Would love to build a house in the desert, except.........

Xylia

Terrarian
So the Dye Trader comes to my village and I'd love to build him a house that he'd like, in the desert except in my world, I only have two really tiny deserts despite me having a Medium world and one of them has an oasis and a bunch of palm trees.

I'd rather not level every tree in that tiny desert and/or mess up the oasis pond to try to fit a house there.

So, I decide maybe I'll build an underground house.......

Oh wait, you can't block swap sand. Derp. Can't do that.

Then I'm like "well, okay, Underground Desert has some ruined houses, I could fix one of those up!"

....... nope. Can't do that because there is background wall absolutely everywhere (which of course doesn't count for homes), and we STILL have no method of breaking background walls without finding an edge which is miles away.

EDIT: Here's a suggestion, could you perhaps have a small piece of background wall missing in those ruined house spawns so the player could replace the rest of the background wall with something valid for housing? It'd be nice to just fix one of those up or something.
 
I just built my desert town around an oasis, and built a bridge over the oasis. What's the problem with this?
 
I just built my desert town around an oasis, and built a bridge over the oasis. What's the problem with this?

The desert I have is so tiny, you'd have to cut down all the trees and all the cacti to make any houses of any size for the NPCs. Not really wanting to lay waste to all the foilage in an entire biome.
 
The desert I have is so tiny, you'd have to cut down all the trees and all the cacti to make any houses of any size for the NPCs. Not really wanting to lay waste to all the foilage in an entire biome.
You can always replant trees and just make them an apartment. I like to make my NPC houses fit with their setting/profession. I dug out a bunker for Arms Dealer and made a caravan for the Dye Trader
 
Desert small? Build it up. Get sand, from the ocean if need be, and make it bigger or even make a new one elsewhere just need 1500 sand blocks to create an artificial desert.
 
....... nope. Can't do that because there is background wall absolutely everywhere (which of course doesn't count for homes), and we STILL have no method of breaking background walls without finding an edge which is miles away.
Absolutely agreed on this part. Especially because I do not at all understand the purpose of making natural walls invincible in this manner.

There is genuinely no apparent purpose other than to spite the player.
 
Absolutely agreed on this part. Especially because I do not at all understand the purpose of making natural walls invincible in this manner.

There is genuinely no apparent purpose other than to spite the player.

There's a purpose to it: it allows natural walls to prevent a player from building a spawn point easily. That means that, if you want to go Dungeon diving and need to dump some items off, you can't do it in the Dungeon itself. You have to leave the Dungeon, even if only to the surface, then trek back.

It makes progress through the Dungeon or through the Jungle a very different experience from, say, progress through the Underground or Cavern, where you get to build spawn points and chest bases easily.

And, as previously established, explosives still make this not exactly difficult, so it's not much of a limitation (except the Dungeon, of course).
 
There's a purpose to it: it allows natural walls to prevent a player from building a spawn point easily. That means that, if you want to go Dungeon diving and need to dump some items off, you can't do it in the Dungeon itself. You have to leave the Dungeon, even if only to the surface, then trek back.

Except for 1 problem: You can just simply tunnel through the nearest wall and build a house immediately outside of the dungeon.
 
There's a purpose to it: it allows natural walls to prevent a player from building a spawn point easily. That means that, if you want to go Dungeon diving and need to dump some items off, you can't do it in the Dungeon itself. You have to leave the Dungeon, even if only to the surface, then trek back.

It makes progress through the Dungeon or through the Jungle a very different experience from, say, progress through the Underground or Cavern, where you get to build spawn points and chest bases easily.

And, as previously established, explosives still make this not exactly difficult, so it's not much of a limitation (except the Dungeon, of course).
With the new system locking out base building in areas with background walls really limits things, most of the undergound layer is walled.

Bombs only break background walls if part of the blast catches the edge of the wall.
Never noticed that, i mostly use bombs in the corruption and break alot of walls as i do so. You could use dynamite to try and find holes you can breakfrom. Otherwise build the best hammer, focus on speed stat, find the nearest edge and break a line all the way to the point you want? (Which sounds ridiculous to need to do)
If you look near the edge of the biome you might be able to mix NPCs so they can be close by while also happy because of their biome.
 
most of the undergound layer is walled.

Actually.....no.

What you're seeing is a parralax background in a good 90% of the underground. You can build your own backwall over these fine, it's no different than the sky on the surface. There are cave rooms, but these tend to be rather tiny and the edges easily found.

Now the Jungle does indeed have a lot of backwall but even it isn't total coverage, and neither is the underground Snow. Pretty sure the Underground Desert and the Dungeon are the only two that are total coverage with their backwalls. Oh, and the Evil Biomes too, but the Evil Biomes (just like the dungeon) tend to be narrow passages where you could easily tunnel to the outside and find yourself the natural underground (and a gap in the backwall).
 
There's a purpose to it: it allows natural walls to prevent a player from building a spawn point easily. That means that, if you want to go Dungeon diving and need to dump some items off, you can't do it in the Dungeon itself. You have to leave the Dungeon, even if only to the surface, then trek back.

Ha-haaa... it's like you don't remember Magic Mirrors exist...

And let's not forget the new Return potions, which granted... you can't make until Hardmode, but before that they can be uncommonly (not RARELY) found.

... also you could just bring a piggybank with you.

There's a number of ways to work around this "limitation" that makes it entirely moot.
 
Ha-haaa... it's like you don't remember Magic Mirrors exist...

