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
To create a character, you must first pick a which game mode you would like to play, Single Player or Multiplayer. It is recommended that you choose single player if it is your absolute first time playing. After you have chosen which mode you wish to play in, one must click the Create Character button to begin customizing your character. Looks do not effect any aspect of the game, and therefore, are purely cosmetic.

In order to change a particular aspect of your character's appearance, you must first click the corresponding title to the attribute you wish to change. To change colors of the attribute, you click on the plus or minus signs next to one of the red, green or blue fields. If you want to change the style, click on the name of the current style. For example, to change your character's hairstyle, one must click on the default hairstyle "Hair 1".

After character customization has been completed, it is time to generate a new world. Any of the three sizes will work, but it is highly recommended that you are to pick small, for Medium and Large are quite big.

Getting Started in Your New World


After the map has been generated, you will have either spawned on dirt or sand. The 10 empty slots at the top of the HUD are your inventory slots. To reorganize your inventory you can press escape to access the rest of your inventory, as well as reorganize your inventory. As you explore, your inventory will become filled with items. They can be dropped by selecting them as your active tool and pressing 'Q', or by opeining the inventory and dragging it out of the inventory slots. You spawn with a copper pickaxe and a copper axe. The pickaxe can be used to mine dirt, stone, and various other earthy materials. The axe is used to chop wood from trees.

After getting your inventory in working order, it would be a wise idea to gather wood. Wood is a very basic and universal resource. It is never a bad thing to have an abundance of this material. Also, mining dirt and stone would be of use as well.

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


Once sufficient amounts of wood is obtained, it is time to begin building your first home. On average, cutting a few large trees will often yield enough wood. 100 wood is plenty. 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. Then, start placing blocks in the shape of a house. You can achieve this by selecting the block you would like to use and clicking on the landscape. Blocks will only be placed if they are adjacent to another block.

After the form of a house has been made, your next order of business will be to construct a workbench, which from you can craft other objects. To make a workbench, you will need at least 10 wood. To craft one, open up your inventory, and in the bottom left corner of the HUD, scroll or click to the workbench icon. To the right of the icon the recipe is shown. To craft the workbench, simply click it and drag it into your inventory. To place the bench, select it and click to place it on the ground. It takes up a 2x2 space, so make sure you have plenty of room in your home for it. To use the bench, stand near it and any recipes required by the bench will become enabled (as long as you have the correct resources).

Another useful addition to your home would be a Door. Doors cost 6 wood and allow easy access inside and out of your new home. Friendly NPC's can pass through them, however enemies cannot. To place the door, it must be placed in a gap exactly 3 blocks high (The height of the player). To open and close the door, right click it.

Finally, to further secure your home from enemies, walls must be placed. Without walls, mosnters are free to spawn inside your home. To craft walls, walk up to a workbench and build either wooden walls, dirt walls, or stone walls. To remove walls, players need to use a new tool, a hammer. Hammers can be crafted with the workbench.

Also, lighting is pivotal in a home. Players should have a well lit home. To light a home up, you can either use torches, Chandeliers, or candles.

Other useful items to craft are swords and bows. These will aid in defending yourself against the monsters that seek to kill you. If they were to kill you, you would be sent back to the spawn and lose a few coins. Coins are dropped by monsters and found in pots. They are used as a currency to buy things from the Merchant.

Defending your home
Now that you have a home, its time to learn how to defend it. Run close to an enemy slime or zombie (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.

Upon killing enemy monsters, occasionally they will drop loot. 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 another very useful item.

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.

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=