limited capabilities to fight them off. If 2 or more members of a clan are raiding a base, the other clan members will usually deal with defending units while the Siege Golem stays back.

Other attackers can also use explosives during this time to break into extra rooms, but generally won’t use explosives in the same location as the Siege Golem because it causes it damage.

V Rising Screenshot Skeleton Horde Defense with Skeleton Lords Summoning

7. Siege Golem Timer Runs Out (Or Dies)

After the 5 minute Siege Golem timer, there will still be 2-3 minutes where the target base is still “breached.” This is the time when attackers usually clean up any defensive units they encountered, then use explosives or regular weapon attacks to continue breaking into any unopened loot rooms.

8. Siege Golem Number 2+

Mid to late game it is common that a base is big enough, with enough defenders and layers of honeycomb walls that the first Siege Golem will not be enough to break into all the loot rooms. Attackers can quickly head back to their raid base and grab another Siege Golem stone to summon another one and repeat the process.

9. Looting

Once the target base is fully opened up with Siege Golems, the first thing to do is to make sure the defender’s respawn coffins are destroyed, just in case. Then when there is no defense left, raiders will start going through all the chests. Sometimes they will just grab the best items (for a max level player that would be things like Scourgestone, Dark Silver Ingots, Pristine Hide, Scales, Imperial Thread, Greater/Primal Blood Essence, and Flawless Gems.) Some less forgiving raiders will also throw all the items they don’t want on the ground so  that they eventually despawn.

V Rising Looting Chests After Successful Raid

10. Scavengers Sneak in to Pick Up the Scraps

On active servers, usually I saw that any Siege Golem raid would gather a number of scavengers. Usually these people didn’t interfere in the raid in my experience, though they could fight the attackers if they felt like it to counter-raid and steal the loot. (However if the attackers have a raid base, they have a big advantage if that happens.)

Once the main raiders have taken an inventory of loot, the scavengers will pick through the rest. Sometimes this can be a way to get some extra loot for free as a scavenger, though sometimes the raiders will just turn and kill scavengers.

11. Sealing up

After the 7 minute breach and then (sometimes?) a 60 second “Castle Under Attack” timer have elapsed, the defender can rebuild walls to seal up the base. If they’re lucky, they can do this before anyone escapes with loot, seal the exits, and trap the attackers inside with no Siege Golem to breach the castle again.

V Rising Tips for the Best Base Defense:

  • Your tools for defending are: be online during your server’s raiding window, honeycomb walls/doors, well equipped vampire servants, and Tomb minions.
  • Always keep your highest level (rarest) crafting materials in the Vampire Lockbox, which can never be looted by attackers.
  • Use extra Vampire Lockboxes from additional Castle Hearts / players. (Each Castle Heart gets 1 Vampire Lockbox. Some servers give 2 Hearts per player, so for example a 2 player clan could have 4 unlootable chests!)
  • Be sure to store a stack of planks and stone bricks in your vampire lockbox for quick wall rebuilding purposes after a siege.
  • Usually it’s a good idea to keep all your vampire servants together, so they can’t be picked off 1 at a time.
  • Place a room of vampire servants so that a Siege Golem will have to break into the room with them in order to reach your best loot. That can kill or stop a Siege Golem’s progression through your base.
  • Similar to the above servant room, you can place a room full of Tombs with Banshees or Skeleton Lords summoned as an additional layer of annoying defense. Keep it separated from your Servants or they will fight each other.
  • Use “honeycomb” wall/doors to slow Siege Golems – put your loot at the top of a plateau, and fill ALL space below that with 1 tile rooms so a Siege Golem has to break through as many walls as possible.
  • Build as many doors as possible up each ramp to access your inner base. Ramps are the most effective choke points to slow down raiders.

Beginner Mistakes to Avoid When Building Your Base:

  • Don’t have wood walls past gear level 20 or so. They can be easily and cheaply destroyed with explosives, which people get around level 30-35.
  • Do upgrade to stone walls right away – at least one consecutive layer of stone walls around areas with loot.
  • Do always immediately close outer doors behind you every time you enter/leave your base.
  • Do always use “airlocks” – 2 doors or more in a row at every entry/exit point. Protects against badly timed connection problems, players ambushing at the exit, etc.
  • Do build on a plateau, but remember players can jump off plateau edges, so you still need to build walls around the entire plateau.
  • Just building a door blocking the ramp is NOT enough! Build a full border of walls to avoid Frog or Bat form players sneaking in and running away with loot.

Visual Glitch: Red Decaying / Breached Glow on a Base in V Rising

Miscellaneous Tip: There is currently a visual bug in V Rising the causes the red glow that normally means castle breached or decaying to appear on random bases. Pretty often, you’ll see random bases you are running by have this red glow. You can test if that castle is really vulnerable by attacking it. If no damage number appears, or the health bar of the wall at the top of the screen doesn’t go down at all, it’s because its just the visual bug. It seems to happen more often if the owner of the base has not been playing for a while, so at the very least it could indicate the base owner is offline right now.

More V Rising Base Raiding and Defense Tips?!

If I missed anything or made any mistakes, please post a comment below. Thanks for reading!

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