User:Spinfx/Guide

= Guide =

As a preface, note down the link to the various existing Guides. They'll come in handy especially since I won't repeat every detail. First make sure to skim the ones listed under the first category, Basics. Yes I know everyone is in a hurry, but at the very least look through the Getting Started guide. Now consider that your character doesn't have that many stats, so your progression in this game is item-based. This means you will spend the bulk of your time collecting material for crafting, even if it seems to involve whacking a lot of enemies.

Before we start, I'd like to recommend a map viewer - I used to use MoreTerra but the recent updates were a little slow in coming, so I switched to TerraMap. As a bonus, you can more easily search the resulting map image as well as filter for specific block types to highlight, which is great.

Yes, I admit this does take something out of the exploration aspect of the game. However, this only really remains novel for the first couple weeks - after several restarts with different worlds it got tiring just randomly digging hoping to find things. It's not like you need to use all of the viewer's features - I use it almost solely just for general world information e.g. finding where a lake in biome X is. You don't have to go pixel hunting for specific items if that feels too cheaty for your tastes.

- While the game is not strictly divided into formal phases, there do exist several distinctions especially between Hardmode and Pre-Hardmode. Killing the pre-hardmode boss Wall of Flesh will permanently transition your world into hardmode. The main feature of hardmode is the accelerated spread of The Hallow and one of either The Corruption or The Crimson, as well as the availability of new bosses.

Many bosses function as checkpoints in the sense that defeating them either gives you drops you can't obtain elsewhere (and which are required to expand your crafting capabilities), or access to a different area - for example, you cannot enter the Dungeon without beating Skeletron.

Initial phase
When first starting out, you have access to wood-based and early ore equipment. Since this whole thing is my opinion, I'm recommending you use Yoyos: even though they are technically a ranged weapon, they are classified as melee weapons - there is no ammunition or mana usage cost, the "projectile" persists for several seconds, and it is largely controllable. There is a bounce effect that makes using a yoyo slightly unwieldy at first, but this is easy to compensate for. This effect shines against groups, where the yoyo will bounce between each enemy rapidly, inflicting damage all the while. All you need is a somewhat steady hand and some experience using this weapon.

As for armor and accessories, anything goes. It is preferable that you get up to gold/platinum Armor but in the meantime you will be doing a lot of exploration in this arc of the game. Highly suggest you begin the initial hellevator excavation - I recommend you build your base right around your start spawn, and your hellevator right underneath it. Makes going down easier when you don't have to trek across the world every time. You don't need to explore the Underworld just yet though, especially with your current crappy gear and likely inability to mine Hellstone (which you'll need at least a Nightmare Pickaxe for, which requires crafting involving Shadow Scale, only dropped by a boss (Eater of Worlds)).

Along the way purchase the Piggy Bank and Safe, they really help for hauling loot back to base. (Ideally you'll loot a Money Trough to replace the Piggy Bank, not having to lay down platforms to place it is very convenient.) This additional storage is especially useful for hauling along things that you need but don't use all the time, like for example fishing gear, or money for when you encounter the Skeleton Merchant (since you only drop money in your main inventory interface when you die).

Side trip: Dungeon
Beating Skeletron is mandatory for entering the Dungeon. While it doesn't contain any progression-lock material, there are several NPCs who you can only initially encounter here (the Mechanic is especially valuable). Make sure you have adequate free housing for them to move into, take care of this before hitting up Skeletron.

Pre-hardmode
With most of the pre-hardmode bosses under your belt, you should have the best kit you can obtain for now: for mining this means the Molten Pickaxe, and if you've been sticking to yoyos you should have obtained a Cascade - although personally I was running around ok with a weaker Amazon. The beautiful thing about yoyos is the accessories which you can get for it that effectively split it into 2 (and then later 4) - look up the Yoyo Bag, which you'll be crafting once you finish obtaining the component accessories for it. As you can see, you'll require a crafting station bought from an NPC rescued from the dungeon, so while it's not a mandatory trip I'd really strongly suggest against skipping the Dungeon.

Depending on whether you took the time out to craft them, you may also now have your first Summon weapon, likely either the Hornet Staff or the Imp Staff. The cool thing is the summons are permanent, until you either dispel them or die, which means you can cast them then store away the staff back into a storage item like the Money Trough. Since they have zero maintenance costs it's good to have a minion out with you all the time. Summoning is pretty much the first thing I do whenever I log into the game now.

Quarantine preparations
Activating Hardmode is an irreversible process that pits you in a race against time versus the spread of 2 biomes which aggressively expand and overwhelm other bioms: The Hallow, and one of either The Corruption or The Crimson. Ignoring these and letting them consume other biomes means you'll be cut off from the drops of monsters native to them (which will cripple your crafting options), as well as the inability to complete the Angler's quests. In short, you will need to preserve the existing biomes or create artificial transplants of them in more opportune locations (e.g. closer to your base), and create a lake in the middle of them.

