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 Let me just quote the OP from the games thread... Terraria is a 2D building-adventure game by Andrew “Redigit” Spinks where you fight monsters, craft armor, tools, weaponry, and other goodies to build yourself a giant, phallic home to call your own. It was released on May 16th, 2011 and is currently  on Steam. Go get it, it’s loving awesome.2D building-adventure game? It's a 2D game where the world is comprised of individual tiles. Tiles that you can dig up and relocate, in order to build structures. There are also a lot of monsters to fight, and they have loot that you will probably want to grab and then use to kill more monsters. Imagine if Minecraft and a Castlevania game had a child, and you start to get the idea. The game came out 6 years ago, and it has received three major updates since then, not to mention the numerous smaller updates. The last massive update was patch 1.3, which came out in June of 2015. The last small update came out on Sept 9th, 2016 - 17 days ago as of the time this OP was written. Sounds great and all, but what kind of LP is this going to be? This is going to be a tutorial LP, done in screenshot style. I've started up a new character on a new empty world just for the LP. The goal will be to show off the general progression of the game, and to cover as much content as is humanly possible. This game does have a very definite end point, and we will get there. Spoilers? Please none, if possible. There's a thread in games if you need to talk about something we haven't seen yet. I also encourage people who both have and have not played before to create a character and play along with the LP! You do have the game, right? If not you should click on a link and get it. Updates: Something I want to point out for future readers is that all of the update titles are song names. You can click on the little asterisk here in the table of contents to listen to the song. You can also click on the title itself in the update to hear it as well. Normal Mode: #1 - Small, Small World * #2 - When the Sun Goes Down * #3 - Brand New Day * #4 - My Town * #5 - Sixteen Tons * #6 - Even Flow * #7 - Walk Like an Egyptian * #8 - On Top of the World * #9 - Weapon of Choice * #10 - Eyes on Me * #11 - Crimson and Clover * #11.5 - This is Halloween * #12 - Foolish Pride * #13 - Heartbreaker * #14 - Through the Fire and Flames * #14.5 - The Man Who Sold the World * * #15 - Snake Eater * #16 - Welcome to the Jungle * #17 - Bat out of Hell * #18 - Cold as Ice * #19 - Love in an Elevator * #20 - Earth Temple * #21 - All Along the Watchtower * #22 - Honey Bee * #23 - Tribute * #24 - Now That's What I Call Polka! * #25 - Another Brick in the Wall * Hard Mode: #26 - Gone Guru * #27 - Magic Dance * #28 - Goblins! * #29 - Werewolves of London * #30 - Entry of the Gladiators * #31 - Shiver my Timbers * #32 - The Trooper * #33 - Stones * #34 - Jungle Boogie * #35 - Tarzan Boy * #36 - One Night in Bangkok * #37 - The Big Boom * #38 - Monster Mash * #39 - Mars Forever * #40 - The Night Santa Went Crazy * #41 - Dangerous Raid * #42 - I'm Your Moon * #43 - Cult of Personality * #44 - It's the End of the World * #45 - Interstice of the Dimension * #46 - Hopes and Dreams Save the World * LogicalFallacy fights Expert Mode Eye of Cthulhu DoubleNegative fucked around with this message at 06:18 on Jan 21, 2017 |
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Sep 28, 2016 02:46
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#1 - Small, Small, World Welcome everyone to this Terraria tutorial LP. We're going to jump forward a bit at the start and skip character and world creation. There are very specific reasons for that, so just bear with me for now, alright?  So here we have three characters. First is a techno Madoka Kaname with a halo and sweet shades. Below her is a wizard wearing a trenchcoat. Finally below the wizard is our I've omitted the two previous character names because they're not relevant. Also because both have the same (lovely) name and I don't want my shame being known. The wizard doesn't have a playtime listed because she's my character from 2013 and was created before the game tracked individual playtimes. But trust me when I say she has probably a similar playtime to miss 76-and-a-quarter hours up top. You might also notice that Sam has 80% less HP and 90% less MP than either character. That will change before too long, though. Finally, all three characters have the term "softcore" which means that dying incurs the least severe penalty. There are also mediumcore and hardcore "difficulty" modes. Softcore characters drop a portion of their money on death. Mediumcore causes you to drop absolutely everything in your inventory, in addition to the portion of money. Finally hardcore just deletes the character when it dies. The mediumcore and hardcore "difficulties" are not fun, and in my opinion, anyone that argues otherwise is merely deluding themselves.  Here we have our selection of worlds. Refreshing and Opposites are my two old (and thoroughly endgame) worlds. Rivershire is the world that we will be using for the LP. The different colors on the trees mean different things, but that will be explained in the future. For now just take note that Rivershire is green and red, while the other two are green, purple, and yellow. All three worlds are large. When you create a new world, you can select between three different sizes, small, medium, and large. For a good rule of thumb, large worlds are twice as wide and twice as deep as small ones, with medium sized fitting in between. Some people might claim that you should never play solo on a large world. These people hate fun. Finally I want to stress something very important. If you are new to the game, do not make an expert mode world! Expert mode assumes you know how to play the game already, and adjusts the difficulty accordingly. Early game monsters will kill you in one hit. This LP will not be done in expert mode. gently caress expert mode. So do you have all that? No? Don't worry too awful much about it. For now let's just hit play on Rivershire and jump into the game.  (click for big)Terraria Music - Day Normally I'm going to chop up every screenshot for visibility's sake, and to highlight what I'm specifically pointing out. But in this one case I have shrunk the scene to show you everything. This is our first glance at the world of Rivershire. If you haven't already, be sure to click on the picture above for a better look at it. I can already point out seven things to talk about from that one image alone, so let's work our way down the list, shall we?  Sam is in the middle of the scene, surrounded on either side by trees. These aren't decorative, either. Before too long, we'll be engaging in that age old practice of deforestation in order to build our first hovel.  A little to the left of Sam and underground we can see a mineral deposit peeking out of the ground. This is copper ore, and it is the most basic ore in the game. We'll find quite a bit more as the game goes on, but it's nice to see some on the surface.  Over to the right of Sam is an NPC wandering around. This is our Guide, and his name is Garrett. The Guide basically functions as the tutorial, and he is incredibly handy to have around even into the very end of the game. He's also standing in front of some mushrooms, which are a common resource we will need to find periodically throughout the game. They grow at random, but just by randomly wandering around the surface we'll find more than we'll ever need.  Here's what our expanded inventory looks like. We've got 40 slots for storage, and an additional 10 for our hotbar up top. 50 slots fills up a lot faster than you might think it does. This will be one of our biggest woes throughout the LP. But for now, all we're interested in are the three items up at the top left.    In the upper left corner of the screen, in the hotbar, we have a sword, a pickaxe, and a regular axe. Our sword is apparently a legendary weapon, our pickaxe is a piece of garbage, and our regular axe has no special stats whatsoever. It's worth noting that even though our pickaxe is "damaged," it's still perfectly usable as a tool. So if we wanted to excavate the copper ore, it would do a perfectly adequate, if slow, job. Anyway, let's walk over and talk to Garrett and introduce ourself.  Clicking the "Help" button will display another tutorial prompt. While it's tempting to have Garrett do my job for me, we'll just move on.  He does have this tip that's worth showing off, however. Other than just randomly clicking around in your inventory, this is pretty much the only time the game will tell you how to do something. Terraria is one of those "play with the wiki open" type of games. We're gonna leave Garrett standing around and start off by walking to the left first.   A short distance into the trip and we encounter our first enemy. This is a green slime, the first enemy you're likely to encounter in the game.  Our "legendary" shortsword is not a particularly good weapon. The reach is pathetic, and all it's good for is stabbing a short distance in front of you. We're gonna be replacing this thing ASAP. But otherwise, this is what combat is like in Terraria. We run up to an enemy and stab them to death, and if we're good enough, we can dodge their attacks in return. It's also kind of difficult to see in the gif, but the slime dropped 2 coppers and 1 gel for us. Terraria uses the standard copper/silver/gold/platinum currency system. 100 copper makes 1 silver. 100 silver makes 1 gold, and so on and so forth. For the most part, money isn't really a concern in the game. There's a few points where we'll need some, but for the most part money woes are restricted to the super early game and possibly the super late game. Anyway, the trees around here are nice and tall, so this is as good a place as any to start our deforestation campaign.  Chopping down a tree is as simple as selecting your axe on the hotbar and just holding down the left mouse button over the tree. This tall fellow gave us 25 pieces of wood and 2 acorns. You can probably guess what the wood is for, but acorns are used to replant trees that we've cut down. No reason to be greedy, after all. We're gonna be stuck on this world for a very long time to come, so may as well let the trees grow back. Anyway, we spend the next few minutes chopping down trees. I finally stop when we have 256 pieces of wood.   Over to the left some more, we find some some very interesting things. First off, there are three pots sitting out on top of the ground. Pots are one-time goody bags, basically. They most often contain money, but can hold a large number of objects inside. The one in front of us held 1 silver and 42 copper coins. More importantly, there is a supermassive tree right in our path, with a blatantly obvious tunnel leading down into the ground beneath it. Worlds will typically have one or two large trees on the surface, but a tree in this style is not common at all. The tunnel leading underground means that there are special items down below that you can only get from one of these trees. We'll grab those later. It's also worth pointing out that these large trees can't be cut down by axes. These are actually a structure in the world, and as such, must be deconstructed by our pickaxe. So, we'll just make the tunnel nice and even and continue on to loot the two pots on the other side. One held some shurikens, and the other a Recall Potion. Shurikens are our first throwing weapon, and are pretty powerful for the first part of the game. We'll hold onto those for a rainy day. The recall potion is a one-use item that will teleport us back to our spawn point. Once we have a base set up, an item like this is invaluable for getting back quickly. Using it right now would just teleport us back over to where Garrett is still pacing back and forth. So, like with the shurikens, I'll just hang onto it.  This small pond is just left of the giant tree, and it marks as far as I really want to explore this way for the moment. The sun is almost directly overhead, and we really want to have a shelter set up before night falls.  We're now just over to the right of where we started. This pot, by the way, contained some torches. These will be super invaluable in the very near future. I also think this is a perfect opportunity to demonstrate building. It's very simple. All you have to do is pick what building material you want to use, and then use the mouse pointer to pick where you want to lay it down, and go from there.  You can see just how easy it was to build a bridge from just 9 planks of wood. Now we won't have to worry about falling into that small pit anymore, which will make traversing the overworld that much easier in the future.  I find that most worlds tend to have some sunflowers somewhere near the spawn point. These things subtly glow in the dark and provide a small movement speed bonus when you're nearby. They also have another hidden feature that we won't get into right now.  This large-yet-small tree marks the end of our expedition to the right. The pot directly in front of us held some rope. I'll cover what that does later, but for now just keep in mind that it's absolutely invaluable through most of the game. Never leave home without a lot of rope in your inventory!  We stopped briefly to pick up a couple sunflowers for future use, but we're now back over to the left, on top of the hill where we fought that first slime. This is as good a spot as any to build our first house. But first, we need to do some landscaping.  The land is nice and flat now. Perfect for building a small hut.   It's not pretty, but it's serviceable enough.  Next we need to make a makeshift door. Now, if you'll think back a bit, you may remember that Garrett mentioned something called a workbench. He told us something about a crafting menu and wood, but I think it's high time we learned how all that works.  Allow me to draw attention to Garrett's "Crafting" dialogue option. Selecting this opens up our inventory.  We're starting to get quite a lot of items taking up space. I also have no idea where I got the gold coin. I assume one of the many green slimes I've squashed dropped it.  Down at the bottom of our inventory screen is a scrolling list of items. There's also a box at the top with the label "Place a material here." What we want to do is drop our stack of wood on that box.  This changes the scrolling list at the bottom to display every recipe in the game that uses wood as an ingredient. This is Garrett's primary use throughout the game! If you pick up an item and don't know what it does? Toss it at your Guide and he'll tell you what to do. Now, I don't know about you, but a scrolling list is pretty unwieldy. Wood is used in a metric shitton of recipes, so finding the one you want can be a pain in the neck. But the designers thought of that! Do you see that little hammer icon above the 337 pieces of wood? If you click on that, it changes the way the list is displayed.  This is still kind of unwieldy, but it at least lets you see all the objects at once. This is all 109 recipes in the game that use regular wood as an ingredient. You can mouse over each item and the game will tell you what they are, and when you find the one you want, you can then click on it and the game will show you what it takes to craft.  In this case, the basic workbench takes 10 regular wood to craft, and no special crafting station. We can cover that pretty comfortably, so let's build us a workbench. Crafting is just as simple as navigating the scrolling menu and picking what you want to build. You don't have to arrange the wood in a certain pattern or anything convoluted like that, you just have to have enough pieces and you can build it. The game is even nice enough to attach what you built to your mouse cursor for quick use.  Placing furniture is just as easy as building. We'll leave our workbench outside for aesthetic purposes.  The sun is beginning to set, so I've taken all 3 of the torches we got out of that pot earlier and placed them around to illuminate the area better. Now, our house is nice and all, but it seems more like an empty shell than a house. What we need are some walls.  Terraria unfortunately requires us to craft our walls manually. We get 4 wall panels per piece of wood we spend, and we'll need a lot of wooden wall pieces for our house.  The game is kind enough to let us craft in bulk quickly. Just by holding the right mouse button down over top of a craftable, stackable item, we can quickly build as many as we want. In this case I make 168, which is a good starting point.  Now, we want to quickly and efficiently place these walls down. So it's time to introduce another neat feature the game has: the smart cursor. By pressing the left control button, the game turns on the smart cursor tool. It's easier to show what it does than it is to explain, so take a look.  We overshot our goal by a bit, but that's fine. Look at how quickly we just placed the walls in our house. It's looking a lot more sturdy now. The smart cursor will also automatically dig holes in front of (or underneath) us if we hold the left mouse button down with the pickaxe selected. Just use the mouse cursor to direct what direction you want to dig and the game will do the rest. It's pretty handy, and I use the tool extensively while playing.   I quickly make a door (6 wood pieces) and place it in the convenient 3-high hole in the wall. With the door in place, our house is looking a lot better than it did not 20 seconds ago. But now we need to entice Garrett to move in to the house. But how?  Over on the right side of our inventory screen is this UI element. I'll cover what these all do later on, but for now we're concerned with what I'm pointing at with the mouse. This is the housing tool, and we will be using this extensively throughout the game.  The housing tool will show every NPC we've recruited, as well as the query tool. By the way, we can recruit NPCs to come live with us. Garrett is just the first of approximately 20 possible tenants. Clicking on an NPC's face will let you assign them a particular room. We're more concerned with the query tool right now, though. Using it is as simple as clicking on our newly built house.  The bottom of the screen will then tell you what you need to make the structure livable. In this case, we need a seat and a table. It will also tell you if you don't have adequate lighting inside. Otherwise it will just say "This housing is not viable." without explaining why. The biggest candidates why it would say that are 1) you're using a naturally occurring backwall, or 2) the house is too small. A distant 3 would be that the housing is too large. I find that the small rectangular room that I've built here is about the right size. Using this approximate size, I've never had a problem with housing.  A quick trip to the workbench and we now have a table (8 pcs. wood) and a chair. (4 pcs.) Garrett has also automatically taken notice of the house and will lazily make his way over to it.  Before we end the update for today, we have one last tool to cover. The hammer takes 8 pieces of wood to build, and is used to demolish backwalls.  I'm sure that was bothering some of you. I know it was bothering me!  I've taken the liberty of demolishing the dirt backwalls where the hill used to be. Now the land looks much nicer. As a bonus, Garrett has finally walked over to inspect his new house.  Stocking up on torches. We're going to need a lot of these over the course of the game. At least they're cheap enough to make! (1 gel + 1 wood = 3 torches) I built 54 of them, using up all the gel we've accumulated so far.  Finally, this will prove useful in the coming minutes.  I think that's a good place to leave off, don't you? NEXT TIME: Terraria By Night DoubleNegative fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Dec 8, 2016 |
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Sep 28, 2016 02:47
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CptWedgie posted:I've heard good things about this game. Guess it's time to see what the fuss is about. To answer your questions in order... 1) Yes! You can totally use a workbench as a table for housing purposes. I like to condense all the crafting stations in a single place, though. Which is why I left it outside for now. 2) According to the wiki, the absolute smallest that a house can go is 60 tiles. That includes the outer shell and the interior stuff as well. Consequently, the absolute largest that a room can go before it's "too big" is 750 tiles. 3) Legendary is the best possible modifier that a melee weapon can roll. Unfortunately for us, a legendary shortsword is about as useful as a toothpick, and deals about that much damage. Until we're about a third of the way through the game, modifiers are mostly going to be a "well that's nice" sort of thing. It isn't until then that we'll actually gain the ability to modify weapons and tools ourselves.
