Portfolio/Multi-Topic Suggested game changes

Snarks

Terrarian
Hi there, this is just me talking about minor stuff that irk me and possible solutions.



///Corruption thorns.
It's been a while since I last played the game, I remember the corruption thorns on the surface seemed to grow quite a bit and made the journey much more dangerous, right now the thorns seem to remain mostly very tiny and I can just run past the corruption without any issues. I checked to see if it was just my imagination and after watching a few videos, it turns out that it is indeed as it seems, the thorns are just 1 or two blocks big and they don't grow beyond that but in older versions they spread out similar to how the thorns in the jungle do.

It really is weird how the most vile biome in your world (depends on what you generate with) is weaker than a simple desert or a jungle (both over ground and underground). I'm not sure if it's a bug that no one cares about or a feature, but I suggest letting the thorns overgrow as they used to, that way it would be harder to traverse the biome, you can even play around and add some kind of rare "blooming" poisonous variant of the thorn that appears every once in a while. That way you can make the corruption a bit more unique since the jungle already has plenty of thorns, plus it will bump up the difficulty. Maybe aside from poisoning you, it can also give you a debuff which increases the spawn rate of Eater of Souls when you touch the thorn. Of course it would have enough visual differences so that you'll be able to tell it apart from normal thorns.

///Blood
The blood has changed in 1.4, before when you would hit an enemy or kill an enemy, many, large droplets would splatter all over the place. In 1.4 the game now plays a more tiny and subtle blood animation, to me it makes combat feel less engaging but the enemy dies, the chunks fly everywhere but all you see is a tiny pinch of blood appearing for less then a second and then disappearing, dismembering creatures that drop almost no blood is unsatisfying and weird. No, I don't have the disable blood/gore option enabled, the game just has a different blood effect.

Maybe keep the new blood effect but also add an option for the old exaggerated blood as well, you can have it like a slider that changes between no gore and blood, bloody and exaggerated blood that flies everywhere.


///Block blending
Some blocks blend naturally, others cut off very abruptly and look very block-ey when placed next to another block for which I assume they don't have the proper blending textures implemented, it really takes you out of the experience. I assume this is something that would be improved upon later.

However, I'd also like an option to toggle between block blending and not, for instance an item can be created, let's call it a "chisel" although that already exists in game, but anyway. When you click on a blended block with that item, it will make the block un-blend from the rest of the block around it, if they're a different type. You can make it scroll between different states of blending, for instance you click once and it un-blends only on one side and so on until you fully un-blend the block. It would let players have more options in terms of building.

///Grassy sand
I think the foliage around oasis biomes will look better if some of the sand blocks had a tiny bit of greenery on them when they're close to water, right now it feels like the plants are glued on top of the sand block in stead of growing from it the same way grass grows from a dirt block.

///Music variations
More music variations, the grassy biome has theme variations in each world, it also has a theme for when it's dark, some biomes don't have those luxuries, they have only 1 theme and that theme plays even when the sun sets, like the desert for instance. More music variety would make the game feel more dynamic and replayable.

///World generation
1.Ultra large worlds, I don't know why I want them, I just want them. Will they be added? Most likely not, I'm not dying for such a feature but it would be cool to have, probably too time consuming to implement.
2.An option to control how many chests generate and the rarity of loot. Terraria has a lot of items and almost every one of those items has a purpose, it has gotten to a point where I empty my inventory, then I walk for 1 min back to the cave, explore for another 2 min and my inventory is already full with items I found from chests, so I have to go back to the house, again. It sucks big time, there comes a point in which there are just too many options to choose from and too many valuable things to debate whether or not to throw away or keep or maybe go back home to deposit your stuff so you can pick up the items you found when you arrive at the same location again. The piggy bank helps, a bit, but not enough. The inventory got bigger over time, but it is not enough, and you can expand the inventory only so much before it gets too big.
An option to lower world loot would help out a lot, it would also make finding items feel more rewarding and will give you time to bond with the item as you use it for longer periods of time.
Speaking of rewarding...

///Damage re-balance, crafting material requirements, etc.
(Rant)
There was a time when I would mine for hours, I'd find only a chest here and there, usually I'd find crap, sometimes I'd find something valuable, when that happened, it felt great. It doesn't feel great anymore, it felt nice because it took you a while to find that item, from there on you knew you'd use it quite a bit before you got an upgrade, for me at least, it gave a sense of attachment to the weapons and armor I earned. How can I feel that sense of achievement and attachment again when I keep swapping items to the point of absurdity, you skip over so many weapons and tools and pieces of armor, it feels like those items are there just to have them, without thinking of, WHY? Why add slightly different and inferior items? Why does cactus armor exist? Why are there so many swords you pick up and discard for no reason. The items that do compete stats wise just add to the sense of anxiety. You find a good weapon, but you already have a vile thorn, musket, boomerang, mace, wand and so on in your inventory, all of which are good, just depending on the situation. WHY do I have so many items? I started playing an hour ago but it feels like I skipped a couple of armor sets and already have a bunch of fancy weapons. Do we really need to see almost every item there is in one playthrough?

Somewhere down the line Terraria just got too obsessed with classes, it's no longer you finding a unique item that spawns an enemy which fights for you, now there's a whole "summoner" class, there is a "mage" class and a melee class and so on. So now you start throwing hundreds of the same type of weapon, but slightly different so people can experience their class from early on in the game. It's actions done with good intentions, but built on a poorly though out foundation. Why have a unique and mysterious staff weapon in your game that takes a while to find, when you can have hundreds of them and make them available early on in the game with almost no harsh item requirements to create them.
Items loose their uniqueness and they become less memorable, items that were iconic are now skipped over or replaced a bit after you get them because you kill something or open a chest that holds the same type of weapon but better.
(End of rant)

As stated above, an option to lower the loot would help, sadly though to truly fix this you need to rework a lot of the game progression. Adding the new way of progressing, weapon stats, material requirements and so on as an option upon creating a world for people who like to grind would do the trick, but it would be too time consuming and I don't see it happening.
10 stars to craft a mana crystal, more hellstone to craft molten armor, give reason for items to exist again, make structures in hell damage you again, so the obsidian skull is needed more, make it so only dynamite can destroy ebonstone and so on. This can be an option when creating a world, like how master mode is an option, alongside lowering the amount of loot in the world, this can make progression feel more rewarding.
I get that there are people who dislike grinding for hours on end, but constantly being showered in items that you wonder where to place and what to do with is also not a good thing.

///Item stacking
If it's too much work to introduce loot generation options and more modes to play when creating a world, you can also just make more of the items stack. Boots, bands, shackles and so on, equipment items can be made to stack at least 3 times so I can finally explore without having to go to the house so often. There are just so many loot chests in the world that It's not uncommon to find 1 item 5 or more times in a short span of playing.
 
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Why does cactus armor exist?

To make cactus as a material useful. Also, someone might like the way it looks.

Why are there so many swords you pick up and discard for no reason.

Because not everyone mines the same amount of ores. Or wants to.

You find a good weapon, but you already have a vile thorn, musket, boomerang, mace, wand and so on in your inventory, all of which are good, just depending on the situation. WHY do I have so many items?

Because different people have different playstyles. And there are different weapons which are situationally useful. The game doesn't expect you to carry around every weapon; you're supposed to pick and choose, preferring certain kinds of attacks and living with the unpleasant effects of them, or picking weapon sets that complement each other.

10 stars to craft a mana crystal, more hellstone to craft molten armor, give reason for items to exist again, make structures in hell damage you again, so the obsidian skull is needed more, make it so only dynamite can destroy ebonstone and so on. This can be an option when creating a world, like how master mode is an option, alongside lowering the amount of loot in the world, this can make progression feel more rewarding.

Yeah, I played that game. It was called Terraria 1.1. I nearly gave up on the game at the beginning because I wasn't sure if I was actually accomplishing anything. I kept digging farther and farther, carving tunnel after tunnel, and simply finding more silver, more copper, maybe some gold, and all without anything else. There was no indication that what I was doing was actually accomplishing anything.

It was only after I read the Wiki, learned how the game worked and gained some kind of explicit goal did I decide to keep playing.

Terraria is a game about stuff. To keep a player interested, you need to keep feeding them new stuff at a reasonably steady pace. And at some point, that new stuff needs to be better than the old stuff they're carrying around.

Terraria 1.2 significantly increased the density of stuff in the world, and the game was so much better off for it. Variety and diversity of content is what keeps me interested in the game.
 
To make cactus as a material useful. Also, someone might like the way it looks.



Because not everyone mines the same amount of ores. Or wants to.



Because different people have different playstyles. And there are different weapons which are situationally useful. The game doesn't expect you to carry around every weapon; you're supposed to pick and choose, preferring certain kinds of attacks and living with the unpleasant effects of them, or picking weapon sets that complement each other.



Yeah, I played that game. It was called Terraria 1.1. I nearly gave up on the game at the beginning because I wasn't sure if I was actually accomplishing anything. I kept digging farther and farther, carving tunnel after tunnel, and simply finding more silver, more copper, maybe some gold, and all without anything else. There was no indication that what I was doing was actually accomplishing anything.

It was only after I read the Wiki, learned how the game worked and gained some kind of explicit goal did I decide to keep playing.

Terraria is a game about stuff. To keep a player interested, you need to keep feeding them new stuff at a reasonably steady pace. And at some point, that new stuff needs to be better than the old stuff they're carrying around.

Terraria 1.2 significantly increased the density of stuff in the world, and the game was so much better off for it. Variety and diversity of content is what keeps me interested in the game.

Fine reply, it all boils down to people having different preferences, I personally think there is a fine line between "feeding people" new stuff at a steady pace and switching items every minute or so. The more you add of something, the less valuable it becomes and thus it makes it less exciting to find and pick up. Why should I care that I found a magical sword embedded in a rock when 10 min later I'll find a better item that I'll replace 5 min after that. What's the point of having so many ores if you can just skip most of the stuff that could be crafted?


You talk about old Terraria as if it was an awful experience because it was slower paced, my response is that not every game needs to be accessible, sometimes making things vague and hard can make you more invested in the game, similar to how Minecraft didn't tell players how and what items they could craft, instead information was passed down through the word of mouth the same way it's done in real life and I think it helped the community grow, it was just another topic people could discuss.

Plus at the end of the day, my suggestion isn't to remove the standard experience but add an optional expansion the same way choosing between corruption and crimson is, or choosing your character or world difficulty, these are things you would also have been against (I presume), but the devs added them anyway and you still get to play easy mode unaffected. You don't have to make a world with less loot in it, it's optional, same for the game difficulty, if you don't wanna farm 10 stars and you don't want to craft obsidian skulls and you don't want to buy dynamite for the corruption and so on, then don't tick the boxes.

As you said, "Because different people have different playstyles", me wanting the option to play a harder more grind oriented version of the game doesn't concern you because it was never about overwriting your experience but adding more options for people like me.
 
So a big part of your post seems to be about having to head back to store things. I don't know if you've made it to Hardmode yet so I won't spoil things other than to say this:

There are 3 other additional inventory items other than the Piggy Bank. I am a hoarder and this allows me to go about for a very long time without having to return. You will also find items that allow you to get back to your base easily, as well as back to other places in the world.

And as a basic rule of thumb, most items from Pre-Hardmode become garbage once you enter Hardmore so it doesn't really make sense to keep everything. Don't worry about things being super rare. There are a small amount that you can only get from World Generated chests. The rest you can easily find again or make at a later time. Especially most items found in wooden/gold-looking chests.
 
I'm not really fond of game modes that can be done already with self-imposed challenges. Hardcore mode is borderline that, but it at least has some purpose in multiplayer.

For example, if you want mana crystals to cost 10 again, you can wait until you collect 10, make one, then trash the other 7. (though personally I do think 3 is far too cheap- 7 or 5 would be more ideal imo)

You could do the same with crafting hellstone bars- if you need 30 bars, that's 90 ore in vanilla now, but if you want them to be 4 hellstone each, collect 120 instead, craft 30 bars, and toss the rest.

Since it seems like you know the game from a long while back, you can also choose not to use new 1.4 items, or 1.3 ones, or 1.2 or 1.1 stuff.

But as for what you CAN'T do with a self-imposed challenge, that is, block blending, I would totally love a way to unstitch blocks. A lot of blocks don't even really "blend," they're forcibly stitched, and in many cases, this gives an unpleasant look. It only works for similar-looking blocks, like stone, gray brick, and other gray-painted blocks, giving a more varied texture, but having glass lined up along wood or sand, it just doesn't work. I'd love it if axes would get a slope-like ability that hammers have, but for unstitching. Hamaxes would be left click for hammer, right click for axe.

I think classes are fairly lax in this game. You're not significantly hindered if you use other stuff. I sort of see the normal way of playing is using whatever you want- no need to stick to a certain class, unless a boss or event is giving you trouble. It gives you an option of specializing in a class to give you that extra edge to try again if you can't beat it.

What really could use a re-work are the copper/tin to gold/plat tiers. They were already highly skippable back in 1.0, but much moreso now. The sets could use a -5 bars for each piece, and buff them to the stats of the next armor (give copper iron's defense, give iron silver's defense, etc). Gold and Plat would have slightly more defense than Shadow, but miss out on melee and movement speed bonuses. Maybe buff those stats for Shadow as well.

