How Clash of Clans base links actually work

Rebuilding a base by eye from a screenshot takes about forty minutes and you will still get two compartments wrong. A base link does the same job in four seconds, and it is a feature Supercell built on purpose. Most players have used one without ever knowing what it is.

What a base link actually is

A layout link looks like this:

https://link.clashofclans.com/?action=OpenLayout&id=TH17:HV:AAAAAA...

Three parts matter. action=OpenLayout tells the game what to do with it. TH17 is the Town Hall level the layout was built for. The long string after it is the layout itself: every building, every wall segment, every trap, encoded into text.

That encoding is why the link is the whole product. There is no image involved and no server lookup. The string in your clipboard contains the base.

Copying a layout into your village

1. 1Tap the copy button wherever you found the layout. The link goes to your clipboard.
2. 2Open Clash of Clans. If it was already running in the background, close it fully first, because the game only reads the clipboard on launch.
3. 3The game shows a prompt asking whether you want to load the layout.
4. 4Pick an empty layout slot. The layout appears fully built.
5. 5Save it, then set it as your home village, war or Builder Base layout from the layout menu.

Nothing about this touches your account, and nothing is shared back. The link is one way.

Sharing your own layout

Open the layout editor on the layout you want to share and tap Copy Link at the top of the screen. That is it. The game writes a link to your clipboard that anybody on your Town Hall level can load.

Worth knowing before you share: the link carries your layout, not your name, not your tag and nothing else about your account. Sharing one gives away no information about you beyond the layout itself.

The four reasons a link does not work

The truncation one catches people out most, because a shortened link still looks like a link. If you pasted it through Discord, WhatsApp or a screenshot of a message, copy it fresh from the source.

Picking a layout that is worth copying

The link is the easy part. Choosing what to copy is where most of the value is, and there are only really three questions.

What is the layout for? A farming layout and a war layout are opposite designs. One gives away the Town Hall to protect storages, the other buries the Town Hall and accepts losing loot. Copying a farming base and then wondering why you keep getting three starred in war is a common and completely avoidable mistake.

Who is attacking you? If the same army keeps opening you up, that is the thing to build against. An anti Electro Dragon layout and an anti Root Rider layout are solving different geometry problems, and neither one is generically "better".

How fresh is it? A layout that has been circulating for six months has been practised against by everybody in your league. Half of what makes a base work is that the attacker has not seen it before, which is why Clan War League in particular rewards using something unfamiliar.

The layout is not the account

One thing worth saying plainly, because base links get sold as a fix for problems they cannot touch. A layout arranges what you have. It does not upgrade anything.

If your defences are several levels behind what your Town Hall allows, the best layout in the game buys you a percentage or two. Attackers are not beating you because of compartment shapes, they are beating you because a level 6 Scattershot dies to things a level 9 would survive. That gap is what a rush check measures, and it is worth knowing which problem you actually have before spending a week collecting layouts.

Short version

A base link is the layout itself, encoded as text, with the Town Hall level baked in. Copy it, fully restart the game, pick an empty slot. If it will not load, it is almost always the Town Hall level, a full slot list, or a truncated link. And the layout you pick matters far more than the mechanics of copying it.