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Defenses, traps and walls

Every tower, trap and wall in Pixel Kingdom Wars: stats, range, air targeting, Keep batteries, leveling rules and the quirks worth knowing.

Your base defends itself. When someone raids you, your towers pick targets and fire on their own, your traps go off when a raider steps on them, and your walls decide where ground troops can walk. This page lists every defense with its real numbers, explains how targeting works, and covers the rules for leveling, repairing and placing them.

All numbers are level-1 values unless stated otherwise, and all distances are in tiles. Pixel Kingdom Wars is in devnet playtest: wherever KEEP or SOL appears below it is a test-net token with no real value.

Quick facts

• 8 tower types: Cannon, Archer Tower, Mortar, Air Defence, Tesla Tower, Mage Tower, Laser Tower, Dragon Nest. All eight are live.
• 4 trap types: Spike Trap, Powder Mine, Pitfall, Air Mine. Traps have no HP, cannot be targeted, and fire once per raid; after that they need a repair.
• Walls block walking only. They do not block shots, and they do not count toward destruction percent or stars. Neither do traps.
• Towers always shoot the nearest raider they are allowed to hit and stick to it until it dies, burrows, becomes untargetable or moves out of range.
• Only Archer, Tesla and Mage towers hit both ground and air. Air Defence is air-only; Cannon, Laser and Mortar are ground-only.
• Every defense and trap goes up to level 20, but nothing can be upgraded above your current Keep level.
• From Keep level 15 the Keep itself fires a long-range gun; from level 17 it adds a close-range one.

The towers

Base stats (level 1)

Damage per shot is DPS multiplied by the fire interval, so a slow gun hits hard and a fast one chips: Cannon 66, Archer 17, Mortar 320 (splash), Air Defence 165, Tesla 48, Mage 48 (splash), Laser 45. Every tower shot is rolled with a ±6% jitter, so you will see small variations from these numbers in the battle log.

Special behavior

Why: the Mortar's dead zone and the Air Defence's air-only rule are what make tower mixing matter. A ring of Mortars alone is helpless against troops that reach them, and a base with no Archer, Tesla or Mage towers has only the Air Defence (plus any Dragon Nest Wyrmlings and a defending hero) to answer dragons.

Splash rules

Mortar, Mage Tower and the Keep's long gun aim at where the target is when they fire and damage everyone inside the splash radius when the shell lands. Ground splash never hurts flyers; Mage splash does. Defending Wyrmlings are never caught in your own splash.

How targeting works

• Towers fire in building order every tenth of a second.
• A tower keeps its current target as long as it is valid and in range. When it needs a new one, it picks the nearest live raider it is allowed to hit. There is no preference for low HP, heroes or troop type — nearest wins.
• Valid targets are alive, not burrowed, not idle, not "untargetable" (some hero skills), and in the tower's air/ground class.
• Against a flying troop, reach is measured from the raider to the edge of the tower's footprint; against ground troops it is measured from the tower's center. This is why a 4-range Tesla or Mage tower can still answer a dragon hovering a little over 4 tiles out.
• A direct shot always connects if the target is still alive, un-burrowed and targetable when it lands. If the target died, burrowed or went untargetable first, the shot is wasted.
• Towers never shoot walls, traps or other buildings, and walls never block their line of fire.

Which raiders go for your towers

Giants, Dragons, Tur Riders, Direwyverns and Barrowlings target "defenses" first. For them, a defense is any building with a gun or a Dragon Nest — and from Keep level 15, that includes your Keep.

Who defends with you

Your trained troops never fight at home. The only defenders on the field are Dragon Nest Wyrmlings and your defending heroes. Heroes can hit flyers. One caveat confirmed in the code: a defending hero is currently removed from the fight 8 seconds into a raid, so today heroes are an opening burst, not a full-length defense.

Keep batteries

Your Keep is a target from day one, but at high levels it shoots back:

• Keep level 15 — the Keep gains a long-range gun with the Mortar's profile: 320 damage per shot, 2–7 tile range, 1.5-tile splash, ground only, scaled to the Keep's level.
• Keep level 17 — it adds a close-range gun with the Cannon's profile (66 per shot, level-scaled) but a reach of only 3 tiles. The Keep uses the close gun when a raider is within 3 tiles and the long gun otherwise, so the close gun covers the long gun's blind spot.
• Neither Keep gun hits flyers.

The Keep has 1,200 HP at level 1 and scales like the other buildings (see below). In the build sheet you will see these listed as KEEP BATTERY — LONG-RANGE GUN / CLOSE-RANGE GUN.

Traps

Traps are cheap, quick to build (60 seconds), 1×1, and cannot be attacked — they have no HP and are never targeted. Each trap fires once per raid.

Trap damage by tier

Trap damage does not change every level. It steps up every 5 levels with the trap's tier: Tier 1 = levels 1–5, Tier 2 = 6–10, Tier 3 = 11–15, Tier 4 = 16–20.

