Defending your base: turrets, walls and range

The turret roster at a glance

Seven turret prototypes exist in the data, split between the base game and the Space Age expansion. Four expose a numeric range and cooldown; three do not, because those values are nested inside attack parameter structures that the extraction did not capture. The table below shows what the data contains and where it stops.

Turret	Source	Type	HP	Range	Cooldown	Craft time (s)
gun turret	Base	ammo turret	400	18	6	8.0
laser turret	Base	electric turret	1000	24	40	20.0
flamethrower turret	Base	fluid turret	1400	NOT FOUND	NOT FOUND	20.0
artillery turret	Base	artillery turret	2000	NOT FOUND	NOT FOUND	40.0
rocket turret	Space Age	ammo turret	1500	36	120	10.0
railgun turret	Space Age	ammo turret	4000	40	170	10.0
tesla turret	Space Age	electric turret	2000	NOT FOUND	NOT FOUND	30.0

Cooldown is the interval between consecutive shots, in ticks. It is not a DPS figure by itself, because damage per shot varies by ammunition type and some turrets draw power or consume fluids per firing cycle. The laser turret carries a damage_modifier of 2, but the base laser damage value lives in the same nested attack parameters that were not extracted, so a raw DPS number cannot be produced for it. The same applies to rocket, flamethrower, artillery and tesla turrets.

HP per ingredient: what durability costs

A turret that survives one more hit is worth more than a turret that deals one more point of damage if the difference keeps it alive long enough to fire. To compare defensive value across turrets that use completely different supply chains, the table below divides each turret's HP by the total number of solid ingredients its recipe requires. Fluid ingredients are listed separately because counting a unit of fluid as equivalent to a solid item would make recipes with large fluid inputs look artificially cheap.

The metric is HP per solid ingredient. It is a rough, reproducible cost ratio, not a full economic analysis. It ignores ingredient tier (a quantum processor counts the same as an iron plate), crafting complexity and power infrastructure. What it captures is the simple question: how many raw items do I feed into an assembler to get one point of structural integrity?

Turret	HP	Solid ingredients	Solid count	HP / solid item	Fluid required
gun turret	400	10 iron gear wheel + 10 copper plate + 20 iron plate	40	10.00	none
laser turret	1000	20 steel plate + 20 electronic circuit + 12 battery	52	19.23	none
flamethrower turret	1400	30 steel plate + 15 iron gear wheel + 10 pipe + 5 engine unit	60	23.33	none
artillery turret	2000	60 tungsten plate + 60 refined concrete + 40 iron gear wheel + 10 processing unit	170	11.76	none
rocket turret	1500	4 rocket launcher + 4 processing unit + 20 carbon fiber + 20 steel plate + 20 iron gear wheel	68	22.06	none
railgun turret	4000	100 quantum processor + 30 tungsten plate + 50 superconductor + 20 carbon fiber	200	20.00	100 fluoroketone cold
tesla turret	2000	1 teslagun + 10 supercapacitor + 10 processing unit + 50 superconductor	71	28.17	500 electrolyte

The gun turret costs 40 solid items for 400 HP, or 10.00 HP per item. The laser turret nearly doubles that at 19.23 HP per item, partly because steel plate and batteries are more compact sources of durability than raw iron and copper. The flamethrower turret reaches 23.33 HP per item despite needing engine units, and the rocket turret sits at 22.06.

The railgun turret is the outlier. Its recipe demands 200 solid items including 100 quantum processors and 50 superconductors, plus 100 units of fluoroketone coolant. Its HP-per-solid ratio of 20.00 is comparable to the laser turret, but the ingredient tier is dramatically higher. Counting each fluid unit as one item would lower its ratio to 13.33, but that comparison is misleading because fluid and item stacks obey different logistics. The tesla turret, with its 71 solid items and 500 units of electrolyte, records the highest HP-per-solid ratio at 28.17, but its superconducting supply chain is anything but cheap.

The artillery turret scores only 11.76 HP per item because its recipe is dominated by tungsten plate and refined concrete in bulk. That is intentional: artillery is a long-range siege weapon, not a front-line damage sponge, and its value lies in reach rather than survivability.

Walls and gates

Walls use the same HP-per-item metric. A stone wall costs 5 stone brick and has 350 HP, yielding 70 HP per item. A gate costs the same number of ingredient items (5) for the same HP, but the gate's recipe substitutes steel and circuits for raw stone brick, reflecting its ability to open and close.

