Dragon Quest Builders

• You can build above and below grade in your towns. You don’t have a lot of room to go down, but usually enough space to build one level of rooms. I like to hide the bedrooms below grade, so you have more room for the crafting areas above ground.

• Building stairs to put some rooms up in the sky can help to keep those rooms safe when monsters attack.

• A fast way to increase the score of your town is to spam the flooring and wall conversion items to change everything from dirt to brick, or some other better material.

• When your base hits a new rank, pop all the doors off and put them back on. There's a weird calculation thing for your score, and doing that from 0 in the new level can boost you over 2/3s of the way to the next rank.

• There are 5 challenges for each level. For the Switch version, the speed run challenge has been replaced by seeing various amounts of items, so just pick up everything at least once.

• Mainline the story of each chapter until you can build your Colossal Coffer, because otherwise loot is a huge pain in the ass.

• Keep a spare hammer at all times. The spin attack massively impacts the durability.

• Use a weapon to kill enemies, rather than the hammer. Tools take far less durability damage when they are used for their intended purposes.

• Water can only exist on the levels below ground level. If you want a water feature in your base, take this in to account.

• If you can mine obsidian blocks, which are found at the bases of every mountain in every region, they are incredibly sturdy walls. Large enemies will still destroy them, however.

• If you find yourself wanting for materials to make cladding for your walls, find a 5x5 area of dirt, 4 blocks tall. Dig straight down so you're at the base level, and use 1 cladding. It will turn the surrounding 96 blocks in to that wall type, as cladding goes 4 blocks high and 2 blocks out in all directions. Now you have a shitload of walls, and plenty to make more cladding. This works similarly for flooring, but only in a 5x5x1 area.

• Trees and plants only grow inside the light of your base.

• If you're having trouble with the Chapter 1 challenge of building a Cantlin Garden, the tree must be EXACTLY 3 blocks tall. It is possible to build it inside your base with a hell of a lot of digging, but it is not at all worth it.

• Every chapter has featherfall footwear somewhere in it, which prevents all falling damage. A ring of criticality usually exists as well, which massively increases your damage output.

• Ghosts and Fightgeists are annoying as shit. Just go to bed.