Ideally when you stand in the middle above a lake to fish, the biome should extend beyond the screen, preventing biome overlap - it would suck to spend hours creating a biome only to discover you can't fish from it because the lake takes on the properties of a neighbouring biome. Mini-biomes are fine for certain purposes (like housing, since several NPCs have additional items for sale when housed in certain biomes) but for fishing purposes you need something large enough to accommodate a big lake (remember: the smaller the lake, the lower your fishing success).

Recommended biomes to save
- space: sky lake - surface: default "forest", jungle, snow, mushroom, ocean, hallow, corrupt - cavern: default "forest", jungle, snow, mushroom, hallow, corrupt, lava

Sky lakes are now generated automatically in place of certain sky islands, so you should be covered there. For surface forests, the area around your base should be fine especially if you've been gardening nearby. The other biomes usually need artificial transplants created since the natural ones tend to spawn far away and isolated from each other, making visiting them a pain. The corrupt/crimson biome usually already has a pre-hardmode location or two, so just let them spread and surround an existing lake naturally. The hallow tends to surface in snow, which prevents it from spreading, so you may need to manually spread hallow elsewhere (using Holy Water) and let it take over a lake.

The jungle is at risk of being overrun by corruption but not the hallow - hallow will be stopped by mud (which jungle grass grows on), while corruption will convert mud into dirt. For this reason you can slow down the corruption's spread by manually spreading hallow around the jungle, if you don't intend to build an artificial jungle elsewhere. More urgently is the underground jungle, because it's where you can fight one of the hardmode bosses, so if you don't plan to save the natural underground jungle you should create a particularly large artificial one capable of fitting a lake for fishing and an arena for the boss. (You could fight over the lake to save room, but water hampers mobility and you really don't want to worry about drowning while a boss is trying to kill you.)

The ocean presents a special problem: if you've used the map viewer, you may haven noticed that your character in the game can mine right up to the "edge" of the world on either side, but the map viewer shows that the world data actually extends beyond that by a good 10+ blocks! This means you can lose your oceans as sand is especially quick to be converted by either hallow or corruption, and they can inch up from the sides via the blocks you can't reach. (Losing your oceans also means you will lose access to one of the hardmode bosses.) Since oceans can't be transplanted - and building an artificial ocean at a higher elevation is a huge pain in the ass - you'll need a "border wall" built right at the edge of the ocean down to the sea floor. Then at the bottom there you need to tunnel underneath the wall and dig out a quarantine gap all the way inland then back up to the surface. Since your quarantine gap will meet with the border wall at the sea floor you need to ensure that hallow or corruption can't spread across the wall. This means the base of the wall that touches the sea floor should be composed of player-crafted bricks. Don't forget that the wall itself needs to be thick enough to resist biome spread, which means it should be at least 3 blocks wide - just because hallow/corruption can't spread over player-crafted blocks, they can "jump over" a wall if it's only 1 or 2 blocks thick.

Finally, for the underground lava, you will find it convenient to just section off an area to the side of your hellevator just before reaching the underworld below.

Miscellaneous
Now's a good time to create a world-spanning Minecart Track to cut down travel time on the surface, it will come in handy especially in hardmode.

Last of all, create a bridge in the underworld from your base's hellevator exit. Use ash blocks, spaced one apart - you save blocks, it acts extra duty as a (low-yield) zero maintenance fireblossom farm, and it will be your running arena against the Wall of Flesh. Although estimates vary between several hundred blocks minimum, I recommend you build all the way west to the left edge of the world assuming the underground jungle is in that direction from your base which you built on the center (default spawn). The allows you to link up additional hellevator exits too e.g. the one you dug in the underground jungle for quarantine purposes.

Hardmode
Hopefully you dug out all your quarantine areas and prepared all the artificial biomes with their lakes before triggering hardmode, because once it starts the hallow and corruption/crimson will start spreading like cancer. If you're smart and reading ahead before you actually get into hardmode, good job, here's some immediately useful tips.

Upgrades
Don't worry about triggering the hardmode ores yet - you can obtain new equipment from several sources.

- Black Recluse spiders now spawn from Spider Nests, they drop Spider Fang fairly often. Farm these to craft Spider armor and the Queen Spider Staff (the Spider Staff minions aren't much better than the ones from the Imp Staff). The armor grants you additional minion slots for a total of 4, which is very helpful until you craft better gear, while the Queen Spider acts as an extra, albeit immobile, summon (these sentry-type summons don't count against your minion cap so they're always useful). - The Amarok is an excellent yoyo which can drop from any Snow Biome monster in hardmode. It's easily an upgrade of ~15 points of base damage from your previous yoyo, which is a massive boost.

These upgrades in your offensive capabilities should suffice for now - the next step is beelining the hardmode ores. Smash 6 Altars in one go, then go up the quality ladder until you've mined sufficient quantities of either Adamantite or Titanium, depending on which spawns on your world. Don't bother with the armor or weapons from the first two tiers (Cobalt/Palladium and Mythril/Orichalcum). Once you have a set of the 3rd tier ore you should be able to take on the first three hardmode bosses.

