Home



A home is a safe haven for players or NPCs where they can spend their Nights without fear of attack under most conditions. If Blood Moon has risen, during which zombies can open doors, or a Goblin Invasion has begun, in which goblins can open doors, the home is no longer a guaranteed safe zone.

Once your house is setup, the first NPC you meet - the Guide - will move in. For additional NPCs you will be required to either make multiple claimable levels using Platforms as access to each, add a Door and make a new room, or make a new House. Each additional NPC will require one room, or level. Once this is complete other NPCs will slowly join you, depending on certain additional criteria.

Requirements
By definition, a house (home) in Terraria:
 * Has closed walls as well as background walls. Dirt for either substance is not valid. For background walls, a small section of it may be removed for asthetic reasons, for instance creating a window, but only so much of the back wall can be removed, depending on the size of the room
 * Less then 50% (4 blocks) of the floor can be made of wooden platforms, but no more.
 * Has a table or workbench and chair
 * Has a door (each NPC demands his or her own door; shared doors don't count)
 * Has a light source - eg. a torch
 * A minimum height and width of 10 blocks wide by 6 blocks high, which means the room will have 8x4 blocks of free space.

Safe NPCs
thumb|right|400px|Simple tutorial to make NPC Houses. NPCs are sometimes hated because of their wandering and opening of doors and allowing enemies to enter into your home. This is a problem that is easily fixed, build a multi-tier home instead of a long spread out home (refer to the screenshots below in Defense).

Have Wood Platforms seperate the tiers and you're good. NPCs will drop down platforms, but will refuse to if the drop is more than 3 blocks high. This is important if you want to "pit" your Guide. If they spawn on the wrong tier, the only way to lead them to the correct room, unfortunately, is to build a literal staircase out of blocks that go 1x1 until they finally go to the right tier, destroying the staircase afterward. If they spawn on the roof, destroy the tiles underneath the NPC and they will drop into your home.

If you had planned out the rooms before hand without any NPCs moving in (which is suggested, build a blueprint with dirt), when they eventually move in, they will claim a room and stand in the middle of it every night, so if you want to really go in depth you can personalize the rooms to tailor the NPC in it (Signs, decorations, etc.)

Defense
Constant threats will terrorize your home including:


 * 1) Blood Moon: Zombies and Demon Eyes will relentlessly attack your base until day breaks (regardless of how many NPCs you have to keep enemies from spawning near your base) and they can open your doors.
 * 2) Goblin Invasion: Not as common as Blood Moons, but still just as bad. 100 (with an additional 50 per user with 200HP~) enemies will spawn and attack your base, the biggest annoyance being the Sorcerer goblin who will teleport all over the place (including inside the home), and can shoot through walls.

Early-Game Tricks
Placing a platform behind a door will prevent it being opened from the outside, yet still allow passage through the door. Opening the door from the other side by players is simply done by facing away from the door then using it. This wont stop Goblins breaking your door down but will prevent Zombies opening it.

Placing sand on the opposite side of your door so that it will fall by gravity will damage every monster it lands on for good damage. Repeating the process of placing the sand then mining it back is a very safe way of dealing with monsters knocking on your doors.

A current glitch in v1.0.3 with all the thrown weapons (Boomerangs, Shuriken, Ball O' Hurt, etc) and the door allows you to throw through the door as long as you aim, noticeably, at the handle of the door or lower. This doesn't work with either melee, gun or bow type weapons. The only exception being the Star Cannon, which can shoot through 1 block wide walls. This is due to the distance between the player and the projectiles' spawn area.

Building your house in the air prevents any sort of land monster to enter your house regardless of their ability to knock down doors. Flying creatures can still be a problem but are easily nullified with platform traps and doors. Building a house like this is completely impregnable except by Goblin Shamen, Worms or Bosses. As seen in the screenshot on the right, only one Zombie is allowed to spawn despite Blood Moon due to how many Demon Eyes are trapped, in addition the player can fight on the ground with melee or from the central "Airlock" of the house with ranged weapons. The only issue with this type of house is it can be detrimental to one's sense of reality.

Additionally, one can build a sort of tower using a platform entrance and a central tower. Lava moats up next to the central tower can provide a good amount of cash especially on blood moons. To see this in action please see avidyazen's house on youtube.

Advanced Approach
Now there are ways to keep your base locked down tighter than a prison. Make only two entrances to your base (via door) on either side of the base. Depending on whether or not you make towers, you can leave these doors open.

In the first screenshot you can see the doors, and how everything is completely symmetrical. Have a simple layout and add aesthetic appeal later when the functionality aspect is finished. The major defense against basically all enemies is to have some type of block that stands out from all the others, and put it above your door, then put at least three blocks of sand above it. You can now leave the door open almost 95% of time. Make sure that the door is OPPOSITE of where the sand is, otherwise the sand will just land on the door and sit there.

Now this is good if you want to just sit there and wait for the event to end, but most people find that boring. So, if you have time, construct towers (this is the one thing that should be copied to the tee) that look similar to the picture above. Make sure to add the sand method (Below) to this as well. Make a flat land outwards from the tower (measured mine to 20 blocks out, MAKE SURE ITS LIGHTED) and then just follow the picture. If done correctly, the only enemy able to get in would be demon eyes, and thats only occasional. You should be able to move around a bit in almost complete safety and hit all enemies with ranged weapons (In the picture im using the Ball O' Hurt, originally I designed this for Arrows and the Boomerang) Any ranged weapon will do but preferably something that is quick and doesnt consume ammo is the best bet, as well as good penetration so that it will pass through many enemies at once. With this technique, the only thing that should be able to kill your NPCs are bosses, and it will also look super awesome.

If you have managed to get to the Dungeon, you can actually mine the Spikes with a Hammer to put on your base. The spikes themselves do not hurt monsters yet still hurt yourself, your house looks far cooler though.



Sand Shell Method
A much more effective Blood Moon/Goblin Night defense system is shown here where the player breaks a torch and sand falls on the entire home, blocking off all entrances. A major drawback is that it is very, very hard to clean up. You can make the sand as tall as necessary depending on how many entrances you have. However, setting up the system is comparitively tedious.

Tower Method of Self Defense
Utilizing a similiar method to the floating base however it is connected to the ground when it is locked down using two sand traps to block the bottom of the tower. The tower uses two platform traps to allow harvesting of Demon Eyes. The traps can be made into any prefered size. The advanced versions of the tower can use a secondary sand blocking system.