Terraria

[Orv]

Terraria

OR

Hipster Minecraft

OR

There Is Something Deathly Wrong With You People

So let me disclaimer this before I start.

I have;

60-65 hours played

Every piece of equipment in the game has at some point been in my possession (and I'm currently clad in and wielding what is considered "endgame" equipment.)

I have a base that goes 1254 feet into the earth and is made of every material in the game, except Ebonstone, and you'll learn why later.

Finally, in addition to the disclaimer, I'd like to apologize to your free time and Toblix, this is going to be long, and a review of sorts. (Though if this were anywhere else on the internet, I'd expect people to not read all of it.)

-----------------------------------------------

So Terraria. Let's get the obvious out of the way. Is it inspired by Minecraft? Yes, absolutely, you'd be incredibly foolish/blind not to realize this. The issue that you run into with that comparison is that Terraria is such a rich, complex set of systems that there's, well, actually a game there. As much as I love Minecraft, it has absolutely zero set objectives. Everything you do in Minecraft is a result of your own impetus.

This is where Terraria begins to do things differently. From starting out with a wooden pick and axe, to making copper, iron, silver and finally gold armor, you are slowly (or quickly) working through a process of equipment progression. The four aforementioned materials make up what is referred to as the "mineral tier" and is where you'll be spending a lot of your time in the game.

As I said, you start off with two simple items. A pickaxe and an axe proper alow you to do two things; mine anything that the ground consists of (to a point) and cut down trees. Here's where you run into another Minecraft comparison, material quality. The simplest material in the game world is dirt, with the most elaborate being hellstone. Your first issue in material quality is running into ebonstone, which is simply stone that has been Corrupted.

Corruption is an area on every Terraria map that consists of terrible, terrible things. Flying cyclopian teardrops of evil and pestilence called Eaters of Souls accost you at every turn in the Corruption, and gigantic, multisegmented worms do their best to knock you into chasms. Chasms are where the game first runs into its serious progression scale.

You've been mining silver and gold for a few hours now, you're in mostly golden equipment and you decide to go have a nose about the Corruption. You carefully make your way down a chasm and can see, just out of your reach, a shadow orb. Breaking enough shadow orbs spawns the first boss of the game, the Eater of Worlds. Essentially a hundred Eater of Souls chained together, he's no joke. But how do you get there? Trying to mine the ebonstone with your golden pickaxe has no results, but what about those bombs that you found while spelunking? No dice there either, but you do seem to remember the demolitionist selling dynamite. . .

The dynamite does the trick and suddenly you're blasting shadow orbs wherever you find them. Eater of Worlds has spawned! The purple message flashes across your screen and you hear a swift digging sound. You explode into viscous chunks of human and spawn back at base. You have no earthly idea what happened, but suddenly the giant worm that just murdered you is in your house, killing your dudes. After a pitched battle of who knows how long, the area in and around your house is littered with worm parts and you have demonite ore.

Now begins the semi-fast track towards the end game. You kill the Eater of Worlds again, kill the Eye of Cthulu for fun, and you're clad in Shadowscale armor, a Nightmare Pickaxe in hand and you're ready to go into the dungeon. From here everything spirals into the endgame and hours later you're decked in armor made from the very ground of hell and wielding an extendo-mace that ruins every boss in the game with a few hits. You've "beaten" the game.

The developers have promised content for "years" to come, and can most likely deliver, so you'll likely be revisiting the game for a short time again and again in the days to come. But there's a lot to do in the game besides get the best gear, so let's take a look at many of the interesting additions to the Minecraft formulae.

To start with, the demolitionist that I mentioned? He's an NPC that you can build a house for. Among the list of NPCs are a Merchant, a Nurse, a Dryad, an Arms Dealer and the Demolitionist. They all require you to build a moderately sized house, with a table, a chair and a light source. Now, because Terraria is 2D, for something to be called a "house" it must have a back wall. Hammers remove certain placed items and the back walls of the map, allowing placement of man-made walls, from stone bricks, to gold ones.

