Reactorcore
Terrarian
The Problem:
I have an issue with Terraria.
I gather tons of objects, build castles, acquire piles of coins and conquer the land. Then I fight the Moonlord and defeat him. He gives me amazing weapons and tools, but at this point, the Moonlord was the only last challenge left. Theres nothing to use it on, its game over. Sure, I could stay around and beat the dead horse that is my conquered world, but theres no real meaning left. The only real option is to reset and start over. All my loot, castles and wealth are useless and would even be harmful to carry over to the new character in a fresh world.
When this happens, I feel sadness because I'd like to keep enjoying Terraria, but it ran out of meaning, surprise and challenge each time I beat the Moonlord.
This makes me not want to commit to building anything serious in terraria or to get too attached to anything, dimishing my fun and immersion of the game greatly.
I'd like to propose a new gameplay mechanic that serves as a post-Moonlord infinite gameplay extention.
The Story:
You know the legendary celestial armors that you get after the lunar event? Solar, Vortex, Nebula and Stardust armor sets? Well acquiring them makes you a Celestial Hero, lore wise. A hero that can travel to new worlds and defeat evil corruption-inflicted monsters and bosses. So the story is that you're this Hero that goes off to perpetually save the universe, rescue non-combatant terrarians, and cleanse the corruption from the galaxy, one world at a time.
Celestial Portal & Celestial Void Worlds:
The way it would work is that defeating the Moonlord gives you loot that allows the creating of a Celestial Portal. A 5x1 high tech pedestal that once used/activated, allows the user to travel to a newly generated Celestial Void World. Your main world will serve as a permanent hub to where you bring in goodies, build permanent structures, do trading, restock on ammo, potions and consumables, while the Celestial Void Worlds infinitely provides temporary worlds that you go in to conquer and loot.
The Celestial Void Worlds generated by traveling to a new world via the Celestial Portal would be temporary. They're a regularly sized Terraria world of either small, medium or large variety, but the world-generation is off the flippin rails on this one. Vast underground ruins, desolate buildings, sprawling dungeons, twisted caverns, sky islands, castles, space asteroids, villages, mountains, oceans, deserts, new alien biomes, all filled with treasures, enemies, traps and other features that make the primary world look tame in comparison.
Destroyable Hives:
The special thing about these worlds is that they have hives. These hives are destroyable cores of randomized procedurally generated biomes, which are guarded by a powerful randomized procedurally generated bosses that generate an invincibility forcefield for the core as long as they are alive, surrounded by randomized procedurally generated mobs. There may be anywhere from 6-20 hives per each Celestial Void World, scattered randomly across world.
Transmutative Element:
The other special thing is the loot they drop. They drop Transmutative Element. They're like "souls" from Dark Souls games, which are used as currency.
The Transmutative Element is special as it can be traded/crafted into ANY item in the game. The rarity of the item will determine the cost. 1 unit of TE can buy a stack of dirt, while 1000000 TE are required to buy the Ankh Shield or the Portal Gun. You can do the math for everything in between.
TE can be acquired through chests scattered around the Celestial Void Worlds, dropped by mobs in this world and dropped in very large amounts by the bosses of these worlds.
The Goal:
The goal is to use the Celestial Portal to travel to a Celestial Void World, explore and find the hives, destroy each hive along with the bosses that are guarding them, loot everything you want, leave the world, then discard it by generating a new Celestial Void World with the Celestial Portal. This gameplay loop is infinite.
Misc Info:
You may only have one Celestial Void World active at a time. Until all the hives are not destroyed, you cannot generate a new Celestial Void World.
You can always travel back and forth between your main world (where you defeated the moonlord originally) and the current active Celestial Void World, to rest, restock ammo, potions or just spend your hard earned TEs to create anything you want.
There are no advanced armor or weapon tiers, as you already have the best possible equipment. Now its all about skill and strategy of using them. This way each new procedural boss, mob and biome you encounter will remain a fun challenge were you're always equally matched.