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Sep 28, 2016 04:33
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CptWedgie posted:I'd ask about the other crafting stations, but that'd be spoilers, I bet. Sound about right? You can kinda intuit what some of the other crafting stations are. The big three certainly aren't spoilers to mention at all: workbench, forge, and anvil. With those three together, you can make the vast majority of items in the game. The rest of the crafting stations have incredibly specialized use cases, but the collector in me likes to have them all in one gigantic workshop. Kemix posted:I tend to veer towards small homes for my NPCs, like around 4-5 tiles high and 10 wide, as well as making a large underground area to make all the stuff at. Along with holding ALL THE THINGS. I'm a fuckin hoarder. DON'T LOOK AT MEEEEEEEEE! Hey, half the fun of collecting all the treasure and stuff you can find is hoarding it like a dragon.
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Sep 28, 2016 06:27
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Lazy Bear posted:Without getting spoilery, how much emphasis is this LP going to place on... large landscaping/bridge-building projects? Those in the know might know what I mean here, but will the LP go into details about what strategies are best for a given preparation? Let's just say that I'm a fan of having a flat surface to run across in case I felt like running from one end of the map to the other for whatever reason. I'm also a fan of massive vanity building projects for no other reason than because I can. Anyway, regarding the wiki: I like to have it open as a reference for when I'm doing stuff. It's easier to do some quick napkin math on the wiki so you know that you'll need another 38 ingots of copper ore, versus running back to the base every time I need to check something. Quick edit: Next update will be on Friday. I'm aiming for every three days.
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Sep 29, 2016 02:25
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Tunahead posted:Hey OP, is this tutorial gonna go mostly into mechanical progression, or will you also be giving tips on making cool houses? As a non-creative type, I struggle a lot with breaking the curse of the box fortress. I too struggle with breaking the curse of the box fortress. The Soviet efficiency apartments are so easy to construct that it's what I wind up going with most of the time. CptWedgie posted:Speaking of aesthetics, though, when's the OP gonna redo the floor on his house? That dirt floor doesn't really go with the rest of it. Tomorrow's update is all about nighttime, combat, and self-defense. After that I'm gonna start abstracting things more. So expect changes regarding the actual base starting this coming Monday. Finally, regarding home defense... this is kind of a spoiler for a couple updates from now, but this is what the home base looks like at the end of how far I have recorded. If you don't want to click on that, I'm a firm believer in "if they can't get in, then there's no problem" school of defense. So the entrance to bases I make is always at least one floor up where random passerby zombies can't get in. EDIT: If you're playing along, feel free to share your bases here. If there's NPCs or something we haven't seen yet, just hide it behind a link like I did. I like seeing what other people build in this game, it's why the "other people's houses" section of the games thread is so long. 
DoubleNegative fucked around with this message at 19:21 on Sep 29, 2016 |
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Sep 29, 2016 19:18
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#2 - When the Sun Goes Down Welcome to our first evening in Rivershire. Garrett has decided he has something important to do off to the right and has wandered off that way. Once the sun finishes setting, he'll come back to his house and stay put for the night. Staying indoors at night had to be coded into the NPC AI behaviors. Early versions of the game had the Guide cheerfully opening the door at night and letting in the lurking horrors. Players would have to block NPCs in their homes at night by placing blocks in front of the doors so they couldn't get out. It was quite a mess. For a very long time people resented the Guide.  The reason that players resented their Guides for opening the doors at night is that nighttime in Terraria worlds is incredibly dangerous. The daytime is rather mild, where typically the most dangerous thing you might fight on the surface is a slime passively bouncing around. The things that come out once the sun goes down are incredibly aggressive, and will actively chase you around. Also demonstrated here is holding a torch in front of you for light. Light sources are at a premium in this game, and torchlight will probably be our go-to for a frustratingly long time to come.  Torches can be attached to any foreground object, as well as anywhere on a backwall. I find that there's little reason to not illuminate the area around your home. It helps you see better at night, and it looks kind of nice too.  Before the day completely turned to night, we've successfully placed torches all the way over to the "smaller" large tree we saw in the previous update. Having so much of the area illuminated will help us tonight. Some people like to hide in their houses at night and hope that the horrors go away. Not us, though. We're going to spend the night fighting.  Like so. This also marks the point where day officially became night. How can I tell? Well it's simple, really... Terraria Music - Night Night is one of the themes you're going to be hearing most often in the game, so give it a listen. I rather like it.  Anyway, we head back to the house and wait for the first guests to arrive. According to the wiki, daytime in Terraria lasts for 15 minutes, from pre-dawn at 4:30 AM until sunset 7:30 PM. Night lasts another 9 minutes on top of that. Also, do you see that over to the left? No? Well let me pan the camera a little...  Still nothing? Why don't we head over to investigate...  This shot is really dark, and I apologize for that. But there is something in this shot on a collision course for Sam here. So let's just retreat back to the house to regroup and fight it with some better lighting.  This is the first of the nighttime enemies, the Demon Eye. This fellow here has 44 HP, and he takes off somewhere between 14 and 15 HP when he hits us.  While (poorly) fighting the demon eye, I hear a distinct sound several times followed by something hitting the ground nearby. This is a fallen star, and we definitely should go out of our way to collect as many of these as we can. I'll show off what these are used for later on when we have more. But for now we want to grab as many as we can.  No sooner does the demon eye die when the other nighttime enemy shows up in the torchlight. This is a zombie, and this is the second one we've seen so far. The first one was in that dark screenshot I showed earlier.  This, folks, is our "legendary" copper shortsword. This weapon is absolutely worthless. We can kinda stunlock the zombie a little bit, but the damage is pitiful. If we get attacked by a demon eye, we're screwed.  So let's craft ourselves an upgrade. The wooden sword is a broadsword, and its swing arc is absolutely amazing.  The knockback leaves a little bit to be desired, but this is an improvement over the shortsword in every other conceivable way.  Look at that. We can jump around and be more mobile too. I really like the swing arc of the broadsword class melee weapons.  Something neat I like is that when this pincushion zombie died, we got a bunch of arrows as drops. Go back up and look at the previous gif and you can see that the zombie had a bunch of arrows sticking out of it. It's such a neat little touch, but it adds so much. Unfortunately, there's not a lot to say about the night. So here's some no context shots of Sam jumping around and doing stuff.    I apologize if the mouse cursor bothers anyone. The next time I record I can make sure Dxtory doesn't pick it up. Let me know if you would like me to change it.   We're actually out in these shots looking for more fallen stars.  As you can see, it's becoming rather dangerous to do so.   While we can kick rear end fairly well, the hits are starting to take a toll. Dodging is great and all, but sometimes there are simply too many enemies to dodge around. We need to be able to take more hits. But how are we going to do so?  First is by cowering in the house while our health regenerates some.  A little over halfway is good enough. Plus zombies like to beat on your doors at night, and I don't want him on the other side dealing us a hit the second we step out again.  Garrett is eager to help us defend the house from the forces of evil.   Action shots are fun, y'all.  Anyway, we eventually clear the enemies out enough that we've got a moment to breathe and regroup. So I think it's time to craft some armor.  Wooden armor is kind of expensive to craft, requiring 75 pieces of wood. (20, 30, and 25 pieces respectively)  You may remember the part of the inventory UI that had the housing tool. Well, the rightmost column is where we equip armor and accessories. The three pieces of wooden armor gives us a total of 3 defense. According to the wiki, damage taken is calculated thusly: net damage = attack - (defense * 0.5) So in our case, we're shaving off 2 points of damage from each attack because the game rounds decimals up. Defense will rise as the game goes on and we get better armor. Right now I'm taking the approach that a little mitigation is better than nothing!  As a bonus, we look a little bit like Wood Man.  I don't know what it is about this tree that attracts zombies and demon eyes so much, but at least we're in a relatively defensible position.  But just like that, the night is over. We managed to find a total of four fallen stars, so I'm happy at least. Feel free to start playing Bloody Tears here.  (Click for big)Pre-dawn is so nice in Terraria. All the nighttime monsters have fled, and the sky is just starting to light up. But, before I leave you all for this update, we have something incredibly important to do.  Combining 3 fallen stars together makes a mana crystal. This will give us another 20 mana points. They don't do us much good right at the moment, but we'll find something to use them on soon enough.  Much better. With 40 mana and a new day dawning, things are looking up.  In fact, I think it's time we expand our settlement some. NEXT TIME: A new friend. DoubleNegative fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Dec 8, 2016 |
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Sep 30, 2016 00:23
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CptWedgie posted:But anyway, I think that new sword's still not all that great. Better, yes, but not good, even for where you are. How long do you think it'll be before you get a bow of your own to shoot your new arrows with? And what do you make your own arrows with? In the next update we'll find something that's just as good as a bow, and actually deals more damage than the first several bows you can craft. As for arrows, we'll see that in the next update as well. You don't necessarily craft the regular arrows. Though you can combine arrows with torches to make fire arrows for example. CptWedgie posted:Go ye forth and deforest the planet to fuel thine plundering! ...or something. You joke, kind of, but that's actually a viable strategy for quickly getting a lot of wood. Just roll a new small world and spend a few nights depopulating the surface of all trees, then delete it, rinse, and repeat as necessary. It really never comes up, but you can freely move your character between worlds, and they will have all their weapons and armor and everything in their inventory when they pop over. DarthJeebus posted:But it doesn't really matter because the best starting weapon, IMO is a <snip> I won't be able to show off the thing you put under the tag for a while in the LP. There's an incredibly nasty area guarding the snowy bit of the map. thecluckmeme posted:You can build simple castle ramparts by alternating actual blocks and background blocks This is a really good point! To further add to it, you can create the illusion of depth by using different background blocks. Like so. (Mild spoilers for the first couple NPCs and a few crafting stations)
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Sep 30, 2016 07:41
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#3 - Brand New Day Move, slime! Get out the way. ...Anyway, welcome back to Rivershire. That slime was standing in the way of progress.  We have another house to build.  Garrett's house also needs to be moved. If an NPC's house is demolished, they just kinda wander around where it used to be until a suitable replacement is built. They don't even seem to get angry about it, so don't feel bad about changing things around as necessary.  Someone in the thread was asking when the dirt floor of Garrett's house would be replaced with solid wood. Don't worry, I wouldn't intentionally make my NPCs sleep on dirt floors.  That's one house down. It's looking pretty spiffy if I do say so myself. Not too bad for the second day, eh?  Two makes a matching set. Now the second house is ready for whenever the next NPC shows up. We've already met the requirements for the second NPC thanks to an extremely lucky drop during the first day. When he shows up later, I'll explain then.  One of the slimes I killed dropped this. You can probably take a stab at what it does, and you'd probably be right. When you're not at full health and you kill an enemy, it has a nonzero chance to drop a heart, which heals 20 HP. The wiki claims it's an 8.3% chance, for what it's worth.  After hopping around like an idiot for about a minute straight, I remembered that the gigantic tree existed, and that there was a tunnel underneath. So what do you guys say to some light spelunking?  But first, we meet another new enemy. The blue slime is slightly stronger than its green cousin, but is otherwise unremarkable.   Well that didn't take very long. This little doorway indicates that we've reached the treasure room under the tree. We're not very far under the surface, either.  For the sake of reference, there's a minimap in the upper right corner of the screen. You can kinda see Sam's head on it, showing that we're only a short ways under the ground.  It's a cute little room. In fact it could almost work as NPC housing. For whatever reason, the wood panel background doesn't count as naturally placed, so just putting a torch down made it viable. But I don't wanna have to run down here every time we want to talk to an NPC, so I'll be deconstructing the furniture. You may have also noticed the chest in front of us.  