Terraria Story

Upon the last huge update of Terraria back at the beginning of December, detailed here, my brother, cousin and I started to new characters on a new world. We saw this new mode called mediumcore, which makes you drop all of your items when you die and is a middle ground between hardcore (permadeath) and softcore (you lose nothing but some coins). It seemed like a great idea at the time, but one we came to lament as we made our way through the new world. The problem with dropping all your items is that you often cannot get them back unless you have several friends to help, a whole extra set of equipment at your base or you are lucky and your corpse is very close by. The other huge problem with mediumcore, the most significant problem, is that when items drop they lose their special abilities. With the latest 1.1 update items are now unique, meaning you can craft a weak mythril sword that has negative points to damage or speed, or you can get lucky and get a sword that has +5% to damage. There are quite a lot of different attributes that can be applied to any item, armors and accessories included, and when you die on mediumcore all of your items lose that. There is a goblin NPC now that lets you reforge items, which costs quite a bit of money depending on the item, and give the item new abilities. So if you spend a lot of money getting a super special sword and then have that sword return to it’s vanilla attributes once you die, well that’s a bit obnoxious. So eventually we got tired of the extreme annoyances of mediumcore, like spending hours trying to get equipment back from the depths of the dungeon, and made softcore characters once again. In the screenshot below you can see many of new things, including weapon attributes, the tinkerer, traps and levers(top left where the bunny is), cobalt armor and the drill. The drill takes over for the mining pick after the inferno set.

We went through the world like you normally would, working our way up to demonite weapons and mining tools. The one big difference for the beginning of the game is traps and mimics, most everything else is normal until you fight the wall of flesh, but there are several new enemies like harpies and snowmen. Traps are pretty fantastic, in a frustrating and satisfying way. There are boulder traps and dart traps throughout the world now, often near chests or in opportunistic areas. Boulder traps will kill you instantly when you are starting the game out, they tend to do 100 damage per hit and they will roll down hill doing damage per movement. Dart traps poison you and will keep firing unless you disarm the trap, which you can do by breaking the pressure plate or finding the trap device that is shooting the darts. You can take all of these back to your base but you cannot do anything with them until later on when you save the mechanic, which you can do only do after you defeat the first new boss The Wall of Flesh. Stole this screenshot of the Wall of Flesh from Terraria wikia.

You summon this wonderful behemoth by finding dolls, which drop from demons in hell. You find the dolls then fling them into lava, once you do so you are stuck in the fight till you die. The Wall of Flesh is unique, if you somehow get behind you die, if you try to retreat you also die, the only option is to fight. With that said he seems a lot more intimidating than he is. If you have some pretty decent armor, silver or better, a minishark (a machine gun basically) and an anti gravitation potion (let’s you float through the air) then you are pretty good to go. Once you beat The Wall of Flesh everything literally goes crazy. All corrupted areas of the world are now spreading at an increased speed and through every type of material except for walls. On top of that there are plentiful amounts of new very tough enemies roaming all corners of the world. Enemies that will seem damn near impossible to fight until you manage to get some weapons and armor from the first new material, Cobalt. The new materials keep randomly popping up in the world, it tells you that Mythril or Admantite has spawned, and you have a bunch of a new materials to work for. There is also a new area called the Hallow that will take over a random surface area of the map and start spreading, much like the new corruption it cannot be stopped by anything except for walls and gaps. We actually had to make a three layer gap all around our base in order to stop corruption from spreading into our home. The Hallow area would invade our home as well if it had started close enough. That area spawns new enemies like Unicorns and Pixies, both of which drop souls of light, one of the many new materials that is needed for many of the best new items.

Other than finding new areas and materials we also worked on finding the new NPC’s. We were able to obtain them all but first we had to rescue the Tinkerer from the dungeon and the Goblin Mechanic from hell. After that we found the wizard, who sells various high end and odd items (like a disco ball!). You know when you see a NPC that sells an item that costs nearly a platinum that he is one of the late game vendors. You can also obtain Santa as a NPC, who sells lights and costume options, but first you will have to find a snowglobe and summon a snowman army. Summoning a snowman army against our newly built traps was pretty enjoyable, especially when you drop boulders down upon them as they attempt to bash your doors down. The snowmen are hilarious creations, you have the tommy gun snowman, mr. stabby and a shotgun snowman. They act just like the goblin army except they are much stronger and they assault your base for quite a long period of time. By the time that siege ended we had lost every NPC except for one.

The snowmen don’t drop anything special but they do drop quite a lot of money and presents. Presents are dropped by damn near every enemy in the game and it has the chance to drop a snowglobe or various colors of candy cane. Candy cane is a wall type that can be used to make a house. The snowmen also drop snow, which is a new biome and will spawn in a new world, but you can also take the snow to create your own snow biome. Nothing in particular spawns in the snowy area but it does look quite delightful. Back to candy cane, we decided to take our excess candy cane and create a splendid house for Santa. It is a worthy home.

The end game of Terraria now has you fighting the super difficult versions of previous bosses. There is now the destroyer, a giant worm with roughly 80k hitpoints and when you injure it flying robots come off it’s body to attack you. This boss is by far one of the hardest one’s that we’ve tried to fight but if you can get some really nice armor, mythril or admantite, then it isn’t too bad. It does help with you have wings, wings are one of the new items that allow you fly moderately high and glide all over the map. Wings are very hard to get though, they require souls from bosses, either the giant worm (destroyer) or the twin eyeballs.

The other two new bosses are double eyes of Cthulu, except they are now mechanical and much stronger. Once you injure them to a certain point they both change forums into robotic versions that do quite a lot of damage. Like the destroyer they are manageable with help and good equipment. The hardest of the new bosses is the new Skeletron, who we haven’t even tried yet but by the accounts of others he is very difficult. All of the bosses drop the necessary souls to make Hallowed equipment, arguably the strongest weapons and armor in the game. All of the Hallowed equipmentrequires you to have one of each type of whatever you are making, so if you are trying to make a Hallowed helmet you will need the mythril, admantite and cobalt helmet plus twenty souls of sight. That equipment is now the ultimate goal but we still find new items every time I play. Fighting bosses is not easy and it takes a while to get good at it.

Terraria has added a lot within the last month, most of which with that huge 1.1 update, and if you haven’t played it in a long time like I hadn’t then you are sure to find a ton of new content to keep you interested. Also if you’ve never played Terraria I hope you picked up yesterday when it was on sale for ultra cheap, but even now it is still on sale on Steam for $5. Absolutely worth it if you enjoy a game that throws on exploring, crafting and rpg elements onto a Castlevania type of action game. Check it out and thanks for reading. Wish I had more to write today but this week is painfully slow for gaming news, so most of our “news” will be reviews and oddities like this post.
Main Website: http://www.terraria.org/