Also, it may be tempting to loot every gold chest you find, and to keep duplicates even if you don't need them. What I tend to do is keep the chests that I fully loot, and leave chests be if they contain stuff I don't need. If another chest with stuff you already have is nearby, you can transfer its items to the other chest, and take it.
 
So a big part of your post seems to be about having to head back to store things. I don't know if you've made it to Hardmode yet so I won't spoil things other than to say this:

There are 3 other additional inventory items other than the Piggy Bank. I am a hoarder and this allows me to go about for a very long time without having to return. You will also find items that allow you to get back to your base easily, as well as back to other places in the world.

And as a basic rule of thumb, most items from Pre-Hardmode become garbage once you enter Hardmore so it doesn't really make sense to keep everything. Don't worry about things being super rare. There are a small amount that you can only get from World Generated chests. The rest you can easily find again or make at a later time. Especially most items found in wooden/gold-looking chests.

Yeah it's about pre-hardmode, I guess I'm just a hoarder, I like to keep things just in case and items that are duplicates I like to sell.


I'm not really fond of game modes that can be done already with self-imposed challenges. Hardcore mode is borderline that, but it at least has some purpose in multiplayer.

For example, if you want mana crystals to cost 10 again, you can wait until you collect 10, make one, then trash the other 7. (though personally I do think 3 is far too cheap- 7 or 5 would be more ideal imo)

You could do the same with crafting hellstone bars- if you need 30 bars, that's 90 ore in vanilla now, but if you want them to be 4 hellstone each, collect 120 instead, craft 30 bars, and toss the rest.

Since it seems like you know the game from a long while back, you can also choose not to use new 1.4 items, or 1.3 ones, or 1.2 or 1.1 stuff.

But as for what you CAN'T do with a self-imposed challenge, that is, block blending, I would totally love a way to unstitch blocks. A lot of blocks don't even really "blend," they're forcibly stitched, and in many cases, this gives an unpleasant look. It only works for similar-looking blocks, like stone, gray brick, and other gray-painted blocks, giving a more varied texture, but having glass lined up along wood or sand, it just doesn't work. I'd love it if axes would get a slope-like ability that hammers have, but for unstitching. Hamaxes would be left click for hammer, right click for axe.

I think classes are fairly lax in this game. You're not significantly hindered if you use other stuff. I sort of see the normal way of playing is using whatever you want- no need to stick to a certain class, unless a boss or event is giving you trouble. It gives you an option of specializing in a class to give you that extra edge to try again if you can't beat it.

What really could use a re-work are the copper/tin to gold/plat tiers. They were already highly skippable back in 1.0, but much moreso now. The sets could use a -5 bars for each piece, and buff them to the stats of the next armor (give copper iron's defense, give iron silver's defense, etc). Gold and Plat would have slightly more defense than Shadow, but miss out on melee and movement speed bonuses. Maybe buff those stats for Shadow as well.

Also, it may be tempting to loot every gold chest you find, and to keep duplicates even if you don't need them. What I tend to do is keep the chests that I fully loot, and leave chests be if they contain stuff I don't need. If another chest with stuff you already have is nearby, you can transfer its items to the other chest, and take it.


I'm not a fan of self imposed challenges, the problem is actually sticking through with your made up rules, sure I can mine extra hellstone, craft the armor and discard the rest, but I won't do it because it feels bad to discard items you worked for when you know you don't have to. It's a psychological thing, It's like trying to quit eating processed sugar but everyone around you keeps giving you chocolate and other kinds of sweets, it's better to remove yourself from such situations so you won't feel pressured or guilty that you refused and you won't keep thinking about how sweet the chocolate would taste only to feel guilty after eating it. It's the same with the game, I'd rather have a mode that makes the rules different than try to pretend I need 10 stars when I need only 3.
It's the same reason I would never recommend journey mode as a replacement for the skips people used to do before the patch, because I know they'll feel like they're cheating instead of playing properly.

By the way, I agree that 7 stars is probably more reasonable, but the spawn rate has been increased so drastically that making 10 stars the requirement really won't take as long as we'd think it would, I don't even need to go out and explore and I'd get more than 10 stars just by being around my house, at times the roof literally gets covered in them. In two nights, just by walking from destination to destination without trying to farm them, I hit the max mana capacity with the current 3 star setup. It's ridiculous, once it was something that you had to earn, it felt like character progression, the same way getting gear is, yet you're just handed these things like it's nothing all because some people want to skip large portions of the game as they have played it already.
I'd go a step further and say that stars spawning should be lower until you have defeated the EoW just as how meteorites won't appear until you do that (of course, again as an optional mode).

The class system isn't strict, I agree with that, you just pick up whatever you feel like and you use it and get better with it the more you learn about the item's abilities. The problem is there are too many items that are alike but with a slight damage change here and there just because someone might want to play only with swords. It brings nothing to the game, you really don't need 10 types of starting swords or armors when they're all almost identical in stats, same for later game items. I'd rather have fewer items, all of which do something cool and unique instead of hundreds of identical items with slight number differences, it's just a lot of fluff and devalues actually good items because you don't get the same anticipation as you would when you have been with 1 item for a long period of time only to finally find a worthy replacement that is unique in the way it acts. However I understand that some people just like getting new looking items constantly, there's nothing wrong with that, that's why I suggest these changes as optional modes.

I guess the only true way to make a lot of the items relevant in the game would be to go back and aside from number changes also make a lot of them act in more unique ways, however that's just too big of a task, the game is colossal, I opened the texture files today and I almost got a heart attack scrolling through the items list, imagine how time consuming it would be to go back and edit so many different items and the sad part is, a lot of them are just throwaway stuff made for the sake of having more things in the game, no wonder we don't have complete texture packs. It's very likely that the player base would get angry if the devs take on such a task anyway, people would prefer new content, not changes to old existing stuff and I understand that.

The option to create a super large world that only has the amound of content a large world has would help slow progression down (and it would probably be easier to implement), also as you said, making equipment cheaper early on and gradually require more and more items to craft would help give incentive to craft those early stuff we usually skip.

Block blending should be something explored further, I think the devs realize a lot of the blocks cut off harshly in unnatural ways, they probably didn't have the time to create so many specific blending combinations so they either did this to speed things up or they're planning better blend textures that are yet to be implemented as 1.4 was released earlier than it was originally supposed to. The axe being used to control how blocks blend is weird but at the same time useful, it would give more reasons to use the axe and would avoid cluttering the inventory by adding a new type of tool, plus if a new tool was added, the devs would probably add hundreds of variants and make the game even more cluttered.

About duplicate items, I just sell them or I keep copies like the hoarder I am, it's illogical I know but it's just how my brain works. It feels bad to find a chest only to have items you already found and on top of that you can't even stack them and sell them, so I start looking through the inventory trying to see what's the least valuable thing at the moment so I can throw it away, sometimes there is no such item and I have to travel back home, it's annoying. Even something as trivial as statues I'd pick up because I like the way they look and I like decorating with them, from there it's a choice of whether I should leave them behind and track back the location when I empty my inventory or empty it now so I can proceed exploring and get it full again in a few minutes. Such items should at least be stackable, it's a way of increasing carrying capacity without increasing the inventory space, the game already does that with potions, you have 30 but you use only 1, so why can't we have multiple clouds in bottles while still being able to only equip one?
 
Yeah it's about pre-hardmode, I guess I'm just a hoarder, I like to keep things just in case and items that are duplicates I like to sell.





I'm not a fan of self imposed challenges, the problem is actually sticking through with your made up rules, sure I can mine extra hellstone, craft the armor and discard the rest, but I won't do it because it feels bad to discard items you worked for when you know you don't have to. It's a psychological thing, It's like trying to quit eating processed sugar but everyone around you keeps giving you chocolate and other kinds of sweets, it's better to remove yourself from such situations so you won't feel pressured or guilty that you refused and you won't keep thinking about how sweet the chocolate would taste only to feel guilty after eating it. It's the same with the game, I'd rather have a mode that makes the rules different than try to pretend I need 10 stars when I need only 3.
It's the same reason I would never recommend journey mode as a replacement for the skips people used to do before the patch, because I know they'll feel like they're cheating instead of playing properly.

By the way, I agree that 7 stars is probably more reasonable, but the spawn rate has been increased so drastically that making 10 stars the requirement really won't take as long as we'd think it would, I don't even need to go out and explore and I'd get more than 10 stars just by being around my house, at times the roof literally gets covered in them. In two nights, just by walking from destination to destination without trying to farm them, I hit the max mana capacity with the current 3 star setup. It's ridiculous, once it was something that you had to earn, it felt like character progression, the same way getting gear is, yet you're just handed these things like it's nothing all because some people want to skip large portions of the game as they have played it already.
I'd go a step further and say that stars spawning should be lower until you have defeated the EoW just as how meteorites won't appear until you do that (of course, again as an optional mode).

The class system isn't strict, I agree with that, you just pick up whatever you feel like and you use it and get better with it the more you learn about the item's abilities. The problem is there are too many items that are alike but with a slight damage change here and there just because someone might want to play only with swords. It brings nothing to the game, you really don't need 10 types of starting swords or armors when they're all almost identical in stats, same for later game items. I'd rather have fewer items, all of which do something cool and unique instead of hundreds of identical items with slight number differences, it's just a lot of fluff and devalues actually good items because you don't get the same anticipation as you would when you have been with 1 item for a long period of time only to finally find a worthy replacement that is unique in the way it acts. However I understand that some people just like getting new looking items constantly, there's nothing wrong with that, that's why I suggest these changes as optional modes.

I guess the only true way to make a lot of the items relevant in the game would be to go back and aside from number changes also make a lot of them act in more unique ways, however that's just too big of a task, the game is colossal, I opened the texture files today and I almost got a heart attack scrolling through the items list, imagine how time consuming it would be to go back and edit so many different items and the sad part is, a lot of them are just throwaway stuff made for the sake of having more things in the game, no wonder we don't have complete texture packs. It's very likely that the player base would get angry if the devs take on such a task anyway, people would prefer new content, not changes to old existing stuff and I understand that.

The option to create a super large world that only has the amound of content a large world has would help slow progression down (and it would probably be easier to implement), also as you said, making equipment cheaper early on and gradually require more and more items to craft would help give incentive to craft those early stuff we usually skip.

Block blending should be something explored further, I think the devs realize a lot of the blocks cut off harshly in unnatural ways, they probably didn't have the time to create so many specific blending combinations so they either did this to speed things up or they're planning better blend textures that are yet to be implemented as 1.4 was released earlier than it was originally supposed to. The axe being used to control how blocks blend is weird but at the same time useful, it would give more reasons to use the axe and would avoid cluttering the inventory by adding a new type of tool, plus if a new tool was added, the devs would probably add hundreds of variants and make the game even more cluttered.

About duplicate items, I just sell them or I keep copies like the hoarder I am, it's illogical I know but it's just how my brain works. It feels bad to find a chest only to have items you already found and on top of that you can't even stack them and sell them, so I start looking through the inventory trying to see what's the least valuable thing at the moment so I can throw it away, sometimes there is no such item and I have to travel back home, it's annoying. Even something as trivial as statues I'd pick up because I like the way they look and I like decorating with them, from there it's a choice of whether I should leave them behind and track back the location when I empty my inventory or empty it now so I can proceed exploring and get it full again in a few minutes. Such items should at least be stackable, it's a way of increasing carrying capacity without increasing the inventory space, the game already does that with potions, you have 30 but you use only 1, so why can't we have multiple clouds in bottles while still being able to only equip one?
I'm not sure about in general, but I think there are "meteor shower" nights (or I guess shooting star nights in Terraria) where more stars fall throughout the night. I suppose if that was unlocked later, yeah, that could help. I have limited myself to the 10 star rule one time, where I tossed away the extra 7.. not too hard really. As for hellstone, if it feels like a "waste" to do that.. well, if the bar requirement was still 4, the bars would have been deleted either way. (Also to take it a step further.. they used to take 6 hellstone and 2 obsidian, and at one point they added gold armor to the recipe). I'm thinking they lowered mana crystal cost is to pave the way for fishing (enchanted nightcrawlers) as well as making the mage more accessible, along with giving more stars to make jester arrows with, and also more star cannon ammo.

I don't think it's intended for you to use EVERY item in the game. There are a lot, many of about the same power, but they give players more options and variety through different playthroughs. For example, the many variants of Hermes Boots in the game now. If you can't get a pair one way, there are other options. Plus they look different when worn, giving more character customization.

I've touched on some texture packing and it's definitely overwhelming now, lol. It was overwhelming even back in 1.1. I don't know if we'll ever see a complete texture pack.

I was thinking the axe would be a fine candidate for the splitting ability since as the hammer pounds down blocks to shape them, the axe can cut them. The copper axe would be able to cut lihzahrd brick from stone, though the wooden hammer can slope and shape temple bricks just as well.

