PC Fresh Newbie to Endgame Guide (1.3.0.8) (WIP)

Xylia

Terrarian
Beginner to Endgame Guide (1.3)

Hello Terrarians! I know I am a bit late in getting this out, as 1.3 has been out for a little while now, but it took awhile for me to explore many of the ins and outs of 1.3 and all of the things it changed by doing a couple playthroughs, and also waiting for things to get relatively stable.

Before we get started, I wanted to say a few things first:
1). This guide is meant to help the complete newbie start the game, and guide them all the way to the end, the last boss, and give them advice throughout. This guide is written for a Melee playstyle; Melee weapons and armor will be used. If you would rather use magic or ranged weapons primarily, you can of course do that, but they are not in the scope of this guide. It is my opinion that newbies really should start with melee; the extra defense helps the player stay alive longer which is quite beneficial to newbies. I am not limiting this to only melee weapons, though it is quite possible to go through the entire game with just a Yo-Yo (more about this in point #3). There are times I will mention magic, ranged, and summoning weapons when I feel they are useful or relevant to the melee-oriented playstyle. Keep in mind that while wearing melee armor, your magic, melee, and summoning weapons will not perform anywhere near as well.

2). This guide is also written in a way that I will be making very minimalist use of wiring and traps. Should you wish to do research into this once you get to a point in the game where this is possible, it may or may not make certain boss fights/events easier. I am writing this guide to show you that it is quite easily done without such things.

3). Also on the list of things to mention first, are the subject of Yo-Yos. They were added in 1.3 and are a relatively new addition and are quite uncommon in videogames. Some people love them, others are indifferent, and some people dislike them entirely. I will mention them when I feel they are relevant; some bosses really are easier with a Yo-yo, but I feel that Yo-yos are weak against other bosses. This guide is written assuming you will keep a Yo-Yo on you, but also another weapon or two as well (which I will also mention). It is indeed possible to play through most of the game all the way up until the end using only Yo-Yos, though I wouldn't recommend it.

4). Fishing. Fishing is a love/hate kind of thing. Some players love fishing, other players hate fishing. I will mention it in the guide, but I will use spoiler tags to hide it, so that those who hate fishing, who want nothing to do with fishing can easily skip the sections pertaining to it. Before we start, I will explain Fishing here. Why would one want to do fishing? Well, you get the following from doing it:
a). The Cell Phone (this saves you 3 inventory slots compared to carrying around a mirror, a REK-3000, a GPS, and a Goblin Tech).
b). Endless Water Bucket and Super-Absorbant Sponge (the ability to create and get rid of water infinitely respectively)
c). Certain weapons during certain times (some of these will be mentioned under the fishing section)
d). The ability to get hardmode ore without breaking a single altar (each altar broken corrupts a random stone block in your world which spreads pockets of corruption/crimson).
e). Ingredients for buff potions (which are helpful but one can finish the game without them).
f). Furniture, decorations, vanity items, pets, etc.
With that said, Fishing is about taking 2-3 minutes per game day to go get a quest fish and return to the NPC to turn it in. If this sounds like something that interests you, try it! I will warn, however, that there's a good bit of RNG (Random Number Generator) involved. It may take quite a few tries to get what you're looking for.

With that said, let's get started!

Characters in Terraria do not have any classes or stats for you to worry about, other than their HP and MP maximum values. Every character starts out with 100HP and 20MP, and with a Copper Shortsword, a Copper Pickaxe, and a Copper Axe, in the first 3 buttons of their hotbar. You will have the choice between Softcore (you drop half of your money when you die), Mediumcore (you drop your items when you die), and Hardcore (your character is dead permanently). Nothing else you choose at character generation will have any impact on gameplay, and even clothing choices are purely cosmetic (and until you get a couple certain items, your clothes/hair will always be covered up by armor once you get armor).

Once you've created your character, then it is time to create a world. Worlds in Terraria are procedurally generated; this means that they are randomly made when you create it with certain parameters in mind (which I will explain shortly). You have only two options: Normal/Expert and Small/Medium/Large. Expert Mode is much more difficult, and is for experienced players, so this guide is assuming you are choosing Normal. As far as Small/Medium/Large pros/cons:

Small: Easy to travel around in, but fewer resources, fewer treasure chests which may mean some items will not be found on your world, and the tendency for weird world generation glitches is higher, due to everything being so cramped together. Also, sky enemies spawning while you're on the ground is more likely which can be a problem later in the game.

Large: Many resources, many treasure chests, the chances of any particular item not being in your world are slim-to-none. However, it takes forever to travel from one end of the world to the other, and it will take forever to dig down to the bottom of the world.

Medium: Best of both worlds! This is my personal recommendation, and this guide will be written assuming you have chosen a Medium world.

Now, when you make a world, the following will be chosen:

1). Corruption/Crimson (one or the other, never both. The loading bar tells you which you have; red is crimson purple is corruption)
2). One of the following pairs of Ores: (Copper/Tin, Iron/Lead, Silver/Tungsten, Gold/Platinum)
3). Which side the dungeon/jungle are on (they are always on opposite sides).
4). Which side the frozen/underground desert are on (they are also on opposite sides).
5). How many sword shrines (always at least 1, sometimes up to 3).
6). Sky Islands (at least one lake and one building with treasure chest, sometimes multiples of these, usually 4 islands total for Medium world)

Other optional things might be included like Pyramids, Large Hollow Trees, etc.

Once you've chosen your world, it is time to jump in! You'll see that you'll be standing, usually in a forest though sometimes wonky world generation issues might put you somewhere else. If you find yourself getting killed early-game because you spawned too close to Crimson or Corruption, then try making another world and try again.

Otherwise, you should be standing in a forest, next to an NPC. This NPC is the Guide, and he offers random hints, but this guide will give you everything he will tell you, plus so much more. He will also look at your crafting materials (drop any item that says "material" in the box that appears after you click 'Crafting' in his dialogue option) and he will tell you everything made from that material, and if you move your mouse cursor away it also tells you what crafting machine you need. This is a handy feature if you play full-screen or do not have access to the wiki.

To get started, select your pickaxe and mine out two blocks directly underneath your feet to mark your starting location; this becomes important at various times of the game. Then, you will want to select your Copper Axe and start chopping down trees. Always point the cursor at the very bottom of the tree, the center square (not the 'root' on either side). It takes several hits, because the Copper Axe is so weak and slow! If a green slime starts bothering you, pull out your pickaxe (it actually works better than the sword you start with, lol) and whack it. There's also a chance the Guide will kill it for you or help you kill it. Keep chopping trees until you have about 200 wood. As you chop down trees, place Acorns where the trees were so that you can grow more trees for more wood later. It takes between five to ten real time minutes for a tree to grow, and if you place an acorn too close to stone, objects on the ground, etc the tree might not grow at all. It needs at least a block of grass on either side for it to grow.

Once you've got enough Wood, press the escape key which will bring up your inventory. Here, I recommend dragging all of the junk items off of your hotbar (this always annoys me) with the exception of Acorns (leave those there for now; I recommend putting them on the slot right after the axe). Once you've done this, take a look at the bottom-left underneath your inventory. You'll see a list of items that you can click and a little hammer icon. This list is a scrollable list of everything you can craft from the materials you have on-hand, the crafting machine you are standing next to (which is 'by hand' if you're not standing near one) and any items in a treasure chest you currently have open. Clicking the little hammer icon will bring up this same list in a row display to the right of that to make it easier to find what you want in a large list.

Select a Workbench and then click the button once and you will make a Workbench, but be careful! Clicking more than once means you will make more Workbenches. You only need one for now. Once you've made the Workbench, it now becomes the mouse cursor. Find a flat spot of land to stick it on (you need at least two blocks side-by-side to put it down on). Once you've done this, you will notice your list of items you can make has grown (assuming you chopped enough wood as I said above). One of these items is a Wooden Sword. Go ahead and make one now. If its name is in grey, that means you got a bad one ('Shoddy', 'Broken', 'Shameful', etc). If that happens, make another one. You could fish for awesome stats (Godly, Legendary, etc) but I wouldn't recommend it; even a Legendary Wooden Sword is barely noticeable over a regular one. If you made a bad one, you can drop it in the box that has the trashcan picture on it and it will stay there until you place another item there (then it will be permanently deleted). If you log out with an item in the trashcan, it will be deleted as well. Once you've made a non-bad sword, stick it in the same box as the copper one you started with, and either get rid of the copper sword, or put it elsewhere in your inventory. I know this sounds weird, that a wooden sword is better than a copper sword, but you'll see why when you try using both.

Now that you have a more proper sword, killing slimes should be much easier now. If you've gotten 200 wood like I suggested, you can start looking around the general vincinity of where you started. Before setting out, I suggest killing a few slimes. Once you do, and pick up their gel, you can open your crafting list and make some torches (one gel + one wood makes three torches). Once you have some torches, start exploring! Here are a few things you're looking for:

1). Entrances to caves: I do not suggest you go down into caves yet; if the drop off is too high to jump back up from, I suggest not going in it yet. However, if you see a treasure chest you can get to, and then get back out of, by all means grab it. Remember that you can also log out and log back in to 'warp' back to your starting point. Just don't leave any items laying on the ground (those will be erased).

2). Small 'grass caves' on the surface with overhangs. These usually have pots (break these with anything you can swing!). These pots will usually have things like healing potions, torches, arrows, and most importantly, rope. Once you get some rope, stick it in a hotkey as you will be needing it soon. Sometimes these will also have treasure chests; I suggest placing a torch next to one to mark that you've emptied/checked it. You can also take the chest with you by using your pickaxe on it once it is empty (it will not work if it is not empty), but we don't have any place to store stuff and you will want to reduce item inventory clutter until you're ready for such items. Leave the chests where they are, but just remember where they are so you can come back and pick it up later.

3). Other biomes: If you see red or purple grass, turn back immediately! Going in there is most certainly going to get you killed and if you linger too long, very powerful enemies will start spawning and you will likely die. If you die, you'll drop your money and a tombstone (if you set it to Softcore) so you can come back and grab your money, but it is best to just leave this area entirely. This is the Crimson or Corruption, depending on which your world started with. Other than that, if you see a Desert, chop some cactus down by mining out the sand block underneath it (this is much faster than using the axe on the cactus itself). Some powerful enemies can spawn in the desert, but if you're careful you can kill the birds and the antlions that are buried in the sand. If you see a large winged bug flying at you, I suggest running away as you won't be able to kill that with a wooden sword (and it will likely kill you). If you can get enough Cactus, you can make yourself a Pickaxe (lol), a Sword, and even some armor that is mildly useful until you get better armor later. Some armor is better than none! I will also note that you can make Wood Armor, but I do not recommend it as the defense is too low and the wood is much better used for other purposes. If you run into snow, you can try checking it for pots and chests, but the slimes here are going to be stronger than the ones you found in the forest, but they are still killable. Just be careful of large pools of water and slippery ice. If you find the Jungle, turn back. You're going to get killed in there unless you seriously know what you're doing.

Once you've explored the surface a bit, the sun is probably dipping low and it's starting to get dark depending on how far you were able to walk. If you found any impassable cliffs, you can use ropes and blocks (dirt, stone, etc) to climb them. If it is starting to get dark outside, I recommend going back to near the center of the world (where you started). You can either log out and log back in, or walk back. I suggest saving your Recall Potions if you got any (they are common from pots and chests) at this point.

You will want to build yourself some quick shelter; the night brings with it zombies and demon eyes and it is pretty hard to see anything at night (unlike many games). To make a house, start by selecting wood (or dirt) and start building a flat section of wood on the ground, perhaps 20 blocks wide or so. Do not build directly over the start point (where I told you to mine the two blocks out earlier). You will want to make this first house a little bigger; you need room for some chests, crafting machines, etc. You can make it as large as you want, but I'd think 20-30 blocks wide would do for now. Once you've done that, go to the end and place 4-5 blocks straight up from the floor you've made and then start on the ceiling and drag that all the way over to the other end. Once you're at the other end, start building downwards until you've got a 3 block tall gap (just big enough for you to walk through) between the floor and the ceiling. Place the workbench you made earlier within this 'frame'. You'll notice that a Door is one of the items you can make; make one now. Placing it is a little tricky, but since 1.3, they added the ghost cursor feature, and it should be easier to figure out just where to click to place the door; aim the cursor at the empty space just beneath the ceiling block. If you have exactly a 3 block gap, the door should click into place easily. Open the door (it opens the direction you're facing and will not open in a direction if something is obstructing it) and mine a two-block wide by three-block deep pit directly in front of the door outside of the house. This will prevent zombies and other humanoid monsters from forcing the door open and getting into your house. Once you've done this, get inside the house and close the door. Assuming you did not make your house so large that some of it goes off-screen, you should be completely safe in here.

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This is a completed house, with workbench, furnace, and a pit that prevents zombies from forcing the door open.

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This is why you should not build your house over the starting location; I had forgotten this when I built this house (that and I didn't have very many places to build on this particular world). Every time I warp back or respawn after death, or load up the game, it is going to remove these 3 pieces of wood. I fixed this by adding wood underneath my feet, which you will see in later screenshots.

You have a choice: You can either wait the night out for safety's sake (the Guide might get killed if he's outside, but that doesn't matter; he'll respawn the next day if you finish the house) OR you can attempt to fight the zombies and demon eyes. They can kill you quick, but they can drop a few awesome items. You can kill them with a Wooden/Cactus Sword but if they swarm you, you might be in trouble. If you want to fight them, stick a few torches on the trees/ground nearby so you can see (you can pick up torches back up later by right-clicking them). You can get these items from them:

1). Zombie Arm (rare drop, it is a powerful "sword" that is significantly stronger than the Wooden/Cactus Swords)
2). Shackle (uncommon drop, 1 Defense, with a random Prefix. Warding is the best; it gives +4 Defense for a total of +5!)
3). Lens (from the eyes, keep these, you'll need them later).
4). Arrows and Gel (from the zombies having them). Note that the arrow zombies are resistant to knockback and have higher defense.
5). Fallen Stars (these will disappear when morning arrives). 3 Fallen Stars = 1 Mana Crystal which increases your MP max, up to 200.

I will note that if you are playing in October, special "Halloween" zombies will spawn instead of the normal ones. These are MUCH more powerful and can kill you fast, but they can also drop a few other additional items (mostly cosmetic except for the bladed claw).

Once dawn comes and the music changes back to daylight, any remaining zombies will start to wander off screen where they will despawn and any demon eyes around will immediately fly away and slimes will start spawning again. Now, it is time to finish the house. Bring up your crafting window, and make a chair, and place it next to the workbench, facing the workbench (you can actually place it anywhere, but it looks a bit silly IMO). Once you've done this, go outside and try to find some stone. You will want a good bit of it, 50-100 blocks at least. Once you've got a good bit of it, come back to your house, and stand next to the workbench. If you have enough torches and wood in your inventory, you should be able to make a furnace. If you can't make one, then you probably don't have enough torches, so go kill some slimes for more gel if so. Once you've made the Furnace, you can place it in your house. Go back to your workbench, and you can see that you can make an item called a "Stone Wall". (And also, Wood Wall). I suggest saving wood, and you will soon have more stone than you will know what to do with, so I suggest using Stone Walls. You might wonder why you need walls when you already have a house... the answer to that question is simple: They mean background walls. Make a bunch of them (50, 60+) and put them on a hotkey. Press the Left Ctrl key and you should see the cursor change slightly. This is called the "Smart Cursor" and it aids with building, digging, etc. I usually only use it for background wall placement, and for digging tunnels. You can experiment with it later, if you want. But for now, select your background walls, and a square yellow box should automatically appear next to you. Just hold down the mouse button and you should automatically start filling the house in with stone background walls. Fill the entire area with this material (go get more if you run out). It will take quite a lot of them, but thankfully you make 4 with each stone block you mine up.

Once you've done that, place a torch anywhere in the house (I suggest the two top corners) and then press escape to bring up your inventory. If you look just underneath the minimap, you will see a row of icons, one of which looks like a house. If you click that, you should then get a list of NPCs (there should only be 1, the Guide) and a Question Mark. Click the Question Mark, and then click inside the house and the game will tell you whether or not the area you clicked on is part of a valid house. If it says "This housing is already occupied" then that means the Guide has already 'moved in'; you should see a banner with his face on it hanging in the house while this menu is open. Clicking on an NPC's face in the menu and then clicking inside a house will move an NPC there (though it takes time for the NPC to actually move, except for certain conditions). If the house is not valid, it will tell you why. For a house to be valid, it needs...

1). Furniture: Comfort Item (Chair, Bed, Toilet, etc), Flat Surface (Workbench, Table, Bookshelf, Bathtub, etc)
2). Entrance: (Door, Trapdoor, Wooden Platforms, etc)
3). One solid block to stand on (Platforms do not count)
4). Light Source (torch, candle, lantern, etc)
5). Big enough area (a 8x5 block interior is enough)
6). Player-placed background walls (natural ones usually do not work)

And it must be enclosed with solid blocks of any kind. You can experiment around with different blocks and how they look; I suggested you use Wood and Stone due to their ease to get, but if you want to make another house out of something different, feel free! Terrarians have been getting real creative for years with what kind of blocks to use together to get unique looks. The important thing for a newbie, though, is to just get a functional house up.

Once you've done that, you can either expand this house to add more rooms, or make new houses entirely. Either way, you merely repeat the same steps to add-on to the house or make new houses. Just don't build ontop of the starting location. If you do, you will "uproot" and displace blocks where you spawn when you warp back or log into the game and you will have to place them all over again which can get annoying after awhile.

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As you can see in the screenshot above, I built a second house. I then decided to add a third "house" ontop of it:

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And once I had finished that, I decided that I would chop the trees down to the left and add another "house" to the left:

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And now I have four houses! I used Wood Background walls in this one to prove that anything player-made works, pick-and-mix em to your heart's content!

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Here, you can see that later on, I added 4 more rooms! I used Grey Brick for these, as they are like a "basement" (2x Stone Block at a Furnace), and the stairs are made by using the Smart Cursor with Wooden Platforms (it takes a bit to get used to, you may need to make a hammer of some sort to hammer the platforms to get them to fit like that, but once you get the hang of it, it is easy). Now I have a total of 8 rooms, which is almost half of all the rooms I will ever need!

Just keep in mind that you will need to knock out any existing background walls while building underground like I did here. You can either use a hammer, or since Patch 1.3, you can place a background wall overtop of another and it will automatically knock out the old, as long as you have access to the "edge" of the background wall if it is a naturally occuring one.

