I'm a one base kind of guy.
Here's a confession: I don't like building multiple bases. I never understood the point of establishing another camp or homestead in a survival crafting game when I've already got a nice roof and a cosy bed waiting for me back at my original. Why would I want to rebuild a layer of resource infrastructure and refinement that I've already progressed through once? It's always seemed like a waste of time and resources to me, especially if you're playing without console commands.
But more and more survival crafting games want me to move to new locations and set up secondary bases, whether it's to fight bosses, access new biomes and materials, or progress through the world. Take Valheim, for instance; I loved establishing my own little Viking hamlet and getting chased by sea serpents in my longboat, but where the game lost me was in how costly it became in time and materials to establish a proper teleportation network from new distant biomes back to my original base.
Rather than fighting the bosses and exploring new lands, my time was increasingly spent on logistics, ferrying items by boat because of the limitation on what can be moved via portal, and setting up portal outposts. A lot of people definitely enjoy that, but it's always been a survival crafting bugbear for me, personally; why can't I take my original base with me instead of retreading old ground from a base infrastructure perspective?
Well, V Rising has one of the smartest solutions I've seen in a survival crafting game—simply teleport your entire base to a new location. V Rising is very much a game about slowly gathering strength and infiltrating human society. At first, you build a castle on the fringes, subsisting on rats and hunting down bandits, but as you gain strength, you push further into the human domain, fighting tougher enemies and gathering rare resources.
It's a formula that hinges on the V Blood boss system; a series of tough enemies you can track in each area and kill to unlock new crafting schematics for your castle and better gear. At a certain point, though, you've done everything, so rather than commuting all the way to another region, you can teleport your vampiric stronghold to an entirely new area close to where the action is. In a game about vampires, it's a wonderfully insidious form of progression, warping your castle ever closer to the heart of human civilization. It's a straightforward process, too.
You build a Castle Relocation Heart in the place you want to settle and connect it to the castle you want to move. This packs all your scattered items into a Travel Bag container you can set down for later, and then it lets you place every structure from your previous castle. Once you're satisfied, you can confirm the change—any structures you didn't place are converted into their base materials—and everything springs into existence around you, including vampiric thralls and chests containing all previous items.
The real joy of this process is that it feels like building a base for the first time again. You don't have to worry about resource cost or what you potentially left behind at the previous castle. Instead, you can focus on the new space you've picked and how you're going to transfigure your pre-existing castle into it in a fun way. Sure, it takes a little while to clear out the trees and rocks so you can put things down, but when you're done, you've got a new no-strings-attached base. You can get on with exploring the region, fighting new V Blood bosses, and work on improving your gear and unlocking crafting stations.
Admittedly, V Rising does have even more of a focus on combat and fighting bosses vs Valheim, but this castle relocation is one of the main reasons it's totally got me hooked. Getting to bring all my stuff with me as I infiltrate new areas feels like it's respecting my time, and if I ever do decide I want multiple bases, it's as simple as placing down another heart and starting from there.
