Part 3: Brand New Day

#3 - Brand New Day



Move, slime! Get out the way.

...Anyway, welcome back to Rivershire. That slime was standing in the way of progress.



We have another house to build.



Garrett's house also needs to be moved.

If an NPC's house is demolished, they just kinda wander around where it used to be until a suitable replacement is built. They don't even seem to get angry about it, so don't feel bad about changing things around as necessary.



Someone in the thread was asking when the dirt floor of Garrett's house would be replaced with solid wood. Don't worry, I wouldn't intentionally make my NPCs sleep on dirt floors.



That's one house down. It's looking pretty spiffy if I do say so myself. Not too bad for the second day, eh?



Two makes a matching set. Now the second house is ready for whenever the next NPC shows up. We've already met the requirements for the second NPC thanks to an extremely lucky drop during the first day. When he shows up later, I'll explain then.



One of the slimes I killed dropped this. You can probably take a stab at what it does, and you'd probably be right. When you're not at full health and you kill an enemy, it has a nonzero chance to drop a heart, which heals 20 HP. The wiki claims it's an 8.3% chance, for what it's worth.



After hopping around like an idiot for about a minute straight, I remembered that the gigantic tree existed, and that there was a tunnel underneath. So what do you guys say to some light spelunking?



But first, we meet another new enemy. The blue slime is slightly stronger than its green cousin, but is otherwise unremarkable.





Well that didn't take very long. This little doorway indicates that we've reached the treasure room under the tree. We're not very far under the surface, either.



For the sake of reference, there's a minimap in the upper right corner of the screen. You can kinda see Sam's head on it, showing that we're only a short ways under the ground.



It's a cute little room. In fact it could almost work as NPC housing. For whatever reason, the wood panel background doesn't count as naturally placed, so just putting a torch down made it viable. But I don't wanna have to run down here every time we want to talk to an NPC, so I'll be deconstructing the furniture.

You may have also noticed the chest in front of us.



These are the contents. Starting from the left we have...

1 Leaf Wand - (Consumes 1 piece of wood to place leaves like you can see on the gigantic trees)
1 Living Wood Wand - (Consumes 1 piece of wood to place a living wood, which is what the gigantic trees are made of)
7 Tungsten Bars - (These are the third tier of metals and are a replacement for silver)
49 Shurikens - (Showing what the icon looks like)
2 Recall Potions - (Same as above)
1 Living Loom - (We can use this to create living wood furniture)

When we come across a chest, I'll explain what the items are from the left hand side of the screenshot. I'll typically only explain items we haven't seen before.

I suppose I should also take this time to explain the basic metal tier system. The early game has four types of metals: Copper, Iron, Silver, and Gold. During worldgen, the game can randomly replace them with equivalents. Copper becomes Tin, Iron becomes Lead, Silver becomes Tungsten, and Gold becomes Platinum.

Each of the four replacement metals can be used in any recipe that calls for the original. The replacements tend to create slightly more powerful weapons, but because it's the early game, it's only a minor increase at best.



Even though we've already found the treasure hidden under the tree, there's no reason we can't explore farther down. These trees tend to connect to existing caverns, so we might find all manner of goodies down below.





Kind of a tall image, but if you look closely at the left side, you can see that we've already found two small caverns. One is completely empty, and the other has a pool of water.



Slightly again below that, we've hit paydirt. Look real closely at the left side. Do you see what I see? Because I see a closed door.



If you couldn't see the door before, you can definitely now see the wooden walls of the structure it belongs to. Let's investigate!



But before we do, the second NPC arrives. The merchant, like his name implies, sells us stuff. He arrives after you've got at least 50 silver coins in your inventory.



I see a golden chest, a bunch of cobwebs, what looks like a chandelier, and a vaguely humanoid shape. Plus there's all manner of pots, to boot.

I also want to take this moment to address the torch on the right side of the screen. I messed up placing a torch in that small cavern over there and tried to pick it back up, but instead of vacuum sucking into my inventory, it fell to the ground. As you can see, torches provide light when they fall to the ground. This includes torches that you find in pots, too.