NPCs sell various items and provide various services. The Merchant sells a number of incredibly useful items. The mining helmet gives off a circle of light, meaning you don't need to carry a torch actively to see. The piggy bank is a fun item. Your character is a separate entity from your saved worlds. And the piggy bank means you can store one chests worth of items, and no matter what piggy bank you use, wherever in whatever world it is, you can access the items in it. For that specific character mind.

The Arms Dealer sells bullets. For guns. Yes, gun. You can find a musket in shadow orbs, or buy a chaingun that fires hundreds of bullets a minute. All the NPCs do useful things, from the Nurse healing you, to the Dryad selling powder to remove Corruption. They're fun little additions to the game that make interesting game possibilities.

There are some interesting possible world events. Blood Moons have a 1-in-7 chance to occur every single night. Zombies and Demon Eyes (flying eyeballs) spawn at highly increased rates, and zombies are able to open doors. It's a hell of a thing to deal with when you're new, but unfortunately is easily dealt with by blocking over your door. Fun, but eventually more a nuisance than a treat.

Goblin Invasions have a specific set of spawn requirements (as do NPCs) and spawn a large force of goblins to attack you wherever you are on the map. In multiplayer, each extra player spawns an extra number of goblins. They drop things like the Harpoonitron that is a weighted hook that you fire out and retrieve. They also drop Rocket Boots, that allow you to quite literally fly, but use mana to do so.

One of the interesting aspects of gear aside from tools and armor, is Accessories. You get 5 accessory slots (no more, no less) and have to choose what accessories are more relevant to the situation at hand. Accesories range from A Lucky Horseshoe, which causes you to not take any falling damage, to the Cobalt Shield, which prevents you from being knocked back when taking damage.

Items like the Grappling Hook, which does what is says on the can, to the Hermes Boots which allow you to move super-fast when running on a flat surface, make for easier travel around the world. And the world can be very large, from a small world taking a day to run across (about ten minutes) to a large world taking almost three days without any movement items.

I could ramble on about how much of a bastard Hell is, or how much I hate Hornets in the Underground Jungle, but the simple fact of the matter is that I enjoy(ed) the hell out of Terrarias current content. Not to mention I expect to continue enjoy any further content to be greatly enjoyable, even if only for a few days at a time. I'm still enjoying building bases and helping friends get their items, but I am mostly done with the game for the time being.

An enjoyable experience and certainly worth ten dollars. And here's a quick-ish list of Minecraft/Terraria comparisons, because I'm sure there's a few I haven't covered.

Minecraft AND Terraria

• A certain equipment quality is required to mine certain blocks.
  
• Any block in the world can be removed and placed wherever you please (with certain limitations.)
  
• Crafting is extensive and uses many materials and crafting implements to create a wide variety of objects and blocks.
  
• A large, randomly generate world to explore.
  
• Monsters of all shapes and sizes.
  
• You can change your personal spawn point by placing a bed.
  

Minecraft ONLY

• Non-domesticated, non-violent animals roaming the world.
  
• Pets.
  
• Weather.
  
• An unlimited world size.
  
• A three-dimensional world.
  
• Wider variety of landscapes and biomes.
  
• A large modding community and the ability to mod the game at all.
  
• Food, crafted and otherwise.
  
• Farming.
  

Terraria ONLY

• Projectile weapons.
  
• NPCs (that aren't monsters.)
  
• World bosses.
  
• Meaningful gear progression.
  
• Mine carts and their accompanying tracks.
  
• Health potions.
  
• Magic spells.
  
• Burrowing monsters.
  

I'm sure I've missed many, and keep in mind the Minecraft points are the vanilla game without mods. Hopefully you've got a better idea of the game, despite my rambling.

Oh, I totally forgot. If you place Ebonstone anywhere outside the Corruption in sufficient amounts, it has a pretty good chance to spawn the Eater of Worlds.

Question about core game function/intent

That's the core process, yeah. I changed the bit from my original 'review' to say "Meaningful gear progression" as opposed to "linear".