How traps trigger

• After every movement step, the first raider standing on the trap's tile sets it off — ground traps for ground units, the Air Mine for flyers. Burrowed tunnelers still trigger ground traps.
• Splash traps hit everyone in radius except dead, burrowed or untargetable units.
• Once it fires, the trap is spent for the rest of that raid.

What raiders can see

Traps are not hidden from the attacker's view of your base. Ground traps are drawn with a deliberately inconspicuous buried frame, and the Air Mine visibly drifts. So think of traps as easy to overlook, not invisible. Spent traps show as sprung to everyone, including on your deed image.

Repairing traps

After a raid, every trap that went off stays on your map but is inert — it is left out of the defense until you repair it. Repair is a builder job: it needs a free builder, costs SHARDS by tier, and the trap re-arms only when the job finishes. A spent trap also cannot be upgraded until it is repaired.

Tip: repairs are short, but they tie up a builder. Re-arm traps right after checking your raid log so they are not waiting on a long upgrade.

How many traps

You can place 2 traps per Keep level across all four families, up to 20 at Keep level 10 and beyond. Trap upgrades take 10 minutes at level 1 rising to 8 hours for the last step, and like every other building a trap cannot be upgraded above your Keep level.

Walls

• 150 SHARDS per segment, placed instantly — no builder. Drag to lay a run; the whole run is one all-or-nothing purchase.
• Upgrades are also instant and per segment, from 48 SHARDS (tier 1→2) to 38,880 SHARDS (tier 19→20). A wall tier can never exceed your Keep level.
• Moving walls is free, and you can move a run together.
• Cap: 40 segments at Keep level 1, growing by roughly 11 per level to 250 at Keep level 20.

Wall HP by tier

What walls actually do

In battle, only walls block movement; buildings do not. How a raider treats a wall depends on its type:

• Flying troops (Dragon, Direwyvern) and ranged "over" troops ignore walls when their target is in reach.
• Tunnelers and Bilgewraiths burrow under.
• "Break" troops smash the wall in their way — a Giant hits any building, walls included, at double damage, and a Keg Runner's wall burst is 900 (level-scaled).
• "Follow" troops look for a gap or a breach another unit has already opened.

Walls never count toward destruction percent or stars, so a raider cannot earn anything by flattening them. They exist to buy your towers time.

Why: because walls and traps do not count toward destruction, a raider who spends their army on your walls has wasted it. Use walls to steer ground troops into Mortar splash and Tesla chains, not as a scoreboard.

Leveling, gates and caps

Leveling

• Every tower and trap goes to level 20.
• Leveling a tower raises HP and damage only. Range, fire rate, splash radius, chain settings and footprint never change with level.
• The per-level gain tapers: ×1.25 per level for 2–5, ×1.18 for 6–9, ×1.15 for 10–12, ×1.13 for 13–15, ×1.11 for 16–18, ×1.10 for 19–20. A level 5 tower is about 2.44× level 1, level 10 about 5.44×, level 20 about 17.2×. A maxed Cannon has roughly 7,219 HP and hits for about 1,134.
• No building can be upgraded above your current Keep level. A Cannon cannot reach level 8 until your Keep is level 8.
• Buildings still under construction do not fight. A building mid-upgrade keeps fighting at its current level.

Known quirk: the HP/DMG chips on the building sheet use a flat +25% per level for every level, which matches the real values only up to level 5 and overstates them above that. The numbers on this page (and the battle itself) use the real tapered scale.

Build costs and Keep gates

Upgrade timers start at 8 hours (Cannon, Archer, Tesla, Mage, Laser) or 12 hours (Mortar, Air Defence, Dragon Nest) for the first step and climb to 5 days for the last. Any job can be finished early for KEEP (devnet test tokens); see Base building for the formula.

How many of each

Cannon and Archer caps grow by one every two Keep levels. Check the KEEP sheet in game: it lists exactly what your next Keep level unlocks.

Known quirks

• Defending heroes leave early. As noted above, a defending hero is removed 8 seconds into the raid. Treat hero defense as a short opening burst for now.
• Sheet stat chips overstate high levels. Above level 5 the HP/DMG preview in the build sheet runs ahead of the real combat value.
• Longer tower reach hurts ground-only campaign armies. The August 2026 retune (Cannon range 3→6, Archer 4→7, Air Defence DPS 45→110) also means some Keep 6–8 campaign stages are now hard to clear with a recommended-budget all-ground army. The team tracks this as an open issue.
• Dragons used to out-range towers. That was fixed: reach against flyers is now measured to the tower's edge, so Archer, Air Defence, Tesla and Mage towers all fire back at a hovering dragon. A max-points pure-dragon army can still full-clear a base; the team has accepted that for now.

See also

• Base building — builders, the Keep, placement rules and speed-ups
• Raids and loot — how destruction percent, stars and loot are scored
• Troops and heroes — wall policies and which troops fly
• Campaign and PvE — the stages affected by the tower retune
• Economy: Shards and KEEP — what SHARDS and KEEP are
• Glossary and FAQ