Terraria (PC)

Super Adventures at Christmas - Game 4:

I have played this one before, and I know it isn't exactly technically a Christmas game. But I've heard that the new v1.1.1 update adds something Christmassy, and I'm determined to find it.

Terraria plays pretty much like a 2D platformer in one big randomly generated world. I move my new custom made hero with the keyboard and interact with things with the mouse.

But before I go off in search of Christmas I should probably interact with some of these trees with my piece of crap standard issue copper axe and use the wood to build myself a cosy shed for my base of operations.

The little character sprites remind me so much of the early Final Fantasy games, though this is more like the Zelda games I guess. I can get extra hearts and mana for my hero, but besides that all my stats come from the gear I have equipped.

Now I have an awesome HQ I can start setting up a workshop to let me craft better equipment. This is the part of the game where people could get frustrated trying to figure out what the hell they're meant to be doing, but I've played this before so I know exactly what to do next: check the wiki.

This helpful Guide NPC can tell me what I can make with the materials I already have in my inventory, but really this is the kind of game where checking the official wiki is pretty much required to know what I should be building, crafting, mining and killing. And the wiki says I'm going to need to mine some stone and then use it to make a forge.

Damn. Well that's humiliating.

When the sun goes down, the monsters come out. I'd bravely ventured out to dig out some of the nearby stone anyway, but even my new wooden sword was no match for the nocturnal forces of evil. Fortunately I'm playing on 'softcore' mode, so I just dropped half my cash and respawned back at base. If I was playing on 'hardcore' mode, I would have just permanently lost my character there.

I've invited a friend to bring his late-game character (and his creepy bunny mask) onto my world to help out, because everything's better in co-op. I'm sure he would have rushed right over to save me there, but he really needed to finish putting up some wallpaper in the shack first.


LATER, THE NEXT MORNING.

I was all set to go digging deep within the Earth to mine for loot, precious metals, and Santa Claus, but then I realised I was totally in the dark down there. I'm going to need some torches, and for that I need wood and gel.

So after spending the rest of the night sitting around the house and being useless, I resolved that the next quest for my valiant explorer shall be... to hunt slimes in the forest for their precious flammable gel.


SOME DRAMATIC SLIME HUNTING LATER.

Okay, the next thing I replace is going to be this damn pickaxe. Items don't get worn out in this, but they can sure wear down my patience. Though I'm digging so slow that it's going to take me forever to find anything to make a new one out of. A seam of iron or silver ore would be nice right about now, all I've come across so far is dirt, clay and rocks.

I'd expected to have seen a cave by now at least, lit up in the darkness by glowing plants. Though I guess that's what I get for playing in the smallest possible window size. Usually I'd be able to see much more of the map around my character, but I needed to keep the screenshots small enough to fit into this page.


EVENTUALLY, BACK ON THE SURFACE.

Hey this is new, I killed an enemy and it dropped a present for me! Finally I've found something to do with Christmas.

I wonder what it could be...

The gift contained candy cane building blocks. In fact all the gifts seem to be candy cane blocks, either red or green. Which will be great to have around if I ever I feel like building stripy buildings, but they're not exactly going to give me the edge in combat.


LATER, (SLIGHTLY) DEEP WITHIN THE EARTH.

Finally I've found some copper ore! Well it's not going to get me a new pickaxe, but it's a start anyway. 3 pieces of ore will get me a copper bar. and 25 bars will get me copper chainmail to wear. Which is total crap, but I'm better off wearing that than going into battle in just a shirt and waistcoat.

Typical. I leave my friend in charge of the base for five minutes, and when I come back I find an ancient evil eyeball boss terrorising it.

I dived straight into the fight, waving my useless wooden blade around and almost immediately got my dumb ass killed. While I was busy respawning, my friend finished the Eye of Cthulhu off all by himself. And we were rewarded for our trouble with a new Dryad NPC moving in to the base, selling seeds and suchlike.


LATER.

I decided that I'd have to dig deeper to get to the good loot, and it's been working out great so far. Now I've got a gold sword and pickaxe, a mirror that teleports me back up to base, and more crap than I know what to do with.

I mean seriously, I don't know what to do with this crap. I'm going to have to sit here for a while and sort through it all to free up some space before I can pick up anything else.


BUT THEN, BACK AT THE BASE.

Sadly my magic mirror doesn't work without mana, so I had to climb all the way back through my tunnel to get back home. Then when I get back to base, I find that it's being invaded by an army of Goblins!

Which is weird, because I definitely don't remember doing anything to provoke the Goblins... but then I'm not the only one playing in this world right now.

The good thing about Goblin invasions though, is that eventually one of those little bastards will drop a harpoon, which is a far better weapon than my tiny golden sword. Okay, now I've got myself a decent weapon, a set of copper armour, and a stylish top hat, I think I'm finally ready to journey across the world to find the Christmas zone.

Each random world in Terraria is made up of different biomes, like Jungle, Desert, and the Forest I started off in. And right now I'm at the Corruption, which spawns these annoying flying bastards and spreads across any grass or trees it touches. It'd eventually turn every Forest biome in the world purple and sinister if there wasn't patches of clay, rock, sunflowers etc. around blocking it.

But fuck the Corruption, I'm supposed to be looking for Christmas!

I did it, I've found the snow! This is all brand new for the Christmas update.

There doesn't seem to be anything here though. Well, except for a couple of slimes. Hey, this is just a Forest biome painted white! I'm sure there's got to be more added to the game than just snow and candy cane walls, but how do I find it?

Right, I have a plan. I'm going to keep progressing through the biomes and boss fights until I stumble across where they've hidden Christmas.

But first I'm going to need to find three more Fallen Stars to give myself mana so I can use this damn mirror I've been dragging around. They drop from the sky randomly when it's dark, so I'm going off to take a late night walk.

Damn, all I wanted was a quiet night so I could stroll around and catch a couple of Fallen Stars, and a whole bloody meteor falls out of the sky! Now I have to get rid of all this meteorite blocking my way. It's too hot to walk over, and it'll keep spawning these Meteor Heads around it if I just leave it here. Plus there might be enough ore here for some nice new Meteor Armour to replace my crappy copper gear.


THIRTEEN FALLEN STARS LATER.

These caves have gotten a lot more 'Indiana Jones' lately, with pressure plates, dart traps and boulders. But it's fine, I'll just dig them all up and stash them at my base for later.

Now I have a set of Meteor Armour and enough mana to teleport back to base with my loot I'm actually able to make some progress.

Okay. Maybe I've made a little too much progress. If I dig any lower I'll end up in the Underworld, fighting demons. Which is fine, but this gold pickaxe is too crap to dig out any of the Obsidian or Hellstone ore down here.

The game doesn't give out any objectives, but I've always got goals. And right now my current goal is to get a better pickaxe, and that means boss fights.

Well, I guess we have a huge stripy lighthouse at base now.

If we want NPCs to move in we've got to expand the base, and it's nice to have other players around to actually see what you've built. This is part of the reason the game is so much better in multiplayer, even when we're not teaming up

But right now I'm going off to fight a boss, so I'm going to need some help.


DEEP UNDERGROUND IN THE DARKEST CORNERS OF THE CORRUPTION.

Somehow I get the feeling we're a little overpowered for this fight. Still, I don't care, I'm only here to get the material to make a new pickaxe.

Actually if this guy's such a pushover, I'm going to summon him a few more times and get enough for some new armour while I'm here.

It's okay, he's an asshole, he totally deserves this.


SOON, ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD.

In fact I'm going to summon the next boss while I'm on a roll. Maybe there's some nice gear in the dungeon he's guarding that I can loot.

Actually I'm going to hold off on killing skeletons and raiding gold chests for a moment, and take the opportunity to strip the wiring while I'm here. Never know when this stuff will come in handy.


LATER, BACK AT THE BASE.

And then Goblins invade again while I'm trying to pack my dungeon treasure away.

It seems there's always some enemy bothering me when I'm trying to get stuff done. It's hard to arrange potions in order of colour when I'm dodging magic missiles dammit.

Finally I've got a pickaxe that works on Hellstone. This ore has a nasty habit of turning into lava when I smash it apart, so it's a little trickier to mine. Though if I alchemy'd up an Obsidian Skin Potion, I could just swim in the stuff.