I think the issue with stacking accessories are the modifiers. You'd have to lose modifiers to allow that, like Light Discs. I would like armors and vanities to stack however, especially Halloween sets. That way you can collect for other characters without filling up your chests with a few outfits.

You're wanting different options for several little things, which I think would be difficult since it adds so many more settings to world character/generation. Don't think it's exactly worth it, since most of these are self-imposed challenges. I mean, those who want to do a run without crafting stations can do that without a world setting that prevents crafting or using them. If it can already be done in-game, it can be done by those who want to without making everyone else do it too.
 
I'm not sure about in general, but I think there are "meteor shower" nights (or I guess shooting star nights in Terraria) where more stars fall throughout the night. I suppose if that was unlocked later, yeah, that could help. I have limited myself to the 10 star rule one time, where I tossed away the extra 7.. not too hard really. As for hellstone, if it feels like a "waste" to do that.. well, if the bar requirement was still 4, the bars would have been deleted either way. (Also to take it a step further.. they used to take 6 hellstone and 2 obsidian, and at one point they added gold armor to the recipe). I'm thinking they lowered mana crystal cost is to pave the way for fishing (enchanted nightcrawlers) as well as making the mage more accessible, along with giving more stars to make jester arrows with, and also more star cannon ammo.

I don't think it's intended for you to use EVERY item in the game. There are a lot, many of about the same power, but they give players more options and variety through different playthroughs. For example, the many variants of Hermes Boots in the game now. If you can't get a pair one way, there are other options. Plus they look different when worn, giving more character customization.

I've touched on some texture packing and it's definitely overwhelming now, lol. It was overwhelming even back in 1.1. I don't know if we'll ever see a complete texture pack.

I was thinking the axe would be a fine candidate for the splitting ability since as the hammer pounds down blocks to shape them, the axe can cut them. The copper axe would be able to cut lihzahrd brick from stone, though the wooden hammer can slope and shape temple bricks just as well.

I think the issue with stacking accessories are the modifiers. You'd have to lose modifiers to allow that, like Light Discs. I would like armors and vanities to stack however, especially Halloween sets. That way you can collect for other characters without filling up your chests with a few outfits.

You're wanting different options for several little things, which I think would be difficult since it adds so many more settings to world character/generation. Don't think it's exactly worth it, since most of these are self-imposed challenges. I mean, those who want to do a run without crafting stations can do that without a world setting that prevents crafting or using them. If it can already be done in-game, it can be done by those who want to without making everyone else do it too.

Every night is a shower of stars, might sound ridiculous but from an "immersion" point of view, you used to start in an empty world and you'd see the occasional fallen star, you'd eventually discover that you can make mana crystals with them and through a decent period of time your character would gradually gain more magical powers as they consumed the crystals, it's like world building, it doesn't happen in a day. Now you spawn and in a night or two you're a mage, gg. Just because Terraria supports mages, doesn't mean you shouldn't work and earn your magical abilities, even if you are weaker early on. After two nights I got full mana, I was using only the vile thorn because I almost never ran out of mana and when I did it regenerated very quickly. Two nights in and I had a weapon that essentially had overwritten any other item I had managed to find or craft after that for a decent amount of play time. Let's all start with a Muramasa so that melee oriented players can feel at ease.

If Terraria was a show, pre-hardmode would be like an early season, but instead of me watching the whole thing properly, I just experience a 5 min recap on YouTube. I don't want a recap, I want a marathon, both are an option, me deciding to watch the whole first season of Terraria won't stop you from getting your 5 min recap if you can't be bothered and want to get to the new stuff. Imagine if the only available hd versions of the original Star Wars movies were only 10 min briefs and the only way to watch the full thing is to watch low def versions and someone told you "well you can take more frequent breaks if you want the movies to last longer like the good old times, it's like a self imposed challenge".

Maybe I want to experience the 1.4 content and get a proper progression, I shouldn't have to download early versions of the game nor should I have to pretend that things are harder than they actually are. Acting like buildings in hell make me take damage when I know they don't is frankly stupid. What's next? Crafting and wearing every tier of early armor for a certain amount of time even though in less than an hour I have enough materials to skip most of them? Sure I'll go on a stroll for 20 min and only open 5 of the 15 chests I found along the way. Maybe I'll lip a coin to see if I get to open the chest or not and if not I'll pretend it never existed. Maybe instead of getting Journey mode we should have just used cheat mods and pretended to research items.

Sometimes self imposed challenges work, being a mage only character back when gaining mana was a pain and you didn't have as many items was a self imposed challenge, throwing away the 30 stars you gathered along the way and refusing to craft or open chests is not a challenge, it's pretending the game is harder than it actually is. Maybe I should occasionally stop and let monsters kill me, just like the good old times.

I don't know how having hundreds of similar items with slight stats change is giving them a choice, cosmetics, maybe, maybe you like that cactus armor (it looks more badass than the higher tier jungle one that's for sure), but weapons, tools, and items you can't really see while using or put in the vanity slots, man I don't know... Like a sword on the surface world that's stronger than the one you can craft from killing bosses just doesn't seem right, and it happens constantly, shouldn't it be the other way around? I'll never fully understand this, the same way you'd never understand why I'd want to grind for hours. I guess people just don't have the time, most people come back after 8 hours of work and 2 hours of travel (or more), they're tired, spend some time with the family, eat, drink, use the toilet and they have like and hour or two left for themselves, of course they'd want to feel like they've progressed several times through those 2 hours and showering them with items is one way of doing it. But there are also people like me, who can make time to play the game and want to feel like we paved our way through the in game world, I want to make memories with that iron armor, not just skip directly to gold which I'll quickly discard.

The modifiers thing can probably be solved, you can stack items with modifiers and have like a tiny button appear on the side with each modified item listed individually when you click on it, then you can choose your item, the ones which aren't modified will just appear as 2x or 3x, 4x stacked next to the modified ones. Not using the button to choose an item will make the game pick one randomly. There, problem solved, you can now have discs each with a different stat.

Anyway, I'm glad to hear other people's point of view on such things.
 
Fine reply, it all boils down to people having different preferences, I personally think there is a fine line between "feeding people" new stuff at a steady pace and switching items every minute or so. The more you add of something, the less valuable it becomes and thus it makes it less exciting to find and pick up. Why should I care that I found a magical sword embedded in a rock when 10 min later I'll find a better item that I'll replace 5 min after that. What's the point of having so many ores if you can just skip most of the stuff that could be crafted?

The point of having so many ores (and really, we're talking about 4 pre-Hardmode) is to give you some reward on your way to other rewards. It doesn't matter if the reward lasts 5 minutes or 3 years; it provides impulsion to continue playing.

You should look into the psychological concept of a Skinner box. Most randomized games lean into it on some level, Terraria included. In particular, note the relationship between frequency of the reward and engagement.

You talk about old Terraria as if it was an awful experience because it was slower paced, my response is that not every game needs to be accessible,

I didn't say anything about "accessibility". And I didn't accuse it of being slower paced so much as not having much stuff in it. There's less to do, and while that makes what little there is individually more meaningful, the arc of play is not as engaging as it would be if there were more stuff in it.

sometimes making things vague and hard can make you more invested in the game, similar to how Minecraft didn't tell players how and what items they could craft, instead information was passed down through the word of mouth the same way it's done in real life and I think it helped the community grow, it was just another topic people could discuss.

I for one do not play games to engage with a community; I play games to play games. Enforced community engagement (ie: you'll never figure out X without the aggregate random contributions of thousands of other people) is not a positive aspect of any game to me. That doesn't make it necessarily negative, but it's not why I'm playing.

Plus at the end of the day, my suggestion isn't to remove the standard experience but add an optional expansion the same way choosing between corruption and crimson is, or choosing your character or world difficulty, these are things you would also have been against (I presume), but the devs added them anyway and you still get to play easy mode unaffected. You don't have to make a world with less loot in it, it's optional, same for the game difficulty, if you don't wanna farm 10 stars and you don't want to craft obsidian skulls and you don't want to buy dynamite for the corruption and so on, then don't tick the boxes.

You can go on and on and on with "optional expansions". You can make "options" that cater to increasingly niche parts of your audience.

Or you can get on with creating compelling features that the majority of your playerbase will actually enjoy.

Think of the development effort needed to do what you suggest. Just for one example, consider having an option to change the crafting recipe for mana stars. That would mean that the crafting database now needs to be, to some degree, world-specific. And I know that it's not coded to be world-specific, because the Guide will happily give me crafting options that require items only found with Corruption, even though I'm in a Crimson world. So in order to implement what you want, you have to make a pretty substantial change to a core part of the crafting system.

Contrast that with Expert Mode. New AI routines were added to many monsters. New spawning rules were added. The damage mechanism was changed. And so forth. None of these things were world-specific beforehand, but in order to make Expert Mode a thing, they had to become world-specific.

Except... not really. All of these routines are hard-coded (I believe), so they live within the game's code. It's not too difficult to have any particular routine check a world flag before deciding which behaviors to use. Now obviously, there has to be development time put into deciding what the new routine's behavior will be and balancing it appropriately. But from the perspective of basic implementation time, you're just querying a piece of world state from a single location within the game's code.

Crafting data isn't actually in the game's code; it's in a database file somewhere else. So now you have two database files, which have to be kept in sync.

So while Expert Mode was certainly non-trivial to implement, doing what you suggest would be far harder to make work. And note that this is just one aspect of your suggestion. Overall, what you're talking about touches on aspects of world generation, loot drop tables, and a wide variety of other things.

Basically, the effort you're talking about, both in implementation and design, approaches the effort of designing a Terraria 2.

The question therefore is this: is investing that time worth the gain in satisfying a (small?) portion of their playerbase, compared to other changes that can improve the game for more of their players?

Equally importantly, can they design such a thing in a way that satisfies all players who might be interested?

Here's what I mean by that last part. I don't play Expert Mode because I don't like the stat imbalancing that's a fundamental part of the mode. At the same time, I want to experience the AI differences. So I'm "stuck" playing through older, less interesting AI, but with stats that I prefer. The designers missed the mark for me, because I'm more interested in interesting gameplay than more brutal stats.

Some player who might be interested in a slower experience might be similarly put off by some specific change you've suggested. For example, if you make mana stars require more fallen stars to craft, or if your world-generation takes out gems entirely, they might be annoyed that their early mage builds don't work anymore. You can never be too sure with these niche changes whether you're leaving some players out in the cold.

Yeah it's about pre-hardmode, I guess I'm just a hoarder, I like to keep things just in case and items that are duplicates I like to sell.

I guess I just don't understand that part. I too am a hoarder, and even Journey Mode makes it difficult to kick that habit.

But part of my enjoyment of the game is taking the time to curate my ever growing collection of stuff. The game would get so much less interesting for me if you did something like give the player infinite inventory (which is why, despite being in Journey Mode, I'm not researching and duplicating everything). Because if you do that, then there's no reason to have a base at all. Not even for crafting stations; you could just carry them with you.

Yes, it's really annoying to have to terminate a Dungeon or Jungle dive to go drop off your current loot. But these moments have their benefits to the flow of the game. They make for natural break points for stopping play for the time being. Retreading terrain makes you familiar with your cavern networks (useful when Hardmode comes along and you need to find your way around. Admittedly not as useful since 1.3 gave us a map).

And lastly, it should be noted that 1.4 gave us yet another personal storage item: the Void Vault/Bag, so pre-Hardmode you can get 120 items worth of inventory space. And 1.4 also has Money Trough drops, unlike prior editions where that was a drop from a Hardmode enemy.

By the way, I agree that 7 stars is probably more reasonable, but the spawn rate has been increased so drastically that making 10 stars the requirement really won't take as long as we'd think it would, I don't even need to go out and explore and I'd get more than 10 stars just by being around my house, at times the roof literally gets covered in them. In two nights, just by walking from destination to destination without trying to farm them, I hit the max mana capacity with the current 3 star setup. It's ridiculous, once it was something that you had to earn, it felt like character progression, the same way getting gear is, yet you're just handed these things like it's nothing all because some people want to skip large portions of the game as they have played it already.

That's not why the cost for star-to-mana was changed. It was changed to make mage builds actually work early-game. Pre-1.2, mages were a late-pre-Hardmode feature; the only available magic weapons were in the Dungeon or the Underworld. By that point in time, it was reasonable to expect that people would have come across enough stars to have decent mana.

However, if your intent is to make mages a viable class pre-EoC, then you need players to be able to get decent mana earlier in the game. If you can't get enough mana to power gem wands early on, why bother having them in the game?

Also, do remember that stars have uses other than for mana. By decreasing the mana cost, and giving people lots of Stars, things like the Star Cannon become much more viable. 1.2 also allowed Jester's Arrows to be craftible from Stars, which make arrow-based ranger builds more viable early-game.

The problem is there are too many items that are alike but with a slight damage change here and there just because someone might want to play only with swords. It brings nothing to the game, you really don't need 10 types of starting swords or armors when they're all almost identical in stats, same for later game items.

Thinking on this, I just realized something: I don't buy that this is the case.

