User:Spinfx

Greetings
Hello all, Spinfx here.

Terraria is a wonderful game, I haven't played any world building/exploring games previously (Minecraft?) so this is a novel experience for me. I can say it's easily one of the best purchases I've made ever, right along with the Exile/Avernum shareware series. I like indie games like those, commercial boxed games are all well and good but far too many of them nowadays are shallow and more glitter than substance.

Quickstart Guide
It's been a while; I dropped off the map around February 2012, and just "came back" a couple weeks ago (August 2012). So many games, so little time, etc. Heh. Anyway, seeing as how this is my 5th SP world I decided to put up a short quickstart guide here to remind myself of a few quick immediate goals to get up and running. This assumes a new character and a new world - it's how I've always started, although I did transfer my first character to one of each different size of worlds.

UPDATE: October 2013 - With the recent release of the massive 1.2 update, quite a few things have changed, heh. Still, as far as I can tell, the new low-tier ores are straight alternatives to the existing ones, and a lot of content appears hardmode-related; I doubt this guide is wholly obsolete. Granted, it would be a good idea to take the new stuff into account - which may take some time given how much new stuff there is to consider.


 * Assuming singleplayer softcore. No need for the harder difficulties as the only change is the dying penalty; items, monsters, etc are all the same.


 * Pick a large world. Don't worry about the size; you'll be using the Moreterra Terraria World Viewer to help you find things. Is this cheating? Well, it's singleplayer - you're playing for a fun solo experience, and it's not like this is a one button auto-win cheat. Besides, even with a map it takes weeks of 1-2 hours daily playing to get thoroughly stuck into things. Oh sure, you can get a lot done in an hour and you can really push forward on free weekends, but this isn't a quickie game by any stretch of the imagination.


 * All the map viewer does is help point out stuff; you still actually need to get there to do whatever necessary. All it does is take out the random digging around, which - while I concede was fun the first time I ever played the game - quickly gets frustrating and puts you into danger of burning out after weeks of seemingly no progress at beyond merely collecting dirt, stone, and far too few other things. You don't have to use it either, but I'm a working adult now: free time is at a premium. I admit far too many instant gratification events in most games have cut down on my patience somewhat, even if I still do things like get into 3,500+ battles merely reaching Roak in Star Ocean: The Last Hope (International ver).
 * There was a point to that btw, 100%-ing monster data mostly, plus Roak is the home of the series' signature "battle arena" minigame. I don't mind grinding when there are tangible goals.
 * Back to MoreTerra, get into the habit of running it each time before you start the game so that you have an up-to-date map you can alt-tab out from the game to check your progress against.

Upgrading Advice

 * Most of the Getting Started guide is fairly useful for the first day, just skim that if you need a refresher for the game.


 * Copper is fairly crap - I didn't bother to craft a full suit of armor from it, ditto Iron; I simply mixed-and-matched pieces from those two.


 * Pickaxe upgrades: This is your number #1 tool - and despite what others might tell you, it makes for a good weapon too since the swing mimics a broadsword's arc, pretty much negating the lower quality broadswords which is kind of a shame. Upgrading-wise the most important factor is what blocks can a particular type of pickaxe mine out. The copper pickaxe you start with is serviceable, but note that the ones immediately above it - iron and silver - offer no distinct improvements outside of a slight swing speed improvement (although you may upgrade to iron if you have plenty of ore to spare). This means your first target is the gold pickaxe, which allows you to dig out demonite ore (very rarely found early in the game though) as well as meteorite (important). The increased damage is a small bonus (your focus here is on mining things, the bloodthirsty rampages will have to wait until you can obtain/craft good weapons).


 * Hammer upgrades: Start off with wood, change to copper if the fancy hits you but it's not important since you hardly use it much early-game. From the list note that copper, iron, and silver hammers all destroy backgrounds in 3 hits. Iron is the earliest faster one (at "average" speed), so don't waste ore on a silver hammer. It'll last you quite a while until you have the spare gold for a gold hammer - which is the earliest hammer to destroy backgrounds in 2 hits while being noticeably easier to craft than subsequent hammers.
 * Btw I consider everything up to gold as "natural", as subsequent ores up the chain all require things that need you to get through at least one boss fight. With the help of the map viewer, you can get yourself kitted out in gold gear without having to deal with a boss so that's the way to roll.


 * Axe upgrades: The last in your holy trinity of tools and likely the least to get much mileage. Silver and gold axes offer practically the same in usage speed (same swing speed, same no# hits to remove wood and cut down trees) so obviously your first target here is the silver axe. It's also the tool with the lowest upgrade priority so only do it when you have the silver to spare.