I suggest taking the time to build at least two more houses, if not three. Just to tell you early, there are 22 total NPCs in Terraria as of 1.3.0.8, but one of them only spawns during December (Santa Claus) and one of them will only come later in the game, and if certain biome conditions are met, so you can safely build 20 houses/rooms and it will be enough for all the NPCs in the game. You shouldn't need any more than that. You needn't build all 20 now, but if you want to plan ahead, this information may be useful. I suggest always keeping a couple open houses at a time, so that NPCs can keep moving in.

For an NPC to move in, it must be daytime, you must have an empty house available, and you will need to meet their requirements:

1). Merchant: Have 50 silver or more on-hand.
2). Dye Trader: Have a Strange Plant, or any other dye-related item after the first boss is dead.
3). Demolitionist: Have any explosive item on-hand.
4). Arms Dealer: Have any gun on-hand.
5). Dryad: Defeat the first boss (or many other bosses count too)
6). Nurse: Have 120+ maximum health.
7). Painter: Have 8 town NPCs in the world.

These are the NPCs you will likely get early-game, there are more you will get later and I will mention them in the guide. The ones you're looking for to start with would be the Demolitionist and the Merchant, or perhaps the Dye Trader if you happen to see a strange plant (they look like big viny bushes).

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Here, I found a strange plant. This one is purple, there's an orange variant, and a few green variants with red fruit, green fruit, etc on it. They all look similar to this.

Once you have a Merchant, I suggest buying a piggybank if you can afford one, and stick it on a table, workbench, or wood platform somewhere. This piggybank is a portable treasure chest, and every piggybank in every world is connected; it is actually a hidden part of the player's inventory. You can safely store money in this bank and if you die, money will not be taken out of it and you can use this money to buy items without physically removing it out of the bank as of 1.3. Also, if you don't have very many ropes, I suggest buying some until you have 300 if you can afford them, and you might want to stock up on torches until you have 99 of them.

Now that you have a few houses, a merchant, and some starter stuff, it is time to think about doing some spelunking. Spelunking is a prominent feature in Terraria, as more than 80% of the world is underground and many of the things you will do in Terraria happens underneath the surface of the ground, compared to the few things you do in the air or on the surface.

Before delving underground, you will want the following:

1). 99 Torches (either buy them from the Merchant or make them)
2). Some wood and gel to make more.
3). At least 2-3 extra houses for NPCs that might spawn while you're meeting requirements underground.
4). 300+ rope. (you'll get more as you break pots down there)
5). A cactus sword and a cactus pickaxe (the pickaxe has the same power as the copper one, but without the -1 range).
6). A Bug Net (if you plan on doing fishing).
7). Either a Wooden Boomerang, or a Wood Bow + Arrows.

With that said, hopefully you've found an entrance to the caves by now. Usually these entrances will be a winding cave cut into a hillside. If you've explored as far as you safely can and have not found one, then you can start digging your hellevator early (I will detail more about this later). Without getting too much into the basics, go somewhere near your start location (but not where you originally spawned on the map) and start digging a two-block wide pit. If you haven't used ropes by now, you simply select the rope and click the square next to something solid (blocks, walls, platforms, etc) and you'll place a rope. Keep holding the mouse button down and you will continue extending the rope downward until the bottom hits something solid. Build ropes on one side of this 2-block wide pit, and place torches on the other side to keep the pit lit, and just dig straight down until you find some caves, which you inevitably will. You might find small caves (make sure to check these to see if they have treasure chests), but you're really looking for larger cave systems.

I would like to take a moment and emphasize the sheer importance of paying attention to your surroundings, as the slightest little glimmer of light in far-off cave can reveal treasures to you:

First, we have a Special Plant that is barely visible almost off-screen:

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If you look very closely, just underneath Hotkey #5 (where the ropes are), you will see a special plant in the cave. This would probably easily have been passed up if I weren't paying attention to my surroundings.

Next, we have something barely visible in the distance:

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If you look real close at the bottom-right of the screen (you may need to click on the image to magnify it), you can barely make out wood platforms and a piano which can only mean there's a cabin over there. Now in this case, I would have seen this either way as I tend to run around with a torch held out to make sure I illuminate all the walls, but if this had been in another small cave, I might not have noticed this if I weren't paying attention.

The whole point of this, is to gain some equipment, some ore, and other items. While exploring the underground, you're looking for the following:

1). Treasure Chests (if you empty it completely, you can pick the chest up and take it with you and place it in your house for storage).
2). Heart Crystals (each adds +20 maximum life, do not increase your maximum above 180 yet). Store extras in a chest in your house.
3). An explosive item (grenades, bombs, etc) to spawn the Demolitionist if you have a house for him. Keep at least 1 in a chest somewhere in your house in case he gets killed so you can spawn him again.
4). Ore (Copper and Tin is rather useless unless you want to use it for aesthetic purposes, the others are useful)
5). Gems (15 gems of a color makes a grappling hook of the same color, they can also be used to make a magic staff). Diamonds can be used to make Diamond Gemspark Walls, which I will explain in the building section.
6). Golden Treasure Chests (these will usually have accessories, weapons, or a magic mirror and are found in underground cabins).
7). Silt/Slush (keep these in a chest in your house for now).
8). Crafting Furniture (looms, anvils, an extractinator if you're lucky; those are usually found in the underground desert but can be found anywhere rarely, sawmills, etc).
9). Bombs from chests and pots (keep about 20-30 or so).
10). Accessories: Running Boots (of any kind), Aglet, Climbing Claws/Shoe Spikes, Cloud-in-a-Bottle of any kind, Shackle, etc.
11). Suspicious-Looking Eyes (do not use these whatever you do).
12). Compass/Depth Meters from enemies found in the underground (Meters from Bats, Compass from Snails, and other such things).
13). Glowing Mushrooms. You can make potions with these (I'll explain alchemy a little soon), otherwise stash them. Hopefully you get some mushroom grass seeds, keep these!

Keep breaking any pots you see to collect their loot, usually money but sometimes ropes, torches, potions, and ranged ammo of various types. If you fill up on items, hopefully you have a recall potion on you or you found a magic mirror. If not, you can Save & Exit, but beware that any item laying on the ground that's not placed will disappear, such as dropped money from a death, etc.

Once you've made a few trips into the underground, I recommend doing the following:

1). Make a Furnace if you haven't already.
2). Make an anvil (5 iron/lead bars at a workbench) if you haven't found one in a cabin yet.
3). Make a sawmill (1 iron/lead bar = 10 chains; 2 iron lead bars + chain + wood = sawmill) if you haven't found one yet.
4). Make a loom (requires sawmill).
5). Make a Wooden Yo-Yo and a White String (using cobwebs and wood), unless you had gotten extremely lucky enough to see a Rally drop.
6). Start turning ores into bars: Silver/Tungsten, Gold/Platinum. Do not turn Iron/Lead into bars unless you actively need the bars!
7). Make a Gold/Platinum Pickaxe/Axe if/when you can.
8). Make a full suit of Silver/Tungsten Armor (this will require a Lot of ore and it is your first primary objective).
9). Getting a stack of grenades (once the demolitionist spawns), which is far cheaper than you'd expect. These do far more damage than anything else you have at this point, but be careful not to blow yourself up with them.
10). Make a grappling hook (15 gems of the same color at an anvil).

You can safely sell the following:

1). Throwing Knives/Shuriken (they do too little damage and take up room in your inventory)
2). Blowpipes (too weak to be of use)
3). Plant Cordage Guide (unless you really like the green vine look for aesthetics, and/or do not have 5 other accessories yet)
4). Sparking Wands (they are far too weak and once you get grenades, you no longer need to burn high defense enemies to death)

With that done, and said, keep spelunking until you have...

1). Gold/Platinum Pickaxe/Axe.
2). Full suit of Silver/Tungsten Armor (if you want, you can keep going to get full Gold/Platinum Armor but it really isn't necessary).
3). 180 health (plus a few hearts for more; the more the better!)
4). 5 Accessories in order of importance: Hermes/Flurry Boots, Cloud-in-a-Bottle, Band of Regeneration, Shoe Spikes/Climbing Claws, etc. Fill the other slots with whatever you happen to have.
5). A grappling hook.
6). A bow of at least Silver quality (or gold/platinum if you've extra gold/platinum to spare)
7). 400-500 Fire Arrows (Wooden Arrows + Torches).

Once you have this, there's a choice to make. If you feel confident and comfortable with the game, we can take a side-journey to get an extremely powerful weapon early, or if you'd rather go the usual way which is significantly easier, but won't yield such powerful weapons, we can take on the first boss.

I'll mention the side-journey real quick: It involves finding the Jungle, going into the Jungle (where there are powerful enemies with high defense) and getting some Mahogany Wood (from the trees on the surface), a Vine (from the vine plant monsters in the underground, the ones on the surface don't drop vines), a couple stingers from bees or spiked slimes and some Jungle Spores (which are found deeper underground; they glow and are very obvious). This is rather dangerous, and you will likely need either an Enchanted Boomerang (if you were lucky enough to have found one), a Bone Sword (they drop from skeletons), or Fire Arrows from a bow to kill some of this stuff, as your cactus sword or wooden yo-yo will only do 1 damage to some of these enemies. Nearly everything in the Jungle can poison you. So if you got the guts and the patience to try this, you can make an awesome Yo-Yo that is far better than other weapons leading up until this point. I only suggest trying this if you are comfortable with the game and its mechanics up until this point. If you go this route, save the extra jungle materials; you'll need them later (or you can make even More overpowered stuff if you spend enough time there collecting these ingredients).

First, we need to find the Jungle Entrance. It will look something like this:
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With the fact I'm wearing full Platinum Armor and I have an Ice Blade and Water Bolt spell, I felt confident enough to take on this task. Ice Blade is easily powerful enough to kill the enemies in here, but even Platinum Armor means you will take a bit of a beating (I had to use two healing potions while doing this).

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Difficult to see, but I fell into some water after defeating two bees which dropped 1 stinger each. That's exactly what I needed for the recipe: 2 Stingers.

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....and I found a vine about 15 seconds after that by killing a nearby Man Eater (which looks like a big jaw on a long vine).

Now, I just need some Jungle Spores...

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Which I found about 30-60 seconds later (look at the minimap and you'll realize this "room" is right underneath where I got the Stingers and Vines in the previous two screenshots! Such luck. I only needed 3 Spores, the one right next to me on the right gave me exactly 3 and the one over by the Heart Crystal I took back to my house as I'll need them later.

With that said...

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I can now make my Amazon! Sadly, mine turned out to be Shoddy, but even a Shoddy (-10% damage, -x% knockback) is still a decent weapon at 18 damage. This weapon is easily powerful enough to kill the first boss, especially if I also found a Skeleton Merchant and bought a Counterweight.

If not, let's instead go to the first boss. If you found any Suspicious-Looking Eyes, these will summon the first boss. But let's not get so hasty; let's do some preparation instead. First, you will want to prepare a good place to fight him. I would suggest going a couple screens to either the left or the right of your house, depending on if there's other biomes nearby (I recommend staying in the forest for this). Find a relatively flat location if possible, and start building a rope upwards. The cool thing about rope, is you can use it to go into the sky, start at the ground by your feet and keep clicking the square above the end of the rope to build upwards. You will want to do this until the ground is just barely off-screen (this depends on your screen resolution; you will want a height that you barely take fall damage from but not so high that you outright die if you fall). Once you've done this, make about 200 wooden platforms, and place one above the rope and then hop up on it and extend the platform to either side. I suggest placing torches every 20th platform or so, so that the area stays lit at night (many bosses are fought at night). I recommend placing a 5-6 block high solid wall (any material will work; dirt, stone, wood, etc) at either end to prevent accidentally running off the edge. Next, make a couple campfires, and place them so that you have the campfire buff (the icon will appear underneath your hotkey bar) no matter where you stand in the arena. If you have enough hearts to get 400 health and have extra hearts left over, you can combine a heart crystal + 4 chains to make a heart lantern. Make a couple of these if you are able; you will need to use your pickaxe to remove a block of wood platform and replace it with something solid (dirt/stone/wood/etc) as you cannot hang a lantern off of wooden platforms. The buff from the lantern stacks with the campfire, which also stacks with the Band of Regeneration if you found one.

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I got all of my heart crystals out and used them to get 400 max life, and had 6 left over. I used one to make the heart lantern next to my mouse cursor. This arena is 100 platforms long; it is easily enough for the coming boss battle, though you might want to make yours 150-200 long in preparation for three later bosses you will be fighting later in the game. Or, you can build a small one like this one now, and just expand it later. Either/or, your choice.

If you're wanting to make sure you can win, another thing you can do is make yourself a couple potions to make the fight easier. First, you will need two dayblooms (you might have already found a couple randomly). These bloom during the day and look like tiny round yellow flowers that yield the herb when struck with a weapon/pickaxe/anything). You can collect daybloom at night, but you won't get any seeds when you pick them. Once you have two dayblooms, get a mushroom and a piece of iron or lead ore. Hopefully by now you've found a few empty glass bottles in a treasure chest; if not you can make some by taking sand to a furnace; make the sand into glass, and the glass into bottles. Once you have empty bottles, stand near water, and you can craft bottled water. Take an empty bottle, place it on a table, workbench or platform and stand near it and you can then make a Regeneration Potion and an Ironskin Potion, the two most basic buff potions. You might have even rarely found a couple of these in chests while spelunking, assuming you kept them and didn't use them already.

Once you've got all of this done, you will need to find a Demon or Blood Altar (depending if you had Corruption or Crimson). These are usually found in their respective biomes, but you might have found one while spelunking as they can be found in random places in the underground. I suggest looking for one until you find it; it can be anywhere underground, just explore the underground near the starting location. They glow, so they will be visible in the dark in places you haven't been to yet, if you get close enough to see it. Once you've found one of these, you can make Suspicious-Looking Eyes with 6 lens as the altar acts like a crafting station. Just keep in mind that now that you have 400 health, the boss can spawn on its own each night (you'll get a warning message that says "You sense an evil presence watching you..."). If you see that message, the boss will spawn within a couple minutes, so hurry and get yourself to your arena.

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This is one of several demon altars I've found near the starting location. Note the glowing purple object in the bottom-left of the picture; that's the altar.

If you made the Amazon Yo-Yo, this guy will be a pure wimp. If you are using a bow, he will still be easy, but it will take a bit longer. If you haven't found a pair of hermes/flurry boots, the fight will be significantly harder, but definitely not impossible. The whole strategy of the fight is to basically keep shooting him with arrows, kill his little flunkies, and run away from him when he does his charge attacks. When you get him down to half HP left (1400), he will change into Phase 2 (and look rather gross while doing it, get used to this, because many mobs do this sort of thing). He won't spawn any more flunkies, he will deal more damage but also take more damage from your attacks. He will charge at you again and again, but if you keep moving you should be able to do it.

Something to remember about bosses and healing potions: As you've probably noticed before this point, healing potions have a cooldown. You can only use one every 60 seconds (45 seconds if you're wearing an accessory that can be found later). You will want to heal the most you can heal, but yet buy yourself as much time as you possibly can. If you use a potion too early, you will heal for less than the potion can heal, so for example if you have 380 life and you use a potion that heals 50, you just wasted 30 healing. However, if you wait until you are almost dead and finally use a potion, then you will waste cooldown time. The best time to use a potion is as soon as you are missing the amount the potion heals for unless the boss fight in question drops lots of hearts, then you might want to wait just slightly longer (so that you do not waste healing from dropped hearts). That way, you buy more time to hopefully survive the potion cooldown so you can heal again. If you heal with 20 left, you heal for 50 giving you 70 HP to try and wait out 60 seconds. Meanwhile, if you healed at 350, you now have 400 HP to wait out 60 seconds with.

Once you've beaten this boss (remember, you can summon him at night with the Suspicious-Looking Eye anytime you want), he will no longer spawn on his own, so you won't have to worry about the warning message every night. He will drop healing potions, crimtane or demonite ore (depending on crimson/corruption world), and either some crimson or corruption seeds. He might also drop a vanity mask or a trophy (wall decoration). Take this Crimtane or Demonite Ore to your crafting stations, and make bars out of this ore. If you did not get the Amazon Yo-Yo, I suggest making the bow first. If it comes out with a bad enchantment on it, sell it and make another. You will probably only have enough Demonite or Crimtane ore to make two such weapons; if the bow was good, then make a sword after, unless you love yo-yos, then you could make the yo-yo next instead. Either way, I recommend fighting the Eye again at least once, twice if you got a bad weapon and had to try again. Once you get enough Crimtane or Demonite, you should have a Bow, a Sword, and optionally a Yo-Yo. Make the Sword even if you do not plan on using it; you'll need it for something else later. Just stash it in your chests if you don't plan on using it (I recommend keeping a Yo-Yo and a Sword on you at all times). If you plan to do fishing, make the fishing rod as this is the best one you can get for awhile unless you get extremely lucky with the Travelling Merchant.

Now we have enough gear to survive in those pesky areas that were too deadly from the start. With the weapons made from the Eye's drops, you can fight nearly anything found on the surface now so I advise you to go edge-to-edge of the map. If you have Corruption, I also suggest building wood platform bridges over the tops of the vertical chasms you will find there to lessen the chances of you falling to your death (remember the Grappling Hook button is E if you fall, try to grapple a wall on the way down to save yourself).

You will want to look for the following..

1). Pyramids (found in deserts obviously, sometimes the tops of them can be difficult to see, other times they are easily seen).
2). Enchanted Sword Shrines (there's always at least one, usually 2 or 3 in a Medium World). To find one, look for a long vertical one-block wide pit. The Shrine will be at the bottom of the pit, but it will oftentimes be a fake. Hit the boulder with your pickaxe, and it might give you one of two reasonably powerful (for this point in the game) swords.
3). Hollow Giant Trees (these are obvious when you find them, they will always contain a treasure chest that will have either a living wood loom, or two wands. These are for making treehouses and the like). These are also one of two rare instances where background walls generated by the game are valid homes. Putting a torch in the room with the chest will make a valid house, and an NPC will move in there.
4). The Dungeon Entrance. Whatever you do, do not go below the Surface Level. If you found a Depth Meter, you can safely measure how far down you can go. If you don't have a depth meter, either be careful or be prepared to die. If you go below the Surface Level, an enemy will spawn and will kill you outright within a second or two. Also, don't talk to the Old Man; he will spawn a boss at night that will tear you to pieces at this point in the game most likely. What you are looking for, however, is a blue book with a grey stripe on it. If you get close to it and mouse over it, it'll have a book icon and if you right-click it, it will turn into a Water Bolt. If you find one of these, it will make your game much easier for awhile. This is an incredibly powerful spell (for awhile) that will just tear everything to pieces. It spawns in the Dungeon, but occasionally it will spawn close enough to the surface for you to get it without getting killed to dungeon guardians..

