#Essential Trampler Building Tips

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This is a basic guide of "essential" trampler building tips based on my experience blueprinting my own tramplers and boarding/fighting other tramplers in solos and small crews on voyage.

It's geared mostly towards newer players who also play in solos or small crews and don't have access to Tier 2 technologies, so keep that in mind. I don't expect everyone (especially large crew or late-game players, or storm dive players) to agree with parts of this guide if not the entire guide, since the meta is different at those levels.

Terminology

Airlocks

  • Airlocks are rooms used to separate one area (usually the outside) from another.
  • Having airlocks, especially against the outside, adds security by forcing boarding enemies to go through more than one door if they want to raid a module (especially your storage, captain’s quarters or reactor). Extra doors means extra time for you to prepare and react to a boarding party, and more resources required from them to raid you.

Broadsides

  • Broadsides are your left and right facing sides of the ship, which are also typically your longest (broadest).

CQ

  • CQ refers to Captain's Quarters, which is where the core of your trampler is stored. If this core is interacted with by an enemy crew for around 10 seconds, they capture your trampler.

Tips

Conceal your motor-reactor.

  • Your motor-reactor is your most critical component, and so it is in your interest to put it beneath as many layers of protection as possible.
  • You’ll be a bit limited early on with how well you can conceal your reactor due to the chassis you’re limited to and the footprint of your starter reactor, but even having your reactor on a lower deck provides it with more cover and survivability than the Grumpy Walker affords you.
  • Early game, placing your reactor on one broadside opposite of most of your turrets allows you to maneuever your reactor away from your enemy and your guns towards them.

Airlock your Captain's Quarters.

  • Your CQ is probably your second-most valuable module, and can arguably be considered even more valuable than the motor-reactor. If your CQ is breached, a player can “capture” your trampler to their team after around ten seconds of interacting with its IO.
  • Losing access to your trampler makes it infinitely harder to fight back, since this disables your ability to enter your doors and respawn on the ship. So, it stands to reason that you should put at least one extra door between the outside world and your CQ.
  • In the early game, when you have no special modules unlocked, you can use a 2-person cabin (which comes with a small hallway room) to create an airlock. In the mid game, using storage compartments and enclosed armaments workshops work well too.

Airlock your Entrance Ladder.

  • Similarly, you want an airlock on your entrance ladder to prevent raiders from being able to easily climb onto your deck (or otherwise into your trampler). **I’ve personally boarded and captured multiple tramplers because they make the fatal mistake of not airlocking their entrance ladder, and having it go to the same deck as their other core modules. **
  • In a pitch battle against a duo or trio, you’d be surprised how easy it is for someone to run up to your trampler during the fight and climb your entrance ladder, allowing them to board you without their trampler even making direct contact with yours. Buy yourself some time against this, and force them to need time bombs if they want to get in this way.

Manually place your ladders/doors.

  • This is perhaps the most easily overlooked thing when building your first trampler. Sometimes the game goes overkill with ladders where they don’t need to be, or will create open doorways that go directly outside instead of placing a proper door. You should get used to manually checking and placing/removing your ladders and doors before saving every design, to make sure it works correctly and in a way that makes sense.
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Don’t invest too much in one idea.

  • You shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket: don’t design something that has no maneuverability in favor of having a ton of armor or turrets, because you will eventually get worn down, not be able to bring your cannons to bear against the enemy (if you can’t turn fast enough) or will get outmaneuvered by a faster trampler and have your reactor targeted while you struggle to hide it or fire back.
  • You should also not invest entirely in maneuverability at the cost of turrets, deck space or armor, because there will be a time you get ambushed or a leg crippled and have to resort to fighting back at least momentarily.
  • Your trampler can focus on one function above all others (combat, evasion, hauling) but hyperfixating on that one thing will leave you vulnerable to losing it in all but the most ideal voyages (and few voyages will be ideal.)

Keep a turret or two close to your cockpit.

  • When in solos in particular, efficiency on your trampler is everything. You should have at least one turret that is easily accessible to your cockpit, so that you can change the direction/speed/strafing of your trampler while also managing your gun. However, this tip can still be useful in small or large crew tramplers.

