Where to Place Crafted Defenses in Your Base

> Quick answer: The three crafted defenses want three different homes. The Hero Hunter goes where enemy heroes are forced to walk, roughly one compartment inside your usual hero entry points. The Hot Candle wants to see a single target rather than a crowd, so it belongs near hero charge lanes instead of in the middle of a funnel. The Cake-A-Pult has a three tile dead zone and cannot hit anything standing on top of it, so it must sit behind something, never on the edge.

Get those three ideas right and the defenses do most of the work themselves. Put all three in the core out of habit and you'll waste two of them.

Crafted defenses aren't ordinary buildings, and treating them like an extra cannon is the mistake I keep seeing in war.

Each one has a hard conditional attached. One only cares about heroes. One runs on a timer and then switches off. One physically cannot hit anything within three tiles of itself. A normal defense at the wrong spot is merely inefficient, while a crafted defense at the wrong spot can contribute close to nothing for the whole attack.

That gap widens at lower Town Halls this season. Module caps mean a Town Hall 11 base is stuck at total level three and a Town Hall 14 base is a long way off the ceiling, so raw stats aren't going to carry you. Position is the lever you actually control, and it's free.

The other reason to care is duration. The crafting phase runs to around the end of December, so whatever you place now is defending your trophies and your war weight for months rather than weeks. Our crafted defense upgrade priority guide covers which one deserves your resources first, and this post covers where it goes once you've built it.

The Hero Hunter targets heroes inside 9.5 tiles and ignores everything else, so the only question that matters is whether enemy heroes will pass through that circle.

Dead centre is usually wrong. By the time a hero reaches your core the attack has already gone well for the attacker, and plenty of successful attacks never send a hero that deep at all. A Hero Hunter buried in the middle of a Town Hall 15 base can sit through an entire three star without firing once.

The spot that earns value is roughly one compartment inside wherever heroes normally enter your base. Queen charges start at an edge and walk inward slowly, which is precisely the behaviour this defense punishes, and catching that charge early costs the attacker a freeze before they've spent anything else.

Look at your own layout and find the two sides that attackers actually pick. Almost every base has them, usually the sides with the weakest air defense coverage or the softest funnel. Put the Hero Hunter to serve those sides rather than distributing it fairly around the base.

Attackers who know the counters will bring an answer, and that's fine. Making somebody spend a freeze on the first thirty seconds is a win in itself. Our Hero Hunter counter guide walks the attacker side, and reading it backwards is the fastest way to see which placements are annoying to play against.

The Hot Candle can hit up to six targets at once, and most players read that as a reason to put it where crowds form. That's backwards.

Its damage splits across whatever it's hitting. Six targets means each one takes a sixth, and against a mass of cheap troops that's rarely enough to kill anything important. Pointed at a single unit it delivers everything, and it fires quickly enough that the total on one target gets frightening.

So the value spot is a lane where one big thing walks alone. Hero charge routes, the gap a lone queen crosses between compartments, the approach a solo Warden takes. Put it in the middle of your funnel where thirty troops arrive together and you've built an expensive tickle.

There's a second wrinkle worth knowing. Its targeting capacity drops as the attack runs on, stepping down to four targets and later to three before it deactivates entirely at 132 seconds on max level. Late in an attack it's naturally more of a single target weapon, which is another argument for placing it where the late pushes happen rather than where the opening wave lands.

I switched mine off the funnel and onto the queen lane after the first week and the difference in defense logs was obvious. Same building, same level, roughly double the value.

This one has the most punishing placement rule in the set, and it's easy to get wrong because it looks like a mortar.

It has a three tile dead zone. Anything standing within three tiles of it takes nothing at all, and its useful band runs from three tiles out to twelve. Place it on your outer ring and attacking troops simply walk up to it and destroy it while it fires uselessly over their heads.

Behind a layer is the answer. You want a wall, a set of storages, or another building line between it and the attack, so troops get held at four to eight tiles away, which is where it does real work. Its damage comes from an initial hit plus an explosion, and both of those reward troops that are stuck and bunched.

Slow ground armies stuck on high hitpoint buildings are exactly the scenario it was built for. If your base has a spot where attackers reliably stall, whether that's a storage cluster or an awkward wall junction, aim the Cake-A-Pult's band at that stall point and it becomes the best of the three.

Against spread out troops it does very little, and there's no placement that fixes that. The building is conditional by design, so build the condition into your layout rather than hoping the attacker clumps.

The Hot Candle deactivates after 132 seconds at max level, and right now its clock starts when the first building in your base is destroyed.

That start condition is a known bug and Supercell has said a future update will change it to begin at the start of the attack. The distinction matters more than it sounds. Under the current behaviour a careful attacker who spends twenty seconds setting a funnel without killing anything is getting those twenty seconds free, and under the fixed behaviour they aren't.

Either way you should assume the Hot Candle is a middle of the attack defense rather than a closer. It will not be firing in the last thirty seconds of a three minute attack, which is often when the final push into the core happens.

Practical consequence: don't rely on it as your core protection. Let it defend the phase of the attack it's alive for and let permanent buildings handle the endgame. The official Clash of Clans blog is where the timing fix will be confirmed when it ships.

This is the first season crafted defenses reach Town Hall 11, and the module caps make placement more important, not less.

A Town Hall 11 base is locked at module level one, so the total crafted defense level sits at three and stays there. The cap climbs by one per Town Hall to a maximum of seven at Town Hall 17, and only Town Hall 18 opens the path to level thirty where the long upgrade times live.

Underlevelled buildings die fast, which changes the calculus. At Town Hall 11 to 13 the crafted defense will not survive sustained attention, so placing it somewhere it fires early and matters early beats placing it somewhere it might matter later. Deep placements suit maxed bases and punish small ones.

Build times are also gentle down there. Three modules finish in about eighteen hours at Town Hall 12 and take around three days each at Town Hall 14, so if you're active in ranked the upgrade is genuinely cheap. It only becomes a serious commitment at Town Hall 17 and above.

Worth remembering this whole rotation is a test. Supercell has said they'll take community feedback during the anniversary period before deciding whether crafted defenses stay available this low, so how it plays out over the next few months decides whether Town Hall 11 bases keep this option at all.

Four patterns show up constantly in war bases right now, and all four are quick to fix.

Putting all three crafted defenses in the core is the most common. They have different jobs and different ranges, and stacking them means at least two are wasted in most attacks. Spread them by function rather than by symmetry.

Second is the Cake-A-Pult on an outer compartment, which is the single most costly error available because the dead zone turns it into a free building for the attacker. Move it behind a layer and it starts earning immediately.

Another one is the Hero Hunter tucked so deep that only a fully successful attack ever reaches it. Defenses that punish attacks that were going to fail anyway aren't doing anything for you.

The last is treating the Hot Candle as an anti swarm building. Crowds split its damage into irrelevance, and lone heroes are what it kills. If you want to see how strong builders are handling all of this in live wars rather than in theory, our base finder pulls layouts straight from recent matches so you can copy placements that are already being tested against real attacks.