Part 27: Another Brick in the Wall

#25 - Another Brick in the Wall



Hello everyone. Welcome back to Rivershire. Today is probably gonna be a long update, you see... today we're going to fight the midpoint boss and officially transition to the second half of the game.

Are you all excited? I'm excited.

Before we do that, we're here in the jungle to look for a few items that have managed to slip through the cracks. One of these items is all but necessary to fish without going through a lot of headache, and the other is just fun to have and to use.



We're fairly deep into the jungle here, in a corner we've never been in before.



How interesting. We've found an ancient stone structure buried deep in the jungle.



Our molten pickaxe doesn't even scratch the surface of this stone.



Though thanks to an idiot skeleton, we can see inside this curious structure. What we're looking at here is called the Jungle Temple, and it's locked up super tight. This is somewhere we'll eventually explore very, very late in the second half of the game. Even if we could get inside right now, all we'd find is death from the very angry inhabitants.

And I thought I had a recording of it, but I guess I don't. We also found the entrance to this temple a little ways to the right. There were even some traps outside that we were somehow able to deconstruct and take for our own. Jungle temple traps are dangerous things, and are typically used by players in the construction of automated mob grinders.



While exploring the deep jungle, we found enough spores to create the jungle set of armor. This is what mages wear at the end of the first half of the game, and it's pretty decent all considered. To make the full set, you need 32 spores, 2 vines, and 10 stingers. So if you're daring enough to sneak into the jungle with an early game character, and skilled enough to navigate around, you could theoretically have the best magic set in the first half of the game pretty quickly.



I also mentioned the bee armor a few updates back. This requires you to kill the queen bee several times, but will let you summon several minions to help you fight. For just general dicking around the overworld, I find that this is the best armor to wear. Having a bunch of minions to fight things with you really helps with exploring.



If you combine the four strongest types of swords from the first half of the game, you get a unique weapon. You need to combine a Muramasa (from the dungeon), a Fiery Greatsword (from Hellstone), a Grass Sword (from the Jungle), and either a Crimtane or a Demonite sword.



The result is suitably impressive. But here's the catch... you can't combine these weapons together just anywhere.



Night's Edge is one of the few items you can only create at an evil altar.



This sword is worth all the effort, though. It out damages any melee weapon in the first half, has an amazing swing arc, and just looks badass.





While we're also showing off things... this is the Necro set that I mentioned many updates ago. This is the best ranged set in the first half, and it's what we're going to be using when we take on the midpoint boss. The set bonuses give you a 20% chance to not consume ammo, which stacks with other similar bonuses.



Right now Sam is wearing the Jungle Armor for the magic damage bonuses.



Jumping forward 2 and a half weeks, we're over at Eevee's rave house. Judging from the cat hanging overhead and the gaggle of fire imps following me, I'm guessing this was recorded just after the Dungeon Defenders 2 crossover event started. Why? Because I didn't start using the summoner armor until then, and the kitty cat is a reward from that event.

Anyway, look at the right side of the image. That nice lady there is the Party Girl, and she's one of the hardest NPCs to get to spawn. She only appears after you have 14 other NPCs living in your world, and she only has a 1-in-40 chance of spawning at the dawn of any given day once you've met the criteria.



There's something really fitting about the party girl NPC moving into the house.



She only sells novelty items, so I doubt we'll ever buy anything from her. So I'm content to let her live out here in the LSD house by herself.



The one item she sells that's worth pointing out is the Party Center, which lets you throw a party on demand.



One of the weapons you can randomly find in the jungle is this sawed off shotgun, appropriately called a Boomstick. This thing is pretty devastating if you can get all of the shots to connect, plus it makes a satisfying sound when it fires.



The item underneath all of this madness is what we came for, though. Rarely in jungle shrines you can find an item called the Flower Boots. It causes flowers to grow wherever you walk, which sounds neat but harmless.

However, if you cut down those flowers, there's a chance that fishing bait will spawn. Flares, I should point out, instantly destroy any grass they're placed on top of. The bug net is also auto swing. I'm sure you can do the calculus on this.



We got three stacks of jungle grass seeds, as well as hundreds of pieces of fishing bait. We're set for basically forever. Because we can wall ourselves off while doing this, we're also safe from 99% of the enemies that spawn in the jungle.



