User blog:Enzeru Kagai/My guide to surviving Terraria

Opening: Hello everyone, I'm Enzeru Kagai, Lord of Terraria's Firey Underworld. But enough jokes, I'm here on serious business. I've read this wiki several times over for this, that and the other thing for help on what to do where to go next how to do this and that and it gets rather confusing. For an example, I had found a Demon Altar and didn't know what it was for several days because it wasn't in a Corruption area and no where near Ebon Stone or other such things. On that note, this is completely open. I have not mastered Terraria and openly welcome help, this guide is to help us all survive and get to the high tiers. If people could add pictures I'd appreciate it, I dont have the ability to do so personally, and any corrections put in the comments would be appreciated.

Day One
Bam. Welcome to Terraria. You have the most annoying AI ever and your wits to survive with. Check your inventory, you're walking around with a Copper Pickaxe, Copper Axe, and Copper Shortsword. Better get moving FAST. Equip your copper axe, cut down several trees, and collect the items that they drop. With the wood you obtain, create a house by left clicking to place the wood where ever you want. Open up your inventory and craft a Work Bench. Once you finish that, plunk it down inside the house and use that work bench to make a door or two, depending on how you built your house and where. Remember, until you get a bed, you will ALWAYS respawn right where you started, so don't go too far from there when you build your first home! Landscaping is better then running through the dark! Now it's time to get to work. First things first, I'm sure you've noticed giant balls of jello trying to kill you while you cut down those trees. Those are slimes, which are mostly green at this point. Do yourself a favor and stab some of them to death with your sword to collect gel which we'll need later. As long as there's daylight, continue cutting down trees and then head back to the work bench and make a chair and a table. Plunk them both down. If you have enough wood, make a background wall, too. Remember, your house can have more then one floor, but each floor has to be of decent size ;we'll cover why later. As night approaches, use the last of your wood combined with the gel we got earlier to make torches. Place them in your house. Two new kinds of baddies are going to be appearing tonight, but because you are in your house, they can't touch you! Sit through the night tough guy, vengence will be coming soon.

Enemies We've Seen so Far:
Slime: Most likely green, maybe a blue if you had some rotten luck, they are incredibly weak. Low HP, low attack power, just bulldoze through them with your little toy copper sword. These buggers spawn during the day and can be annoying but not very threatening if you're careful.

Zombie: The first of the 2 night spawns. Given how many zombies there are, Terraria must have been very well populated before our time. Zombies do more then 10 damage per hit, but their only attack is to walk towards you. If you're as brave as I was, you can go out and fight these guys, they drop your first accessory. Shackles. A shackle boosts your Defense by 1. Not great, but a good start!

Demon Eye: Okay, these guys are buggers this early on. Your only weapon stabs and these jerks FLY. Ignore them for now, if you see one coming, get back inside, it's not worth fighting them yet anyway all they drop is Money and Lenses. And right now we DON'T want Lenses.

Goals for the day (TL;DR)
-Spawn

-Build the basics of your house

-Get some torches

-SURVIVE.

Day Two
So we survived the night, hopefully, awesome for us! Now we head out and do more of the same as yesterday. We're gonna finish that house by making wooden walls for it at the crafting bench, and we're going to get our weapon for dealing with Demon Eyes. (Note: The Guide will move into the house and stay there, or at least in the area, if you built the house right. At least he's not in the way anymore.) Keep cutting down trees until both of these goals are accomplished. Make yourself a Wooden Broadsword; this weapon swings in an arc and is much better for Demon Eyes even though it's pretty weak. Set out. I'm sure you've noticed your trees dwindling by now. Never fear, acorns are here. Using acorns, you can left click on the ground to make a sapling, which grows into a tree. You might be feeling a bit itchy to use that pick, so go ahead and have fun. Dirt is pretty much useless, but the stone that's underneath? We need a bit of that. If you want to twink out a little bit, make a wooden bow. Using wood and stone, you can make arrows. Also, using stone and some torches, make a furnace, which will be important later. Find a spot close to home where you feel comfortable and start digging away, but remember to stay shallow at this point; you're made of glass. We're looking for stone and a sparkly orange-ish metal at this point. That would be copper, which lets us make basic armor, a better broadsword, and some other goodies. Now, remember to bring torches, it gets dark down there. If you get lucky and find some copper, mine it and get back to base! This is where the furnace comes into play. Melt all the ore down and smelt it into copper bars. However, now we have a problem. We can't do a THING with those bars yet. Here, we have a choice.