Cobwebs are pretty important to pick up. They're finite in number, but They're absolutely all over the underground. The amount of caverns on a small world will give you enough cobwebs to last a lifetime, and that's only multiplied on a large world.

If you step into them, your character moves super slowly for a few seconds and then breaks the cobweb. This is important to keep in mind, as it means that falling into a bunch of cobwebs will arrest your fall and reset the height "counter" for the purposes of taking damage. This doesn't mean you can necessarily place them under yourself as you fall, but it's still good to keep in mind.

LogicalFallacy has made a quick correction on my point about cobwebs:




These underground cabins, as they're called, are an excellent source of cobwebs. Also the humanoid shape we saw turned out to be a statue.



An "undead viking" statue, which sounds metal as hell.



Anyway, here's the contents of that gold chest. Again, starting from the left...

1 Magic Mirror - (Terraria veterans are calling me lucky. You know all those recall potions we've found? This item makes them useless. For 20 mana, we have an instant return to our spawn point that is never used up.)
77 Rope - (I still need to show off what these do)
5 Lesser Healing Potions - (Restores 50 HP when consumed*)
1 Hunter Potion - (Causes nearby enemies to show up in a bright color, can helpful while spelunking to see where nearby caves are)
2 Recall Potions - (Welp)

It turns out that I was wrong in the description for the Magic Mirror. I'll let Dr. Fetus explain:


So there you have it! The magic mirror is free and recall potions work slightly faster than the mirror.

I put a little asterisk next to the description of the Lesser Healing Potion because I need to talk about one of the mechanics Terraria has. Potion Sickness.

When you eat or drink a healing consumable, you get a 1 minute debuff called "Potion Sickness." This prevents you from healing using consumables for that minute. It's... While I understand why the debuff exists, it is kind of a pain in the ass to manage. You know those mushrooms I briefly pointed out in the first update? You can eat those to regain 15 HP, which also causes potion sickness.

Normally it wouldn't be a problem to eat a mushroom instead of drinking a potion, right? Well, you're half right. See, Terraria has a quick healing hotkey - H. You can tap that while in combat to use the first healing item available. The H key uses healing items on your quick select bar first, and then starts in the upper left of your inventory and goes line by line until it hits the bottom right.

So if you don't micromanage where your healing potions are, you can wind up screwing yourself over in a crucial moment. It's for that reason, that I always try to keep at least 1 stack of healing potions in the upper left corner of my inventory, and all mushrooms and other useless consumables well away from the quick select bar.



Anyway, now that the chest is empty, don't forget to bring it with you. We can never have enough storage!



I also grab the tungsten chandelier for no particular reason. It looks kinda nice and really what other reason do I need? (Spoilers I have yet to hang it up.)



Just under the little mining cabin, the tree's hollow trunk opens up into a cavern. While there are several materials we haven't yet seen in the screenshot, I'm pretty sure your eyes were drawn to the odd greenish colored stuff on the left. That green ore is raw tungsten. We'll have to be back for it later when we can more easily get up to where it is.





Before we go back up to the surface, this is a demonstration of what ropes do. We can use them to safely explore high places. When you walk near rope, you can press the W or S keys to ascend or descend it. This is the reason why you should never leave home without a lot of rope in your inventory.



Yellow slimes are stronger than green or blue slimes. In fact, they're the fifth type of slime, which means that they're somewhat dangerous to us at the moment. They have 45 HP, as much as a demon eye or a zombie.

Just next to the slime are some oddly shiny rocks. Those rocks are iron ore. We mine them out and then return to the surface.



The leaves surrounding that bottom branch are what we can place with the leaf wand. They don't serve a purpose aside from aesthetics, which is purpose enough for me!



Anyway, the elderly gentleman with the orange coat is our merchant, Edwin.



He's the reigning Rivershire rock-paper-scissors champion.



He's also a shameless flatterer.



Anyway, his goods are as follows. Again, from the left.