Transmutative Elements allows you to acquire materials that may have otherwise become depleted in your main world, like gold, iron or other things that you require for crafting or building cool castles in your main world.
The other thing the Transmutative Element solves is the need to cheat in items or to farm them via RNG. Since you already beat the final boss, you're at your peak and have no need to upgrade the character any longer. You may want to collect every item in the game, so doing so through defeating Celestial Void World hives and spending TEs to acquire missing items instead of relying on RNG to farm them is far more enjoyable.
The whole point of this suggestion is to give meaning to keep an existing character after defeating the Moonlord and have a real use for all the loot I've acquired, while always having something to look forward to. I'd like to be able to play Terraria forever, but without something like this, its just meaningless and hurts enjoyment.
Celestial Void Worlds include regular mobs, blocks and biomes too, not only the randomly generated ones.
I'm intentionally leaving the suggestion vague, only focusing on the general idea, as you may come up with cool aesthetic, technical and visual solutions for the final implementations that are more convinient with the existing terraria codebase.
If Terraria is to be expanded with more progression based updates, this suggestion would be actually far cheaper to implement and provide substantially more value to players, than creating hand-crafted content which would otherwise be exhausted in a matter of minutes. Adding more content and variables to a procedural generator system instead of exponentially multiplies the existing play-time and possibilities.
About randomized procedural generation of bosses, mobs, biomes and worlds:
Bosses in Terraria are already composed of multiple parts and come with various basic behaviours. Using this modular structure of bosses that have a core, with additional attachments that serve different functions, such as protection (armor), an offensive ability (attacks/weapons), a mobility piece (movement, think Plantera's "legs"), it is possible to build a library of boss archetypes (skeletron-like floating bosses, EoW-like worms, Slimeking/Golem-like non-ethereal mega mobs) boss parts (armor parts, weapon parts, movement parts) Boss AI behaviours (stay at a distance, charge at player), Boss decoration pieces and color schemes to make each boss unique and boss stats, strenghts and weaknesses to make each boss an interesting entity, where sometimes they are fast and weak to fire debuffs, while sometimes slow, tanky and can cause certain debuffs on the player with their attacks.
Using these components like Lego bricks, its possible for a randomized procedural generator to create infinite surprising combinations that are interesting to discover and challenge against. See the GDC 2015 talk on procedural generation to understand the potential of Proc Gen:
Same would apply both for mobs, biomes and worlds. Using all the possible variables that the game already contains, it could be easily possible to create infinite content without actually creating infinite content. Furthermore, adding new pieces into the procedural generation will exponentially multiply the amount of combination possible, extending the game's playability value thousand fold.
Neutered Void Biomes: (NEW)
With the addition of infinite procedural biomes, a problem arises of how to store or handle them. Terraria allows the player to dig blocks and collect items, but the procedurally generated blocks for Void Biomes - which contain the destroyable Hives and bosses - means there could be infinite blocks, infinite mobs and infinite items.
The way to solve this issue is that the unique procedural biomes are limited to existing within the current Celestial Void World. Their data is erased and replaced with a new unique procedural product with each new CVW. If the blocks of this biome are mined, dug out or blown up, they'll drop a universal "Neutered Void Biome" equivalent of the item.
If the player picks up and places these blocks obtained from digging the procedural biome from a Celestial Void World either in their main world or another CVW, they'll be able to create a universal artificial biome, where random neutral and friendly mobs spawn instead. These biomes can be used to harvest bugs, small animals and gain other benefits, like having new renewable resources for things that otherwise are finite, such as trees/plants that will yield iron ore and acorns if chopped down.
Wiring mechanism require a lot of iron, gold and other materials, so these can be provided by the neutered void biome to create new kinds of farms to gain these materials.
Sharing:
If you want to see this happen as much as I do, add the link to this thread in your signature:
http://forums.terraria.org/index.ph...worlds-post-moonlord-infinite-gameplay.43969/
I have an issue with Terraria.