The Easy Way
If you went on a monster massacre like I did, then you probably have close to 50 silver now. If you have 50 or more silver, go back to your first house and make a second one just like it. Leave it alone for a while, go back to mining if you must, but don't watch the house. If you put a light source, a table, a chair, put doors on, added a background wall, and made your house the right size, a merchant should move in. Yup, a new NPC. Building houses like this is the only way to get more NPCs. The merchant is the first one I got personally; he sells useful early-game items. The mining hat and piggy bank probably look appetizing but leave them alone for now (especially the piggy bank if you're on single player). Buy yourself an anvil and put it down with your furnace and work bench.

The Hard Way
You hid inside during the night, didn't kill much yet, and have less then 50 silver. Boo. What seemed like a good idea at the time has backfired because now we need IRON. Iron is like copper, an ore found in the ground, which needs to be mined, and molten into bars. Problem is, it's located a little deeper then copper is, and can be harder to get as a result. If you stay in the cave for too long, Demon Eyes and Zombies will follow you in and you will be fighting for your life in your home-made cave/cavern system. Grab yourself some iron and get the hell out, get back home and smelt those bad boys into some bars, then turn those bars into an anvil. So now we have an anvil, yay! Now we can make things out of our various metal bars. First things first, tools are important. Build yourself a decent hammer, we'll be needing it at some point. Hammers are used to break a variety of things, including platforms, background walls, treasure chests, etc. Now begins the part where we dig and pray to God we get good stuff. As night descends, it's your call: stay and fight and continue digging, or flee home to fight or run away there.

Goals for the Day (TL;DR)
- Finish your house -Build a wooden broadsword -Use acorns to replace lost trees

-Build a furnace out of stone

-Try to find Copper

- (OPTIONAL) Get your merchant -Get your anvil through whatever means necessary.

-Get a hammer

-Continue digging

-End your day alive.

Time to thrive
From here on out we wont be going by days, rather by goals. You should be in the swing of things by now so I'm going to let you tweak my strategies to your liking. Our first goal? Defeating the Eye of Cthulhu.

Defense
The Eye of Cthulhu is no chump compared to what we've fought so far. He is rocking an insane 3,000 HP and boasting two forms. Before we fight this guy, we need to prepare. First things first, a full set of body armor. And no mis-matching, go for full body armor of one type, the reason? Set bonuses. When I fought the eye, I only had copper armor. This ended up being a bad mistake and I got ROCKED. So part one? Get some iron armor on. Once you've gathered enough bars to make a helmet, body armor, and greaves, you'll be boasting a wicked 7 defense with a set bonus increase, so that 7 will go up to 9. And that's not even counting the shackles you might have found on the way! By the time the Eye and I had our stare down, I had 11 defense.

Offense
The Eye of Cthulhu is mostly a ranged fight; he flies and so do his helpers, so we wont worry about our swords too much at this point. When I fought the eye, I had a gold bow. The food chain goes Gold, Silver, Iron, Copper then wood (From good to bad). If you got at the eye with wood weapons, you're screwed. The fight was still a challenge my first time around and I still have trouble today even with the flintlock pistol (Which we'll cover later) when I'm not careful. For ammunition I used flaming arrows, 250 of them to be exact, that was just barely overkill. You'll be picking up arrows a LOT during this fight to keep your supply healthy. Which brings us to my next point, location.

Location
This is very important. When fighting the eye, using the ground is a terrible idea, its too randomly shaped to be good for dodging and shooting like you need to be able to. What I did was; I climbed on top of my house and I built straight up, went up into the air until I couldn't see any signs of the houses below, then I built 100 wooden platforms and put half on each side. I then used 100 wooden planks as a safety net just in case I hit the S key by accident (That's is how I died my second time fighting the eye) To prevent knock-baccidents I used walls on each end to keep my feet on the platform during the fight. Of course, now how do we get down...

