At a glance: the three wooden Barricades cost the same recipe — 4 planks + 2 sticks — but give 250 (Birch), 300 (Maple) or 350 (Pine) HP. A Sandbag is 300 HP for only 5 Cloth. So the best walls are Pine if you have wood, cloth Sandbags if you have cloth, and never Birch unless it is all you can chop.
Most base guides tell you to “layer walls and hide your loot”. That is not wrong, but it skips the numbers that decide whether your wall survives. Here is the defence built from the actual barricade table.
The barricade table, and the one rule it implies
The Official Unturned Wiki lists every wooden barricade with its HP and its exact recipe:
| Barricade | Rarity | HP | Recipe |
|---|---|---|---|
| Birch Barricade | Common | 250 | Birch Plank (4) + Birch Stick (2) |
| Maple Barricade | Uncommon | 300 | Maple Plank (4) + Maple Stick (2) |
| Pine Barricade | Rare | 350 | Pine Plank (4) + Pine Stick (2) |
Look at the recipe column: they are identical. All three cost 4 planks and 2 sticks of their wood type. That single fact collapses the choice to a rule — build with the best wood you can get, and never spend a pine-tier recipe on birch-tier output.
The wiki confirms the hierarchy directly: “Pine is generally the superior variant to craft with, with birch being the inferior variant, and maple being in between.” The barricade HP is that sentence turned into numbers. There is no scenario where a Birch Barricade (250 HP) is the smart pick over a Pine Barricade (350 HP) at the same material cost — the only reason to use Birch is that no pine grows nearby.
Sandbags: the 300-HP wall that costs no wood
The Sandbag is the sleeper pick. Its stats:
- 300 HP — equal to a Maple Barricade.
- Low armor tier — it slows small-arms fire.
- Crafted from 5 Cloth — no planks, no sticks.
That means a Sandbag reaches the Maple Barricade’s HP using a completely different resource line. If you have been chopping trees for planks, cloth is sitting unused in your inventory. A wall of Sandbags is the budget route to 300 HP, and cloth is common enough to farm in bulk.
Stack that with the earlier finding that fishing drops Cloth at 0.95% per cast (see how to fish), and Sandbags become a resource you accrue passively. The only downside versus Pine is the 50 HP gap and the Low armor tier — against explosives, armor tier matters less than raw HP and layering.
Layer, because salvage deletes
The most underrated defence fact: a placed barricade can be salvaged by any player who reaches it, which removes it from the world rather than breaking it down. That changes what “layering” means. You are not adding HP to a single wall; you are forcing an attacker to find and salvage several separate pieces, each of which must be reached individually.
Practical layering:
- Outer ring of cheap pieces (Birch or Sandbag) to absorb the first approach.
- Inner ring of Pine Barricades (350 HP) around storage.
- Separate storage rooms so one breach does not expose everything.
The raiding guide covers how attackers actually break in; the base side is that every extra layer is another piece they must reach and salvage or blow.
The repair loop: out-sustain the raider
A wall under attack is not lost if you can repair faster than it drops. The tool for that is the Blowtorch:
- It repairs barricades, structures and vehicles, not just vehicles.
- The repair recipe is Blowtorch + 2 Metal Scrap.
- It repairs continuously while held, so it is a sustain tool, not a one-shot.
That turns a defence into a resource race: the attacker spends explosives, you spend Metal Scrap. Metal Scrap is easy to stock — it comes from construction sites, hardware stores, garages, harbors and warehouses, from mining boulders, and from salvaging most tools and weapons. A base with a stocked Blowtorch and a scrap pile is dramatically harder to break than one that is just thicker.
For where to source the scrap and planks, the how to get wood and crafting guide pages cover the gathering side.
Location still beats HP
None of the numbers matter if the base is found on day one. The rule is unchanged and it is the highest-leverage decision:
- Build away from landmarks and spawn routes. A fortress on a main road is a billboard.
- Small and boring wins. A low, tucked-away base gets passed over; a big one gets scouted.
- Hide the storage, not just the door. Keep the best loot in the least obvious room.
The map guide has the terrain types worth building in, and the looting guide helps you plan a route that does not advertise your base.
What to actually build, in order
If you are starting from nothing, this is the sequence the numbers support:
- A Campfire (5 logs) and Simple Workbench (8 planks + 3 Metal Scrap + Nails) — the crafting backbone.
- A ring of Sandbags (5 Cloth each) for cheap 300-HP cover while you gather wood.
- Pine Barricades (350 HP) on the storage room as the real wall.
- A Blowtorch + Metal Scrap stockpile so you can repair through a raid.
That path never wastes a recipe on Birch, uses cloth you already have, and ends with a repair loop that makes the base a moving target rather than a fixed HP pool.
A note on version drift
Barricade HP, recipes and the Blowtorch repair cost are stable but patchable numbers. Every figure here — 250/300/350 HP, the shared 4+2 recipe, Sandbag’s 300 HP and 5 Cloth, and Blowtorch + 2 Metal Scrap — was read from the Official Unturned Wiki in October 2026. If a balance patch changes a wall’s HP, recheck the Barricade and Sandbag pages before trusting this table.