User:Spinfx/Old Guide

2015-10-02: The contents of this page were split off from my main UserWiki page. Go back: User:Spinfx.

2015-08-16: Well now, it's been about 2 years since I last played, heh. Considering I hadn't explored Hardmode yet when I last left off, I was effectively playing v1.1 - it's v1.3.0.8 now, and boy, have a ton of things been added! And what's this - Expert mode, a buffed up difficulty? Sign me up! ...except about a week in I finally ran face-first into the bosses. Ouch. Skeletron in particular is a <10 second kill for the unprepared. Well, damn. Looks like I can't just traipse around as carefree as before, gotta actually use them buffs and potions now.

I think I'm going to bite the bullet and restart on a fresh non-Expert mode world. I can sorta deal with most Expert mode enemies, only time I had any real issues were in the underground jungle (damn poison) and mining meteorite, but the bosses are a different story - even the measly King Slime managed to lay me out a couple times. Considering what Expert mode rewards you with, I don't think it's for me - at least not yet. I did manage to nail the Eye of Cthulhu (it was actually a double-KO lol, fortunately I was fighting him right beside my base so the drops didn't despawn) and obtain his Expert mode drop, but. Meh. About the only thing good from my pov is the supposed better loot drop chances, but I can't say I've been particularly blessed either. And considering the bosses are pretty much progress checkpoints I don't really feel like grinding for better gear just to get past them. Skeletron in particular is a huge pain - the dungeon has quite a few things like NPCs (plural!), so the Skeletron fight really isn't something you'd care to put off for too long because the game pretty much goes nowhere. Oh, I suppose one could skip right to the Wall of Flesh and boot up Hard mode, but... well, maybe not just yet.

Just a tad annoyed with the previous week's progress though, which is pretty much down the drain. I could just drag my character over, but it does feel kinda cheap. Then again, I can't tell myself seriously that I want to repeat the whole jungle exploration thing - yeah, my original guide here is still relevant, although instead of the Thorn Chakram the Amazon yoyo is a pretty nice alternative. You need jungle spores too iirc (oh boy) and it deals similar base damage. Thing is, yoyos are real nice to use. That click-and-hold guided thing makes it far easier to target things and not just hope the chakram happens to bounce into the spot you want it to.

Anyway, yeah, I think I'll bring my character over. I'll still have to redo the Eye of Cthulhu and regain all the NPCs I'd picked up, but that's not too bad. Hadn't really been interfacing with them anyway. Now it's just a matter of what loot I want to drag over. Damn, I had some nice accessories too, although to be fair the ones in storage aren't doing anything other than serving as a reminder that I'd obtained them.

2015-08-18: No surprise a Normal mode world was much easier. I actually got jumped by the Eye of Cthulhu on my very first night (the perils of importing an upgraded character), and... it was a piece of cake. Seriously. Compared to Expert mode here it did much less damage, was much slower, and barely strung together its attacks even during the second phase. It'd make 2 passes, max, before spinning around or doing whatever crap. I wasn't even freaking buffed - the only thing I had was a campfire buff (had one lying atop my base), I didn't even have any healing items on me. The few times it did hit me were nowhere as painful compared to in Expert mode, and at the end of the fight I was basically kicking its ass rather than the other way around.

UPDATE: Just found a Flying Carpet. At first this didn't seem too useful, but then I realized something. It has a decent long flight time - 10 sec? That's practically an eternity compared to the brief, single moment you get with something like Cloud in a Bottle. Think about it: when is CiaB most useful? That one instance where you use it just before hitting a surface, thus resetting the fall distance. (Double jumping doesn't count, most of the time you can use the grapple to drag yourself up wherever.) Well, this just blows it out of the water - you can tap it repeatedly for multiple "resets". This is most obvious when climbing down the initial entrance to the Dungeon - it's usually a long tube downwards, maybe at an angle, but still definitely with enough distance to hit terminal velocity. Well, with a Flying Carpet all you need to do is tap it occasionally to reset the fall distance counter. Heck, it pretty much removes the need for Lucky Horseshoe, provided you're not caught napping. You don't even need to be precise when to hit it, the time limit is extremely generous so you can tap jump every so often until your long fall ends. Even a massive hellevator isn't an issue, if you think you've nearly used up all of the carpet's time simply grapple a surface, it'll reset the timer.