Terraria has a literal end-game that you reach, gear-wise, where nothing in the world really bothers you. Hell and the Dungeon are the only real concerns when you get Molten Armor and it's affiliated weapons.

[Orv]

And because the above post is too damn long.

John Walker of RPS plays Terraria and makes words about it.

[brkl]

So I need two people for the Steam 4 pack, any takers?

[mikemariano]

I watched the video for this on Steam. I thought it was a missed opportunity that the combat doesn't seem to affect the environment at all.

Sandworms burst in and out of the ground, and your characters summon meteor storms as magic, but neither of these affect the terrain that we know to be transformable.

It's a neat idea and seems to offer more than Maple Story, a similar "endless JRPG".

I'd actually like to see a Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft-style of world building used for a traditional RPG. Basically, the computer itself would be playing Terraria and your exploratory hero quest would take place traveling to and from these changing lands. (This would only appeal to people like me who have no creativity.)

[Erkki]

I've been playing this the whole day. Amazing game. Found an Enchanted Boomerang and even managed to get enough money for the miner's helmet. Yay! The combat and mining actually feels more responsive and satisfying than it looks in the videos (that huge arc of the arm swing threw me off at first).

I have a beginner's question: how important is the world size recommendation (in the Wiki/Tutorial video)? I started a Medium world, but small is recommended for newbies. Unfortunately I didn't read the wiki until a couple of hours into the game and then just kept going instead of starting again. But how important is this really? If I will have to walk all that distance every time I get killed somewhere far, that's going to be annoying.

I guess I could build a house/bed and reset the spawn to closer... But do you eventually discover some other means of teleportation (I have the Magic Mirror) rather than just teleporting home or respawning at home?

Does one even need to go near the edges of the world to finish the game?

[Orv]

You need. . .well.

You don't need to travel to the edge of the map in order to beat the game. You can totally skip the Dungeon (always spawned at one edge of the map or the other) and just go straight to hell with Molten/Shadowscale gear.

That said, for a personal world that you actually want to do things in (build, dungeon, fight bosses) I'd recommend a small world. For mining meteors and stuff, I'd recommend a large, as there are more

Shadow Orbs to break in order to cause meteors to fall

.

Once you get a bunch of the movement items, even Large worlds only take a few (being relative, a few is 10 with movement items, large worlds take almost 25 minutes sometimes to cross at first starting the game) minutes to cross.

[Erkki]

I made a small world and it's much more dense and fun. It also helped that my stuff is carried over between worlds. Found a floating island in the sky and a dungeon. And just defeated the Eye of Cthulhu. If this is the easiest of bosses, I'm scared of what the next one will be like. I guess you just need to get better and better gear between fighting the bosses? I tried to battle the Old Man/Skeleton, but that was way too tough.

[Orv]

Skeletron will wreck your shit. End of discussion. You need some serious gear/firepower to deal with him solo, and it's usually done in a group. Thankfully, once he's cleared on a world, that's it, he's gone.

Also, yes. What you should really do is dig down to the "stone layer" of the map (about 800 feet on a small map, if you have a depth meter) and fight skeletons until you get a hook. Then

make 9 iron bars, then 3 iron chains, then combine the chains and the hook into a grappling hook.

At which point, go into the Corruption.

Go into the very first chasm you find and there should be a shadow orb very close to the surface. Now you have two options. If you've beaten a boss (you've beaten Cthulhu in this instance) and you have a suitable opulent house, ergo, bigger than a room with a table and chair, make it maybe twice as large; a dryad will move in. You might also have a demolitionist by now.

Either buy dynamite from the demoman, or purification powder from the dryad. Dynamite will blow up the ebon stone to allow you at the orb, purification powder will turn it into normal stone so you can mine it.

Break the orb with a hammer. Do this two more times. Enjoy.

[Erkki]

Already have the Dryad and the grappling hook, so to the corruption it is.

