Crafted Defense Upgrade Priority Every Town Hall

> Quick answer: Upgrade the hitpoint module on all three crafted defenses first, then pour everything else into the Hero Hunter. A crafted defense starts at level 3, one level per module, and tops out at level 30 with all three modules at 10. Below TH18 your module cap is low enough that maxing what you're allowed takes days, not months, so there's very little reason not to. At TH18 the cap opens up and the upgrade times get genuinely brutal, which is where picking one defense instead of three starts to matter.

This season runs on the crafting station, and for the Clashiversary test it's open from TH11 up rather than TH18 only. If you're new to it, the base library has layouts you can copy that already leave a slot for it.

People keep asking why their brand new crafted defense says level 3 when they've upgraded nothing. That's the floor. Every crafted defense is built from three modules, each module starts at 1, and the number you see on the building is just the three added together.

So the ladder is 3 at the bottom and 30 at the top, and 30 only happens when all three modules sit at 10. The modules aren't interchangeable either. One governs hitpoints, one governs damage per shot, and one governs the attack cooldown. That split matters more than the headline number, because a level 12 defense with a fat hitpoint module survives an attack that a level 12 defense with a fat damage module gets deleted in.

Each module also charges you a different currency. One wants gold, one wants elixir, one wants dark elixir. If you're sitting on full gold storages and empty dark, the game has effectively already told you which module to start with. I've been doing exactly that, upgrading whatever the overflowing storage pays for, and it works out fine because you're going to want all of them eventually anyway.

The catch is builders. A module upgrade takes a builder, and it locks that builder for the duration. That's the real cost here, not the loot.

Here's the part that decides your whole strategy, and it isn't in the UI anywhere obvious. Your Town Hall sets a maximum level for each individual module, and that maximum climbs by one for every Town Hall you go up.

At TH11, where this season opens, your module cap is 1. Read that again: 1. You cannot upgrade anything. Your crafted defense is stuck at level 3 and it will stay there all season. TH12 gets you a cap of 2, TH13 a cap of 3, and so on up the ladder. By TH17 you're allowed module level 7, which puts your ceiling at level 21.

TH18 is the only Town Hall that can reach the real cap of 10 per module and therefore level 30. And that's deliberate. The crafted defense system was built to give maxed TH18 players something to spend builders on, and opening it to TH11 is a four month experiment rather than a permanent change.

So if you're TH11 right now, place the thing, enjoy the free defensive building, and go spend your builders on something that actually levels up. Nobody at TH11 should be planning their week around this.

Between TH12 and about TH16, maxing what you're permitted is close to trivial. We're talking hours at the low end and a couple of days in the middle, per module. Running three separate builders on three separate crafted defenses at once is completely reasonable at those Town Halls, and I'd just do it.

TH17 is where it starts to bite. The times stretch into the week-plus range per module, and now you're weighing a crafted defense against a real building that stays when the season ends. That's a genuine trade, not a free win.

TH18 is a different universe. The bulk of the entire upgrade cost lives in those last three module levels, and going for a full level 30 on all three defenses would eat your builders for most of the season. It cannot be done casually. Pick one.

And remember these things vanish when the phase rotates. Each crafting phase runs four months, three per year, and the defenses change every time. Anything you sink into them is rented, not owned. That's the single most important sentence in this post if you're a mid Town Hall player who hasn't clocked that this is temporary content.

If you take one thing from this, take this. Get the hitpoint module up on all three defenses before you touch damage or cooldown on any of them.

The reason is boring and it's about queens. A crafted defense sitting at its base hitpoints is soft enough that an Archer Queen with decent equipment can pop it from outside your compartment without committing anything. When that happens your shiny new defense contributed exactly nothing to the defence. All the damage tuning in the world doesn't matter if the building doesn't survive long enough to shoot.

Push the hitpoint module a few levels and the maths flips. Now it takes a real commitment to remove, which is the entire point of a defensive building. My clan mates who did damage first spent the first week of the season watching these things evaporate in war replays.

Cooldown is the one I'd do last on most of them, with one exception I'll get to. Raw damage per shot reads better on paper, but a defense that dies early has a damage output of zero regardless.

There's a knock on effect people miss too. A crafted defense that's tanky enough to demand a proper commitment pulls hero time away from the rest of your base. Every second a queen spends grinding through it is a second she isn't spending on your Town Hall compartment, and that alone wins defences that the damage numbers never explain.

Once hitpoints are handled across the board, the Hero Hunter is where the rest of your builders should go, and it isn't close.

It targets heroes specifically, reaching past troops to find them, and every hit lands a poison effect that slows them down while it chews through their health. Heroes decide attacks now. Force a hero ability early, or take a hero off the board entirely, and you've broken the attack whether or not the rest of your base holds.

It's also awkward to counter. Dropping a distraction next to it does nothing, because it isn't interested in your distraction. It's waiting for a hero to walk into range. You have to freeze it or go invisible, which costs your attacker spell slots they'd rather spend elsewhere. Queen charges have become the default opening for a lot of players, and this defense is aimed squarely at that habit.

Cooldown is worth more on the Hero Hunter than on the other two, because the poison wants to be reapplied. That's my one exception to doing cooldown last.

The Hot Candle is the interesting runner up. It hits multiple targets, but its capacity drops in stages as the attack drags on, from six down to four and finally to three before it stops entirely. Get it firing on a single unit and it's ferocious, since it doesn't have to split anything. The Cake-a-pult is the coin flip. It lobs delayed explosives that leave a bomb behind, which is devastating against clumped troops stuck on a wall and nearly worthless against anything spread out. It also has a dead zone close in, so a hero that walks right up to it is safe.

Most people reading this aren't builder rich, so here's the honest short version by Town Hall.

TH11: nothing. You can't upgrade. Place it and walk away.

TH12 to TH14: max all three, it costs you almost nothing. This is the only window where the answer is genuinely just do all of it.

TH15 to TH16: hitpoints on all three, then finish the Hero Hunter. Leave the other two partial and don't feel bad about it.

TH17: hitpoints on all three, then Hero Hunter only. Stop there. Your ceiling is module level 7 and the remaining time is better spent on permanent buildings. If you're mid Town Hall and still deciding what those permanent upgrades should be, the TH16 upgrade priority guide covers the ordering that actually moves your defence.

TH18: hitpoints on all three, then commit fully to one defense and accept you won't max the others. The Hero Hunter is my pick. If your war opponents are running heavy air, the Hot Candle is a defensible second choice given it hits both ground and air.

One last thing worth saying out loud, because it changes how seriously you should take any of this. Every defense this season attacks ground and air. Previous crafting phases had a standout that only handled one of the two, which quietly pushed everyone toward air attacks. That distortion is gone, so you can build around these without your whole base leaning one way. Supercell laid the module system out in the Let's Get Crafty release notes if you want the original wording. When you're ready to rebuild around the new station, Find My Base will pull up the layout from a screenshot so you're not redesigning from scratch.