Meet Your Maker wants to kill you. There’s no avoiding that fact, but you can minimize the many deaths it’ll try to fling your way. That, or increase the number or lives your own creations claim. If you’re new to the game, our Meet Your Maker tips and tricks for beginners will take you through seven pieces of key advice you need to know as a raider or base builder to maximize your hauls from the desolate wasteland.
Meet Your Maker tips and tricks for raiders
© Behaviour
A raider’s life isn’t an easy one, but you can trim down your death count by using your brain before charging in. Here are the key Meet Your Maker beginners tips all raiders should know.
1. Patience pays dividends
Don’t rush in. It might seem like you’re in a race to recover the genetic material, but you’re free to take as much time as you like when diving into player-made dungeons. Almost every trap can be countered with caution, so make sure you check the corners, floors, and ceilings carefully while exploring.
And when you do trigger something unexpected? The best step is almost always backwards. So long as you’ve cleared the path behind you, your safest movement option will usually be to drop back to a known space. Watch out for sneaky vertical designs, though, which might rain death from above or behind you.
2. But speed can see you through some gauntlets
Slow and steady is best overall, but when you already know what a room or corridor has to offer, sometimes speed will see you through. Most traps take a second to trigger, which means rapidly grappling past them will get you through unharmed. Just make sure you know there’s a safe space to pause on the other side of the danger.
© Behaviour
3. Always explore for Forsaken Tombs first
Before you enter a base, its always worth doing a quick scout of the outside to look for Forsaken Tombs. These glowing coffins are easily found via their loud, whirring sound. Destroy one and it’ll drop a large chunk of materials for you to collect. There are usually two per level, but mean-spirited builders sometimes block them off from access.
4. Melee first, shoot second
The starting crossbow in Meet Your Maker comes with just two bolts. Two. You can reclaim them, sure, but doing so can open you up to even more traps. Aim to use your melee first rather than shooting. You’ll keep your ammo for when you need it, and become much better at judging the range of different trap types.
5. Grapple often
You can only double jump once before landing, but you’re free to grapple as many times as you like. Practice using this early to move quickly through environments or scale the walls of a building. When you grapple onto to a wall or ceiling, you’ll be able to hang in place for a few seconds before detaching. If you manually drop and refire your grapple, you can keep yourself in a safe spot for long periods of time. In a wider area, that can offer the time and viewpoint needed to asses the dangers ahead.
© Behaviour
6. Let guards come to you
Guards can be a pain, but usually only at a distance. If a guard spots you, it’s best to let them move forward where possible. If there’s a clean path for a walking or flying guard, break line of sight. They’ll follow all the way to the corner you’re hiding behind, letting you easily melee them. The only exceptions to this rule are the armored guards and beefy Warmonger melee guards with twin blades. Miss one of them with a close-up attack and they’ll kill you instantly.
7. Be wary of ramps
Beware verticality. Some of the most dangerous spaces in Meet Your Maker are when you’re forced to ascend or descend. Your movement options become far more limited, and it’s much easier for builders to sneak traps into angles you can’t see.
When climbing upwards, bombs falling from above are extremely difficult to avoid, Heading down, meanwhile, puts you at risk of traps triggering from your feet, before you have the chance to see them. Take these spaces as slowly as possible and keep that grapple ready.
Quick tips:
- Melee attacks will break the Iron Claw trap's grapples
- Don't shoot the harvester, they'll lead you to the Genmat on maze-like maps
- A quality HyperX gaming headset will ensure you can always hear guards and traps coming!
- Upgrading your crossbow will increase its ammo count
- Pair up in co-op for a far easier time
- Remember to trigger advisor boosts to increase your earnings
- Guards can't leave the edges of the level, so you can take out melee attackers from safety
Meet Your Maker tips and tricks for builders
© Behaviour
Looking to design your own devilish Burial Site? Getting in there and playing around is the best way to learn, but when you start to commit to a design, be sure to bear these Meet Your Maker builder tips and tricks in mind.
1. Draw the raider’s eye
As we’ve noted, patient play will counter almost all of Meet Your Maker’s traps, so you need to get creative to earn those kills. Your main goal is to split or draw the raider’s attention between different potential trap points.
Got a spike trap on a corner? Put a hole on the opposite wall and fill it with with unusual shapes to draw their attention. Repeatedly placing threats in gaps from above will keep their eyes fixed upwards, leading to a surprising success rate for a humble spike trap on the floor. Splitting the raider’s attention is the best way to catch them out.
© Behaviour
2. Unusual architecture is your ally
Don’t just stick with basic blocks. You can swap out the standard square for ramps and other unusual shapes, and you should make use of them often. Flooding an environment with half-walls and ceiling spikes can make an environment extremely difficult for a raider to visually comprehend, overwhelming them with potential threats. That makes it easier for your humble bolt throwers and spike traps to get to work.
Verticality, too, is a nightmare for raiders. If they have to climb upwards, they’re far more vulnerable to falling mines and angled bolts. Combine these tricks with regular changes in elevation and disconnected sightlines. You want guards and traps from different angles to trigger at the same time, forcing quick decisions to avoid death.
3. Stick distant guards on isolated platforms
The basic ranged guards are noisy and easy to kill. But with most raiders entering with limited ammunition, they can become a real nuisance at a distance. Stick guards high up on isolated platforms and they won’t leave their position, forcing the raider to lose ammo or come to them. This will make them annoying pests, and the perfect bait for other traps.
© Behaviour
4. Holocubes are your best friends
All of Meet Your Maker’s traps have their uses, but the Holocube works in tandem with all of them. Make this one of your first purchases as a base builder. To all but the finest inspection, it’ll appear as a regular blank wall, only disappearing when approached closely or stepped on.
Holocubes can hide Boltshots, a deluge from Bomb Ejectors, or even a horde of Warmonger melee guards. Even better, they can take the floor out from under someone just as they need stability. Combine them with a pair of Iron Claw grapple traps and a few Corrosive Cubes, and you’ve got the foundations of a raider-ravaging machine.
© Behaviour
5. Check your replays
The replay machine is easy to overlook, but when you’ve recently activated a new base, it’s well worth watching how players approach it. Doing so will show you which traps they discovered and destroyed most easily. You can then rearrange your designs to make them more effective. It’s also a great opportunity to cackle like a James Bond villain as those foolish would-be plunderers fall foul of your creations.
6. Steal ideas while raiding
Don’t be afraid to copy concepts you’ve encountered as a raider. There are no plagiarism laws in the apocalypse. So if you found a particular trap combo tough to reckon with, try incorporating it into your next base! Raiding other bases is the perfect place to spark some ideas for your own death-dealing designs.
7. Don’t forget the paintwork
And finally, when you’ve finished creating you killhouse, don’t forget to spruce it up with decorations. Adding paintwork like a trail for players to follow or entertaining colors makes a raider’s experience far more fun, but it can also improve your base, too.
Cosmetics layers for blocks include rotating gears and meshes which look suspiciously like traps, so make sure to plaster them around corners and in places you want the raiders to be looking when that spike trap triggers from behind.
Got any Meet Your Maker tips of your own? Share them with us so we can steal them our own levels and runs. Yes, we're just that shameless.