It also trivializes exploring the Dungeon for the first time. All those vertical tunnels? No problem. Hold down jump to hover while you find a suitable surface to grapple to - no more split-second mid-fall blind panic grapples. About the only time it doesn't guarantee an ass-saving is if you jump off a floating island - the drop is long enough to likely run out of hover time if you abuse it, and there's no surface to grapple to reset the timer. But you have to admit it's still way better than CiaB, where you'd have to peel your eyes open for that split second before you hit the ground so that you can safely use that single double jump to negate the fall. In this case yes the Lucky Horseshow is better, but negating fall damage is much less useful than the ability to arrest a fall on command.

2015-09-28: Wall of Flesh was surprisingly easier than anticipated - I also want to note I'm still using yoyos. They're really great: they hit hard enough and you have more control over them compared to chakrams - hell, you can sling them over and around obstacles. I might have rushed into Hard Mode a tad fast though; I only quarantined my base but it seems there are more areas you should save, especially considering how the various Angler fishing quests require you to fish at specific biomes. This means your quarantine areas should also have lakes.

You'll soon lose the jungle/underground jungle to the Corruption (or Crimson?), as well as the deserts if you're not quick. I'm not too sure about "underground desert", but there's definitely an underground jungle. The jungle can be huge, all you need to do is section off part of it. I dithered for a while but finally gave in and dug another hellevator through - after that it was merely a question of branching out to one side at the appropriate underground depth to quarantine an area down there. Up top on the surface is also easy to quarantine.

In the sections you've walled away, make sure to have it wide enough all around so that when you go fishing in the lake you created there, you aren't affected by the surrounding corrupted/hallowed area! My mistake was making a relatively small section, around 1.5 screens wide/high, and I had the lake right up near the border. Welp, it started playing hallowed music there and generating hallowed creatures, and I caught hallowed biome-specific fish. Damn. So the next areas I made sure to leave a generous buffer around them - at the very least, make sure the lakes you put in your artificial biomes are well away from the sides. Vertically shouldn't be too much of an issue (it doesn't take much to go offscreen), but horizontally yeah you're going to need good sized buffers.

Biomes saved (all have lakes unless mentioned otherwise):

- surface + forest (i.e. default)

- underground + forest (i.e. default)

- sky + forest (i.e. default); I didn't have to do anything, sky lakes are a thing now in v1.3

- surface + desert - no lake here; the Fishing article confirms there's no desert-specific requirement; I'm just saving this biome for the enemies and cacti

- surface + jungle

- underground + jungle

- surface + snow

- underground + snow

You don't have to worry about the corruption and hallow, they spread enough on their own. In fact this whole artificial biome shenanigans is precisely to 'save' other biomes from being overrun by these. You may have to give the hallow a helping hand though, depending on the world - mine emerged surface in snow, and thus had no forest/desert areas to reach. Those would be overrun by the corruption, so I manually seeded some surface areas to change them into hallow.

Finally, don't forget the oceans. If you've spent any amount of time on a map viewer you'll notice the world data actually extends horizontally beyond what we can reach. This means corruption or hallow will spread beyond any horizontal-only barriers. My main concern for this was oceans, since sand seems to get corrupted/hallowed extremely quickly. What you need to do is go right to the very edge of the world and build a barrier there down all the way to the ocean floor. Make it, eh, 3 tiles thick. Then at the bottom, tunnel from the side to go under it, then seal off the exit with non-corruptible blocks (stone bricks will suffice, and you should have truckloads of these from all your exploration). Make sure you brick up both sides of the seal, so that any corruption or hallow coming from the outer side you can't reach has no way of crossing. I made the tunnel 6 blocks wide, yeah I'm paranoid. Dig down, then dig inwards back inland, then dig upwards until you reach the surface again, hopefully beyond the ocean and beach. Ta-da, you just quarantined your ocean, good job.