Aside from the most basic craftable weapons (swords, bows, and wands), I don't know of a kind of weapon in the game that operates as you suggest. In melee weapons, you've got tons of variety: spears, flails and boomeranges all do damage in very different ways. And there are only 3-4 of each kind of such weapon pre-hardmode. Only Yo-yos have a large sequence of weapons with just stat differences, and most of them are purchased or crafted. For rangers, you've got bullet weapons and throwing weapons, almost all of which behave in very different ways. There's the slow-and-steady musket, the fast-firing minishark, the Star Cannon, etc. There's no series of "barely different" weapons.

And the magical weapons? These are all radically different from one another once you get past the gem wand tier. The vilethorn, water bolt, magic missile (which is God-tier now, BTW), they could not be more different from one another.

So you must be talking specifically about the base crafted weapons: swords, bows, and wands. The other items, by and large, are found; these are made.

There are a lot of them because, well, you've got several tiers of ore. While I skip everything up to Gold these days, back in my first playthrough when basic locomotion was still something I was getting used to, getting enough bars of the next tier of ore to get the next sword weapon was a pretty substantial occasion. And while it was "just" a damage boost, it was a significant one, making it easier for a neophyte player to descend further into the underground.

And here's the thing: the early-game craftable swords and bows have been around since Terraria 1.0. The only kind of weapon that fits your description are the gem wands, which were added to make mages a proper, functioning class early-game. So if your accussation is that the developers have only been adding worthless "more stat" items to the game... where are they?

Yes, 1.1 added Hardmode ore crafted weapons, but note that they branched out a bit on variety. Spears can be crafted, for example, giving melee players a different kind of attack. The other thing is that, again particularly in your first playthrough, each tier of ore gear makes you that much more survivable to get stuff in the next tier. You may only see the difference as new stats, but the players definitely feel the difference in how much damage they do.

And once you get Hallow-tier and beyond items, things get pretty interesting.

The thing about the basic crafted weapons are that they're... basic. For the most part, they're tools that provide consistent damage in predictable ways. They're not supposed to be flashy; flash is reserved for gear that you find from drops, chests, or craft from specialized materials. This pushes people into finding chests, drops, or specialized crafting materials. This is why early pre-Hardmode is different from late pre-Hardmode.

And that's really important to the feel of Terraria. It is as it has always been.
 
Every night is a shower of stars, might sound ridiculous but from an "immersion" point of view, you used to start in an empty world and you'd see the occasional fallen star, you'd eventually discover that you can make mana crystals with them and through a decent period of time your character would gradually gain more magical powers as they consumed the crystals, it's like world building, it doesn't happen in a day.

That's certainly one thing that could happen.

Another thing that could happen is that the player in question learns that stars are useless, because they don't have anything that uses them. They stick to the one or two good weapons they find or craft, because they have no other options. And they do this for hours on end, and therefore learn that these options are good enough to deal with all threats.

One of the most important thing that 1.2 did was making early-game mages possible. That was important, not because the mage class was non-existent in 1.1, but because the game taught players that an entire dimension of the game's "class system" did not exist.

If you stick players in a narrow box with only 3 options, and much later on, you give them another 2 options, most players will stick with the initial 3 options so long as they're still viable. Having an entire dimension of the game ignored, or only lightly explored, because of player ignorance due to lack of proper design is not good gameplay.

If you want players to understand the breadth of the options available to them, then you need those players to be able to experience those options as soon as possible. Because once you start teaching them to rely on X and Y, trying to introduce them to Z 6-10 hours into the game just isn't going to be as successful as doing so from the beginning.

After two nights I got full mana, I was using only the vile thorn because I almost never ran out of mana and when I did it regenerated very quickly. Two nights in and I had a weapon that essentially had overwritten any other item I had managed to find or craft after that for a decent amount of play time.

The Vilethorn is a nice weapon. But it is only a good weapon if you're really good at staying away from enemies and controlling your character. In short, it's good because you're really good at playing the game.

And I think that's really your problem: the game isn't like you remember it. Terraria 1.2 is more dense than 1.1, but it's not really that much more dense. Oh yes, there's more stuff, but there's not that many more weapons. So what changed for you?

You did. You got better. You can get from a virgin character on a virgin world to the Vilethorn in two days. In my initial playthrough, even with help from the Wiki, that took me at least 10 hours of play, if not 15.

The problem is that you know the game well enough that you can burn through its content quickly. That's why you encounter so much stuff so quickly: because you're not frequently dying and going back to spawn, having to trudge back through to where you were.

And I see this in my own playthroughs of the game. I still remember part of the layout of my very first Terraria 1.1 world. Not so much because it was memorable, but because of how long I spent playing it. And that wasn't beause 1.1 didn't have as much stuff; it was because I wasn't nearly as good at the game. I died, a lot. I could cover the surface of an entire small map in the Graveyard Biome with my headstones from just that playthrough.

The game didn't speed up; you got faster.
 
Every night is a shower of stars, might sound ridiculous but from an "immersion" point of view, you used to start in an empty world and you'd see the occasional fallen star, you'd eventually discover that you can make mana crystals with them and through a decent period of time your character would gradually gain more magical powers as they consumed the crystals, it's like world building, it doesn't happen in a day. Now you spawn and in a night or two you're a mage, gg. Just because Terraria supports mages, doesn't mean you shouldn't work and earn your magical abilities, even if you are weaker early on. After two nights I got full mana, I was using only the vile thorn because I almost never ran out of mana and when I did it regenerated very quickly. Two nights in and I had a weapon that essentially had overwritten any other item I had managed to find or craft after that for a decent amount of play time. Let's all start with a Muramasa so that melee oriented players can feel at ease.

If Terraria was a show, pre-hardmode would be like an early season, but instead of me watching the whole thing properly, I just experience a 5 min recap on YouTube. I don't want a recap, I want a marathon, both are an option, me deciding to watch the whole first season of Terraria won't stop you from getting your 5 min recap if you can't be bothered and want to get to the new stuff. Imagine if the only available hd versions of the original Star Wars movies were only 10 min briefs and the only way to watch the full thing is to watch low def versions and someone told you "well you can take more frequent breaks if you want the movies to last longer like the good old times, it's like a self imposed challenge".

Maybe I want to experience the 1.4 content and get a proper progression, I shouldn't have to download early versions of the game nor should I have to pretend that things are harder than they actually are. Acting like buildings in hell make me take damage when I know they don't is frankly stupid. What's next? Crafting and wearing every tier of early armor for a certain amount of time even though in less than an hour I have enough materials to skip most of them? Sure I'll go on a stroll for 20 min and only open 5 of the 15 chests I found along the way. Maybe I'll lip a coin to see if I get to open the chest or not and if not I'll pretend it never existed. Maybe instead of getting Journey mode we should have just used cheat mods and pretended to research items.

Sometimes self imposed challenges work, being a mage only character back when gaining mana was a pain and you didn't have as many items was a self imposed challenge, throwing away the 30 stars you gathered along the way and refusing to craft or open chests is not a challenge, it's pretending the game is harder than it actually is. Maybe I should occasionally stop and let monsters kill me, just like the good old times.

I don't know how having hundreds of similar items with slight stats change is giving them a choice, cosmetics, maybe, maybe you like that cactus armor (it looks more badass than the higher tier jungle one that's for sure), but weapons, tools, and items you can't really see while using or put in the vanity slots, man I don't know... Like a sword on the surface world that's stronger than the one you can craft from killing bosses just doesn't seem right, and it happens constantly, shouldn't it be the other way around? I'll never fully understand this, the same way you'd never understand why I'd want to grind for hours. I guess people just don't have the time, most people come back after 8 hours of work and 2 hours of travel (or more), they're tired, spend some time with the family, eat, drink, use the toilet and they have like and hour or two left for themselves, of course they'd want to feel like they've progressed several times through those 2 hours and showering them with items is one way of doing it. But there are also people like me, who can make time to play the game and want to feel like we paved our way through the in game world, I want to make memories with that iron armor, not just skip directly to gold which I'll quickly discard.

The modifiers thing can probably be solved, you can stack items with modifiers and have like a tiny button appear on the side with each modified item listed individually when you click on it, then you can choose your item, the ones which aren't modified will just appear as 2x or 3x, 4x stacked next to the modified ones. Not using the button to choose an item will make the game pick one randomly. There, problem solved, you can now have discs each with a different stat.

Anyway, I'm glad to hear other people's point of view on such things.
At least according to the wiki, about 1 out of 10 nights are meteor showers.

You obtaining the vilethorn is a sequence skip, and that's not exactly a bad thing. You've become more skilled at the game and know how to obtain one as well as avoid the dangers of the Corruption with minimal gear. You can kill Skeletron first night as well to get that early Muramasa, but the new player likely wouldn't be able to do that. Melee and rangers have gear as soon as they acquire some wood- mage still needs gems and ore and mana stars, unless they score a spark wand. Again, 3 feels too low, but I understand why they decreased it down from 10.

Nicol mentioned a lot of good points, so I'll try to avoid unnecessary repetition and reply to part of this post.

You can't experience new content if you download older versions anyway, but there are still hellstone towers. If you really want the same effect, mine 20 obsidian and toss them? Burning buildings were more of an inconvenience than a challenge. By making more towers made of obsidian now, the skull has less purpose, but now it has more tinkers. I honestly don't see this being much of a problem.

You never had to make every armor in the game, even at 1.0. You're free to for completionist's sake though.

Chests aren't super common either.. in fact one playthrough with a friend, it took us hours to find just one. There was also a surprising lack of hearts through our journey, and I felt I owed them an explanation. In 1.2.. or 1.3, I went a whole playthrough without a magic mirror, because I couldn't find one. On another (or maybe the same one) I never found a glowing mushroom patch. RNG will be unfavorable at times, but if you make things too rare, you run a higher risk of those missing out. They've fixed this somewhat with gold crates sometimes dropping hearts, and the angler skipping repeat info accessories if you're holding what he tried to give you.

They're not all nearly identical, mainly just the early starting stuff. That's another thing on progression- not only do you gain stronger things, but things tend to become more interesting throughout the game. That's why the basic stuff is kind of plain. After EoC, stuff starts to get a bit cooler.

As for stacking accessories, I suppose, but it may be more trouble than it's worth. You don't really need more than one hermes boots, unless you intend to craft all its upgrades, which wouldn't be able to fit in the same slot anyway. You don't have to take every extra copy with you.

Also you'd be surprised, I've got a friend who hasn't played in years and on our playthrough, he tends to only play about an hour at a time. Besides getting lucky and finding an enchanted sword, and me with ancient shadow leggings, we haven't really gotten anywhere after two hours. I can progress much more quickly since I have 9 years of experience on me, but he's still relearning everything and so we're taking it slower. The first time Terraria experience is vastly different to having several years of gameplay. That's why they made Expert and Master modes, for those who find the game too easy. They do need some tweaks, but to the seasoned Terraria player who has their issues with Expert, imagine a new player with normal mode. It's arguably much more important to make the standard first (and possibly only) playthrough as fun, engaging, and as least frustrating as possible. We've also got Journey mode that allows toggling the difficulty modes for those who may not like some aspects of Expert and Master.

I've grown up with this game and used to be sour at how so much of the early stuff seems so easy now. I was so certain that they nerfed Skeletron to the ground in 1.2 update. Nope, no changes besides drops. I found him difficult in 1.1 but now I think he's a piece of cake, but it's because I've gotten much better at the game.

That's not to say I think the game is perfectly balanced though. For instance, EoW needs a heavy buff, yoyos early on over-compensate for melee's lack of range, and Magic Missile, Flamelash, and Sunfury feel like hardmode items now. They're still doing balance tests, and have a thread for balance feedback, so we can voice our thoughts on what's too strong or weak and wait and see.
 
The point of having so many ores (and really, we're talking about 4 pre-Hardmode) is to give you some reward on your way to other rewards. It doesn't matter if the reward lasts 5 minutes or 3 years; it provides impulsion to continue playing.

You should look into the psychological concept of a Skinner box. Most randomized games lean into it on some level, Terraria included. In particular, note the relationship between frequency of the reward and engagement.
It's not a skinner box if every time you click the button you get the treat without a delay in gratification or refusal of the treat itself. Terraria showers you with treats, it's not a skinner box, it's a buffet for people who like to indulge in mindless eating.


I didn't say anything about "accessibility". And I didn't accuse it of being slower paced so much as not having much stuff in it. There's less to do, and while that makes what little there is individually more meaningful, the arc of play is not as engaging as it would be if there were more stuff in it.
"I kept digging farther and farther, carving tunnel after tunnel" ; "There was no indication that what I was doing was actually accomplishing anything." ;

"It was only after I read the Wiki, learned how the game worked and gained some kind of explicit goal did I decide to keep playing."

You said you didn't mention anything about accessibility, but the slower progression due to less items in itself makes the game less accessible, a game can indeed be too sparse but it can also be too full of content. You don't have to shower the player with items every 4 minutes to make them feel like they're progressing and I'm sure once you read the wiki you actually felt like you were working towards something even if it was at a slower pace. It's just that the game never communicated it properly to you and you eventually got bored when the game ran out of content. It wasn't the pace that was the problem, it was the lack of stuff, but you can have more stuff while still keeping the slower pace.

