Warband Raids in Dragonwilds: Why Your Base Gets Attacked, and How to Stop It
A battle horn sounds and a banner appears: "A warband is attacking your base." Two waves of enemies are already on their way, and if you retreat inside your house they will start breaking the house instead of chasing you. Dragonwilds has three kinds of random event — base raids, hunted events and dragon events — and all three are driven by where you sleep and which region you are standing in. Both of the first two can be ended outright by running, which almost nobody does.
The Three Random Events
| Event | How it announces itself | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Base raid | Battle horn + "A warband is attacking your base." | Two waves arrive and attack you directly |
| Hunted event | Horn + "You are being hunted!" | A party comes to find you, wherever you are |
| Dragon event | Regional attacks with no warband | Fuzan lightning strikes or Velgar poison barrages |
Base raids fire when you are within 20–30 metres of your claimed bed or bed roll. That is the trigger — not proximity to your buildings, but to your respawn point. Which means bed placement is a raid setting you control: put your bed where you do not linger and the event fires far less often.
Hunted events have a second, funnier trigger. Players who wake up in Brynmoor or Ghornfell can receive the banner "Sorry, you're being hunted." — the event lands as you log back in, before you have done anything at all.
Zombie warbands work differently again. They spawn within 100 metres of the player with audible ground-breaking sounds, so the audio cue is your warning rather than the horn.
Dragon events are not warbands and cannot be fought off. Fuzan hits the region with lightning strikes and Velgar with poison barrages, placed around and on you. The counters are to teleport to another region or simply dodge the telegraphed attacks.
Who Attacks, By Region
Raid composition depends entirely on where your bed is set:
| Region | Area | Who comes |
|---|---|---|
| Brynmoor | Bramblemead Valley & Whispering Swamp | Power level 1 goblin runts, power level 2 goblin berserkers, goblin archers |
| Ghornfell | Fractured Plains & Bloodblight Swamp | Power level 3 garou |
| Ghornfell | Stormtouched Highlands | Power level 4 garou |
| Fellhollow | — | Dozens of zombies, approaching very slowly |
| Umbral Sands | — | Fuzan, hunting you with a red dragon |
| Dowdun Reach | — | No warband raids reported |
This table is a base-siting decision, not trivia. A bed in Stormtouched Highlands invites power level 4 garou; the same bed in Bramblemead Valley invites power level 1 goblin runts. Same mechanic, wildly different difficulty — and Dowdun Reach and Umbral Sands have no reported base raids at all, which makes them the quiet places to keep a main base if raids are not something you want to design around.
The Fellhollow zombie raid is the one people misread. Dozens of zombies is alarming, but they approach very slowly — it may be a long time after the warband message before anything reaches you. That gap is free preparation time, or free escape time.
Fight or Run — Both Work
There are two clean outs and one common mistake.
Running ends the event. Move 100 metres from where the warband spawned and the party turns around, runs the other way and disappears. This is not a temporary escape — it terminates the event.
Teleporting ends it too. A Lodestone hop to another region stops both base raids and hunted events, and is the standard answer to a dragon event as well.
The mistake is hiding inside a building. If you take cover in a wall or a house, the warband switches to destroying your buildings — and player-built objects can be destroyed in these events. Retreating indoors converts a fight you might have walked away from into structural damage.
If you do want to fight, fight from height. The reliable method is Windstep to a high position with cover and concealment, then attack with Ranged or Magic. Jumping and putting world objects between you and the party both work; the point is to break line of sight from a place they cannot reach.
Building defences is the standing answer if you intend to hold ground rather than leave. But note the asymmetry: defences are worth building for a base you will defend, and worth nothing for a base you will always run from. Decide which kind you are running before you spend the materials.
And if you are underlevelled, just leave. Flee until you receive the confirmation message that the party has stopped hunting you. There is no penalty for it.
The Only Published Rates
Jagex published raid tuning figures exactly once, for Ghornfell, in Patch 1 – 0.7.2 on 24 April 2025:
| Setting | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Base raid chance | 10% per event tick | 5% |
| Base raid grace period | 9 in-game days | 12 |
| Base raid cooldown | 2 in-game days | 3.75 |
| Hunted event chance | 10% per event tick | 5% |
| Hunted event cooldown | 1 in-game day | 2.25 |
| Raid party cooldown | 2 in-game days | 4 |
Read the direction rather than the numbers. Every single value moved the same way — rarer, later, and further apart — which tells you Ghornfell raids were shipping too often and Jagex halved them.
Treat the figures themselves as historical. That patch is from April 2025, and the game has moved through many builds since — the current build is 0.12.1, with 1.0 arriving on 15 September 2026. These are the only rates ever published, not necessarily the rates you are playing under. The grace period concept is the useful takeaway: a new base gets a protected window of in-game days before raids can start at all.
Practical tips
- Base raids trigger within 20–30 m of your claimed bed — bed placement is the real setting.
- Run 100 m from the spawn and the event ends. So does a Lodestone teleport.
- Never hide indoors. The warband switches to destroying your buildings, and they can be destroyed.
- Fight from height with Windstep, then Ranged or Magic from cover.
- Bed in Bramblemead for PL1 goblins; bed in Stormtouched Highlands for PL4 garou.
- Dowdun Reach and Umbral Sands have no reported base raids — the quiet places for a main base.
Running your own Dragonwilds server
Raids fire on in-game day cooldowns, which means a world that only runs while one person is logged in experiences them very differently from one that stays live. On a gamever Dragonwilds server the world keeps its own time, so grace periods and cooldowns behave consistently for everyone rather than resetting around a single host's schedule — and a group can actually be present to defend a base together. One-click backups matter here too: warbands can destroy player-built structures, and a restore point is cheaper than a rebuild.
Conclusion
Dragonwilds has three random events. Base raids announce themselves with a horn and "A warband is attacking your base," fire when you are within 20–30 metres of your claimed bed, and send two waves whose composition is fixed by region — power level 1 goblin runts in Bramblemead Valley up to power level 4 garou in Stormtouched Highlands, with dozens of slow zombies in Fellhollow and no reported raids in Dowdun Reach or Umbral Sands. Hunted events come to you wherever you are, and dragon events blanket the region with Fuzan's lightning or Velgar's poison. All of them can be ended by running 100 metres from the spawn or teleporting to another region, and the one thing not to do is retreat indoors, because the warband will switch to destroying your buildings — which it can. If you would rather fight, Windstep to high ground with cover and use Ranged or Magic. The only tuning figures Jagex ever published, for Ghornfell in April 2025, moved every value toward rarer and further apart — useful for direction, too old to quote as current.
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