 * Don't bother crafting the basic swords, although the quick poking motion of the shortsword has some early-game utility when you manage to corner (or are cornered by...) something in a tunnel that moves at a sedate, predictable ground-shuffle. Their relative uselessness against fliers, jumpers, and burrowers (which constitute most of the game's monsters...) should convince you not to waste resources making them. Broadswords are somewhat more useful in that they swing in an arc that the pickaxes mimic, but this pretty much means you can just keep swinging your pickaxe rather than swapping to a broadsword to fend something off, although you trade off quite a bit of damage - which often turns out to not really be a problem anyway considering their inherent knockback is usually sufficient for the pickaxe to keep monsters at bay.
 * Once you get past the lower-tier ones requiring only natural ores though, broadswords can be quite good.


 * With the v1.2 update, you may find chain knives, which are apparently rare cave bat/skeleton drops as well as possible chest loot. A chain knife acts as a retractable throwing knife, flung out a short distance away from the character at a speed comparable to that of firing a grappling hook, making it a pretty good early game weapon - especially if you've yet to explore the underground jungle for ingredients.


 * Consider boomerangs; no, I realise you can't craft them for a while and finding the early ones is a matter of luck. However, the first craftable one (the Thorn Chakram) merely requires a handful of ingredients that shouldn't be too hard to gather. Harvesting Jungle Spores is admittedly largely dependent on luck, but with clever tunneling and shaft creation techniques it is not too hard to carefully entrap the hornets you need to kill for obtaining Stingers.


 * Creating a Thorn Chakram, in fact, should be your first "medium level" goal: it outshines early-game swords by a mile, and is basically the first milestone to reach before hitting up bosses. Sure, you can go fight them before creating a Thorn Chakram, but the first few bosses available are solidly in the "I didn't know it was going to be this hard" territory if you try to go against them using swords, whereas using a bow usually means crafting a ton of arrows as preparation, as well as a bunch of potions to make the pain last longer to ensure that you actually survive the fight - because arrow damage sucks, guaranteeing that the battle will long, bloody, and painful.


 * Using a Thorn Chakram basically allows you to concentrate more on avoiding the boss' attack patterns and eyeing your health, freeing you from worrying about inflicting enough damage on it because:
 * the Thorn Chakram is plenty large enough that it is easier to aim compared to shooting arrows (plus it bounces off terrain and obstacles, allowing you to make angled shots),
 * can attack from a safe distance compared to using swords,
 * and deals enough damage to prevent things from degenerating into a battle of attrition.


 * Before you go all gung-ho about weapons don't forget to craft a Grappling Hook, as it is an extremely useful tool that greatly helps moving around caves. As soon as you feel comfortable enough to start exploring deeper, go after Skeletons since they drop the other necessary ingredient (a Hook) to create your grapple (the first ingredient being several Iron Chains which you can simply craft from iron).
 * As of update v1.2, you can craft grapples from gems - not a bad idea early in the game if you've amassed a surplus of a particular type of gem. The same update also removed grapples as Ivy Whip ingredients, although it's still a good idea to create a grapple first rather than skip it and attempt to gather the ingredients for the whip.

Before You Go

 * You may actually want to hold off on consuming Crystal Hearts, as using even one will permanently activate the possibility of Blood Moons.
 * The event itself is no great hardship once you have a somewhat-defined main base (which generally also serves as your NPC quarters), but prior to that the higher monster spawn rate can really mess up evenings spent fixing up your base. This is not a problem for people venturing far afield mining stuff (because monsters only spawn in your vicinity, thus if you're not at your base your NPCs aren't in danger), but better be safe than sorry.
 * In short, only start using those Crystal Hearts once you are reasonably sure that your NPC accommodations are secure. You definitely do not want scores of monsters traipsing around your main base harassing your NPCs while you are still busy clearing out the area.


 * Speaking of NPC accommodations, it is advisable to design your main base near your original player spawn point, and make it large enough to fit all possible occupants - and don't forget to include an extra room for yourself (required for spawn point changing via the use of a Bed). This works to about 12 rooms. Feel free to lay them out however you wish, as long as you secure the entire outline - interior decorating can wait, we're mainly concerned about the total horizontal and vertical edge-to-edge dimensions here.
 * Considering that the majority of players build pretty much at terrain height, all you have to do is secure the entire east-west sides and bottom from monster intrusion. Check out the image on the right, which is taken from the base guide (image number 2) on this wiki:


 * From the patch of grass in the lower left corner you can infer that that is the ground level. See how the entire base is built up from a small column on the ground, which expands into a large rectangle shape on top that contains the various individual NPC houses and other areas. Yes, you need to put in some effort in enclosing the entire thing, but it is already solidly defended on either side and below, while additional construction can later be added on top since it is open to the sky.


 * While not exactly the pinnacle of creativity (it looks like a raised up box perched on a stick...) you can easily observe the principles behind the construction of this particular base: prevention of monster intrusion from pretty much all 4 sides, while allowing additional construction to be built upwards. In fact, the player can also expand by adding rooms to the side as well - as you can see there is nothing in the way of tacking on rooms to the right side of the existing structure.


