Hey guys,
I bought Terraria a long time ago back when Hardmode was new, and I've come back to play the game again. Whilst a lot of things are better, some things have not gotten better with age, and one of the biggest offenders is crafting. Essentially, it was never great but in ye olden days there just weren't that many things to craft or that many things you needed to know, so it just didn't really matter and it was fine. Coming back to 1.4.4.9, it's really painful and effectively I only found the game playable by continuously referring to the wiki. First I'd like to clearly enumerate the problems and then suggest the solutions.
UI
The problem with the actual crafting UI itself when you have many items seems kinda obvious; as the list gets longer, it just takes more and more time to scroll through and find the thing you actually care about. Having multiple different types of wood is a great example; there's loads of stuff you can find with wood and so many variants for every type of wood. If you have many bars of different metals you get a similar effect. Or just ask the Guide to show you all the items you can make with Rich Mahogany. You may say, just use the crafting window? The crafting window is not so great.
I'd suggest the following as relatively cheap improvements:
Discovery
Actually figuring out what to make and how to make it really hurts.
Now to some extent, I see the arguments against simply adding a recipe explorer to the game. It's not very immersive and doesn't really fit well with natural player discovery. That being said, I do not think Terraria's mechanics reward organic player discovery either. RNG plays a big part of this because even if you are in the right place, at the right time, in the right biome, and kill the right enemy, the right item just may not drop due to RNG. The player doesn't know what didn't drop. Even if you killed 50 of every enemy to fill them in the Beastiary, the player doesn't know what enemies did not spawn for whatever reason. Natural exploration games, like Subnautica, do this better in many ways but most importantly, there is no variability in what you do or do not find. The area's contents are consistent as far as items/etc are concerned. The player can check an area and if they don't find what they want, they can have confidence that it's probably not there.
I think that there's no way to avoid simply telling the player where to go and what to kill/loot/etc without a lot of further changes, and having the wiki on the other screen is even less immersive, so it's probably just a question of how to do so in the least obtrusive way possible. I'd suggest as some sort of middle ground changing it so that the Guide is more useful.
As a quick note for any discussion, kindly avoid commenting on mods or item storage as I'm going to open separate conversations on those.
I bought Terraria a long time ago back when Hardmode was new, and I've come back to play the game again. Whilst a lot of things are better, some things have not gotten better with age, and one of the biggest offenders is crafting. Essentially, it was never great but in ye olden days there just weren't that many things to craft or that many things you needed to know, so it just didn't really matter and it was fine. Coming back to 1.4.4.9, it's really painful and effectively I only found the game playable by continuously referring to the wiki. First I'd like to clearly enumerate the problems and then suggest the solutions.
UI
The problem with the actual crafting UI itself when you have many items seems kinda obvious; as the list gets longer, it just takes more and more time to scroll through and find the thing you actually care about. Having multiple different types of wood is a great example; there's loads of stuff you can find with wood and so many variants for every type of wood. If you have many bars of different metals you get a similar effect. Or just ask the Guide to show you all the items you can make with Rich Mahogany. You may say, just use the crafting window? The crafting window is not so great.
- The crafting window is a button you click every time, rather than a toggle. Clicking it every item is pretty tedious.
- You can't actually craft from the crafting window. You click on the item you want, but you don't craft it, you then have to click back on the list to actually craft.
- The crafting window is in the wrong place. It should be colocated with other UI elements you're using, but the inventory, list, and window are not very close together. There's a lot of mouse and eyeball movement for something that should be easy.
- The crafting window is not organised any more than the list; this means the player can't use any kind of muscle/eye memory to navigate it because any given item could be in loads of different places every time depending on what's in your inventory.
I'd suggest the following as relatively cheap improvements:
- The player toggles between either the list or the window. This is a remembered setting. They never need both so there's never any reason to display both.
- Players who choose the window can craft directly from the window just like they can with the list.
- The window should be located somewhere more helpful; perhaps directly under the inventory similar to the list.
- The window should be consistently organised so that the player can find similar items in similar places every time no matter what's in their inventory. If inspiration is needed, see how Factorio organises their crafting window. With cosmetic versions, Terraria must now include just as many or even more recipes by default.
- The list/window should be right next to the inventory, rather than with a kinda odd gap.