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I can hardly believe the ridiculous luck. Note the Blue Book with the Grey Stripe on it right next to the mouse cursor, and how the cursor changes to a book icon. Merely right click this for a ridiculously powerful spell!
5). The Oceans. Each edge of the map will have an ocean. I suggest finding the one near the dungeon, and making a wood platform bridge above the ocean, all the way over until the screen stops scrolling (leave enough room to fish there if you plan to do fishing). Also, the Angler NPC can be found here, and if you talk to him, he'll move into an empty house. This NPC is absolutely vital if you want to do any fishing. Once you make the wooden platform bridge, drop some ropes into the ocean so that you have a quick way back out, and set a campfire ontop of the bridge. That's all you need to do here for now. You can try to make a quick run at the bottom of the ocean, but if you run into a shark, you will likely die fast. I recommend just leaving the treasure chests alone for now; there's nothing in them that is really any good.
6). The Jungle. You won't be going here quite yet (unless you want to do the Amazon now, which is easier than earlier), but it will be good to note where it is. The Jungle, and the Dungeon will always be on opposite sides of the center.
7). The Snow Biome. If you had poor luck finding the Hermes Boots in the caves, you might find the Flurry Boots in the Underground Snow Biome instead. The challenge of the Snow Biome is just slightly harder, but with equipment gotten from the Eye, this shouldn't be that hard; the bigger danger is fall death and drowning because each body of water is capped with thin ice.
8). Underground Desert. If you are still missing accessories, or you haven't found an extractinator yet, or you just want to explore it, you can find some nice stuff in here, but you won't be able to break the fossil blocks here yet (your pickaxe isn't strong enough). The enemies here can be fought with your current armor and weapons, but are a little difficult yet. I suggest letting this go; just pass up the entrance pit for now.

With that said, it's on to the next part!

Since this guide is for newbies, I am now going to suggest that you get yourself a Corruption World. If you started with Crimson, I suggest making another world (you may need to try a few times to get what you want) to get Corruption. You can tell by the loading bar when you make the world, which it is (Purple = Corruption). Once you get your Corruption World, chop wood down, make some houses, etc. You're just here for the second boss (don't forget, the Eye of Cthulhu can pop anytime it wants until you kill it). I suggest making an arena to fight it first-thing in case he decides to pop on the first night. You can also pop it yourself to remove the element of chance. Having both worlds will make things easier later (and I will explain why when those times come). This guide assumes that from this point on, you are doing both.

Either way, once you get a Corruption World ready (either it was your first world, or you made a new world with houses and such), head on over to the Corruption, and you will see lots of deep chasms. Bring rope and bombs with you, and make sure you've some gel on-hand too. Make wood platform bridges over the tops of each of the chasms and drop ropes down these chasms. One or more of the chasms will lead to a horizontal cave system; the rest will lead to dead ends. Keep trying until you find the horizontal cave system. Once you're down there, make a wood platform bridge that's up in the air (doesn't have to be a real long one, 40-60 platforms will do) and make sure that if there are any additional chasms that go even deeper, "cap" that with a wood platform bridge too (you don't want to accidentally fall and die).

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First, we start by "capping" the chasm entrance with wood platforms so we do not accidentally fall down the hole later, and then drop ropes down and slowly go down, placing torches as we go. These have natural background walls, so you can put torches anywhere.

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Sometimes, the ropes will hit the chasm walls even if you start in the middle of the chasm on top, so sometimes you need to stop and drop another rope when that happens. Just be careful and get ready to grapple a wall if you get hit (this will knock you off the rope until you get a shield).

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Lucky! I found the horizontal room on the very first chasm. And furthermore, there's an extra heart crystal right there (that I will likely use for making heart lanterns later since I already have 400 max health). Now it is a matter of exploring the cave, finding any more chasms and "capping" them with platforms, getting an idea of where the orbs are, etc.

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There's Warning #1 after I smashed the first orb.

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...And Warning #2. The next orb I break will spawn the boss, so I better be ready to get somewhere flat and stable to fight him in. Therefore, I left an easy-to-get-to orb to be the third.

You will see a whole slew of demon altars in here, you will see some glowing purple ore (demonite), and you will see round purple orbs in the walls. Your pickaxe cannot break the stuff these walls are made out of, so we're going to go blasting (you could instead buy powders from the dryad and purify the stone and then mine it with your pickaxe, but that's slow). Open your crafting inventory and make some sticky bombs (gel + bomb). Regular bombs bounce around too much to really be of use in precision blasting. If you've found any dynamite, you can also use sticky dynamite (made in the same way), but that's really overkill. Just make sure you're not too close to the blast yourself. Blast your way to an orb (the blast itself can break the orb). Once you break one of these orbs, you will get a "warning message" that chills run down your spine. This opens up two things: Meteorites and Goblin Invasions (you will be told when these happen). Go ahead and blast a second orb, but make sure to leave one easy-to-get-to orb to be the third. When you blow up orbs, you will get items from them, hopefully one of them is a vilethorn. Hopefully you've got a mana max of at least 60 or so, if not, you might want to take a couple nights and farm some fallen stars to increase your Mana capacity.

Anyways, before breaking the third orb, use ropes and platforms to make sure you can get to your platform bridge fast, becuase the boss spawns as soon as you break the third orb. You might wanna stick a campfire on this orb, you could use potions but it shouldn't be necessary; as long as you do not let his mouth hit you, he really doesn't do very much damage at all. Once you're confident and ready, break the third orb and run back to the arena.

The Second Boss, the Eater of Worlds, is an extremely long worm that has lots of segments. You've probably fought tiny worms of this type before, but this one is huge and unlike the tiny ones, when you kill a segment, it will split into two worms, and it will keep splitting unless you kill either a mouth or a tail segment (then the worm just gets shorter). Using a Vilethorn if you found one, aim the thorns so that the worm goes straight into them and you will rip the worm up in seconds. Water Bolts also work well (due to the enclosed area) if you were lucky enough to have found one by now, and if all else fails, pull out a sword. Yo-yos do not work very well against segmented worm-type enemies, so don't even bother with that. Touching his body should not do much damage; just avoid his mouth(s).

Each segment will drop a small amount of demonite ore, and some shadow scales. If you started with a Corruption World, don't bother making any of the things you made in the Crimson One (sword, fishing rod, bow, etc). They are roughly the same in terms of power (the Crimson variants are just a slice more powerful). However, the things you do want to make are a Suit of Armor and maybe the Pickaxe (the Crimson one is slightly better and you'll be making that soon). This will likely take you two kills of the worm; hopefully you can find six orbs. If you don't, there's probably a second corruption area somewhere with more orbs. Every third orb will spawn the boss, and you can spawn it yourself if you gather some rotten chunks and some vile mushrooms. Take the mushrooms to an alchemy station (a glass bottle on a table/workbench/platform) and make vile powder. Take the powder and chunks to a demon altar to make Worm Food which summons the boss (you must use it inside the Corruption).

Once you have enough stuff to make a Suit of Armor and optionally a Pickaxe, you're done in this world (for now). Go to the Crimson World (or make one if you started with Corruption).

While in the Crimson World, we're now ready to take on its second boss. This time, however, I highly recommend you bring your buff potions and a good Yo-Yo (the Crimtane Yo-Yo will do). If your first world was Corruption, you will need to build houses, kill the Eye (which will give you the Crimtane to make the Yo-Yo), and so on and so forth.

When you're ready for the boss, look for the gaping "mouth" caves in the Crimson Area (these are unmistakable, they look like a big mouth in the side of a red stone 'head'). Head down into this, it will be a windy cave that opens up into a huge round room. Drop ropes so you don't die from fall damage and place torches, and make a wood platform bridge. Coming off of this round room will be "finger" caves, each with a Demon Heart at the end of it. These Demon Hearts function just like the Orbs that you broke in the Corruption area; every 3rd one will summon the boss. Make sure you've a sword and a Yo-Yo at the ready (unless you have Water Bolt, lol). Using Sticky Bombs (or a Nightmare Pickaxe from the Worm's scales... bombs are much faster), break some of these hearts to summon the brain.

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Here's a "mouth" cave opening that leads into the bowels of the Crimson Biome. Also, note the purple glow to the right, that's a Deathweed in bloom. If you happen to notice the Moon is full, that's a good time to go to the Corruption or Crimson Areas to hunt Deathweed Seeds so you can get a garden started. Deathweed is used in a few good potions, so you might want to grab them when you see them, especially while they are blooming (Blood Moon or Full Moon).

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The Crimson is pretty much the same as the Corruption, only the Terrain is a good slice easier, but the boss is significantly harder. Same shtick, bring sticky bombs, blast holes in the wall, break the hearts and they will drop items. IMO, only the Rotted Fork is worth mentioning; the other items are rather lack-luster.

The Brain is a much, much harder fight. Use a sword on the eyes floating around; this is the easy part. (You can also use Water Bolt). Once you kill all of the eyes (these eyes drop small amounts of crimtane ore and tissue samples; just like the worm dropped demonite and scales), the Brain goes into Rage Mode. It will keep trying to rush at you to attack you with melee; this will hurt. If you have a good Yo-Yo (and hopefully a counterweight if you found a Skeleton Merchant by now), you can keep it at bay. You can also use a Rotted Fork if you got one from one of the hearts you broke to keep it away from you as well.

With the Shadow Armor from the worm, the Brain shouldn't be nearly as hard as he normally would be, kill the Brain (or keep killing its eyes if you are having trouble surviving it) until you can make a full suit of Crimson Armor and the Pickaxe. Don't worry about making a Sword if you made one from Demonite; they both work in that later recipe you will use them for and they are interchangeable.

With this done, you can kill the brain or the worm as many times as you want for fun, but while doing this, keep an eye out for Goblin Invasion warnings. Otherwise, you're done in the Crimson area for now. Whichever world you progress further on, depends solely upon you as the next few chapters can be done in either world, or even both worlds. The beauty of making two worlds, is that if you have trouble finding any specific item in one world, you might have an easier time finding it on the other world and vice-versa.

Anyways, let's move on:

At some point, you will eventually get a warning that Goblins are invading. This has a highest chance of happening the day after you broke an orb or heart, but can also happen anytime thereafter. You can also force it yourself by killing Goblin Scouts near the Oceans, and collecting ten tattered cloths, and combining that with some wood at a demon altar to make a Goblin Battle Standard. This acts like a boss summon item.

In either case, go to the center of the world and wait for the Invasion to start. A meter will appear on screen as to the progress, and to make that bar fill up, simply kill goblins. With Crimson Armor (or even Shadow Armor), they will hurt a little, but not Too bad. You can always take cover behind solid walls and pits from their arrows, but keep in mind the sorcerers' magic goes through walls (but you can hit the bolts with your weapons to get rid of them). I recommend not fighting too close to your NPCs; they might get hit by the goblins. NPCs can fight since Patch 1.3, but they aren't particularly powerful. You can die as many times as you need and still complete the event, so just keep at it until the bar gets 100%. The goblins will then start running away until you've killed them all, or they despawn. From this point on, you can find the Goblin Tinkerer tied up underground, and he is extremely important to the progression of the game. The sooner you find him, the sooner you can have some truly awesome gear.

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Sometimes it can take awhile to get a Goblin Invasion to happen. You can always do some building, explore some caves, farm the Eye, whatever until one happens.

With that in mind, let's go down to the caves next. Earlier in the guide, I touched on Hellevators. If you didn't start one then, I suggest doing so now. Somewhere near the center of the world (but not right next to your spawn location), start digging a two block wide pit straight down. Drop ropes down the one side and place torches on the other to keep things lit. Just keep digging down, down, down. If you run into a body of water, you can refer to the next section of how to deal with liquids. Keep exploring any caves you break into (you're hoping to find the Goblin and/or any cabins with chests in them), etc.

Keep going all the way down, until you eventually arrive in the Underworld (you'll know when you do). If you run into lava, the next chapter will cover how to deal with liquids. What you're really looking for, is a place where you can make some obsidian (or find obsidian already made). This will be explained in the "how to deal with liquids" section in the next chapter. If you made your Hellevator properly, you should be able to hop on the rope and go clear from the surface to the underworld in about 20-30 seconds and from the underworld to the surface in about 60 (warping is much faster). Once you find some obsidian, mine some up, you will want at least 120, if not 150. Use 20 of them to make an Obsidian Skull.

If you find the Goblin, hopefully you've also found a decent amount of gold coin by now! Once rescued, he will offer to reforge (I'd only do this if you get negative stats on a newly found/crafted item) and he will sell you items. Buy a Tinkerer's Workbench and Rocket Boots from him. Place the Workbench near your other crafting machines, and with that, we can do some accessory combinations:

1). Rocket Boots + Hermes/Flurry/Sailfish Boots = Spectre Boots
2). Spectre Boots + Aglet + Anklet of the Wind (from the Jungle's Ivy Chests) = Lightning Boots
3). Lightning Boots + Ice Skates (from the Snow Biome's Ice Chests) = Frostspark Boots
4). Climbing Claws + Shoe Spikes = Tiger Climbing Gear
5). Gold/Platinum Watch + Depth Meter + Compass = GPS
6). Metal Detector + DPS Meter + Stopwatch = Goblin Tech (the Detector and DPS Meter are sold by the Travelling Merchant randomly; Metal Detector is dropped by the rare Nymphs that spawn as Lost Girls in the underground/caverns of any kind)

There are some other combinations possible at this point, but they mostly pertain to mages, or building equipment. Basically, any accessory that says "Material", show it to the Guide and he will tell you what you can make out of it. All Accessory Combines need the Tinkerer's Bench.

Next on the list of things to talk about, are meteorites. If one fell, you can go and mine it. Meteorite makes some unique furniture (you must turn the meteorite into meteorite brick instead of bars!) that is vaguely space-themed, and you can make a suit of armor that is more for use with the Space Gun (it allows you to fire it an infinite number of times and gives +magic damage), the Space Gun itself (it's a magic weapon that uses Mana for ammo), and the Meteor Hamaxe. I suggest just skipping meteorite as this is a mostly melee playthrough, and the Space Gun while it is a novel weapon, will not be seeing all that much use in our playthrough as other weapons are better. You will also be getting a better Hamaxe very soon, so you won't need the Meteor one either.

Now, just in case you need advice on how to deal with water, or lava in your Hellevator (or even in other places), here's some help:

I had originally thought to include this up in the section with Spelunking, but usually while Spelunking, you can just avoid water, and you shouldn't be going so low you run into lava in the first parts of the game, and digging a Hellevator is probably going to be the first time you're going to care about where exactly water is, and where it ends up, and you'll want to learn how to deal with Lava in Terraria, so I waited until Now to give advice on how to deal with this stuff.

One of the easiest ways to deal with Water, is to simply build vertical dirt/stone walls to match your elevator shaft, dig down until you have solid walls on either side, and then start digging to the side (make sure to catch your breath so you don't drown) and then start digging down again to make an upside-down "L" formation to hold the water.

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Hitting pools of water is inevitable while digging a hellevator. I ran into one in this screenshot, but dealing with this sort of thing is easy:

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As you can see, I placed dirt blocks on the left to stop most of the water, and then I dug a passage to the right, and then went down for the water to drain into that little pool. I decided not to flood the round chamber on the right, in case there was something in there that I might have been interested in.

I generally try to avoid unnecessarily flooding chambers if I can avoid it, even elsewhere. Here are a few more screenshots of how to avoid unnecessary flooding:

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Here, I ran into a pool of water. If I just tunnel forward, the water is going to flood the granite area to the right, and I don't want that to happen. So, I start by going above:

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And then tunnelling down into the pool (water never flows upwards). Now, to exit on the other side without flooding chambers to the left, I dig upwards so I can get out of the water before going left:

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Now I can continue tunnelling to the left without worrying about the water.

First thing's first: The simplest way to deal with lava if you're not building a Hellevator, is to simply build over it:
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A lot of times, the easiest way to solve a problem is also the simplest one.

While I'm on the subject of lava, never, ever, ever ride fast on a minecart track while you're near lava depth for this reason:

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This minecart rail continues down deep into the lava and would be quite fatal, even to someone with maximum life and strong armor. One could perhaps survive with a lava charm, or an obsidian skin potion, but the rule of thumb is to go slow on minecart rails this deep.

But for now, here are a few examples of how to deal with Lava in your Hellevator (when you simply must move it out of the way):

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Here, I encounter a small bit of lava that I decide to tunnel to the left and then down to check that room underneath to see if I can drain it there.

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As it turns out, it's a tiny room with nothing in it, and it is already completely enclosed. Perfect! Let's set the pipe up so all I gotta do is knock a block out to let it flow.

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Success! The Hellevator can continue in a few moments when the last bits of lava drain out.

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This pool is a bit too large to drain. However, I know for a fact that there are several pools of water above me that will work just fine! However, some preparations need to be made...

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First, I start by blocking off all the side passageways and removing all the torches in the hellevator (since the water will uproot them anyways). We want to make sure the water cannot possibly go anywhere but down, so we block the sides off to create a "pipe" that goes all the way down.

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This looks like enough water! A lot of times, the game will glitch and the actual amount of water you get might vary. If it isn't enough, you can always go up further and get more. You don't really need a whole lot of water, and even if you got too much, there's plenty of lava around, in fact you might run into more lava further down that you can use the extra water on! Sometimes it is worth draining a whole lake into the hellevator just so you can cut right through the lava using water to make obsidian walls. Well, let's break this and see what happens!

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And it's all faaaaaaaallllling! Look out below, lol.

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As it turned out, I got way more water than it looked like (I think the game glitched on me lol). Anyways, I forgot I was still using a platinum pickaxe, so I had to log out of this world, and go back to the other world (Corruption) to make a Nightmare Pickaxe so I could actually mine obsidian. I had already fought the boss in there (but I haven't fought the brain in this world at this point yet, I'm a little behind on the playthrough compared to the guide as I'm writing this). With that said...

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To "Cut" through lava, simply keep mining the obsidian as you go and the water will automatically convert lava to obsidian on your sides. Just mine it slowly; if you mine too fast, lava might touch you before it hardens and you will take damage if that happens. But if you do it slow enough, you shouldn't get hit. Just don't drown; make sure you keep an air pocket nearby at all times. I actually wound up mining out most of this cavern (one needs about 140 obsidian if you plan on making all the hellstone stuff) and then that little thin bit of lava you see below, I used water on that too.