Finally, don’t underestimate power efficiency and maneuverability.

  • Maneuverability is more than just turn speed: it’s acceleration (and deceleration). It’s not hard to design a trampler that can achieve 100% top speed, but having the maneuverability to reliably reach and maintain that (especially when going uphill, strafing, etc.) is another story entirely. You might think that your monstrous trampler can catch up to another simply because both have 100% top speed, but if their maneuverability is 5x yours, and they have a half-decent pilot, they can quite easily shake you if you don’t score a lucky hit against their legs.
  • Similarly, power efficiency is important if you don’t want to run out of energy in the middle of a fight or while pursuing tramplers across the sands; some chases can last many minutes, and in the very early game, power rods will feel precious.
potent moat
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This is a really good guide man, nice job! There are two things I would like to add:

Door Parkour: If a trampler uses the standard, worst entrance, not a vestibule, and if the trampler is on flat or flattish ground, you can do what I call Door Parkour. Turn around, sprint jump out of the entrance, turn around midair, spam space, and climb over the entrance compartment. This makes any defense you intended to have past the entrance obsolete. Thankfully, there is a way to counter this. Place a compartment on top of the entrance, and raiders can’t parkour over it. Even a deck with nothing on it will do.

Climbing the legs: During combat, if your trampler is on a hill, or has it’s motor-reactor off, raiders can climb the legs of your trampler, without having to go through any defenses. In the early game, like you said, you can use crew compartments to create a layer of protection on the bottom deck of your trampler, to prevent raiders from doing this. In the mid/late game, really anything works: Storage compartments, enclosed workshops, etc.

I designed my 1, 2 and 3-player combat tramplers “Bastions” around preventing raiders from easily boarding, and I utilized both of these features.

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# potent moat This is a really good guide man, nice job! There are two things I would like to ...

Oh yeah, with mantling you can do some impressive tech like the "door parkour" like you mention.

For that reason, in some of my designs I like to use balconies or the non-square/round deck pieces (forget if they have a proper name) to create "overhangs" from the upper deck to the lower, to make it harder (if not impossible) for people to parkour up/down my deck levels without using the proper route (like a ladder.)

In one of my trampler designs, namely https://discord.com/channels/1192467643144355910/1514242327726653611, one way I resolve this is putting my helm above the entrance, so that raiders can't easily mantle onto/up anything- but really a lot of different deck pieces/overhangs will help.

Leg climbing is another reason I like to make traversal between decks difficult except by ladder, or use compartments to split decks up (if I can) so that boarding a deck on, say, the bottom level doesn't necessarily grant you access to everything there without breaching a door or parkouring up another side.

potent moat
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This is really the only photo of my bastion design that I have, but you can see on the left that I put a cargo deck above the entrance to prevent Door Parkour, and obviously used compartments to prevent leg climbing

IMG_4218.jpg
hot scroll
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From what I can tell it's a very defensive design, especially against boarders. 👀

potent moat
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I wish I had a picture of the interior 😔, you’d see that I put a door on every frame I could. It does seem to be a somewhat effective design, because I won all of my solo fights with it, and only lost it twice with my friend. Once when we got cocky, destroyed a trampler with an orbital strike and stopped our trampler, just to also be hit with an orbital strike and they took over our trampler. The other time, we attacked a large, 3-person crew trampler while fed up from the previous loss, and couldn’t outlast them in a long fight.

sharp panther
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The internal 70mm, pointed at the entrance group that has an open corridor x)

Its also facing forward so you can still fire slugs and smokes out front to assist the fight somewhat, tho the intent is to blast whatever poor sould will not expect to climb up infront of a turret

potent moat
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That’s hilarious! I love it!

warped crypt
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We’ve been running a 6 cannon build, with a typical elevated gun deck of 5 cannons, and a sixth down lower, adjacent to the helm so that O’Captain my Captain can contribute to DPS.

40mm seems to do well bc they don’t need to reload but an 80 will do just as well

thorny python
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whats cockpit "???

thorny python
potent moat