Terraria Wiki talk:Projects/Guides

Location/naming
Should guides be in the mainspace or should they be under a subpage somewhere like "Guides/PvP"? --JonTheMon 02:51, 22 May 2011 (UTC)
 * For right now, they go in mainspace... they will be moved to their own namespace later. -- Wynthyst [[Image:User Wynthyst sig icon.png ]] talk  02:56, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Guide Suggestions
I'm going to cobble together a concise guide listing suggested activities for a player's main base. If there are any suggested topics for guides please post something here. Thanks! --Theothersteve7 14:29, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

List of Guides
I think we will need one, and it will need to be in an easily accessible place. I suggest the creation of the introductory Guides:Guides page, which will help point users to the guides that interest them. Currently, the guides are in the side bar, but as their numbers grow this will not be maintainable. Furthermore because guides get little wiki-link exposures, they become forgotten and lost unless referenced some other place. 08:30, 2 June 2011 (UTC)
 * It'd help to put all guides in a Guides category, so that you'd have a list automatically maintained by the wiki software. --The preceding unsigned comment was added by 88.141.47.199 (talk).
 * I've added a nav box on all the linked guides. Please sign your talk page comments :D -- Wynthyst [[Image:User Wynthyst sig icon.png ]] talk  20:39, 9 June 2011 (UTC)
 * So, I just contributed my first wiki page ever. I'm convinced it is ... bad. But, nonetheless, there's a mushroom biome/farm guide now. did I do it acceptably enough to help me learn how to do it better next time?
 * I think it's a good start! Try adding some pictures, and I'll look it over and copy-edit it later tonight. 74.69.40.245 22:46, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

Skeletron guide?
I'd like to take a stab at the Skeletron guide if no one else will. It'll very likely involve migrating most of the existing info to the new guide page and expanding it from there. If anyone wants to help out, screenshots and videos would be awesome. MasterShizzle 23:00, 5 July 2011 (UTC)
 * That's perfect :D -- Wynthyst [[Image:User Wynthyst sig icon.png ]] talk  23:36, 5 July 2011 (UTC)
 * First draft of the guide is up, now we need to expand on it. Pictures would help a lot. Anyone else is encouraged to dive in and contribute, and the talk page is up as well. MasterShizzle 06:17, 6 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I've moved the three boss guides to the In Progress section because, well, they are. ILiaWneK 11:13, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Walkthrough Guide
I'm going to start a walkthrough guide. Just posting here so that I can be sure not to step on anyone's toes. The goal of the guide is to give an idea of the order players should attempt the biomes and bosses in, and equipment suggestions. I think I'll put links to other guides in, where appropriate. --Mr. Farenheit 23:36, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

The "save file implementation" idea
The new post on suggested guides is what I'm talking about. This does not require a full guide. Here's your guide:

"Go into C:\Users\Username\Documents\My Games\Terraria\Worlds and copy your world file and put it into a different folder. Same with player files."

I do this a lot. I have about 12 worlds and 7 players. Takes me about 5 seconds to switch. Can we please take that suggestion off now? Reed501 02:54, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

Renaming the boss guides
Their titles are unnecessarily long-winded; I propose to shorten them down to Guide:Fighting (the). I will go ahead with the moves if there are no objections after 1 week. iLiaWneK'''|talk|contributions]] 20:03, 6 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree. However, I think "Eye of Cthulhu Strategies" might work better, as it's more likely people will search for "Eye of Cthulhu strategies" than "Eye of Cthulhu fighting" on Google. Mark (Talk) 20:31, 6 September 2011 (UTC)
 * They are slightly long-winded, and "(Boss) strategies" seems fine to me. --JonTheMon 20:40, 6 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Anything to shorten their names is already an improvement, so I don't really mind which we go with. iLiaWneK'''|talk|contributions]] 21:06, 6 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Agreed. "Guide:Eye of Cthulhu Strategies" seems perfect, but anything would be better than the current titles. MasterShizzle 17:22, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Guide Idea!
I want a guide with instrutions on how to make a PvP arena with wiring, sudden death ect. Can someone make one? --Cats 55 08:55, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Names
Do we really need a creator/editor list? You can see that simply by looking at the page history. Some aren't even maintaining their articles; I see a few where the guy spent like 4 days on this wiki then never came back. That's fine and all, but it kinda makes the name list meaningless since others may have spent way more time on the articles. If the intention was to make someone responsible for a particular article, that doesn't work either since they're general articles (and not things like, say, "Tim's Guide To Building A Clay Greenhouse"); anyone can edit them just like regular articles, and if things need to be fixed, anyone can fix them just like regular articles. - Spinfx 06:07, 10 January 2012 (UTC)
 * You've got my vote. Less personal ownership of a page tends to mean less edit wars or opinionated info, things like that. If my name is wiped off of the Guides page for good, I'm fine with that. MasterShizzle 07:55, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Deleted guides?
Why have all the guides been deleted? :S --95.155.250.176 20:56, 17 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Looking into it. -- Wynthyst [[Image:User Wynthyst sig icon.png ]] talk  00:28, 18 April 2013 (UTC)
 * They should be restored -- Telshin
 * Nice and fast fix, thanks :) --Liviaro (talk) 14:14, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

