Top tips to build your base in Lord Of The Rings: Return To Moria
“We must face the long dark of Moria. Be on your guard.”
Long after the battle between the Balrog and the Fellowship deep in the mines of Moria, the dwarves returned to the site to attempt to make it hospitable to future generations. The Lord Of The Rings: Return To Moria shows what happened in the Fourth Age of Middle-Earth as they attempt to rebuild Moria: hunting, sleeping, managing mysterious creatures, and—above all else—building new structures that will hopefully last for generations.
Like other survival games, Return to Moria focuses on building an entire base, whether alone or with friends. The base you build must be functional too, as you’ll be attacked by enemies fairly often, so you need to find a defensible location.
Stock up
Before you start your masterpiece in the game, there are a few key things to remember. You need to collect various resources before you can do anything—as is the case in almost any survival game—so make sure you’ve got a surplus of crafting materials before you start building. Otherwise, you’ll have to leave a half-built and half-defended structure to venture into the mines further.
Home is where the hearth is
To construct a base, you need to build a Stone Hearth, which acts as the core of your home. It takes 15 coal, 18 stone, and 20 wood scraps to build one of these, so you should be able to get one quickly. However, you should always make sure you have the spare resources for a Stone Hearth in case you ever find somewhere you want to build a base and you don’t want to have to trawl back through the map to find it.
The final thing you need to remember before building your base is that you need a Bedroll. The Bedroll is the respawn point if your character dies, and without it, you could be set back a lot, especially if you haven’t been frequently setting up camp and resting.
How to build a safe base
Make sure your base only has one entrance. The fewer entrances, the fewer places enemies can invade, which means you have less chance of being overwhelmed. While enemies can come from all angles, having one very defensible area means you (and any friends who might be with you) can take out enemies without spreading yourself thin.
Keep a room for resources. Part of the issue with having a massive base in any game like this is that you can quickly become lost or overwhelmed by enemies unless you’ve REALLY organized your stuff. If you have one room that you know you can easily defend, it makes it a lot easier to not completely lose track of yourself and your equipment.
While you’re working on a base, you’ll also want somewhere to store your building materials. Since you’re a dwarf, you’re not exactly great at carrying a large amount of stuff, so you should build a facility to store everything. This is especially useful in Lord Of The Rings: Return To Moria, because when you die, you drop all of the items that you were holding at the time. You don’t want to drop all of the stuff that you’ve accumulated over the course of multiple play sessions, do you? That would set you back significantly.
Build more than one base
Make sure you’re building bases often. As you explore, you’ll want to heal and refill all of your resources frequently. Therefore, keeping enough just to make a small base is a good idea, and it also means you can fast travel throughout the mines of Moria really easily.
The final thing you’ll want to keep in mind while you’re playing is that you’ll sometimes stumble on places that are loaded with resources already. The issue with these locales is that the base often has a downside: Perhaps it’s not easily defensible, or it’s literally falling apart. However, if you really like the location, make sure you build up your walls so everything won’t collapse from an initial attack. After all, with hordes of enemies invading you at only a moment’s notice, and with the potential of death around any corner, then there’s no real downside to using your resources on a place that you like the look of.
With all these tips under your belt, you should be able to make a base that can grow over time as you collect more and more resources. You’ll be able to make a shipshape home that you can defend from any of the roaming nasties of Moria. Just watch for any Balrogs down there—we all know what happened last time.
