Items Official alternative to TShock's /warp command

Baconfry

Terrarian
For those who haven't played on TShock multiplayer servers before: /warp allows any player with access to the command to teleport to a pre-defined waypoint. Unfortunately, the only way to emulate this without access to 3rd party commands is through teleporters, which are inefficient to set up over huge distances.

So I think a great QoL update for long-distance travel would be to add more utility to Wormhole Potions. Right now, they are only useful in multiplayer (albeit very useful in multiplayer). My proposal isn't to change the mechanics of the Wormhole Potion itself, but to add a new, stationary placeable item that can be teleported to as if it were a multiplayer teammate, via an icon on the world map.

Along with this functionality, these beacons can be edited as signs (20 character limit). This name would be displayed on the world map for the benefit of anyone else who might want to use the beacon, or yourself, if you need a reminder. The size would be 2x3, the same as a player, so there'd be no guesswork as to where you would end up.


Points of discussion:

-Should we also add versions with Large Gems so certain beacons can only be used by members of a matching party?
-How difficult should they be to obtain? Some level of rarity should be given to them, to alleviate map crowding. They do have map icons after all.
-Should we also allow players to wormhole to NPCs?
-Should we make Wormhole Potions obtainable from pots/chests in both singleplayer and multiplayer modes?

I think this is a realistic, conceptually simple, and highly useful potential update, and I genuinely want developer feedback on this. Of course, player feedback is valuable, too, so if you have a useful opinion on this, go for it.
 
Hmm. I've been gone awhile but it seems you've kept yourself busy indeed. First off, a hello from me!

Secondly, I like the idea of there being versions with giant gems because then you could set up bases within the ground or sky, etc that are hard to find/access in a large world. It would definitely liven up multiplayer and would allow people to carve out some really fun experiences for themselves.

I think it should be crafted by a recipe with Wormhole Potions and a Teleporter- which is "Blue" and a "White" or a tier 1 and tier 0 respectively in Terraria Scaling. There's pots and slimes that drop them (in multiplayer hosted servers only at this moment) but the only other way to obtain them otherwise is fishing. This kind of change is something that is very impactful if you're utilizing it however, and you don't want to make Minecarts seem useless. Especially when you get a mechanical one later- even if Teleporters might make them a bit redundant except for underground tracks. Digressing!

If we go the Teleporter route however it gates it to hardmode and a mechanical boss (Before the steampunker arrives.) Which some might argue is more fair that you don't have the power to move across the map instantly until you'd be able to rig it up, but it doesn't leave you with more than half the game done which lets you enjoy the change if you're a newer player. The recipe could then be combined with gems/big gems to make the "team" oriented versions. With one(or all?) gems that aren't team oriented changing the recipe back to the default "beacons" as you referred to them. While thinking about it, it occurs to me that the teleporter gets turned into an ingredient and becomes lackluster, therefore immediately making it useless compared to the beacon. Perhaps something that can literally teleport you anywhere like these suggested beacons can should be restricted to luminite? So 1 Luminite, a teleporter, a wormhole potion(Or maybe not?) and possibly a Gem to make the team focused ones?

I don't personally think wormholing to NPC's is necessary if the signs work like you're mentioning. You could have beacons near the abodes in question if needed to go there. Even in larger creative maps where you have NPC's split up for whatever purpose- be it theming or etc the placeble beacon that you're suggesting eliminates that need, from my perspective.

Ah, I touched on this earlier. If it were to be this way, and if we were making it gated to luminite it would be nice if the player could get their hands on them without having to host an empty multiplayer game.
 
Cheers, mate! Thank you for the reply! I’ve actually been inactive for a pretty long time until recently, so no, telling me I’ve kept myself busy would be giving me too much credit.

I think we should look closely at the available transportation methods to determine what level of gating would be suitable. Gating the wormhole beacon to luminite would not be appropriate; this is intended to be a quality of life update, and I’d assume that most gameplay would take place before defeating the final boss.

Your concern that wormhole beacons would make teleporters obsolete is definitely valid. My hope is that teleporters will maintain their utility for players who don’t want to spend effort towards maintaining a Wormhole Potion supply. They do require a Specular Fish each, which is reasonably attainable but time-consuming to obtain in bulk. Aside from that, teleporters do have uses other than long-distance transport. For instance, they can teleport monsters, making them useful for invasion/farming scenarios.

I think the most appropriate tier for wormhole beacons would be around the start of hardmode, when most of the map’s biomes have been explored and the player is starting to feel the need to revisit certain areas.

And I do feel like rather than mixing the crafting recipes, beacons and teleporters should be kept separate. The reasoning is that the former doesn’t require wiring, so crafting it with a wired mechanism wouldn’t make sense.
 