So we did all of that exploring for some boots that let us get infinite fishing bait. Great, but why?



Because fishing is honestly kind of relaxing. It's not very hard, and there's no minigame involved. You just listen for the bobber to dip under the water and hit the button. You instantly reel the fish back in.

There's a lot of mechanics to fishing. For instance, you need 75 blocks of water together for a pond to be considered fishable. Whether that's 1x75 or 75x1 or anything in between doesn't matter. It just has to be at least 75 blocks.

There's also increasingly severe penalties applied for fishing in ponds smaller than 300 blocks. These penalties are to a stat called "fishing power" which governs what type of fish you fish up. If you're below, I believe, 50 fishing power you can fish up garbage like seaweed or old shoes.

The weather and time of day also have a small impact, both positive and negative, on your fishing power. There's a lot to keep track of, and it's barely worth remembering. The largest source of your fishing power will come from the rod you're using and the bait applied to it.



It's as easy as that. Also ignore the blatant editing in the gif.



Sometimes when you're fishing, you can fish up what are known as crates. These are goodie boxes that hold all sorts of stuff. There's a well known exploit that I'm going to kind of show off, but not indulge in too much. It involves a bunch of fishing crates and the second half of the game.



Fishing also gets you some neat rewards. If you do a number of quests for the angler NPC, you can get a ridable bunny mount.





Before I dive into fishing quests, I want to quickly show off alchemy. You need some empty bottles filled with water.



Combine bottled water with some amber, a moonglow plant, and some deathweed, and you can make a crate potion. When drunk, this potion gives you an increased chance to fish up crates.

There are dozens of alchemy recipes, and I forget most of them.



So, here's fishing quests. I've talked enough about them, so it's finally time to show off one.



The quest is easy enough. He tells you where you need to fish, and what the fish you need to catch looks like. If you mouse over the fish in the bottom right, you can see what it's called too. In this case, Bonefish.



Once you've found a good spot, just cast your line out and start fishing them in.



Sometimes you can fish up weird shit like the Rockfish.



70% hammer power is as much as our molten hamaxe. There's a similar fish you can get out at the beach, which is as powerful as a molten pickaxe. That would naturally obviate much of the progression in the first half, so I wisely decided to not pursue it.



Unless you're insanely unlucky, you'll get the fish you're looking for inside of a few casts. I have gotten a fishing quest right at 4:30 AM and taken until 4:05 AM the next day to get the fish the angler wanted.

Anyway, once you have the fish the angler wanted, talk to him again and hit the quest dialogue option.





The rewards aren't typically great. Fishing potions give you another 10 fishing power on top of what you already have, which is nothing to sneeze at.



There are dozens of types of fish out there. Some are more explosive than others.



...hahahahahhahaha.



Fishing quests can also reward you with a tome that lets you create a type of ropes from vines. The majority of the angler's rewards are 2% drops, but others require you to complete a certain number of quests. If you finish 30 quests for him, you get the best fishing pole in the game, for instance. But fishing quests also have The Big Three rewards.



The Sextant.



The Fisherman's Pocket Guide.



And the Weather Radio.



Together these three rewards create the Fish Finder.



There's also an extremely rare enemy called the Lost Girl. She only shows up at a very vanishingly small chance, and she has a 50% chance to drop an item called the Metal Detector. I got the item, but I was unfortunately not recording at the time. I was, instead, idling at my underground item farm and playing Pokemon Sun. When I looked back up at Terraria, I saw the metal detector on the ground.



You can combine the Metal Detector, the DPS Meter, and the Stopwatch to create the Goblin Tech.



If you combine the GPS, the REK 3000, the Fish Finder, and the Goblin Tech, you can make a PDA.



Combine the PDA and a magic mirror, and you have a smart phone.



We're now mostly set for the first half of the game.



I raided a couple of worlds to find two more Shiny Red Balloons.





We're combining them with our two remaining bottles.



We're then combining those two balloons with our original one to create the Bundle of Balloons. Now we can quadruple jump with just one accessory slot.

To prepare for the boss fight we're going to grab seven potions: Regeneration, Ironskin, Heartreach, Hunter, Archery, Thorns, and Magic Power.

