Nasdara — rebuilding houses

Nasdara's towns are built from flat-roofed brick and mud houses, and almost every one of them can be worked on. There is no kit to place and no flag to raise first: you walk into a house, clear it out, and build its missing walls, roof, doors and windows straight into the building. About five thousand houses on the map work this way, roughly eleven hundred of them damaged.

A rebuilt house belongs to nobody. What keeps other players out is a lock on each door — see Locking your house below.

The short version

• Two kinds of house. Intact houses already have their walls and roof; you can add doors, windows and brick barricades. Damaged houses are open shells full of rubble: you clear the rubble, then rebuild them wall by wall, then put the roof on.
• The materials go into the house itself, into its "Floor Materials" slots, not into your hands. The build action takes them from there.
• You build from inside. Every part is built and taken down from the room it belongs to.
• No territory flag, no owner. Anyone who stands inside an unlocked house can build in it, repair it and take its parts apart. Locked doors are what keep them out.

Which houses can be rebuilt

The pictures are the same ones the Nasdara map shows: drag one left or right to turn the house, then pick it on the map and recognise it on the ground. A house that is not in this table cannot be rebuilt.

Tools

The game sorts the work into a few kinds, and each kind takes its own tools. The cost tables further down name the tool group for every part; this is what each group means:

The one tool most players have never needed before is the Brick Trowel: it is the only thing that lays bricks. It spawns in industrial buildings. A hammer builds but cannot take anything apart, and cleared rubble never comes back.

Every build takes about 7.5 seconds and wears the tool a little; a Brick Trowel is good for roughly fifty builds.

Materials and where they come from

Material	Used for	Where to get it
Common Brick	brick walls, frames, barricades	industrial buildings, and the brick piles below
Mortar Mix	every brick part	mix a Mortar Mix bag (industrial buildings) with water
Plank	wooden walls, roofs, doors, windows	saw a Wooden Log with a Hand Saw or Hacksaw
Nails	every wooden or metal part	open a Boxed Nails (industrial buildings, farms)
Wooden Log	roofs and doors	chop a tree
Sheet Metal	metal doors and windows	industrial buildings
Metal Wire	doors	industrial buildings, farms

Brick piles. Around Nasdara's towns you will find Brick Pile stacks — loose bricks left over from building work. They cannot be carried, but you can take bricks off them by hand, a few at a time, until the pile is empty. They come back at fixed spots over time.

Mortar. A Mortar Mix bag is useless until it is mixed. Hold the bag and use Mix mortar at any water — a pond, a pump or a rebuilt well — or combine the bag with a bottle, canteen or pot that holds at least a litre of clean water. Each mixed bag is one unit of opened mortar. A brick wall takes one to three units.

Clearing rubble pays you back a little. Every rubble pile you clear drops two planks, a log, five nails and two bricks on the floor — a small head start on the first wall.

Step by step: rebuilding a damaged house

1. Clear the rubble

Take a digging tool in your hands, step inside and use Clear rubble on the pile. Until the rubble of a room is gone, that floor's material slots do not even show up in the inventory — the house will not accept anything.

2. Load the materials into the house

Stand inside and open your inventory. The house shows up in the vicinity panel as Rebuildable House, with a 1st Floor Materials group (and 2nd / 3rd Floor Materials on taller houses). Drag planks, nails, bricks, mortar, logs, sheet metal and wire into it, or hold an item and attach it to the house directly. Each floor holds up to 100 planks, 300 nails, 100 bricks, 15 logs, 20 metal sheets, 10 wire and 10 mortar.

3. Build the walls

Every gap in the walls can be filled in more than one way, and the options exclude each other:

• Wooden or brick. Wood costs planks and nails. Brick costs bricks and opened mortar, and is much harder to break (see Damage below).
• Plain, with a window frame or with a door frame. Not every gap offers all three. A frame is what gives you a window or a door to fit later; a brick frame also takes one plank.

4. Put the roof on

A roof needs enough wall under it. Each wall that carries the roof adds support, and the roof can only be built once the support adds up — the per-house tables below list how much each roof needs and which walls give it. It works the other way round too: you cannot take a wall down while the roof still needs it. Dismantle the roof first.

5. Doors, windows and barricades

Doors go into door frames (or into the doorways an intact house already has), windows into window frames and window holes.

• Door: wooden or metal. Only doors take a lock.
• Barricade: a solid brick plug instead of a door. Nobody walks through it, and it has the most health of anything you can build — the right choice for every entrance you do not need.
• Window: wooden or metal. Windows cannot be locked; they open from the inside only.