I actually forgot to take a Before screenshot, but this first screenshot should explain why I decided not to use water this time:

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This lava pit is HUGE! And it curls back around in on itself, and I already used a lot of water above. And I figured that for purposes of this guide, I should demonstrate Sand's sheer power in dealing with lava! Basically what you want to do is get a bunch of sand. Now, I should have moved the sand column over one block to the right, because lava still occupies the same square the sand is in, and this causes the game to act a bit glitchy at times. I'll explain why shortly. Just remember, drop the sand one block further than where you mean for the actual wall to be. Anyways, all you do is click where I have the cursor pointed and the sand will fall straight down. Normally, you cannot build ontop of lava, but Sand overrides that rule because it falls straight down after placed until it hits something solid. This also works with Silt and Slush, but normally those are used in Extractinators, while Sand you can get anywhere.

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With the Sand placed, I then tunnelled to the left and down (look at the minimap for reference) to look for a place to drain the lava to. I found a decent-sized closed off room, and I know that the pipe itself is pretty long and can hold a good bit of lava so I decided to go for it. Notice the "bottom" of the world near the fire bat, that's the start of the Underworld so I'm almost there!

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So I have the pipe completed, and I'm standing in a safe spot where the lava can't touch me (liquids never flow upwards, remember?) so all I gotta do is break those two blocks and let 'er rip.

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Success!

Now, the only problem if you look closely at the sand blocks, you notice the lava is actually behind the sand. I started digging down and all the lava that was ontop of the sand blocks suddenly "teleported" down to where I was digging. I didn't die and I got out fast enough, but it was a surprise! I bet if I had moved the sand column and built a stone wall up against the sand, that probably wouldn't have happened. I simply made an L pipe to get rid of that bit of lava, was easy enough.

Now that our Hellevator is complete, it is time for us to venture into the bowels of the world. Before going down here, however, you need two of three things:

1). Obsidian Skull (extremely important, don't even think about this until you make one and have it equipped).
2). Rocket Boots (very important, it is a potential live-saver).
3). Lots of placeable blocks can be substituted for Rocket Boots if you're careful.

If you are waiting on a Goblin Invasion, I suggest you take a look at the next chapter (Building Advice) for some ideas on improving your house/base while you wait for an invasion to happen.

Before I say anything else... Do Not Kill a Voodoo Demon While It is Over Lava. The Voodoo Demons are the ones carrying a doll in their claws; it is very obvious which ones they are. If you kill one while it is over lava, the doll will drop and you need to catch it. If the doll lands in lava, it will summon a boss. If this happens, use your mirror or a recall potion immediately. You will respawn at your house and immediately die, but it is worth it. You are most likely not prepared to fight this boss yet, and even if you are, beating it has permanent repercussions on your entire world and you are likely not ready for what happens after just yet. It is better to die here, than to permanently change your world right now. If you warp up to the surface, you will die instantly and drop your money right at your spawn so you can retrieve it easily (the wall will keep going until it has swept past the entire underworld but it shouldn't bother you anymore).

Basically, we're going to go from house-to-house down here. You'll find lots of ruined towers, and what you want to do, is mine out the hellstone you can reach from inside the towers (you can mine up to two blocks away not counting the obsidian brick wall). You should be able to get enough Hellstone to make everything without ever risking exposure to lava, especially lava created by Hellstone (each block of hellstone mined turns into half a block of lava).

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Here's a Hellforge; simply hit it with your Pickaxe (Nightmare/Deathbringer or better) and take it with you.

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Every time you mine a piece of Hellstone, it leaves behind half a block worth of lava which will then flow as Lava does. An easy way to get around this is to simply mine this material through the obsidian wall (don't hit the obsidian wall itself!). You can mine up to two blocks through a wall. You can hit the 3rd but you won't be able to pick it up. If you're patient enough, you could probably get your entire quota doing just this, or very close to, but I will show you a couple other ways to get Hellstone if you're impatient or unlucky with Hellstone/Ruined Building spawns.

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This red building is why you need the Obsidian Skull. Merely stepping on those red bricks drains your life fast and makes you walk very slowly (which endangers you further). However, with the Skull equipped, no problem!

Basically, you're trying to get enough Hellstone to make the following:

Molten Pickaxe (20)
Molten Hamaxe (15)
Fiery Greatsword (20)

55 Total Bars (165 Ore, 55 Obsidian)

And optionally:

Molten Fury (15; 45 Ore, 15 Obsidian)
Suit of Hellstone Armor (45; 135 Ore, 45 Obsidian)
Imp Staff (17; 51 Ore, 17 Obsidian)
Phoenix Blaster (you can't make this until you get a Handgun from the Dungeon) (10; 30 Ore, 10 Obsidian)
Flamarang (10 + Enchanted Boomerang; 30 Ore, 10 Obsidian)

So, you can use the above values to calculate how much Hellstone and Obsidian you will need to get everything done.

A Note about Hellstone Armor: Wearing Hellstone instead of Crimson gives you +6 Defense and +11% Melee Damage (and -6% Magic/Ranged/Summon/Throw damages), whereas the Crimson Armor gives you increased Life Regen. It's a tossup; the 6 defense will negate 3 damage per incoming hit while the Life Regen will speed your regen up (noticeably so). But then, the Regen mostly only works while not moving (it is slow while moving even if you're wearing Crimson Armor) and you can always drink a potion. It's up to you; I've done it either way and Crimson seems just slightly squishier than Hellstone, but 3 damage per hit really isn't all that much (the +11% melee damage, though, can be).

As for the other weapons... the Molten Fury is slow but powerful, the Imp Staff is (IMO) almost useless as the imps fire slow and do very low damage (you're better off waiting until later to get a minion or even getting a Bee Staff here shortly), the Phoenix Blaster is a good weapon but you can't make it yet if you've been following this guide, and the Flamarang can be useful against the next boss (but you need an Enchanted Boomerang to even make it), but I will suggest an even better weapon to use instead.

While you're down here, make a long bridge out of something (I suggest collecting ash, as Fireblossom will naturally grow on Ash, but that's not all that important given how easy it is to get it to bloom since 1.3). Once you get your fill of Hellstone, you can leave the Underworld for now. We'll return later...

So you're either waiting on a Goblin Invasion, or maybe you're filling up on items. I decided to include this part right about here, as sometimes you are ready for the Underworld except for that pesky Goblin Invasion. Sometimes it happens the very same second you break an orb or a heart, and other times you can wait days and no invasion will happen. Well, let's take the time to talk about some tips and tricks of making a good base of operations!

Up until now, this guide has only shown you how to make box houses, and assuming you've not been getting creative, you've probably either been experimenting or you've been throwing together haphazard dwellings for your NPCs without much forethought into anything long-term. Well, here's some advice on how to make your Terraria life easier. First, I'm going to start off with a screenshot:

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I will explain the things in the screenshot above. From upper left to lower right:

1). I placed windows in each of the houses: Simply take some sand to a furnace to make glass and then take the glass to a workbench to make glass walls. You can place the glass walls over top of the existing wall to automatically knock out that section of wall. The walls you see in the houses are Boreal Wood walls and the horizontal wood lines on Boreal Wood Walls make it easy to tell where the squares are going to line up. Also note that I lined the windows up perfectly with each other.

2). Chandeliers. Torches are so early game, you know? I figured some Chandeliers would spruce things up nicely! These ones are platinum; Gold ones also look good.

3). The Dryad's House. This is also going to double as my alchemy room. When I get to the dungeon and get an alchemy station and some more iron, I'm going to make a Glass Kiln, and with it I can then make a glass chest for the Potions. The Ivy Chest you see the Dryad standing beside is going to be for ingredients (herbs, mushrooms, etc) and the glass chest will go right next to it, and the Alchemy Station goes right next to where the Glass Chest will go. With that, and the small pool of water (make two Iron Buckets that take 3 bars each to transport the water there), I can make all of my potions from this room. I used Flower Wall background that you buy from the Dryad, as the naturally occurring flower walls won't make a valid house.

4). The Golden Chest Storage Room. This Room is to store all armor, equipment, and vanity items. Once filled, this room will have some 30 chests in it, which should be plenty enough room for every single weapon and armor I will ever find or use in the game and then some (I will only keep 1 of each weapon/armor/accessory unless it is used in a crafting recipe). I used Mudstone Blocks to build this (1 mud block + 1 stone block at a furnace).

5). The Crafting Room. I used Red (Clay) Brick to build this. Note the white wall where the brown chests are; that's Diamond Gemspark Wall which I mentioned earlier in the Guide. The special thing about this wall, is that it requires no light sources to keep lit, even if you place it in behind solid blocks. The chests will hold crafting materials, and the crafting machines will be right there. I usually have one chest for Normal Mode Ores, one for Normal Mode Materials, then one for Hardmode Ores and Hardmode Materials, and then one for Mechanics, etc. This should be enough room to store practically anything I ever need to store in the game.

6). Planters. In between the wooden beams of the house on the left, you will see I have two rows of planters. I don't have seeds to put in these yet (except for one lone Deathweed plant), but when I do I'll have more than enough seeds to cover my potion requirements. These two wooden beams happen to be 26 blocks apart and I'm going to have one row of planters for each type of seed once I unlock them all. The chest at the bottom is for seeds and a staff of regrowth (when you harvest plants with said staff, you occasionally get extra plants and seeds).

7). (Not Pictured, I didn't build it yet): Biome Block Storage. Somewhere in this base, I'm going to put a row of chests to store Biome Blocks. Dirt Blocks, Stone Blocks, Ice, Snow, etc. It doesn't take too long to get multiple stacks of these while doing stuff, and I've found time and time again, I've needed blocks at random times so I don't like to trashcan them when I don't have to.

So hopefully this gives you some building ideas as to how to improve your base and reduce item clutter frustrations while waiting on stuff to happen (like a goblin invasion).

Once you've gotten your fill of Hellstone equipment and/or a Cascade, now's the time to take on the Dungeon. You've probably found the entrance to it by now, but if you haven't, then just keep in mind that you should look on the opposite side of the Jungle, near the ocean.

Once you find the entrance, make about 100 wooden platforms or so, and extend them from the roof of the dungeon's entrance like in the following screenshot:

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A campfire should be plenty; Heart Lantern would honestly be overkill for Skeletron. You can either use a Flamarang or a Molten Fury... or you could just simply clonk him with the Fiery Greatsword. Either way, wait until night starts (you want to get there before night starts and get the arena ready) and when you hear the night music start to play, talk to the Old Man and click the "Curse" option. He immediately turns into the boss which is just a skull and two hands that float around.

Kill the hands first, they are easy and weak. Once the hands are gone, you can focus your attacks on the skull which moves in very predictable patterns and is very easy to avoid. He should go down quick and easy especially if you have the Molten Armor set with that +17% melee damage.

Once he's dead, you can enter the dungeon proper without being instantly one-shot by huge spinning skulls! While delving into the dungeon, here are things to look out for:

1). Water Candles. Right-click these to pick them up and take them with you. Collect all of them that you find. This will make the dungeon easier (by getting rid of that enemy spawn "debuff") and the candles will come in handy later in the game. Stash them somewhere at your house.

2). Bound Mechanic and/or Goblin: If you haven't rescued the Goblin yet and you've seen a Goblin Invasion, there's a high probability of running into him in the Dungeon. Also, there's a Mechanic who is also bound up in here. You'll know when you're close as you'll hear the non-bone "got hit" sound as only the dungeon slimes make such a noise when they get hit and there's nothing else in the dungeon that should be hitting them. Just right-click to talk to them and free them. If you see the Mechanic, buy a pair of Wire Cutters and stick em on a hotkey for...

3). Traps and Light Switches: Using your new Wire Cutters, turn the smart cursor on and select them. You'll see wires now! They're usually red (though they can sometimes be green or blue) and you can harvest the wire (which also disables the traps and light switches). You can simply turn on a light and then take the wires and the light will stay on forever. The reason you want to do this, is that Wires are rather expensive and you can get a few hundred if you harvest all of the wire found in the dungeon (you can also do this anywhere you ran into traps in the caves and elsewhere).

4). Alchemy Table. This is a must-have for your house! Grab it and place it in your alchemy room. When you use it as an alchemy crafting machine, you will occasionally not consume materials when making potions.

5). Bewitching Table. The Witch Doctor sells these, but why not pick them up for free in the Dungeon? You should find 1-3 of these in a Medium-sized world. When right-clicked, they give you a 10 minute buff to your summon capacity (not that it matters now; we don't have a summon weapon yet unless you found a Slime Staff or you made the Imp Staff).

6). Dungeon Slimes. These will always drop a Golden Key, so kill them when you see them!

7). Brown Chests. These always contain a Golden Key, along with standard chest loot (potions, metal bars, Suspicious-Looking Eyes, etc). Even though you don't need the Eye's drops by this point, collect all of the Suspicious-Looking Eyes as you can make a lot of cash by killing the eye and then smelting the ore into bars and dumping the bars on one of the vendor NPCs.

8). Locked Chests. These have nice items, though only two of them are particularly interesting. In the Dungeon, you can find...
a). Muramasa (you need this for a later sword)
b). Cobalt Shield (FINALLY, no more Knockback! Combine it with a Skull at the Goblin Tinkerer's bench).
c). Handgun (If you want a Phoenix Blaster, you'll need one of these).
d). Blue Moon/Aqua Scepter/Magic Missile (meh).
f). Shadow Key (for the Purple Chests you might have seen in the Underworld. One key is all you need; they are infinite use).

9). Mob Drops: Nazars drop from the small floating skulls. Do Not Kill The Boss In The Underworld Until You Get One. I can't stress this enough. Going on to Hardmode without a Nazar is only setting you up for pain later. Thankfully if you somehow miss this warning (and the one I will give later when talking about said boss), you can still use your other world to get the Nazar. With that said, there's also another item that drops in here: the Tally Counter which can drop off of any enemy in the dungeon. It is used in making one of the information devices and can save inventory room if you have the other two that go with it (the Radar and the Lifeform Analyzer).

10). Spikes. These hurt, I suggest building over them with blocks or you could mine them out and drop them (they are useless for Singleplayer maps as mobs are not affected by them, even if you place them yourself).

Once you finish with the dungeon (I suggest grabbing all the golden chests after emptying them and selling/stashing the stuff in the chests which might take 3-5 trips to the dungeon to haul it all out), we can move on!

With the Dungeon done, there's only one major part of the world we haven't explored yet! If you haven't done anything in the Underground Ice or Desert Biomes, you can also explore those, but there's not really anything unique that is gotten out of there except for maybe an Extractinator if you've yet to find one (they are incredibly common in the Underground Desert). But at any rate, now's the time to explore the Jungle.

First off, I will cover the things you're looking for:

1). Ivy Chests. These will either be found in Shrines (small boxes of Mudstone/Iridescent Brick with a chest inside it) or inside of large hollow mahogany trees, the chest will be at the bottom of the tree near the roots. From these chests, you want..
a). Staff of Regrowth (you will want this for your gardening)
b). Anklet of the Wind (for the Lightning Boots)
c). Flower Boots (if you decided to get into fishing, these can be helpful)
d). Feral Claws (optional, they can be used to make a rather nice accessory later)
You will find other stuff, but most of that is rather "meh". The mahogany chests you see in the houses will have general underground cave loot instead of Jungle-specific items.

2). Beehives. These are large structures which will stand out. Inside a Beehive should be a Larva and a pool of honey. When you break the larva, you will summon a boss that you want to kill at least once (I recommend killing every one you find for the money and items).
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Also, take note of which beehive has the largest pool of honey if you decided to get into fishing, that might become relevant later.

3). Lihzarhd Temple. Near the bottom of the Jungle, usually near one of the left/right edges of the Jungle, you will find a huge structure made of rusty-colored blocks that you cannot break with your pickaxe. Somewhere near the top of this Temple should be a locked door. You won't be going in here for a long while yet, but it is good to note the entrance to it so that you can come back here later quick and easy. If the entrance is a long hallway, whatever you do, do not linger in the entrance hallway as incredibly powerful monsters will start spawning that will kill you in a few hits that are far too hard to kill. These monsters are meant to be fought near the end of the game and we're nowhere near that point yet. Best thing to do if you see one (either a flying snake or a lizard walking upright) is to run and find some place he can't follow you to, or simply use your magic mirror/recall potion and get out of there. You could theoretically find a way to block him so he can't hit you with blocks and use a yo-yo but it will take a long time to kill him as you'll only do 1 damage per hit most likely.

4). Items that drop from enemies:
a). Bezoar (optional, you can always get this later too). If you get one, stick it in your house; you'll need it later.
b). Stingers (get at least 12 of them).
c). Vines (get at least 3 of them).
d). Jungle Spores (these are not actually mob drops but you'll see them laying around if you go deep enough; you want at least 24 of them).

I highly recommend mapping out the majority of the jungle, placing torches to keep things lit as you go. The larger rooms you might want to put a floor or two of wooden platforms in, perhaps stick a campfire and heart lantern at each, and make sure there are easy pathways to these larger rooms so that no matter where you are in the Jungle, you can get to one reasonably quickly. You'll thank me later if you actually took the time to do this.

Keep in mind that the Jungle is an Inventory Management thing; you will fill up fast in here (kinda like the dungeon but worse). You may need to run back to your house several times before you're done here. Once you get the aforementioned materials, you will want to make an Ivy Whip (equip it now) and a Blade of Grass. With the Blade of Grass, you should be able to finally complete your brand new Night's Edge if you've been following my guide in order. You can also optionally make a Hornet Staff; I regard it as better than the Imp Staff even though it does less damage. Having a Minion is free, so you might as well. The Hornet Staff is made with Beeswax that is dropped by the Queen Bee boss.

Take the Blade of Grass, the Fiery Greatsword (which you were probably using up until this point), the Blood Butcherer (or Light's Bane, either work), and the Muramasa you got from the Dungeon to a Demon or Blood Altar and make your Night's Edge. If it comes out with terrible stats, go ahead and reforge it at the Goblin. You could spend some time trying to get Godly or Legendary, but it depends on how much time you want to spend farming up cash to pay for it as it could take a lot of cash to do so. I'd suggest using any +Damage modifier, or even no Prefix at all gives you a weapon that does 50+ damage which is way better than any other weapon you've been using up until now. This weapon will make the rest of the first "half" of the game a cinch. With this weapon, and Molten Armor equipped, you've pretty much nothing to fear (except for Lihzarhds as I mentioned above). With Rocket Boots or better, and the Ivy Whip, there's nowhere you can't go so you pretty much have free reign over the world (for now).

With that said, let's get to the next section.

