When I started building a free iOS library of Clash of Clans base layouts, I assumed search would be the hard part. It turned out the hard part was deciding what a "base" even is in data terms.

The three fields that mattered

Town Hall level – the single filter every player uses first. Stored as an integer, never as a string like "TH16", so ranges (14–16) are trivial.

Purpose – war, farm, trophy, or hybrid. Players think in goals, not in building positions.

Source link – the in-game copy link. Everything else is metadata; this is the payload.

What I dropped

I tried tagging "anti-2-star", "anti-3-star", "ring base", "island base"… and nobody used those filters. They were opinions, not facts, and two people tagged the same base differently. I kept them as free-text notes instead.

What I learned

Model the decision the user makes, not the object. Players decide "I need a TH16 farm base", so that's the index.

Keep opinionated labels out of filters.…