Quickstart Guide
It's been a while; I dropped off the map around February 2012, and just "came back" a couple weeks ago (August 2012). So many games, so little time, etc. Heh. Anyway, seeing as how this is my 5th SP world I decided to put up a short quickstart guide here to remind myself of a few quick immediate goals to get up and running. This assumes a new character and a new world - it's how I've always started, although I did transfer my first character to one of each different size of worlds.

UPDATE: October 2013 - With the recent release of the massive 1.2 update, quite a few things have changed, heh. Still, as far as I can tell, the new low-tier ores are straight alternatives to the existing ones, and a lot of content appears hardmode-related; I doubt this guide is wholly obsolete. Granted, it would be a good idea to take the new stuff into account - which may take some time given how much new stuff there is to consider.


 * Assuming singleplayer softcore. No need for the harder difficulties as the only change is the dying penalty; items, monsters, etc are all the same.


 * Pick a large world. Don't worry about the size; you'll be using the Moreterra Terraria World Viewer to help you find things. Is this cheating? Well, it's singleplayer - you're playing for a fun solo experience, and it's not like this is a one button auto-win cheat. Besides, even with a map it takes weeks of 1-2 hours daily playing to get thoroughly stuck into things. Oh sure, you can get a lot done in an hour and you can really push forward on free weekends, but this isn't a quickie game by any stretch of the imagination.


 * All the map viewer does is help point out stuff; you still actually need to get there to do whatever necessary. All it does is take out the random digging around, which - while I concede was fun the first time I ever played the game - quickly gets frustrating and puts you into danger of burning out after weeks of seemingly no progress at beyond merely collecting dirt, stone, and far too few other things. You don't have to use it either, but I'm a working adult now: free time is at a premium. I admit far too many instant gratification events in most games have cut down on my patience somewhat, even if I still do things like get into 3,500+ battles merely reaching Roak in Star Ocean: The Last Hope (International ver).
 * There was a point to that btw, 100%-ing monster data mostly, plus Roak is the home of the series' signature "battle arena" minigame. I don't mind grinding when there are tangible goals.
 * Back to MoreTerra, get into the habit of running it each time before you start the game so that you have an up-to-date map you can alt-tab out from the game to check your progress against.

Upgrading Advice

 * Most of the Getting Started guide is fairly useful for the first day, just skim that if you need a refresher for the game.


 * Copper is fairly crap - I didn't bother to craft a full suit of armor from it, ditto Iron; I simply mixed-and-matched pieces from those two. Same goes for the alternative ores for these two (Tin for Copper, and Lead for Iron). For most of this guide I will use the traditional ores, substitute in the alternative ores if your world comes with them instead. For example in my very first post-1.2 world I got Copper, Lead (instead of Iron), Tungsten (instead of Silver), and Platinum (instead of Gold).


 * Pickaxe upgrades: This is your number #1 tool - and despite what others might tell you, it makes for a good weapon too since the swing mimics a broadsword's arc, pretty much negating the lower quality broadswords, albeit pickaxes tend to have less knockback. Upgrading-wise the most important factor is what blocks can a particular type of pickaxe mine out, and how fast it can mine out the ones it does. The copper pickaxe you start with is serviceable, but note that the ones immediately above it - iron and silver - offer no distinct improvements outside of a slight swing speed improvement (although you may upgrade to iron if you have plenty of ore to spare). This means your first target is the gold pickaxe, which allows you to dig out demonite ore (very rarely found early in the game though) as well as meteorite (important). The increased damage is a small bonus (your focus here is on mining things, the bloodthirsty rampages will have to wait until you can obtain/craft good weapons).


