Kill Maze For Raiders

This proof-of-concept is a more complex example of Wiring. For other examples, see Wiring Examples. The purpose of this kill maze is to defend against Raiders.

How and why does it work

A killmaze takes advantage of the Raider's AI preference to not break any blocks, or if it has to, break Doors or Fence Gates to funnel them into an area filled with traps to kill or at least severely damage the Raiders before they enter your base. Having kill mazes around your base can help reduce or fully negate the damage your settlers will take in an event of a raid.

• Do note that if a path is too far or have too many doors or fence gates vs a single wall (such as 10 gates to break vs a 1-layer wall), the raider would sometimes choose to break in instead. Therefore, players will need to ensure separated mazes are not too far from one another (such as on two opposite corners or have four for every direction) and if using doors or fence gates to slow down raiders, ensure the wall is thick enough. (two walls thick should be enough to force raiders to use enter a kill maze with 4-5 gates, as of v0.25)

A kill maze will require a large wall surrounding your base, and entrances meant for raiders to pass through.

Doors and Gates can help with slowing down raiders, allowing you to build smaller and more compact kill mazes. However, when you have too many of them, a raider might find it faster to just break through the wall. The material and the choice between Door or Gate don't matter as they both have the same durability)

• It is also HIGHLY RECOMMENDED to exclude kill mazes from settlement defend zones so your settlers won't jump into the kill mazes when it is active.

Settlement Wall

To stop raiders from entering from multiple directions, a wall surrounding the whole settlement is required.

• The kill maze is the only opening in the settlement wall, so no matter what direction Raiders or NPCs come from, they should be able to make their way to the kill maze and navigate it to enter and leave the settlement.
• To prevent kill mazes from hurting the settlers and the player, Sensors should be used and set to detect hostile enemies.

The required thickness of the wall depends on the number of doors/gates you are planning to place into your kill maze, as well as the size of your wall (affecting how far Raiders from each of 8 directions have to walk to reach the kill maze).

• 1 thick wall is generally enough for kill mazes with 0-2 gates/doors
• 2 thick wall is generally enough for kill mazes with up to 5-6 gates/doors.

Kill Maze

Here is a close-up of the kill maze on the south side. Raiders will be coming in from the bottom/South.

And here is the wiring setup used.

Note that there are 5 Fence Gates, 5 Pressure Plates, and a two wide wall behind it.

Wiring Explanation

• The red Wire is the source of power for starting the kill maze. The Sensors will power it then the wire powers the Timer.
  • In the example, it is also connected to a Lever. This is just to test if the traps work.
• The green Wire is the output of the timer, and it's the one that triggers the traps.
• The blue wire connects the gates and pressure plates (optional).
  • The reason for this is so the gates will auto-close again after a raider breaks through the gate, activate the pressure plate (and "actively powers the opening of the gates"), and walks away allowing the pressure plate to deactivate and close the gates.
  • This allows for a more consistent multi-wave raider clearing as well as making everything full automatic where the player does not need to manually close to gates at all after a raid.

Doors and Gates in a kill maze

Doors and Gates are amazing for slowing down Raiders, keeping them inside for longer while their health gets chipped away. This allows for a much more compact design than a "distance-only" based kill maze.

Doors vs Gates

With good design, a single Door can block a raider's path not only once but twice, slowing them down twice.

However, Gates have the ability to allow the flame trap's AOE to pass through. (Not to mention that Gates are centered on the blocks so it looks nicer than a Door)

Ultimately, both are good choices but the right choice depends on your maze's design. Both Doors and Gates have the same durability so the choice entirely depends on if the player wants to make full use of Flame Traps or by making an even more compact maze with Doors.

Traps

The best traps to be used are the Void Traps and Fire Traps.

• Void traps deal high damage but is unable to pierce through gates. Therefore, it is placed before gates in the example so Raiders get damaged while spending time breaking through the gates.
• Fire traps are weaker in damage, but deals Damage-over-time after hit as well as have the ability to go through gates. This is why they are placed after the gates so the whole corridor is covered by the flame trap.

Other traps or methods of dealing damage (Arrow traps, thorns) are less used as they are not able to deal damage to more than 1 enemy. Thorns are also broken by any other trap's projectiles.