No worries!~ I always love reading your threads/ideas so I was very stoked to see right when I return there's literally a fresh thread from you, made just yesterday no less.

Sure, that sounds reasonable, and I understand why you don't want to gate it at luminite, it makes sense to gate it sooner because as you said it's a QoL change, and some people can't even defeat the Moon Lord/feel it's a hassle- which would suck to not let them in on this. I was thinking too far ahead with the idea of combining it with Teleporters; without making them less relevant and it kind of blinded me to where this change would be applied/needed.

I'd still probably argue at least one mechanical boss should be defeated, Hollowed Bars become fairly common- It's hard to justify the amount of distance you get with them for a wormhole potion versus the amount of time needed to wire up a multiple Teleporters. Again I really love this idea, but if you get them before you even get Teleporters, then the Teleporters seem like they lose their function before people have to deal with it. I'd want to honestly put it after Plantera. The reasoning for this is so people can't just teleport into the Lizhard temple 1, and 2 because that means the Cyborg is unlocked, and he could just sell the beacon(s) instead of needing to implement recipes. Plus "Warping" kind of fits his techno theme.

Personally- and as you can probably tell. I think something like this should be worked for. What makes it a QoL change is the difference it makes in the game and when you can appreciate it.

There's 6 Bosses (7 if you account biome equivalents) before Hardmode. There's three mechanical bosses, then Plantera. After which there's 3(6 if you include all the pillars) Bosses, and a Few Event/summon reliant bosses (Martian Madness, FrostQueen/Pumpking, and Pirate Invasion's Pirate Ship) before the Moon Lord. It still leaves half the bosses just about before MoonLord to fight.

To be fair on the combining aspect- we combine multiple pairs of boots together and somehow create singular pairs out of them. There's other items that equally have things that don't really logically make sense but can be fused together to create different things, and if we use the argument "We take the parts we want and create something else"...- I digress and will concede though, something like this doesn't really need Teleporters as a recipe requirement. (And might not need one at all.) Especially since it uses the function off of Wormhole potions to begin with, and gives them a useful dynamic. Unfortunately, it still feels like an "upgrade" over Teleporters even with the fishing aspect and the extra mechanics/use of them.

(Heading to bed, will get more to this tomorrow if there's more to talk about. Great talking to you again. Always helps my brain to function talking to intelligent individuals, that I'm so lucky to be around.)
 
One possible idea to balance this, if anybody ever felt like this were overpowered, it probably could be solved easily by essentially placing a limit of how many can be placed in a world. I don't think it'd be necessary, but I could see why some people would feel it is.
 
I'm still convinced that the start of hardmode (or even earlier) is a more suitable time to introduce this item. The earlier it is introduced, the more useful it will be. The tradeoff is the potential to be overpowered, but I don't think those rules apply to an item whose main purpose is to save time. Comparing it to teleporters doesn't tell us much because teleporters are a "fun" item, not a "quality of life" item. You buy teleporters when you're feeling creative, but not when you're seriously trying to save yourself the trouble of flying across the entire map.

When judging whether something is overpowered, you should ask yourself, "Does this remove the challenge from content that we intended to be challenging?" If not, then it's not overpowered. And I think that in this case, the answer is no.

Although this could be replaced functionally with a magic mirror and a teleporter hub it still seens like a novel concept.
The Magic Mirror would not work for this purpose, because it can only take you to one destination. You cannot redirect the mirror's teleportation unless you added an interface, which is not optimal because 1. it would likely be more complex than the wormhole route, and 2. it would make the magic mirror less effective as an emergency escape button.

And using a teleporter hub requires laying down a great deal of wire; the point of a quality-of-life update is to save players the time it would take to finish a boring task. Personally, I also think laying miles of wire across a map is quite ugly.

placing a limit of how many can be placed in a world.
While this isn't a bad idea, I'm not sure it would be possible to impose such a limit. A more organic way to impose a "soft" limit would be to include Life Crystals in the crafting recipe.
 
What about the mounts? Isn't that part of their entire purpose as well, to offer transportation? I didn't really think about it before but the Teleporter you said is for "fun." But I've literally only used it to get from one side of the world to the other because I primarily work with larger worlds when I play- and I'm not saying that's everyone. I'm saying that it's more useful(Since it takes less time to get from point A to B in the smaller ones) in giant worlds that takes minutes to cross on foot and significantly less on a mount, which is what I'm discussing.