I for one do not play games to engage with a community; I play games to play games. Enforced community engagement (ie: you'll never figure out X without the aggregate random contributions of thousands of other people) is not a positive aspect of any game to me. That doesn't make it necessarily negative, but it's not why I'm playing.
Fine, you don't care about the community, some people care, that's the point we all have different tastes. Also it was just used as an example, I'm not saying the game should force you to look up wiki's, videos or reddit posts, just that a slower paced progression is liked by others and isn't a bad thing to have as an option.

You can go on and on and on with "optional expansions". You can make "options" that cater to increasingly niche parts of your audience.

Or you can get on with creating compelling features that the majority of your playerbase will actually enjoy.

Think of the development effort needed to do what you suggest. Just for one example, consider having an option to change the crafting recipe for mana stars. That would mean that the crafting database now needs to be, to some degree, world-specific. And I know that it's not coded to be world-specific...*armchair developer ensues*... Except... not really. All of these routines are hard-coded (I believe), so they live within the game's code. It's not too difficult to...*amrchair developer intensifies*...Crafting data isn't actually in the game's code; it's in a database file somewhere else. So now you have two database files, which have to...*Armchair developer ultra mode*..So while Expert Mode was certainly non-trivial to implement, doing what you suggest would be far harder to make work. And note that this is just one aspect of your suggestion. Overall...*God mode armchair dev*... approaches the effort of designing a Terraria 2.

The question therefore is this: is investing that time worth the gain in satisfying a (small?) portion of their playerbase, compared to other changes that can improve the game for more of their players?

Equally importantly, can they design such a thing in a way that satisfies all players who might be interested?

Here's what I mean by that last part. I don't play Expert Mode...

The thing with compelling features that players actually enjoy is that most people don't have the imagination to imagine how such features would actually work and so they shun them unless they actually get to see them implemented. People also have a very narrow field when it comes to the world around them, just because a lot of people, yourself included like the game the way it is, doesn't mean there aren't people who would like to see optional difficulties. Master mode is pretty popular, if it was just a forum post with someone explaining master mode to others, you probably would have said the same "sure you can add niche features like a master mode or you can add compelling features the players actually enjoy".

There's no need to play arm chair developer with me, I have an understanding of how difficult certain changes can be. I doubt different crafting recipes for different worlds is as difficult as you make it out to be, the biggest problem is just the sheer number of items and having to update two different crafting databases. Maybe the devs can write code that allows them to use only 1 crafting file which will hold two or more different styles of recipes for each required item which the game will switch between depending on the mode.

Of course they could always just give the option for a larger world with the ability to lower the contents like chests and ore, that won't be as hard, there are already world creation options and custom seeds that do that.

Also let's remove expert mode because you don't find it compelling.


But part of my enjoyment of the game is taking the time to curate my ever growing collection of stuff. The game would get so much less interesting for me if you did something like give the player infinite inventory (which is why, despite being in Journey Mode, I'm not researching and duplicating everything). Because if you do that, then there's no reason to have a base at all. Not even for crafting stations; you could just carry them with you.

Yes, it's really annoying to have to terminate a Dungeon or Jungle dive to go drop off your current loot. But these moments have their benefits to the flow of the game. They make for natural break points for stopping play for the time being. Retreading terrain makes you familiar with your cavern networks (useful when Hardmode comes along and you need to find your way around. Admittedly not as useful since 1.3 gave us a map).

And lastly, it should be noted that 1.4 gave us yet another personal storage item: the Void Vault/Bag, so pre-Hardmode you can get 120 items worth of inventory space. And 1.4 also has Money Trough drops, unlike prior editions where that was a drop from a Hardmode enemy.

I never said anything about an infinite inventory, I suggested things like more stackable items or the option for less common loot and materials. Again you're playing arm chair developer, talking to me about break points like I don't know what those are. Break points and down time are not annoying, the annoying part is when they happen before you even get a chance to get into the groove of playing the game, I walk 2 min to the biome I need to explore, 3 min of exploration and my inventory is already full because the game has chests galore and I have to teleport back, this isn't proper break time because I never got to the point where I needed to take a break yet.

It's like if I play an fps game and the game immediately falls into 10 min of silence after I shoot 2 guys and then I shoot two guys after which there is 10 more min of silence, I'm sick of teleporting back to my home. Void bags and chest are only available after you kill skeletron, which in master difficulty will take a player some preparation and that means having to endure more "break times".


That's not why the cost for star-to-mana was changed. It was changed to make mage builds actually work early-game. Pre-1.2, mages were a late-pre-Hardmode feature; the only available magic weapons were in the Dungeon or the Underworld. By that point in time, it was reasonable to expect that people would have come across enough stars to have decent mana.

However, if your intent is to make mages a viable class pre-EoC, then you need players to be able to get decent mana earlier in the game. If you can't get enough mana to power gem wands early on, why bother having them in the game?

Also, do remember that stars have uses other than for mana. By decreasing the mana cost, and giving people lots of Stars, things like the Star Cannon become much more viable. 1.2 also allowed Jester's Arrows to be craftible from Stars, which make arrow-based ranger builds more viable early-game.

Less mana early on means magical weapons will have to be used more strategically until you get the proper amount of mana, it's the same as having to upgrade your sword, you aren't just given such things for free because there would be no point in playing the game, for an armchair developer you sure don't get basic gameplay principles. Next time I play spore I'll just remove the DNA system or give myself infinite DNA and unlock every creature part so I can use them as soon as I start the creature stage, because if I can't use the cool stuff immediately, what's the point of it being in the game?
I can still use my vile thorn with only half the mana, it'll just mean that I'll have to be more careful and switch to other weapons more frequently. You can be a mage and have a "side arm". Stars can be made more frequently available after you kill EoW, that way way the progression is smoother and you get an extra reward for defeating a boss.

Geez I'm good at this, I should get a dev armchair as well.

Thinking on this, I just realized something: I don't buy that this is the case.

There's no series of "barely different" weapons.

And the magical weapons? These are all radically different from one another once you get past the gem wand tier. The vilethorn, water bolt, magic missile (which is God-tier now, BTW), they could not be more different from one another.

So you must be talking specifically about the base crafted weapons: swords, bows, and wands. The other items, by and large, are found; these are made.

So if your accussation is that the developers have only been adding worthless "more stat" items to the game... where are they?

And once you get Hallow-tier and beyond items, things get pretty interesting.

The thing about the basic crafted weapons are that they're... basic. For the most part, they're tools that provide consistent damage in predictable ways. They're not supposed to be flashy; flash is reserved for gear that you find from drops, chests, or craft from specialized materials. This pushes people into finding chests, drops, or specialized crafting materials. This is why early pre-Hardmode is different from late pre-Hardmode.

And that's really important to the feel of Terraria. It is as it has always been.


Magical items are the exception, for the most part it really is just items that vary in size, knockback and damage. I don't agree with skipping weapons, I took a 5 min stroll and found an Ice blade that does 18 damage plus bonus stats, the weapons is already better than Light's bane, a sword you craft by getting demonite ore from bosses, why is a more difficult item to get, also less powerful? Never mind, I took a walk in the other direction and I found an Enchanted sword that deals 24 damage, the Light's bane is made redundant, there is no point in bothering with it now, it's just a filler item that exists for the sake of existing so you can use it as a material later. The Ice blade and the Enchanted sword? Both the same, both shoot a projectile with a cooldown, different colors, different stats, same weapon, totally not redundant, both of them found and not crafted, barely any effort to get them. The crafted early swords? Now they're useless as well, amazing progression, sit on your developer armchair and tell me more about how progression in games works.

Trident, Rotted fork, different stats, different look, same weapon. Same for flails and bows and throwable weapons and whatever. I had to look back to check the name of the sword was Ice blade, I forget many of the item names, I just change between them too quickly. What was it... fiery mace or whatever it was called, it dealt 20 damage when I found it, then I upgraded it and it lost it's stat bonus so it became 18 damage. Doesn't matter, 10 min later it was gone from my inventory, no one will remember the fiery mace, it was such a crucial item, definitely got to know it.

Also who cares whether the starting craftable weapons are flashy or not, I'm talking about usefulness, they provide consistent damage yada yada, and you waste time mining for ore to get one of these "consistent" damage weapons or you take a 5 min walk and you already have items from chests that are better. What's the point in crafting these early tools if you'll never use them? Just so you can give a glance and decide you don't want them? Do you even think before typing? If chests didn't appear every 30 seconds and the rarity of items was higher, maybe you'd consider using one of them "basic tools".




That's certainly one thing that could happen.

Another thing that could happen is that the player in question learns that stars are useless, because they don't have anything that uses them.

One of the most important thing that 1.2 did was making early-game mages possible.

If you want players to understand the breadth of the options available to them, then you need those players to be able to experience those options as soon as possible. Because once you start teaching them to rely on X and Y, trying to introduce them to Z 6-10 hours into the game just isn't going to be as successful as doing so from the beginning.

Give them magical weapons and let them earn the mana. Simple as.

They'll see that there are weapons that use mana and they'll see that the weapons are cool and they'll see that they don't have enough mana which will in turn make them want to explore to find more stars and just like that the player has a goal. It's not rocket science, you give a good gun and you keep the ammo sparse, it's been a common thing in game design since before the dinosaurs walked the earth. As an armchair developer you sure do disappoint.

The Vilethorn is a nice weapon. But it is only a good weapon if you're really good at staying away from enemies and controlling your character. In short, it's good because you're really good at playing the game.

And I think that's really your problem: the game isn't like you remember it. Terraria 1.2 is more dense than 1.1, but it's not really that much more dense. Oh yes, there's more stuff, but there's not that many more weapons. So what changed for you?

You did. You got better. You can get from a virgin character on a virgin world to the Vilethorn in two days. In my initial playthrough, even with help from the Wiki, that took me at least 10 hours of play, if not 15.

The problem is that you know the game well enough that you can burn through its content quickly. That's why you encounter so much stuff so quickly: because you're not frequently dying and going back to spawn, having to trudge back through to where you were.

And I see this in my own playthroughs of the game. I still remember part of the layout of my very first Terraria 1.1 world. Not so much because it was memorable, but because of how long I spent playing it. And that wasn't beause 1.1 didn't have as much stuff; it was because I wasn't nearly as good at the game. I died, a lot. I could cover the surface of an entire small map in the Graveyard Biome with my headstones from just that playthrough.

The game didn't speed up; you got faster.

Nah man, I still suck. I literally just point at the enemies with the vilethorn and they can't get to me and die, that's it. There is no grand strategy. I broke a few pots and got bombs, I went to the Corruption, the corruption thorns don't grow properly so I just walked past everything unhinged, threw a few bombs, got the vilethorn. It's not expert play, if I downloaded Terraria 1.0 I would have to make a house for the demolitions guy and get dynamite or a dryad so I can convert the corrupted stone. The biome itself will be more dangerous as it would be filled with thorns.


I respect you as a person, I just don't agree with your opinions, there's no point in trying to impress me with your game development and design knowledge.
 
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At least according to the wiki, about 1 out of 10 nights are meteor showers.

You obtaining the vilethorn is a sequence skip, and that's not exactly a bad thing. You've become more skilled at the game and know how to obtain one as well as avoid the dangers of the Corruption with minimal gear. You can kill Skeletron first night as well to get that early Muramasa, but the new player likely wouldn't be able to do that. Melee and rangers have gear as soon as they acquire some wood- mage still needs gems and ore and mana stars, unless they score a spark wand. Again, 3 feels too low, but I understand why they decreased it down from 10.

Nicol mentioned a lot of good points, so I'll try to avoid unnecessary repetition and reply to part of this post.

You can't experience new content if you download older versions anyway, but there are still hellstone towers. If you really want the same effect, mine 20 obsidian and toss them? Burning buildings were more of an inconvenience than a challenge. By making more towers made of obsidian now, the skull has less purpose, but now it has more tinkers. I honestly don't see this being much of a problem.

You never had to make every armor in the game, even at 1.0. You're free to for completionist's sake though.

Chests aren't super common either.. in fact one playthrough with a friend, it took us hours to find just one. There was also a surprising lack of hearts through our journey, and I felt I owed them an explanation. In 1.2.. or 1.3, I went a whole playthrough without a magic mirror, because I couldn't find one. On another (or maybe the same one) I never found a glowing mushroom patch. RNG will be unfavorable at times, but if you make things too rare, you run a higher risk of those missing out. They've fixed this somewhat with gold crates sometimes dropping hearts, and the angler skipping repeat info accessories if you're holding what he tried to give you.

They're not all nearly identical, mainly just the early starting stuff. That's another thing on progression- not only do you gain stronger things, but things tend to become more interesting throughout the game. That's why the basic stuff is kind of plain. After EoC, stuff starts to get a bit cooler.

As for stacking accessories, I suppose, but it may be more trouble than it's worth. You don't really need more than one hermes boots, unless you intend to craft all its upgrades, which wouldn't be able to fit in the same slot anyway. You don't have to take every extra copy with you.