These are the contents. Starting from the left we have... 1 Leaf Wand - (Consumes 1 piece of wood to place leaves like you can see on the gigantic trees) 1 Living Wood Wand - (Consumes 1 piece of wood to place a living wood, which is what the gigantic trees are made of) 7 Tungsten Bars - (These are the third tier of metals and are a replacement for silver) 49 Shurikens - (Showing what the icon looks like) 2 Recall Potions - (Same as above) 1 Living Loom - (We can use this to create living wood furniture) When we come across a chest, I'll explain what the items are from the left hand side of the screenshot. I'll typically only explain items we haven't seen before. I suppose I should also take this time to explain the basic metal tier system. The early game has four types of metals: Copper, Iron, Silver, and Gold. During worldgen, the game can randomly replace them with equivalents. Copper becomes Tin, Iron becomes Lead, Silver becomes Tungsten, and Gold becomes Platinum. Each of the four replacement metals can be used in any recipe that calls for the original. The replacements tend to create slightly more powerful weapons, but because it's the early game, it's only a minor increase at best.  Even though we've already found the treasure hidden under the tree, there's no reason we can't explore farther down. These trees tend to connect to existing caverns, so we might find all manner of goodies down below.   Kind of a tall image, but if you look closely at the left side, you can see that we've already found two small caverns. One is completely empty, and the other has a pool of water.  Slightly again below that, we've hit paydirt. Look real closely at the left side. Do you see what I see? Because I see a closed door.  If you couldn't see the door before, you can definitely now see the wooden walls of the structure it belongs to. Let's investigate!  But before we do, the second NPC arrives. The merchant, like his name implies, sells us stuff. He arrives after you've got at least 50 silver coins in your inventory.  I see a golden chest, a bunch of cobwebs, what looks like a chandelier, and a vaguely humanoid shape. Plus there's all manner of pots, to boot. I also want to take this moment to address the torch on the right side of the screen. I messed up placing a torch in that small cavern over there and tried to pick it back up, but instead of vacuum sucking into my inventory, it fell to the ground. As you can see, torches provide light when they fall to the ground. This includes torches that you find in pots, too.  Cobwebs are pretty important to pick up. If you step into them, your character moves super slowly for a few seconds and then breaks the cobweb. This is important to keep in mind, as it means that falling into a bunch of cobwebs will arrest your fall and reset the height "counter" for the purposes of taking damage. This doesn't mean you can necessarily place them under yourself as you fall, but it's still good to keep in mind. LogicalFallacy has made a quick correction on my point about cobwebs: LogicalFallacy posted:Just want to point out real quick that cobwebs are actually not finite. There are certain areas that slowly spawn cobwebs over time. You are definitely correct in saying even without those, cobwebs are already effectively infinite.  These underground cabins, as they're called, are an excellent source of cobwebs. Also the humanoid shape we saw turned out to be a statue.  An "undead viking" statue, which sounds metal as hell.  Anyway, here's the contents of that gold chest. Again, starting from the left... 1 Magic Mirror - (Terraria veterans are calling me lucky. 77 Rope - (I still need to show off what these do) 5 Lesser Healing Potions - (Restores 50 HP when consumed*) 1 Hunter Potion - (Causes nearby enemies to show up in a bright color, can helpful while spelunking to see where nearby caves are) 2 Recall Potions - (Welp) It turns out that I was wrong in the description for the Magic Mirror. I'll let Dr. Fetus explain: Dr. Fetus posted:Wow, talk about lucky. Finding a Magic Mirror that early makes things so much more bearable. Oh, and it doesn't have a mana cost anymore. That got taken out in 1.2. There's a slight edge the Recall Potions have over the Mirror, which is that they have a slightly faster use time to transport you. The mirror has a bit of a bigger delay, but that stops mattering pretty fast. Though the potions are a lot easier to come by than the mirror, and can hold you over until then. So there you have it! The magic mirror is free and recall potions work slightly faster than the mirror. I put a little asterisk next to the description of the Lesser Healing Potion because I need to talk about one of the mechanics Terraria has. Potion Sickness. When you eat or drink a healing consumable, you get a 1 minute debuff called "Potion Sickness." This prevents you from healing using consumables for that minute. It's... While I understand why the debuff exists, it is kind of a pain in the rear end to manage. You know those mushrooms I briefly pointed out in the first update? You can eat those to regain 15 HP, which also causes potion sickness. Normally it wouldn't be a problem to eat a mushroom instead of drinking a potion, right? Well, you're half right. See, Terraria has a quick healing hotkey - H. You can tap that while in combat to use the first healing item available. The H key uses healing items on your quick select bar first, and then starts in the upper left of your inventory and goes line by line until it hits the bottom right. So if you don't micromanage where your healing potions are, you can wind up screwing yourself over in a crucial moment. It's for that reason, that I always try to keep at least 1 stack of healing potions in the upper left corner of my inventory, and all mushrooms and other useless consumables well away from the quick select bar.  Anyway, now that the chest is empty, don't forget to bring it with you. We can never have enough storage!  I also grab the tungsten chandelier for no particular reason. It looks kinda nice and really what other reason do I need? (Spoilers I have yet to hang it up.)  Just under the little mining cabin, the tree's hollow trunk opens up into a cavern. While there are several materials we haven't yet seen in the screenshot, I'm pretty sure your eyes were drawn to the odd greenish colored stuff on the left. That green ore is raw tungsten. We'll have to be back for it later when we can more easily get up to where it is.   Before we go back up to the surface, this is a demonstration of what ropes do. We can use them to safely explore high places. When you walk near rope, you can press the W or S keys to ascend or descend it. This is the reason why you should never leave home without a lot of rope in your inventory.  Yellow slimes are stronger than green or blue slimes. In fact, they're the fifth type of slime, which means that they're somewhat dangerous to us at the moment. They have 45 HP, as much as a demon eye or a zombie. Just next to the slime are some oddly shiny rocks. Those rocks are iron ore. We mine them out and then return to the surface.  The leaves surrounding that bottom branch are what we can place with the leaf wand. They don't serve a purpose aside from aesthetics, which is purpose enough for me!   Anyway, the elderly gentleman with the orange coat is our merchant, Edwin.  He's the reigning Rivershire rock-paper-scissors champion.  He's also a shameless flatterer.  Anyway, his goods are as follows. Again, from the left. Mining Helmet - 4 gold coins - (A helmet, provides a source of light, but only when worn as armor. This means it has questionable value) Piggy Bank - 1 gold coin - (Store your coins in this and they won't drop when you die. It also doubles as personal storage, and the contents are also saved to your character, so you can use piggy banks in other worlds to access your stuff) Iron Anvil - 50 silver coins - (In case you can't find enough iron/lead ore, or just want to skip looking for some) Bug Net - 25 silver coins - (Allows you to capture worms and other ambient insects to use for fishing bait) Copper Pickaxe - 5 silver coins Copper Axe - 4 silver coins Torch - 50 copper coins - (Good if you inexplicably have no wood or gel?) Lesser Healing Potion - 3 silver coins Lesser Mana Potion - 1 silver coin - (Restores 50 MP when used) Wooden Arrow - 5 copper coins (Cheap and available in infinite amounts) Shuriken - 15 copper coins Rope - 10 copper coins Sickle - 60 silver coins - (Allows you to collect hay when you cut down tall grass. Hay can be used as a building material) Anyway, we buy approximately 300 arrows, and 25 rope. We're also down to 89 pieces of wood, and we're going to need more. So time to be a lumberjack.    We're also on a roll with our spelunking, so how about a shorter trip?  The hanging vines not only block your view, they also block torch light. So you should cut them down if they get in your way.  It's not a very deep pit, but I'm never going to say no to a treasure chest.  You know the drill by now.  The first item is a doozy. This blowpipe is as powerful as a tungsten bow, and the ammo can be collected from tall grass. It's an incredibly useful find for the early game! Besides the usual suspects, (the healing potions and the recall potions) we also find a Builder Potion and some empty bottles. The builder potion increases our build range by 1 tile and increases tile placement speed by 25%. It's useful, but I can never remember that I have them. The empty bottles are used in potion brewing. We can make our own if we have sand, for what it's worth.  Lets take this late afternoon opportunity to stock up on blowgun ammo.  Past the last tree, we're entering uncharted territory.  Because we're still in the middle of the map, it's fairly boring.  Another large tree bars our path.  Just past the tree, we find a small flower. This is Daybloom, and it's the first herb most players usually find. When you chop it down, you get the herb itself, as well as some seeds you can plant. There are seven types of growable herbs, and all of them are used in various alchemy recipes. So we'll just hang onto the Daybloom seeds until we get a future NPC who will allow us to grow stuff more easily.  This purple slime is two steps below the yellow, and just above the blue. It's the strongest slime you can find on the surface, which isn't really saying a lot.  I take the opportunity to pelt it with seeds.  Yet another new item! This is the yellow marigold, and it is used to create dyes. We can't make them yet, but looting the item will help partially qualify us for the associated NPC.  You can see from the screenshots that it's getting darker, so this is really as far as I want to explore for now. But there's a whole bunch of pots and a chest to ease the "sting" of turning back.  While there are a bunch of familiar items, we still have some strangers in the group. 1 Umbrella - (Having this equipped in your hotbar causes you to fall slowly, like Mary Poppins. Of debatable usefulness.) 5 Grenades - (Just finding these qualifies us for yet another new NPC. We need to build them a home first.) 7 Copper Bars - (Like copper ore, but in bar form) Before we head back, I want to give a sneak preview of something...  Despite my minimap covering up part of it, there's a reason we're not going farther right for the time being. That there is the Crimson, and it's absolutely nowhere that a newbie like us wants to be. So let's just go back home instead.  Night falls so quickly.  But before you know it, we're back home.  With no outward-facing doors, we're a little safer than we were last night. Plus two NPCs means potentially twice the killing power.  Before I go, I want to quickly mention that there's a world map feature. You can press the M button to see the world as far as you've explored it.  You can even zoom in and out. The world map also helpfully shows you where all your NPCs are. Here's another shot of the Crimson from earlier. That red is awfully foreboding...  When I say you can zoom out, I'm not kidding. This is as far out as you can possibly zoom, which shows us the entire game map, and our relative position. That's an awful lot of undiscovered land out there...  As a parting shot, here's our inventory. We need to organize pretty badly. NEXT TIME: More Home Improvement. Just without Tim Allen or power tools. (Also no, I'm not intentionally splitting this between day and night. I promise that the next update will cover more than 15 minutes of playtime, though.) DoubleNegative fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Dec 8, 2016 |
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Oct 2, 2016 23:01
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Cador_2004 posted:Also, will there be any form of Multiplayer involved with this or will you be demonstrating the game from start to finish in Singleplayer? I want to show off multiplayer stuff, but I have yet to decide exactly how I want to handle it. Some boss fights and events in the mid-late game can be bastards solo, so that might be a good time. I'll work it out at some point! CptWedgie posted:That blowpipe looks REALLY handy. I mean, reasonable power, ranged attacks, and easy-to-acquire ammo? Lethal joke weapon! By the way, can you, hypothetically speaking, use plantable seeds as ammo, or is it just the seeds you get from grass? And how does it compare to the shuriken, statistically speaking? You can't use plantable seeds as ammo, but tall grass grows constantly over time, so you'll never really run out before you finally outgrow the blowpipe. The shuriken has better damage and pierces through targets. I'm saving them for the boss fights. And yes, ALL THE CHESTS. You want as much storage as is humanly possible. I mean, look at the state of our inventory after one and a half days. Storage space is one of the most important things you can have. LogicalFallacy posted:Just want to point out real quick that cobwebs are actually not finite. There are certain areas that slowly spawn cobwebs over time. You are definitely correct in saying even without those, cobwebs are already effectively infinite. I didn't realize they grew back in that area. To be fair, I usually have to go well out of my way to hunt the area down, and when I do find it, I'm typically only there to get one thing.
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Oct 3, 2016 00:59
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I've edited the corrections from Dr. Fetus and LogicalFallacy into the update. Don't be afraid to correct me on things I've gotten wrong! As long as you're not being a dick about it, I'll happily edit in the corrected info with a credit.
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Oct 3, 2016 02:09
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Are you labeling your chests with the tiles underneath? Because that's pretty clever. Lache posted:Seriously, hell of a roll you got with those two finds. It'll be interesting to see what crimson is. Also, seeing as you're burrowing in a few different directions all at once, do you have any plans to (minor construction tactic spoiler)build a hellevator at some point? To give a non-spoilery answer, yes. To elaborate... Yes, but not until after I've gone into the dungeon. I wanna find the shadow key first. Digging the hellevator might also be the first time I recruit some help, because digging a 5-6 wide tunnel clear down through the map, and then walling it off and adding safety ropes takes ages by yourself.
