@ppowersteef
Any chance you could give me a little more advice?
What major changes are there to look out for?
Overall, it's better to learn Expert Mode first in softcore a few times to be well aware of the dangers yourself, I can't cover them all.
Now, from my experience, the difficulity spikes:
- The start of a game is already one of the hard parts. The lack of movement, strength, defence and fall damage, is really annoying against the early dangers and traps.
- Expert Skeletron is seen as the most difficult boss in all of pre-hardmode. The dungeon should be kept as the last before entering hardmode.
- Just...everything of hardmode...weaker enemies gets stronger by a significiant amount, (common slimes, common zombies Dark Caster's water bolt ect.) you should really avoid getting attacked by seemingly weak enemies. Most of the biomes gets powerful enemies too. Crimson gets Ichor Stickers, Hallow gets Gastropods, Jungle and Ice gets Tortoises, Desert gets gigantic worms, sandstorms gets sand sharks. Sky gets Wyverns and so on, and so on.
It's a bit to the point where your home at the center is the only safe spot for the time been, so every move you make towards any biome has to be careful.
- Post-Plantera unlocks the Hardmode dungeon, there isn't really anything valueable that worth risking your life at, so I've stayed away from there.
- Post-Golem unlocks the fearsome Martians. Which is also better avoided, it's safer to fly over the drone (that activates the invasion) instead of trying to destroy it, because it's durable enough to fly away.
- Post-Cultists, as you can probably tell, unleashes chaos pillars on the whole surface.
- Solar Eclipse is one of high risk/high reward events, it introduces Mothron and Reaper after defeating all Mech Bosses. and even more dangerous enemies after defeating Plantera.
- The Old One Army (from Dungeon Defenders 2) event is also a high risk/high reward one, because it has regeneration armors, but it's very imbalanced and I suggest to only grind their weaker tier when you're just about to reach their next tier. Tier 2 happens when at least one Mech boss is defeated, while Tier 3 appears after Golem is defeated. (but please, never try Tier 3 in this mode.)