Now let's look at mounts. There's 4 pre-hardmode- 3 of which increases your movement speed quite a bit. If you make a water channel you have a faster mount in the Turtle Mount- again you have to MAKE it though- and this water channel can be re-purposed for the one you get from duke later on, the turtle allows you to go 36 MPH, which is an increase of 21 (But you have to fish to even obtain it.)
The Rabbit mount is really good when it comes to flat out speed and traversing the land, but it's better to make a long bridge across the place- most people build 'sky/star' bridges anyways, but you still need to put quite a bit of effort fighting harpies, especially in early stages in the game, and this becomes further dangerous when Wyverns make the scene and arguably makes minecarts/creating a track more viable. This seems to be supported by the fact that the mechanical bosses drop a piece of Minecart as if the above ground is unsafe in general in hard mode comparatively and the game gives you the means to circumvent some of the dangers if you're willing to put the work into it; getting a speed boost to boot at 66 MPH (with a 102MPH top speed.)

(Edit: Sunflower was effecting my tests D:< it IS 15MPH, my bad, fixing all stats now.)
Normal Hermes moves you from 15 MPH to 30 MPH. That's a 15 increase, or double! In comparison the Rabbit mount moves you to 38 MPH. Which is an 23 increase, but only an 8 difference from Hermes. Not a huge upgrade but the difference is there.

The Honey Bee Mount gives you a flying speed of 31 MPH, a 16 increase from base, and a block flight of up to 654 blocks. The only way to get this however is defeating the Queen Bee in the jungle, and despite it's lowered speed it allows you to avoid a lot of dangers by using it.

After we enter hardmode there's now 7 new mounts you can earn/obtain all technically before getting Teleporter. Although one could argue that in Duke Fishron (Expert Mode only) and Frost Queen wouldn't be the best thing to tackle entering hardmode.
That leaves you with 5, fairly obtainable mounts in comparison to the aforementioned.
All ranging from 40 being the lowest, up to 61. That's a 25-46 increase in MPH.


Getting to the dungeon/beaches to farm things is a process; to go through many different biomes of hazardous things. Especially in modes like hardcore and the like- and while you call it something that adds more for quality of life instead of trivializing transportation. The reason it is "adding" anything is because it's a step above everything else. I think that by definition changes the task to trivial to move across the map when you can instantly transport there without anything more than setting it up before hand. You run to a point, set it down. Mirror back home and you're done and as long as you obtain wormhole potions with fishing, you can endlessly go back and forth.

Setting up Teleporters on the other hand is a task that is far more lengthy and requires extensive time in dangerous zones which feels thrilling and forces players to make choices for what they want and how "worth" something is to them. You can "save "time by pre-hardmode making a minecart trail across the world to either direction and gating off anyway in or out underground and then set up the wiring through those points. But I will still argue that it would be better just to wait for beacons overall then actually set up any alternative transportation if they are in the game because they are overall more efficient, because that's what they are supposed to be- efficient.

As you said, we should look upon if it removes challenges from the game that should be challenging- and I'd argue it does, especially on the Teleporter angle. It's not only supposed to be a quick way, but an extremely safer way to travel, but comes with the task that you have to set it up in the first place. Right now the only task you have to do to make these work is fishing, which can be done safely and without too much trouble. I'd argue that setting up a bait farm with jungle grass/mud near spawn, in a tiny area, and a small pond underground makes this way easier.


Mounts make exploring easier for a reason, because the game is trying to encourage that. To enjoy exploring, to gain treasures like the above to move across the land to get even more. And I really do believe beacons would trivialize that in a sense as you're suggesting them currently and feel they need to be gated to mid hardmode/plantera. The same goes for Teleporters; you lose on the urgency needed to complete a circuit(time needed to run along a pre-made tunnel) while fighting things off. While if you get Beacons later in the game- it makes sense that you can just wormhole your way across the map because at that point most if not all monsters on the surface are going to be way weaker than you if you're above Plantera in the Terrarian foodchain, compared to early hardmode and the difficulty spike that comes with it.
 
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Mounts are useful for reasons other than long-distance travel. Staying airbourne provides a combat advantage, and increased movement speed enables easier dodging. I don’t think wormholes will deprive mounts of their niche, which was always more of a combat niche. Think of mounts/wings as evasive impulse engines, while wormholes are more like an interplanetary warp drive.

And traveling through a biome without dying in the process is not difficult at all for those who have played in early hardmode long enough to get a pair of wings. Not even gastropods and giant tortoises present a serious threat to a highly mobile player who is trying to evade them rather than fight. To actually gain access to treasures, a player must survive and kill enemies in a biome for an extended period of time, and wormholes don’t make that easier; the process of getting to the biome represents little or none of the intended challenge.

I mean, I don’t mind much if wormholes are gated to a relatively late stage of the game, but I don’t see a compelling reason to do that.
 
It's been a while since I've seen a good suggestion, and this is indeed a pretty great idea (honestly, I'm kind of surprised it's not already a feature).

