City of Heroes Homecoming unveils huge community-driven base building initiative

April 18, 2024 1:00 PM

If you’ve been enjoying our tours of our favorite City of Heroes supergroup bases and portal hubs on the officially licensed Homecoming servers, then you’re in for a treat as the Homecoming community team has unveiled a new project to help players find and access cool bases in-game, complete with a themed tour of some newer bases – some of which I’ve never seen before myself.

The idea here is that the community team has put together one base on every server that visually lists a ton of other bases, divided by theme, so players can easily access public bases on their specific server by just going to the first one. And I do mean all players; any brand-new player can create a new level 1 character and head to the supergroup portal in any newbie zone to access these maps (using the passcodes) in perfect safety. (A broke level 1 character can also build one of these, assuming the player has the design skills!)

Homecoming community rep Dacy explained to me that she and her fellow organizers will be updating the bases with new base codes, with a new theme (or two) every month, with the hope of being done by Halloween. The current showcase theme is tech and sci-fi bases, but if you look closely at the hubs, you can see there are currently empty gates for life-like bases, arcane/fantasy bases, nature/natural bases, and the “other” category, so you can get an idea for what the upcoming showcases will look like. In fact, Dacy suggests that the organizers will continue inserting new additions as well as more themes based on the number of submissions they get. And yes, you can submit your own.

“The showcase is open to any and non-competitive,” she says. “The idea was to give people a way to show off their bases without having to enter a competition.”

Because the list will be updated as the showcases develop, I’ve decided not to copy the whole thing here, as it would be out of date quickly anyway; you can go to the forums to grab the per-server lists. In fact, there are really only four base codes you need to worry about, as all the others are in-game: TOUR-33691 on Everlasting, TOUR-30788 on Excelsior, TOUR-9105 on Reunion, and TOUR-14480 on Torchbearer. (There’s none for Indomitable yet, but maybe that’ll change in the future if more players from there submit bases.)

But I couldn’t stop myself from turning the current tech/sci-fi tour into a popmenu for myself, so I may as well share it here too, even knowing it’ll eventually be out of date:

Download TechTourPop menu (April 2024 version)

I’ve got a whole guide on popmenus, but the short version is you can unzip this package and drop the .mnu file into Homecoming\data\texts\English\menus, then fire up the game and type into chat /macroimage TalonsOfVengeance_ChainLightning TechTour popmenu TechTourPop to create a macro full of commands you can use to quickly teleport to all of these bases. Just remember, you’ll need to be near a supergroup base portal on the appropriate server, and you can port into the next base from inside a base (so you don’t need to exit and come back).

You’ve seen a few of the included bases in my past tours – for example, CYBERPUNK-14407 is probably my favorite base of all time, and here it is in this tour – but a lot of the bases being showcased here are new to me, and I want to call out a few I particularly enjoyed as I toured:

ONES-5030 – Super detailed Trek-esque starship with multiple decks and portals.
OAA-19403 – An epic steampunk castle paradise.
SGL-28076 – This is a stunning sci-fi nightclub with handy portals at the entrance
EDGE-33106 – Rikti-themed, super gloomy base. Dig around for the portals.
CLONES-10732 – Huge hub with great ambiance and super easy navigation.

Incidentally, the core “TOUR” bases also include teleports to pretty much everywhere else too, meaning they’re extremely useful as transport hubs in their own right, even if you’ve already seen all the player bases themselves. Have fun touring!