Mining Helmet - 4 gold coins - (A helmet, provides a source of light, but only when worn as armor. This means it has questionable value)
Piggy Bank - 1 gold coin - (Store your coins in this and they won't drop when you die. It also doubles as personal storage, and the contents are also saved to your character, so you can use piggy banks in other worlds to access your stuff)
Iron Anvil - 50 silver coins - (In case you can't find enough iron/lead ore, or just want to skip looking for some)
Bug Net - 25 silver coins - (Allows you to capture worms and other ambient insects to use for fishing bait)
Copper Pickaxe - 5 silver coins
Copper Axe - 4 silver coins
Torch - 50 copper coins - (Good if you inexplicably have no wood or gel?)
Lesser Healing Potion - 3 silver coins
Lesser Mana Potion - 1 silver coin - (Restores 50 MP when used)
Wooden Arrow - 5 copper coins (Cheap and available in infinite amounts)
Shuriken - 15 copper coins
Rope - 10 copper coins
Sickle - 60 silver coins - (Allows you to collect hay when you cut down tall grass. Hay can be used as a building material)

Anyway, we buy approximately 300 arrows, and 25 rope. We're also down to 89 pieces of wood, and we're going to need more. So time to be a lumberjack.







We're also on a roll with our spelunking, so how about a shorter trip?



The hanging vines not only block your view, they also block torch light. So you should cut them down if they get in your way.



It's not a very deep pit, but I'm never going to say no to a treasure chest.



You know the drill by now.



The first item is a doozy. This blowpipe is as powerful as a tungsten bow, and the ammo can be collected from tall grass. It's an incredibly useful find for the early game!

Besides the usual suspects, (the healing potions and the recall potions) we also find a Builder Potion and some empty bottles. The builder potion increases our build range by 1 tile and increases tile placement speed by 25%. It's useful, but I can never remember that I have them.

The empty bottles are used in potion brewing. We can make our own if we have sand, for what it's worth.



Lets take this late afternoon opportunity to stock up on blowgun ammo.



Past the last tree, we're entering uncharted territory.



Because we're still in the middle of the map, it's fairly boring.



Another large tree bars our path.



Just past the tree, we find a small flower. This is Daybloom, and it's the first herb most players usually find. When you chop it down, you get the herb itself, as well as some seeds you can plant. There are seven types of growable herbs, and all of them are used in various alchemy recipes. So we'll just hang onto the Daybloom seeds until we get a future NPC who will allow us to grow stuff more easily.



This purple slime is two steps below the yellow, and just above the blue. It's the strongest slime you can find on the surface, which isn't really saying a lot.



I take the opportunity to pelt it with seeds.



Yet another new item! This is the yellow marigold, and it is used to create dyes. We can't make them yet, but looting the item will help partially qualify us for the associated NPC.



You can see from the screenshots that it's getting darker, so this is really as far as I want to explore for now. But there's a whole bunch of pots and a chest to ease the "sting" of turning back.



While there are a bunch of familiar items, we still have some strangers in the group.

1 Umbrella - (Having this equipped in your hotbar causes you to fall slowly, like Mary Poppins. Of debatable usefulness.)
5 Grenades - (Just finding these qualifies us for yet another new NPC. We need to build them a home first.)
7 Copper Bars - (Like copper ore, but in bar form)

Before we head back, I want to give a sneak preview of something...



Despite my minimap covering up part of it, there's a reason we're not going farther right for the time being. That there is the Crimson, and it's absolutely nowhere that a newbie like us wants to be. So let's just go back home instead.



Night falls so quickly.



But before you know it, we're back home.



With no outward-facing doors, we're a little safer than we were last night. Plus two NPCs means potentially twice the killing power.



Before I go, I want to quickly mention that there's a world map feature. You can press the M button to see the world as far as you've explored it.



You can even zoom in and out. The world map also helpfully shows you where all your NPCs are. Here's another shot of the Crimson from earlier. That red is awfully foreboding...



When I say you can zoom out, I'm not kidding. This is as far out as you can possibly zoom, which shows us the entire game map, and our relative position. That's an awful lot of undiscovered land out there...



As a parting shot, here's our inventory. We need to organize pretty badly.

NEXT TIME: More Home Improvement. Just without Tim Allen or power tools.

(Also no, I'm not intentionally splitting this between day and night. I promise that the next update will cover more than 15 minutes of playtime, though.)