Here’s everything you need to know to get started, raid successfully, and build bases that are fun and cause kills. Check out our Meet Your Maker Builds, Tactics and Tips guide without wasting time.
Meet Your Maker Builds, Tactics and Tips
Welcome to our Meet Your Maker Builds, Tactics and Tips guide. For beginners, this guide has everything you need to know to get started, raid successfully, and build bases that are fun and cause kills.
Resources
Genmat
This one was poorly explained in the beta. It’s essentially experience for your advisors. The symbols you see next to a base or when buying a plot correspond to which advisor will get experience if you raid or build this location. Leveling up your advisors leads to leveling up the Chimera which is your main source of red cells.
Red cells
This is the bottleneck for basically all the permanent upgrades. You need to get genmat to level your advisors to level the Chimera to get this.
Parts
This is mostly used to upgrade raiding equipment or buying consumables. More often than not, you also need red cells. You get those semi-randomly from raiding when you kill enemies and destroy traps. People dying in your outposts can also drop parts.
Synthite
This is mostly used to buy or upgrade traps and guards. You will also need red cells. You get those semi-randomly from raiding when you kill enemies and destroy traps. People dying in your outposts can also drop parts.
Tombs
The tombs emit a dim light and make loud noises when you are close. Destroying them grants a decent amount of parts and synthite. When you are building, avoid blocking them. They are good bait for traps and you lose nothing if the raider gets them. Try not to make the resources that drop inaccessible though or you might lose accolades in the long run.
Raiding
Maintaining outposts is a nice source of passive income, but raiding is usually the faster way to progress especially early on. It’s also good to go out there between builds for inspiration and it can really help with synthite if you look for tombs. Besides, what else will you do once you have the maximum number of outposts online? Go outside? Work? Come on.
Tips for raiders
Equipment
The starter gun can break traps and armour, which the other gun cannot do. You can usually retrieve your ammo if you’re careful, but I still recommend using melee first and using the gun as a last resort.
The starter sword can deflect many projectiles with a well-timed block, but cannot break armour. Be careful about hitting armoured enemies. Aiming your strikes matters as you can bypass armour if you’re accurate enough.
The bigger sword cannot block, but it can shatter armour. It’s great with a gun or the other sword as it allows you to kill enemies very quickly and you don’t have to be as careful about armour.
The purchased gun has a lot of ammo, but it cannot break armour or traps. It’s probably the most situational piece of equipment in the game right now. It’s mostly useful for dealing with rooms with lots of enemies when you think you might lose some of your ammo.
The shield is a powerful tool. It lets you ignore damage briefly, but be careful as you can put yourself in a lot of trouble by rushing ahead.
Grenades are great for clearing a cluster of traps or enemies. The bounce and area of effect are a little finicky sometimes, but they are definitely worth it.
Tactics
Patience and knowledge are your strongest weapons. You can clear basically any map with basic gear if you know what you are doing and take your time.
Ignoring traps and enemies and just grappling through a room is a valid strategy sometimes. The key is to recognize when it’s safe to do so. If you unlock the shield and/or practice your timing and reflexes with the starter sword, you can get away with a lot.
Check your corners or be prepared to quickly grapple out of the way. Favour going up over going down otherwise bombs might follow you.
Meet Your Maker Building
Active outposts provide genmat passively based on its location. You can see the icon corresponding to an advisor when buying a plot. There’s a few things to be mindful of:
You can only have 5 outposts active at one time.
You can have something like a 1000 outposts saved however, so once they are depleted, you can set them to social and challenge your friends or the internet in general.
Prestige refills the genmat you get and gives you a small increase in build capacity. The main reason to prestige is to keep the outpost active as long as possible, so it’s best to wait until it expires before prestiging.
Accolades give a lot of progress towards prestige; making your base fun or cool-looking is a good way to make sure you can prestige all the way to 10.
If your base runs out of genmat and has been prestiged to 10, then the only option left is social raids.
Unless you specifically set your base to that mode, people getting your genmat doesn’t lose you anything; if you make it so you wouldn’t like raiding your own base, chances are others also won’t; it’s a balance.
Make sure to visit outposts every once in a while when they get kills to collect resources (not sure why you have to load in the map and look for stuff; plz fix devs)
Here are some general pointers as to what people like and don’t like
People either hate or are indifferent to mazes; I don’t recommend building them or at least keep the maze part short.