[Erkki]

Killed two Eaters of Worlds and made some shadow armor and a nightmare pickaxe. I hope I'm getting close to the end because this game is eating up all my time.

I think I will just play until the endgame and then maybe occasionally go and build something -- I'm probably playing it more like a platformer and less like a sandbox than most people, haven't even built a proper shaft.

[Erkki]

Any hints for handling the Underworld? Those fire imps keep killing me. I already have Shadowscale armor, a Phaseblade and an Obsidian Skull.

[Orv]

If you haven't done the Dungeon, you may want to consider it. A

Cobalt Shield will prevent you from being knocked back when taking damage

there-by negating most lava-based deaths.

And Imp projectiles can be batted away, so just face the largest group of Imps and mine away. Try to find a pocket of hellstone that goes into a nice rock island in the lava, so you can just dig down and around inside the mountain of ash without having to worry. You will die! But it takes a lot longer this way.

Finally, you need obsidian to craft hellstone bars (6 hellstone, 2 obsidian to a bar) there are a number of ways to farm obsidian but it's pretty heavily dependant on your locale. I broke through into hell from the jungle, which meant I could really easily flood it with water from the jungle. YMMV.

[Erkki]

I found the Underground creatures spawn less near the very bottom, where there's not much space, just ash, hellstone and lava. A hint in the wiki was helpful too -- Imps can't spawn if there is no horizontal ground. If they do spawn, I'm only able to avoid about half of the projectiles while holding the mouse button with a pickaxe.

[Erkki]

Got enough hellstone for the molten armor set and a flamarang. Had to make a hellevator and make lots of short trips down.

So I now have the best armor, should still look for some better weapons, and have a couple of unexplored areas (jungle, dungeon). Besides that, what now? I still have the Skeletron to kill, is that considered the endgame? I did some google and wiki searching, but didn't find anything about this game having an actual ending.

[Orv]

Molten Armor is the best defensive armor in the game (though recently nerfed.) Meaning Cobalt and Molten are the "end game" armor.

End game weapons include:

- Phoenix Blaster (made from a Handgun [Found in the Dungeon] and molten bars)

- Sunfury (a flail dropped by Bone Serpents)

- The Starcannon (You can buy a minishark at the Arms Dealer for 50 gold and upgrade it into the most damaging weapon in the game with meteor bars. Fires stars.)

You already have the boomerang. You should probably make an Ivy Whip. There's an underground Jungle somewhere in your world. It's underground, as said, and it's only part of the map, it isn't an entire layer. If you kill Man-Eaters, they drop vines, and hornets and the grass drop Jungle Roses. These upgrade your grappling hook into DOCTOR OCTOPUS MODE, allowing you to shoot three grapples at once and position yourself mid-air. It's not necessary, and a bit of a grind, but a thought.

But that really does wrap it up. Now it's build and wait for content, or just shelve it for a bit and wait for content. They've added a bunch of new mobs and items (vanity items for instance) in the past week or so, so it seems they'll be putting out content for a while.

[Erkki]

- The Starcannon

Ended up making that one. I was hesitant of making it at first since the Minishark cost so much and ammo is rare. But by the time I had found about 50 stars, I just didn't know what else I'd do with them so I used them to defeat the Skeletron.

Found the Muramasa in the dungeon, now I feel invincible!

But that really does wrap it up. Now it's build and wait for content, or just shelve it for a bit and wait for content.

I guess I'll just end up building a little bit and then shelving it until new content comes. The building side in 2D doesn't interest me as much as in Minecraft (and even in Minecraft my map is probably quite empty-looking compared to most people's). Maybe it would be more interesting if there were walkable stairs.

[Orv]

I guess I'll just end up building a little bit and then shelving it until new content comes. The building side in 2D doesn't interest me as much as in Minecraft (and even in Minecraft my map is probably quite empty-looking compared to most people's). Maybe it would be more interesting if there were walkable stairs.

Wooden platforms act as ladders/stairs, but we don't have proper ones.