You can probably guess what most of those do. The only one I don't think I've covered before is Heartreach, which just lets us grab healing hearts from farther away.

So are you guys ready to finally fight the boss?



We're standing at the far edge of our Hell Highway. Yes, I ran minecart track clear to the middle. That's our hard limit for this fight. If we can't beat this boss by halfway across a large world, then we have some pretty serious DPS problems.



But first, I know you guys were asking. This is Rivershire just before we take the boss on. We've explored a surprisingly small amount of it.

If you look closely, you can see I'm lying through my teeth. This shot was taken just after we beat the boss because I forgot to take one first.



To summon this boss, we have to sacrifice the Guide. All it requires is tossing the voodoo doll into the lava, and the game will take care of the rest.



Wall of Flesh Boss Fight

Terraria Soundtrack vol. 1 - Boss 2

Goodbye Bradley.

In case the official Wall of Flesh theme doesn't work for you, there's also an alternative available:

La-Mulana OST - 16 - High Speed Beast

The second theme is also fitting for what I hope are obvious reasons. If not, then you really need to play La-Mulana.



So we caught a glimpse of the Wall of Flesh before. But here's another look. These little mouth things are called The Hungry and they jut out from its body and try to bite us.



As for the Wall itself, it has 8,000 HP and slowly advances toward us. If we get caught behind it, a fleshy tendril will pick us up and throw us back in front of the Wall's path. If we retreat back to the surface or out of Hell, the Wall will instantly kill us.



In normal mode, the Wall is a pretty standard boss. If you've prepared like I have and built a highway, then you've taken care of 99% of the difficulty. I think this was honestly another case of me over-preparing for a boss, because this guy got curbstomped.



In Expert Mode, the Wall gets steadily faster as the fight wears on, it has more health, and the Hungry mobs will respawn. In Normal mode, once we've cleared the grabby mouths, the boss itself is wide open to attack.



Using a minecart is almost too easy. In addition to the Hungry maws, the Wall will also fire lasers at you. The lower its health gets, the more frequent these lasers get.



The Wall will also spawn enemies called Leeches. These little buggers always drop red hearts when killed, and barely have any health. They do have worm AI, though. So be careful of them trying to target you.



I love taking screenshots of this fight. They all look metal as hell.



Rivershire.jpg here. Sam riding backwards in a minecart, shooting a sawed off shotgun at an eldritch horror.



The boss falls before we're even 1/3 of the way to the Center.



When the Wall dies, it leaves behind a little box made out of the world's primary type of Evil. Your rewards for the fight are contained inside, to prevent them from falling into lava.



A laser rifle!

So, anyway, the Wall has a bunch of rewards it can drop. It will always drop some money, some healing potions, and a Pwnhammer.



The game's giving us a hint here as to what we should do next. The Pwnhammer is the first item in the game that can destroy evil altars without you losing half of your max HP in retaliation.



Oh I think we're changing to a magic based build. Look at that beautiful, beautiful baby.

The Wall can also drop...

Breaker Blade - (The largest weapon in the game. It looks like Cloud's sword. It's massive, slow, and only deals 39 melee damage, making it inferior to the Night's Edge)
Clockwork Assault Rifle - (Fires in three-round bursts, with only the first shot consuming ammo, effectively giving it a 66.7% ammo preservation. The next step up from the Minishark, with all of the awesomeness that entails.)
Warrior Emblem
Sorcerer Emblem
Ranger Emblem
Summoner Emblem - (The four Emblems all increase the relevant type of damage you deal by 15%)
Wall of Flesh Mask - (You shouldn't have. No, really.)
Wall of Flesh Trophy - (Show your friends you've beaten a horror from beyond time and space!)

EDIT: Thanks to Lazy Bear for correcting me on the Pwnhammer and Clockwork Assault Rifle.



You guys? I think we just uncorked a very full, very pressured bottle full of very bad shit. Also pictured, an achievement I should have already gotten before now but didn't have thanks to a bug with the server software I play with.



I'm just gonna leave that there as a marker for our progress. We might come back at some point in the future to challenge the Wall again, and it'll be neat to see how fast we tear it apart.



While things don't look like they've changed... trust me, they have. Rivershire has entered Hard Mode.

NEXT TIME: Break a Demon Altar? What could possibly go wrong?