Guide cleanup project
Okay, so the guides all need a ton of work. All of them are big huge messes full of typos and broken english at best and need to be severely overhauled. We'll need to decide on a few guidelines, and then start taking action on them. First, a few questions to contemplate:


 * Should there be a unified layout for guides with infoboxes and templates and stuff?
 * Should the language in guides be similar to the way things are ideally presented in mainspace, or should they be more informal?
 * Do some things even deserve guides, or are they too player-constructed to provide any meaningful information (looking at you, Guide:Class setups)? Do guides even have to present meaningful information, or would something like Guide:NPC-Themed Base Decorations be permissible?
 * Are boss guides meant to tell beginning players how to defeat a boss for the first time, or help veteran players do them more efficiently? Is there any merit in suggesting the use of hardmode weapons against the Wall of Flesh?
 * Who exactly is going to actually do any of this?

If anyone else is like me, then we've all turned a blind eye on a conspicuous edit to a guide before, but it's something that's been put off for a little too long. We can't keep using the guides as dumping grounds for pedantic minutiae forever.
 * When I think about it, I actually have a potential solution right off the bat that I'd like the rest of you to consider. The team at Curse recently got in touch (scroll down a bit) about wanting to make some videos for the wiki, and I think this is a prime opportunity to see what they're capable of in terms of content quality. Video walkthroughs for certain things could prove useful, and articles could be written around them rather than just being large lists of what individual people did to win. It'd definitely be easier and cleaner than a seven-second video of sand falling, and it'd fit right in with what they intend to do.
 * Besides, if it's gonna happen, I'd rather our landlords be the ones putting youtube links up everywhere rather than some kid with a copy of fraps trying to make a buck. It's at least in their best interest to produce watchable content. Gearzein (talk) 01:03, 19 February 2015 (UTC)


 * As for cleaning up the guides, I have no interest in doing this whatsoever. The guides themselves are written at a much less formal level than the mainspace and lack any sort of structure. Like you said Gearzein, they would need a complete overhaul, and it isn't worth the effort in my opinion. As for the videos, I think it's a great idea, as long as Curse staff are the ONLY ones making the videos. We don't need people spamming links to their channels all over the wiki.  Chrisf1020  (talk)  17:57, 20 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately you're right, and I just don't have it in me to even do it myself. Looking at what's on any given guide now is just insurmountable garbage. I'll just tell Curse to go ahead and make the videos, then use them as an excuse to trash entire articles and eventually get to rewriting them from scratch. That's probably disgustingly cynical but I dare anyone reading this to go to one of those pages and actually learn anything. Consider this a hard reboot of the guide project. Gearzein (talk) 21:30, 20 February 2015 (UTC)


 * I noticed that every boss guide suggests basically the best items and weapons available to the player. So I was thinking about making a single boss guide page, where the bosses would be divided into early PH, late PH, pre-Plantera and post-Plantera. Each of this category would have its own section with the best weapons, accessories and potions to use. Every category could include brief info on all the available armors and weapons and say their good and bad sides. There could also be a general ideas about arenas. The next part would be a boss-specific info, like 'Use homing weapons' and 'make arena from asphalt blocks' for a Fishron battle. The tips and guides for battles could be also generalized a bit with the specific recommendations after that. The general part could use templates to list the best items to use.

Any thoughts?
 * I still think there might be some merit to individual articles, but a general "boss strategies" article wouldn't be bad. Maybe "general boss" could be for pragmatic first-time walkthroughs of strategies, while the split articles can go into min-maxing stuff like setups for grinding Eye for gold or EoW for souls. Gearzein (talk) 06:08, 6 March 2015 (UTC)