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Oct 4, 2016 02:51
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#4 - My Town Hello there, I didn't hear you come in. Welcome back to Rivershire! I'm bringing you tomorrow's update early.  So what do you think about expanding even more? But not outward. No, we're going up. But first we're going to need to make some scaffolding.  It ain't pretty, but scaffolding is always a function over form thing anyway. We just gotta be able to jump to the second floor.  Like so! This new block that we're placing down is called a platform. We've seen them before, in the tree last time. These are another in the "incredibly handy to have while spelunking" category of items. They are super cheap to make: 1 piece of wood creates 2 platforms. You can walk on top of them freely, but if you tap the S button while on them, you drop right through! We won't be doing it here, but you can also use platforms to create doorless rooms for NPCs. As long as the entire floor isn't made of them, you can use them as the "doors" for an NPC's dwelling. Some people use this to create tiny coffins for their poor tenants, rooms that are just barely wide enough for a chair and a workbench side-by-side.  The shell of the second floor is mostly done! We just need an easy way in and out, and I think I have just the thing...  Wheeee! Anyway, the upper floor is gonna need some special wall tiles, and I know just where to find them. So we'll just tear down the scaffolding and make our way back underground.    The planked wall has a nice look to it. Kind of like what you would find in a cellar. It's not exactly appropriate for the second floor of our clubhouse, but it'll do right now.  Looking pretty sharp if I do say so myself. Sure the second floor is defying every law of physics simultaneously, but that's part of the charm. Anyway, we're going to need some more wood for furniture. So I'm going to go collect that. I'll spare you all the trip, because nobody needs to see yet more screenshots of me cutting down trees.  While I was out, the traveling merchant showed up. He has a 1-in-4 chance of showing up each day, provided we have at least two NPCs. So let's go see what he's offering.  Bohemas is apparently admiring our handiwork.  poo poo, that's too rich for our blood. Anyway, I briefly mentioned it last time, but fishing is indeed a thing in this game. We can make a simple wooden fishing pole, so we don't really need this monstrosity. Not yet, at least. even if it is the third best fishing pole in the game Anyway, the other stuff he has for sale right now is... DPS Meter - 5 Gold coins - (Displays your DPS on the right side of the screen) Portable Cement Mixer - 10 Gold coins - (Increases wall placement speed. INCREDIBLY useful, but we can't afford it) Chalice - 50 silver coins - (  It... looks... nice?)Extendo Grip - 10 Gold coins - (Increases tile reach. Like the cement mixer, incredibly useful to have, but we can't afford it) Stopwatch - 5 Gold coins - (Displays your movement speed on the right side of the screen) We can't afford anything but the decorative chalice, so Bohemas can linger in the empty upstairs apartment all he likes.  So you know what our little fortress-clubhouse needs? Actual tree bark for walls. This is the use of the Living Wood Wand that we found last time.  We've even got a little balcony entrance. Now it's time to show off another useful feature of the hammer. You see those rough stairs next to the door? What if I told you that we could smooth them out?  You can smack any block with the hammer to change its shape. In the case of jagged stair-like edges, you can smack it twice to create a smooth slope.  It looks much nicer as a result. Now, we need to be able to get in and out of the base. But the ledge we're standing on is just barely high enough that a zombie could jump up. So we're left with a slight dilemma. It's time to set up some defenses!  First we clear out the nearby trees and use the pickaxe on the first couple layers of soil. This makes the balcony above impossible to reach from the ground. You can see on the mouse pointer the solution for getting in. Enemies in this game can't use ropes, which makes the base all but impregnable by ground assault.  Using the leaf wand, we also make the base start to look like a particularly squat tree.   Now for the second part of the defenses. Thanks to a weird quirk of the jumping system, we're just barely able to get out. Any hostile creatures that wind up down there aren't likely to be so lucky.  Now for the other important part of having a permanent base. We need item storage and badly!  On the right side of the menu for chests is the option to rename them. This is new as of a few months ago!  I give it a slightly more appropriate name. This chest is gonna hold all the wood and dirt and sand and whatever else we find that we can build stuff with. The next three chests are for Potions and Ingredients, Minerals, and Everything Else. The minerals chest will hold ore, bars, and gemstones.  As the third day draws to a close, our little wooden base is starting to look more and more like a tree. Something else happens as well...  Terraria Soundtrack Vol. 2 - Rain It starts to rain. I've also swapped to the official Re-Logic bandcamp pages instead of random youtube videos. There are unmarked spoilers for the tracks on these pages, so be aware that you might be spoiled for all kinds of stuff if you click through. Anyway, raining is mostly a cosmetic thing. Certain things do happen in the rain, but right now none of it affects us.  No sooner is the next room completed when...  Seriously. It was less than 5 seconds before he showed up.  Kind of a short fellow, but we won't hold that against him.  As you might expect, the Demolitionist is the NPC we qualified for when we found that grenade last time.  Grenade - 75 Copper coins - (60 Throwing Damage, doesn't destroy tiles) Bomb - 3 Silver coins - (Small explosion. Destroys a few tiles. Probably will kill you if you are caught in the blast) Dynamite - 20 Silver coins - (Large explosion. Destroys tiles*. Also 60% cheaper than it used to be) Dynamite is a special case for the "destroys tiles" description. Specifically it will destroy everything that isn't explicitly marked as explosion proof. Containers with items inside are explicitly explosion proof. Anyway, we don't buy any of his goods... yet. There will be a time in the not too distant future where we will be well acquainted with Dolgen and his goods.  Here we're walking out into the wilderness to take advantage of one of Terraria's quirks. See, Dolgen can't use ropes either. So he's currently trapped outside of our clubhouse.  But if we go a couple screens away at night and then return to the base...  Oh, right. During rainstorms, zombies will wear raincoats. They even have a nonzero chance to drop either the coat or hat for us.  Anyway, we're back at home and Dolgen has magically transported up to his new room. How? Why? Well, leaving your base specifically at night and walking away for a couple screens causes the game to teleport every NPC to where they're supposed to be.  I take this opportunity to make the left side of our base as equally unreachable as the right portion.  Because we're using so much living wood otherwise, no reason we can't set up the Living Wood Loom to see what else we can make.  But before we do, take a look at this. During rainstorms, goldfish will get up out of their ponds and walk around.  Living wood walls sound good, right?  It has kind of a wooden fence look. I like it.  So how about living leaf walls?  I really like that look. As a bonus, the chill from the nighttime rain is kept out.  Now tell me that doesn't look warm and cozy. It ain't the prettiest base ever made, but it's ours. And that's also enough for now. NEXT TIME: Caves! Mining! Spelunking! Lots of torches! DoubleNegative fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Dec 8, 2016 |
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Oct 5, 2016 02:30
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Jagged Jim posted:Good grief, first the Magic Mirror then a Sitting Duck's Fishing Pole? I've never had the Traveling Merchant sell one in all my games. Where the hell are you getting all this luck from? (Yes I know you couldn't afford it, but it's the principle of the thing dammit!  As of this morning's recording, I still don't have enough ore to make the best pre-boss armor. So all my good luck is going to item drops instead of the useful stuff.
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Oct 5, 2016 03:16
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mauman posted:I made an infinite liquid generator (water/lava). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-frFd9u0CGU
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Oct 6, 2016 13:48
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#5 - Sixteen Tons Welcome back to Rivershire. Last time was the end of the first bit of recorded footage, so I decided to throw in what the loading screen looks like. It's just some text and a number that goes from 0-100%. I recorded this particular batch of playtime a week ago, so you'll forgive me if I don't remember specifics.  So you might be wondering why we spawn here instead of in our base. You may not recognize it without all the gigantic trees around, but this is where we initially spawned into the world several updates back. There is a way to change your spawn location, but it requires stuff we don't yet have. Let's fix that, shall we?   This little pond marks the edge of how far we've previously explored. So everything to the left from here is uncharted territory. Exciting, huh? Also take a look at the weird bush in front of us. You wouldn't know it to look at it, but that is a dye plant.  I'm sure you remember a couple updates back when I briefly discussed dyes, and mentioned that the Yellow Marigold partially qualified us for the associated NPC. This Strange Plant is the actual key. He'll show up in a little bit, but the Dye Trader only spawns when three conditions are met: 1) You must have an empty house 2) You must have found a Strange Plant OR 2) You must have beaten one of the first four bosses and finally 3) You must have a material used to craft dye in your inventory. Strange Plants count for this purpose. So really, Strange Plants are the key here. The dyes that they create tend to be bizarre. We'll find a bunch of Strange Plants as we journey throughout Rivershire, and I'll be sure to show off their various effects as we turn them into dyes.  Let's continue on. There's a much deeper pond just a little farther to the left from the smaller one. This would have stopped our explorations had the last one not. But we're now better equipped to deal with what we'll find this way, so some water won't stop us now.  Terraria is a game where you need to think laterally about the challenge in front of you. Sure you could meticulously jump up nigh-impossible cliff faces, or you could just build a staircase, or place a rope instead.  Well this cave is a bust. If there's anything down there, it's out of our reach for right now. We're not a very good swimmer. In fact, we don't "swim" so much as "sink."  While replenishing my stocks of wood for the journey ahead, the largest annoyance of rainy days in Terraria comes to harass me. Flying fish are unusually aggressive enemies. They don't have a lot of health or defenses, and most any weapon will make short work of them. So they're never really dangerous - just annoying as hell.  I'm not sure why it got so dark. Daytime will last for many hours yet to come. Anyway, because the lower path is a dud, I've elected to build a second bridge to help with the flow of movement.  As we continue even more to the left, the Dye Trader arrives back at the base. It'll be a while yet before we can properly welcome him, so he'll have plenty of opportunity to move into his new dwelling.  Yet another large tree blocks our path. There sure are a lot of these things in the world.  As though there were any doubt how I was going to handle getting past the tree. The Ironskin Potion increases our defense by 8 points, which if you remember the math, means we will shave off 4 additional points of damage from an attack. These are super handy for boss fights, and we'll be holding onto this for just that reason.  This imposing cliff will mark the end of our journey to the left. But we're not done exploring yet. This particular spot continues downward. This spot incredibly likely to be a cave entrance.  This small area under the cliff is mostly empty except for some pots containing the usual suspects.  Shall we?  Determining which canyons and valleys on the surface lead to a cavern isn't an exact science. After a while you kind of get a feel for it. Some otherwise unassuming pits in the ground can lead to astonishingly large caverns.  The way this one keeps going down is an incredibly good sign. If it were a shallow cave, it definitely would have ended before now.  We're just getting started and already we've found some treasure!   The Spear is a better weapon, damage-wise, than our wooden sword. It can be harder to use, though. The only new item is the green potion, which is a Swiftness Potion. It increases our movement speed by 25%.  I tried to get a gif of poking this slime to death, but it was much too large. But the spear is a poking weapon with a very long reach. It's kind of difficult to use correctly, but you can indefinitely juggle a group of enemies if you know what you're doing. It also pierces through anything you hit with it, which is what lets you juggle so many enemies.  You can tell we're in an actual cave now because of the abundance of iron ore everywhere.  Until we get an early game accessory, it can also be quite difficult to mine things on the ceiling. So we have to, again, think outside of the box.  This next chest has two new items.  This is the first magic weapon most players are likely to find. It's not bad, but quickly gets outclassed by everything else. The other new item are the bars next to the wand, which are just iron, but in bar form.  The little spark isn't exactly impressive. But it can pierce through enemies, and can even rarely set them on fire.  This little enemy is a new one. This is a jellyfish, as you might guess, and they show up fairly often in deep enough pools of water.  You also really do not want to get stung by them. 20 HP is a lot at this stage of the game!  When they die, jellyfish always drop glowsticks, which you can see the use of here. Torches, naturally, do not work underwater. You can also see in the previous two shots the game's breath meter, which can be identified by those bubbles above Sam's head. Until we can properly swim, or at least have better options for movement, it's best to avoid water altogether. Otherwise you're very likely to drown in a pool of water half a mile under the earth.  And now nobody has to fall into that murky pool of water ever again.  You can see the cavern layer starting properly just below us. There's also a strange mushroom as well. This is the Teal Mushroom, and it's another dye item. Now, I'd like to demonstrate the other use for glowsticks.  The glowstick isn't supposed to bounce off of tungsten and phase through a solid wall at the end, but you can throw them to see what's in the darkness below you. Handy, huh?  It's never really a problem underground, but you always want a bunch of building blocks so you can bridge gaps. If you run out, then... well, how do you run out of building materials when you're surrounded by them in every direction? The way back up will need some smoothing out in the future, but this works for now.  When underground, be sure to check out every nook and cranny. You never know when you might find a massive vein of ore with some cursory exploration.  Do you see what I see?  Hell yeah! An underground cabin, some copper ore, and some topaz gemstones.  For the most part, gemstones are just another decorative block. They do have one other, incredibly helpful, use. But we won't be seeing that for a while yet. Because they're valuable stones, we're going to collect and hoard them.  These statues in the underground cabin are kind of grotesque.   Shoe Spikes give us Mega Man-like wall jumping abilities. They're also 1/4 of a much larger accessory that we won't completely have until near the very end of the game. Because this is our first accessory, I should go over how to equip them.  Back over to the equipment pane, there are five slots below our armor. Those are for accessories.  It can also be difficult to see, but Sam is now wearing shoe spikes. Equipped accessories will, for the most part, appear on your character somewhere.  As ugly as they are, we still grab the two statues. Maybe they'll scare something away from the base?  Time to continue on!  Or not. So what just happened?  We got crushed to death by a boulder trap, that's what. The underground is an incredibly dangerous place. There are traps all over, and we just got unlucky enough to blindly jump right onto a touchplate. Scroll back up to the last shot where we were alive and look, you can see that there's a tiny raised bit of floor. That was our only clue that particular trap existed. Anyway, that's enough for now. NEXT TIME: Death is but a door. Time is but a window. I'll be back. DoubleNegative fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Dec 8, 2016 |
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Oct 7, 2016 02:07
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Lache posted:I'm really surprised you stuck with the wooden sword after you found cobweb. I was shocked by how effective the wooden yo-yo was in the very early game. I can't think of a better option that can hit multiple times (to a ridiculous number in some cases) at range, and can have its range easily extended with a craftable item. It hasn't really shaken out in the updates yet because we're still so early in, but after making some rather substantial progress while recording this morning, I've taken to using a magic and ranged playing style. EDIT: Also I had honestly forgotten that the spoilered item type even existed until earlier today. Spoilers below for those interested: As of this morning, King Slime is dead, the Eye of Cthulhu is dead, the Brain of Cthulhu is dead, a Goblin Army has been defeated, two meteorites have landed - one of which I've completely strip mined, and so Sam is fully outfitted in Meteorite Armor, with all worthwhile items having been crafted from it. I've also found both the Dungeon and the Jungle I think after all of that, I'm gonna stop recording for a bit and let the LP catch up.
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Oct 8, 2016 03:32
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mauman posted:Forget the bosses, I'm of the belief that the Angler is the most vile and evil thing in this game. Ask Yapping Eevee sometime about that particular thing being spiteful. He was very unhappy with it yesterday.
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Oct 8, 2016 08:50
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#6 - Even Flow I told you Sam would live again. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Rivershire.  Hello Dye Trader, goodbye Dye Trader.  But before we head back down to recover our money, I want to show off another neat feature that chests have. Pictured here is what the minerals chest looks like. The top row has the raw ore, while the second row has the bar created from it. I find that this sorting method helps me visually keep track of how much of anything I have at a glance.  But whoops! I accidentally closed the chest before I could put in these 45 pieces of iron ore. What to do?  This little button here is the answer! If a nearby chest has any amount of something we have in our inventory, we can press this button and the game will automatically distribute the items into the proper chests.  Before...  And after! You can also quickly place items in chests by shift clicking on the item if the chest is already open.  Anyway, let's try that again with 100% less death to boulders*. * - Death to boulders not necessarily guaranteed to be lowered.  Terraria Soundtrack - Underground The good news is that retracing our steps takes almost no time at all. As a further bonus, the boulder traps are once only. So once they're triggered, you don't have to worry about setting them off again.  We got all our money back, too. Plus there's a new thing to look at just over to the left. But first...  Touchplates can be mined without setting them off the first time. So if you're lucky enough to see it first, you can deactivate the trap.  If you equip the touchplate on your hotbar, you can also see where the game generated any nearby wires. In this case, we can see just how the boulder fall trap worked in its beautiful, deadly simplicity. This will make a lot more sense much later on, when we can start working with wires ourselves.  Looking at your own tombstone is kind of hosed up.  Anyway, before we continue on, I want to show how water works. So we're going to mine out the bottom of this pool we fell into last time.  As you might imagine, water flows until it goes down as far as it possibly can. So in this case, we have a pool of water emptying out into the caverns below. I should point out that flowing liquids will "uproot" torches that you've placed.  Continuing on...  There's not a lot to say about exploring caves. It's where the bulk of the game's content lies, but most of the time it's the same old, same old.  We must be near the desert. Look at all of this sand!  A little ways to the left and we finally find something worth mentioning.  This is a Life Crystal. I don't use it straight away for some dumb reason, but it increases our maximum health by 20 points. So in order to cap out, we need 15 life crystals. (15*20 = 300 + 100 base = 400 maximum health) In the super early game, we don't want to use too many. Bad things start happening once you have 200+ health. So we want to be ready before we go over 200.  I also elect to retreat back to the right and go down instead. It does pay off, though.  Yet another underground cabin!   Gotta find the way in. I would mine out the top, but I don't like creating entrances for enemies. Underground cabins, I feel, are supposed to be a place for the player to catch their breath for a moment.  So we're going around the long way.  Nearly there...  Tah-dah!  This was someone's home away from home. A bookcase and a piano are pretty luxurious for an abandoned cabin under the ground. Anyway, let's check out the chest.  A Band of Regeneration is a pretty useful find. The potion is a Night Owl Potion. The game claims it increases night vision, but what it really does is just make torches put out light farther for a while.  Down under the house, we find some rubies in the wall.  There's also a small chamber with a naturally-occurring backwall behind the rubies.  Some iron, lots of copper, and yet another Life Crystal? Sounds great to me!  There's even some more topaz down at the bottom of the small chamber. At this point I pulled out the world map for some reason. I'm glad that I did, though.  You can dimly see that there's something at the bottom of the giant pool of water nearby.  Let's go investigate!  Water chests almost always have good stuff inside.  Because the bottom is so thin, we can easily drain the water into the tunnel below. Let's do that first, that way we don't have to worry about drowning after looting the chest.  Now to just wait.  You can't see it, but trust me when I say that this tunnel we're in now connects directly to the one we saw earlier, near the desert. You remember where I turned back? Yeah, it connects to there. So we've gone in a gigantic circle. There's also a metric fuckton of copper in this tunnel.  See? Told you so. That upper torch is where the first Life Crystal was sitting.  I got tired of waiting.   Oh hey, another Life Crystal. That makes three!  While waiting for the interminably slow water to drain, we meet a new enemy. This is the cave bat, and it is the annoyance of every person who has been underground in Terraria for longer than 10 minutes. They have almost no health, and they spawn way too frequently. Also unless you're keeping an eye out, the first time you'll probably realize one is nearby is when it starts flying into you, because of course they're also aggressive. Basically gently caress cave bats. Little bastards.  That's the last of the water draining down. Time to go collect our prize!   God DAMMIT. We got trolled... twice! To start off, the pink potion is a regeneration potion. You can probably guess what it does. The first item is a breathing reed. It's like those things you see ninjas use in cartoons. As long as the top of the reed is sticking out of the water and into open air, you can breathe. It has its uses, but it's probably the worst possible item to get out of a water chest. The second troll is the angel statue. Those things are a long-standing joke of the game. I'll let the wiki handle this one: Terraria Wiki posted:Before the 1.1 update, the Angel Statue could be neither placed nor sold, and had no apparent use in the game. It was (and still is, even after the update) the subject of a running in-game joke, whereby NPCs will make reference to its useless nature. It was speculated to be a replacement for developer testing items, to prevent the overpowered test items from being hacked in. It could also simply be an in-joke among the game's developers. The angel statue is also the game's failsafe item. If, for whatever reason, the game can't process what item something is supposed to be - or if an item becomes corrupted data for some reason - the game will turn it into an angel statue instead. So you never really know if the game deliberately placed the angel statue, or if something messed up during worldgen. That's enough spelunking for the moment. Our inventory is pretty full, so let's go back and drop off all the crap we picked up. Maybe we'll have enough for some new toys.  It was around this point of returning from the underground that I started to distantly hear the sound of a train. That means that the other underground annoyance has finally shown up.  He takes a moment to show up, but there he is. This is the giant worm.  They don't have much health, but they always show up at the most inopportune moments.  For some reason, I decide the fastest way out is through this pillar of sand and dirt. Though this does give me a chance to discuss digging out sand. You see, sand is one of a few types of blocks in the game that has physics enabled. So if you want to mine through some, you have to mine out the entire column, as the bottom block will instantly be replaced by the block that was on top of it. If the sand falls on top of you, or you get caught inside of the column as it falls, it'll hurt quite a bit.  Back on the surface at last!  It was about here that I remembered that we have a magic mirror.    I don't know exactly why I decided to go fighting enemies on the surface, but here's what it looks like when you use the Life Crystals.  Finally, back at home. We have a few things to do before this update comes to a close. First off is talking to the Dye Trader...  Hitting the Strange Plants button will turn in 1 strange plant in exchange for some randomly chosen dyes.   In this case, we got some Purple Ooze Dye.  The water chest we got earlier is a perfect place to store a bunch of bottles of dye.  Like other NPC merchants, his inventory will expand as we do stuff in the game. But by default, the Dye Trader sells... Silver Dye - 1 Gold coin Brown Dye - 1 Gold coin Dye Vat - 5 Gold coins - (Creates dyes from the various dye items I've been pointing out) I forgot to show what dyes do, so that will have to come later. The quick explanation is that you can equip them in one of the slots next to your armor or accessories to change the color of that item. For the most part, Strange Plant dyes are ugly as sin.  Moving on, Garrett gets the bookcase we found earlier. Maybe he can make good use of it.  For no particular reason, I think Dolgen would appreciate the piano. If nothing else, it makes his bedroom look less empty.  We... we won't mention some of the other shenanigans I got up to. Suffice it to say that the weapons we found underground aren't quite adequate enough to help us survive against the night. We'll have to fix that. Anyway, that's enough for now. NEXT TIME: You guys are really gonna hate me. DoubleNegative fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Dec 8, 2016 |
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Oct 9, 2016 11:37
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CptWedgie posted:Hey, sometimes you want your armor to be absolutely hideous for some reason. I mean, trolls would be ALL OVER IT, for one. This is looking a bit forward in the LP, but I just booted the game up to capture what some dyes look like. As of this morning, I have four types of Strange Plant dye, so here's some images.  This is Sam in regular armor. It's kind of advanced, but don't pay that any mind.  This is Purple Ooze Dye. It's too subtle for a gif, but the dye moves around a bit like ooze.  This is Glowing Mushroom Dye. It has the same shimmering moving effect like the purple ooze.  This is Reflective Gold Dye. True to its name, it reflects nearby light sources.  This is Shadow Dye. The void where no light exists is Sam. So yeah, the Strange Plant dyes are for the most part butt ugly. As far as gravestones go, you can indeed mine them and pick them up. They don't really have a purpose, but if you wanted to create a mausoleum or graveyard, I guess you could do that.
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Oct 9, 2016 12:24
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Can we dial down the spoilers just a bit? We'll get there eventually!
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Oct 11, 2016 06:59
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#7 - Walk Like an Egyptian Hello everyone, welcome back to Rivershire. Today y'all are really gonna hate me. Why? Just wait and see! We rejoin Sam on top of the cliff that leads underground. Today we're going farther to the left, off into unknown territory.  I somehow managed to completely miss the blatantly obvious Strange Plant.  At the top of the hill just beyond the Strange Plant, we see something very interesting. Looks like I was right about the desert being near the cave. Anyway, this game has several different biomes, like the forest we've already seen. Most biomes are super major spoilers still. We'll cover them as we come across them. The Crimson that I mentioned a few updates back is another biome, but it's an extremely dangerous one. Terraria OST - Desert For some reason, this theme isn't on any of the three Bandcamp pages. It's got a pretty desert-y feel to it, so give it a listen!  Here we can see some cacti, some growing coconuts, and a Waterleaf. Also the screenshot looks kinda wavy because the game simulates a heat effect while you're in hot biomes. The cacti are mercifully changed from the super early versions of the game. See, before the first major patch, you had to painstakingly dodge cacti. If you ran into them, you took damage, which made getting around kind of annoying. Cacti are another building material that we can make furniture out of. The growing coconuts are palm trees that I planted. Each surface biome has a different type of tree that grows in it. So you can harvest regular oak trees in the forest biome, and then plant the acorns in the desert to convert them to palm tree seeds. Each different type of tree naturally has a different type of wood associated with it, and each type of wood builds different-looking structures. The wooden armor and weapons even have different stats! I like the palm wood look because it has a very beach-y feel. Finally Waterleaf is the growable herb for the desert. Unlike Daybloom, we don't automatically get its seeds. No, it needs to be raining in the world for Waterleaf to drop its seeds when harvested. The good news is that we only need one seed to grow an infinite number of these plants. So I'll be back at some point when it's raining to get the seeds.  This is the Vulture, and it's the first desert enemy we've met. There are a couple others that spawn on the surface, and this one is probably the least dangerous of them all. A good ranged weapon, even our blowgun, will absolutely decimate its health.  This gigantic image shows the primary feature of the desert. The biggest desert in the game world will always have a massive antlion pit somewhere in the middle. The two antlions in this shot are just incidental, by the way. They don't necessarily spawn in and around the pit.  Because the underground desert is so dangerous, it's best to just wall off the antlion pit until you're ready to tackle it. Also I'm going to be honest here, the underground desert was very recently revamped - just over a month ago at the time of writing (Oct. 11, 2016) - and I'm not as familiar with the changes as I am with the rest of the game. Though just from a cursory look at the changes, they won't be affecting us for a long time.  The desert even has its own species of slime, which has 60 HP. Anyway, are you guys ready for this?  Yeah. A lot of people reading this just got mad at me. This is the top of a pyramid, an incredibly rare structure in Terraria. Not every world is guaranteed to be generated with one. It's actually significantly more rare than the gigantic trees with hollow trunks that we've seen, and the treasures inside are a lot more useful than a couple wands that place decorative blocks. This pyramid is unfortunately buried, so we're going to have to excavate the entrance.  At the time I thought the right side would be the one open. I don't know why I thought that, to be honest.   Mistakes may have been made in looking for the way in.  Waiting for us outside of the pit is a committee of vultures. I also hear the distant sound of a train again, and get complacent. After all what could a tiny "giant" worm do to us?  gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress gently caress So you remember when I said that the underground desert was dangerous? This guy is a large part of why. He hits like a freight train and can pop out of the ground right under us.  Consequently, Sam got turned into dog food.  On the way back, the sun set and now the zombies have come out to play. If you're trying to dig a hole at night, your best bet is to do what I did here and wall yourself off.  This is much better.  The tragic part of all of this is that if I had just kept tunneling through the wall, I could have broken into the pyramid the hard way.  The pyramid's treasure room has a couple of decorative banners, some breakable urns, and our prize for all this effort.  This wasn't what I was expecting to see, but I'm not going to complain. The Magic Carpet is going to allow us to trivialize falling damage for as long as we have it equipped.  There's also this. The Shine potion is what the Night Owl Potion wishes it could be. This potion actually causes your character to become a mobile light source for 5 minutes. They are also hilariously cheap to make once we do a bit more spelunking and find a particular item.  Anyway, the pyramid continues down for a ways in a zig-zag pattern before finally emptying out in the underground desert. We don't want any part of that, so it's time to leave.  So the magic carpet. This thing lets us hover for "a few seconds." While hovering we can freely move left and right, just not up and down. The wiki doesn't have any information for how long it lets you float, but after extensive testing I've found that it's around 10 seconds of uninterrupted floating. A clever player can feather the jump button while falling from an impossibly high distance to reset their momentum and not take fall damage. Basically we just hit the Terrarian jackpot.  We're also now up to 100 mana, which means we've found at least 15 fallen stars! In the old days, you needed 10 fallen stars per mana crystal, so we've come quite a long way since then. To celebrate our good luck, let's make something we should have created a very long time ago. The furnace is one of the Big Three crafting stations, along with the workbench and the anvil. These three together will let us create the vast majority of items. But first, a demonstration of the furnace is in order.  We have 14 tungsten ore, and each bar requires 4 pieces of ore, so we can make 3 bars with 2 pieces of ore left over. Mercifully, unlike many other games of the same type, we don't have to find any coal or use wood to power the furnace. It is always active.   Each iron and copper bar takes three pieces of ore per. We currently have 128 pieces of copper ore, and 117 pieces of iron ore. That means we can make 39 iron bars evenly, and 42 copper bars with 2 pieces of ore remaining. Neither is enough for a full suit of armor, but we can make some tools to tide us over. Our starting equipment has started to show its age.  For the moment, we move the workbench up next to the forge. Now we can make our anvil.  5 bars for one of the most useful crafting stations? That's one hell of a deal.  With the furnace, the workbench, and the anvil all placed together like that, we can use all three at the same time without having to move around.  Even though our blowpipe deals the same damage, I still make a tungsten blow to replace it. It gives us a chance to use something different for a change, and also to put to use all many the arrows we've been finding.  A new pickaxe is probably one of the most important investments we can make with our tungsten bars. It has 15% more pickaxe power, which means it can mine things much faster than the copper one we started with. It also swings faster, and is capable of mining Meteorite, for whenever we find that.  Our new bow, by the way. A 9% crit chance is nothing to sneeze at, and neither is another point of base damage.   We also get a new axe and hammer. Iron is just a single step up from copper, but these are also tools we don't use nearly as often as the pickaxe, so a single upgrade is fine.  Cactus, by the way, can also be used to create a pretty good early game armor. Our total defense has also increased to 5 points!  Chains can be used like ropes, but several very important things we need to craft also require them. So no reason not to be prepared ahead of time. 1 iron bar will get you 10 chains, and that should be more than we'll ever need.  In fact, here's one of those items now. The sawmill, like its description implies, is used to craft things more "advanced" wooden furniture items than what the basic workbench can handle.  Be sure to put a chair next to your workbench, and then slap a glass bottle on top. A couple items can only be crafted at the chair workbench, and the glass bottle on top lets us brew potions.  This is also a wonderful time to buy a piggy bank. We can't lose money on death if it's safely stored away.  We were quickly getting to the point where losing money on death was becoming prohibitively expensive. Sure we can get it back now, but later we might not be so lucky.  Now let's introduce the social armor slots. Goggles aren't very good at defense, but we don't have to wear them for their protective qualities. We can instead wear them because they look awesome. 2 lenses (from Demon Eyes, remember?) at a chair+workbench combo lets us craft them.  Back over to the equipment UI element. The far right column is naturally where we equip the stuff we want to actually use. The middle column is for "social" items. Anything we equip in the middle column lets us use the appearance of that item without getting stats from it. The dropper/vial icon in the far left column, by the way, is where we put any dyes we want to use.  Finally we have the sawmill we built earlier. Like I mentioned before, most of what we can craft with this is furniture. So we can make benches and dressers, for instance.  But we can also make things like mannequins and weapon racks to show off the weapons and armor we've collected. That's enough for now, though. We're considerably better equipped than we were earlier, though we're not quite ready just yet to take on the first major challenge of the game. NEXT TIME: Spelunking 2 - The Search for More Tungsten DoubleNegative fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Dec 8, 2016 |
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Oct 11, 2016 12:35
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CptWedgie posted:So... who here has made a mannequin museum? That certainly sounds like the kind of thing people would do in this kind of game. Um... A gigantic skyscraping tower with every weapon and armor set in the initial 1.3 patch release. Also each armor set has both male and female mannequins showing the armor off. A smaller tower with every armor and cosmetic armor in the 1.2 patch release It's kind of a thing that I do.  Also super duper ultra mega DEFCON 1 level spoilers in both links.
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Oct 11, 2016 13:09
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GirlCalledBob posted:This LP reminded me to finally buy Terraria and try it out, and I feel like I'm doing okay with my first few attempts so far. Except it looks like my large world has Crimson on both sides of my spawn point, so I'm just a little bit trapped if I don't want to get my poo poo kicked in. Cthulhumatic posted:I'm a relative newbie to this and have this same problem, only mine is Corruption. In that instance, should I just...dig deep and dig greedily? My advice is the same in both instances, namely try and find a cave you can get into. Most caverns, as we're going to find out tomorrow, connect with each other. The Terrarian underground has more caves and chambers than you might think. If that fails, just dig down near your base and look for a cave to start exploring. Though if the Crimson/Corruption are too close to spawn, then it probably is better to save that world for later exploring and create a new one that isn't quite so nasty.
