Expand Your Terraria Empire - Pylons, Town Building, and NPC Happiness

[darthmorf]

ok no problem... so is there a way to partake in this new system, ? or is it just a dont play the game thing?

I assume you mean to not partake?
No, as with all changes you can't just pick and choose what bits of 1.4 are active and what aren't. I don't think it's a big deal, in all of the testing it never felt like the raised prices made much of an impact on gameplay, especially considering how easy it is to lower them.

 

[Lucasness]

For everyone coming into this thread- here’s the FACTS regarding how npc prices work in regards to the new happiness system. These are multiplicative apparently, but I’ve heard they may be additive instead.

Of note: if an npc is in a disliked biome OR near someone they dislike, you CANNOT overcome the price penalty, and prices will ALWAYS be higher than 1.3 levels. There’s also a 25% cap on price reductions, as opposed to the 50% increase cap.

 

[Derunih]

I have voiced my opinions elsewhere on the specific points, but:
I mostly like the new system, aside from vertically. This has taken me HOURS to redesign around though, so I still would have liked the radius ahead of launch.

 

[Tyrax Lightning]

yeah but, the tax collecter before being purified is a TORTURED soul, so i think hell pretty much tortured him

Meh, he's got Terrarian Toughness, he can just walk it off. Plus for all we know, he might be Kook enough to like torture...

So. HappyDays just put out a video on this subject.

In it he shows off the price increase for unhappy NPCs

Wanna know how much it was?

30%

***THIRTY*** percent (the item he showed normally costs 75 copper, it was marked up to 97)

that's not a minor increase. That's punishing players for not playing the way the devs want us to.

Now, is it probable that the system isn't binary, and that there's some form of scale to it? I'd call it a near certainty. Add that to the fact that Happy showed off a literal worst case "NPC Prison" and it's likely most people won't ever see that level of price hike.

However, I should also point out that its also likely that that price hike ISN'T EVEN THE MAXIMUM, given that the NPC he showed as an example liked its neighbor and thus wasn't likely at maximum unhappiness..

Looks like the naysayers had reason to be worried.

Meh, Money's not hard to get, especially in Expert Mode or above.

Well, it’s actually 50% max increase. And it happens if you so much as put an npc next to someone they dislike.

*Too busy swimming in Money to notice...*

well the price of everything in my world went up... guess I cant just "opt out of the happiness part"

dev's "play the way we want or we make everything cost more... oh but you can opt out" (doesnt state how to opt out)

"Of course you don't HAVE to partake in this new system, " UM everything now costs more... how do i NOT participate in this new system of play how we want or we make stuff more expsensive? is the joke "dont play the game"?

I know how to Opt Out of the Feature... here's a step by step:

1. Play Journey Mode.
2. Kill enough Slimes to get 100 Copper Coins & get it Researched.
3. Left Shift-Click the duplication Copper Coins to get a Silver Coin then Research it.
4. Left Shift Click duplication Copper Coins 99 more times for 99 more Silver Coins then Research it to Unlock it.
5. Left Shift Click duplication Silver Coins to get a Gold Coin then Research it.
6. Left Shift-Click duplication Gold Coins 99 more times then Research it to Unlock Gold Coins.
7. Left Shift Click duplication Gold Coins to get a Platinum Coin & Research it.
8. Left Shift Click duplication Gold Coins 99 more times to get 99 more Platinum Coins then Research them.
9. Left Shift Click duplication all the full stacks of Platinum Coins ya could ever want.
10. (Optional) Give no more damn what anything ever costs ever again.
11. Profit! (Literally!)

Hope that helped!

For everyone coming into this thread- here’s the FACTS regarding how npc prices work in regards to the new happiness system. These are multiplicative apparently, but I’ve heard they may be additive instead.View attachment 271562
Of note: if an npc is in a disliked biome OR near someone they dislike, you CANNOT overcome the price penalty, and prices will ALWAYS be higher than 1.3 levels. There’s also a 25% cap on price reductions, as opposed to the 50% increase cap.

Question... there's a Penalty for NPC within 25 Tiles, but bonus if within 25 Tiles if Liked... which one takes precedence...?

 

[Derunih]

(snip)
Question... there's a Penalty for NPC within 25 Tiles, but bonus if within 25 Tiles if Liked... which one takes precedence...?

There is no penalty at only 3 NPCs in a group. The end result is based off each multiplier stacked, both positive and negative, so it would balance out with only a few extra NPCs, but become negative again at, say, 9 NPCs in a grid.

 

[Nicol Bolas]

So, as an outspoken critic of this feature when it was just hypothetical, what is my take on it?

I surmised that getting Pylons would be tedious. That you'd have to build a house in a biome, send an NPC who likes the biome there, and then you can purchase a Pylon. Which is a lot of work just to get the thing, but you can at least build two houses there and transfer someone else there so that you can set up a Pylon right away.

What I didn't predict was how expensive it would be. Oh sure, in early Hardmode, 8.5 gold may be easy to come by, but pre-EoC, when you're still exploring the world, that's a rather huge expenditure. One you have to make twice, since you need at least two Pylons (of different types) to be useful. Fortunately, Nymphs drop lots of gold, so that plus selling a few redundant accessories did the trick.

The happiness system is actually worse than I thought. I kind of expected the developers to prevent happiness deadlocking from happening, but... they didn't.

What is a happiness deadlock? Well, maximum happiness (and therefore, the full 25% price reduction) requires 3 things:

1) Living in their preferred biome.
2) With exactly one NPC within 25 squares.
3) Who is a person the character "loves" (technically it can be "likes", but you'll "only" get a 23% price reduction).

If you violate any one of these (or have 5 or more NPCs within ~120 squares), then you can't get the full 25% price reduction. A happiness deadlock is what happens when you have two NPCs that sell stuff, one of whom loves the other, but the other hates that character's preferred biome.

Oh, and the penalty for being in the wrong biome is a whopping 50% cost increase.

Enter the Goblin Tinkerer and the Mechanic. The GT's preferred place is underground, but the Mechanic hates being underground. But they each have the other under "loves".

Therefore, if you want to get the GT's best prices, you need to move the Mechanic to a place where she will give you her worst prices. And vice-versa. And since there's a good chance that you'll be spending money with both of them over the course of the game, this is going to get really annoying really fast.

In a well-designed version of this feature, you would be able to find a stable arrangement of characters that would give you the best prices, clusters of characters who prefer the same biome and prefer people who also prefer the same biome. But that's not actually possible given the particular set of character preferences.

The feature is not just annoying in concept. The implementation of it seems to be designed to make you either accept a non-optimal price, or make you shuffle people around a lot just to get the optimal price from a particular character. The feature is double-annoying.

And no, you can't just say "go play in Journey mode and dupe up some money".

 

[Heroman3003]

This feature seems to be bugged at the moment, actually, where 'disliking' a biome or character results in immedeate max negative happiness, while 'hating' only results in moderate decrease in it. Hopefully it will be fixed in first hotfix.

 

[inaire]

I assume you mean to not partake?
No, as with all changes you can't just pick and choose what bits of 1.4 are active and what aren't. I don't think it's a big deal, in all of the testing it never felt like the raised prices made much of an impact on gameplay, especially considering how easy it is to lower them.

considering all of what has been already stated, i find that hard to believe. I have to completely change any world to get what a 25% bonus... but if i dont play how the dev's want i have a negaive 100% or more negative? "easy" was what already existed. Guess ill wait for mods to fix these odd choices. fyi trying making the mechanic and goblin both max happy see if you see how that will be undo-able.... sad day well everyone have a good day.

 

[Nicol Bolas]

i have a negaive 100% or more negative?

It's 50%. Let's not exaggerate. The way the numbers are stated on the Wiki is the percentage relative to the base price of the item. So if the happiness level of an NPC leaves them with a percentage of 90%, then the price they sell for is 90% of the regular price, a 10% discount. But if the happiness level leaves them at 150%, then the price they sell for is 150% of the regular price, a 50% increase.

 

[Loki]

Let's also toss in some other context that people seem to forget in all of this.... the supply of money has increased. By what percentage? Don't know... but absent any negatives from happiness, you would effectively have that % increase in purchasing power vs what you were used to before already - thus offsetting any negatives at WORST and at BEST, when coupled with happy boons, making you more rich than ever before...

- Enemies have an increased chance to drop bonus amounts of money when killed
- Enemies drop extra money during Blood Moons

 

[Nicol Bolas]

Let's also toss in some other context that people seem to forget in all of this.... the supply of money has increased. By what percentage? Don't know... but absent any negatives from happiness, you would effectively have that % increase in purchasing power vs what you were used to before already - thus offsetting any negatives at WORST and at BEST, when coupled with happy boons, making you more rich than ever before...

I'm not sure I understand your thinking. It sounds like you're saying that it's OK to extract more money from people who aren't willing to play along with some arbitrary rules because the game added a bunch more money, so you have more money to spend.

It's like inflation, only it's deliberate (rather than the natural outgrowth of market economics) and serves no purpose. It would have been easier to not cause inflation and just give happy NPCs a price drop. Or just not have NPC happiness as a thing and give us Pylons in some other way.

Psychologically speaking, rewarding someone and then punishing them by extracting exactly that reward feels far more like a punishment than leaving things as they were.

 

[lZSM]

then why did you reply

I wanted to summarize it- I didn't actually continue it. The idea is perspective will help with ending the conversation peacefully.

 

[Callum.Sk]

Just wanted to appreciate the work that's gone into this literal masterpiece of a game.
The devs on board this game remind me of the times when the gaming industry was good.
If you compare this with minecraft, a game that Notch personally walked out on when he sold it out to microsoft, it blows minecraft out of the waters in terms of content and gameplay.
I had a lot of love for minecraft back when Notch was leading the project. You guys >really< should work on a 3D build of Terraria.
Think about it.

