Terraria

[Valky]

Can walls in midair block spawns or lower spawn rates? I put mushroom and living leaf walls lining the top of my roofed mushroom forest, like 10-20 tiles above ground. The ground areas are still open air.

 

[Turjan]

It shouldn't really matter much, as most enemies spawn off-screen. As to walls, only the wall behind your char counts.

 

[Valky]

I finished my roofed mushroom forest. If there were any spawn rates lowered due to the walls, the biome is 100% in range of the 4 water candles. It also makes it a tough place to be in pre-hardmode which is thrilling. Those mushi ladybugs are dangerous.

 

[Crash]

Yeah, the first issue was of the background walls, thanks for the help.

Got much further, now some other things I fail to understand through online wikis:

1) How do I get the dye trader (afaik, he's needed for two achievements at least) ? I've killed three bosses, have carried and have in chests the dyes and just now also added one of the strange plants to my chests. And, of course, I have extra housing, even a choice of it. But nothing happens. What am I missing ? Or do I have to hold a dye/strange plant in my inventory for a long (how many days?) time ?

2) Steam achievement "Slayer of Worlds" says I need to kill all bosses. I've killed three already (Cthulhu Eye and Brain, and Slime King), but Steam counter for said achievement only shows 2. Is that a 'normal' bug of Steam or is it a game bug that will mean I will have to redo some boss ?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

How do I get the dye trader (afaik, he's needed for two achievements at least) ? I've killed three bosses, have carried and have in chests the dyes and just now also added one of the strange plants to my chests. And, of course, I have extra housing, even a choice of it. But nothing happens. What am I missing ? Or do I have to hold a dye/strange plant in my inventory for a long (how many days?) time?

Double-check your housing, then carry around a Strange Plant and a material used for making a dye in your inventory (flowers, beetle shells, etc).

There may also be an unknown/hidden requirement that certain other NPCs have arrived first.

Steam achievement "Slayer of Worlds" says I need to kill all bosses. I've killed three already (Cthulhu Eye and Brain, and Slime King), but Steam counter for said achievement only shows 2. Is that a 'normal' bug of Steam or is it a game bug that will mean I will have to redo some boss?

You'll have to redo most bosses anyway, so don't worry too much about this.

 

[Valky]

I have the following left on my list of to-do items before I consider my pre-hardmode journey ready to finish.
-Fish for 15 of each biome crate (I already have around 3 stacks of wooden crates which should be enough for all my ores, I want a decent variety of all biome drops though because I've never fished for biome crates before)
-Set up home defences for my weeaboo castle involving mechanisms to automate the dart/geyser traps I've found, maybe lava as well
-Create a proper chain of sky-islands to have my own lands in the skies to do things in. Hardmode will be horrible to do this in so I have to do it now.
-Make an alchemy garden for all of the plants on one of the sky-islands I make
-Quarantine the jungle with hellevators on both sides and a box on the inside to protect it from being converted from crimson outside that the WoF generates or the crimson that was spawned smack dab in the middle of it

If I end up finishing them all before 1.3.6, I think I will likely postpone killing the WoF until 1.3.6 releases since there may be new pre-hardmode additions to try out.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

In no way do I want to tell you how to do things in this game, but I'll tell you how I did it during my playthrough that got me all the way to the end: I held off killing the WoF while I got some things sorted out, but once I felt ready and killed it I realized that I had not prepared myself well enough for what was to come... so I improvised pretty much all of it on the fly.

And those improvisational acts were some of the most entertaining parts of my last playthrough. Half-assedly doing what needed to be done, while racing against the clock - those chaotic moments were the best ones.

So lay off the wiki and just play the game - that's my suggestion.

 

[Valky]

What do you mean? I have been avoiding the wiki as much as possible, I just think fishing and making farms and stuff are common sense to do so that when I hit hardmode I can do it on my terms and sit safely in my weeaboo castle.

edit: My goal is to set myself up so that when I go into expert hardmode, my home is more than just a home, it will be a place that is actually very safe and fortified to be the central base of operations that I can carry out all of my expeditions from.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

What do you mean? I have been avoiding the wiki as much as possible, I just think fishing and making farms and stuff are common sense to do so that when I hit hardmode I can do it on my terms and sit safely in my weeaboo castle.

edit: My goal is to set myself up so that when I go into expert hardmode, my home is more than just a home, it will be a place that is actually very safe and fortified to be the central base of operations that I can carry out all of my expeditions from.