So we're almost ready to take on Hardmode! There's a few things you might want to consider before you plunge into Hardmode, though. First, you want a good house that can support all 21 of Terraria's main NPCs (the 22nd you will probably build his house somewhere away from your base for reasons I'll mention later). That way you don't have to stop in the middle of what you're doing to build. Once you start Hardmode, you're going to want to go bam bam bam right through it until you've defeated Plantera, because of the speed of which biomes spread in Hardmode (defeating Plantera cuts the speed of biome spread by 66%). So basically, from the moment you activate Hardmode, it is a race to hurry up and kill Plantera, but that will take some time depending on how fast you are. I suggest checking my "Building Advice" section above for some advice of things that are nice to have in a base.

Once you've done that, you might want to give thoughts to preserving a section of pure forest in the center around your base. To do this, you will want to go a few screens to either side, and dig a vertical tunnel to about Level Surface (0' on your Depth Meter, or where the dirt background walls stop forming and/or when the music changes to underground music). Once you've done this, then start digging a horizontal tunnel back towards your Hellevator until you meet it. Biomes will spread through all kinds of sand, Stone and Ice, but not Grassless Dirt or Snow. You will want the tunnel to be 4-5 blocks wide of uncorruptable material, and for the areas up near the surface where grass will grow, you will want to cover this grass on the outside with wood, clay, snow, etc so that thorny bushes cannot grow and spread the corruption or crimson across your tunnel. Basically, when you do this to both sides, you're going to end up with a "Quarantine Bowl" where the Corruption, Crimson, and Hallow cannot pass through. Be careful of vines and grass, and make it 4-5 blocks wide and you should be fine! Here's an example screenshot:
309FA60485660FCAC0FFFE22A83076D406F45FC8
It might be a good idea to check it now&then to make sure that no grass is growing where you don't want it to, etc.

Also, you might want to give thoughts to the Jungle and/or whether or not it is near any Corruption or Crimson. If so, you might want to dig at least a vertical tunnel to the Level Surface to hinder the Corruption/Crimson growth long enough so that Chlorophyte can start growing (which will sort of "inoculate" the jungle against these biomes). Hallow will not affect a Jungle whatsoever, so if you end up with Hallow right next to your Jungle, then you don't have anything to worry about. In fact, you can also use the Hallow to protect your Jungle if there is no Corruption or Crimson right next to it; simply grab a few Hallow blocks and plant them right next to the edge of the Jungle and let the Hallow spread downward. Since Corruption, Crimson, and Hallow cannot overwrite each other, your Jungle will be nice and safe from Corruption and Crimson.

Another thing that can be done, is to extend Minecart Rails from the Center Forest over to each ocean and make yourself a mine cart (iron/lead bars + wood). Minecart Rails are made from Wood and Iron/Lead Bars and can be placed while riding a minecart. Simply build a decent amount of rope upwards (I wouldn't go above 500 feet on the Depth Meter) and then a small wood platform bridge (10 platforms or so). Once you do this, start placing minecart rails and then hop on the minecart. You can go forward, placing minecart rails as you go and if you work out a good speed you merely only need to hold the mouse button down until you reach the edge of the world. This will take a decent amount of iron, but it is very worth it as it allows for fast and easy (and relatively safe) travel across the land. I suggest making platform bridges with a solid block on either side with torch so that you can see it coming up, and drop ropes down to prominent locations (Jungle/Dungeon Entrance, Underground Desert Entrance, etc).

Next thing on the list of things to do, is to prepare an Ocean for farming. This is rather simple and easy to do, you basically make sure you have a decent amount of wood on you (100+), 200-300 rope and a couple Water Candles and go out to the ocean of your choice. I recommend using the ocean beyond the Dungeon unless there's Corruption or Crimson between the Dungeon and the Ocean. Once you decide which Ocean you want to use as your farm, go there and make a bunch of wood platforms (~100) and start placing them overtop of the surface of the water and extend it out over the ocean until the screen stops scrolling (if you're doing fishing, you need room to throw the bobber in). Put a Campfire down near the edge of the platforms and drop ropes into the water in a couple different places (at the end of the platforms, and in the middle most likely). Then, make two workbenches and hop in. You will probably get attacked by sharks but by now they should easily be killable with your Night's Edge and they shouldn't do that much damage to you if you're wearing Crimson or Molten Armor. The biggest danger here is of drowning; know where the ropes are (toss some glowsticks to keep things lit). You will want to place the workbenches apart so that the candle debuff covers most of the ocean floor. With this in place, you're done here for now.

With that said, another thing you might want to do, is an inventory checklist:

1). Weapons: Night's Edge (check Bungle in the Jungle for instructions), Cascade (dropped from Underworld mobs), Phoenix Blaster (Handgun + 10 Hellstone Bars)
2). Armor: Hellstone Armor or Crimson Armor.
3). Accessories:
a). REK-3000: Tally Counter (dropped from dungeon mobs) + Lifeform Analyzer (Travelling Merchant) + Radar (Brown Chests at the Surface)
b). Goblin Tech: DPS Meter (Travelling Merchant), Stopwatch (Travelling Merchant), Metal Detector (50% chance to drop from Nymphs which show up as "Lost Girl" on rare mob detector).
c). GPS: Gold/Platinum Watch (10 Bars + 1 Chain at Table+Chair) + Depth Meter (dropped by various bats) + Compass (dropped by Viking Skeletons, Flinxes, Snails, etc).
d). Boots: Rocket Boots + Hermes/Flurry/Sailfish Boots = Spectre Boots. Spectre Boots + Aglet + Anklet of the Wind = Lightning Boots. Lightning Boots + Ice Skates = Frostspark Boots
e). Obsidian Shield: Cobalt Shield + Obsidian Skull.
f). Architect's Gizmo Pack: Brick Layer + Extendo Grip + Paint Sprayer + Portable Cement Mixer (all sold by the Travelling Merchant randomly). This item greatly helps build things much faster and easier.

If you decided to get into fishing, check out the next chapter. If not, skip it.

I didn't get into Fishing in much detail in this guide yet; I wanted to wait until the player has some good methods to move around in. Now that we can move around fast, you will want to get yourself some bait if you haven't been collecting it already. Basically take a few nights (hopefully around New Moon if you've been keeping track of the Moonphase) and sit at your base. As long as it isn't Blood Moon, enemies should not be spawning near your base and you should see fireflies (they spawn best on the smaller moons). About 50 fireflies should easily be enough and this can easily be do-able within a night or two, especially if you set up a Water Candle (I told you to grab them from the Dungeon, remember?). If you want to speed the process up, either kill or catch the birds, rabbits and squirrels too as they take up "space" on the number of creatures that can be spawned at any given time.

Once you have some bait, talk to the Angler NPC once per day and ask him about the Quest. He will tell you what fish he wants, and then he will tell you where you catch it from. In Normal Mode, you will likely get one of the following:

Surface (there's usually a large pool of water near your base)
Underground & Caverns -or- Caverns Only (take note of a large pool of water in the caverns since the one in the caverns works for both)
Surface Tundra
Tundra
Honey (this is why I told you to note which beehive has the largest honey pool)
Jungle (any depth works, but I normally try to find a pool on the surface)
Crimson/Corruption (any depth works)
Surface/Sky
Sky Only (there's always at least one sky island lake, just find it using Gravitation Potions).

The bigger the pool of water, the better it will be for fishing, however the way the game calculates size is a little odd: it starts from the edge and counts the number of blocks across to the other edge. Then for each block, it counts straight down, so that any overhangs will not count. So basically, if you have a pool that is 10 blocks wide by 10 blocks deep, that is considered to be a 100-block pool. Now, if you have, say, 5 blocks cut into the one wall that's 3 blocks high, you're still going to get 100, not 115. This image might help you:
Fishing_dimensions.png

The Green arrows in the image above are valid for fishing, the red area is not counted. If you mined out the blocks above the overhang on the left, then suddenly that red area would then become valid. So, using this as reference, enlarge any pools that you intend to use for long-term fishing. Also note that any Surface, Underground or Caverns fish listed must be caught in PURE Areas; they cannot be Corrupt, Crimson, or Hallowed.

Also, a word about biomes: The game considers the current biome to be the biome of the fishing pool. You can line a fishing pool with Crimstone but if the Crimson Music isn't playing and there's no Crimson Background, then you're going to get Pure Catches. You can use this to your advantage by making/modifying a pool that's on the edge of, for example, Snow and Forest. Standing on one side of the pond, you'll near Forest music, you'll catch Forest fish. If you stand on the other end and hear Snow music, you will catch Snow/Tundra fish.

And one last thing about fishing: Do not open any crates before Hardmode. Save them! After Hardmode, you can find Hardmode Ore in them and if you fish up enough crates, you might be able to make all of your ore items without ever breaking a single Demon/Blood Altar. Also, Crates can sometimes have awesome weapons in them in Hardmode.

I would recommend spending several in-game days (make improvements to your house, gather ore, gather bait, tend your garden, stock up on potions, etc) while doing the fishing quest once-per-day; you should collect a few crates and hopefully get some of the gear associated with fishing. If RNG smiles upon you, you might even get the ingredients to make a Cell Phone:

Weather Radio + Sextant + Fisherman's Pocket Guide = Fish Finder

Once you have that, you can make a Cell Phone (assuming you have all of the above checklist):

Fish Finder + Goblin Tech + REK-3000 + GPS = PDA
PDA + Magic/Ice Mirror = Cell Phone

With this, you can save yourself 3-4 inventory slots. Just don't forget to favorite this item so you don't accidentally drop it or something.

Before I start on this, I want to emphasize the fact that once you kill this upcoming boss, your world is irrevocably changed and there is no going back unless you make another world. Once you change your world by defeating the boss, you are in a sense on a time limit unless you don't mind your entire world being overrun by Hallow/Evil biomes as these biomes will actually start spreading much faster. So, before doing this I highly recommend to again go over the prep and inventory checklists, make sure your base is to your liking for the most part (and/or 'good enough' that you won't feel the need to build for awhile), that you have a good boss arena for fighting the 3 bosses after this next one with, that your Jungle is good and mapped out, etc. If you're a fisher, you might want to fish up a lot of crates (50+) and get a bunch of fishing quests done if you want to make the transition smoother and faster. As I said before, do not open the crates until after you enter Hardmode.

Before spawning the next boss, the more caves you have mapped out, the easier your early Hardmode tour will be.

That said, once you're good and ready (you can always make another world if you think you screwed up), what you will want to do is get yourself about 1,000 blocks or so, perhaps 2,000. I recommend harvesting a bunch of Ash but it really doesn't matter what you use. If you use Ash, you can return here later and harvest a lot of Fireblossoms which is good for potions... but yet they made Fireblossoms bloom a lot more often (every Sundown to Night) so it isn't like Fireblossoms are hard to get like they were pre-1.3 where you had to mess around with submerging clay pots partially in lava, blah blah. You could also use dirt or mud and get yourself a bunch of blinkroot, but then again, blinkroot blooms randomly and you just harvest it when it is blooming from your greenhouse.

You Could, if you're a fisherman, use mud and spread Jungle Grass Seeds so that this bridge will grow all sorts of jungle plants that will make it easy to collect fishing bait (Jungle Plants release bugs that can be used as bait when "broken").

OR, you can use Stone, and use the Underworld as a Soul Farm... simply intentionally spread Hallow, Crimson, or Corruption on this stone bridge to cause those enemy types to spawn on those blocks to farm in the Underworld.

Either way, you need 1k-2k of these blocks of your choice. Start about halfway between the "roof" of the Underworld and the lava, start about where your Hellevator is, and build either left or right. Make sure the bridge is straight and flat, you can use slopes or steps, but just make sure you can continue running and do not have to stop to jump over anything. If you hit a building, mine out some blocks of the building (4-5 blocks high) so that you can run right through the building itself and/or use steps where necessary. You want a 1000-2000 block long bridge to run on, and you should be able to run from one end to the other without stopping or doing anything other than running.

Remember those Voodoo Demons that I told you to be REAL careful with? Well, if you haven't gotten a Voodoo Guide Doll yet, you need to hunt them and kill one so you can take his doll that will drop. Once you have one, go to the end of the bridge (which is hopefully above a pool of lava) and when you're ready to fight the boss, pick the doll up out of your inventory and right click so that you "drop" it into the lava which will immediately spawn the boss.

The boss is a huge wall that has two eyes, a large mouth, and several little mouths on tentacles that will move towards you slowly. Your objective is to move away from it (hence why you wanted the long bridge) while dealing damage. It has a lot of health, but if you have good weapons, you can deal with this thing rather easily. I will give some suggestions for weapons:

1). Night's Edge to deal with the mouths on tentacles (they are called "the hungry").
2). Cascade (yo-yo that drops in the Underworld from any mob) works well on the boss itself.
3). Phoenix Blaster (make sure you bring 500+ musket balls)
4). Water Bolt works OK but you will occasionally run out of mana
5). Dark Lance is a spear that is found in Shadow Chests (get a Shadow Key from the dungeon to open them), it works well against the boss.
6). Demon Scythe, which is a spell, can do some damage if you aim/time the casts right, but you will run out of mana fast.
7). Hellwing Bow from Shadow Chests is rather decent, but you must use wooden arrows to get the bow's special effect.
8). For the Yo-Yo users, a Cascade will now drop in the Underworld from any mob once you've killed Skeletron. This is an effective weapon to use on this boss and even early hardmode until you get the next Yo-Yo.
9). All else fails, you can use a Molten Fury with Hellfire Arrows, just be aware that said arrows can hurt you too if you're too close.

Use any combo of the aforementioned weapons while running away from the wall. The wall will speed up as it takes damage and you will need at the very least Hermes Boots to keep away from it when it is near death but if you were following my guide, you should have at the very least, lightning boots which should be plenty for him.

When the boss dies, a box of Demonite or Crimtane (depending on your world) will form and inside this box will be the boss's loot: He always drops a Pwnhammer (you need this! don't leave without it), and either a weapon or an emblem. Hopefully he drops the emblem. If not, we can always kill him again later when we need said emblem. Of the weapons... the Laser Rifle is a replacement for the Space Gun, the Breaker Blade really isn't that useful, and the Clockwork Assault Rifle can be decent in some situations/setups, but I never bothered using it. Experiment around with them if you like, but now we're on a time limit so let's not waste time.

When you killed the boss, you got a "warning message" that said "Ancient Spirits of Light and Dark have been released!" (or something to that effect). What this is talking about, is from the center of the world (in the left/right sense) down in the underworld, a "V" pattern spread of Hallow (a new biome) and Crimson/Corruption (whichever your world started with) appeared in the world. The "V" starts in the underworld and extends clear up to the very top of the world (up in space). Every corruptable block has been changed to that biome's variant (Stone becomes Crimstone/Ebonstone/Pearlstone, Grass gets changed, Sand and its variants gets changed, etc). The spread rate has also been drastically sped up (this is why I told you to dig those anti-corruption tunnels earlier) and now much harder enemies will start appearing everywhere (except for daytime forest).

With that, the first part of my guide is done. We are now in Hardmode, considered by many players to be the "meat" of the game.

(Continued in the next post!)
 
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Welcome to Hardmode! As I said previously, when you entered Hardmode by killing the Wall of Flesh, a "V" formation spread of Hallow and the Evil Biome happened. The first thing we're going to do is warp back to your town after getting the items that the Wall of Flesh dropped (making sure the Pwnhammer is among them). Once you warp back to your base, go Left and Right of your base, looking for where the "V" hit and which Biome went where.

Hopefully neither biome landed inside your "quarantine bowl" if you dug one as I advised you to earlier. If it did, you will have to quarantine the area again, simply dig a vertical 3-4 block wide passage straight down to "cut off" the "damaged" area to keep it from spreading further. You can fix this later, don't worry. For now, we just want to "cut off" the area.

If the Hallow went to the side the Jungle's on, breathe a sigh of relief, you don't have to worry about the Jungle because the Hallow won't bother it. If the evil biome went that way, hopefully you made at least a small quarantine tunnel to preserve the surface Jungle.

Either way, before I go any further, I will explain the fact that now that we're in Hardmode, we now qualify for the auto-spawning of three "Mech" bosses: The Twins, Skeletron Prime, and the Destroyer which are robotic versions of bosses you've fought earlier (and are much more powerful). These can pop any night they wish, and you will get a warning if they're about to, so watch out for these warnings. Make sure you are nowhere near your house when one is about to spawn, just go out somewhere and let it kill you because you're not ready for it yet.

That said, if you're a fisher and you have crates, open them. Hopefully you get at least a decent amount of hardmode ore (more about this shortly). If you fished a Lot of crates, you might even be able to skip Chapter 3 entirely if you've enough ore. I'll put an ore/bar checklist in the beginning of that chapter so you can skim through it to see if you have enough.

That Molten Armor might as well be your starting clothes right now, and that Night's Edge might as well be a Cactus Sword... well it isn't quite THAT bad, but we need better equipment and fast!

I will mention as we get into Hardmode that your first priority is paying attention to the weather. If you got a Weather Radio from Fishing Quests, this will be much easier. If not, hopefully if Rain happens, you notice it. If it does happen, get a good ranged weapon and get to your Forest biome pronto; you will want to farm Angry Nimbus which will drop an awesome weapon called a Nimbus Rod. Getting one of these is one of your first priorities and hopefully it happens sooner rather than later. If you get a Nimbus Rod, whenever it rains, go to the Snow Biome and try to farm Golems. Hopefully there's a land formation that lets you avoid his lasers but still hit him with something like a Yo-Yo. You want a Frost Feather to drop from him which might take a few kills.

First thing's first, go to the Snow Biome and dig yourself a little hidey-hole (or manipulate the surroundings that are already there). Some of the enemies (wolves, elementals, frost golems) will downright hurt (and can freeze you outright) so you will want to find a place that the larger enemies can't hurt you. This might take some trial and error, don't be afraid to chug some potions if you need to stay alive. What you're doing, is killing enemies until an Amarok (a yo-yo) drops. Not everybody is a fan of yo-yos, but this weapon is just simply too nice to pass up even if you aren't hugely into yo-yos.

Once you have an Amarok, explore the caves looking for a Skeleton Merchant. Once you find him, buy from him a Yo-Yo Glove (he should always have it) and if you haven't bought one yet, a Counterweight. I hope you have 55g. Pricey but so very much worth it. Go back to your town and if you haven't done so yet, make a White String (take some cobwebs to a loom to make silk, then make the silk into the String). With those 3 items, you can make a Yo-Yo Bag at a Tinkerer's Workbench. This hugely increases the damage potential of a Yo-Yo and from now on, I suggest always carrying your Yo-Yo Bag on you (you can put it in a social slot and swap it out when you intend on using your Yo-Yo). Using a Yo-Yo without the Bag is a rather bad idea as you lose a lot of DPS and Crowd Control if you're not also using the Bag.