 * Hammer upgrades: Start off with wood, change to copper if the fancy hits you but it's not important since you hardly use it much early-game. From the list note that copper, iron, and silver hammers all destroy backgrounds in 3 hits. Iron is the earliest faster one (at "average" speed), so don't waste ore on a silver hammer. It'll last you quite a while until you have the spare gold for a gold hammer - which is the earliest hammer to destroy backgrounds in 2 hits while being noticeably easier to craft than subsequent hammers.
 * Btw I consider everything up to gold as "natural", as subsequent ores up the chain all require things that need you to get through at least one boss fight. With the help of the map viewer, you can get yourself kitted out in gold gear without having to deal with a boss so that's the way to roll.


 * Axe upgrades: The last in your holy trinity of tools and likely the least to get much mileage. Silver and gold axes offer practically the same in usage speed (same swing speed, same no# hits to remove wood and cut down trees) so obviously your first target here is the silver axe. It's also the tool with the lowest upgrade priority so only do it when you have the silver to spare.


 * Don't bother crafting the basic swords, although the quick poking motion of the shortsword has some early-game utility when you manage to corner (or are cornered by...) something in a tunnel that moves at a sedate, predictable ground-shuffle. Their relative uselessness against fliers, jumpers, and burrowers (which constitute most of the game's monsters...) should convince you not to waste resources making them. Broadswords are somewhat more useful in that they swing in an arc that the pickaxes mimic, but this pretty much means you can just keep swinging your pickaxe rather than swapping to a broadsword to fend something off, although you trade off quite a bit of damage - which often turns out to not really be a problem anyway considering their inherent knockback is usually sufficient for the pickaxe to keep monsters at bay.
 * Once you get past the lower-tier ones requiring only natural ores though, broadswords can be quite good.


 * With the v1.2 update, you may find chain knives, which are apparently rare cave bat/skeleton drops as well as possible chest loot. A chain knife acts as a retractable throwing knife, flung out a short distance away from the character at a speed comparable to that of firing a grappling hook, making it a pretty good early game weapon - especially if you've yet to explore the underground jungle for ingredients.


 * Consider boomerangs; no, I realise you can't craft them for a while and finding the early ones is a matter of luck. However, the first craftable one (the Thorn Chakram) merely requires a handful of ingredients that shouldn't be too hard to gather. Harvesting Jungle Spores is admittedly largely dependent on luck, but with clever tunneling and shaft creation techniques it is not too hard to carefully entrap the hornets you need to kill for obtaining Stingers.


 * Creating a Thorn Chakram, in fact, should be your first "medium level" goal: it outshines early-game swords by a mile, and is basically the first milestone to reach before hitting up bosses. Sure, you can go fight them before creating a Thorn Chakram, but the first few bosses available are solidly in the "I didn't know it was going to be this hard" territory if you try to go against them using swords, whereas using a bow usually means crafting a ton of arrows as preparation, as well as a bunch of potions to make the pain last longer to ensure that you actually survive the fight - because arrow damage sucks, guaranteeing that the battle will long, bloody, and painful.


 * Using a Thorn Chakram basically allows you to concentrate more on avoiding the boss' attack patterns and eyeing your health, freeing you from worrying about inflicting enough damage on it because:
 * the Thorn Chakram is plenty large enough that it is easier to aim compared to shooting arrows (plus it bounces off terrain and obstacles, allowing you to make angled shots),
 * can attack from a safe distance compared to using swords,
 * and deals enough damage to prevent things from degenerating into a battle of attrition.


 * Before you go all gung-ho about weapons don't forget to craft a Grappling Hook, as it is an extremely useful tool that greatly helps moving around caves. As soon as you feel comfortable enough to start exploring deeper, go after Skeletons since they drop the other necessary ingredient (a Hook) to create your grapple (the first ingredient being several Iron Chains which you can simply craft from iron).
 * As of update v1.2, you can craft grapples from gems - not a bad idea early in the game if you've amassed a surplus of a particular type of gem. The same update also removed grapples as Ivy Whip ingredients, although it's still a good idea to create a grapple first rather than skip it and attempt to gather the ingredients for the whip.

