Scrap Mechanic Farm Defense Guide: Build for the Wave

Know what is coming before you build for it

Defending a farm is mostly a matter of building for the right level. The bot mix changes sharply as crop value climbs, and a layout that shrugs off level 2 is scenery by level 5.

Here is where each bot first appears in the raid tables:

Level	New arrivals
1	Totebot - Green, Haybot
2	Blue Totebot
3	Red Totebot, Green Tapebot, Yellow Tapebot
4	Yellow Totebot
5	Tapebot, Farmbot
7	Three Farmbots in the opening drop

Levels 5, 6 and 7 draw from the same set of weighted groups. What changes is the budget: 300 to 500 at level 5, 500 to 700 at level 6, and 1,000 to 5,000 at level 7. Same bots, far more of them.

The two bots that decide your build

Most of the roster is chip damage. Two are not.

A Farmbot has 1,500 health against 40 for a Totebot - Green and 100 for a Haybot. It hits players for 35 with its swipes and 10 with a kick, sprays at range for 4 out to 16 metres, and slams structures for 60. That last number is the important one: the Farmbot is the only raider in the tables built to take a base apart rather than a player.

A Tapebot fires for 35 damage out to 40 metres on a 1.5-second cooldown. It only has 40 health, but it will out-range almost anything you have built and it does not need to reach you. At level 5 and above, an unanswered Tapebot line is what kills defenders standing on their own walls.

For comparison, the early bots are much softer. A Totebot - Green does 15 damage at 1.15 metres, and a Haybot does 20 at 2 metres.

Haybot swing speed is worth reading carefully, because its pitchfork swipe carries two separate timers: an attack cooldown of 0.3 seconds and an animation cooldown of 1.65 seconds. The engine applies both, and the longer one gates the shorter, so the swipe does not land three times a second. Neither number is a swing rate on its own, and the published data does not settle what the realized rhythm is. Treat a Haybot as a steady melee threat rather than a burst one, and check the bot pages for the full stat lines.

Level 5 is where the Farmbot arrives

At level 5 the opening group is a single Farmbot, and there is a weighted group that buys another one for 75 points. Level 5 begins at 1,000 crop value, which is a single Pineapple or ten Oranges. That is a small enough field to reach without planning for it.

Where the bots actually land

The drop targets the geometric middle of the crops that triggered the raid, not your base. Every crop you plant or pull moves that point.

That one rule decides where the fight happens. Put the scoring crops in a field away from your workshop and the wave goes to the field. Scatter them through your base and the wave lands in your base.

Two distances matter for laying that out. Crops within 10 units of an existing planting cluster count as the same cluster, and the raid area has a radius of 96. Two patches close together are one raid on the midpoint between them. Two patches genuinely far apart are two separate raids, which is worse if you cannot be in both places.

The timing you get to work with

The countdown runs 60 seconds. A crop planted in the first 10 seconds of it resets the clock to a full 60. The first group lands 12 seconds after the countdown ends, and later groups follow at 2-second gaps, or 5 seconds for the groups that carry Farmbots.

So the answer to “how long do I have” is at most 72 seconds from the last plant to first contact, and less than that if the countdown was already running when you planted. That is enough time to get into position and not much else, which is why defence has to be built before you plant rather than after.

Layout ideas that follow from the data

These are strategy suggestions rather than published rules, but each one follows from a number above.

Separate the scoring field from everything you care about. The landing point is the midpoint of the crops, so distance between the field and the workshop is free protection.

Build for the Farmbot slam rather than for player damage. A structure taking 60 per hit from a 1,500-health attacker is a different problem from one taking 15 from a 40-health Totebot. Cheap sacrificial walling around the field buys more time than expensive walling around the base.

Answer the Tapebots first. They are the fragile ones with the long reach, so anything that closes distance or blocks line of sight helps more than more armour does.

Keep the field small enough to cover from one position. Because groups arrive at 2-second gaps around a single landing point, a compact field is a fight you can hold. A long strip drags the midpoint around and spreads the fight out.

Working out your own level first

Before rebuilding anything, total the crops you actually have and read off the level. The raid calculator uses the same thresholds, budgets and group weights described here, and it also gives an expected bot mix rather than a guess. Knowing you are at level 4 rather than level 5 changes whether you need a Farmbot answer at all.

The Seekerbot is a separate problem

The Seekerbot is not part of the raid system. It does not care about your crop value, it does not arrive on the raid countdown, and none of the thresholds above apply to it. It patrols, it tracks where players have been, and it goes hunting on its own schedule.

The consequence for base building is a strategy point rather than a rule: raid defence and Seekerbot defence are different jobs. A field ringed with walls answers a raid landing on a known midpoint. It does nothing about something that arrives by air on its own initiative, at a place you did not choose.

Two habits worth adopting, both offered as strategy rather than as published behaviour. Treat travel routes as information you are giving away, because the Seekerbot works from where players have been rather than from where they are. And keep the workshop and the scoring field separate for this reason too, since a base that is not also the farm gives you somewhere to retreat to when the other one is being taken apart.

Item pages in the item database list what each raider drops, which is worth checking before you decide a raid is purely a cost. Farmbots in particular are one of the better Component Kit sources in the game, even at the reduced raid rate.