I gather tons of objects, build castles, acquire piles of coins and conquer the land. Then I fight the Moonlord and defeat him. He gives me amazing weapons and tools, but at this point, the Moonlord was the only last challenge left. Theres nothing to use it on, its game over. Sure, I could stay around and beat the dead horse that is my conquered world, but theres no real meaning left. The only real option is to reset and start over. All my loot, castles and wealth are useless and would even be harmful to carry over to the new character in a fresh world.
When this happens, I feel sadness because I'd like to keep enjoying Terraria, but it ran out of meaning, surprise and challenge each time I beat the Moonlord.
This makes me not want to commit to building anything serious in terraria or to get too attached to anything, dimishing my fun and immersion of the game greatly.
I'd like to propose a new gameplay mechanic that serves as a post-Moonlord infinite gameplay extention.
The Story:
You know the legendary celestial armors that you get after the lunar event? Solar, Vortex, Nebula and Stardust armor sets? Well acquiring them makes you a Celestial Hero, lore wise. A hero that can travel to new worlds and defeat evil corruption-inflicted monsters and bosses. So the story is that you're this Hero that goes off to perpetually save the universe, rescue non-combatant terrarians, and cleanse the corruption from the galaxy, one world at a time.
Celestial Portal & Celestial Void Worlds:
The way it would work is that defeating the Moonlord gives you loot that allows the creating of a Celestial Portal. A 5x1 high tech pedestal that once used/activated, allows the user to travel to a newly generated Celestial Void World. Your main world will serve as a permanent hub to where you bring in goodies, build permanent structures, do trading, restock on ammo, potions and consumables, while the Celestial Void Worlds infinitely provides temporary worlds that you go in to conquer and loot.
The Celestial Void Worlds generated by traveling to a new world via the Celestial Portal would be temporary. They're a regularly sized Terraria world of either small, medium or large variety, but the world-generation is off the flippin rails on this one. Vast underground ruins, desolate buildings, sprawling dungeons, twisted caverns, sky islands, castles, space asteroids, villages, mountains, oceans, deserts, new alien biomes, all filled with treasures, enemies, traps and other features that make the primary world look tame in comparison.
Destroyable Hives:
The special thing about these worlds is that they have hives. These hives are destroyable cores of randomized procedurally generated biomes, which are guarded by a powerful randomized procedurally generated bosses that generate an invincibility forcefield for the core as long as they are alive, surrounded by randomized procedurally generated mobs. There may be anywhere from 6-20 hives per each Celestial Void World, scattered randomly across world.
Transmutative Element:
The other special thing is the loot they drop. They drop Transmutative Element. They're like "souls" from Dark Souls games, which are used as currency.
The Transmutative Element is special as it can be traded/crafted into ANY item in the game. The rarity of the item will determine the cost. 1 unit of TE can buy a stack of dirt, while 1000000 TE are required to buy the Ankh Shield or the Portal Gun. You can do the math for everything in between.
TE can be acquired through chests scattered around the Celestial Void Worlds, dropped by mobs in this world and dropped in very large amounts by the bosses of these worlds.
The Goal:
The goal is to use the Celestial Portal to travel to a Celestial Void World, explore and find the hives, destroy each hive along with the bosses that are guarding them, loot everything you want, leave the world, then discard it by generating a new Celestial Void World with the Celestial Portal. This gameplay loop is infinite.
Misc Info:
You may only have one Celestial Void World active at a time. Until all the hives are not destroyed, you cannot generate a new Celestial Void World.
You can always travel back and forth between your main world (where you defeated the moonlord originally) and the current active Celestial Void World, to rest, restock ammo, potions or just spend your hard earned TEs to create anything you want.
There are no advanced armor or weapon tiers, as you already have the best possible equipment. Now its all about skill and strategy of using them. This way each new procedural boss, mob and biome you encounter will remain a fun challenge were you're always equally matched.