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Oct 12, 2016 16:03
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#8 - On Top of the World Hello everyone. Welcome back to Rivershire. I think before we get started with our expedition into the earth, we need to expand the base some. We now qualify for at least one more NPC, and once we make a little bit of progress in the game, we'll need a whole bunch of rooms.  First things first. The loom is another useful crafting station, and it will allow us to finally start processing all of those cobwebs we've been finding all over the caves.  7 cobwebs creates 1 silk. We have 225 cobwebs, so we can make 32 pieces of silk with a single leftover piece. For the most part, it's used to create furniture items. We can make sofas and beds, for instance. But you can also use silk with some materials we don't have quite yet to make cosmetic armor sets. Basically you have no reason to not collect every cobweb you can find. We'll always have a use for it, even if it's just Fashion Souls.  In fact, we can already create one cosmetic item, and several banners. The banners have no use besides looking nice and colorful. We won't be making these, but the option is there.  This here is what our silk is claimed for. Like so many other things, I should have made one of these a very long time ago. "But DoubleNegative," you may ask, "what good is a bed?" To you, my hypothetical friend, I answer this: beds let us move our spawn point. So once I put this down and use it, we won't respawn out in the middle of the forest.  So let's start expanding our home. After the discussion upthread, I've spiced up my building style with several new room types. Be sure to say which you like!   While out looking for more wood to build rooms with, I decided to spice up the little bridge I built a few updates back. It looks a lot nicer now.  I have at least 5 more hours of recordings after this one and these trees that I planted? They have yet to grow back.  I figure it the base is going to be a lovely giant tree, then I may as well own it. So the center of the base is now the tree's trunk.   It's difficult to get an idea of what the base looks like from these small screenshots, so I'm going to post a large picture of the finished product.  The first room is done! A simple pentagon shape is a good starting point and looks nicer than a box efficiency room. A small stepped pyramid is my personal favorite of the four new rooms I built. Yes I know it's off-center. I've already fixed it!  The third room is a fatter stepped pyramid. I do not like it, to be honest.  The fourth room has boobs.   While setting up and putting finishing touches on the rooms, this notification pops up. Heather here will heal us and remove (most) debuffs for a nominal fee. She will show up once we have used at least 1 Life Crystal.  (Click for bigger version)Here's the final base. Like I said, be sure to post about which of the four new rooms you like best.  Heather also has this to say. We haven't yet even found the dungeon, but it's something to look forward to. I've said several times now how dangerous the Crimson is. The Dungeon? It makes the Crimson look like child's play. Before the first major patch of the game, the Dungeon used to be one of the two places you went to if you wanted a challenge in the endgame. And also to head it off, please don't take this as carte blanche to post all your thoughts about the dungeon or the other place. We'll find them in good time. So, now that the base has been expanded, how about some of that spelunking I promised last time? And, to me, the best place to start is under the tree right next to our tree fort.  That Tungsten has laid un-mined for far too long. So that's as good a place to start as any.  I also can't adequately put into words how much I love the flying carpet. Being able to hover in midair makes getting stuff on the ceiling so much easier.  Only a little ways past that last shot, look what I found hiding in the darkness. That brings us up to 180 HP! That number is where I'm also going to put a hold on using any new ones. I said it before, and I'm going to repeat it now: 200 HP is when bad things can start happening.  This little trap marks another of the ones you can find underground. There's absolutely no chance this one could ever hit you, thankfully. This is a poison dart trap. Step on the button on the left side of the screenshot, and the stone head spits out a poison dart that will damage you for 40 HP, and then deal even more as poison tick damage. You won't often be killed by these, but they can be the start of a very painful chain reaction.  Here's what the world map has to say about where we are, versus where the other tunnels we've been exploring are. It's a bit of a ways, but there's no reason we can't manually dig a tunnel to connect the two.  This is as good a place to start as any other.  Digging in this game often involves long tunnels to nowhere, so don't be afraid to create them. You never know when a tunnel you're digging will connect to a larger cavern system.  After several solid minutes of digging, something pops up in the upper left corner. Let's make our way over and investigate it further.  Of course, be sure to keep your eye out for gemstones.  Success! The tunnel has finally connected to the chamber that weird red thing is in.  This is a Crimson Altar. These things are usually found in the Crimson underground itself, but they also uncommonly appear all over the rest of the world. They're typically used to create boss summoning items. So it's handy to have one relatively near your base. Also, and this is very important, you should never ever hit them with a hammer, unless you feel like you need to be suddenly missing half of your max HP.  The Crimson Altar was about half a screen away from the other caves we explored previously.  Now we can access the large cave system from our base!  Shall we continue exploring?  Well that dead end didn't take very long to reach. There's an awful lot of water under us, though.  A little ways back in the cave, we find another passage hidden under some stone.  Ooh, devious. You see that chute in the ceiling in front of us? That's a hint that there's a boulder fall trap.  The local undead are not making things easy on us, though. Skeletons are another enemy type that only spawns underground, and they're also the embodiment of spiteful RNG. You see, skeletons and another enemy we haven't met yet both drop an item that is absolutely essential to making exploring easier. You can kill dozens and never see one.  Hello there sneaky boulder.  By mining out the "active stone blocks" underneath it, we can trigger the trap at no danger to ourselves.   I could watch this gif all day... Hey rear end in a top hat, don't think I don't see you down there!   This is the other enemy that embodies spiteful RNG, and shares a drop with the skeleton. This is the piranha. They show up more often in another surface biome, but they do spawn underground as well... for some reason.  While exploring, we hit the motherlode of emeralds.  In fact, we have enough to get the thing I've been hunting for!  This guy here is gonna signal the end of this expedition. The Hoplite only spawns around an underground biome added in 1.3, the marble biome. This guy is not somebody you want to take on with our current gear level. Plus, y'know, we're utterly out of both torches and wood.  We'll put these Javelins to good use, but obtaining them cost us 122 health, out of the 180 we have.  Back at the treefort, we can finally build a grappling hook. The three easiest ways of obtaining one are as follows: 1) get 15 gemstones, craft at an Anvil OR 2) get a 3% drop rate "hook" item from a skeleton, a piranha, an undead miner (the dude with the mining light we saw), a Hoplite, or an undead viking. THEN you combine that hook and 3 chains at an Anvil OR 3) Buy from a mid-game NPC we won't have access to until sometime after the first boss for 2 Gold coins.  Hooks are so important, they have their own dedicated inventory slot as well as a dedicated hotkey to use them. By the way, there's also a second page of equipment. It's not used quite as often as the others. I think the default keybinds put the hook key on E. But I've played too much Just Cause 2, so my grappling hook keybind is and will always be F.  Here's the hook in action. Because we made ours out of emeralds, it's a pleasant emerald green color. The hook is yet another item that will also let us trivialize falling damage, though you have to be careful when using it. Every Terraria player has at least one story where they were falling and went to use their hook to save themselves, only to splat on the ground because the hook moves somewhat slowly. The hook will also let us even more easily mine anything in hard to reach places, as well as let us climb to otherwise inaccessible heights. In fact, now that we have it, the era of using rope for spelunking is largely over. We'll still always carry some with us for the odd time we need it, but for the most part we'll now use the hook to climb out of and descend into pits.  Such a feeling's coming over me There is wonder in most everything I see Not a butt in the sky Got the sun in my eye And I won't be surprised if it's a dream  I'm on the top of the world Looking down on creation! NEXT TIME: Slime is falling from the sky! DoubleNegative fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Dec 8, 2016 |
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Oct 13, 2016 11:17
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Danaru posted:Yo what the hell, how long has this been a thing?! Since 1.2 according to the wiki. So... 2013 or so?
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Oct 13, 2016 11:35
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Kibbles n Shits posted:The addition of rope in 1.2 make it much more tolerable at least. Oh god, this. So much. Rope completely revolutionized exploring in this game. I don't have my release or 1.1 worlds anymore, but the tunnels beneath both were patchwork jobs with platforms and inexplicable dirt shelves everywhere. With all the quality of life changes added over the years, rope is easily one of the best. I'm also happy that this LP has convinced so many people to start playing again, or even playing for the first time.
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Oct 14, 2016 21:00
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HardDiskD posted:By the way, can you craft ropes? You can craft items that are functionally ropes. Iron chains, for instance. Or you can turn cobwebs into a type of rope. Honestly, though, you'll find more ropes than you'll ever need by just breaking the random pottery you find absolutely everywhere.
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Oct 14, 2016 21:32
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#9 - Weapon of Choice Hello everyone. Magic carpets never get old.  We're preparing to fight the first boss of the game today. While it's perfectly doable to fight this boss with Iron armor, I prefer something that can mitigate more damage. So to that end, we need to find either more tungsten or hopefully some gold. Unlike, say, Minecraft or the real world, gold is a perfectly acceptable step in gearing up in Terraria. We haven't even found any yet, though. So I guess we need to go back into the mines and look even harder. I'm sure there's gold (or platinum) all over the place, and we've just been unlucky in searching for it.  Now that we've dug a path between the tree basement and the rest of the caves, I will almost never be using the actual entrance. The passage under the tree is closer and it feels like it takes less time to get where we're going as a result.  While it's true that we're searching for tungsten or better, we're certainly not going to look down our nose at copper. It can make some very pretty blocks if nothing else.   This spray of gore used to be a common giant worm. A whoopie cushion, though? You can probably guess what it does... you'd probably be right. Given that I record while listening to my backlog of podcasts, and the sound of farting every time Sam jumped would get old fast, I elect to not use this. It can gather dust in one of the chests back in the tree fort.  Just under there, we found a small chamber. On the other side of the wall we're next to, we can hear chittering noises. Those noises mean we're right on the border of the underground desert.  Like so. Antlion Swarmers are nasty enemies that we want absolutely nothing to do with right now. They hit like a truck and, true to their name, the game will spawn a lot of them to swarm you. This one just running headfirst into us cost us 24 points of health!  This wall of sand and the background wall both mean this is the underground desert. So we'll turn back from here. We absolutely are not equipped to deal with this right now.  We must have rhythm today, because we've attracted a bunch of worms during this expedition. Only a fight to the death will stop one from chasing you, so we have no choice. We absolutely do not need this thing harassing us while we look for ore.  Because it's a long enemy, its AI tries to get it to dive straight through us, hitting us with as many segments as it can. In this case we take two ticks of damage - 31 and 12. 43 HP is a large chunk of our total right now.  I've never seen so many slimes in one tiny place before. I guess it's the local border-of-the-desert dwelling slimes convention?  Moving on, the chamber right above us is the one we found several updates back. Right before we drained that large underground pond? Yeah, it's that one. The reason I call this out is that you can see yet another underground cabin just in front of us.  It's starting to get to the point where I'm not even going to bother calling them out anymore. Not unless there's something new inside the treasure chest.  Though I can get behind the metal-looking skull statue.  This, though? This is worth mentioning. Boomerangs are another type of weapon you can find in chests. There's a regular wooden type you can occasionally find in chests on the surface. But most often, the first boomerang you'll find is an enchanted one. It's a ranged melee weapon and it beats our spear in all the ways that matter.  The chest also has this inside. The dangersense potion is relatively cheap to make, and will highlight all nearby traps and sources of damage. It also highlights nearby cobwebs for some reason. So this humble little potion here can help more than any other in showing you where nearby caves are while underground.  This is a different underground cabin, one we explored several updates back. This door here is on the edge of unexplored territory, so it gives us yet another place to go looking for gold. This is a what a lot of spelunking is in this game. You look for places on your map you've missed for whatever reason, and you go exploring in that direction until you hit a dead end. Then you repeat the process ad infinitum.  Bingo. This is platinum ore, folks. So Rivershire doesn't have gold, and instead has something even heavier and more dense, but just as valuable.  After several minutes of searching, we finally find a good group of enemies to demonstrate the boomerang with. Pretty handy, huh?  While digging more tunnels, we find this glowing red ore. This is crimtane ore, and it's a special ore that is unique to worlds with Crimson biomes. It's the next step beyond gold/platinum in terms of gameplay tiers. But the kicker is you can't mine crimtane without at least a crimtane pickaxe. The game will solve the riddle of how we get the initial bunch of crimtane in due time, so don't worry too much about it. Just know that if you see glowing ore while spelunking, you very likely can't mine it yet. And once you can mine it, you very likely no longer have need of it.  Same tunnel, about five seconds later, we accidentally discover a water chest.  Inside is one of the most useful finds you can get from them. Like the description says, these flippers let us actually swim. So with them equipped, we can now explore bodies of water without sinking like a rock. Also present inside the chest are some platinum bars, and 5 healing potions. These are distinct from the lesser variety we've been finding in chests and pots in that they heal twice as much and are extremely cheap to make once we have the right ingredients.  Back at the treefort to unload our haul and return, I see that we have a Metric Fuckton of iron bars.  The armor set still takes 75 bars, though. Which leaves us with 57 out of the initial 132 we had.   But we do almost double the amount of armor we have. While the armor isn't intended to be a permanent solution, it does help smooth the edges as we search for even more tungsten and platinum.  Speaking of platinum, this broadsword is a good investment for now. The pickaxe is really not. It can mine the same stuff that the tungsten one can, but just slightly faster. (59% vs 50% pickaxe power)   While out looking for more fallen stars to use in making mana crystals, we finally kill enough zombies to get a banner. Banners show that you've defeated at least 50 of a type of monster. When you hang them up, they give you a buff that increases damage you deal to them, as well as decreases damage you take from them. Some players like to collect and hang up these banners in a central location.  Still out looking for fallen stars and we happen across this ugly fellow. Face monsters are things you can only fight in the crimson. That they're spawning so relatively near our treefort means nothing good. The place we're fighting here is about a 2 minute walk from our base.  This isn't a shot of me using a mana crystal. This is a shot of me failing to use a mana crystal. That can only mean one thing...  Normally, mana caps out at 200, but because of the flippers, we have 20 more on top of that. So now we're completely topped out on mana for the rest of the game, barring using sets of armor designed for caster characters.  Before we return underground, our base is looking kind of crowded. We're at about the part of the game where we get a bunch of crafting stations, too. So it's worth taking the time to set up a dedicated crafting station building.  It's not perfect, but this little hut can be easily expanded, and it's a nice dome shape, too. You can get the window effect by just burning some sand in the furnace to get glass, then turning that into glass walls. The chest in the little cellar beneath is where we're going to store all of our ore, bars, and gemstones. The two new crafting stations on the right side are the heavy workbench and the glass kiln. The glass kiln lets us make glass furniture, while the heavy workbench is what we can use to make statues and trapped chests, apparently.  In addition to the usual furniture suspects, we can make terrariums in the glass kiln. You know all those squirrels and bunnies and birds that randomly show up in screenshots once in a while? We can use a bug net from the merchant to trap those, and then we can shove them in a glass aquarium and put them on display.   Much better. Now our NPCs have some little pets to call their own.   We also find a goldfish and showing it to Garrett lets us know that we can stuff it inside of a tiny bottle to create a fish bowl.  Here's the small pond we found the goldfish in. We can use it to fill a bottle with some water.  Like so.   In case we wanted to take our new pet fish with us, we can wear the fish bowl on our head. You can also equip it in the armor slot, but that makes you start drowning.  Now Heather has a little friend, too.  Anyway, it's past time we got back to looking for more platinum. While digging down near where we fought the Hoplite last time, we find a new biome. This is the mushroom cave. This is the only place you can find glowing mushrooms in the wild. Glowing mushrooms, incidentally, are one of the items you absolutely want to get as many of as you possibly can.  Also ow. Mushroom caves are also where you're almost guaranteed to find traps. In my experience, there's always at least one, and quite often more.  Here on the edge of the mushroom cave is the marble biome we brushed against last time. There really isn't a lot to say about these, other than you can use the marble to create nifty looking blocks. Also Hoplites, like assholes, will spawn for a wide radius all around them. Believe it or not, but marble biomes used to be a hell of a lot more dangerous when they were first introduced. They used to have yet another enemy that spawned in them, and this enemy could instantly kill you without you ever seeing them nearby. Thankfully the devs realized this was a dick move and made these other enemies spawn much later in the game.  