Guide:Getting started

Welcome to the land of Terraria! Everyone starts out at some point, and here is a small guide in how to start out in Terraria and what to do afterwards. This guide is intended to make a person with absolutely no knowledge of gaming and Terraria into an explorer of Terraria in no time!

Creating Your Character and World
You're in the menu screen, and you click on single player. You've customized your character the way you like them, and come to the decision of what size you want your world. Assuming you are a beginner, seeing as how you're reading this guide, I would highly recommend starting out a small or a medium sized world if you want to get more out of the first world you start with. Small if you want to get used to the game, medium if you want to do some serious exploring after as well.

Getting Started in Your New World


So you've created a new world, with a fancy name and everything! You may either spawn on some randomly placed dirt, or randomly placed sand. You have to start out somewhere! See the 10 empty slots above you? Those are your bar of tools that you can quickly use at your disposal. The two tools you see are a copper pickaxe, used to mine dirt, mud, stone and other various blocks, and a copper axe, which is mostly used to cut wood. Your mission right now is to create a shelter using the two tools you've been given in order to survive the night. At night time, bad things happen to good people... Now that you know the basics, it's time to get some wood!

If you need some in game help, there's always the Guide that you can talk to! He's an NPC (Non-Player Character), who has a lot of useful information to help you within Terraria.

Your Very First Home


You've collected a bunch of wood by cutting down lots and lots trees. Great! Now what? Well, the first thing you want to do is flatten out a small area of land. Use your pickaxe to destroy blocks of dirt/sand around you and make a horizontal land to begin building your house out of.

'''Hold on a second, am I just gonna trap myself in a small little box of wood for the entire night? That's boring!'''

Not necessarily. During the night time, you have the option of defending your house if you so choose. And if not, you can always begin preparing yourself for the next day!

Of course, in order to begin preparing you must have the necessary tools in order to assist you in your preparations. Press the escape button to bring up your inventory. '''NOTE: The game does not pause during this time. Be wary of this!''' Notice the column of bars on the left side? Those are the general items you can craft using what you have in your inventory. Neat isn't it? Now, hopefully you still have a plethora of left over wood after making your house! As you can see, you can scroll up and down this column using the scroll wheel. Hover over a short table looking object. It's a workbench! Now left click the workbench in order for you to craft this item in to existence. Now, place that table in to one of your empty slots on the quick bar next to your axe and pick-axe. Hover over the workbench with your mouse and click the workbench in order to select it, or simply use the scroll wheel to highlight the bench, and then place it somewhere in your house. You now have a workbench to create various tools for your house!

Your house seems a bit empty. That's probably because there's no walls for your house! Walls are placed in the background so that enemies won't be allowed to spawn inside your house, ever. What you want to do is stand next to the workbench. Notice how you have the option to create wooden walls now? Create enough walls to fill your empty house with, and you now have yourself a wooden house!

Won't breaking my house over and over again to get in and out become annoying after a while?

Of course it will. That's when you make a door! With the workbench, you can do that! As long as you have enough wood, you're fine. Create the door like you create the wooden walls, then place it in your quick bar. Break three wooden blocks from your house(starting from the block next to your foot, up to the block next to your head, which totals up to three blocks) then simply left click the empty spot on the ground and presto! You now have your own wooden door! Simply right click to open and close the door in order to get yourself in and out quickly without the hassle!

Defending your home
Now that you have a home, its time to learn how to defend it. First (if you still have some wood) create a sword by standing near your work bench and crafting a sword. Equip it and lets head outside. Depending on the time of day you may see either little blob creatures or zombies (zombies only come out at night). Run close to one (but not touching it) and hit it with your sword a couple of times. If you want to see its health, just hover the mouse cursor over it. After a couple of whacks the creature should die.

But what's this, it seems the creature left you a parting gift. Copper coins, silver coins, gel and maybe even a shackle. Coins are used to trade with merchants and other NPCs who will move in near you (more on that later). Shackles are early defense booster accessories that can stack, and gel is awesome.

Gel can be used to make torches, craft potions, and do a bunch of other stuff so it's good to have a decent stockpile set up.

But for now just kill a bunch of slimes (they spawn in day by the way) and get yourself a small pile of gel.

Beginner Crafting 101
Right so by now you should have a bit of gel, its time to learn to make some basic crafts for yourself. First you want torches. Torches keep the bad darkness from taking over and lets you see what you're doing. You can make 3 torches with a piece of wood and some gel. Lets make around 30 (a full stack is 99 torches) [NOTE: if you want to make more go ahead there's not really going to be a difference and you can craft more later]. Good now we also want to make a hammer and if we still have some wood, we want to make bow for later. WAIT A MINUTE, we're getting low on wood. Alright well lets go plant some trees then.

In the Garden
Now if you've been paying attention, you may have noticed that when you cut down some trees you got more than just wood. You also received an acorn or two (or ten). Thats how we're going to make more trees. First equip the acorn, next find a good open spot in the sunlight for your tree to grow. Now just click on the spot you want to plant the tree and voila a sapling is born.

"But the trees I cut down were over 9000 time bigger then that..." Well poorly staged questioner don't you fret. That sapling will take a bit of time but it can grow to over 9000 time bigger than the tree you cut down. (Over 81 000 000 profit) but in the meantime lets go get some stone and metal.

=To Be continued=