Also you'd be surprised, I've got a friend who hasn't played in years and on our playthrough, he tends to only play about an hour at a time. Besides getting lucky and finding an enchanted sword, and me with ancient shadow leggings, we haven't really gotten anywhere after two hours. I can progress much more quickly since I have 9 years of experience on me, but he's still relearning everything and so we're taking it slower. The first time Terraria experience is vastly different to having several years of gameplay. That's why they made Expert and Master modes, for those who find the game too easy. They do need some tweaks, but to the seasoned Terraria player who has their issues with Expert, imagine a new player with normal mode. It's arguably much more important to make the standard first (and possibly only) playthrough as fun, engaging, and as least frustrating as possible. We've also got Journey mode that allows toggling the difficulty modes for those who may not like some aspects of Expert and Master.

I've grown up with this game and used to be sour at how so much of the early stuff seems so easy now. I was so certain that they nerfed Skeletron to the ground in 1.2 update. Nope, no changes besides drops. I found him difficult in 1.1 but now I think he's a piece of cake, but it's because I've gotten much better at the game.

That's not to say I think the game is perfectly balanced though. For instance, EoW needs a heavy buff, yoyos early on over-compensate for melee's lack of range, and Magic Missile, Flamelash, and Sunfury feel like hardmode items now. They're still doing balance tests, and have a thread for balance feedback, so we can voice our thoughts on what's too strong or weak and wait and see.
The problem is, I don't think the rareness of stars was the issue, the lack of early mage weapons was. You achieve nothing by showering the player with stars if they still don't have a weapon to use.
The corruption was easy, you no longer need dynamite and the thorns don't grow out as they should, I just ran past everything, I'm really not that good at the game, I just know here stuff is. The biome needs an update, how can the corruption pre-hardmode stay the same for so many years, yet the jungle has 10 times the content and danger? An underground desert is harder than the corruption, a regular cave is harder.

You never had to make every armor but there was a smoother progression between armors and each armor felt effective in its own way, even after I got molten armor, earlier armors could still be used due to mana boosts, melee speed boosts and so on. Necro armor, Meteorite armor, Shadow armor, I never felt like they outgrew their purpose completely and all of them looked vastly unique and polished in terms of silhouettes and colors.

You are right that I don't have to take copies though, I don't know what makes me do it, I guess after 4 chests in a row with the same items, I at least want to be able to sell them.
The items being plain is not a problem, just the lack of use and longevity, if some of these more powerful items you find in the chest spawned deeper into the underground instead, you'd at least have a reason to craft better starting weapons with the ore you mine, so you can go deeper and get better chest loot.


The ability for a larger world with less ore and chests would be great, of course mods will come out eventually and I'll even give it a shot myself. However I really think the corruption should be harder and the blood sprites should be restored.
 
..I'm confused, why are you throwing around the term "arm chair developer" to dismiss others' views on the game, then insist that your vision of game design is the one and only correct way? This is getting borderline ad hominem. "Geez I'm good at this, I should get a dev armchair as well. " ..maybe cool it with the self-congratulations as well.

Also confused by this statement " It wasn't the pace that was the problem, it was the lack of stuff, but you can have more stuff while still keeping the slower pace. "

..But yet you now say that more stuff is the problem? And are arguing too much stuff does the same amount of damage? Isn't that more stuff while keeping a slower pace?

You also greatly exaggerate going 3 or 4 minutes and having to head back because of a full inventory.. I'm able to go 2, 3, even 4 hours sometimes on one mining trek. You must be bringing waaaay too much stuff with you, and/or taking much more than you need, such as duplicate accessories.

New players won't know about the quick shadow orb item method and will probably get shredded by corruption mobs, as well as suffer fall damage when trying to descend the chasms. Vilethorn IS decent, but it's also a mid pre-hardmode weapon. Of course it will dominate early game.

Light's Bane got a much needed buff in 1.4, and maybe it could still use one, however demonite is technically a pre-boss resource since you can acquire it in small amounts underground with bombs or a gold pickaxe. The underground snow is much more difficult than the normal underground, so a more powerful weapon is justified. As for the Enchanted Sword, it's very rare, much more rare in 1.4. It's not a reliable weapon to count on getting.

I'm able to use new weapons for at least an hour or two before finding something else.. again, I think you are greatly exaggerating here. What 50 items are you picking up at the start of the game in less than 5 minutes? What 50 items are you picking up by the time you can fight EoC? What 50 items are you picking up when finishing up pre-hardmode? In less than 5 minutes?
 
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..I'm confused, why are you throwing around the term "arm chair developer" to dismiss others' views on the game, then insist that your vision of game design is the one and only correct way? This is getting borderline ad hominem. "Geez I'm good at this, I should get a dev armchair as well. " ..maybe cool it with the self-congratulations as well.

Also confused by this statement " It wasn't the pace that was the problem, it was the lack of stuff, but you can have more stuff while still keeping the slower pace. "

..But yet you now say that more stuff is the problem? And are arguing too much stuff does the same amount of damage? Isn't that more stuff while keeping a slower pace?

You also greatly exaggerate going 3 or 4 minutes and having to head back because of a full inventory.. I'm able to go 2, 3, even 4 hours sometimes on one mining trek. You must be bringing waaaay too much stuff with you, and/or taking much more than you need, such as duplicate accessories.

New players won't know about the quick shadow orb item method and will probably get shredded by corruption mobs, as well as suffer fall damage when trying to descend the chasms. Vilethorn IS decent, but it's also a mid pre-hardmode weapon. Of course it will dominate early game.

Light's Bane got a much needed buff in 1.4, and maybe it could still use one, however demonite is technically a pre-boss resource since you can acquire it in small amounts underground with bombs or a gold pickaxe. The underground snow is much more difficult than the normal underground, so a more powerful weapon is justified. As for the Enchanted Sword, it's very rare, much more rare in 1.4. It's not a reliable weapon to count on getting.

I'm able to use new weapons for at least an hour or two before finding something else.. again, I think you are greatly exaggerating here. What 50 items are you picking up at the start of the game in less than 5 minutes? What 50 items are you picking up by the time you can fight EoC? What 50 items are you picking up when finishing up pre-hardmode? In less than 5 minutes?
There's nothing to be confused about, I gave my opinion on what I like and he dismissed it in a condescending manner, trying to explain to me how the features I'd like to see are useless based on his personal opinion because he prefers a different style of gameplay (doesn't even like playing expert mode and is talking to someone playing on master why it makes no sense to request a harder game or a game with slower progression). There is no need to talk about skinner boxes and down time or break time as he calls it, I get what those are, no need to act like I'm clueless and I know nothing about the human psyche. A lot of what he says simply contradicts what is seen and proven to work in many titles.

Also explaining in detail why it would be hard to code a specific feature is unnecessary if you also admit you have little clue what you're talking about, you're just scratching your ego at that point.

Also YES you can have more items while still keeping the pace slow, for instance you just spread them out which extends the amount of time you'd need to play the game to get to the "end", however right now both pre-hardmode and hardmode are jam packed with things which you switch between on a moment to moment basis, it's not properly spread out content. Aside from that, you can add more stuff to a game while keeping it reasonable, even when it comes to spreading out the items because there comes a point in which there are just too many identical items added for the sake of having more stuff instead of being added because they make the gaming experience more fun or unique. You either don't need so many redundant armors and weapons or you need to be given enough time before switching to a better one and so on.

Terraria 1.0 could have benefited from more variety, key word being variety, not just uninspired equipment so you can brag you added 1000 new items. When 1.1 came out for the most part all the armors looked identical except for a color swap and a unique helmet, the bosses were re-skinned enemies you already fought, even if the pattern was a bit different, it still felt like you were repeating the same things you already did. It was boring, more for the sake of more, not because it was of good quality. Sorry if that sounds controversial.

I kid you not, I empty my inventory, sometimes I even forget the potions in the chest, 10 min later It's full again, it's a large world and I'm shocked by how many chests there are, the caves continue forever and ever and ever and every nook and cranny has a chest or a house with a chest and I'm wondering what the hell happened. I used to dig quietly for a while before discovering a cavern and a while before finding something useful there. Not sure if this is a lucky world generation or a cursed one, just let me explore god damn. Do you think I'd spend so long writing walls of text if I was lying?

If the vilethorn dominates, then it should be an achievement to get it, not a 5 min walk. Of course new players will find it slightly difficult, they're still learning the game mechanics, I'm not talking about new players, I'm talking about me playing on master mode, is master mode for new players? No. OR yes, maybe, who knows at this point, hardmode would probably kick my :red:, I just wish pre-hardmode wasn't looked down upon as something to skip to get to the "good stuff".

Still, whether you kill a boss, or you mine for demonite, it's more effort than just walking a bit in the overworld and stumbling across an item more powerful than the one that requires effort. This is not a "It's a pre-hardmode weapon, wut did u expec?", it's a badly designed progression. Are you telling me, I'm killing these bosses and mining that ore just so I can make a pickaxe and move on? Is that all it is? Why do these items even exist.

Not sure how rare these weapons have gotten, but if the difference between a sword I had to mine and kill bosses to get and a random chest item is just a point or two, why craft it? Also why is a snow biome more dangerous than a vile, evil, rotten land that spreads like a disease? You get a flying germ and an over sized worm, that's the biome, the end, cya in hardmode, when the fun begins, yet some of the more powerful weapons are in this easy to traverse biome.

It's a combination of stuff, weapons, vanity, accessories, potions (god these chests are full of potions) and I also nick statues and furniture. I'm a kleptomaniac I know. If I had the space I'd steal the tiles as well, but I'm already carrying 3 ice mirrors, a magic mirror, those things that let you slide walls, two clouds in bottles, a blizzard in a bottle, a mace I found, this boomerang, the ice blade, a band of regeneration, the mace, this musket, these things that are used for crafting dye, gems, ice skates, ice machine (I don't even know what I'll use it for), a purifier, sand castle bucket (that's an important one), statues, this cool painting, can't forget the piano, the ore (of course) and... nvm I ran out of inventory halfway through.

I'll go deposit everything, crawl back down, click loot all 3 times and that's it, back to the house babyyyyyyyyyyyy.




PS: The whole time while writing this I kept thinking something was crawling on my screen, but it was just the black ball on your animated banner. Got me good.
 
There's nothing to be confused about, I gave my opinion on what I like and he dismissed it in a condescending manner, trying to explain to me how the features I'd like to see are useless based on his personal opinion because he prefers a different style of gameplay (doesn't even like playing expert mode and is talking to someone playing on master why it makes no sense to request a harder game or a game with slower progression). There is no need to talk about skinner boxes and down time or break time as he calls it, I get what those are, no need to act like I'm clueless and I know nothing about the human psyche. A lot of what he says simply contradicts what is seen and proven to work in many titles.

Also explaining in detail why it would be hard to code a specific feature is unnecessary if you also admit you have little clue what you're talking about, you're just scratching your ego at that point.

Also YES you can have more items while still keeping the pace slow, for instance you just spread them out which extends the amount of time you'd need to play the game to get to the "end", however right now both pre-hardmode and hardmode are jam packed with things which you switch between on a moment to moment basis, it's not properly spread out content. Aside from that, you can add more stuff to a game while keeping it reasonable, even when it comes to spreading out the items because there comes a point in which there are just too many identical items added for the sake of having more stuff instead of being added because they make the gaming experience more fun or unique. You either don't need so many redundant armors and weapons or you need to be given enough time before switching to a better one and so on.

Terraria 1.0 could have benefited from more variety, key word being variety, not just uninspired equipment so you can brag you added 1000 new items. When 1.1 came out for the most part all the armors looked identical except for a color swap and a unique helmet, the bosses were re-skinned enemies you already fought, even if the pattern was a bit different, it still felt like you were repeating the same things you already did. It was boring, more for the sake of more, not because it was of good quality. Sorry if that sounds controversial.

I kid you not, I empty my inventory, sometimes I even forget the potions in the chest, 10 min later It's full again, it's a large world and I'm shocked by how many chests there are, the caves continue forever and ever and ever and every nook and cranny has a chest or a house with a chest and I'm wondering what the hell happened. I used to dig quietly for a while before discovering a cavern and a while before finding something useful there. Not sure if this is a lucky world generation or a cursed one, just let me explore god damn. Do you think I'd spend so long writing walls of text if I was lying?

If the vilethorn dominates, then it should be an achievement to get it, not a 5 min walk. Of course new players will find it slightly difficult, they're still learning the game mechanics, I'm not talking about new players, I'm talking about me playing on master mode, is master mode for new players? No. OR yes, maybe, who knows at this point, hardmode would probably kick my :red:, I just wish pre-hardmode wasn't looked down upon as something to skip to get to the "good stuff".

Still, whether you kill a boss, or you mine for demonite, it's more effort than just walking a bit in the overworld and stumbling across an item more powerful than the one that requires effort. This is not a "It's a pre-hardmode weapon, wut did u expec?", it's a badly designed progression. Are you telling me, I'm killing these bosses and mining that ore just so I can make a pickaxe and move on? Is that all it is? Why do these items even exist.

Not sure how rare these weapons have gotten, but if the difference between a sword I had to mine and kill bosses to get and a random chest item is just a point or two, why craft it? Also why is a snow biome more dangerous than a vile, evil, rotten land that spreads like a disease? You get a flying germ and an over sized worm, that's the biome, the end, cya in hardmode, when the fun begins, yet some of the more powerful weapons are in this easy to traverse biome.