Wiring Settings

• Ensure that the output of sensors is connected to the input for timers and NOT connected to any traps.
• Ensure only the output of the timer is connected to any traps to allow the traps to be continuously triggered.
• Sensors should be set to detect only hostile mobs to prevent settlers and the player from getting damaged when passing through.

Making extra entrances for easier movement

If you would like to make extra entrances so you don't have to walk through the maze, you can do it by adding more doors/gates to said entrance relative to the number in the kill maze (ie, 6-8 doors if your kill maze has 4-5 doors) , making it "harder to break through" for raiders, which means the raiders would prefer entering the kill maze. An example is a straight row of doors right next to the entrance.

You can also try ladders, placing one inside the wall and one outside. As raiders (and settlers) are unable to use ladders, this will be a player-only entrance method.

However, as you progress through the game you might start making use of Homestones and Waystones more, usually omitting the need for extra entrances.

How to build a kill maze

A Gentle reminder that trap direction depends on the direction the player is facing

A kill maze is very simple and the design is extremely flexible. For this building guide, I'll be using a much simpler design and players may experiment with their own designs.

Before we start, we have to prepare the material. A simple kill maze will require building blocks (Dungeon Walls used in the example), Traps, as well as Wiring Items (Cutter, Wrench, Wires, Timer Gate and Sensor Gates). Optionally, Doors or Gates too for slowing down Raiders. The exact number needed depends on the size of your kill maze.

Initial Design

The first step is to Plan the Path and Trap Placements. There are some things to keep in mind at this step The max range of Flame Traps and Void Traps are 8 blocks, so don't make your path too long. You can also make your paths exactly 8 blocks before reach turn to fully maximize the trap's AOE. If you are planning on using Gates or Doors, you might want to think about where you are going to place them. My recommendation is at the end of the turn, and at the spot where the Raiders stand when breaking the Gate or Door, placing more traps there to deal more damage is a good idea. Initial Design before thinking of where to put doors or traps. Entrance to the kill maze is top right, while the exit / entrance to my settlement is bottom left Next comes the Timer Gates and Sensor Gates. Wire your Sensor Gates to your Timer Gates. Ensure that none of the wire powers any traps. Sensor Gates only have a maxed range of a 5, allowing it to detect anything within a 11x11 square. To ensure that everything in your kill maze can be detected by the sensor, you can enable detecting players, connecting to to some wires, and check if which blocks that the sensor can sense the player from. You can change Wire Color at the top left of your screen when holding a Wrench or Cutter After testing the sensor's range, turn off the Player Detection and hook up a wire of a different color from the timer to the traps. And finally, set up your timer. Now, your initial kill maze is basically done. It is time to test it against real raiders. The health of the Raider as it goes through the maze with this initial design

Upgrading

Now for the optional bit, putting in Gates and Doors. With one single Gate, it's a pretty big difference. Some can't even get through the Gate. With a one wide wall around my settlement, I can place at least two Gate or Door.

Two sided Kill Maze that fits in better with the build. Comes with an "easy access route" too in the middle. Contains a Door and a Gate

Tips

Collecting Traps

You can explore dungeons while holding a wiring item to make wires appear on both the map and your screen. Then, doing a mapshot (in-game map screenshot, or with /mapshot for the whole map) will show the location on the saved map too.

Testing Kill mazes

To know if your kill maze works, you have to check two things,

• If raiders will enter your kill maze instead of breaking through the wall
• The effectiveness of the kill maze (how much damage it can deal)

Waiting for a raid to occur can take a while. What you can do is make a copy/backup of the world, enter the copy (with another character or set the world to disallow outside characters), and do /startraid twice. The first time will ask for your confirmation to enable cheats. (Characters used in Cheat enabled worlds will have achievements disabled)

Note

The design of the kill maze does not need to match what was shown in the example. In fact, all four kill mazes in the large mapshot example are slightly different.

All types of doors, gates, and blocks have the same durability (time required for raiders to open/break), which means the materials of your doors/gates/walls don't matter.

This page was recently fully revamped. The previous author went into more details on the step-by-steps for killmaze building. If you are curious about it, you can check it out by clicking into the page histories.

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• Click on any of the [time, date] buttons before 11:03, 5 July 2024‎ by Rainfury. I recommend 04:19, 23 May 2023‎ by a unregistered user.