As for balance, I agree that it should be available earlier rather than later. Maybe instead of being gated by progression, it could be gated simply by making it where these beacons take time to set up. I kind of like the idea of using NPCs for it. If you could teleport to NPCs, then you'll technically have access to this right at the start of the game, but in order to actually use it you'll have to either build a house where you want to teleport and wait for nightfall, or set up a king/queen statue to get them there. Something like this would require just a bit more investment on the player's end, so they won't feel the need to use it every time they go out and render other methods of transport obsolete.
 

We're talking about really broad concepts here especially "difficulty." There's a softcore mode for a reason as you know, and that's because there are players that most likely will prefer an easier time dealing with what they "can" and "can't" lose. You could easily argue it's also primarily for builders and those that want a more leisurely paced game. I however see it as a statement for what happens to players- if people die often from enemies, and they do. Especially ground based ones regardless of wings, mounts, etc. Then having things like teleporters/wormholes becomes really handy. What you're proposing here- to my perspective- is essentially making a "softcore" teleporter in this sense. Something that's far easier to set up, far more accessible- and I absolutely no problem with the concept, just the execution.

I could just as easily not use it until I feel I "earned" it. But may I ask a question as to why teleporters are gated to Hardmode to begin with? If it's not intended to make players have to travel along the map multiple times- then what do you see as the reasons as to gating it in the first place? (I honestly want your opinion. Not rhetorical.) I feel like these reasons would be similar as to why the wormholes wouldn't be good early, but since we HAVE teleporters, unless these just replace them outright I don't understand why we'd get them earlier or even around the same time.

I am not saying they (Mounts) aren't useful for other reasons. I'm saying their primary focus is the speed they provide and realistically that's what mounts are for in real life scenarios too. I'm trying to compare these as Nike shoes, compared to bikes and then cars, then helicopters, to teleportation, and then warp-magic, one functioning usually as two points connected for transport (which requires more work in this case,) while the other is more going from point A to B without necessarily having a way back which is a very "small" problem when you can just have a second one, and a second potion at point A.

The wings, Ninja Gear, and Cthulhu shield- even the grappling hooks I'd argue are more for evasiveness than speed compared to Mounts/footwear (Albeit Rocket boots and upgrades using such may be seen as a combination, and I'll concede there.) The former take you off one of the primary areas for fighting, which is land/ground and allow to you drop through the air/glide when needed to avoid certain obstacles/dangers within the surface, which is how you can avoid enemies. While the latter are land based until hardmode and even then some still are, which gives you flying mounts to make it easier to traverse land/dodge enemies/etc, but not until a certain point in the game speed wise. The biggest thing is even though you get wings early. You still have to touch down at some point.

I'm just saying they'd make more sense to me to be later than earlier, primarily because Teleporters do indeed exist. If these just outright replaced them I wouldn't even be having this conversation to be honest. But we're talking about introducing a similar variable to a world that has a system that's been in place.

I compare it to an ecosystem. We have several types of predators(Solutions), for several types of Prey(Tasks). If we add another Predator, then we may run out of prey. Which kills other predators that can't adapt. If we're going to be making something that is better, then it should be an upgrade- which means in my opinion it should come later- when there's less solutions to take care of the tasks at hand. You can only go so far with Teleporters, so why not let them live out their usefulness first, or at least have a chance to do so? Maybe I just have an askew sense of the game? I felt like whenever we move up, we get the better versions or more reliable items. I think your beacon is a better version of the teleporter's function to move a player somewhere else, way better function even if it has other things it can do that wormholes can't.
 
My honest opinion on why teleporters are gated to where they are is that it makes thematic sense. Gating them earlier would probably not present balance issues, but thematically, it doesn’t make sense that a Mechanic would have access to technology like that.

I consider teleporters an optional fun item, and not a progression tool. The idea of laying several lines of wire across an entire large world map is so tediously repulsive that most players wouldn't even bother. There are many fun ways to use teleporters, but that is not one of them. So I guess I'm saying that wormholes are a QoL update because they fulfill a niche that for the majority of players didn't exist in the first place.
 
As someone who went out of their way to make a 1.2 large world readily traversable for building purposes, I've had my fill of placing so much wire. It's neither a terribly rewarding or easy way to get it done but it worked. So I'd certainly be pleased by another system or option that still needs a measure of input (finding and/or crafting the potions and such) without the clunkiness of a minecart rail or the overt expense of wiring that doesn't really mesh with the average playthrough.

I'm personally wondering about two options that could work together: beacon components, one crafted and one found, could be then crafted into a wormhole anchor/beacon. Then, much like the way Recall Potions are forgone in favor of Magic Mirror, there could be a permanent item of traveling between beacons (and allies) potentially tiered above teleporters. Hmm, Vermiform Traveler.
 
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