Structure	HP	Ingredients	Item count	HP / item
stone wall	350	5 stone brick	5	70
gate	350	1 stone wall + 2 steel plate + 2 electronic circuit	5	70

At 70 HP per item, walls are by far the most HP-efficient defensive structure in the game. That efficiency is the reason they exist, but it does not mean they are designed to absorb punishment indefinitely.

Range and coverage area

A turret with range r can fire at any enemy within a circle of radius r tiles centred on the turret. The area of that circle is πr². This is the single most important number for perimeter layout because it determines how many turrets are needed to cover a given stretch of wall without leaving gaps.

Turret	Range (tiles)	Coverage (tiles²)	Relative to gun turret
gun turret	18	1018	1.00×
laser turret	24	1810	1.78×
rocket turret	36	4072	4.00×
railgun turret	40	5027	4.94×

The gun turret covers 1018 square tiles. The laser turret, with just six tiles of additional range, covers 1810 tiles — 1.78 times the area. The rocket turret at range 36 covers 4072 tiles, roughly four times the gun turret's reach. The railgun turret reaches 40 tiles and covers 5027 tiles, nearly five times the gun turret's area.

Coverage scales with the square of range, not linearly. A turret with double the range covers four times the ground. This is why range matters more than raw DPS for layout: a higher-DPS turret with short range still needs to be placed in denser clusters to avoid dead zones, while a longer-range turret can be spaced further apart and cover the same wall with fewer emplacements. The DPS difference determines how quickly enemies die once they enter the circle; the range determines how large that circle is in the first place.

The circular coverage figure is a theoretical maximum. In practice, walls are straight lines and turrets are placed behind them, so the effective coverage is a semicircle or a strip, not a full circle. Turrets near corners overlap asymmetrically, and terrain obstacles can block line of sight. The table gives the upper bound; real coverage along a wall segment is lower.

Cooldown: fire rate is not DPS

The gun turret fires every 6 ticks. The railgun turret fires every 170 ticks. The ratio is 28.3: the gun turret shoots 28.3 times for every railgun shot. On fire rate alone, the gun turret wins decisively. But fire rate without damage per shot tells only half the story.

Ammunition	Damage / shot	Cooldown	Damage / cooldown unit	Shots to kill behemoth biter
Firearm magazine	5	6	0.83	600
Piercing rounds magazine	8	6	1.33	375
Railgun ammo	10,000	170	58.82	0.30

A firearm round deals 5 damage. A railgun round deals 10,000 damage — 2000 times as much per shot. Even though the gun turret fires 28.3 times more often, the railgun's damage per cooldown unit is 58.82 compared to 0.83 for firearm ammo, a ratio of 70.59 to one. Piercing rounds narrow the gap but do not close it: 1.33 versus 58.82.

These are paper figures. They do not account for armour reduction, which the prototype data does not provide, and they assume every shot hits. The railgun turret also consumes 10MJ of energy per shot, a cost the gun turret does not have because it burns chemical ammunition instead of electrical power. The gun turret's advantages are its low tech cost, its modest ingredient list and its independence from the power grid. The railgun's advantage is that a single shot removes targets that would take hundreds of firearm rounds.

The cooldown gap also shapes what each turret is for. A gun turret with a 6-tick cooldown is a sustained-fire weapon: it throws a steady stream of bullets and is most effective against waves of smaller biters where individual hits do not need to hit hard, they need to keep coming. A railgun turret with a 170-tick cooldown is an alpha-strike weapon: it waits, aims and removes one high-value target. Using railguns against a swarm of small biters wastes their per-shot damage on targets that a firearm round would have killed just as dead.

Walls buy time, not damage absorption

A stone wall has 350 HP. A behemoth biter has 3000 HP. The wall's HP is 11.67% of the biter's. That is not a contest of endurance; a wall segment facing a behemoth biter does not tank sustained punishment so much as it delays the biter for the few seconds it takes a turret to kill the biter before the wall section is destroyed.

This is the correct mental model for walls. They are not armour. They are terrain. A wall forces biters to path around it, funnels them into kill zones, and holds them in turret range for a few extra ticks. The 350 HP matters only insofar as it determines how long that delay lasts before the wall breaks and the biters spill through. Against behemoth biters with 3000 HP, that time is measured in seconds, not minutes.

Spawners are even softer. A biter spawner has 350 HP, the same as a single wall segment. This is why clearing nests with an artillery turret or a player-carried weapon is far easier than holding a perimeter against the biters those nests produce: the structure that generates threats is structurally weaker than the threats themselves. A behemoth spitter has 1500 HP, more than four times a spawner's health pool.

The practical implication is that wall design should focus on channelling and overlap rather than on stacking wall layers for hit-points. A double wall does not double your effective defence if turrets cannot cover the gap between the layers; it just gives biters something else to chew through while they path around it. Gates serve the same channelling function while allowing player and vehicle passage, and they share the wall's 350 HP.