Gear
Immediate necessity, The Grappling Hook. During your quest for iron surely you started digging down, like, WAY down? Good. If you did we're in luck if not get back in that cave and start digging down! Eventually the back wall will turn stoney, and even further down get darker in color and be stoney. Down this far skeletons spawn. Skeletons are like suped up zombies, they have more health and do nearly double the damage, but that's ok, we can just pin them to the wall and tear them apart. Keep killing skeletons and avoiding cave bats until you get a hook, then using 9 iron bars to make 3 chains. Head back to, I believe, your anvil and create the grappling hook. This awesome tool lets you cling to walls and ceilings, allowing you to safely get up and down your tower o' boss fight.We'll also be needing potions. This time I encourage exploring, not digging. Head out until you find mushrooms and collect every single one you see, keep exploring until you find desert sand. Bring back as much as you want and turn it into glass, then craft glass into bottles. Mix gel, bottles and mushrooms to make lesser health potions. Okay, we're almost ready. Just one more thing...

Final Preparations, and the summoning.
As you searched for those skeletons hopefully you found a crystal-made valentines day heart. Break that open with your hammer to find a life crystal, use it and your health goes up by 20. If you find more, you can use them till you get to a max of 400 HP. I was at 140 HP for this fight, not a great amount, I recommend getting more, but I got by. Now in your search for desert sands you might have found a creepy area, with deep deep chasms and purple rot every where. This is The Corruption. In The Corruption, Eater of Souls and Devourers spawn, two dangerous enemies that are best to be avoided for now, I had golden swords at the time and they gave me HELL. Eater of Souls is a super up Demon Eye that comes in 3 variants. Big, Medium and Small. Devourer is Eater of Souls with a body, it works like the giant worm just more dangerous. Undearneath all this insanity you can find a Demon Altar, a glowing black unbreakable object that can be seen through walls. If you try to damage it, you take damage from it. Using 6 lenses collected from Demon Eyes, create the Suspicious Looking Eye here and get OUT of there quickly before you get overwhelmed and die. The Suspicious Looking Eye is used at night to summon the Eye of Cthulhu, and if you try to use it during day time, you will be insta killed. During this portion, I highly recommend leaving your money at home as grappling hooking your way out can be dangerous and you dont want to waste potions or arrows. Get on top of your battle tower and wait until night fall then use the Suspicious Looking Eye to summon the boss... make sure you're ABSOLUTELY READY FOR THIS FIGHT!

Phase 1
Named after the monster created by Lovecraft, this son of a gun is going to put up your toughest fight yet. From 3,000 to 1,500 HP he fights by spawning Minions of Cthulhu which are mini-Demon eyes and sending them at you. Dont judge an eyeball by its size, these punks hit HARD. Counter this ability by shooting right at the pupil, if you get lucky you will kill them as they spawn. After spawning a few eye ball buddies, the big eye will charge right at you for some decent damage, but less then the minions do. Watch your health and stay healed up, the fight is just starting. Just run side to side on your giant arena and rapidly shoot the hell out of him. As long as you dont miss your arrows will always drop back onto the platform to be collected, assuming they aren't destroyed on contact.

Phase 2
Ok, so now the eye is down to 1,499 HP. He's pissed, he's dying, time to think up some new tricks right? DAMN RIGHT. The eyes pupil explodes off, revealing a huge row of teeth, but he no longer summons Minions of Cthulhu (YAY!) Now he just charges at you like a mad man dealing double the damage but taking more damage as well. During this phase he will charge at you three times, then stop to catch his... breath...? Then continue charging again. At this point I found running in a straight line from side to side away from him helped, I would get hit most often once instead of 3 times, and just pepper the hell out of him with arrows. Heal as necessary and keep gunning him until he drops. Eventually he'll die and YAY, WE WIN! Loot rains from the sky where he died, and life is sweet.

The loot
The Eye of Cthulhu's main goal is to drop Demonite, a rare metal found in The Corruption and dropped by the first two bosses. Using Demonite you can smith Lights Bane and a War Axe of The Night. No armor or pick axe YET though. He also drops unholy arrows, a lot of money, corrupt seeds (Plant Corruption grass, which spreads on dirt blocks) He might drop vile powder, which creates corruption and can turns rabbits and goldfish into enemies, which will attack you.