 * Some players take the "raised off the ground" concept to the extreme and even build their bases up high in the sky. Other than for looks there is no real reason to do this since most surface monsters are ground-bound; a mere 3 blocks (enough to walk under) is plenty. It's also a pain in the ass to have to jump up many platforms all the time, although I suppose you could take advantage of a grappling hook and go with a Tarzan theme or something.


 * Don't worry about stuff like furniture yet; the important thing here is to have the outline of the building ready. Renovations can come later when you no longer fear monsters breaching unfinished walls, getting inside, and eating the tasty brains of your helpless NPCs.

Getting Diggy With It

 * There are no hard-and-fast rules about where to start digging, although as a matter of practicality I usually begin by leveling the area immediately around the original player spawn point as preparation for building my main base (as explained in the previous section). Keeping to the surface also allows you to get a general feel of the area surrounding your starting location.


 * Leveling the nearby ground also serves other purposes, namely for quick traversing later on - having to climb a steep hill right outside your doorstep every time gets old quite fast, not to mention the hazard posed by jumping monsters that might actually manage to land on the roof of your base - as well as your very first artificial planting area: a tree garden.
 * Yes, you start the game with relatively plenty of trees nearby, and if - like myself - you tend to avoid using wood as building material because stone and ore blocks look prettier, you will normally not be in danger of running out of trees to chop down for wood... but why not take advantage of all that terrain leveling you're doing? You certainly won't be building a huge 5-screen wide fortress any time soon, so that extra flat grassland can quickly be put to use for growing trees.


 * On the map image on the right I have summarized 5 quickstart goals to give you some idea of where to start. It's sampled directly from my current game.

[1]  The Main Base is built pretty much right under the initial player spawn point (marked by the white square with the letter 'S' in it). As you can see, I carved out my base from the existing ground while leaving a noticeable gap around it to prevent monsters from walking in. It's far from complete as you can tell from the rather haphazard look of the area; I hadn't even bothered to cut down the trees from the soil over the base! This was an aesthetic choice, I like the "green" feeling from having grass and trees nearby.

[2]  To the left of the main base here you can see a fairly level area which I created by flattening the terrain - it is the location of my tree garden and as you can see there are trees already growing from the acorns I planted. I chose this location because to the right of my base is a section of corruption, which is fairly hazardous for the average unequipped new character. As a general rule corruption chasms don't usually occur this close by - it just happens to be my bad luck here that it's so close. As if to rub insult into injury, the underground jungle of my world is also located in this corrupted area. It's not a death knell however, and in fact I exploit the nearness in point [5] below.

[3]  This is a shaft dropping straight down from the main base to the nearby Demon Altar, mostly for convenience since that altar is used for crafting a boss-summoning item.

[4]  This is the main "exploration shaft", and as you can see it goes down slightly below the surface before branching out horizontally. The reason for these long shafts are because they will serve as "firewalls" for isolating different areas of the map, which is a vital consideration regarding a world-changing event: Hardmode Corruption. That article's talk page goes about the subject in more depth, specifically the following two subsections: link 1, link 2. You may have noticed that I was one of the players who first discussed the subject of getting the corruption under control by preemptively digging tunnel shafts to carve up the world map. See, foresight :p Seriously, the corruption is no joke and can ruin an unprepared world.

[5]  Here I stopped digging downwards in order to tunnel sideways into the underground jungle. This ties into my earlier point up this page for gathering the requisite ingredients for crafting a Thorn Chakram. From the map you can see I'm far below enough from the corruption chasms that they don't affect the area I'm digging into, so I merely run against the regular underground jungle monsters rather than the inhabitants of areas infected by the corruption.

Mostly done; there's not really much to put in a "quick start" guide after all since it's only supposed to help you get started.

Other Games
It's 2013 now; haven't been playing much Terraria lately. There are several interesting upcoming games along similar vein, check 'em out:


 * Starbound - I originally followed a link attributed to Terraria's art guy and found this gem. Not sure whether the devs joined the team as well. Starbound appears to be the next step up from where Terraria left off, and what can be seen here is already very interesting.


 * Cube World - this looks like an interesting 3D experiment. However, with it being a blog and all, and the dev presumeably just that one single guy, it may take a (long) while before anything materialises.


 * Castle Story - I really love the looks of this one - it appears to be a Minecraft/RTS hybrid of sorts. I couldn't get into Minecraft; crafting for the sake of crafting does not interest me, and it feels like a waste to create huge castles and elaborate defenses when they never get used. This game apparently aims to takes care of that.


 * Timber and Stone - an RTS where you actually build and manage everything, and not simply plunk down prefabricated buildings? Sign me up!


 * Age of Decadence - an interesting looking old-school RPG


 * Legends of Eisenwald - I'm a sucker for SRPGs, this looks interesting

- Spinfx 16:15, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

- Spinfx 14:47, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

- Spinfx 05:56, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

- Spinfx 09:20, 13 October 2013 (UTC)