First off, let's start with that checklist I mentioned earlier, for the people who fished up crates:

Tier 1: Cobalt Pickaxe (45 Ore or 15 Bars) -or- Palladium Pickaxe (54 Ore or 18 Bars)
Tier 2: Mythril/Orichalcum Anvil and it's Pickaxe (must make anvil first):
a). Mythril Anvil: (40 Ore or 10 Bars) -or- Orichalcum Anvil (44 Ore or 12 Bars)
b). Mythril Pickaxe: (60 Ore or 15 Bars) -or- Orichalcum Pickaxe (72 Ore or 18 Bars)
Tier 3: Adamantite/Titanium Forge, the Armor, and the Sword (Furnace Must be made first):
a). Adamantite/Titanium Forge: 30 Ore + Hellforge (using a Hardmode Anvil). You need to pick your existing Hellforge up with a pickaxe first.
b). Full suit of Armor: Adamantite (270 Ore or 54 Bars) -or- Titanium (295 Ore or 59 Bars). Note: Make the Melee Bonus Mask as you have a choice of helmets
c). Sword: Adamantite (60 Ore or 12 Bars) -or- Titanium (65 Ore or 13 Bars)

So hopefully if you were fishing crates, you have enough for all of this stuff or at least a good chunk of it. Again, make sure you make the melee mask for the helmet of the armor set. Note that if you fished crates, you can skip the Cobalt/Palladium Pickaxe if you have enough Mythril or Orichalcum to make the Anvil -and- its Pickaxe.

If you're not a fisher, or if you fell short, you will need to grab your pwnhammer and head over to your local Crimson or Corruption area (the one that was there when the game first started) and go down to where all of those Demon/Blood Altars were. Hopefully you found a Demon/Blood Altar near the center of the world. If not, put torches next to an easy-to-reach one to "mark it" and then start breaking the rest of them. Each time you break an altar you will see a message that your world has been blessed with an ore. The game will choose 1 of two ores:

Tier 1 (first altar): Cobalt (blue) or Palladium (orange)
Tier 2 (second altar): Mythril (bluish-green) or Orichalcum (purple)
Tier 3 (third altar): Adamantite (red) or Titanium (greyish with colored specks)

The fourth altar and beyond will continue to produce ore of the chosen type. If you got Cobalt on your first altar, the Fourth Altar will give you more Cobalt (and will never give you Palladium). The altars will always follow the "1-2-3" pattern as you break them. Each altar broken will turn one random stone block anywhere in the world into Ebonstone or Crimstone which will further aid in the spread of those evil biomes (which is why I suggested that fishers try to get around this by fishing crates).

When ore is produced, random stone, dirt, ash, or mud blocks will be converted to these new ore blocks. The deeper you go, the more likely it is you will find these new ore. Spelunker Potions (Bottled Water + Moonglow + Blinkroot + Gold/Platinum Ore) will help greatly in searching for the new ore. You need a Molten Pickaxe or a Reaver Shark to mine Tier 1 ore, and you need a Tier 1 pickaxe to mine Tier 2 ore, and you need a Tier 2 pickaxe to mine Tier 3 ore.

The "sweet spot" for finding Tier 3 Ore (and lots of Tier 2) is the depth at which lava is just starting to spawn, and just underneath where the frozen biome extends (but not necessarily only where the frozen biome, I'm only using that as a point of reference for how deep you should go). Ore usually only spawns in the underworld at the "roof" of the underworld; going down there isn't profitable in terms of Hardmode Ore usually unless you're looking for new ways to enter the lava caves above the Underworld.

Once you get your Tier 2 pickaxe, tunnelling should be much faster than before and you should be able to just blaze through with your Spelunker Potions active, it shouldn't take TOO long to get yourself a nice spiffy suit of armor and matching sword.

If you're a fisher, don't mix Titanium and Adamantite Armor; you won't get any of the bonuses for doing so.

If you're a fisher, hopefully you've collected a lot of bait by now. You have a decision to make -- there are some really nice weapons to be had from fishing in Hardmode that were not previously available until now. Keep in mind that while you're fishing the days away, Hallow and Crimson/Corruption are spreading (you might want to check every now&then to make sure your containment tunnels haven't been breached) and every night has the chance to spawn a boss while you are unprepared to fight it. I recommend waiting until after you've got some hardmode ore armor, but if you want you can also use this time to fish up crates to get said armor, as long as you've a nicely sized pond all dug out and ready to go, along with various protections to make sure mobs can't get to you.

There are three weapons we are going to look at:

1). The Bladetongue. It is stronger than the Titanium Sword by just 3 damage, however it also inflicts the Ichor debuff which reduces your enemy's defense, which essentially adds 10 damage per hit. It also fires a projectile that bounces around when swung, so it is a very good weapon for the melee user. It can only be fished up in a Crimson Biome, however. You can make an artificial crimson biome (be careful to make sure it can't spread) in a Corruption world if you wish, and then put a pond in it to fish from, or place some Crimstone blocks near an existing pond.

2). Toxikarp. This is a very strange weapon that is fished up from the Corruption biome; it does not use Mana, nor Ammo, but yet does Ranged damage. It still does good damage, despite these facts, a base damage of 43 is not bad at all. It fires green bubbles that travel a short distance, and then they fly straight upwards which makes the weapon pretty much the opposite of the Nimbus Rod (you use the Nimbus Rod for things below you).

3). Crystal Serpent. This is a magic weapon that comes from the Hallow biome, that does OK damage (since we're wearing melee gear) but has great crowd control capabilities. It fires a bolt similar to the Staff weapons, but this bolt explodes into a bunch of smaller bolts on impact with any surface or creature. Larger creatures might get hit 3-5 times if all of the smaller bolts also hit the creature which can really add the damage up, even if you're not geared for magic weapons. With a Mana cost of 9, you can fire this thing quite a few times before running out of magic assuming you've got the full 200 mana max (why shouldn't you by now?). It, along with the Water Bolt, Nimbus Rod, and Golden Shower are among the very few magic weapons I will ever suggest you take a look at.

All of the aforementioned weapons are somewhat rare and can be fished from any depth, though you can improve your chances of catching one by improving your rod (Sitting Duck's Fishing Rod from the Travelling Merchant, or the Golden Rod from the Angler's quests), having good bait (Enchanted Worms are easy to make, even if the worms can be hard to come by sometimes, or use the better Jungle bait, or even some of the bait gotten from the Angler's quest rewards), and should you get a Pocket Journal, keep track of your fishing power day by day (it changes every day depending on moonphase and other similar things), making sure the body of water you are fishing from is at least 300 blocks in total "valid" area (see above) and last but not least, wearing all of the fishing gear: Angler Hat/Vest/Boots/Earring, High Test Fishing Line and the Tackle Box as well as using a Fishing Potion (you should have a ridiculous amount of these if you took the time to do the Angler's quests before Hardmode to collect said fishing gear).

If you choose to go this route, you can get yourself a really nice weapon or two (especially that sword...) and it should make your early Hardmode much easier. The Sword in particular is your prize weapon and it will do well right up until Golem and the events right after him.

While looking for Ore, you might come across Biome Mimics (they show up on the Lifeform Analyzer/REK-3000). They can also be spawned by placing a Light or Dark Key (made from 15 souls of light/dark which you get from killing enemies at the Underground/Cavern depth in the Hallow or Crimson/Corruption Biomes respectively) in a treasure chest and then closing the window.

These are very powerful enemies, and I highly recommend using a Yo-Yo on them as they can deflect projectiles when they close and go invincible (they cannot, however, deflect yo-yos). Get an Amarok before you even think about trying this, and you will ideally want a decent open area to fight this thing in, and use your Yo-Yo while weaving around various natural structures to stay away from it. It has a lot of health and it will hurt plenty if it gets ahold of you (moreso than normal mimics).

They can drop good weapons, the ones to look for are the Fetid Baghnahks from Crimson Mimics (very short range but incredibly high DPS; it will shred one of the mechanical bosses in seconds), the Hooks are a nice upgrade, and the Daedalus Stormbow from the Hallow Mimics is one of the few ranged weapons I would advise you consider using. If you have a Corruption world instead, the Chain Guillotines are worth looking into. The Clinger Staff is somewhat similar to the Nimbus Rod, but it can only hit 20 times before the wall disappears which can be problematic for many of the situations that you want the Nimbus Rod for.

So, by now, you should have at the very least, Adamantite or Titanium Armor, and a Adamantite or Titanium Sword. Hopefully you had some luck in getting yourself a Nimbus Rod and an Amarok. If not, keep your eyes on the sky, check a couple times a day if you've been doing underground stuff, and in the case of the Amarok, go to the Snow Biome and start farming away until you get one.

Once you have the above items, now we need to start preparing some farms. First order of business is the easiest one: We need a Hallow Desert. Find a decent patch of desert away from your home, and bring a few Hallow blocks (Pearlstone, Pearlsand, etc), a couple workbenches, and a couple water candles.

Place the Hallow Blocks randomly amongst the regular sand, set up the workbenches with candles on the benches a bit apart from each other to cover a large area with the candle buff.

If your world already has a Hallow Desert, then obviously all you need is the workbenches with candles. Once you've done this, you're done here. If you don't want the Hallow spreading, you could dig some tunnels (which should be super fast and easy with the Mythril/Orichalcum Pickaxe) around the desert, but you might have to go down a good ways to avoid the sand.

Anyways, once you're done with that, now it is time to set up a Crimson Farm. If you went Hardmode with a Corruption World, I recommend getting your Crimson World up to Hardmode status, and once you do, find some cavern area near the lava that is pretty well corrupted with Crimson. I recommend trying to find a wooden cabin in this area, but if there are none, you could build one yourself. Place some block bridges over the nearby lava pools so that mobs don't die in the lava and drop items in the lava, put a campfire and a heart lantern in the cabin, and a workbench with a water candle.

Once you've done this, do the same in a Hallow area.

And, also, repeat the instructions for a Hallow Desert above for a Corruption Desert (you can take some blocks from a corruption world to a crimson one and create a Corruption Desert in a Crimson world).

With that done, we're ready for some farming!

So now we've got decent armor, we've got good weapons, and we've got some farms set up. The next thing to do is to kill bosses, and if one should pop, hopefully it is Destroyer first. If it isn't Destroyer, I recommend letting it kill you. If Destroyer pops on you automatically, then refer to the next chapter.

Otherwise, we have some time on our hands. I would first suggest going to the Crimson Cavern Farm I told you to set up in the previous chapter. While here, you are looking for...

1). Souls of Night (dropped by everything)
2). Trifold Map (rare drop by Giant Bats)
3). Vitamins (rare drop by Floaty Gross)
4). Ichor (always dropped by Ichor Stickers)
5). Armor Polish (rare drop from Armored Skeletons)
6). Magic Quiver (optional, rare drop from Skeleton Archers)

If you haven't run into him yet, the Skeleton Merchant always has a Yo-Yo Glove that will allow you to complete the Yo-Yo Bag if you haven't done so already and you will inevitably run into him while farming.

That said, get some Battle and Hunter Potions (if you don't have any vertebrae to make the Battle Potions, you will very shortly) and head down to your farm. The cabin is for regenerating health, because these guys can hurt a plenty especially if you get armor broken by a skeleton. Note that the Floaty Gross can go through walls (partly why you wanted the hunter potions, so you can see them coming). I recommend making the cabin big enough with room to dodge. Don't forget to make the door up in the air so skeletons can't break it down.

Sometimes a Crimson Mimic might spawn, you want to try to kill it if it does. Regularly dump your money in a piggybank in case you die. These guys hurt a plenty as well, even moreso than the other mobs and they take a lot to kill. I highly suggest using a Yo-Yo on them, as they can reflect projectiles when they close up. They can also jump through blocks, so don't think you can exploit terrain and kill them in complete safety. If you keep moving and keep weaving around terrain in circles while keeping your Yo-Yo on it, you should be able to eventually kill it. They can drop nice items when you do finally kill it.

With that said, once you get a decent amount of Souls (20-30 should be enough for now), let's move on to the Cavern Hallow Farm. We're going to do the same thing in there, but instead you're looking for...

1). Souls of Light (20-30, dropped by everything)
2). Rod of Discord (optional but awesome incredibly rare drop from Chaos Elementals)
3). Trifold Map (Giant Bats)
4). Armor Polish (Armored Skeletons)
5). Crystal Shards (mined from the terrain)

There's less to be found here, but the Souls are important anyways. Hallow Mimics can spawn here, and you deal with them the exact same way you dealt with Crimson Mimics, though their drop list is a little different, still some nice items all the same.

Should you get 20-30 Souls of Light, you can leave that place for now.

Hopefully by now, you've gotten at least one of the following:

1). Mechanical Eye
2). Mechanical Skull
3). Mechanical Worm

They will drop randomly until you kill the boss associated with these items, then they stop dropping. They are somewhat rare drops, but you can also make them yourself (which is why we were gathering souls).

Once you get done in there, you can either continue farming for the Status Debuff items (I mentioned a few of them above), or you can create the Boss Spawners and take on the bosses. If you decide to keep farming, go to the Chapter about the Ankh Charm and read there. If you decide to go for the bosses, go to that Chapter instead.

Now, we're ready to take on the next three bosses! That might seem a little odd, but Hardmode has a lot more bosses, and they're fought more often than the ones in Easymode considering there's not so huge gear gaps between the bosses as there was before.

So, first up is the Destroyer. Remember the wooden platform Arena you made for the Eye of Cthulhu way back in the beginning? Hopefully it is still there. Go to this Arena, and make sure that it is about 150 or so platforms long (add more platforms to it if you need to) and then, add a second wood platform floor above it. Do the same thing you did at the beginning of the game -- start a rope and go up until the platforms below you are just barely off-screen and then start a platform floor up here too, same length as the bottom one. If done at the right height, the Destroyer should not be able to reach the top "floor" giving you a chance to retreat, but yet he won't despawn because you're not that far away. Like all mech bosses, he must be fought at night.

Fighting him is pretty simple -- Buff Up (Ironskin/Regeneration Potions), use your Nimbus Rod and your Bladetongue or Adamantite/Titanium Sword to kill the little orbs. You could also, as an alternate strategy, use Jester Arrows with an Adamantite/Titanium Repeater if you still haven't found a Nimbus Rod. Try to line up your Nimbus Clouds and/or Repeater shots so that they hit the most amount of segments possible, and while you're not killing probes that break off of him, you can apply some DPS by swinging your sword at him as well. If you still need help, you can refer to this video that I made during 1.2.4:


Note in this video I mention using a Cutlass... but a Bladetongue or Tier 3 Sword will work just fine instead.

With Destroyer dead, now is the time to make ourselves a new weapon! If it is still nighttime, hurry up and buy some Illegal Gun Parts (only sold during Night) and then a Minishark from the Arms Dealer. Earlier in the guide, I told you to make a bridge on the one ocean, right? Go the the ocean, and kill some enemies until you've got 5 shark fins. Bring those back, and with the Souls of Might that the boss you just killed dropped, you can make a Megashark! I recommend trying to fish a decent prefix on this if you've got the money. I suggest trying for either Deadly, Nasty, or preferably Unreal.

With the Megashark in hand, now we need some wings. Hopefully you got a Frost Feather while you were farming for your Amarok, and/or took my suggestion earlier and prioritized rain above all else. If you've had horrible luck with rain appearing, you can also go to the Underworld. Now that one Mech boss is dead, new enemies are spawning in the Underworld now, and one of them is called Red Devil. They look like demons, but they are dark red and they throw tridents at you instead of sickles. These tridents hurt! Avoid them at all costs; they hit for 120-140 damage. I recommend finding a ruined building somewhere, and using your yo-yo to hit them from safety, perhaps set up a water candle to speed the process up and don't forget to kill the other mobs so that stuff can keep spawning in. If you're a fisher, you have an advantage in that the Weather Radio (if you got one by now) will tell you if it is raining on the surface, so you can farm the Red Devils while waiting for it to rain.

Once you have a Frost or Fire Feather, go to a Sky Island (if you haven't found one yet, you can use Gravitation Potions to look for one) and set up a Water Candle up there (this is why I told you to get all of them from the dungeon earlier). It shouldn't take long for a big long white eastern dragon to show up; it is called a Wyvern and it can do some significant damage if you allow its head to touch you (touching it's body barely tickles). Kill it to get a random number of Souls of Flight; you need 20 of them. Once you have 20, go back to your base, go to your Anvil and make your wings!

With Wings and Megashark, if you've been following my guide, you should have a good bit of ichor by now. You only need 12-24 of them. Buy 2-4 stacks of Musket Balls from the Arms Dealer, go to the Anvil and make Ichor Bullets. Now we're ready for the next boss!

It doesn't matter which you fight next; both bosses are fought with the same equipment. You can do either/or. I'll start with arguably the hardest next: Skeletron Prime.

Like all mechs, you will want to fight him at your two-floored Arena that I advised you to build upon just earlier for the Destroyer. When you spawn him, don't forget to drink your buff potions and simply fly around shooting at him. He comes with four arms this time -- the Prime Saw you will want to kill first and foremost, followed by the Prime Claw. The Prime Laser is optional, you can either kill it, or leave it, it doesn't do enough damage for you to really care about. The Prime Cannon I would leave alone entirely; if you're standing on wooden platforms it can't hit you whatsoever as the cannon balls fall through platforms. That just leaves Skelly himself and he is fought exactly the same way you fought regular Skeletron earlier. Just like Skeletron, he will speed up greatly one-shot you if 4:30AM comes and he's still alive.

Here's the video if you need further help:


Note I used the Nimbus Rod in this video... on thinking back, it was wasting time I coulda been shooting at him. It is probably better to just forget about the Nimbus Rod for this fight and use the Megashark full-time. I highly recommend against Yo-Yos until you have the Prime Saw/Claw/Laser down, then perhaps you can think about using a Yo-Yo on his head. Megashark will still do just fine, though.

Once he's dead, next up are the Twins!

This is basically Eye of Cthulhu 2.0, only there are two of them, and they both have projectile attacks, and they ram you. They no longer spawn helpers, but the Green Eye is fairly nasty. Again, we're just going to use a Megashark for the Green Eye, and then once the Green Eye is dead, it's a tossup -- both Megashark and Yo-Yo work rather well, so it is up to you. I advice against using a Yo-Yo for the Green Eye's second form as his fire streams out-range your Yo-Yo and you will take massive damage if you try to hit him while he's breathing green fire.