Discovery
Actually figuring out what to make and how to make it really hurts.
- Sure, I can ask the Guide what I can make with an Obsidian Shield. He tells me to combine it with the Ankh Charm. But I can't ask the Guide about the Ankh Charm so I've learned nothing I can actually use about how to acquire the Ankh Shield.
- With so many items making cosmetic variations of furniture, many, many items are now materials but most of them don't actually matter in gameplay at all. The player would have to be bringing hundreds of items to the Guide and checking the results there. Virtually all Blocks can be used to make walls for example, but rarely they make things that aren't walls, like stone blocks make the starting furnace. So do some random blocks I've found actually make something more interesting? I've got to sift through a lot of stuff to find out.
- The Guide is frequently just not available. If I've hit my inventory limit and have to choose an item to throw away, I kinda need to know how important it is right now, not later when I get back to my base.
- There's lots of items the player might want where they don't currently have any of the ingredients to use. I like the Ivy Whip and head for it early. But you don't get any of the materials for the Whip until after you've been to the Jungle, so first you'd have to go to the Jungle, find one of the materials by accident, bring it back to the Guide, then go back to the Jungle and farm them. You can't learn about the Whip and then just go get it. You also can't ask about items you didn't buy from an NPC.
- There's a lot of details missing about how to acquire them even if you get lucky. One good example of this is the Dao of Pow. You can ask the Guide about it if you get a Soul of Light/Night, and the Shards are "sometimes carried by creatures in dark/light deserts". I actually didn't get a Hallowed desert in either of my playthroughs and had to make one both times, which is certainly not a process described anywhere, and after I did, the whole thing fit on the screen so standing in it wasn't enough to actually spawn Mummies because enemies spawn offscreen, so I had to stand not actually in the Hallowed Desert, but kinda vaguely nearby, to even get a chance of Light mummies. So the vague idea that I want some kind of Light desert was just nowhere near sufficient for me to actually acquire a Light shard. And many materials don't mention their source at all, like Hallowed Bar. And I sure hope you didn't want an item from creatures that only spawn by moon phase or something like that.
- Quite a few important things aren't actually recipes or mob drops at all. Shimmer transmutations would be a great example of this (after you find the biome by pure luck, and then also figuring out transmutation is what it's for and how to do it). But another example would be items bought from an NPC who just isn't happy enough to sell it to you, or items only available at some stages of progression like only in Hardmode or only post-Golem for example, items dropped from chests, shadow orbs, etc.
Now to some extent, I see the arguments against simply adding a recipe explorer to the game. It's not very immersive and doesn't really fit well with natural player discovery. That being said, I do not think Terraria's mechanics reward organic player discovery either. RNG plays a big part of this because even if you are in the right place, at the right time, in the right biome, and kill the right enemy, the right item just may not drop due to RNG. The player doesn't know what didn't drop. Even if you killed 50 of every enemy to fill them in the Beastiary, the player doesn't know what enemies did not spawn for whatever reason. Natural exploration games, like Subnautica, do this better in many ways but most importantly, there is no variability in what you do or do not find. The area's contents are consistent as far as items/etc are concerned. The player can check an area and if they don't find what they want, they can have confidence that it's probably not there.
I think that there's no way to avoid simply telling the player where to go and what to kill/loot/etc without a lot of further changes, and having the wiki on the other screen is even less immersive, so it's probably just a question of how to do so in the least obtrusive way possible. I'd suggest as some sort of middle ground changing it so that the Guide is more useful.
- The player can ask the Guide about biomes. The Guide should tell the player what creatures to find there and what items can be found lying around (looking at you, jungle spores/crystal shards/chest contents), and if it's a biome that can fail to spawn, then how to make one. The Guide should probably do this for every biome that can exist currently in the world even if it didn't.
- The Guide can answer questions about items the player doesn't currently have, not just ones they do have.
- The Guide can answer questions about NPCs as well. I thought Happiness it was just a small extra charge on items and had no idea they didn't sell you some items if they weren't happy or in the right biome or whatever.
- The Guide can answer questions about creatures. What biome to find them in, what conditions they like (looking at you, Flinx fur, Werewolves...), what they drop, etc.
As a quick note for any discussion, kindly avoid commenting on mods or item storage as I'm going to open separate conversations on those.