Transmutative Elements allows you to acquire materials that may have otherwise become depleted in your main world, like gold, iron or other things that you require for crafting or building cool castles in your main world.
The other thing the Transmutative Element solves is the need to cheat in items or to farm them via RNG. Since you already beat the final boss, you're at your peak and have no need to upgrade the character any longer. You may want to collect every item in the game, so doing so through defeating Celestial Void World hives and spending TEs to acquire missing items instead of relying on RNG to farm them is far more enjoyable.
The whole point of this suggestion is to give meaning to keep an existing character after defeating the Moonlord and have a real use for all the loot I've acquired, while always having something to look forward to. I'd like to be able to play Terraria forever, but without something like this, its just meaningless and hurts enjoyment.
Celestial Void Worlds include regular mobs, blocks and biomes too, not only the randomly generated ones.
I'm intentionally leaving the suggestion vague, only focusing on the general idea, as you may come up with cool aesthetic, technical and visual solutions for the final implementations that are more convinient with the existing terraria codebase.
If Terraria is to be expanded with more progression based updates, this suggestion would be actually far cheaper to implement and provide substantially more value to players, than creating hand-crafted content which would otherwise be exhausted in a matter of minutes. Adding more content and variables to a procedural generator system instead of exponentially multiplies the existing play-time and possibilities.
About randomized procedural generation of bosses, mobs, biomes and worlds:
Bosses in Terraria are already composed of multiple parts and come with various basic behaviours. Using this modular structure of bosses that have a core, with additional attachments that serve different functions, such as protection (armor), an offensive ability (attacks/weapons), a mobility piece (movement, think Plantera's "legs"), it is possible to build a library of boss archetypes (skeletron-like floating bosses, EoW-like worms, Slimeking/Golem-like non-ethereal mega mobs) boss parts (armor parts, weapon parts, movement parts) Boss AI behaviours (stay at a distance, charge at player), Boss decoration pieces and color schemes to make each boss unique and boss stats, strenghts and weaknesses to make each boss an interesting entity, where sometimes they are fast and weak to fire debuffs, while sometimes slow, tanky and can cause certain debuffs on the player with their attacks.
Using these components like Lego bricks, its possible for a randomized procedural generator to create infinite surprising combinations that are interesting to discover and challenge against. See the GDC 2015 talk on procedural generation to understand the potential of Proc Gen:
Same would apply both for mobs, biomes and worlds. Using all the possible variables that the game already contains, it could be easily possible to create infinite content without actually creating infinite content. Furthermore, adding new pieces into the procedural generation will exponentially multiply the amount of combination possible, extending the game's playability value thousand fold.
Neutered Void Biomes: (NEW)
With the addition of infinite procedural biomes, a problem arises of how to store or handle them. Terraria allows the player to dig blocks and collect items, but the procedurally generated blocks for Void Biomes - which contain the destroyable Hives and bosses - means there could be infinite blocks, infinite mobs and infinite items.
The way to solve this issue is that the unique procedural biomes are limited to existing within the current Celestial Void World. Their data is erased and replaced with a new unique procedural product with each new CVW. If the blocks of this biome are mined, dug out or blown up, they'll drop a universal "Neutered Void Biome" equivalent of the item.
If the player picks up and places these blocks obtained from digging the procedural biome from a Celestial Void World either in their main world or another CVW, they'll be able to create a universal artificial biome, where random neutral and friendly mobs spawn instead. These biomes can be used to harvest bugs, small animals and gain other benefits, like having new renewable resources for things that otherwise are finite, such as trees/plants that will yield iron ore and acorns if chopped down.
Wiring mechanism require a lot of iron, gold and other materials, so these can be provided by the neutered void biome to create new kinds of farms to gain these materials.
Sharing:
If you want to see this happen as much as I do, add the link to this thread in your signature:
http://forums.terraria.org/index.ph...worlds-post-moonlord-infinite-gameplay.43969/
Last edited:
