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 in to a explorer of Terraria in no time! 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.

A 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 you bar of tools that you can quickly use at your disposal. The two tools you see are the copper pick-axe, used to mine dirt, mud, stone and other various blocks, and the normal 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 you can use to help with the first day!

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 pick-axe 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?