Before You Go

 * You may actually want to hold off on consuming Crystal Hearts, as using even one will permanently activate the possibility of Blood Moons.
 * The event itself is no great hardship once you have a somewhat-defined main base (which generally also serves as your NPC quarters), but prior to that the higher monster spawn rate can really mess up evenings spent fixing up your base. This is not a problem for people venturing far afield mining stuff (because monsters only spawn in your vicinity, thus if you're not at your base your NPCs aren't in danger), but better be safe than sorry.
 * In short, only start using those Crystal Hearts once you are reasonably sure that your NPC accommodations are secure. You definitely do not want scores of monsters traipsing around your main base harassing your NPCs while you are still busy clearing out the area.


 * Speaking of NPC accommodations, it is advisable to design your main base near your original player spawn point, and make it large enough to fit all possible occupants - and don't forget to include an extra room for yourself (required for spawn point changing via the use of a Bed). This works to about 12 rooms. Feel free to lay them out however you wish, as long as you secure the entire outline - interior decorating can wait, we're mainly concerned about the total horizontal and vertical edge-to-edge dimensions here.
 * Considering that the majority of players build pretty much at terrain height, all you have to do is secure the entire east-west sides and bottom from monster intrusion. Check out the image on the right, which is taken from the base guide (image number 2) on this wiki:


 * From the patch of grass in the lower left corner you can infer that that is the ground level. See how the entire base is built up from a small column on the ground, which expands into a large rectangle shape on top that contains the various individual NPC houses and other areas. Yes, you need to put in some effort in enclosing the entire thing, but it is already solidly defended on either side and below, while additional construction can later be added on top since it is open to the sky.


 * While not exactly the pinnacle of creativity (it looks like a raised up box perched on a stick...) you can easily observe the principles behind the construction of this particular base: prevention of monster intrusion from pretty much all 4 sides, while allowing additional construction to be built upwards. In fact, the player can also expand by adding rooms to the side as well - as you can see there is nothing in the way of tacking on rooms to the right side of the existing structure.


 * Some players take the "raised off the ground" concept to the extreme and even build their bases up high in the sky. Other than for looks there is no real reason to do this since most surface monsters are ground-bound; a mere 3 blocks (enough to walk under) is plenty. It's also a pain in the ass to have to jump up many platforms all the time, although I suppose you could take advantage of a grappling hook and go with a Tarzan theme or something.


 * Don't worry about stuff like furniture yet; the important thing here is to have the outline of the building ready. Renovations can come later when you no longer fear monsters breaching unfinished walls, getting inside, and eating the tasty brains of your helpless NPCs.

Getting Diggy With It

 * There are no hard-and-fast rules about where to start digging, although as a matter of practicality I usually begin by leveling the area immediately around the original player spawn point as preparation for building my main base (as explained in the previous section). Keeping to the surface also allows you to get a general feel of the area surrounding your starting location.


 * Leveling the nearby ground also serves other purposes, namely for quick traversing later on - having to climb a steep hill right outside your doorstep every time gets old quite fast, not to mention the hazard posed by jumping monsters that might actually manage to land on the roof of your base - as well as your very first artificial planting area: a tree garden.
 * Yes, you start the game with relatively plenty of trees nearby, and if - like myself - you tend to avoid using wood as building material because stone and ore blocks look prettier, you will normally not be in danger of running out of trees to chop down for wood... but why not take advantage of all that terrain leveling you're doing? You certainly won't be building a huge 5-screen wide fortress any time soon, so that extra flat grassland can quickly be put to use for growing trees.


 * On the map image on the right I have summarized 5 quickstart goals to give you some idea of where to start. It's sampled directly from my current game.