Two particular Hardmode events will test that. The first one should be a good test of your abilities and traps after just entering Hardmode. Later on you'll encounter the Martians. They'll laugh at your preparations and just kill you dead. Learn to improvise.

 

[Valky]

I'm really looking forward to seeing how the eternia crystal thing improves in hard mode, because my last terraria playthrough was before the update that added that and sandstorms, so I'm going in with no knowledge. I was a bit disappointed by the stuff the taverkeep sells right now for defender medals, I spent 75 for the forge and I thought it would be a crafting station or something exciting.

 

[Valky]

Oh boy, don't I just fucking love hearing that there's a new terraria update spoiler and it turns out to be new furniture.
Every fucking time.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I'd actually like to see biome-specific variations on this little piece of furniture:

 

[Turjan]

My goal is to set myself up so that when I go into expert hardmode, my home is more than just a home, it will be a place that is actually very safe and fortified to be the central base of operations that I can carry out all of my expeditions from.

Two particular Hardmode events will test that. The first one should be a good test of your abilities and traps after just entering Hardmode. Later on you'll encounter the Martians. They'll laugh at your preparations and just kill you dead. Learn to improvise.

Yup, building a base that works was a learning process for me. I actually built a small shelter next to my first pre-hardmode base for stuff like pirates and, to a lesser extent, goblins which target the spawn point directly. The NPC's are just off-screen. For the Martians, I built another small shelter slightly underground where some natural rock roof hovered above the ground. This is much further away from the base, but has to be in the innermost 20% of the map for the Martians to go there. I put it right on the edge of that area (you can check that during the event), although that turned out to mean that you have to avoid it during the Pillar Event, as that's exactly one of their spawn points.

 

[Valky]

I'd actually like to see biome-specific variations on this little piece of furniture:

What's that, you Terraria players have been eagerly waiting for years for another fantastic update to the game? Here it is, you've waited all this time for 39 new models of a toilet.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

So I briefly re-visited Terraria for the worst reason - I discovered there are mods for this game.

Not some minor ones, mind you - bigass sprawling mods that add dozens of bosses, post MoonMoonLord-content and hundreds of enemies.

I tried out two mods: Calamity and Tremor. Both of these fit the above description and look very promising... but that's all there is to them, I'm afraid.

For both mods I started fresh on Expert mode, so as to try to get the feel for the mods from beginning to end.

The Calamity mod is described as the largest, most popular Terraria mod. Well enough. I was immediately greeted by two new Wülfram monsters which drop Wülfram fragments which serve as an ore on par with Silver/Tungsten. The only advantage it gives is that it has armor sets for each of the main "classes" available in Terraria. There are also Crawler monsters in the Underground that drop gems when killed, with one Crawler for each gem type. As if getting gems wasn't easy enough. Except for some new recipes that allows for basic gear to be crafted, the major positive changes I found was that the breath meter in water in the Snow biome is only about five seconds. Otherwise Calamity is very barren on new content at the start. You see, Calamity is ALL about the boss battles. 22 new boss fights, only three of them in pre-Hardmode, and most of them post MoonMoonLord. This is best demonstrated by the Iron Heart item. This is an item that's in your inventory at the start of the game, but only for the first minute or so. If used in that time, a new difficulty level is unlocked where every death during a boss fight is permament.

As I didn't feel like playing through the entire game in Calamity (and to get an idea for how the new endgame content was like) I randomly read one of the wiki pages for the new bosses.

Oh boy.

Boss fight traps you in a 200x200 cube of unbreakable blocks, and leaving the arena counts as a failed boss fight.

Boss is literally described as being a Bullet Hell boss, meaning it's instantly unappealing to a large part of the playerbase.

If for some reason an attack from the boss does only 20 damage or less to the player, the player is punished by being insta-killed.

This mod is literally unexploded modder drama aimed at the tryhards. Some of you reading this may be interested, but I know autism when I see it.

...

The Tremor mod is described as being a "quality" mod. While it adds new things, it doesn't add as many new things as Calamity, so I expected the new additions would have more quality.

Well... they kinda are.