As a side project perhaps

I'm ashamed to have less than a single hour on Terraria PC.
I played this game to figurative death on xbox360.
There's something about the controller UI on PC that is slightly jarring to me. I haven't quite gotten used to it.
If i had one piece of advice for a future compatibility update, i would like the console controller UI to be implemented practically as it was on console, to PC.
Maybe it's partially because i'm using a third party knockoff controller but it is rather difficult to play with this controller on the PC version of Terraria.
In general PC gaming, controller support is very janky. At least i am glad this version of Terraria HAS controller support! Creating steam layouts can get annoying sometimes.
But if memory serves me correctly, i feel like the PC version of Terraria would be better integrating the full console controller mechanics.
For example, if i recall correctly, the xbox360 version had a version of mouse (joystick) acceleration which made placing the cursor an easy task.
(Pulling the analog stick further accelerated the cursor faster, but close to the centre made it slower)
Again, i'm using a third party controller with a bit of a deadzone in the centre so maybe i should just upgrade my hardware but for a compatibility issue maybe worth looking into?

However, considering the extent of the updates to this game, i am interested in overcoming some minor controller issues to get back into this game.
I love it.

I saw the update on steam and i kinda had to look twice to realize what it meant.
I remember Red posting back in 1.3 how he thought it would be more or less the final update!!! LOL
(I remember some talk about an update of a whole different moon world, but i haven't actually played 1.3... did he manage to implement this?????????)
If Red hasn't implemented that moon world yet then i guess if you really want to make him happy then get working on that! LOL.
I was / am very sympathetic to those posts back then. Very aspirational guy. Red is a true hero in the industry.
Kinda restores my faith in humanity a little? Yknow?

I mean i remember the video game industry back in the 90's being about content. If you bought a game you owned the game. The updates were free.
DLC didn't exist back then. But game devs who had bigger visions for their games made practical sequels in the same engine, and released those as ''Expansion packs''
Usually Expansion packs were no less than total overhauls of the game you had bought. Practically speaking these expansion packs added content to the game that was at least the size of the base game itself. And were half the price of the original game. At the time it was a fair deal. You had a whole new game, for half the price of the original. Yet the expansion was just as good as the base game was, if not better, whilst improving upon the base game.

Nowadays the industry is so ed it's beyond recognition. I'm almost ashamed to be a ''gamer''.
This single Terraria update could warrant a 30$ DLC price tag, but i wouldn't buy it.
5$ maybe. Probably, but it'd feel weird about it. Psychology is weird.
Heck as a ''corporate business model'' Terraria could slap on microtransactions on some super duper exclusive cosmetics if they wanted.
You want this rad armor? It's 2$. .
But no. None of that here. And i'd rather buy my girlfriend a copy of the game for it. Because it's a full game, i buy it on every console i can because it's worth it.
Although i avoid consoles like they're the plague since walking 360 degrees away from the 360.

No this game is made with passion. I didn't even realize it's been such a long going project. I read in this thread that it's been 8 years since hard mode was released.
That's like nearly a third of my life so far? :|
Lol. Didn't mean to get too deep. There's a lot of loyalty and love towards the project.
I really am lacking the words to describe my appreciation for the work and passion that has gone into this, and how much it is symbolical of a redemption of the entire video game industry.
I cannot stress enough how much games like Terraria will end up saving this industry from destroying itself AND our actual economies.
People addicted to buying digital cosmetics are not supporting our agricultural industries with that money. You know, the industries we require to survive off of?
It's a huge problem.

Anyway,
Whilst writing this i had come up with some ideas that may improve upon the experience of the game and do something to help the community become stronger within the context of Terraria.
There's essentially 2 suggestions, and i hope to learn what the devs think about this.
3 if you count ''Terraria 3D'' as an idea for a future side project.

Worms Mode
So worms is a neat game right, and terraria has a lot of functions, if not more, than worms has in terms of gameplay.
In worms you can equip a bunch of weapons to fight other worms on a 2D terrain that you can also blow up n stuff.
Ok so as a multiplayer / online / even hotseat experience Terraria could easily emulate the gameplay in Worms.
Sure it'd take a few pages of code to do, but not anything too difficult. Just make a game state to incorporate the mode.
Slap a timer, turn based progression on a team of player controllable characters. Give em a selction of weapons / tools to choose from.
Add in crate drops, scoreboard. Pretty much done amirite.
Limit player characters movement, etc.
Make a couple of official maps to play on.
And make it possible for people to make their own maps and upload em or whatever like you're doing with the golf minigame.
I think it could work quite nicely and give people a fun thing to do with friends at home or online.

Gamespy / Server Browser
Obviously having a functional server browser would make the multiplayer Terraria experience a lot more immersive.
Don't think i need to say more on the matter.
Pretty self explanatory

Gamespy was pretty neat back in the day. Was a sad day when it went offlline.

 

[Admiral Voidzuli']

i'm making towns for everyone in there favorite biomes. So far i have a desert one (My house is there now) and a forest one.

 

[ZJ]

same