Artillery, tesla and flamethrower: positioning without numbers

Three turrets in the data have no extracted range or cooldown values. This is not an oversight in the game; it is a known limitation of the extraction pass, which did not descend into the nested attack_parameters tables where those values live for artillery-turret, electric-turret and fluid-turret types. The cells are marked NOT FOUND because inventing numbers would be worse than admitting the gap.

Artillery turret

The artillery turret has 2000 HP and a rotation speed of 0.001, the slowest traverse of any turret in the roster. Its recipe costs 170 solid items, dominated by 60 tungsten plate and 60 refined concrete. It is classified as an artillery-turret type, which in game mechanics means it fires slowly at very long range and automatically targets spawners and worms within a large radius. The automatic targeting radius is a behaviour defined by the turret type, not by a numeric range field in the extracted data, so no coverage area is computed for it. Its role is clearing nests from beyond retaliation range, not holding a front line.

Tesla turret

The tesla turret is a Space Age electric turret with 2000 HP and a recipe that includes a teslagun, 10 supercapacitors and 50 superconductors, plus 500 units of electrolyte fluid. Its HP-per-solid ratio is the highest of any turret at 28.17, but that metric understates the real cost because the superconducting supply chain requires cryogenic production. As an electric turret it draws power rather than consuming ammunition, and its chain-lightning attack behaviour is a mechanism defined by the turret type rather than a numeric field in the extracted data.

Flamethrower turret

The flamethrower turret is a base-game fluid turret with 1400 HP. Its recipe costs 60 solid items including 5 engine units and 10 pipes, and it consumes oil-based fluids through a pipe connection rather than loading ammunition. Fluid turrets deliver continuous area damage that lingers on the ground, a mechanic governed by the fluid system rather than by a cooldown value in the extracted prototype data. Its damage output depends on which fluid is piped in and how much flows per tick, neither of which is captured by a single cooldown number. The turret's value is its area denial and sustained damage against clustered enemies, not its range or precision.

Putting it together: how the stats shape layout

The numbers point to a layered perimeter rather than a single uniform wall of identical turrets. Gun turrets are cheap, grid-independent and fire quickly; they form the dense inner layer where small biters arrive in numbers. Laser turrets cover more ground per emplacement and do not need an ammunition supply line, making them suitable for outer stretches where resupplying magazines is a chore. Rocket and railgun turrets reach far enough to thin waves before they reach the wall, but their slow cooldowns and expensive ammunition mean they are least efficient when swarmed.

Artillery turrets extend the perimeter outward by destroying spawners before they can send attacks at all, which reduces the total number of biters the inner layers have to kill. Flamethrower turrets create damage zones that punish anything pathing through a choke point. Tesla turrets fill a high-tech niche between laser and railgun, trading ammunition logistics for power and cryogenic infrastructure.

Walls connect these layers. They do not need to survive a sustained assault; they need to survive long enough for the turrets behind them to do their work. A wall that holds for the few seconds it takes a laser turret to burn down a behemoth biter has done its job, even if it breaks immediately afterward. Repairing walls is cheaper than replacing turrets, and replacing turrets is cheaper than rebuilding the factory section that a breach exposes.

Applies when…

• All HP, range, cooldown and ingredient values are read from the prototype data for game version 2.1.12. Mods that alter turret stats or add new turret types will change these figures.
• Coverage areas use πr² with the range value treated as an integer tile radius. Real coverage along a straight wall is a semicircle or strip, and corners or terrain obstacles reduce it further.
• HP-per-ingredient counts solid items only. Fluid ingredients are listed separately. The metric does not weight ingredient tier, crafting complexity or power infrastructure cost.
• Damage-per-cooldown figures use raw damage_amount from the ammunition prototypes and do not subtract armour, apply resistance or account for missed shots. They are upper-bound paper values, not measured DPS.
• Artillery, tesla and flamethrower turrets have no extracted range or cooldown values. Their positioning and role descriptions are based on turret type and recipe data, not on numeric combat stats.
• Space Age turrets (railgun, rocket, tesla) require the Space Age expansion. Their recipes and entities do not exist in the base game alone.
• Recipes without an explicit energy_required (stone wall and gate) inherit the engine default crafting time of 0.5 seconds.

Related

• Quality mechanics — how higher-quality turrets gain improved stats and what the cascade costs
• Beacons and modules — module effects that boost production supporting your ammunition and supply chains
• Science pack ratios — the military and utility science packs that unlock turret and wall technologies