Game Mechanics An issue with player-placed background walls preventing enemy spawns

Scroogle

Terrarian
This is less a specific suggestion, and more of a complaint about an existing game mechanic that could have a number of solutions, a few I will put here but that do not cover the full range of approaches.

Specifically, terraforming at a large scale is very largely hindered by the fact that player-placed walls prevent enemy spawns. Creating artificial underground deserts or dungeons is impossible without use of external tools, I cannot customise back walls in existing biomes without removing spawning spaces and a misplaced hammer swing can cause irreparable damage to a biome. In a world that evolves as much as the player does, customisation is important to me and I dislike the limitations to building of backgrounds and the suspense of maintaining an existing biome while modifying it.

As previously mentioned, this issue could be balanced a number of ways; two simple methods could be to only restrict spawning in NPC housing (which is still limiting to players attempting to create larger scale non-spawnable spaces) or to tie spawnable spaces to the type of wall (such as those crafted in Ecto Mist), which is again lacking in proper customisability in the case a player wishes to use a nonstandard, unnatural tile in a natural setting. The only solution I could think of (but that seems ham-handed) without limitations to players or repercussions for existing builds is a variety of paint crafted in Ecto Mist, applied via roller, which converts player-placed walls to "natural" walls whether the wall variety could spawn naturally or not.
 
It doesn't work for every wall type, but for some walls there is a way to create natural ones artificially. Basically if you let walls get infected, then purify them with a Clentaminator, they become natural walls that allow enemy spawns. This works for artificial underground deserts, but obviously not for biomes that can't be infected like dungeons.

This could be expanded, though, to make the Clentaminator just always turn walls into their natural counterpart no matter what solution you use. This would be a simpler way to implement your second idea that wouldn't require adding any new items.
 
It doesn't work for every wall type, but for some walls there is a way to create natural ones artificially. Basically if you let walls get infected, then purify them with a Clentaminator, they become natural walls that allow enemy spawns. This works for artificial underground deserts, but obviously not for biomes that can't be infected like dungeons.

This could be expanded, though, to make the Clentaminator just always turn walls into their natural counterpart no matter what solution you use. This would be a simpler way to implement your second idea that wouldn't require adding any new items.
Note that if expanded like this there would still be a couple of natural walls specifically those in the ice biome and the special varieties of wall in the underground jungle which can't be created or restored as those biomes natural walls when purified become their regular cavern equivalents. In the case of the Jungle Mud and regular Jungle walls still work as they can get converted to glowing mushroom walls which purified become their height dependent natural counterparts
There are also a few caverns special walls which lack counterparts in the spreading biomes and thus become regular crimstone/ebonstone/peralstone walls which if purified turn into regular stone walls which as they never generate naturally are not natural and can be harvested by a hammer.

Also some grass walls depend on what biome you convert them to. Flower walls are lost to Corruption and Crimson but not Hallow as hallowed grass walls appear to be based on flower walls and purify to them (i.e. the purified hallowed grass walls grow the flower wall specific vines)
Thus both natural flower and or normal grass walls can be artificially produced by converting any grass walls to Hallow or Corrupt/Crimson grass walls respectively.

Also be warned that use of blue(Hallow) solution on jungle will convert it to Hallow even if the Jungle is normally immune to hallow. I learned this the hard way if you want a hallow barrier at the edges of your Jungle it has to be done manually via the slow and tedious route. >_<
 
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