I suggest focusing on the Green Eye first, and then when he's dead, go after the laser eye next. Whatever you do, don't get them both into their second form simultaneously. This fight is rather easy, as long as you can reliably dodge the green fire stream attack. Here's the video to help you:


Once you kill all three mechs, go back to your base, and with the Hallowed Bars, Souls of Might, Souls of Fright, and Souls of Sight, you can make a Pickaxe Axe which leads us to the next section!

There is, with the release of 1.3, an alternate strategy involving all three bosses!

For this alternate strategy, we are going to need a few things:

1). ~10 Unicorn Horns
2). ~30 Pixie Dust
3). 10-20 Fallen Stars
4). Magic Quiver
5). 2-3 Archery Potions
6). Daedalus Stormbow

Using the Horns, Dust, and Stars make about 2,000 Holy Arrows and about 200 Jester's Arrows (you might have found a bunch in pots and treasure chests earlier in the game, if you kept them you can use em now). Kill Skeleton Archers until one drops a quiver (this is optional but helpful, it gives you +10% Damage; the Arrow Conservation sadly does not work with the Stormbow) and then kill Hallow Mimics until you get a Stormbow.

Use your Ironskin/Regeneration Potions, and also an Archery Potion for an additional +20% damage!

Put your Jester's Arrows in the top Ammo slot and then put the Holy Arrows in the 2nd and 3rd slots down, and summon the Destroyer first. You don't even need a Nimbus Rod with this method (but do use it if you have one!), but you DO need a Wood Platform Arena for this to work well (the arrows will fall right through the platforms).

Once you kill Destroyer, take the Jester's Arrows out of the Ammo slots and put them in your regular inventory (so you are shooting Holy Arrows instead of Jester's Arrows) and then summon the other two bosses, one by one. You should be able to kill all three of them in one night, but if you're unsure, you can take it slower if you wish, but this bow will absolutely wreck the mech bosses with ease. The only thing you want to be careful about, is that you might accidentally cause both of the Twins to transform simultaneously, but that shouldn't be too much of a problem; you can always heal and try to stay away from them.

Here's a video of the Daedalus Stormbow Strategy:


Start the video at 1:40 (I had some trouble with OBS and I don't know how to do video editing).

Note that I take on all three bosses simultaneously just to prove how effective this really is. You're not required to do that (unless you want the achievement, of course). If I did it with all 3 bosses up simultaneously, most players should be able to do them one at a time easily with this method.

So with the mechs dead, we're down to only a couple places in the world we haven't been yet since Hardmode, and we're going to visit two of them next -- the Jungle, and that mysterious brown dungeon that you likely saw in there but couldn't do anything with.

Well, let's start with the Jungle. The enemies in here are quite strong, but thankfully 1.3 updates have made things a little easier. You need a Pickaxe Axe or a Drax (I prefer the former because it can ward of enemies and it can accept a +speed modifier and it is a lot quieter and that is important in the Jungle).

Whatever you do in the Jungle, be careful of glowing pink bulb plants. They say "Plantera's Bulb" when you mouse over it, and they glow. Do not hit this with a pickaxe or drill; it will summon a boss you're not ready for quite yet.

In the Jungle, there are Turtles. You need 3 Turtle Shells, so you want to hunt down turtles whenever you see or hear them. They make a very distinctive sound when they are about to launch themselves in a spin jump. This spin jump hits very hard, and you want to avoid it all costs. If you have an auto-swing sword you should reliably hit it before it hits you. Even if you touch the Turtle after it comes out of its spin jump, you will take far less damage than you would have if you got hit with the actual spin attack. That's why being able to hear what goes on around you is so important.

Also, you want to be careful of water. Arapaimas will now spawn in water, and they are big long fish and they hit pretty hard as well, and there are new vine plants that are bigger and stronger. They can rarely drop a decent gun called an Uzi which is a decent Megashark replacement if for some reason you've not made a Megashark yet. It fires slower than the aforementioned 'shark, but does significantly more damage per shot.

Anyways, first thing is first -- there's a new Yo-Yo in here, and it can only be found after a Mech boss is dead (according to wiki), but from my experiences, I could not get one to drop at all until all 3 were dead. It is called "Yelets" and you should become very familiar with it, because it will drop on a regular basis. It is a rather powerful weapon, I highly recommend keeping it on your hotbar (it easily replaces the Amarok that you might have been using off and on up until this point).

Also, if you haven't gotten a Bezoar yet, be on the lookout for one. Now that we're in hardmode, you really don't need to open any chests (unless you want to look for flower boots or something), you don't need Stingers, Vines, or Jungle Spores and you will likely get a ton of bombs, lesser healing potions, etc which will fill your inventory up fast. Don't be afraid to drop some of these useless items that you really don't need now.

I highly suggest bringing along some Spelunker Potions, they will be highly useful in here, not only for the Ore you're looking for, but also for Life Fruits! They will show up on your Metal Detector/Goblin Tech if you have one, but the Spelunker Potions will also make them visible just like the ore. Life Fruits will turn your red hearts into golden ones, for +5 life per heart (total of +100 to bring your 400 max life up to 500!) so you will definitely want to be on the lookout for them.

Anyways, what we're really after is Chlorophyte Ore. This is a very bright green ore that is always found in mud. Since the 1.3 update, more of it can grow in any given area which should make this next part quicker and easier. You will want to gather about 330 ore (I think the actual number is something like 328, but I say 330 just to be sure). Don't leave the Jungle until you have the 3 Turtle Shells (unless you're doing the daily fishing quest), though.

Once you have 3 Turtle Shells and ~330 Ore, you can go back to your house and make a full suit of Turtle Armor! This armor is quite good; it has more defense and enemies that hit you with melee attacks will take damage themselves. If you were wearing Titanium Armor, you will take slightly more damage due to the lack of the avoidance buff, but that shouldn't discourage you from upgrading to Turtle Armor.

With the Turtle Armor worn, now it is time to look for a Plantera Bulb. Maybe you've seen one by now (I mentioned it earlier), or perhaps you haven't. They spawn gradually over time and there can be multiple up simultaneously. You just need to find one, but don't break it yet! Open your map and study the route to the nearest decent-sized room. Go to this room, and improve it, place a campfire, heart lantern, etc there, perhaps some wood platforms to aid you in moving around. You basically want a nice open area that you can move around in circles, perhaps with some cover you can duck in and out of.

Once you've found such an area, you can use torches to make arrows pointing the way towards this room so you don't get lost if you're worried about that. Either way, now is the time to think about what weapon(s) you might want to try using on him.

If you've got a Daedalus Stormbow from before, and if you're patient enough, you can hollow out a large section of jungle so that the arrows can rain down. This will rip Plantera to shreds in seconds. If you're not that patient, you could use a Megashark and Ichor Bullets. You could also use the Yelets with a Yo-Yo Bag, though I found this to be just slightly harder because it required me to be in closer range than I would be with the Megashark.

I've also heard of players saying the Chlorophyte Partisan is a good weapon, and the Chlorophyte Claymore also fires a projectile that could be useful in this situation too. Either way, here's a 1.2.4 video of me using the Megashark Method:


Start the video at 4:45 (unless you want to watch me derping around making potions, I apologize for the lack of video editing, I don't really know much about that).

Pretty simple strategy, just run circles around him, avoid the bouncy spike balls, and as you damage him closer to half of his health, his seed spit attacks are faster and do more damage and when he hits half, he lets off little spores and just tries to eat you (keep running circles and staying away from him). His hooks can be killed (the smaller ones) in this form.

Once he dies, he will drop a Grenade Launcher, Rocket 1s, and most importantly, a Temple Key! When you kill him subsequent times, he can drop other stuff. The only thing I'd really note here, is the Seedler and the Pygmy Staff. The Pygmy Staff allows you to buy an accessory from the Witch Doctor (he won't sell it, if you don't have the Staff) that might or might not be of interest. The Rest of Plantera's drops are up to you, but none are essential to getting to the "end" of the game. The Temple Key is the main prize here and Plantera always drops one, and you only need one for opening the Temple Door. Once you open the Temple Door, you can safely drop extra keys, you don't need them. Even if you go to another world, you still need to kill Plantera to set other things in motion even if you have keys to open the door.

With that, we're ready to enter the Lihzarhd Temple!

Well, this is the last place in the world we've never been to yet! You still can't break the blocks in here, not even with your Pickaxe Axe. Before getting into a hurry and unlocking the door, make doubly sure you get a pair of Wire Cutters; they will be very important to your survival in here as the place is littered with deadly traps.

You will find only two new enemies spawning in here -- Lihzarhds and Flying Snakes. They both are merely melee enemies, and sometimes Jungle Bats can spawn in here too, and occasionally you'll see mimics and Armored Skeletons along with their Skeleton Archer friends, but those are more rare. Man Eaters can spawn outside the Temple and come in to harass you now and then, but they shouldn't be a problem by now.

Take it slow, and in each room, harvest the wire (I suggest harvesting the traps too -- you can't break the Lihzarhd Bricks, but you can pick up the traps and switch plates). Open any chests you find (each will have a power cell and a furnace in it, sell the extra furnaces for 2g each!) as you go through the place. Use your Pickaxe Axe to get rid of the wooden spikes (that oddly do way more damage than the iron ones you found in the dungeon).

Eventually, you'll come to a large, final room (hopefully you did not get a glitched world where the hallway is blocked off or something, it can happen. If it does, you need to either farm up a Rod of Discord, or more simply get another world to this point and try the Temple in that world). This room will have a large altar with a glowing sun emblem above it. This is the boss spawn room; do not right click the altar until you're ready.

Start by making a wooden platform bridge as high in the room as possible that you can still run back and forth the entire length of the room (which means you need 3 blocks between the platforms and the lowest point of the ceiling) and then build a vertical dirt wall a bit between the altar and the rest of the room (hopefully the altar is further towards the edge of the room). Put torches around, throw a campfire down, hang a heart lantern somewhere, and get your potions ready.

To summon the golem, simply right-click the altar while having power cells in your inventory. When he jumps down in, he has two fists and a head, get rid of at least one of the fists first (you can use the Nimbus Rod and stay away from him in almost complete safety, only his bouncing fireball will be able to hit you). If you don't mind playing it safe, use the Nimbus Rod to kill the other fist before attacking the head.

Once you have the head down past a certain point, he'll start shooting eye lasers at you, and he will do so with a greater frequency the more you get his health down. When you deplete the health meter, his head detaches and starts flying around the room shooting lasers at you, and now you can hurt his body. Once you get to this point, it isn't too hard to finish him off, though you might want to try to dodge the lasers.

He's a rather easy boss, but I will show you a video anyways:


Start the video at 3:50 and you will get an idea of what I mean by setting up the vertical wall, and such. I actually kill him twice in this video, and the first was a little messy because I forgot that I should not extend the vertical wall all the way up to the ceiling, you only need it high enough so that he can't jump over it.

Depending on how good your Golem Room is, you may or may not be able to farm Lihzarhds while the Nimbus Rod clouds do their work on Golem himself, and the more Lihzarhds you kill while you're fighting Golem, the higher chance there is of more power cells (and solar tablet fragments) dropping during the fight, which would hopefully allow you to fight him an semi-infinite number of times.

From Golem, you will want to get the following:

1). A Picksaw (this allows you to break the Lihzarhd Bricks and is faster than the Pickaxe Axe)
2). A Possessed Hatchet.
3). A Sun Stone.
4). A Stynger (optional, depends on whether or not you got a Stormbow earlier).
5). An Eye of Golem.
6). 18 Beetle Husks.

Once you have that stuff, it is time to upgrade your Turtle Armor. With 18 Beetle Husks, go to your house and take your Turtle Armor off, and you should be able to make Beetle Armor instead. Make sure to make the Beetle SHELL Armor, and not the Beetle Mail. Hopefully after all that, you have a decent number of Solar Tablets and Solar Tablet Fragments, you're done in here unless you want to come back later for easy money.

Time for some '80s B-Movie Horror Action! Get your Daedalus Stormbow (or the Stynger), your Yelets, and hopefully some other similar weapons and go to your Mech Boss Arena, and wait for Dawn. Don't do this in the middle of the day, you want to start at 4:30AM, so get there a little early. You might want to set up a workbench with a Piggybank on it, along with Water Candle in addition to the usual Campfire+Heart Lantern.

Once 4:30AM arrives (wait for 4:32 or so to make sure there aren't any Goblin/Pirate Invasions or a Naturally Occurring Eclipse), use a Solar Tablet and you should get the notification that "A Solar Eclipse is happening!"

Get on one of the ropes that you made way in the beginning of the game so that you can see the ground below you, and just pelt the ground with Arrows (if using a Stormbow) or Stynger Bolts (if using a Stynger). If you want, you can also use a Yelets. The only three enemies that can hurt you while you're hanging on ropes, are Vampires (they fly up at you), Deadly Spheres (they are the little floating orbs that can be hard to see) and Mothron.

Mothron is like a mini-boss, it will act a lot like the Queen Bee does; it just charges at you again and again and again, but will suddenly break off. Follow it! It's trying to lay eggs and this is the perfect time to lay on some pain, and make sure to break its eggs before they hatch. The vampires and deadly spheres aren't much to worry about; just deal with them first so that you don't get hit.

Solar Eclipse is a very good way to make money, but what you're really after, is...

1). A Moon Stone (from Vampires)
2). The Eye of Cthulhu (2nd best Yo-Yo possible outside of Expert Mode) from Mothron.
3). A Neptune's Shell from Creature of the Deep.
4). Two Broken Hero Swords (from Mothron).

Other weapons will drop, all but the weakest mobs have their own unique drop, but IMO, only the Deadly Sphere is really worth mentioning.

Once you've gotten that list above, combine the Sun&Moon Stone to make a Celestial Stone. Hopefully you've also gotten a Moon Charm from Werewolves that appear on Full Moon Nights. If not, we'll have to farm one of those up one of these Full Moon Nights (keep track of the moonphase either by the Sextant/Cell Phone or just look at the moon each night). If/when you get a Moon Charm, combine the Moon Charm and the Neptune's Shell to make a Moon Shell, and then combine the Celestial Stone and Moon Shell to get a Celestial Shell, one of the coolest accessories in the game.

This Shell will...

1). Give you underwater breathing and fast water movement.
2). Turn you into a wolf at night (if you don't have the accessory slot hidden) which gives you bonuses to several stats
3). Gives you a bonus to several stats day and night. Note that #1 and #2 are exclusive; if you go into water at night, you'll get the underwater buffs, but not the wolf buff but that's minor.

With that said, if you get 2 Broken Hero Swords, it's time to make an awesome sword! Get your Night's Edge and your Hallowed Bars out. Make a True Night's Edge by combining the Night's Edge with one Broken Hero Sword. Craft an Excalibur from the Hallowed Bars, and then combine the Excalibur with the other Broken Hero Sword to get a True Excalibur. Combine the two True Swords together to get a Terra Blade!

Some people don't think much of this weapon, and that's kinda a tragedy; it used to be a pretty awesome weapon indeed. I feel it is still useful in some situations, and if you have the materials, you might as well! This weapon will fire straight projectiles almost like a magic staff would, but it does not use any mana, and it has an extremely long range, and perfect accuracy (no projectile spread), and each projectile can pierce 2 enemies. It is excellent at crowd control (in fact, it is a killer weapon to use in Solar Eclipse or Pirate Invasions!)

Also worth mentioning is The Eye of Cthulhu. It is one of only three (one is Expert Mode-only) Yo-Yos that have infinite "flight" time, the other being the Terrarian which is dropped by the last boss; it is definitely a weapon worthy of keeping on you as it is definitely better than the Yelets in every way.

With that said, I'm going to take a bit of a side-detour just in case you need time to farm up a Moon Charm.

Now that we have a very good source of money flow, now's the time to think about teleporters and your biomes. Teleporters make life really easy, and although they were available since your first Mech Kill (the Steampunker sells them), you probably did not have the money income to really support heavy wire usage. Solar Eclipses are very good for making money, with all of the weapons that drop that can be sold for cash (Eyes of Cthulhu sell for 6-11g each!), it isn't too hard to make several platinum an hour, and if you run out of Solar Tablet Fragments or Tablets, you can always go farm Golem some more (kill Golem while killing Lihzarhds) which isn't exactly bad money either.

Either case, you might want to consider running teleporter lines from your house to the Jungle, to the Lihzarhd Temple, and from your house to the Dungeon at the very least. If you're a fisher, you might also want to consider running teleporter lines to major fishing spots so that you can go there in a flash. On a Medium World, going from the center to the Dungeon, you can expect to spend about 2 Platinum in wire (it takes 2,500-ish wire) just to give you an idea. The easiest way to do this, is to use a minecart track if you already built one -- run wire up to the minecart track, get on the minecart track, and run the wire straight over to the Jungle/Dungeon.

You can also make teleporter "hubs", where you start from your base in the center, and teleport to a house in the surface of the Jungle, and that house will have 2 more teleporters in it, which might go either to the Lihzarhd Temple or further to the Ocean or some-such. Just make sure to find some way to mark which is which so you don't forget which teleporters go where. Also, don't use pressure plates as switches, place switches on the wall; it is more reliable that way.

Now for the Clentaminator, which is also sold by the Steampunker. It alone costs 2 platinum, and the Green Solution she should be selling (if not, build a house high enough in the air to get normal music) is not exactly cheap either. With this, you can "spray" biomes to turn back to Purity, but just be aware that you need to make sure it doesn't get re-corrupted or Hallowed because then you would have just wasted your money. Or, you could just leave the biomes as they are, your choice.

With that said, we're ready to go to the Dungeon!

We have the Celestial Shell (if you've been following my guide), or perhaps you still need a Moon Charm and you ran out of things to build or improve upon in your world, the biomes are all OK, you don't need ore, or anything... and you might be thinking "Um, okay, what next?"

Well, let's go after three more accessories while you wait!

Hopefully by now, you have:

1). Nazar (Hopefully you got in Normal Mode when I told you to... if not, use your other world if you haven't brought it to hardmode yet, or even start a new world. Seriously, don't try getting this in Hardmode). Just some review, it drops from small cursed skulls, and flying weapons in Hardmode. In Hardmode, all 3 of these mobs are incredibly rare. The skulls are a lot more common Pre-Hardmode.
2). Celestial Shell, or at least all of its components minus Moon Shell.
3). Eye of Golem.

