Ideal location for a massive base?

I'm starting to work on making a base, which is based off of this picture below, I have thought seriously about it, and am curious;

(This base was made by Spiritos, which can be found here)

When someone enters Hardmode, certain enemies arise, including the Wraith.
Wraiths can go through blocks which can do more harm than needed.

I don't care about worms, but what I do care about, is having to constantly be pulling out a sword and be killing enemies...

What kind of location/biome/height can I ensure that NO enemies (I can deal with worms) can get in?

I don't want to make that thing, and then have to rebuild it somewhere else when I enter Hardmode. I want the one place where it will be good.

Any suggestions?

2 Answers

There are a couple things to keep in mind when building a large base:

1. NPCs in an area reduce the spawn rate.
   • This means that if you have enough NPCs in your base, you won't have to deal with normal enemy spawns.

2. Enemies cannot spawn in an area if there are player placed walls and the natural walls have been removed.

   • This makes it easier to build bases near the surface since you can remove natural walls much more easily. You could also remove walls in a lower layer, but you would need to remove at least 1 section of wall all the way from the surface to do so. Below 0 depth, there are no walls (except for in Pyramids, Giant Trees, The Dungeon and certain microbiomes), so you can just place walls there to prevent monsters from spawning.

3. Enemies cannot spawn on your screen.

   • This means that if your base is not wider than your screen, enemies will never spawn inside it.
4. There are 4 types of enemies that can pass through walls: Wraiths, Worms, Reapers, and Goblin Sorcerers.
   • The first 3 of these enemies have a maximum distance that they can travel above the ground, so you can prevent them entering your base by having several blocks of empty area around your base.
   • Wraiths, Reapers, and worms are immune to lava, so lining the base with lava does not really help you.
   • Wraiths only spawn on the surface.
   • Reapers only spawn as part of a solar eclipse, which only affects the surface.
   • Goblin Sorcerers only spawn as part of a goblin invasion, which only affects the spawn point.

With that in mind, I would say that the ideal location for such a base is in the cavern layer in the forest biome. This puts you away from the surface (avoiding wraiths and reapers) and away from the spawn (avoiding invasion enemies). If you have enough NPCs in your base, you should not have to worry about worm enemies spawning either. I would also construct the base to not have doors, but rather have player only switches wired to actuators such that a player stepping on the switch opens the "door" and another switch on the other side closes it. Note that you will need to remove all natural walls in the base and replace them with any player placed wall (as noted in #2).

I am guessing if you put a ring of lava with 5-6 blocks large, no wraiths will enter! Wraith have 160 hp and lava per hit does 50 hp damage to monsters (plus the buff), so they cant enter! If you have a lava charm and contruct a kind of gate you can safely enter and exit your base. If not you can always build a teleporter to a safe location to exit and enter (using that).

So I'm guessing any location is fine, if you have your ring of lava around it.