Place the weapon that matches the shape of your hull. If your ship has long, straight sections with convenient lines of fire, use long-range weapons that can shoot through multiple enemies; if the ship is shaped more like a twisting tunnel, use stronger short-range weapons along with ricocheting projectiles that bounce through the corridors. A long-range turret wants an open area or an exposed corner, and a short-range turret wants a small enclosed section you create by leaving a gap between hull blocks.
The Hull Rupture turret placement guide starts with the hull
Combat in Hull Rupture is a tower defense played across the outside of your ship. Alien drop pods land on different parts of the ship's upper and lower hull, and the creatures inside begin making their way toward the Airlock while your turrets shoot them along the way.
Internal corridors that monsters can travel through create additional routes, turning the battlefield into something much closer to a traditional tower-defense map with multiple lanes, choke points and overlapping fields of fire. That is why ship layout becomes a strategic consideration in its own right, and why the shape of the hull is a weapon decision. The hull construction guide covers how to change that shape mid-flight.
Read the hull in this order before you buy anything:
- Find the long, straight stretches with clean lines of fire. Those are your long-range lanes.
- Find the narrow gaps between blocks. Those are the enclosed pockets your short-range guns want.
- Trace the path from the outer hull inward to the Airlock, because that is the route your guns have to cover.
- Decide what the units stationed in the Airlock will handle, so the rest stays with the turrets.
Match the weapon to the geometry
The rule from the official defense deep dive is simple and physical:
- Long, straight sections with clean lines of fire take long-range weapons that can shoot through multiple enemies.
- A twisting tunnel takes stronger short-range weapons, plus ricocheting projectiles that bounce through the corridors.
- A long-range turret needs an open area or an exposed corner.
- A short-range turret needs a small enclosed section, which you make by leaving a gap between hull blocks.
Use debuffs, not raw damage
Slowing enemies, increasing the damage they receive and poisoning them are all available. You will not be able to use every debuff in a given run, but relying on raw damage alone will be difficult. The modifiers that push Beam turrets into applying the Fragility debuff are the clearest example of what this looks like in practice.
Choose cheap guns or expensive guns, not both
Artifacts and modifiers can turn cheap turrets into weapons capable of destroying everything in their path. That gives you two philosophies: collect economy artifacts and fill the ship with expensive turrets, or collect artifacts that make cheap turrets devastating. Both work; mixing them halfway is how you end up with neither. The artifacts guide covers the collection side.
Put guns on the route and keep the Airlock as the net
Turrets first, meat shields second. The September demo update deliberately weakened unit-based ship defense — the Cheat Code artifact was nerfed as the example — so the Airlock and the units stationed inside it are your last line of defense and a safety net for anything that gets past the turrets, not the main plan. The workforce guide covers what those units cost you.
Moving a turret is legal but expensive
Select the turret, open its ? panel to the right of its upgrade arrow, and use the four-direction arrow at the bottom left to Move; the trash can at the bottom right is Demolish.
Moving is free but takes a very long time, and the turret has a downtime period afterwards. That downtime exists on purpose: without it, the best-looking strategy would be to park every turret on the boss spawn and drag each one along the boss's path, so the same turret shot the boss twice. Moving is mainly for taking a weak turret off a valuable spot without destroying it — and modules cannot be moved at all. The boss strategy guide explains why that downtime changes how you plan a boss fight.
Read the panel, not a fixed number
The gun you actually own is the Gun Turret, labelled Machine Gun in its information panel. Read the selected gun's panel for its current values rather than trusting fixed numbers, because the statistics shown belong to the example gun.