Terraria is a blockcraft/adventure game released by a new indie development team. Point of note here: the game is heavily influenced by Minecraft, and as much as I hate to compare one game directly and heavily to another existing game, that really is the easiest way to talk about this title. Perhaps someday when the blockcraft genre is significantly wider, we will be able to talk about the games without holding them up to the bright light given off by Minecraft in order to study the many colors and facets therein.
The first thing to notice, of course, is that the game is two dimensional. This is not a first among mining simulators, but it does change a lot about the basics of building shelters and other structures. Something that Teraria has done new here is the addition of a back wall, which becomes integral to each building. Essentially, the player has the ability to use their building materials to change the look of the background graphics. This doesn’t affect the movement of players or monsters, but does affect the soundness of the structure. This comes into play because each structure must be rated as a proper shelter in order to serve most useful purposes—for example, you can’t change your spawn point without a proper shelter. To qualify, a structure must be of a certain size, have a full back wall, be well lit, and contain some rudimentary furniture.
This is the apartment building I built for my NPCs.
This is a good time to talk about NPCs, because they love houses. If you have houses built, the NPCs will move in when you reach certain milestones (for instance, the Demolitions Expert moves in when you’ve found your first stick of dynamite). These NPCs add a level of interaction to the single-player game, allowing the character to buy and sell products, get advice, get healed, and so forth. They also serve as an incentive for town building, since to get all of the NPCs, you need at least six houses. The NPCs also establish a currency, and give that currency a value, something that comes in handy in multi-player interactions.
The world of Terraria, while flatter, is much taller than Minecraft. There are three world sizes to choose from when starting out, and the ‘small’ has a sky building limit of approximately 200 blocks up from the ground (there is not discernible ‘sea level’, so I just counted from my spawn location), and the ground digs much deeper. These blocks are also of higher scaled resolution, as the characters are 2×3 blocks, rather than the 1×2 of Minecraft.
If left alone, plant life will grow out of control and block the player's vision.
There are a lot more ‘recipes’, though they are simplified. One only needs to have a certain amount of the correct materials, and be near the correct furniture to craft things, and they are listed in a menu rather than requiring players to memorize a recipe. There are many more different types of each item than Minecraft players are used to—the weapons, for example, have not just one of each type of metal, but also differnt styles. For each weapon material, the player can make a longsword, a broadsword, or a hammer, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. There are also a lot more things to wear. The armor system is similar to what we’ve seen before, but there are also numerous ‘accessories’ players can equip for various effects.
The inventory screen. Note the scrolling craft menu in the lower left.
Multi-player modes allow for a range of options. Servers can be made persistent with no additional software, and players who have the password may join freely. Once in, players may choose for themselves if they wish to participate in PvP combat. Players can only injure other players if both have their PvP flag turned on. Furthermore, each player who wants to PvP can choose a team color (up to four different teams) to assist with organizing CTF games and the like, and to eliminate the chance for accidental friendly fire.
Player characters are persistent from world to world. One does not need to start completely over from scratch when they enter a world they’ve never been to. No structures are crafted, of course, and NPCs have to be re-attracted, but all of the player’s possessions remain. There is even a type of container, the ‘piggy bank’, which retains a persistent inventory per character, so that no matter what piggy bank you click on, your own piggy bank inventory shows.
Despite the persistence of characters, character location in a world is not saved, which I found mystifying. If one leaves a world and comes back, the character is returned to the spawn. This means two things: There is no danger of getting stuck or cornered anywhere, since one can always just return to spawn for free with a few button click. Worse, however, is that it means one cannot have exploration missions which extend beyond a single log-in. Additionally, characters do not drop possessions when they die (they drop one of each denomination coin in their inventory instead), meaning that there is very little actual danger in the game, thus there is very little excitement-level interaction.
Death can come fast when one is located by one of these ground-clipping worm things.
Controlling the character is typical side-scrolling keyboard and mouse style, which makes combat with the vast array of monsters simpler, but in some ways, it is a bit counter-intuitive. For example: because of the way one’s sword swings, one has a combat advantage for being below one’s opponent, rather than above, as one would expect (in fact, it can be downright frustrating tying to attack an enemy which is downhill). This is more than made up for by the breadth of available monsters. There are dozens of different creatures to fight in the game, of varying difficulty scale. There are even ‘bosses’, which can be summoned for great reward and access to otherwise closed-off areas of the world. The spawning of these creatures can be annoying, however, in that they don’t always look at the off-screen environment. If you close yourself into a walled off area, it will keep monsters from spawning there, but once the edges of that area go off the screen, the game doesn’t see it as closed off anymore and monsters begin to spawn. This encourages small buildings, and frequent doors in mineshafts in order to remain safe. It almost seems like a bug, but it’s hard to tell.
The Flora and Fauna of a randomly generated world can vary widely.
This brings me to the thing that Terraria has managed to do most impressively when compared to the famous genre definer. The fluid physics are very impressive. The water is generated in blocks, but these blocks flow and settle marvelously. There seems to be no such thing as a ‘source block’, and that’s a good thing. If you tunnel under a small lake from inside your mine, the water from that lake will drain out into your mine and will settle in a very natural way to the bottom level of the mine, knocking out torches and things along the way. Also, if one takes a bucket of water from a pool, the level of the pool lowers, and will eventually deplete. If there is one feature of this game that I want Mojang to notice, it’s this one.
One must be cautious when digging around the bottom of a lake. This kind of damage cannot be undone without spending a lot of time with a bucket.
At the end of the day Terraria is a fun and exceedingly well-crafted game, and anyone who enjoys this new genre of games should pick it up and give it a shot. Will it have the broad appeal and staying power of Minecraft? Probably not. I don’t see anyone opening this thing up and deciding to do a replica of the Enterprise or Hyrule. I don’t see myself building things to show others, feeling an amount of pride in my constructions. Something about the dropped dimension just changes the dynamic and feel of the concept too much. Probably it’s the fact that it feels a lot more like a drawing program. Especially the way the mouse is used to place the blocks—essentially drawing them on the screen.
I guess one could say that Terraria is a box of colored pencils to Minecraft’s LEGOs.
Terraria is available for PC on Steam for $9.99.
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