New monsters added right at the start include Orcs, Rogues, Thiefs and some Undead Horrors that spawn at night, meaning that monster encounters are generally tougher. In the Underground more monsters appear, including some large ones in the 500HP+ range that can easily kill you, but you have an advantage as they're usually too large to fit through any passages. As for new biomes, there are now mini-dungeons (with only a fraction of the difficulty) and the Glacier biome, a sub-biome of the Snow biome. The new monsters there offer some new and interesting challenges, but the lighting effect in that biome is a nightmare on the eyes. The Tremor mod also adds new NPCs. I got an Archer (sells bows and stuff), a Knight (sells axes), a Sorcerer (sells spellcasting stuff) and then an Alchemist, which is a new 'class' for Terraria that specializes in throwing grenades and area denial attacks. I doubt it's a coincidence that he looks like Rick Sanchez.

Overall I had much more fun with Tremor than Calamity, but the two points that made me stop playing it was the increased difficulty and general lack of 'new' content. Oh sure, there are lots of recipes and new things to find, but with the exception of the craftable shields none of it was going to benefit me until sometime in Hardmode, and too much of it was trash-tier stuff that's easily outdone by the vanilla Terraria stuff. The new monsters raise the challenge level, but either I was extremely unlucky or the Tremor mod severely cuts down on the amount of Life Crystals available, as I had played for several hours before I found my first one. It wasn't until I got my hands on Meterorite gear that I felt I was finally getting strong enough to survive for long durations.

Unfortunately the Tremor mod has been abandoned by the original developers, who decided to start a new Terraria mod focusing exclusively on 'quality'. That mod is still in the early stages, so no comment on that. The Tremor mod is maintained by other modders now, but in the bare minimal aspect it seems.

I checked out several other Terraria mods, but the 'big ones' all seem to have the same focus - bigger and badder boss fights. Actual 'quality-of-life' changes that could be done seem to take a distant back seat to the boss fights.

As for Vanilla Terraria - I finally checked the new zoom feature and it works great. Unfortunately when I zoom out to the maximum my monitor's size manages to include the game's 'edge-of-the-screen' on-screen, meaning that monsters will just pop in and out from nowhere. Hopefully 1.3.6 will offer added support for larger screen resolutions. Also, an upcoming change in 1.3.6 is that NPCs will now use toilets... so

to that.

 

[Siveon]

Thanks for bringing the Tremor mod to attention (as well as modding in general). I wanted to get back into a really good crafter game but I realized that's still only Terraria as the others are unfinished due to the Early Access model.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

I was interested in the Calamity mod, until you said it had try hard horseshit. I don't mind difficulty, but I do mind tedium and bullshit.

 

[Damned Registrations]

A ton of the quality of life mods have been rolled into Terraria over the years. Remember how walking into a one tile high block used to stop you dead in your tracks? Modders fixed that.

There's a couple of total overhaul mods that do things like add an xp or class or race system. I never saw the appeal myself, since they generally just straight up make the game easier.

I played Calamity mod a year or two ago and I don't recall any boss fight locking you in place, but the last boss available at the time was pretty crazy. Of course, you need to look at these things in context- by the time you're fighting those post moonlord bosses, you've got truly crazy shit that lets you ignore an attack every 3 seconds, heal massive amounts constantly, fire homing attacks through walls, etc. And if an attack at that point is hitting you for less than 200, you're either cheating or using another even more OP modded set of gear (which... is cheating.) You'll probably want to build some custom arenas for a lot of these fights, but that's part of the fun of prepping for them instead of just plowing through because nothing can out damage your healing potion or outrun you.

As for why nobody makes mods that add a dozen new bosses for easy mode... where would you fit them in? If they're much easier than the vanilla wall of flesh, they're going to be made trivial by the same shit you use for that fight, and their drops are going to be garbage. Easymode already has plenty of content; you're never going to use ice armor and cactus armor and silver armor and jungle armor and bone armor unless you're some 110% autist. It makes way more sense to add the bosses in a tiered way at a point in the game where progression is slower or non existent.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

As for why nobody makes mods that add a dozen new bosses for easy mode... where would you fit them in? If they're much easier than the vanilla wall of flesh, they're going to be made trivial by the same shit you use for that fight, and their drops are going to be garbage. Easymode already has plenty of content; you're never going to use ice armor and cactus armor and silver armor and jungle armor and bone armor unless you're some 110% autist. It makes way more sense to add the bosses in a tiered way at a point in the game where progression is slower or non existent.

You're kinda missing the point. When it comes to bosses it goes without saying that most of them will be lumped towards the endgame, but a mod has the potential to add so much more than just boss fights. Your own words suggest that your focus for Terraria also seems to be on the bosses.