Half submerged under the mushroom cave, we find another cabin.  The Hermes boots are one of the better accessories you can find, and they can be upgraded several times throughout the game, adding even more features.  I can't believe the number of cabins in this world. I know I said I wouldn't call them out anymore, but I'm just astounded at the sheer number we've found.  This one at least has a new potion for us to try out sometime.  Another cabin, yet more loot. This time we find a flare gun. These are semi-permanent fixtures in my inventory once I find one. You can use them like you would a glowstick, except the flares are shot out of a gun, and they don't bounce through solid blocks. Both have their uses, and we'll keep both in our inventory as the game goes on.  Between flares, torches, and glowsticks, we're now pretty well covered as far as illumination goes.  Our inventory is getting full again, so I drink a spelunker potion to make room. This is what that does. It turns out there's a lot of minerals all around us. In this case, there's a fairly large deposit of platinum just underneath us here. The potion's effects last for 5 minutes, which can be very handy. But they're also rather expensive to create. Remind me in the future when we have a greenhouse up and running, with all 7 flavors of herbs being grown. I'll have to show off making as many potions as we can.  While looking for yet more platinum, we get this notification. I've been expecting this to happen for a while now, but it's still at an inopportune time. Slime rain is a random event that can happen in the world. To qualify for it to start happening, we need 140 HP and more than 8 defense.  Then while I'm out getting ready to kill slimes, the nurse and the dye trader decide this is the perfect opportunity to throw a party. Parties are a relatively new event for the game, being added back in May with the 1.3.2 patch. They were added to commemorate the 5th anniversary of the game's launch. They have a 10% chance to happen on any given day, as long as a party hasn't happened within the past 5-10 in-game days. All NPCs have unique dialogue during parties, and some even sell new stuff. Both parties and slime rain are events that affect the background layer. Slime rain causes slimes to fall in the background, while parties make balloons rise. If the dice roll causes both to happen on the same day, then both effects will stack.  So I've written at length about parties, but what about slime rain? That particular event has, according to the wiki, an approximately 4.9% chance to occur any given game day. But because we haven't yet beaten the event or its boss, that chance is doubled. So the first slime rain, once we met the criteria, has a 9.8% chance to happen every day. I'm not particularly good at probabilities. I took a single statistics class ten years ago, and I barely got out of it with a C. So while I'm certainly no expert, it looks like the odds of both happening simultaneously are less than 1%? If the calculator on the Internet is to be believed, it's a 0.98% chance of happening. So that's pretty cool. For the record, the calculator claims that if both criteria are met, and we've already defeated the slime rain event at least once, there's a 0.49% chance for both to happen. So the takeaway is that you're incredibly unlikely to see both events happening simultaneously. So with all of that out of the way, the mechanics of slime rain are incredibly simple. A bunch of non-aggressive slimes will fall out of the sky and it's our job to kill them. We need to kill at least 150 slimes before the event will end.  The good news about the slime rain event is that it makes spotting Pinky here a lot easier. Pinky is a rare slime that occasionally shows up on the surface. It has a lot of health and a lot of defense, but almost no knockback resistance, and if it hits you, it deals barely any damage. Some players make a game of seeing how far they can hit a Pinky, like a demented Smash Bros. style homerun contest. The wiki claims that Pinky has a 1/180 (~0.5%) chance to spawn in place of a blue slime. It is the only source of pink slime in the game, and has a much higher chance to drop an incredibly rare weapon. Because it's highly unlikely that we'll ever see the weapon, I'll just discuss it now. It's called the Slime Staff, and it has a 1-in-10000 chance to drop from any slime you kill. That's a 0.01% chance to drop. Pinky, though, has a drop rate of 1%. What makes this weapon so nice? I've mentioned before several different play styles. You have your melee fighters, you have casters, and you have ranged attackers. We have at least one of each type of weapon in our inventory. But the Slime Staff is the first chance to get a fourth class of weapon. The staff summons friendly slimes to attack our enemies for us. Before the second half of the game, summoner weapons are incredibly rare. I think, counting the slime staff, there are only three in the first half. Eventually once 150 slimes are killed, the event ends. Kinda.  You see, the slime rain is the first opportunity we have to fight a boss in this game. Terraria Soundtrack 1 - Boss Theme Listen to that theme. It is awesome. Boss fight video here.  Meet the King Slime.  We are not remotely prepared.  38 contact damage, and it's gigantic. Melee weapons are not an option. We can use our platinum broadsword to clear the trash slimes, but for the boss man we need to use ranged attacks. Getting close is simply too dangerous. I should point out that King Slime is one of the few bosses in the game that will continue to harass you after you've died. Many others will instantly despawn once you die to them.   Oh yeah and King Slime can follow us by teleporting around. So there's no cheesing him from a high ledge. You also do not want him inside your base.  Being outdoors doesn't help either.  Thankfully I have it so that opening the inventory pauses the game. So this offers us a chance to loot our potions chest for anything that will help. We wind up grabbing a regeneration potion, an ironskin potion, and an archery potion.  Three deaths. This is why you don't want to bring King Slime indoors.  With our buff potions active, and now that we're outdoors, we can just kite him back and forth across the ground. With the archery potion active, we want to be using our bow as much as possible.  There's a lot of tedious back-and-forth.   Finally after about 5 minutes, the bastard goes down for good.  We get one heck of a haul, too. The ninja shirt is a vanity item, while the slime gun shoots a harmless stream of goop. The Solidifier is yet another crafting station, and one I don't believe I've ever used.  With the defeat of King Slime, the slime rain ends as well.  As a very hectic day ends with rain beginning to fall, I think that's a good place to call it for now. We were not remotely prepared for that boss fight, and it showed. There's no better way to put it, we got our rear end kicked. Hard. But despite that we still emerged victorious. King Slime was just the first - and easiest - boss in the game. We're very nearly ready to take on the second. We just need... NEXT TIME: We need a proper boss arena and better gear. DoubleNegative fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Dec 8, 2016 |
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Oct 15, 2016 13:59
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RareAcumen posted:So what the heck was that thing that hit you? Giant snail enemies are a divine punishment for something I'm not sure I even did.
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Oct 15, 2016 15:15
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CptWedgie posted:Gotta say, though, that teleportation thing was a nasty surprise. Do all the bosses have little "screw you" tricks like that? Cador_2004 posted:Expert mode I'm going to show them off at some point in the future, but that's the whole gimmick behind expert mode bosses. They all gain new attacks and will deal more contact damage. They also have a lot more HP. Take King Slime, for instance. In expert mode he has 2800 HP, and he also summons a special kind of slime that only appears in the expert mode version of the fight. These slimes are spiky and will shoot the aforementioned spikes at you. According to the wiki, these spiked slimes deal 28 contact damage and 36 ranged damage. King Slime, on the other hand, now deals 67 contact damage on expert. Keep in mind that the wiki doesn't even consider King Slime a proper boss. He's actually considered a miniboss. Oh and you want to hear the most fun part? King Slime can just randomly spawn in the outer two-thirds of the map. There's a 1/300 chance for that to happen. (That's 0.3% chance to randomly replace another slime anywhere but the actual center part of the map.)
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Oct 15, 2016 16:40
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I'm in the middle of doing some more recording because I was bored. I had A Bad Time Spoiler behind that link. It wasn't intentional.
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Oct 16, 2016 13:06
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#10 - Eyes on Me Hello everyone. It's a rainy night in Rivershire, and we're hard at work already. What are we hard at work making?  Oh, nothing really. Staves are early-game magic weapons, and one for each type of metal and gemstone exists. This makes them one of the only recipes that discriminates between, say, iron and lead. I wanted to make a platinum staff, but those require diamonds, and I have as of yet to find any.  The bolt fired from the emerald staff pierces through up to 2 enemies, and the staff can even autofire. It's a ridiculously good weapon for how early you get it, and it will remain relevant through a lot of the first part of the game. Also it's kinda awesome that we duct-taped some emeralds to a tungsten staff and made a magic focusing device.  I'm feeling daring. Time to investigate the underground desert.  Antlion Chargers are another type of desert enemy. Like their flight-capable cousins, they also love to swarm you.  They also appear to resist magic damage quite a bit.  Anyway, down here where the charger was, we can find a curious structure. It's not well illuminated, but these are minecart tracks. Right click the tracks and...  Sam is mobile! Minecart tracks will randomly spawn all over the underground. It's not uncommon to be tunneling through solid rock and emerge next to a set of abandoned tracks in the darkness. We can even make our own tracks for a ridiculously cheap price. 1 piece of wood and 1 bar of iron/lead will net us 50 tracks. Given that iron is stupidly common underground, and that trees are infinitely renewable, you can quickly make a lot of tracks. Like, say, enough to create a public transit system for your game world, spanning from the left side of the world to the right. With exits to every point of interest along the way. Not, y'know, like I've ever done that or anything.  This antlion nest is already paying off. Look at all of that platinum.  I wasn't kidding when I said these suckers swarmed you. This is just the smallest hint of the hordes we've been fighting for the past two minutes.  This is one of the largest deposits of platinum ore in the game world. I know this because I loaded up a map viewer before recording and looked specifically for platinum ore, because I was tired of hunting blindly in the dark.   Sometimes the game likes to make little traps like this. You'll find an absolutely jaw-dropping amount of ore in the wild, and it'll be next to a TNT plunger. This plunger is connected to a lot of high-yield explosives nearby. I don't know exactly where, but they are always close enough that by jumping on the plunger you will take well over 500 damage.  I don't know how much platinum that was, but it almost definitely wasn't enough.  There's a lot of crimtane in this antlion nest.  There's a familiar sight. Looks like this minecart track ends right over next to the pyramid.  But just because we can survive down here, doesn't mean I want to be here. So let's go back to the other cave tunnels and continue our search.  Even if it's only to avoid fighting these things anymore. God I hate worm type enemies.  Anyway, it looks like we mined out 114 pieces of platinum in the desert. With 4 pieces of ore per bar we have... 28 bars worth in our inventory, plus two left over. That might be just enough.  Counting what we had in the box, that should be just enough to make some nice armor.  Two-thirds of the way there and we are short by seven bars. Because, for some stupid reason, platinum armor requires 90 bars instead of the usual 75. So we have a lot more work to do.  This is approximately the point where I completely lost patience with hunting for this loving ore. So here I reopened the map viewer and followed it to the nearest platinum vein. Luckily it was large enough to just cover our needs.  20 defense is pretty drat good. Also we're wearing the ninja shirt we found from King Slime. So now that phase 1 of our preparations is complete, it's time for arguably the more important step. We need to build a boss arena.  Here's the starting point. The arena needs to be floating off the ground.  It should also be approximately half a screen long as well.  It's not the prettiest arena ever, but it will more than adequately serve for our purposes.  We also have a bunch of clay from somewhere, so let's show that off too. You can turn clay into bricks at the furnace.  We're going to line the back of our arena with red brick because it will look pretty.  Uh... close... enough? Honestly, I'm too lazy to go find more clay right now. I'm antsy with wanting to continue with the game, so this will serve just fine.  You might call it 'cheating' because I have the map viewer open, but I'm on the hunt for a specific item. The closest one to our base turns out to be back in the underground desert. So...  That innocuous golden chest has one of the best movement accessories in the game inside. One that is almost certainly critical to progressing beyond the next several bosses. I'm sure some of you have already figured out exactly what it is, and why I looked specifically for it.  Need I say more?   We're ready. Now to wait for night to fall. While we're waiting what do you say about visiting the surface desert? Maybe those palm trees have finally grown.  Or not. This is a sandstorm, and it is a weather type that was introduced with the patch that revamped the desert. The wind will blow us around, and if we're running against the wind, it can be almost impossible to make any meaningful progress.  The antlions from the underground will also come out to play during the sandstorm.  Angry tumbleweeds will also come to harass us while the sand blows.  Back at the base, night falls and makes a liar out of me. Looks like we've gotten a brief reprieve. So with another free night, let's go spelunking some more. This time not for ore, but just to see what we can find.  Like this. You can see the explosives and detonator in this shot.  We even managed to avoid blowing ourselves up, and got a bunch of ore and stone with no effort required.  A life crystal! We can use these for things other than increasing our health, you know. I'll show this off when we return to the surface.  While exploring, we find one of the game's more odd crafting stations. We can feed trash blocks into this thing to potentially get useful ore out.  I'm also not entirely sure when, but we managed to find a compass at some point in our explorations. This is a rare drop from a large number of enemies that all spawn in the caverns.  The heart lantern is another buff-providing object. It requires a life crystal and 4 iron chains. While that seems kind of expensive, it does provide a life regen buff that stacks with a regeneration potion and the campfire.  The arena is done and dusk is here. We can stand in any corner of the arena and still be in range of not only the life regeneration buffs, but also the movement speed provided by the sunflowers below.  Last time we fought King Slime, an enemy that the wiki refers to as a miniboss. You saw just how much it kicked our rear end. Are you guys now ready for the first real boss in the game? This boss is one of four in the game that can be spawned randomly once we meet the criteria. In this case, we need... 1) 200 HP and more than 10 defense 2) 3 NPCs in our base 3) That the boss not have been defeated previously Once all three criteria have been met, the game will more often than not display that status message at night. Once that message appears, we have somewhere between 20 and 40 seconds before the boss spawns and starts attacking us. If you see that message and are not ready, that's your cue to get underground and not return until the night has passed. The boss will not spawn if you're underground, as fighting it down there would not be fair.  Boss Fight Video Here  You know those demon eyes we've been defeating all game? The Eye of Cthulhu is their big brother, and it wants a word with us. It's glowing red because one of the buff potions I drank lets me see where all nearby enemies are, and it highlights them in red. So, the Eye fight has two phases.  In the first phase, it floats around and spawns smaller eyes to harass us. These things don't have a lot of health and tend to die quickly in the crossfire.  After spawning several smaller eyes, it decides to try and ram us instead.  This is why I went out of my way to find the Cloud in a Bottle. Double jump is, while not of critical importance right now, still extremely useful. EDIT AFTER THE FACT: The Cloud2Butt Chrome extension briefly changed the text of this post to something a lot funnier.  You know that rainy day we've been saving all our shurikens for? This is it.  This is also a wonderful time to use any javelins you've found.  Don't neglect the bow, either. We drank an archery potion, so it's going to be our biggest damage dealer.  When it's lost half of its health, it gets pissed off and the fight enters the second phase.  In the second phase, the cornea and pupil of its "eye" are gone, and replaced with giant loving teeth. It also no longer tries to spawn smaller eyes, and instead spends all of its time charging at us. In the second phase of the fight, the Eye also has lowered defense. As long as you can continue to dodge the Eye, it should fall in no time at all.  Like so.  This, by the way, is how we get our first crimtane ore. The Eye always drops a bunch, usually enough to make at least one item. Crimson seeds are seeds that spread the crimson biome. Because that doesn't sound like a bad idea at all. Joking aside, there are reasons we would want to do this, and it involves - you guessed it - potion making.  We have enough ore to make 15 crimtane bars.  We also got a second black lens just before the Eye fight. We can combine two of those at a chair-workbench to make some sweet shades.   Aw yeah, we're looking good now.  Normally I would advocate building a pickaxe first, but that requires some additional materials on top of raw crimtane bars. So we're making a bow instead. Other options included a fishing rod, an axe, a sword, and a yoyo. Yoyos are melee weapons you can use at range. They are pretty powerful, and I will show them off eventually. But the MVP of that last fight was our bow, so I think we should upgrade it first. Not the least reason of which being that it gives us another 10 base damage on top of what we already had. I also think that is a pretty good place to stop for now. The Eye fight wasn't so much a fight as it was an absolute curb stomp. I don't really show it well in the screenshots, but we barely took any damage, and thanks to our arena and the buffs we had, whatever damage we did take was almost instantly healed. So what happened between last time and now? We were much better prepared, and we were fighting the Eye on our terms in a specially built arena to take advantage of our ridiculous mobility. NEXT TIME: Up to the highest height! DoubleNegative fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Dec 8, 2016 |
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Oct 17, 2016 15:41
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FredMSloniker posted:So the basic idea of the arena is to effectively give you flight and regeneration? Basically, yeah. We'll come to see this more as the LP goes on, but Terraria is a game all about mobility. It's why you should build arenas when you fight bosses. The arena is there to support that mobility so you minimize the amount of hits you take. I didn't use it very much with the Eye of Cthulhu fight, but coming up in the next update or two is a boss fight where I will make drat good use of an arena.