[1]  The Main Base is built pretty much right under the initial player spawn point (marked by the white square with the letter 'S' in it). As you can see, I carved out my base from the existing ground while leaving a noticeable gap around it to prevent monsters from walking in. It's far from complete as you can tell from the rather haphazard look of the area; I hadn't even bothered to cut down the trees from the soil over the base! This was an aesthetic choice, I like the "green" feeling from having grass and trees nearby.

[2]  To the left of the main base here you can see a fairly level area which I created by flattening the terrain - it is the location of my tree garden and as you can see there are trees already growing from the acorns I planted. I chose this location because to the right of my base is a section of corruption, which is fairly hazardous for the average unequipped new character. As a general rule corruption chasms don't usually occur this close by - it just happens to be my bad luck here that it's so close. As if to rub insult into injury, the underground jungle of my world is also located in this corrupted area. It's not a death knell however, and in fact I exploit the nearness in point [5] below.

[3]  This is a shaft dropping straight down from the main base to the nearby Demon Altar, mostly for convenience since that altar is used for crafting a boss-summoning item.

[4]  This is the main "exploration shaft", and as you can see it goes down slightly below the surface before branching out horizontally. The reason for these long shafts are because they will serve as "firewalls" for isolating different areas of the map, which is a vital consideration regarding a world-changing event: Hardmode Corruption. That article's talk page goes about the subject in more depth, specifically the following two subsections: link 1, link 2. You may have noticed that I was one of the players who first discussed the subject of getting the corruption under control by preemptively digging tunnel shafts to carve up the world map. See, foresight :p Seriously, the corruption is no joke and can ruin an unprepared world.

[5]  Here I stopped digging downwards in order to tunnel sideways into the underground jungle. This ties into my earlier point up this page for gathering the requisite ingredients for crafting a Thorn Chakram. From the map you can see I'm far below enough from the corruption chasms that they don't affect the area I'm digging into, so I merely run against the regular underground jungle monsters rather than the inhabitants of areas infected by the corruption.

Mostly done; there's not really much to put in a "quick start" guide after all since it's only supposed to help you get started.

Other Games
It's 2013 now; haven't been playing much Terraria lately. There are several interesting upcoming games along similar vein, check 'em out:


 * Starbound - I originally followed a link attributed to Terraria's art guy and found this gem. Not sure whether the devs joined the team as well. Starbound appears to be the next step up from where Terraria left off, and what can be seen here is already very interesting.


 * Cube World - this looks like an interesting 3D experiment. However, with it being a blog and all, and the dev presumeably just that one single guy, it may take a (long) while before anything materialises.


 * Castle Story - I really love the looks of this one - it appears to be a Minecraft/RTS hybrid of sorts. I couldn't get into Minecraft; crafting for the sake of crafting does not interest me, and it feels like a waste to create huge castles and elaborate defenses when they never get used. This game apparently aims to takes care of that.


 * Timber and Stone - an RTS where you actually build and manage everything, and not simply plunk down prefabricated buildings? Sign me up!


 * Age of Decadence - an interesting looking old-school RPG


 * Legends of Eisenwald - I'm a sucker for SRPGs, this looks interesting

2015-08-16: Sadly, none of these have really panned out for me, but to be fair I haven't checked on the last 2 recently. Starbound has been making progress, but it's not exactly fast. Still chugging along though, no worries. Cube World on the other hand - well, let's not get into that mess but suffice to say if this ever works out it won't be within the next 2 years. Not sure about Castle Story either, I don't hear much of it nowadays and the few posts I read weren't encouraging. Still, the site does appear to be current so it's not exactly abandoned. Timber and Stone is another slow one, I've been on the forums on and off, they're just plodders. At ver 1.6.3(?) it isn't bad to play but there's little to do goal-wise other than just build up your settlement. Not nearly enough content to keep replaying it just yet.

- Spinfx 16:15, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

- Spinfx 14:47, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

- Spinfx 05:56, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

- Spinfx 09:20, 13 October 2013 (UTC)

- Spinfx (talk) 15:01, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

- Spinfx (talk) 12:55, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

- Spinfx (talk) 02:48, 28 September 2015 (UTC)