Having more than one path can be fun; use decals and/or geometry that HRV cannot traverse to indicate optional paths (the little box guy that wanders between the entrance and the genmat).
Do your best to make the tombs accessible; even better if they are part of your base; avoid making it so resources fall into acid, this will annoy people and reduce your odds of getting accolades.
Killboxes, i.e., rooms with large amounts of acid cubes, enemies, and traps usually leave people indifferent or annoyed. That said, if you’re clever and original, people will often reward you for it. If you’re just wasting their time with repeated patterns and cookie-cutter setups, you probably won’t get as many accolades and people may even just quit outright. Again, it’s a balance.
Building Tips
Aesthetics
Using as many different decals and cubes as possible can help you hide traps in plain sight, but it also makes people’s eyes bleed. If you want to overwhelm people with this strategy, at least try to use it sparingly instead of throughout the entire base.
Using a limited palette of 2 or 3 cubes, 2 or 3 colours, and a handful of decorations makes your base look more cohesive and appealing.
If you are after artistic accolades, try to think of a story for your building. Maybe certain rooms look like they serve a specific purpose. Maybe you built this into an abandonned building, if so, what kind of building was it? Having a sense of direction will help a lot in making cool and unique bases.
Fun
- Movement in MYM is very satisfying. While it may not lead to the most kills, try to have at least one open room in your base where people can grapple around while avoiding traps and/or guard fire.
- Slowing down speedrunners doesn’t have to feel bad. Whenever you have a trap to block the way (e.g., AoE plasma, incinerator) you can offer an alternate route. It might actually take as long as waiting, but it feels better than sitting there waiting for a particle effect to expire.
- Alternate paths, shortcuts, and including tombs in your bases can be a lot of fun. Just because HRV has to have a simple path to the genmat doesn’t mean it has to be the only path.
- Do not use the same trap/guard setup more than 2 or 3 times per map. Even 3 times might be pushing it if it takes long enough to disarm/get through. Repeating patterns are usually just tedious and they become less and less likely to get kills as people get used to it.
- Higher capacity doesn’t mean better. I find the sweet spot is 1500 to 2500. I don’t recommend going above 3000 unless you have a pretty decent bag of tricks and unlocks or your base will just end up being a lot of the same. 1000 and below can be hard to work with though.
Making deadlier bases
- Understanding human psychology and the fact that the brain is great at figuring out patterns are your best assets for catching people off guard:
-Put a trap in an obvious place to draw people’s attention and blindside them with another trap.
-Design the map in such a way that there are nooks where it feels like there should be a trap and put nothing there to lull them into a false sense of security.
-Put acid cubes in plain sight but somewhere harmless; some people will basically forget about them since they’re not immediately threatening and then walk/fall in them while avoiding something else.
- Spice things up with different trap mods or exploding enemies. Have one or two bolt shot fire twice or have homing bolts for example.
- Point traps at other traps to catch people trying to recover ammo or just being greedy trying to break everything.
- Use guards to draw attention away from traps; patrols can be really useful for delaying the appearance of a guard and get them to either completely blindside the player or cause a panic reaction.
- Use slopes with bomb guards/traps to create chaos.
- Consider using wider corridors and having holo-cube trap floors.
Dealing with speedrunners
- Corridors with enemies, AoE plasma, having incinerators/bolt shots around corners can really mess with someone trying to ignore everything in your base; all you need is to either force them to stop or pressure them longer than a shield can protect them.
- Corners or winding corridors can really slow people down since the grapple has a short cooldown.
- Some people are just that good; don’t re-arrange your whole base because of that one guy.
- Be careful to balance pressure and obstacles; you don’t want to make your base tedious or boring; after all, if people leave before dying you don’t get anything.
Difficulty Ratings
tl;dr, there are a lot of good analyses out there providing specific numbers. The main thing you need to know is each trap and guard is worth a number of points. Their value decreases the further away they are from HRV’s path.
The length of the path also plays a small role.
Bottom line is: the more traps/guards and the closer they are to the main path, the higher the perceived difficulty. This means a normal base can be really hard, but probably very short, and a brutal base can be very easy but very long.
You can activate a boost to have intel on bases before you raid by talking to one of the advisors.
