Terrarian Time

Uhh, yeah. At about 6pm today, after reading up a Terraria guide or three - as it is apparently not obvious on first glance what precisely to do - I decided to give it another chance.

The Steam 'hours played' counter said about 2 hours when I started - and that was across three play sessions or so.

I finally decide to stop and look up, and it's 12.30am, and the hours played counter now says 7 hours...

...Oh dear.

Haven't done one of these since maybe Civilisation or Alpha Centauri, where one simply loses track of the time.

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That said, I am nowhere near mid-game, let alone end-game. Terraria is remarkably grindy and progression-based, except it hides it pretty well, I think.

It suffers from a slow start.

After figuring out from a guide (the out-of-game wiki kind) that ordinary wood is what is needed for constructing houses, I've had to maybe cut down 100+ trees across this five hour session to build my 4 room abode (and fuel a flaming arrow ammo addiction).

I've managed to attract the guide, the nurse, the merchant and the demolitionist NPCs to set up shop in my base.

Each stage takes time though. One needs to find a life crystal to get the nurse, I think. That pretty much meant digging around, platforming, looking for ores and hoping to get lucky.

Grinding 50 silver to get the merchant was a lot of mouse clicks, while doing the above.

I don't even know what I did that got the demo NPC to move in, I was deep into a loooong dungeon crawl by that time.

The problem is that the starter tools suck. It is a horrific amount of clickclickclick using the copper tools. It is also a horrific amount of iron ore to get the next tier of tools, as contrasted with Minecraft where one switches over to stone tools in about 5 minutes into the game. Imagine if you had to play the first two hours of Minecraft with wood tools.

Granted, there's no item damage in Terraria so you never have to replace the tools, but that's an awful lot of time to dig out one pathetic pixel.

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Presumably now that I know this, for future games I will be more informed and inclined to look out for iron ore as an immediate goal after building a simple house.

Who was to know though?

The build order was wood => house => make torches and arrows and a bow => go cave exploring and yeah, cave exploring with copper tools is kinda painfully slow.

Now that I actually have iron tools (and I went so deep that I actually have some silver and gold, though I'm not sure if I have enough to make anything), this feels more like how the normal game should play.