Base Location Selection Guide

**Base Location Selection**

In this “How To Guide for CPE” installment, I’ll cover where to build your base.

You’ve heard the old real-estate saying: location location location. You have options depending on how geared up you are, whether you can travel safely through the nether and how active the server population is.

Let’s assume you want to keep your storehouse base a secret for a long time: a year or more. The first thing then is to avoid the axis radiating away from spawn. Putting a base or dupe stash down within a few hundred blocks of the lines running due north, south, east and west from coordinate 0, 0 guarantees its discovery sooner than later. To a lesser degree, the same holds for the diagonal axis NW, NE, SE and SW. Anything you build should be at least tens of thousands of blocks from the lines you see here. It’s also best to avoid round number coordinates like 55,000, 30,000 where possible.

So how far from spawn is reasonably safe from explorers? That’s a tough question to answer because the conditions on CPE often change. Right now, there is a player limit of 50, which only veterans with accounts from Year One can bypass. Also, most players are busy building in the wild or patrolling spawn. Not so many care about deep range base hunting. For now, something beyond the 50,000 mark for a new player or beyond the 100,000 mark for a well-geared player will probably keep your location private for a year or more.

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Generally, the further you go the better, but there are limits. CPE runs on a custom-built software platform called Nukkit, which uses the Minecraft Bedrock Edition. This is why you’ll notice the terrain at CPE doesn’t look like a normal vanilla Minecraft world. There are no villages, desert temples, nether fortresses, etc. There are a lot of extreme hills biomes. And unlike Java-based anarchy servers such as 2b2t, the game mechanics start to break down the further you travel.

Starting at a 100,000 blocks, you’ll start to notice a slight judder to your player’s movements. By 500,000 blocks this becomes more pronounced and by 1,000,000 blocks, it’s a pain to work with. In addition, some objects like sunflowers and torches flatten or flicker with distortion by the half million mark.

By 2 million blocks the judder makes controlling movements very difficult and dangerous for building at any great height. Though I haven’t seen it myself, some veterans tell me the effective world limit is a few hundred thousand blocks shy of four million.

So, if you build past 1 million blocks from spawn, you’re unlikely to be found, but you might not enjoy the gaming experience. Nukkit may someday make it possible for CPE’s owner, Ginjeet, to upgrade the server in ways that change this, but that could be a long wait.

There is some good news in all of this. The fact that CPE is a custom-built world means it should not be possible to use terrain-coordinate exploits seen on 2b2t, where even a picture of natural terrain can be used to determine a base’s location. You can post base pictures free of fear, so long as you’ve covered the coords, of course.

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Also, as of this writing, no hacks exist to highlight old chunks such as the NewChunks hack used in Java edition. This means that, for now, base hunters can’t easily follow trails of old chunks to find where you might be hiding. Nor are there any differences (yet) between chunks made under older server versions and new ones that would make it obvious someone had been through an area. They can see where mobs have spawned and, of course, see any out-of-place blocks like chests or nether portals, but these are a cumbersome hunting methods.

There are some some ways to hide your tracks. Flying above 800 blocks on the Y axis is said to not generate new chunks. If you have duped a bunch of rockets, you can get your character above Y 3,000 on a single stack of rockets. Horizontal flight distances will vary depending on server lag. It is not uncommon to see the elytra-equipped player’s progress “stopped” every 50 blocks or so of flight. But even then, I’ve found that 40,000 blocks can be traversed in an hour.

In addition to picking a distance from spawn, another consideration is terrain. To give you the best chance at staying hidden, you might wish to build near bedrock, but believe me, clearing out a space is tedious, even with TNT or hacks. Also, bedrock effectively limits you to Y level 5 and up. Worse still, lava pools have to be cleared to build below Y 11.

You can also make a sky base which, when built over low-lying land may stay more hidden, especially closer to spawn. Be aware that the build height limit is 256 and only someone with a hack client that gives a top down view is still likely to see that from the ground. At present, however, CPE limits render distance to 6 chunks and even that limited range takes time to load. This makes it very hard for fast-moving base hunters to find things by chance, even when using hacks. This means you could be standing directly beneath a high-flying base and not see it at all.

If you have suggestions for improvements to this article or want to request a topic to be covered in this How To Guide to CPE, please send me a direct message!

Last Updated: 2020-06-14

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