And then you have to walk all the way back. You can (and I have) build an outpost at the top of the Dungeon, but you'll still have to go through a lot of the Dungeon you've already seen.

The point of this is to make Dungeon diving seem treacherous and different from other parts of the game.
 
And then you have to walk all the way back. You can (and I have) build an outpost at the top of the Dungeon, but you'll still have to go through a lot of the Dungeon you've already seen.

The point of this is to make Dungeon diving seem treacherous and different from other parts of the game.
It's... not really that treacherous though? I guess once Hardmode begins...

But here's another thing I just thought up, it's actually really easy to destroy dungeon walls in particular, and make a spawn somewhere down inside it.

The trouble we're talking about in this thread only applies to the uppermost section of the underground layer which usually has a lot of walls in the caves. Once you get deeper down, the background wall gives way to an "empty" space which just displays a panoramic background. You can build walls here.

More importantly, it's empty space that would let you easily dig into the dungeon's blocks from any of it's outer walls.

Sure, you can't make a spawn in the upper layers, but that's typically not the part of the dungeon you care about. That's just the long, dropping entrance into the ACTUAL meat of the place.

In short, the only thing preventing you from building a spawn where it counts is the level of your pick and hammer.
 
And then you have to walk all the way back. You can (and I have) build an outpost at the top of the Dungeon, but you'll still have to go through a lot of the Dungeon you've already seen.

The point of this is to make Dungeon diving seem treacherous and different from other parts of the game.

Or you could, you know, just simply tunnel through the dungeon wall and build a house anywhere you want, heck, you could do so with the dungeon bricks that you just mined while tunnelling through the dungeon wall and it would be a valid player home. Heck now with 1.4, you could even set up a cavern pylon down there so you can teleport to and fro, just as long as the NPCs' houses are not in the dungeon, it's still counted as underground/cavern.
 
The problem with the Underground Desert in particular is the way it's done: Removing the walls also destroys the biome, unlike the other major biomes; and said walls cannot even be replaced, so part of the reason why the walls cannot simply be removed without finding the edge, just as in the Dungeon's case, is likely so Players can use explosives in the biome without accidentally destroying it.
So the problem is overall bad design ("Hostile" walls should be craftable with Ecto Mist just so this cannot happen; and, in the case of the Desert, making it require Hardened Sand and/or Sandstone would have been quite easy).
 
Actually.....no.

What you're seeing is a parralax background in a good 90% of the underground. You can build your own backwall over these fine, it's no different than the sky on the surface. There are cave rooms, but these tend to be rather tiny and the edges easily found.

Now the Jungle does indeed have a lot of backwall but even it isn't total coverage, and neither is the underground Snow. Pretty sure the Underground Desert and the Dungeon are the only two that are total coverage with their backwalls. Oh, and the Evil Biomes too, but the Evil Biomes (just like the dungeon) tend to be narrow passages where you could easily tunnel to the outside and find yourself the natural underground (and a gap in the backwall).
Not sure if it is abnormal but if mining through the underground desert in the intermediary sand patches I have found a number of gaps where the distance between rooms is quite large. Alternatively what about extending the Desert at the edge?
The problem with the Underground Desert in particular is the way it's done: Removing the walls also destroys the biome, unlike the other major biomes; and said walls cannot even be replaced, so part of the reason why the walls cannot simply be removed without finding the edge, just as in the Dungeon's case, is likely so Players can use explosives in the biome without accidentally destroying it.
So the problem is overall bad design ("Hostile" walls should be craftable with Ecto Mist just so this cannot happen; and, in the case of the Desert, making it require Hardened Sand and/or Sandstone would have been quite easy).
Yes this is the thing I have been complaining about for years ever since they changed it so that player placed dungeon walls were "safe" for housing years ago. It should be noted the described situation is also true for the spider minibiome and is also the thing that prevents me from making my arenas look nice as enemies would no longer be able to spawn. It would be a simple fix and a tool tip informing the player that it wasn't safe for housing would be in fine order. (In fact perhaps they could be crafted from the safe versions of the same walls (as I believe the desert like the lootable dungeon back walls are now both obtainable in 1.4) to remove any case of confusion
 
So the Dye Trader comes to my village and I'd love to build him a house that he'd like, in the desert except in my world, I only have two really tiny deserts despite me having a Medium world and one of them has an oasis and a bunch of palm trees.

I'd rather not level every tree in that tiny desert and/or mess up the oasis pond to try to fit a house there.

So, I decide maybe I'll build an underground house.......

Oh wait, you can't block swap sand. Derp. Can't do that.

Then I'm like "well, okay, Underground Desert has some ruined houses, I could fix one of those up!"

....... nope. Can't do that because there is background wall absolutely everywhere (which of course doesn't count for homes), and we STILL have no method of breaking background walls without finding an edge which is miles away.

EDIT: Here's a suggestion, could you perhaps have a small piece of background wall missing in those ruined house spawns so the player could replace the rest of the background wall with something valid for housing? It'd be nice to just fix one of those up or something.

Two fixes.

1 - Make the housing above the desert. This actually works better for spawns because it keeps the npcs safe. Add rope, platforms, etc if you want to give it a realistic feel.
2- Make a house underground. Grab your hammer, and make a hammer-line down to where you need to be. It doesn't have to be visible either. You can break walls behind placed blocks. Sometimes you may have to dig up a sand tunnel but sand is the easiest to replace of all the blocks.
 
Back
Top Bottom