Game Mechanics A way to connect boss fights with wiring

RealSaucer

Skeletron
When it comes to mapmaking in Terraria, there is one really big problem: boss fights.
If you want to have a boss fight in a map you would probably want it to:

  • Be summoned without having the player use a summoning item
  • Be summoned several times in case the player fails, without breaking the map
  • Be summoned at any time of day/night
  • Block progress in the map until the boss is killed, without relying on an honor system
  • Maybe control its drops so it doesn't drop anything that breaks the map
There are a few bosses that fill some of these criteria. For example, you can summon the Queen Bee or BoC automatically. And you can make paths that go through a Dungeon to block it until the player kills Skeletron. But it's very limiting for mapmakers to create good boss fights when only a few bosses can be used. It's also very annoying for a player to have to wait for night time to kill a boss, or to fail a boss fight and have no way of replaying it.

The current alternative is using an honor system, which means that a player is told that they cannot progress without defeating the boss, although there is technically nothing preventing them from just walking past. While it works, it definitely ruins immersion and it feels very unprofessional. It's like adding cheats into a game with no consequences, and telling people not to use them.

To solve this, I propose the following:

Boss Monoliths

There are multiple boss monoliths, one for every boss in the game. Every boss monolith can be crafted with luminite and the respective boss trophy at an Ancient Manipulator.
For example, you need a Skeletron trophy to craft a Skeletron Monolith, and a Moon Lord trophy to craft a Moon Lord Monolith.

The Boss Monolith looks similar to the Lunar Monoliths, and it has an important gimmick: It has special output and inputs for wiring. Just like the Portal Gun Station.
If you connect a wire to the Input, which could mean the lower two tiles of the Boss Monolith, the Boss Monolith summons its boss.
If you connect a wire to the Output, which would be, say, the two top tiles, the Boss Monolith activates the wire if its boss is defeated.

Now, you can summon a boss anywhere you'd like in an adventure map without relying on the player. You can, for example, lock players in a room, summon a boss, and have a door open when the boss is defeated.

For balance reasons, a boss summoned by a monolith does not drop anything. Not even hearts.

Other possible features


I'm not sure if these extra features are possible to implement but I'm mentioning them anyway:

Bosses summoned by a monolith do not escape at sunrise, and can be summoned at any time.

Bosses summoned by a monolith can fight in any biome without escaping or becoming enraged.

Multiple bosses can be summoned at the same time using a monolith

There could also be other features to monoliths such as:
  • Make a boss escape and despawn
  • Instantly kill a boss
  • Make bosses enraged
Conclusion

I feel that an update to the boss summoning is necessary for this game to have a good mapmaking community. The bossfights as they work right now are really limiting and are holding mapmakers back.
Adding this feature, or any other way to connect bosses with wiring in some way, would greatly improve Terraria maps and mapmaking.
 
Unique idea, glad someone is bringing attention to the importance of tools for map makers. Also, it's nice that you expanded on the idea, by giving ways this can be implemented.
 
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