As an UD moving up the ladder and improving it is critical to know how to block your gold mine so that you cannot be harassed. Below is a guide created by BidoFan1 on how to properly block your gold mine on the current 1v1 map pool and an explanation of how building size plays a role in blocking your base.

You can find the full guide in the embedded imgur post at the end.

The basics of what is “walling off”.

This guide contains layouts for walling off your gold mine to prevent Acolyte harass.

A few things you should understand about what creates a wall off.

What is a wall off? When we refer to wall off it typically refers to blocking your base (gold mine) from larger units (heroes, grunts, knights). Smaller units (footman, ghouls, spirit wolf) can still pass through. (More info on this in next image)

• Any building against a tree is a wall (except Necropolis).
• A ziggurat against a build is a wall.
• Ziggurat against a tree or another ziggurat with 1 grid space between is a wall.
• Ziggurat against a tree or another Ziggurat with no space between is a full wall that Acolytes and small units cannot move through (for the purpose of this guide, making a full wall like this is generally not advised, as your Acolytes will become trapped and the gold mine will be extremely vulnerable to zeppelin harass. If you watch Happy, you might notice he often does full wall off, put will remove trees on one side to open it)
• The default Necropolis cannot be used to wall off, but a Ziggurat against the top side of a Necropolis is a wall and will make that space on the north side unwalkable.

When should the mine be walled off?

This can be hard to determine. Anytime your mine is walled off, it becomes vulnerable to smaller units and zeppelin drops. As a beginner I would recommend always trying to wall off until you’re comfortable with how to do so. Afterwards, you want to make your base layouts with the option to wall off if needed. I personally always wall off against Blademaster, Paladin, and Warden.

There’s a few considerations in how I’ve made the layouts in this guide. Most layouts will use Tomb of Relics, Graveyard, and 2 Ziggurats, but I’ll use only 1 Ziggurat where possible.

1. Altar is not used to wall off (to prevent your hero from getting stuck from a bad rally point)
2. Tomb of Relics is in the back (Tomb is a weak building, and you can’t build Statues without it)
3. Tomb is closer to the 1st standard creep camp where possible (considering Tomb will always be in back), however you can always swap positions with where I’ve put Graveyard.
4. Graveyard is used to wall off where possible (you can move your ghouls behind the wall if needed and still harvest lumber)
5. Graveyard is closer to the side with more trees (to optimize lumber harvesting) There’s many other possible layouts with/without varying combinations of the above considerations. On most maps where I note a tree needs to be cut, this can be avoided by using Altar in that location.

Other considerations:

• Using altar instead of graveyard might be preferable, because altar has less HP and with graveyard you need to be careful about ghouls cutting the trees used in the wall off.
• When playing fast fiends, you dont have time to cut trees for graveyard.

Using the small black grid spacing, you’ll see the “pathing size” our units occupy

Hero = 4×4

Ghoul = 2×2

All buildings have a walkable pathing size around the perimeter

0x0

-Ziggurat

2×2

-All other Undead buildings

4×4

-Necropolis

-Haunted Gold Mine

-Note the north side of Necropolis has smaller walkable space. If you put a Ziggurat against the north side, your heroes won’t be able to pass through.

1v1 Map block off examples

Warcraft 3 Undead Base Layouts