Part 7: Walk Like an Egyptian

#7 - Walk Like an Egyptian



Hello everyone, welcome back to Rivershire. Today y'all are really gonna hate me. Why? Just wait and see!

We rejoin Sam on top of the cliff that leads underground. Today we're going farther to the left, off into unknown territory.



I somehow managed to completely miss the blatantly obvious Strange Plant.



At the top of the hill just beyond the Strange Plant, we see something very interesting. Looks like I was right about the desert being near the cave. Anyway, this game has several different biomes, like the forest we've already seen. Most biomes are super major spoilers still. We'll cover them as we come across them.

The Crimson that I mentioned a few updates back is another biome, but it's an extremely dangerous one.

Terraria OST - Desert

For some reason, this theme isn't on any of the three Bandcamp pages. It's got a pretty desert-y feel to it, so give it a listen!



Here we can see some cacti, some growing coconuts, and a Waterleaf. Also the screenshot looks kinda wavy because the game simulates a heat effect while you're in hot biomes.

The cacti are mercifully changed from the super early versions of the game. See, before the first major patch, you had to painstakingly dodge cacti. If you ran into them, you took damage, which made getting around kind of annoying. Cacti are another building material that we can make furniture out of.

The growing coconuts are palm trees that I planted. Each surface biome has a different type of tree that grows in it. So you can harvest regular oak trees in the forest biome, and then plant the acorns in the desert to convert them to palm tree seeds. Each different type of tree naturally has a different type of wood associated with it, and each type of wood builds different-looking structures. The wooden armor and weapons even have different stats!

I like the palm wood look because it has a very beach-y feel.

Finally Waterleaf is the growable herb for the desert. Unlike Daybloom, we don't automatically get its seeds. No, it needs to be raining in the world for Waterleaf to drop its seeds when harvested. The good news is that we only need one seed to grow an infinite number of these plants. So I'll be back at some point when it's raining to get the seeds.



This is the Vulture, and it's the first desert enemy we've met. There are a couple others that spawn on the surface, and this one is probably the least dangerous of them all. A good ranged weapon, even our blowgun, will absolutely decimate its health.



This gigantic image shows the primary feature of the desert. The biggest desert in the game world will always have a massive antlion pit somewhere in the middle. The two antlions in this shot are just incidental, by the way. They don't necessarily spawn in and around the pit.



Because the underground desert is so dangerous, it's best to just wall off the antlion pit until you're ready to tackle it. Also I'm going to be honest here, the underground desert was very recently revamped - just over a month ago at the time of writing (Oct. 11, 2016) - and I'm not as familiar with the changes as I am with the rest of the game. Though just from a cursory look at the changes, they won't be affecting us for a long time.



The desert even has its own species of slime, which has 60 HP.

Anyway, are you guys ready for this?



Yeah. A lot of people reading this just got mad at me. This is the top of a pyramid, an incredibly rare structure in Terraria. Not every world is guaranteed to be generated with one. It's actually significantly more rare than the gigantic trees with hollow trunks that we've seen, and the treasures inside are a lot more useful than a couple wands that place decorative blocks.

This pyramid is unfortunately buried, so we're going to have to excavate the entrance.



At the time I thought the right side would be the one open. I don't know why I thought that, to be honest.





Mistakes may have been made in looking for the way in.



Waiting for us outside of the pit is a committee of vultures. I also hear the distant sound of a train again, and get complacent. After all what could a tiny "giant" worm do to us?



Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck

So you remember when I said that the underground desert was dangerous? This guy is a large part of why. He hits like a freight train and can pop out of the ground right under us.



Consequently, Sam got turned into dog food.



On the way back, the sun set and now the zombies have come out to play. If you're trying to dig a hole at night, your best bet is to do what I did here and wall yourself off.



This is much better.



The tragic part of all of this is that if I had just kept tunneling through the wall, I could have broken into the pyramid the hard way.



The pyramid's treasure room has a couple of decorative banners, some breakable urns, and our prize for all this effort.



This wasn't what I was expecting to see, but I'm not going to complain. The Magic Carpet is going to allow us to trivialize falling damage for as long as we have it equipped.