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Oct 17, 2016 18:48
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kvx687 posted:No, that's... something else. (I think you missed a butt to butt extension here) I'm debating on changing it. I'm torn. I'm also confused how Cloud2Butt changed actual text that I copied from Notepad++.
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Oct 18, 2016 00:58
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senrath posted:Did you click preview before posting the update? Cloud2Butt makes it hard to be sure if those butts are actually clouds or not. It also makes reading FF7 stuff super funny.
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Oct 18, 2016 01:03
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#11 - Crimson and Clover Hello everyone. Welcome back to Rivershire. Boy it feels like a weight has been lifted from our shoulders, doesn't it? We've taken down the first major stumbling block in the game and now the world is our oyster.  I didn't want to say anything at the time, but we had found an item last time to summon the Eye of Cthulhu. So in the off chance that we got gibbed, I was ready with a backup strategy. We can take 6 Lenses to the Crimson Altar under the tree and turn them into this summoning item. You can't use two of these Suspicious Looking Eyes to get two bosses, but if you get the "You feel an evil presence watching you..." message, you can quickly use one of these to summon the Eye. Then while you're fighting the Eye you summoned, the one that was going to appear anyway will show up. There's no practical reason to do it beyond "it's fun."  Today we're going to start off by going up. This gravitation potion is pretty fun. You'll understand why in a moment.  Here we are on top of the base. Chug the potion and nothing appears to happen. But if you press the W (or up) key...  A gravitation potion will reverse your gravity. Instead of falling down to the ground, you're now pulled toward the top of the map instead. Today we're going to explore the skies and see what's up above us.  The shot is incredibly dark, but we've fallen more-or-less straight up and we're now passing a solid cloud with what looks like ore sticking out of it.  Doing this at night was not my smartest move ever, but we're standing on top of a floating island.  I'm being very careful to not put a torch inside this building. These count perfectly for NPC housing, and if we're not careful, one will move inside if given half the chance.  For what it's worth, the clouds do support our weight.  I had a thought of putting rope back down to the ground, but I learned here the hard way that rope will only go so far away from our character before the game refuses to place more.  Another shot of the house on the island. This is a sky chest, and it contains items that are unique to floating islands. These are all incredibly helpful, so searching them out is a great idea.  The item description says it all. With this equipped, we are more than able to jump into our tree fort without using the ropes on the sides.  Moving on to the left, we come across another floating island.  These are sky lakes, and if we had a fishing pole, we could catch fish up here. We'll just move on for now. The gravitation potion is wearing off and I want to find more islands before it does.  Here we are, yet another island.  Bingo! This is the item we were looking for. Again, the description says it all. Now, before we jump down and look for something else to do... (because the potion ran out) I want to discuss sky chests for a moment. Before one of the previous patches, these chests were locked. The game does have keys, but they only drop from a specific part of the map. A part of the map guarded by yet another boss. There are weapons to be found in sky chests, but they're not so great that they will impress you over what you find in that other part of the map. So basically, the developers made another awesome move in unlocking these chests. As a bonus, the sky chests will occasionally contain an item called a "Sky Mill" which lets you build the incredibly colorful blue and yellow decor you can find in these houses.  I knew it was bound to happen eventually. The upper parts of the skies have an enemy as well. We were pretty lucky to go this long without seeing one.  For not minding her own business, we filled her full of arrows with our new bow.  In case you were wondering, the third island was right on top of the border with the desert. So we didn't have to go very far at all to find some really powerful accessories. I don't know about you all, but I'm feeling pretty daring. Like we could take on anything. So let's do some explosive mining.   How about to the tune of 30 dynamite?  We get about as far as the boss arena when this message pops up. The Dryad is an NPC that moves in once we kill one of the game's major bosses. For most players, she will move in once they kill the Eye, but really any of the first four major bosses will do.  Being the smart one, she decided to move into the only room with a bed.  She also sells some items, but her specialty is the Status screen. She'll tell us how much of our world is consumed by the crimson biome. More on that in a moment. But there's no point in clicking on Status in the first half of the game. So we'll leave it sitting for now.  Being a dryad, her stock of items are all nature themed. So let's do like old times and start from the left... Purification Powder - 75 copper coins - (Purifies the crimson in a small area around where you throw it) Grass seeds - 20 copper coins - (Plants grass) Sunflower - 2 silver coins - (We can buy these now) Acorn - 10 copper coins - (Same) Dirt Rod - 5 gold coins - (We can use this to move dirt. There are a lot of uses for this, not the least of which is triggering traps) Pumpkin Seed - 2 silver, 50 copper coins - (We can plant pumpkin plants on the ground. We'll cover pumpkins next time in A Very Special Update) Grass Wall - 10 copper coins - (You know the grass colored backwall in that small cave under our tree fort? We can place it) Flower wall - 10 copper coins - (Same as above, but it has flowers) Next we get into the interesting items. Daybloom Planter Box - 1 silver coin - (We can use any planter box to provide farmable ground without spending clay on pots) - Available after we defeat King Slime Blinkroot Planter Box - 1 silver coin - Available after we defeat the Eye of Cthulhu It really doesn't matter what planter boxes you use. Once I have all seven varieties unlocked, I like to use them for the associated plant for aesthetic purposes. But now that we have the dryad and these planter boxes, we can now build a functional greenhouse. So yeah, once we get back from our expedition, we've got some building to do.  Let's go pay the crimson a visit, shall we?  Oh... poo poo. So this is what I was referring to when I said that the crimson biome will consume Rivershire. If you think back to the early updates, this entire outcropping was pure and green. The crimson was only the barest hint just out of sight. So it's time to explain. During worldgen, the game will place one of two types of evil in the world. Some worlds have the putrid purple of the corruption. Rivershire has the disgusting red of the crimson. Throughout the game, the evil will spread and consume and blight the very land. We can already see the process in action here. However, it's important to note that we can impede the spread of this evil with the use of sunflowers. If the crimson or corruption hits a sunflower, it will stop spreading in that direction. The evil biome will only spread through grass, rock, sand, mud*, and ice. Dirt and wood will halt the spread of any type of evil altogether. Mud is a special case in that any evil that hits mud will convert it to dirt and then corrupt the grass on top of the dirt patch. The evil will also only "jump" up to, I believe, a compatible surface 3-5 tiles away. Some people go to no small amount of trouble to dig a massive 5-tile wide trench around their base to isolate it from the world's spreading evil. I personally think that's a bit much, but hey - you do you. As for the nature of the evil, the corruption is just what it sounds like. It's the form of evil in the world corrupting the land and making it a very unhealthy purple. Corruption has been part of the game since the beginning. Crimson, on the other hand, was added with the 1.2 patch back in 2013.  Crimson is the world being corrupted with blood and gore.  Eventually the land will start to sprout teeth and bones.  Crimera are a flying enemy from the crimson. They're otherwise unremarkable.  The crimson also has spiders. These are blood crawlers, and they are pretty creepy. When you're in an evil biome, you really should keep moving. The game is all too happy to swarm you with enemies, and it can be very easy to get bogged down.  These blights on the landscape are actually crimson "dungeons." The fact that the entrances are shaped like mouths makes them pretty creepy. Not helping matters is that the tunnels underneath are like a giant throat, finally emptying out into an expansive cavern.  We... we'll just move on for now. We'll be back later.  Here's a new biome. Right on the far border of the crimson is the snowy area.  The crimson can infect snow as well. That's not ore... that's bloody ice.  I also want to take this moment to appreciate the giant creepy ribs in the background of crimson infected areas. Also pictured on top of the bloody ice is a new type of growable herb - shiverthorn.  Look at the world of difference between crimson snow and regular snowy biome.  I'm no expert in climates, but I'm pretty sure a sandy desert shouldn't be next to a snowy winter wonderland.  So there's two things here in this image. The first is yet another pyramid. The second is the disgusting black and brown sand. Evil biomes spread like wildfire through sand.  I don't have the numbers in front of me, but a second pyramid is pretty freaking rare.  You see those two spilled objects? Pyramids can occasionally spawn with bags of spilled silver or copper coins. If you "mine" them, you get a bunch of that type of coin as a reward. So that's pretty neat.  So I'm pretty sure that about half of you are now researching ways to kill via the power of hate. Yes, it is a different item from our first double jump. So that means it stacks. Yes, we now have triple jump.  Wheeeee! *ahem* Moving on...   Before we delve into the crimson "dungeons" I want to walk to the edge of the world.   Rivershire has been hit pretty hard by the crimson.  Though the world does present some pretty stark biome changes.  Yawn. Yet another giant hollow tree.  Oh, hello. So in the outer two-thirds of the map, goblins can spawn infrequently. They aren't much of a challenge to kill, and always drop the same item.  We can combine a bunch of pieces of tattered cloth together to make an item that summons a combat challenge. If I'm not mistaken, it's 10 pieces of cloth and several pieces of wood.  Moving on, we come across this curious structure. Even without me telling you, I bet you guys could instantly guess this was the dungeon I wrote about several updates ago.  We can even talk to this old man who seems to live here.  Okay... sure thing, buddy. We'll be back much later. I'm not going to show it off, but we absolutely do not want to enter the dungeon without breaking this guy's curse. If we do, a guardian monster will spawn that has a metric fuckton of HP and only takes 1 damage from attacks. Oh and that guardian monster instantly kills anything it hits. It's bad news all around, and we want nothing to do with that. There's a reward for killing the guardian monster. I will not be doing this because... gently caress that noise.  We'll just walk over the dungeon instead.  Abundance of water in the background, islands with moai heads, and palm trees? I do believe we've found the beach!  There's even seashells and starfish on the ground.  The ocean is as far as we can go in this direction.  That is unless we feel like going for a swim!  There wasn't anything worthwhile in the water.   I'm not crazy, right? This sleeping dude wasn't here before, right?  So this is Matty, the angler NPC. He shows up sleeping at the beach, either in the water or on the beach near the water. Once we talk to him once, he'll make his way over to the treefort back in the middle of the map and claim a bedroom. His whole deal is fishing. Once per day, he'll offer a quest for us to go somewhere in the world and catch him a fish. If we do enough of these quests, he'll give us rewards. The problem is that you can only do one quest per in-game day. So if you finish the quest, you have to wait until 4:30 AM at the earliest to get the next one. One quest per 24 real world minutes is pretty bad, not gonna lie. So just in the interests of full disclosure here, yes I will show off fishing at some point. When I show fishing quests off, I will be doing so with a multiplayer server running. And every time I finish a quest, I will use the server console to move time to 4:29 AM. Otherwise I will go crazy waiting half an hour in between fishing quests. Anyway, that's enough for now. NEXT TIME is going to be a Very Special Update covering a time-limited event in the game. But after that? We're going to be going into one of the crimson caverns to fight the next boss of the game. DoubleNegative fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Dec 8, 2016 |
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Oct 19, 2016 22:39
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Eric the Mauve posted:Yeah the guy who has already copped to using TEdit to locate ore deposits just happened to find a Lucky Horseshoe and a Sandstorm in a Bottle back to back I never said I used TEdit. I use a map viewer not a map editor. I use this map viewer, specifically: https://terramap.codeplex.com/
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Oct 19, 2016 23:23
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Eric the Mauve posted:Are you going to do the semi-exploity thing involving holding on to certain fishing items until later in the game? Maybe like keep 5-10 just to show it off. But otherwise I'm gonna be opening every crate I find. The world has all three double jump items, but only 2 balloons. So I'm gonna have to fish to get the last balloon I need.
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Oct 19, 2016 23:28
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Lazy Bear posted:This, pretty much. I'll explain exactly what I did to prepare in a few updates' time. In fact, it'll be the second Very Special Update of the LP. Though, for now the short answer is yes. I generated about 9-10 worlds before I found the specific one I wanted to use. I didn't keep the other ones, but some standouts included: a world starting in the desert, a world starting next to the snowy area, and three worlds where the crimson was next door to spawn. There was also a world that had five Magical Sword grottos. Each one had a real sword in it.
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Oct 20, 2016 01:57
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