Crafted Defenses Season 4: Hot Candle, Hero Hunter, Cake-a-pult
What Crafted Defenses are
Crafted Defenses are seasonal defensive modules built at the Crafting Station. They are not permanent buildings in the way a Mortar or an Inferno Tower is. Each season Supercell rotates the available set, so what you can craft in August is not what you can craft next year.
The Crafting Station itself is a 3 by 3 building, and you get exactly one of them. That single slot is the whole system: you are not adding three defences to your base, you are choosing which one module the station runs.
The station shipped with the Town Hall 18 update on 17 November 2025 and was later lowered to Town Hall 11. In our building catalogue it appears from Town Hall 11 up with a count of one, which matches what Season 4 players can actually build right now.
Who can build one in Season 4
This is the part most guides get wrong, so it is worth stating plainly.
The Crafting Station is normally gated to the highest Town Hall in the game, which today means Town Hall 18. Season 4 opened it to Town Hall 11 and above as a one-off concession, tied to the 14th Clashiversary in August 2026.
Two consequences:
- If you are between Town Hall 11 and Town Hall 17, you can build and place a Crafted Defense right now, and this is the first season where that has been generally true.
- Do not assume the gate stays there. It is reasonable to expect it to snap back to top Town Hall only in Season 5, so a base you build today around a Crafting Station may lose that building when the gate moves.
The Season 4 line-up
Season 4 began on 1 August 2026 and runs to around the end of December 2026. Season 3 ended on 31 July 2026.
The three modules in rotation are:
- Hot Candle
- Hero Hunter
- Cake-a-pult
We are not going to publish damage numbers, ranges or targeting rules for these three, because we have not verified them against the game or an official Supercell post, and a layouts site that guesses at defence stats is worse than useless. What we can do is show you what a Crafted Defense has meant in practice, because the Season 2 set is documented.
| Season 2 module | What it did | Design lesson |
|---|---|---|
| Hero Bell | Buffed defending heroes, with a range wide enough to cover the whole base | A support module is placement-insensitive. Protect it, do not aim it. |
| Light Beam | Single target, roughly 15 tiles, damage falling off with distance | A module with falloff wants to be where the fight happens, not on an edge. |
| Bomb Hive | The longest range in the game, around 20 tiles, firing bombs along grid-parallel lines | A grid-aligned module cares which way your compartments run. |
That range is the point. Crafted Defenses have covered everything from a base-wide aura to a lane weapon, so the correct placement depends entirely on which module you are running. When you pick one this season, work out first whether it is a support building, a point weapon or an area weapon, then place it accordingly.
Where the module belongs in your base
Whatever the season’s set turns out to be, some placement rules hold because they come from how attacks work rather than from the module’s stats.
- Never stack it with your other high value defences. A Siege Blimp is paid for by what it can reach in one drop. At Town Hall 18 you have one Monolith, two Super Wizard Towers and one Revenge Tower. Putting the Crafting Station in the same compartment as two of those turns your core into a single worthwhile target.
- Keep it out of the outer ring. A new module is the first thing an attacker will scout for and the first thing they will remove if it is cheap to reach. If it dies in the first fifteen seconds it contributed nothing.
- Do not build the compartment around it. The module leaves at the end of the season. If your wall structure only makes sense with a 3 by 3 building in that exact spot, you will be rebuilding in January instead of adjusting.
- Watch the axis. Hero equipment burst punishes straight lines. Keep the station off the same line as the Monolith and the Revenge Tower.
At Town Hall 11 the calculus is different because the base is smaller and the station is proportionally more important. With 7 Cannons, 8 Archer Towers, 4 Mortars, 5 Wizard Towers, 4 X-Bows, 2 Inferno Towers and a single Eagle Artillery to work with, one extra defensive building is a real shift in coverage. Put it where your existing coverage is thinnest rather than where the base already holds.
What to do when the season rotates
Season rotation is the one maintenance job unique to this era of the game. When Season 4 ends:
- Check every layout you run for a gap where the module was.
- Re-check the compartment it sat in. A missing 3 by 3 building changes pathing, not just damage.
- Do not assume the new module goes in the same place. A support module and a lane weapon want completely different positions.
Every layout on this site records the Crafted Defense season it was designed for, so a layout built for Season 4 is labelled as such rather than quietly going stale.
Layouts to start from
- Town Hall 18 war bases and Town Hall 17 war bases
- Town Hall 11 layouts, the lowest hall that can build a Crafting Station this season
- Anti 3 star bases at Town Hall 16
- Base design principles, which covers where a strong single building belongs in a compartment structure
- Layout finder to filter by hall, base type and the attack you need to stop
Every layout page shows the full base picture, so you can check a placement before you commit builder time to it.