There's also this. The Shine potion is what the Night Owl Potion wishes it could be. This potion actually causes your character to become a mobile light source for 5 minutes. They are also hilariously cheap to make once we do a bit more spelunking and find a particular item.



Anyway, the pyramid continues down for a ways in a zig-zag pattern before finally emptying out in the underground desert. We don't want any part of that, so it's time to leave.



So the magic carpet. This thing lets us hover for "a few seconds." While hovering we can freely move left and right, just not up and down. The wiki doesn't have any information for how long it lets you float, but after extensive testing I've found that it's around 10 seconds of uninterrupted floating. A clever player can feather the jump button while falling from an impossibly high distance to reset their momentum and not take fall damage.

Basically we just hit the Terrarian jackpot.



We're also now up to 100 mana, which means we've found at least 15 fallen stars! In the old days, you needed 10 fallen stars per mana crystal, so we've come quite a long way since then.



To celebrate our good luck, let's make something we should have created a very long time ago. The furnace is one of the Big Three crafting stations, along with the workbench and the anvil. These three together will let us create the vast majority of items.

But first, a demonstration of the furnace is in order.



We have 14 tungsten ore, and each bar requires 4 pieces of ore, so we can make 3 bars with 2 pieces of ore left over. Mercifully, unlike many other games of the same type, we don't have to find any coal or use wood to power the furnace. It is always active.





Each iron and copper bar takes three pieces of ore per. We currently have 128 pieces of copper ore, and 117 pieces of iron ore. That means we can make 39 iron bars evenly, and 42 copper bars with 2 pieces of ore remaining. Neither is enough for a full suit of armor, but we can make some tools to tide us over. Our starting equipment has started to show its age.



For the moment, we move the workbench up next to the forge. Now we can make our anvil.



5 bars for one of the most useful crafting stations? That's one hell of a deal.



With the furnace, the workbench, and the anvil all placed together like that, we can use all three at the same time without having to move around.



Even though our blowpipe deals the same damage, I still make a tungsten blow to replace it. It gives us a chance to use something different for a change, and also to put to use all many the arrows we've been finding.



A new pickaxe is probably one of the most important investments we can make with our tungsten bars. It has 15% more pickaxe power, which means it can mine things much faster than the copper one we started with. It also swings faster, and is capable of mining Meteorite, for whenever we find that.



Our new bow, by the way. A 9% crit chance is nothing to sneeze at, and neither is another point of base damage.





We also get a new axe and hammer. Iron is just a single step up from copper, but these are also tools we don't use nearly as often as the pickaxe, so a single upgrade is fine.



Cactus, by the way, can also be used to create a pretty good early game armor. Our total defense has also increased to 5 points!



Chains can be used like ropes, but several very important things we need to craft also require them. So no reason not to be prepared ahead of time. 1 iron bar will get you 10 chains, and that should be more than we'll ever need.



In fact, here's one of those items now. The sawmill, like its description implies, is used to craft things more "advanced" wooden furniture items than what the basic workbench can handle.



Be sure to put a chair next to your workbench, and then slap a glass bottle on top. A couple items can only be crafted at the chair workbench, and the glass bottle on top lets us brew potions.



This is also a wonderful time to buy a piggy bank. We can't lose money on death if it's safely stored away.



We were quickly getting to the point where losing money on death was becoming prohibitively expensive. Sure we can get it back now, but later we might not be so lucky.



Now let's introduce the social armor slots. Goggles aren't very good at defense, but we don't have to wear them for their protective qualities. We can instead wear them because they look awesome. 2 lenses (from Demon Eyes, remember?) at a chair+workbench combo lets us craft them.



Back over to the equipment UI element. The far right column is naturally where we equip the stuff we want to actually use. The middle column is for "social" items. Anything we equip in the middle column lets us use the appearance of that item without getting stats from it.

The dropper/vial icon in the far left column, by the way, is where we put any dyes we want to use.



Finally we have the sawmill we built earlier. Like I mentioned before, most of what we can craft with this is furniture. So we can make benches and dressers, for instance.



But we can also make things like mannequins and weapon racks to show off the weapons and armor we've collected.

That's enough for now, though. We're considerably better equipped than we were earlier, though we're not quite ready just yet to take on the first major challenge of the game.

NEXT TIME: Spelunking 2 - The Search for More Tungsten