6. Upper floors

The two- and three-storey ruins are rebuilt floor by floor. The walls of the second floor need the first floor's roof — it is their floor — and the rubble up there cleared; the third floor needs the second floor's roof. Each floor has its own materials group, so load the upper floors separately.

Where you have to stand

You always build and dismantle from inside the room the part belongs to. Some doors and barricades can be built from either side; those must then be taken down from the side they were built from. You can build standing or crouched, but you have to stand to dismantle.

Cost of every house

Every table groups the parts by wall, roof, door and window. Only one option per wall, door or window can stand at a time. Needs is what has to be built first, HP is the part's health, and the tool groups are explained under Tools above. On houses with more than one floor, the Floor column says which floor's materials the part uses. Materials marked * are not returned when you dismantle the part.

Doors and windows (every intact house)

Doors and windows cost the same in every house. One intact house as the example:

Damaged houses

The intact house with a missing wall

Locking your house

A house has no owner of its own. Every built door has a lock slot, and a locked door is the only thing between your stash and the next player who walks past.

• What fits. A built door — wooden or metal — takes one Digital Code Lock, or a dial 3-Dial Combination Lock / 4-Dial Combination Lock instead. Windows and barricades take no lock.
• Power. The Digital Code Lock runs on a 9V Battery in its battery slot. A full battery lasts about three weeks of server time. When the battery runs flat, the lock switches off, unlocks and forgets its PIN.
• Setting the PIN. Attach the lock to the closed door and put the battery in. From the outside, use Set PIN and type 4 to 6 digits. The door is locked at once.
• Getting in and out. From the outside, Enter PIN. From the inside, Unlock opens the lock without the PIN — so anyone who is already inside can let themselves (and others) out. Lock closes it again, and while it is open Reset PIN lets you choose a new one.
• Battery and lock removal. The battery comes out only from the inside and only while the lock is unlocked. The lock itself can only be taken off while it is unlocked.
• Wrong PINs. With the game's default settings, three wrong PINs in a row block the keypad for 30 seconds; after that every single wrong PIN blocks it again, until an hour has passed without a wrong one.

What a lock does not let anyone do:

• Lockpicks do not work on rebuilt doors.
• A door with a lock on it cannot be dismantled — by anyone. Take the lock off first if you want the door gone.

What raiders do instead is break the door, or the wall it sits in. A destroyed door drops its lock on the ground, unlocked and with its PIN cleared. So a lock is only as good as the door and walls around it — which is why brick and metal matter.

Digital Code Locks spawn in industrial buildings and on farms.

Damage, raiding and repairs

• The house itself cannot be destroyed — only the parts you or others built into it.
• Brick is the strongest material. Brick parts have the most health, take half the damage of wood or metal from bullets, about half from melee, and roughly a third from explosives. Metal doors and windows have a little more health than wooden ones. The HP column in the tables has the exact numbers.
• A destroyed part is gone — no materials come back — and so is everything that depended on it: the door in a broken door frame, or the roof once too few walls are left to carry it.
• Repair a damaged part with a Hammer, Hatchet, Meat Tenderizer or Brick Trowel. Each repair takes a share of the part's original materials from the floor's slots and raises it one health level, up to Worn.
• Dismantling gives materials back: most of them for an undamaged part, less the more damaged it is. Mortar is never refunded.

Built parts and the locks on their doors are saved with the server, like any base.

What it takes to break a part

Every part belongs to one of a few kinds, and the kind decides its health and how much of each type of damage gets through:

The tables below count how many charges, rounds or hits it takes to destroy one undamaged part of each kind. Breaking a door or a wall is usually all a raider needs — whatever was built in it or depends on it goes with it.

Explosives

Ammunition

Melee

Good to know

• Territory flags play no part here. You do not need one to rebuild a house, and a flag does not protect one: rebuilt houses are protected by their doors and locks alone.
• Anyone inside an unlocked house can work on it — including taking your walls down from the inside. Lock every door you use, barricade the others in brick, and fit metal windows.
• A house is not claimed by building in it. If you spend an evening rebuilding and leave the door unlocked, the next player to walk in has the same rights you had.
• Watch your batteries. A code lock with a dead battery is an open door. Swap batteries before they run down — from the inside, with the lock unlocked.
• Map-wide, the brick piles and industrial buildings are where the bricks, mortar and trowels are. Start your search there before you pick a house.