[clyde]

I figured out how the controls work last night. This is a pretty fun game. The graphics and the "2D Minecraft" description turned me off, but many of my Steam-friends are playing Starbound and I had a copy of Terraria I never figured out how to play so...

Of course, I'm immediately going to compare it to Minecraft; playing a Minecraftlike (hehehe) in 2D with a full-screen awareness fundamentally changes the experience for me. In a first-person survival-sim, I find myself orientated in every direction based on where I managed to find wood and coal. Then I dig myself a house for the night and wonder if there is a spider on my roof and what the zombie could be doing that is making so much damn noise. I might make a hole in the wall to try and watch.

In Terraria, I know exactly what is going on outside when I'm hiding. I find myself managing my immediate circumstance rather than only what my character can see an hear. I feel like a autobiographical narrator; the full-screen awareness is similar in type to retrospect. It's a significant difference. I can finally empathize with people who say that they can only play in third-person.

The other difference I notice after playing for only an hour is that the limitation of building in only two dimensions has benefits. I end up creating something that looks grand fairly quickly. And because I can see the whole screen, my two-dimensional accomplishments are more noticeable. In Minecraft, I'm constantly orientating myself and trying to visualize the space I'm carving in living-stone. In Terraria, the format does that for me.

I also want to mention that I'm watching a Korean mini-series about a woman who sees dead people, but they stop bothering her when she touches a stand-offish rich dude; it writes itself.

http://www.viki.com/videos/1008739v-masters-sun-episode-1

Anyway, the show has a duplicitous tone of normal urban environments and the haunted version of it. That tone is filling in the gaps of Terarria for me and it's a pleasant side-effect.

After skimming the above posts, I don't know whether I should read about how to do everything or if I can discover it just by exploring. It seems a bit too complex for uninformed play. I think that happens with alpha-funded games because they are eventually developed with a player in mind who has already internalized early systems.

[JonCole]

Since this game doesn't really teach you very much and instead expects you to learn largely by long periods of trial-and-error, I feel like some degree of reading how to do stuff makes the experience much more manageable and easy to "finish" by reaching the end game.

 

For instance, I never even thought of the idea of Skybridges until I read about them, and they largely changed how I played the game for the better. Had I not read about them, I'd have to work 10x harder for a key currency in the game's systems and probably would have grown tired of tedious farming.

[impuuuu]

The thing about Terraria is that it's like a Do-It-Yourself campaign; you make progress toward upgrading your stuff and adventuring to new areas. In multiplayer this can be a little frustrating because your friends can get far ahead of you, shooting lasers and wearing a bunch of super cool equipment while you're still a good few tiers behind... and now they're off to fight stuff you can't really handle for lack of hearts and equipment.

[Sno]

The big 1.3 update that just went live is, i am told, one of the biggest overhauls Terraria has had. Loads of new biomes in newly generated worlds, a new "expert" mode with tons of different loot and a significantly greater challenge, proper support for steam matchmaking, cloud saves, and achievements, etc. Loads of other little mechanical improvements i've noticed, like the overhauled fluid physics. (The new version seems like it might be a tiny bit crashy though, some of the new worlds i've generated seem to cause Terraria to CTD on longer play sessions, but not all of them have and none of my old worlds have.)

Anyways, that all seems like a good reason for a thread resurrection.

 

So yeah, Terraria's still pretty rad with its weird hybrid of minecraft and metroidvania sensibilities, there's just now a whole lot more of it, and overhauled matchmaking is way, way overdue. Rather, the presence of any matchmaking is long overdue. You seemingly don't even need to fuss with port forwarding anymore.

[Trip Hazard]

Re. Matchmaking: thank fuck for that. I downloaded it again today but have yet to give it a try to see whether this update is worth my while.

The combat in Terraria is sloppy as hell. I quite like it.

[Sno]

There's apparently over 800 new items in this update. Some of that will show up in existing worlds, but a lot of it is tied up in the new biomes and the new expert mode. (Which is a toggle at world creation that makes that world more difficult, it seems balanced for large multiplayer groups or already developed characters.)