It's a combination of stuff, weapons, vanity, accessories, potions (god these chests are full of potions) and I also nick statues and furniture. I'm a kleptomaniac I know. If I had the space I'd steal the tiles as well, but I'm already carrying 3 ice mirrors, a magic mirror, those things that let you slide walls, two clouds in bottles, a blizzard in a bottle, a mace I found, this boomerang, the ice blade, a band of regeneration, the mace, this musket, these things that are used for crafting dye, gems, ice skates, ice machine (I don't even know what I'll use it for), a purifier, sand castle bucket (that's an important one), statues, this cool painting, can't forget the piano, the ore (of course) and... nvm I ran out of inventory halfway through.

I'll go deposit everything, crawl back down, click loot all 3 times and that's it, back to the house babyyyyyyyyyyyy.




PS: The whole time while writing this I kept thinking something was crawling on my screen, but it was just the black ball on your animated banner. Got me good.
Well, I won't try to defend what they were saying. They can do that if they want. Though I was confused since you were kind of acting the same way you were accusing them of doing.

I know Terraria has a lot of items, but I think this is a good thing since it allows more options for people to use. If there was only one good weapon to fight EoC with, everyone would use it, on every single playthrough. Having different weapons lets people use what they like and what's most effective, but I'm just not seeing what you mean by upgrades every 4 minutes.. that's an exaggeration.

And you're taking waaay too much with you. You only need one mirror- magic mirror or ice mirror. You don't need both.. and you don't need multiples. Climbing gear doesn't need to be in inventory if not actively using them, same with a cloud in a bottle (which you only need one of) and the blizzard bottle. Band of regen should be worn or stored in vanity slots if you need to swap it in to heal up. You don't need two maces. Gems are lower priority now since you can grow them. Ice skates can be worn. You mean purification powder? You only need that on trips to the Corruption. Sand castle bucket.. I hope you're just joking, cuz that's definitely not an essential for a mining trip. And.. piano..? Why? Part of Terraria is inventory management. You don't need to bring non-essential items, and you definitely don't need to bring multiples of things like mirrors. Just the one will do. The game also gives you the piggy bank and safe, and later on, the defender's forge and void vault/bag. The game is super generous with storage. Again, I really doubt you fill up your main inventory in less than 5 minutes as you claim.. you are exaggerating trying to prove a point, which doesn't seem fair. I'm a collector and like to have one of everything, and even I can go hours before needing to return.. and I barely use my piggy bank, let alone the safe, forge, and void bag I have yet to try out.

On your mining trips, you should really only have maybe 10 slots filled with stuff or less. Tools, 1-4 weapons, torches, a mirror, healing potions, and maybe something related to your current goal. Buff potions for bosses, powder for Corruption, bait for fishing, etc. You don't need to carry everything you own on you. If you have to travel back after looting 3 chests, sorry, but you're definitely doing something wrong there. Again, as a collector, I can easily last 10+ chests without needing to return. Try to use the piggy/money trough and safe if you really need all that space.

And again, the Light's Bane is a pre-boss sword. It doesn't need that much demonite to make, and you can find enough underground to craft one. Not the underground Corruption, but you can find some there too. Demonite's scattered across the world, and it's easy to see, since it's as if you had a spelunker effect for just that ore. Generally it's harder to obtain the Ice Blade, so it gets to be a little stronger.

They could maybe buff the Corruption mobs a bit, but you could also ask why Gingerbread Men are more deadly than Queen Bee. The underground snow biome serves as an alternate way to gain slightly better gear to prepare for EoC, EoW, and Skeletron. Blizzard in a Bottle is better than Cloud, Ice Boomerang is better than Enchanted, Ice Blade is better than Light's Bane.

EoW has more purpose than just the pickaxe. It's how you gain shadow armor, and now unlocks meteorites as of 1.4. The EoW is also one step in unlocking the Void Vault/Bag, for additional inventory which may be handy for you. EoW's defeat also unlocks the Barkeep, which unlocks the DD2 event which leads to a few different weapons and armor and another inventory expansion: Defender's Forge. EoW is kind of an important boss.. now only if it could be buffed back to its former glory, or beefed up more than it is currently.

If you're able to easily reach down to the Shadow Orbs early on in Master Mode, then maybe you're just good at the game. You see this skip as poor game design, but I see it as non-linear game design. Those who have the skill can skip ahead if they so choose so. I kind of like this, as opposed to hardmode, where you have to grind out every ore in order. But in pre-hm, the copper pickaxe can mine up to gold/platinum. It gives the player more freedom, less holding them back. If the player cannot manage the Corruption early on, they can go underground and work up the tiers.

But yeh.. I don't really see the issue here other than you could work on your inventory management. The game gives you SO many expansions, and now there's even that one portal potion that lets you warp home and warp back to where you were when used. What more does the game need to provide? Even if you collect every block, every gem, every torch, every accessory, every chest, even all the furniture in every cabin, every pressure plate, every enemy drop, every banner, every statue, every trap, and.. anything I'm missing, the 50 inventory slots plus 40 from the piggy and 40 from the safe give you more than enough, and I'm sorry but I cannot believe you are filling up in just 4 minutes. Even 20 minutes is hard to believe. Are you maybe carrying crafted bricks, stucco, gemspark and so on with you..? In that case I could see filling up sooner. But.. still not in 4 minutes. Something wrong is happening here.

As for my sig.. heh. That's Snickerbobble. Wish I hadn't messed up by missing a few frames when he reaches the right side.

Actually.. about my sig. That's my character, and one really cool thing about having some side options in Terraria, is that it allows you to better customize and theme your character. I have a star-themed character, so jester arrows and meteorite hold up well for her. An ice-themed character, who can make use of the snow biome's items and loosely the water weapons of the dungeon. For my Snickerbobble character, flails and pseudo-flails work in place of punching. Now not everything in-game works for literally every character, but with a decent amount of side grades, people are more easily able to play as their characters, and that's awesome. Meteors technically don't need to be in the game, but they give us more fun toys to play with. Dungeon, in terms of pre-hardmode, doesn't need to be there either. Many areas of the game don't need to be there, but they're there for more things to do, and more possibilities for character customization and things to play with.

So many options.. and you make it seem like everything's "about the same" where you only use something for 4 minutes. Terraria deserves way more credit than that. You're exaggerating to the extreme here. 3 chests and you have to return home? 4 minutes and your weapon is obsolete? 4 minutes and your inventory is packed to the brim? I-.. can we be fair here?
 
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Well, I won't try to defend what they were saying. They can do that if they want. Though I was confused since you were kind of acting the same way you were accusing them of doing.

I know Terraria has a lot of items, but I think this is a good thing since it allows more options for people to use. If there was only one good weapon to fight EoC with, everyone would use it, on every single playthrough. Having different weapons lets people use what they like and what's most effective, but I'm just not seeing what you mean by upgrades every 4 minutes.. that's an exaggeration.

And you're taking waaay too much with you. You only need one mirror- magic mirror or ice mirror. You don't need both.. and you don't need multiples. Climbing gear doesn't need to be in inventory if not actively using them, same with a cloud in a bottle (which you only need one of) and the blizzard bottle. Band of regen should be worn or stored in vanity slots if you need to swap it in to heal up. You don't need two maces. Gems are lower priority now since you can grow them. Ice skates can be worn. You mean purification powder? You only need that on trips to the Corruption. Sand castle bucket.. I hope you're just joking, cuz that's definitely not an essential for a mining trip. And.. piano..? Why? Part of Terraria is inventory management. You don't need to bring non-essential items, and you definitely don't need to bring multiples of things like mirrors. Just the one will do. The game also gives you the piggy bank and safe, and later on, the defender's forge and void vault/bag. The game is super generous with storage. Again, I really doubt you fill up your main inventory in less than 5 minutes as you claim.. you are exaggerating trying to prove a point, which doesn't seem fair. I'm a collector and like to have one of everything, and even I can go hours before needing to return.. and I barely use my piggy bank, let alone the safe, forge, and void bag I have yet to try out.

On your mining trips, you should really only have maybe 10 slots filled with stuff or less. Tools, 1-4 weapons, torches, a mirror, healing potions, and maybe something related to your current goal. Buff potions for bosses, powder for Corruption, bait for fishing, etc. You don't need to carry everything you own on you. If you have to travel back after looting 3 chests, sorry, but you're definitely doing something wrong there. Again, as a collector, I can easily last 10+ chests without needing to return. Try to use the piggy/money trough and safe if you really need all that space.

And again, the Light's Bane is a pre-boss sword. It doesn't need that much demonite to make, and you can find enough underground to craft one. Not the underground Corruption, but you can find some there too. Demonite's scattered across the world, and it's easy to see, since it's as if you had a spelunker effect for just that ore. Generally it's harder to obtain the Ice Blade, so it gets to be a little stronger.

They could maybe buff the Corruption mobs a bit, but you could also ask why Gingerbread Men are more deadly than Queen Bee. The underground snow biome serves as an alternate way to gain slightly better gear to prepare for EoC, EoW, and Skeletron. Blizzard in a Bottle is better than Cloud, Ice Boomerang is better than Enchanted, Ice Blade is better than Light's Bane.

EoW has more purpose than just the pickaxe. It's how you gain shadow armor, and now unlocks meteorites as of 1.4. The EoW is also one step in unlocking the Void Vault/Bag, for additional inventory which may be handy for you. EoW's defeat also unlocks the Barkeep, which unlocks the DD2 event which leads to a few different weapons and armor and another inventory expansion: Defender's Forge. EoW is kind of an important boss.. now only if it could be buffed back to its former glory, or beefed up more than it is currently.

If you're able to easily reach down to the Shadow Orbs early on in Master Mode, then maybe you're just good at the game. You see this skip as poor game design, but I see it as non-linear game design. Those who have the skill can skip ahead if they so choose so. I kind of like this, as opposed to hardmode, where you have to grind out every ore in order. But in pre-hm, the copper pickaxe can mine up to gold/platinum. It gives the player more freedom, less holding them back. If the player cannot manage the Corruption early on, they can go underground and work up the tiers.

But yeh.. I don't really see the issue here other than you could work on your inventory management. The game gives you SO many expansions, and now there's even that one portal potion that lets you warp home and warp back to where you were when used. What more does the game need to provide? Even if you collect every block, every gem, every torch, every accessory, every chest, even all the furniture in every cabin, every pressure plate, every enemy drop, every banner, every statue, every trap, and.. anything I'm missing, the 50 inventory slots plus 40 from the piggy and 40 from the safe give you more than enough, and I'm sorry but I cannot believe you are filling up in just 4 minutes. Even 20 minutes is hard to believe. Are you maybe carrying crafted bricks, stucco, gemspark and so on with you..? In that case I could see filling up sooner. But.. still not in 4 minutes. Something wrong is happening here.

As for my sig.. heh. That's Snickerbobble. Wish I hadn't messed up by missing a few frames when he reaches the right side.

Actually.. about my sig. That's my character, and one really cool thing about having some side options in Terraria, is that it allows you to better customize and theme your character. I have a star-themed character, so jester arrows and meteorite hold up well for her. An ice-themed character, who can make use of the snow biome's items and loosely the water weapons of the dungeon. For my Snickerbobble character, flails and pseudo-flails work in place of punching. Now not everything in-game works for literally every character, but with a decent amount of side grades, people are more easily able to play as their characters, and that's awesome. Meteors technically don't need to be in the game, but they give us more fun toys to play with. Dungeon, in terms of pre-hardmode, doesn't need to be there either. Many areas of the game don't need to be there, but they're there for more things to do, and more possibilities for character customization and things to play with.

So many options.. and you make it seem like everything's "about the same" where you only use something for 4 minutes. Terraria deserves way more credit than that. You're exaggerating to the extreme here. 3 chests and you have to return home? 4 minutes and your weapon is obsolete? 4 minutes and your inventory is packed to the brim? I-.. can we be fair here?
Nah it's fine to point things out, good even, sometimes can I also act like a jerk.

Anyway this discussion is just us writing walls of text saying the same thing over and over again. Yes I go in with an empty inventory, yes I get my inventory full after a tiny bit of cave exploration, no I don't have to pick up every item, yes I still do it, done. Let's move on this is getting tiresome, I know about the piggy bank, It's not as useful as you make it out to be.


While I agree with you about the different playstyles thing, my point is, when was the last time you crafted a light's bane and used it as a regular weapon and not just as a material? Yeah I don't remember as well, having useless items is not good game design, either the light's bane gets a buff of 24 damage and the other swords get pushed down, or both light's bane and the enchanted sword have a similar damage output and the enchanted sword isn't just found after a light stroll. Same with any other item in game, give them a reason to exist or delete them, no being a material is not good enough, it's a sword, if you don't want us to use it as one then don't make it a sword.