Mechanical Bosses
These are a tad sturdier than the pre-hardmode bosses, but with tier 3 hardmode ore based armor you should be able to face them without needing to rely overmuch on luck. They don't have much in the way of interesting drops so you don't need to farm them.

Plantera
With the drops from the mechanical bosses you should now be able to craft a Pickaxe Axe, allowing you to finally mine Chlorophyte Ore - which you'll need a lot of, especially since 6 ore is required for a bar. A side trip to the dungeon to obtain a Yelets yoyo is a good idea but not mandatory (nice damage boost though). Life Fruit should be available as well, you'll need 20 pieces to reach the current maxHP limit. The Turtle armor is a nice boost to damage reduction, as well as a component in crafting Beetle armor later.

Plantera isn't too bad provided you have an arena in which to fight it, which is important. An arena of wide open space with platforms for maneuvering can help you run rings around Plantera - mobility is key. As an added precaution I drained the Honey from a Bee Hive into my arena, providing an additional life regen source whenever I dipped myself into it. Note that your Plantera arena is separate from your normal base arena - you can't lure Plantera too far away before it despawns, and if you manage to make it leave the underground jungle it will enter an enraged state (double speed, stats, etc) so you really want to build an arena specifically for Plantera in the heart of the underground jungle. The item used to summon it, Plantera's Bulb, cannot be picked up - Plantera will be summoned the moment you destroy a bulb. This means you have a limited radius away from the arena in which to drag Plantera to - this is why preparing a large-ish arena works best. Mine was just under 2 screens in size both in width and height (yeah, I went a little overboard), but this meant it was easy for me to find a bulb growing nearby just outside the arena boundaries. All I had to do was pop a bulb, wait for a couple of seconds to make sure Plantera appeared and started moving towards me, then run the short distance into the arena proper without worrying that Plantera would despawn for being too far away.

Plantera has some nice loot so it's worth fighting it several times for them. Killing Plantera also causes several other changes to take place in your world, among the more significant being the spread of the hallow and corruption/crimson reduced to a third of their initial hardmode speed, and biome keys finally able to unlock the biome chests located in the dungeon. The dungeon also has new hardmode spawns and thus new loot drops.

Golem
On top of the reinforced dungeon enemies, defeating Plantera also earns you the key to accessing the Jungle Temple where you will face the Golem. I recommend you farm the dungeon for a while, there are quite a few new drops to obtain, like the Kraken. While The Eye of Cthulhu is a stronger yoyo, you'll need drops from the jungle temple to craft the Solar Tablet required for manually activating a Solar Eclipse, so it's ok to run around with a Kraken for a while. There is also the Magnet Sphere which is a deceptively powerful secondary weapon. I say "secondary" because it may be too slow to use your primary weapon, which makes it eminently suitable for firing occasionally from another hotbar slot. The slow projectile makes it really good for boss fights, where you can fire it off between attacks with your primary weapon - in essence it's almost like another summon.

Fighting the Golem isn't too bad even if you're typically forced to fight him where the Lihzahrd Altar is located. If you're lucky the altar spawns on a bed of spikes, which you can dig out to dislodge the altar, allowing you to pick it up and place it somewhere more convenient e.g. your base arena you've used for fighting other bosses. While mobile the golem isn't that fast or dexterous so it's possible to dodge around him especially if you managed to move his altar to your arena (which I assume you've fortified quite a bit by this point). Having the abovementioned Magnet Sphere also lets you see the value of that weapon in a boss fight firsthand, it's great to see how it keeps zapping the boss while it rolls past.

Similar to Plantera, the Golem has a bunch of interesting drops to farm for.

Post-Golem
Now that you've disposed of the mechanical bosses, Plantera, and Golem, you can take a well-deserved break to pursue other goals. At this point you're basically left with several invasion-type events and a couple of bosses. If you haven't, now is a good time to complete crafting accessories that require merging several together, for example the Ankh Shield or the Cell Phone. The Angler in particular should help keep you occupied regularly.

Invasions
If you haven't, you should try the relatively easier of the remaining invasions - the Solar Eclipse, Pirate Invasion, and Martian Madness. The remaining two, Pumpkin Moon and Frost Moon, are structured a little differently - the enemies come in multiple waves rather than in one continuous assault. The waves also increase in difficulty, and pretty much necessitate the use of an arena if you want to beat as many waves as you can before the event ends (simply surviving is usually merely a matter of flee-while-shooting-backwards at the mini-boss types).

(WIP)

= Conclusion =

There's not that much else left except for the section on the final bosses. I barely mentioned anything on equipment and strategy either, maybe someday - there's already various guides and videos out there, and I don't think I have a particularly novel approach, just sticking to the basics mostly.

Above all, have fun!

- Spinfx (talk) 02:47, 2 October 2015 (UTC) - Spinfx (talk) 07:32, 17 October 2015 (UTC) - Spinfx (talk) 14:28, 25 October 2015 (UTC)