That bastard demon up there interrupting my mining is carrying a voodoo doll of the Guide (the helpful NPC who told me how to craft at the start of the game). If the doll falls and hits lava it'll summon a particularly nasty boss fight that I would certainly lose and can't teleport away from. Plus it'll kill my Guide! So I'm trying to avoid that if possible.

Half of Terraria is digging through rocks trying to find stuff, the other half is being distracted by enemies when you're trying to do stuff. Just piss off for a minute you unrelenting demonic assholes, I'm trying to build a fucking bridge here!

Plus I keep forgetting to switch back to my weapon when I attack them, so here I'm trying to beat this slime to death with a brick. Still, it could be worse. I found a item in the dungeon earlier that stops me being knocked back by attacks, without it these things would have hit me into the lava by now.


A FEW MINUTES LATER, DEEP WITH THE UNDERGROUND JUNGLE.

Jungle enemies definitely don't like my new Fiery Greatsword, but if I grab a few more stingers from these damn Hornets I'll be able to forge the even more mighty Night's Edge from it, the most powerful sword in the game. Well, in Easymode anyway.

Since the 1.1 update, the game has been split into two halves, Easymode and Hardmode, and killing the Underworld boss will trigger Hardmode. This makes the Corruption much nastier, spawning tougher enemies and letting it travel through rock, sand, and jump small gaps. Meaning there's nothing to stop it from infecting the whole world. Well, apart from the new Hallow biome, which spreads pretty much just like the Corruption, except it has Unicorns and laser firing Gastropods and other things to make my life just as miserable.

But hey, there's some good loot there, and I'm hoping it'll trigger the new Christmas content, so I guess it's time to doom the world.

I'm really glad I built that bridge now.

The worst thing about the Underworld boss... is that I had to sacrifice my poor Guide to summon it. The only way to enter Hardmode and get half the content in the game, is to murder the most helpful of NPCs. That's pretty messed up.

A Sorcerer Emblem? The boss dropped a bloody Sorcerer Emblem? Well I'm sure that'd be awesome if I was a magic user, but I'm not, so it's entirely useless to me.

We went and sacrificed the next Guide to summon the boss again. (Hey, if our characters are evil enough to kill one innocent NPC, we might as well kill two of them.) And it dropped ANOTHER bloody Sorcerer Emblem.

So we summoned it a third time. Well we tried to anyway, but apparently the new Guide hasn't shown up in town yet so the voodoo doll didn't work. It seems there's been fewer people applying for the job after the last two Guides exploded.

But activating Hardmode worked! We have summoned Christmas! Well actually we've summoned the Frost Legion, an army of knife-wielding snowmen that broke into our base and slaughtered all our dudes. But that's kind of Christmassy.

Fortunately I used the wiring I stole from the dungeon to set up a switch-activated lava trap outside the front door, so I can at least avenge our fallen NPCs.

SANTA CLAUS!

It turns out that dooming the world to Corruption and Hallow and summoning a murderous army of snowmen was all it took to summon Father Christmas to my humble town. But sadly he'll only be around until December 31st. Then he'll apparently disappear until next Christmas.

But this STILL isn't Christmassy enough. Something's missing here.


SOME DIGGING LATER.

You know, I wasn't actually planning on releasing the lava while I was mining this new green Hardmode ore, and it'll probably cause me problems later, but that teleporting purple bastard was annoying me way too much while I was trying to work.

I've decided that I actually like this world as it is, and I'd rather not have it filled with these annoying new Hallow enemies, (or Corruption worms for that matter), so while I'm digging out ore I might as well dig myself a nice wide cavern to travel though. Let's see the Hallow cross that.

There, I made a mythril tree! Now it's really Christmas.


Terraria plays like some strange cross between Metroid, Diablo, and... I dunno, Minecraft, and is as addictive as any of them. All the time I spent being harassed by increasingly annoying enemies while trying to get stuff done just made me more determined to keep digging up better gear so I could kill the bastards faster.

As I can't think of anything else quite like it, I'll go ahead and say that the game is probably the best there is at what it does, and therefore I must shower it with well deserved awards.