It's fine you enjoy your character, still I think stars should spawn less often early on, it won't hurt you, if anything it will make the bond with your character stronger as you had to build them up slowly.
Also I'm not good at the game and I disagree that it's a good game design, you can have a non linear game and have the non linear options be challenging and require some effort, there's nothing non linear about me getting the vile thorn anyway, it's what you're supposed to do, crack the orbs, the game even made it easier to do it by just using bombs.

" Meteors technically don't need to be in the game, but they give us more fun toys to play with. Dungeon, in terms of pre-hardmode, doesn't need to be there either. Many areas of the game don't need to be there, but they're there for more things to do, and more possibilities for character customization and things to play with."

Nothing technically needs to be in the game, the difference between meteor items and demonite items is that meteor items are useful and you actually want to craft them, with demonite you just craft the pickaxe and the armor. The dungeon you want to explore because it's a cool location and has cool loot. Again we're just spinning wheels here, I'm baffled as to why you guys are struggling with understanding such simple concepts.

"What more does the game need to provide? "
Stackable items, absurdly large worlds, loot gen options, etc.

Mods will solve this, I always wanted to give Terraria modding a go anyways, once the tools are up to date I'll spend some time learning how to use them so I can tweak the game to my liking, like I always do with any title anyway. Dear Muramassa, I'll do you justice, just wait a bit longer.

Can we discuss something different now? Like making the corruption difficult again, you guys keep talking about how hard the corruption is and how I'm a skilled player, I don't see it, the biome literally has nothing, 2 types of mobs and you walk past them. The jungle is hard, thorns everywhere, all kinds of different creatures, traps and so on, the corruption is a joke.
 
Yes I go in with an empty inventory, yes I get my inventory full after a tiny bit of cave exploration, no I don't have to pick up every item, yes I still do it, done.

Here's the problem. What you said isn't true; it's an exaggeration of the truth.

I would define an "empty inventory" as having at least 30 free slots. And I would define "tiny bit of cave exploration" as reaching from the top of the surface to the point where the background walls go away.

So your claim is that, in that time, you find 30 unstackable items. That's not possible.

Surface chests give you 1-2 unstackable items, some other things that may stack with what you have, and potions which stack with each other. So in total, you may get 4 unique inventory items per chest.

So you'd have to find 8 such chests to run out of 30 free inventory slots. There are quite a few chests in a world, but there aren't that many of them, nor do they spawn so densely that you'd find 8 of them in something described as a "tiny bit of cave exploration".

You are exaggerating the problem to the point of caricature, of creating a strawman version of Terraria which you can rail against. The problem is that, well, it's a strawman; it doesn't resemble the actual game, so it's hard to discuss the matter.

when was the last time you crafted a light's bane and used it as a regular weapon and not just as a material? Yeah I don't remember as well, having useless items is not good game design

Actually, it is.

Remember: Terraria worlds are randomly generated. What happens if you don't get an Ice Blade or Enchanted Sword in your playthrough (in my most recent world, I have yet to find either, but I wasn't going melee, so it didn't matter)? You have to have something which is decent that the game can rely on the player to have. That's the point of ore-craftable weapons: to be that something, that basic tool the game can just expect you to have at a certain point.

Yes, basic ore-crafted weapons are weaker overall than what you can find. That's deliberate; it allows your chest finds/enemy drops to be more meaningful. If you could craft better weapons than you get in chests/drops from basic ore grinding, why would you care about chests?

Also I'm not good at the game

Yes, you are. If you are able to play Master Mode, and be successful at it, then you are good at the game. You may not think that you are, but by any objective measurement, you are.

You don't have to be a master speedrunner-class player to be good at the game.

there's nothing non linear about me getting the vile thorn anyway, it's what you're supposed to do, crack the orbs, the game even made it easier to do it by just using bombs.

The linear/non-linear distinction arises when you have some particular element that is clearly gated off by some mechanic in the game. A linear game enforces this gate both directly and solidly; you must do X or you can't get through. Non-linear games are considered non-linear because they don't gate content off like this. Terraria is somewhere towards the non-linear end: it has rules and enforcement, but it often has backdoors that were built-in by the developers.

You are clearly expected and intended to get a powerful pickaxe before breaking Orbs/Hearts. But the game has explosives which allow you to bypass that if you're clever enough to think of it. The developers could have made evil stone impervious to explosives until the EoW/BoC was defeated, but they didn't.

If you go straight for Orbs/Hearts at the beginning of the game, you are sequence breaking. And yes, if you sequence break, you'll get powerful items that trivialize parts of the game that don't expect you to have broken the sequence. That's why sequence breaks are fun ;)

Like making the corruption difficult again, you guys keep talking about how hard the corruption is and how I'm a skilled player, I don't see it, the biome literally has nothing, 2 types of mobs and you walk past them. The jungle is hard, thorns everywhere, all kinds of different creatures, traps and so on, the corruption is a joke.

So your complaint is that the Jungle, a late-pre-Hardmode biome, is more dangerous than the Corruption, an early-pre-Hardmode biome?

I mean yes, this is true. But... doesn't that make sense?
 
Here's the problem. What you said isn't true; it's an exaggeration of the truth.

I would define an "empty inventory" as having at least 30 free slots. And I would define "tiny bit of cave exploration" as reaching from the top of the surface to the point where the background walls go away.

So your claim is that, in that time, you find 30 unstackable items. That's not possible.

Surface chests give you 1-2 unstackable items, some other things that may stack with what you have, and potions which stack with each other. So in total, you may get 4 unique inventory items per chest.

So you'd have to find 8 such chests to run out of 30 free inventory slots. There are quite a few chests in a world, but there aren't that many of them, nor do they spawn so densely that you'd find 8 of them in something described as a "tiny bit of cave exploration".

You are exaggerating the problem to the point of caricature, of creating a strawman version of Terraria which you can rail against. The problem is that, well, it's a strawman; it doesn't resemble the actual game, so it's hard to discuss the matter.



Actually, it is.

Remember: Terraria worlds are randomly generated. What happens if you don't get an Ice Blade or Enchanted Sword in your playthrough (in my most recent world, I have yet to find either, but I wasn't going melee, so it didn't matter)? You have to have something which is decent that the game can rely on the player to have. That's the point of ore-craftable weapons: to be that something, that basic tool the game can just expect you to have at a certain point.

Yes, basic ore-crafted weapons are weaker overall than what you can find. That's deliberate; it allows your chest finds/enemy drops to be more meaningful. If you could craft better weapons than you get in chests/drops from basic ore grinding, why would you care about chests?



Yes, you are. If you are able to play Master Mode, and be successful at it, then you are good at the game. You may not think that you are, but by any objective measurement, you are.

You don't have to be a master speedrunner-class player to be good at the game.



The linear/non-linear distinction arises when you have some particular element that is clearly gated off by some mechanic in the game. A linear game enforces this gate both directly and solidly; you must do X or you can't get through. Non-linear games are considered non-linear because they don't gate content off like this. Terraria is somewhere towards the non-linear end: it has rules and enforcement, but it often has backdoors that were built-in by the developers.

You are clearly expected and intended to get a powerful pickaxe before breaking Orbs/Hearts. But the game has explosives which allow you to bypass that if you're clever enough to think of it. The developers could have made evil stone impervious to explosives until the EoW/BoC was defeated, but they didn't.

If you go straight for Orbs/Hearts at the beginning of the game, you are sequence breaking. And yes, if you sequence break, you'll get powerful items that trivialize parts of the game that don't expect you to have broken the sequence. That's why sequence breaks are fun ;)



So your complaint is that the Jungle, a late-pre-Hardmode biome, is more dangerous than the Corruption, an early-pre-Hardmode biome?

I mean yes, this is true. But... doesn't that make sense?
Empty inventory as in I placed everything in a chest and only the hotbar has items aside from a set of torches and maybe glowsticks, yes I even dispose of healing potions sometimes and go exploring only to realize I have nothing to heal with. Maybe the wall of texts are too long and you can't be bothered to read what I'm saying, so you're skipping over things, stop, if you can't be bothered to read, you shouldn't reply as you're just embarrassing yourself.

I never claimed I found 30 unstackable items, just enough, you act like the game doesn't have 11-14 different types of potions that spawn in chests, along side with bombs and metal bars AND the un-stackable items. You're not as clever as you think you are. Geez. You have 40 inventory slots aside from the hotbar, 11-14 different types of potions, 4 types of metal bars, 1 set of bombs, glow sticks you find along the way, 4 or 5 unprocessed types of ore from mining, 9-10 unstackable items also items like shurikens, throwing knives, dynamite, the suspicious looking eye and so on, that's like 39 items and we haven't even included mob drops, looms, statues and paintings you can nick from caves. I suck at math and even I can put two and two together.

Also that's just the golden chests, there are different types, all with unique items. Normal chests, frozen chests, sandstone chests, water chests, etc. I wish I was exaggerating.

There's no point in proceeding to reply to you, you're just repeating yourself and you're again trying to explain basic concepts to me in a condescending way while you yourself don't know what you are talking about. Don't worry, I know what non-linear is, I also know useless items when I see them, you can make a game in which you have to grind for a 2 points attack sword or hit a tree and have a 200+ attack sword drop from the sky, you can call that non-linear, I call that stupid. <--- now that was an exaggeration.

Also using freely available bombs to go to a non threatening biome and destroy a container to get an item is about as much of a sequence break as using your pickaxe to mine stone and open chests.

PS: No, the corruption being probably the weakest biome doesn't make sense, the game tries to sell it as evil and threatening, yet everything else is more dangerous and hostile compared to it.
 
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I'm baffled as to why you guys are struggling with understanding such simple concepts.
And I'm baffled at how rude you can be. We've gone at length trying to explain things to you, but like Nicol said, you make a strawman position against the game and continue to attack what simply isn't true. You seem to have completely ignored what I said about how you don't need four mirrors and two of the same weapon. Pianos are not an essential to travel either.

Maybe the wall of texts are too long and you can't be bothered to read what I'm saying, so you're skipping over things, stop, if you can't be bothered to read, you shouldn't reply as you're just embarrassing yourself.
Except this is exactly what you are doing. As far as I can tell, we have addressed all of your points, while you continuously ignore ours when they seem to inconvenience your strawman position and continue to exaggerate an issue that doesn't exist.

Also I literally made a Light's Bane on my 1.4 playthrough since I couldn't find an Ice Blade or Enchanted Sword, and no I'm not saying this just to be a contrarian. People have different experiences in different playthroughs. It's fairly decent for a pre-boss sword now. Higher damage now, and it's larger.

There's no point in proceeding to reply to you, you're just repeating yourself and you're again trying to explain basic concepts to me in a condescending way while you yourself don't know what you are talking about.
We might seem to be on repeat BECAUSE you are not responding to our points, leaving us having to reword and better emphasize our points which you keep evading. But maybe this is ultimately a waste of time, since this is now two or three times in a row you have ignored and/or dismissed something you should've responded to. You keep claiming demonite is only useful for the pick, but I just explained what all the EoW unlocks. You completely disregarded my points on the usefulness of EoW and continued to insist your point EoW's defeat having little purpose, despite me just countering that.

Also I'm not seeing any condescending behavior other than you. Now I can get that it can be frustrating to be in a 2 or more vs 1 debate with lengthy posts, but maybe you should take a moment and chill a bit before responding. When someone becomes hostile and uppity in a debate, they stop listening. If you can pause for a moment, and glance back over missed points, we can have a more productive discussion here. But if you're just here to dodge, and vastly exaggerate things, then what is your ultimate goal here? To blame the game for being something it isn't?

You keep claiming you're a bad player but continue on how you're playing through Master Mode without much problem. A lot of players have trouble with Expert, and even moreso with Master. Maybe you're just good. It seems pointless to keep insisting you're not good. You know the game's shortcuts and can manage the sequence skips even on the highest difficulty.

It would be appreciated to take an honest position, because as you are, you are being very disrespectful, not just in your wording, but also the stances you claim to take. You aren't just doing something wrong by filling up in 4 minutes if that's actually the case, but you're purposely doing something wrong. Having 4 mirrors at once seems to be proof of that. Piggy bank almost doubles your inventory so it IS super useful, so I don't know why you're dismissing it as someone who somehow runs out of inventory after just three chests. The only way to become filled up after 3 chests if you deliberately begin your mining trip with a very full inventory, and it is not the game's fault if you do that. The game is abundantly generous with storage, and it's on your if you do not take advantage of what it gives you.

No, the corruption being probably the weakest biome doesn't make sense, the game tries to sell it as evil and threatening, yet everything else is more dangerous and hostile compared to it.
Another thing you avoided, with my gingerbread man and Queen Bee comparison. The Corruption IS a threat early on. But that's part of progression, new challenges arrive. Later on, the Corruption makes a comeback, but as a gameplay stance it doesn't make sense to make earlier accessed content harder than later content. In 1.0 the surface Jungle didn't exist- just the underground Jungle, which was something you had to discover later in the game, so it was made harder. Now in a story or comic or movie, you could make the Corruption the most dangerous area, but as a game, it's not as strong as the Jungle. You'd have to completely revamp the game if you want what "feels" like should be a stronger threat to be one. But for now, this is a game where a soul eater is less deadly than a gingerbread man, and a cute pixie's touch harms more than a man eating plant.
 
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