Assuming you have this stuff, it is time to complete the Ankh Shield:

1). Megaphone: All Mummies can drop this. I suggest farming in either a Hallow or Crimson/Corrupt Desert. The former will also give you Trifold Maps and Fast Clocks, the latter will also give you Blindfolds.
2). Trifold Map: Giant Bats, Light Mummies, Ghouls in Hallow Underground Desert
3). Fast Clock: Wraiths, Pixies
4). Adhesive Bandage: Werewolves, Rusty Bones (Post-Plantera Dungeon)
5). Bezoar: Bees and Spiked Slimes in the Jungle, Poisonous Slimes in Pure Underground/Caverns.
6). Blindfold: Dark Mummies, the various slimes in Hardmode Surface Corruption.

Once you have all of these...

Nazar + Megaphone = Countercurse Mantra
Adhesive Bandage + Bezoar = Medicated Bandage
Fast Clock + Trifold Map = The Plan
The Plan + Medicated Bandage + Countercurse Mantra + Blindfold = Ankh Charm
Ankh Charm + Obsidian Shield = Ankh Shield!

Get Warding on this baby ASAP.

Once you have that, it's time to go to the Dungeon. If you haven't already been there, there's 3 things you will want from there:

1). Tabi (from Bone Lee)
2). Black Belt (ditto)
3). Wisp-in-a-Bottle (any Blue or Rusty skeleton, low drop chance) (optional)

The Wisp is an equippable light pet that works like the shadow orb, the fairy bell, etc and provides more light than those pets do. It's up to you if you wanna grind for it or not.

Once you get the other two items, combine the following...

Climbing Claws + Shoe Spikes = Tiger Climbing Gear
Tiger Climbing Gear + Black Belt + Tabi = Master Ninja Gear

And there's another accessory! Get Warding on this too.

Now, you have an Eye of Golem. Hopefully, the Wall of Flesh also dropped one of the Emblems. If not, go kill him until he does (you must wait for the Guide to respawn before dropping another doll in the lava!). Don't worry about new spreads of Crimson/Corruption/Hallow; that only happens the first time you kill it. Once you have an Emblem, combine it with an Eye of Golem to make a Destroyer's Emblem. There's your third accessory.

So now you should have...

1). Ankh Shield.
2). Destroyer's Emblem.
3). Master Ninja Gear.
4). Celestial Shell.

Now we need one more. You can either use a Cross Necklace, or combine the Cross Necklace with the Star Cloak to make a Star Veil, but that's totally unnecessary. The Star Veil will cause stars to fall when you get hit (kinda like a Starfury) and does minor damage if something happens to get hit by the falling stars. What you really want, is the extended period of invincibility after getting hit which both items do. Your choice; trying to get Warding on a Star Veil is likely to be significantly more expensive.

That makes our 5th accessory. Note there's no room for wings! However will we be able to move around? Don't unequip your wings yet (you can leave one of the other items off, the Destroyer Emblem or Cross Necklace) Well, let's go fix that now.

First thing you will want to do, is use teleporters or switches and actuators to make a safe place for you to camp. Start by digging a two-block wide pit down 9 blocks.

Once you've done that, count up 3 blocks and start either to the right or to the left and make a 3-block tall indent in the wall, and go over two more. Then either mine some blocks out underneath you for a teleporter or put actuators in the wall, but make it so that there's only a 1 block gap between you and the pit (if you're standing in the side alcove).

This is to throw your Eye of Cthulhu out and be able to hit anything in the pit and up above the surface. I recommend doing this somewhere near your house so the event will actually occur, but not so close that NPCs will be getting killed.

Next, grab a workbench and a water candle, and go to a sky island that is not near the center of the world. Put the workbench down, then a water candle ontop of it, and just stay put for a minute or two.

It shouldn't take much time until a "Martian Probe" comes up on your rare monster scanner. Fly around until you see it, but don't kill it! It should be green or yellow and then turn red when you get near it and then it should fly off. Immediately warp back and get in your hidey-hole that you just made and stay put.

Try not to kill the martians off too fast. Use your Eye of Cthulhu and kill martians until a saucer appears, and then focus on the saucers. Only the saucers drop anything interesting, and you're looking for one item in particular: The Cosmic Car Key. The Influx Waver is a Terra Blade alternative (it is better for single enemies than the Terra Blade, but weaker for crowd control) so it is worth mentioning, and there's a Laser Drill that works like Edge of Space mining laser picks, so that's kinda neat.

Once you have the Cosmic Car Key, and anything else you want from these guys (they also drop a unique kind of building block that gives off its own light in pulses!), you're done with that. If you didn't get a Car Key, pop another Invasion by going back up to your Sky Island and waiting for another probe to come and let it fly off again.

Remember those guys at the entrance to the Dungeon that I told you not to touch whatsoever? Time to go touch em.

First, equip your Cosmic Car Key and fly around a bit to get the feel for infinite flight. Get your Eye of Cthulhu, Possessed Hatchet, and optionally the Terra Blade. With the Cosmic Car Key, you don't need your wings (put them in your social slot). Get your "main 5" accessories on, and potions.. you shouldn't really need buff potions for this fight. You can if you want, but they really aren't necessary.

When you're ready, mow the cultists down, and their leader will show up. He has different magic-based attacks, which just involve moving fast and dodging his crap, but the one thing you do want to do, is watch out for the attack where he splits up into 4 copies of himself. One of them will look different -- hit THAT one with either the Yo-Yo or your Terra Blade projectile. If you hit the wrong one, you'll hear a skeleton "crick" sound and he'll summon a mini-wyvern that's a wimp if you use the Terra Blade on it. Just keep at it, and he should eventually die.

When he dies, he will drop a new crafting machine, and a new event starts!

This is one giant world-wide event that leads right up to the last boss! First, go back to your base and stick that sweet new crafting machine somewhere (you DID pick it up, didn't you!?) You can't do anything with it...... yet.

Go to your alchemy lab and make sure you've a decent potion stock (10-20) of...

1). Ironskin Potions.
2). Rejuvenation Potions.
3). Endurance Potions (if you don't mind fishing)
4). Lifeforce Potions (fishing required)
5). Rage Potions (fishing)
6). Wrath Potions (fishing)

Not everybody likes fishing, but if you do take the time to fish up some of the materials for these potions, they will make things a LOT easier!

Once you're ready to do the next part, open your map up and observe the four new icons floating above the surface. Note which one of them is Orange, we're going there first.

When you start to arrive, a sweet new battle music will start to play and everything will hue orange. Stay on the ground whatever you do unless you want to be ripped into pieces by a Crawltipede. New enemies will spawn and they hurt. Use either the Terra Blade, Influx Waver, Eye of Cthulhu, whatever you need to use to kill this stuff. Note that you can't hurt the "worm" itself yet; it has a shield around it. Each thing you kill, will damage the shield upon its death, and it takes about 100 kills or so to break the shield.

Once you've broken the shield, focus your attacks on the pillar itself and it will eventually break up. Make sure to collect all of the fragments. The good news is that if you die, you can come back and finish the job; the pillars and mobs do not reset upon death.

Once you've done this, take those hot little fragments back to your base, and make yourself a new weapon, the Solar Eruption! This is a sweet, sweet weapon, and will probably be your primary weapon for quite awhile. It does monstrous DPS, and it's best modifier is Godly. If you have enough fragments, make a Daybreak as well. If not, we can fix that later so don't worry.

Next, look for the Dark Blue pillar and go there next. With the Solar Eruption, you will find that stuff will die MUCH faster now. You can fly around with the other 3 pillars; there are no Crawltipedes near those. Once you kill this pillar, take the Stardust fragments back to your base, and make a Stardust Dragon Rod, the best minion in the game! Even with no +Summon Capacity, this minion is significantly more powerful than anything else you've been using. Summon him, and then kill the other two pillars in any order.

As soon as the last pillar is down, the Moon Lord will start to spawn. The game gives you several warnings as the music cuts out, everything starts getting blurry, etc. If you had enough to make a Daybreak, you can try to kill the Moon Lord, but if you don't have a Daybreak, chances are you're probably not going to succeed. You can try, and get a feel for his attacks. Go to near the edge of the world if you can and wait for him to spawn.

When he spawns, he starts attacking you immediately. Basically, you want to keep these things in mind:

1). He has 3 eyes -- Head, and two hands.
2). When the eye on his head opens, he's about to fire a huge deathray, he aims it at you and the beam follows you. Best thing to do to avoid this attack is to fly in either a clockwise or counter-clockwise pattern towards his head to avoid it.
3). Wear all 3 eyes down evenly! Watch what your Stardust Dragon is doing and keep track of the health meters. When you kill an eye, it detaches, becomes invincible and continues to attack you. Therefore, whittle them all down to almost dead, and kill all 3 of them in quick succession.
4). When all 3 eyes are dead, fly away from him! Swap to your Daybreak and throw Daybreak spears at his newly-opened heart. He will have a pretty hard time hitting you in this phase if you do it right, so if you can get to this point, you've got him, most likely!

You can refer to this video for some general pointers:


When he dies, he will drop Luminite Ore. You need this ore to make your Solar Armor, which is the best Melee Armor in the game! You can also make lots of other things from Luminite Ore and the Moon Lord himself drops a weapon and a portal gun (always if you don't have one on you).

That said, that's pretty much the end of the game. Keep reading on for a list of other things to do for fun!

We skipped some content, because it didn't really have any items really necessary for killing the Moon Lord. Some of these things include...

1). Duke Fishron: Use a Bug Net to get a Truffle Worm (rare spawn) in an underground Mushroom Biome. Might be easier to make a bunch of flat surfaces yourself, use a Hunter Potion, and once you have the worm, go fishing in the ocean to spawn him. He drops OK-ish weapons and a pair of wings, but the Pillar/Moon Lord equipment is far, far more powerful.

2). Pumpkin Moon: Combine some Boss Souls with some Ectoplasm from the Dungeon, with some Pumpkins (plant pumpkin seeds bought from the Dryad in grass) to make an item that spawns the Pumpkin Moon. Use it at 7:30PM to make a special event happen. Get to Wave 15 for an achievement and best possible item drops. Kill things to advance the waves. Should be easy-peasy with Moon Lord equipment. If you don't have quite enough DPS, you can put some spiky ball traps on a flat section of ground and wire them all up to a 1-second timer so that the wimps will get ground up to bits while you focus on the larger enemies to help the score advance faster.

3). Frost Moon: Same deal, only it takes silk instead of pumpkin and this is Christmas Themed instead of Halloween. Some more neat items (the Chain Gun is fun to play with!), but nothing to write home about, especially for melee.

With that said, the only other things to do, is to perhaps build yourself a drilling machine from different metals including luminite for a mining machine mount that obliterates blocks at lightning speed, and farm Moon Lord until he drops the Terrarian (best Yo-Yo), etc etc.

Hope you had fun!
 
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Tldr, lol, but it's probably good.

Just one thing, use spoilers, this is a huge wall of text.
 
Nevermind, blah lol. Anyways, yes it will be long and I'll try to nest spoiler tags... can you nest spoilers inside of spoilers? It will be a lot longer, lol.

EDIT: There we go, each chapter in its own spoiler, though Chapter 1 is still big...
 
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Update: Added some more screenshots to more fully flesh out the guide as I go. Nested Spoilers are a nightmare to debug, really wish they'd make the edit window bigger and/or have it color-code BBC tags or something, but ah well.

I'm having some crazy luck on this playthrough, which is one of the reasons I love doing playthroughs for guides: I get ridiculous luck sometimes when doing these kinds of things.
 
This guide and your prior 1.2.4 guide I've found immensely helpful in easing back into the world of Terraria after a long break. I just wanted to create an account here to voice my support! I look forward to further updates in this guide.
 
This guide and your prior 1.2.4 guide I've found immensely helpful in easing back into the world of Terraria after a long break. I just wanted to create an account here to voice my support! I look forward to further updates in this guide.

Glad to hear it! I hope to get the rest of this guide up so that it will be every bit (perhaps better than) the 1.2.4 guide.
 
There, finished the "how to deal with lava" part. I need to actually catch the playthrough up to the guide, I still need to kill the brain and get screenshots for that section then I should be caught up.
 
@Xylia just a couple points with regard to fishing (yes I really enjoy it lol), also thanks for writing this guide, its well formatted and well written and easy to understand, new players will find it very helpful
  1. you made no mention of the reaver shark pick, it can be caught in the ocean as soon as you get there, its the strongest and possibly the fastest pick pre hm
  2. other tools/accsessories from fishing pre hm include the rockfish (cavern layer, fast hammer) and purple clubber fish (corruption, good melee weapon up to late pre hm) sawfish (ocean, great pre hm chainsaw), also biome crates (sky, corruption/crimson, dungeon, jungle) can yield biome specific loot for when you cant find what you are looking for in chests, frog legs, and puffer fish baloon
  3. iron crates can drop the falcon blade,(short, very fast sword with good damage), sailfish boots, (alternative to hermes/flurry boots), Tsunami in a bottle (alternative to cloud in a bottle, combine with puffer fish baloon for an alternative to the cloud in a bottle), wood crates can drop surface chest accessories, and gold crates can drop the turtle mount(easy water movement)
  4. fishing 5 quests gets you the bunny rabbit mount
  5. and perhaps most importantly a few fish are used in buff potions that are a HUGE help in fighting bosses
 
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@Xylia just a couple points with regard to fishing (yes I really enjoy it lol), also thanks for writing this guide, its well formatted and well written and easy to understand, new players will find it very helpful
  1. you made no mention of the reaver shark pick, it can be caught in the ocean as soon as you get there, its the strongest and possibly the fastest pick pre hm
  2. other tools/accsessories from fishing pre hm include the rockfish (cavern layer, fast hammer) and purple clubber fish (corruption, good melee weapon up to late pre hm) sawfish (ocean, great pre hm chainsaw), also biome crates (sky, corruption/crimson, dungeon, jungle) can yield biome specific loot for when you cant find what you are looking for in chests, frog legs, and puffer fish baloon
  3. iron crates can drop the falcon blade,(short, very fast sword with good damage), sailfish boots, (alternative to hermes/flurry boots), Tsunami in a bottle (alternative to cloud in a bottle, combine with puffer fish baloon for an alternative to the cloud in a bottle), wood crates can drop surface chest accessories, and gold crates can drop the turtle mount(easy water movement)
  4. fishing 5 quests gets you the bunny rabbit mount
  5. and perhaps most importantly a few fish are used in buff potions that are a HUGE help in fighting bosses

I'll probably add it somewhere in the notes about fishing, I knew of this stuff but I wasn't sure where exactly in the guide to put it. I might move the fishing-central stuff to before Chapter 1 and expand on it, though I am also a bit hesitant to suggest to newbies (the intended target of this guide) that they should be sequence breaking (Underworld before Dungeon before Jungle is already stretching it; I did that because I feel it provides the most complete yet smooth play experience).

Also, I did mention the Buff Potions in the "Why Fish?" section in the Prelude.
 
An update for today: The last chapter of normal mode (finally! editing that always took forever because of all the screenshots) and I got the first three chapters of Hardmode up. We're coming along nicely!
 
I am also a bit hesitant to suggest to newbies (the intended target of this guide) that they should be sequence breaking (Underworld before Dungeon before Jungle is already stretching it

although fishing can be used to sequence break I dont think thats its main advantage, just my personal opinion here, maybe make a dedicated fishing post before chapter 1 as you thought, listing potions (and effects), tools, and weapons as well as good pre hm loot from crates, possibly also mention the advantage of crates vs breaking alters and crate stockpiling

then at the beginning of hardmode another small section with the new hardmode fished weapons (crimson, corruption and hallow)
 
although fishing can be used to sequence break I dont think thats its main advantage, just my personal opinion here, maybe make a dedicated fishing post before chapter 1 as you thought, listing potions (and effects), tools, and weapons as well as good pre hm loot from crates, possibly also mention the advantage of crates vs breaking alters and crate stockpiling

then at the beginning of hardmode another small section with the new hardmode fished weapons (crimson, corruption and hallow)

I'm definitely going to list the Hardmode Fishing weapons... some of them are ridiculous, and that's even before they nerfed the Seedler, lol. I'm just debating where exactly to stick that in, because on one hand, I want to stress how important it is to kill Plantera ASAP to stop the rampant biome spread (I doubt a newbie wants 90% of the surface world covered by Hallow/Crimson/Corruption), but yet on the other hand, the Fishing Weapons are awesome in early Hardmode. That's kinda the whole Dilemma behind these things... you'd wanna get them ASAP but yet you probably don't have time to spend 10 game days doing nothing but fishing praying that you'll eventually pull the weapon up.
 
some of them are ridiculous, and that's even before they nerfed the Seedler

unfortunately with seedler only being optainable after killing plantera that kinda negates it as an early hm weapon, also mention must be made of the stormbow, and possibly a cheese arena for the monster mimics and soul farming (king slime in soul farming areas) also the fetid bagnakhs are insane when killing plantera and golem

also dont forget the leaf wings from witchdoctor in jungle at night, I find a small artificial jungle (80 blocks) more than serves the purpose for this and they are quick and easy wings optainable the first night into hm
 
unfortunately with seedler only being optainable after killing plantera that kinda negates it as an early hm weapon, also mention must be made of the stormbow, and possibly a cheese arena for the monster mimics and soul farming (king slime in soul farming areas) also the fetid bagnakhs are insane when killing plantera and golem

Yeah I'll also mention biome mimics... and yeah that's what I meant about the Seedler being "nerfed". It was once a fished up weapon which made it ridiculously OP and then they "nerfed" it by making it a Plantera drop.
 
if you have any questions about cheese arenas just pm me lol I pretty much know them all, and again great guide
 
other tools/accsessories from fishing pre hm include the rockfish (cavern layer, fast hammer) and purple clubber fish (corruption, good melee weapon up to late pre hm)

I once obtained the Rockfish and used that as the Purple Clubberfish. As long as you don't have smart cursor on / aim close to your character, it's the purple clubberfish with a faster swing speed.
EDIT: it also doesn't require you to go to the Corruption to fish.
 
I once obtained the Rockfish and used that as the Purple Clubberfish. As long as you don't have smart cursor on / aim close to your character, it's the purple clubberfish with a faster swing speed.
EDIT: it also doesn't require you to go to the Corruption to fish.

done that myself more than once, my personal favorite pre hm is the falcon blade tho, its basically a prehm version of the cutlass
 
done that myself more than once, my personal favorite pre hm is the falcon blade tho, its basically a prehm version of the cutlass

The problem with the Falcon Blade, is that you need to open several crates to get it...... but if you open crates pre-hardmode, you are wasting chances of getting hardmode ore. That's why I advise saving crates. And besides, nothing in Normal Mode needs a Falcon Blade to kill, lol. Night's Edge kills pretty much everything in 2 hits flat.
 
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