Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain – Mother Base Details

While completing all of the missions that comprise the main story of Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain will be important, keeping the new Mother Base up and running will be equally important. The new Mother Base has a wide variety of features that will help you tremendously throughout the single player campaign and even give you the ability to play 1v1 multiplayer completely separate from Metal Gear Online. So let’s take a closer look at everything Mother Base has to offer in The Phantom Pain.

Building Up Mother Base

You probably already know about the Fulton recovery device that allows you to pick up items and even enemy soldiers in the field and send them back to Mother Base. However, there’s a limit to how much you can send back based on the size of your Mother Base. Eventually you’ll need to build new platforms to expand Mother Base so it can hold more staff and equipment and support Snake even more.

When building up Mother Base you need to look at how you’re playing through the game and what would help you most during missions. You can build a variety of additional platforms including but not limited to the support, combat unit, research and development and base development platforms. Each of these platforms serves a different purpose that will help Snake during missions.

Support Platform

The support platform is where you’ll staff the people that help support Snake during missions. The support you receive varies depending on the staff and focus you decide to play on the support platform. Everything from calling in air strikes and cover fire to providing basic diversions is handled by the support platform. The more you level up the support platform, the faster their response time will be. With the proper support you can make difficult missions much easier.

Combat Unit Platform

There are quite a few missions you can go on as Snake, but if you build up the combat unit platform you can send other troops on missions autonomously. Keep an eye on the difficulty of each mission and the skills of your combat units to determine which missions they should partake. While a successful mission will provide various rewards, including helping Snake on related main campaign missions, it’s possible to fail a mission and be set back a bit.

It’s important to train the staff in the combat unit because you can use them on main campaign missions instead of Snake. For example, if you need to gather a specific herb while on a mission, you can pick a soldier with more knowledge in botany to make that portion of the mission much easier. The more you level up the combat unit platform, the more staff you’ll have at your disposal.

R&D Platform

This is arguably one of the most important platforms in Mother Base. The more you level up this platform, the better the weapons you’ll receive in return. Level up this platform high enough and you can get cloaking devices and even enhance your Fulton recovery device to become a wormhole extraction that can’t be shot down (unlike Fulton balloons). It’s pretty important to level up this platform just to get all the fancy weapons and toys that come along with it.

Forward Operating Bases

As you expand your Mother Base you can create Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) that allow you to partake in player vs. player multiplayer experiences outside of the team-based gameplay of Metal Gear Online. By creating FOBs you open yourself up to invasion by other players, and you can invade other online FOBs.

Of course invading other player bases isn’t the only function of the FOBs. They enhance your ability to gather resources and expand your own Mother Base, so they’re very helpful. However, because of the risk of invasion, it’s important to fortify your FOBs accordingly. You’ll need to use money to install security systems and staff the bases with troops to repel invasions.

If you’re online when an invasion occurs you can head back to base and defend it yourself. This starts a player vs. player battle that essentially gives you an infinite number of base incursion and protection missions outside of the main game. Of course if the invading player succeeds you’ll lose some items and troops from your base, but you’ll also know who the invader is so you can invade them and steal back what is rightfully yours.

There’s a lot more to Mother Base, but with Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain releasing in just a few short weeks, you’ll be able to experience all of this for yourself very soon. In the meantime, check out some of the best features of the main game and Metal Gear Online!