Calamity recognizes that there's at least a gap at the start of the game by there being limited options available for the various classes besides melee, and tries to plug that with the Wülfram items. Wülfram has a basic torso and leg armor, but then six or seven different helmets, depending on what effect you desire from the armor set. Sadly most of the rest of its efforts seem focused on boss fights.

Tremor adds lots of new stuff, but has no consistent path of direction with its additions. One example is the Invar metal. Some enemies drop old gear made out of Invar, which is useless except to be smelted down into Invar bars, which can then be made into new, useful Invar-based gear. The problem? Invar gear isn't any better than Copper/Tin-tier gear, and considering the rarity of Invar gear (I got nine bars worth of it in total during my playthrough) the whole practice seems pointless.

Another such example is a spell the Sorcerer NPC has on sale very early on, a rebounding fast-moving projectile that costs little mana and leaves lots of shiny graphical particles, meaning it's great for illuminating dark areas of terrain on the map. Damage-wise it's comparable to the Space Gun, and I ended up using that spell as my primary damage dealer for many hours of my playthrough. It's too powerful to be introduced so early in the game.

Finally trees have a chance of dropping a Birb Staff when felled, which serves perfectly as a Baby's First Summoned Minion and is very useful as a supplemental damage dealer. Despite these powerful additions, I felt that my progress in Tremor was much MUCH slower than in vanilla or Calamity Terraria... which again raised the question for me why I should be bothering playing it.

Tremor's main focus also seems to also be on the boss fights, though it doesn't go as much overboard in that regard as Calamity does.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I'm not sure what kind of additions you mean. Just more gear/biomes aside from the boss drops unlocked stuff? Your examples of Tremor stuff breaking the game is why that's not easy to do. It's bad enough you can hop up into the sky and get a bottled cloud and ubersword with nothing more than a pile of dirt, way faster than you can mine a bunch of gold to make a sword that's still much weaker. Adding even more stuff like that is obviously going to make the balance worse, rather than better. OTOH, if boss 6 drops weapons and armor, you can tune them to do just the right amount of damage to make boss 7 an interesting fight instead of a pushover or suicide mission.

 

[moraes]

I last played with Thorium and Spirit mods, they are described as "vanilla-friendly" mods, meaning they don't trivialize the early game. I played with both at the same time till killing Plantera, unfortunately I got burned out and uninstalled after that point. The mods add a lot of gear and bosses, even some new biomes, and don't really imbalance the game -- there is just some redundancy between them, but nothing game breaking. Thorium was the most polished of the two.

There's also a mod that tries to change the game physics and player movement, making fire spread, rain fill the surfaces with water, letting your character do evasive rolls and bunny jumping, etc. I tried it for a brief time but reverted back to vanilla instead. IIRC its name was Terraria Reloaded. EDIT: It is Terraria Overhaul.

 

[Siveon]

It sounds like the problem lies in the fact that Terraria already has plenty of content and such as it is, that trying to mod in more tiers and the like are either redundant or are just additions to the end-game (which includes bosses). Personally I think they should add in more dungeons.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I'm currently trying out Thorium, and it's disappointing at the start as the only new items are related to the new 'classes' (a Bard and a Healer) and so far their abilities seem to be Multiplayer only. That's cool and all, but leaves os Lone Wolves kinda hanging.

What's FAR more interesting are the small mods that are also available. My biggest gripe with Terraria has always been its dependency upon an outside wikipedia site for shitloads of important information, like recipes you need but don't even have any of the ingredients for. Enter... the "Recipe Browser" mod. This shit made my fucking day. Pick any item in the game, and the mod will tell you what you need to craft it, AND which monsters you need to farm to get it. You can even use the Browser to craft the items if you have all the ingredients, AND it's compatible with other mods.

THIS is the kind of stuff I wanted for Terraria. Straight-up Quality of Life upgrades.

 

[Siveon]

I really hope a Terraria 2 just adds that and more organic improvements to combat, bosses, dungeons, building etc. But not go too far into the aesthetic route like Starbound did, and lost 90% of the point of playing.

 

[Valky]

The guide exists and he works perfectly, there is absolutely no need for a wiki. What is the point of wanting to know recipes that you don't have any ingredients for? It's no good for you anyway since you can't make it. Just play the game and take new items to the guide when you find them.