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 which game mode you would like to play. The available modes are 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, you must click the Create Character button to create a character (unless you've already done so). Looks do not affect 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. However, the combined value of the three colors must be equal to or over 255. If you want to change the style, click on the name of the current style. For example, to change your character's hairstyle, you 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 medium, as the Small size is rather small, and the Large size is really big.

Getting Started in Your New World


After the map has been generated, you will spawn on dirt. 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 opening 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 (by pressing the right-click button on him)! He's an NPC (Non-Player Character), who has a lot of useful information to help you within Terraria.

Your Very First Home


Once a sufficient amount 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 (Exceptions are during a Blood Moon or a Goblin Invasion). 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, monsters are free to spawn inside your home. To craft walls, walk up to a workbench and build either wooden walls or stone walls. To remove walls, players need to use a new tool, a hammer. Hammers can be crafted with the workbench.

Once you have a room, that is, an area blocked off completely by blocks and doors AND man-made walls, monsters will not spawn within its boundaries.

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 half of your coins. Coins are dropped by monsters and found in pots. They are used as a currency to buy things from the Merchant or other NPCs.

Defending your home
Now that you have a home, its time to learn how to defend it. Run close to a Slime, Zombie, or Demon Eye (but don't touch one) 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 or Lens. Coins are used to trade with Merchants and other NPCs who will move in near you (more on that later). Shackles are accessories that add +1 to your defense for each one you put on. 10 Lenses can be collected and crafted into a Suspicious Looking Eye to summon the Eye of Cthulhu at a Demon Altar (Even as the easiest of the three Bosses. This is not recommended until you have at least 200 life, Gold or better Weapons, and Gold or better Armor).

Gel is yet another very useful item: it 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 and get yourself a small pile of Gel.

Lava Pit Defence
When you get further on in the game and mine deep enough you will discover lava pools. These lava pools are very helpful for defending against zombies and other monsters. Craft an Empty bucket and proceed down to the lava, fill your bucket and return to the surface. dig a small pit by your door (about 2-3 tiles deep and 5-7 tiles long) fill it with the lava you just collected. Repeat this as many times as you feel you need to as it does not take much lava to kill a monster. NPCs are vulnerable to lava and if they get caught in it they will die as they cannot move 9 out of 10 times. This is the only downside of this method. You can then build towers to rain down arrows and other ranged weapons on the monsters that are on the other side of the pit. Refer to the PvP traps section 5 for more ideas on defending your home.

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). That's 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. You may need to clear the area of surrounding flowers or plants before a tree can be planted. This can be done with a sword, pick, or most other tools.

The trees need enough room on both sides of them in order to grow to their fullest potential. This means that two saplings directly adjacent to each other will not grow, neither will a sapling right next to the edge of a cliff. Make sure to space out your saplings so each one has enough room and they will all grow to supply you with wood ... and more seeds to replenish the garden.

If there is no good open spot in the sunlight for your trees to grow, make your own! You can use your pickaxe to level off a large section of land (preferably right next to your house) and a mallet to knock down the background dirt. Give a few hours for the grass to cover the newly plowed dirt and begin planting your acorns for your very own forest of replenishable wood.

The trees might be a bit smaller than the ones you cut down, they can grow. Anyway, in the meantime, let's go get some stone and metal.

The scary(?) mines
After you got yourself a nice little(or a nasty large) home set up, it's time to go and mine some ores. Now, you can either choose to dig straight down (don't worry, it's safe enough, as you can see through walls with enough light) or explore a bit and find a nice suitable mine. Chances are that you have found some different colored stone whilst exploring, those are ores, mining them might be a good idea. Once you've collected about 15 iron ore, you can explore more or just return to your cozy house. If you've got a nice amount of stone, wood and torches you can make a furnace. Try placing it down just like you did with the workbench, but this time, it takes a 3x2 space. If you look in your crafting window after placing the furnace, you will see that you can make bars out of the ores you saw in the caves/overworld. Try to make 5 iron bars and take them to your crafting bench, with it, you can make a nice iron anvil. Place it down, and if you have enough wood and bars, you can make new tools/weapons! With this, you can upgrade the tools/weapons you have currently.(If you have enough materials) You can also make your own armor, but it will take a lot of bars to make a full set.

While mining underground you may come across some pools of water / underground lakes. Know that it is possible to use torches underwater, but it is impossible to place them. If you come across one of these pools, don't fear diving down underwater to continue moving downwards, you have a rather large air meter. However should you fear running out of air there is a technique to allow yourself to get more air underwater.

First either find a wall or make a small shaft at the bottom of the water. (The shaft should be around 10 squares deep) Then dig a 3 high 1 wide hole in the wall and then a 4-6 high and 2 or more wide hole in this wall. You should see that the water will not fill the upper squares. Now you merely need to surface, in that hole and your air supply will refresh.

You may also come across large deep chasms inside the caves. A good way to traverse them is to create a gapped bridge. To do this create a background wall of any material (stone and dirt will be in excess so those are recommended. Place a strip as far as you can reach then build the stepping stones at least 1 block apart.  There are 2 benefits to this.  1 light can still reach below and 2, most enemies cannot actually pass through the blocks (you can't either so make sure to leave a somewhat larger gap near the end so you can jump down/up.

Notice in the last picture, the player has a time display under the item bar, more than 5 hearts and a star in the top right corner. The timer is given if you craft a Copper Watch at a workbench. The extra hearts are found via crystal hearts underground. You need a hammer to get them so its a good idea to bring one with you. Grab as many as you see (you can't go wrong with extra health). Lastly the star is mana power. This won't be used until later, but for now its good to start stockpiling. You craft mana crystals from 10 fallen stars and use them to receive mana power.

Try to keep this going for a while until you can make a nice set of armor (Gold or better recommended) and then we can talk about fighting your first boss!

Video guide
Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3: