User blog comment:Supermrman911/More Suggestions for Terraria 1.0.7 (or 1.1)/@comment-24.191.225.114-20110904230811

Here's my own random idea; feel free to add it to your list if you like it. The idea is that you could build a market square of some kind, which might have various sorts of requirements like NPC's have, or just material requirements.

Anyway, once the market square is built, you will start attracting traveling merchants. Every so often, you may get a message "Merchant on his way from the east/west!", meaning that soon a merchant will arrive on a ship on one of the two sea shore in, say, a day or so.

Once the merchant steps off his ship, he will travel towards your market square, and he may run into either impassible terrain or enemies...maybe even bandits who only attack traveling merchants. You will be notified when this happens, and must travel to help him, or he will either die or turn back. Basically, you have to help make sure the merchant makes it back to the market square. You might even be given the opportunity of inviting a merchant, giving the player some control over the timing of these events.

Each merchant, once it arrives, will have a variety of random items for sale. It would be a good way of introducing new items into the game, by having them appear with random merchants. Often, they will offer stuff that's quite good or hard to come by, but there are ways to make sure this won't break the game. There can be limits on quantities, and restrict against balance-breaking opportunities.

Anyway, it's something that would introduce new NPC's, possibly new monsters (i.e. bandits), a new structure and new mechanics. I think it would make things interesting and add a new dimension to play, and also make the world of terraria seem more alive.