Part 9: Weapon of Choice

#9 - Weapon of Choice



Hello everyone. Magic carpets never get old.



We're preparing to fight the first boss of the game today. While it's perfectly doable to fight this boss with Iron armor, I prefer something that can mitigate more damage. So to that end, we need to find either more tungsten or hopefully some gold. Unlike, say, Minecraft or the real world, gold is a perfectly acceptable step in gearing up in Terraria.

We haven't even found any yet, though. So I guess we need to go back into the mines and look even harder. I'm sure there's gold (or platinum) all over the place, and we've just been unlucky in searching for it.



Now that we've dug a path between the tree basement and the rest of the caves, I will almost never be using the actual entrance. The passage under the tree is closer and it feels like it takes less time to get where we're going as a result.



While it's true that we're searching for tungsten or better, we're certainly not going to look down our nose at copper. It can make some very pretty blocks if nothing else.





This spray of gore used to be a common giant worm. A whoopie cushion, though? You can probably guess what it does... you'd probably be right. Given that I record while listening to my backlog of podcasts, and the sound of farting every time Sam jumped would get old fast, I elect to not use this. It can gather dust in one of the chests back in the tree fort.



Just under there, we found a small chamber. On the other side of the wall we're next to, we can hear chittering noises. Those noises mean we're right on the border of the underground desert.



Like so. Antlion Swarmers are nasty enemies that we want absolutely nothing to do with right now. They hit like a truck and, true to their name, the game will spawn a lot of them to swarm you. This one just running headfirst into us cost us 24 points of health!



This wall of sand and the background wall both mean this is the underground desert. So we'll turn back from here. We absolutely are not equipped to deal with this right now.



We must have rhythm today, because we've attracted a bunch of worms during this expedition. Only a fight to the death will stop one from chasing you, so we have no choice. We absolutely do not need this thing harassing us while we look for ore.



Because it's a long enemy, its AI tries to get it to dive straight through us, hitting us with as many segments as it can. In this case we take two ticks of damage - 31 and 12. 43 HP is a large chunk of our total right now.



I've never seen so many slimes in one tiny place before. I guess it's the local border-of-the-desert dwelling slimes convention?



Moving on, the chamber right above us is the one we found several updates back. Right before we drained that large underground pond? Yeah, it's that one. The reason I call this out is that you can see yet another underground cabin just in front of us.



It's starting to get to the point where I'm not even going to bother calling them out anymore. Not unless there's something new inside the treasure chest.



Though I can get behind the metal-looking skull statue.



This, though? This is worth mentioning. Boomerangs are another type of weapon you can find in chests. There's a regular wooden type you can occasionally find in chests on the surface. But most often, the first boomerang you'll find is an enchanted one. It's a ranged melee weapon and it beats our spear in all the ways that matter.



The chest also has this inside. The dangersense potion is relatively cheap to make, and will highlight all nearby traps and sources of damage. It also highlights nearby cobwebs for some reason. So this humble little potion here can help more than any other in showing you where nearby caves are while underground.



This is a different underground cabin, one we explored several updates back. This door here is on the edge of unexplored territory, so it gives us yet another place to go looking for gold. This is a what a lot of spelunking is in this game. You look for places on your map you've missed for whatever reason, and you go exploring in that direction until you hit a dead end. Then you repeat the process ad infinitum.



Bingo. This is platinum ore, folks. So Rivershire doesn't have gold, and instead has something even heavier and more dense, but just as valuable.



After several minutes of searching, we finally find a good group of enemies to demonstrate the boomerang with. Pretty handy, huh?



While digging more tunnels, we find this glowing red ore. This is crimtane ore, and it's a special ore that is unique to worlds with Crimson biomes. It's the next step beyond gold/platinum in terms of gameplay tiers. But the kicker is you can't mine crimtane without at least a crimtane pickaxe. The game will solve the riddle of how we get the initial bunch of crimtane in due time, so don't worry too much about it.

Just know that if you see glowing ore while spelunking, you very likely can't mine it yet. And once you can mine it, you very likely no longer have need of it.



Same tunnel, about five seconds later, we accidentally discover a water chest.



Inside is one of the most useful finds you can get from them. Like the description says, these flippers let us actually swim. So with them equipped, we can now explore bodies of water without sinking like a rock.

Also present inside the chest are some platinum bars, and 5 healing potions. These are distinct from the lesser variety we've been finding in chests and pots in that they heal twice as much and are extremely cheap to make once we have the right ingredients.



Back at the treefort to unload our haul and return, I see that we have a Metric Fuckton of iron bars.



The armor set still takes 75 bars, though. Which leaves us with 57 out of the initial 132 we had.



But we do almost double the amount of armor we have. While the armor isn't intended to be a permanent solution, it does help smooth the edges as we search for even more tungsten and platinum.



Speaking of platinum, this broadsword is a good investment for now. The pickaxe is really not. It can mine the same stuff that the tungsten one can, but just slightly faster. (59% vs 50% pickaxe power)




While out looking for more fallen stars to use in making mana crystals, we finally kill enough zombies to get a banner. Banners show that you've defeated at least 50 of a type of monster. When you hang them up, they give you a buff that increases damage you deal to them, as well as decreases damage you take from them. Some players like to collect and hang up these banners in a central location.



Still out looking for fallen stars and we happen across this ugly fellow. Face monsters are things you can only fight in the crimson. That they're spawning so relatively near our treefort means nothing good. The place we're fighting here is about a 2 minute walk from our base.



This isn't a shot of me using a mana crystal. This is a shot of me failing to use a mana crystal. That can only mean one thing...



Normally, mana caps out at 200, but because of the flippers, we have 20 more on top of that. So now we're completely topped out on mana for the rest of the game, barring using sets of armor designed for caster characters.



Before we return underground, our base is looking kind of crowded. We're at about the part of the game where we get a bunch of crafting stations, too. So it's worth taking the time to set up a dedicated crafting station building.



It's not perfect, but this little hut can be easily expanded, and it's a nice dome shape, too. You can get the window effect by just burning some sand in the furnace to get glass, then turning that into glass walls. The chest in the little cellar beneath is where we're going to store all of our ore, bars, and gemstones.

The two new crafting stations on the right side are the heavy workbench and the glass kiln. The glass kiln lets us make glass furniture, while the heavy workbench is what we can use to make statues and trapped chests, apparently.



In addition to the usual furniture suspects, we can make terrariums in the glass kiln. You know all those squirrels and bunnies and birds that randomly show up in screenshots once in a while? We can use a bug net from the merchant to trap those, and then we can shove them in a glass aquarium and put them on display.



Much better. Now our NPCs have some little pets to call their own.



We also find a goldfish and showing it to Garrett lets us know that we can stuff it inside of a tiny bottle to create a fish bowl.



Here's the small pond we found the goldfish in. We can use it to fill a bottle with some water.



Like so.





In case we wanted to take our new pet fish with us, we can wear the fish bowl on our head. You can also equip it in the armor slot, but that makes you start drowning.



Now Heather has a little friend, too.



Anyway, it's past time we got back to looking for more platinum. While digging down near where we fought the Hoplite last time, we find a new biome. This is the mushroom cave. This is the only place you can find glowing mushrooms in the wild. Glowing mushrooms, incidentally, are one of the items you absolutely want to get as many of as you possibly can.



Also ow. Mushroom caves are also where you're almost guaranteed to find traps. In my experience, there's always at least one, and quite often more.



Here on the edge of the mushroom cave is the marble biome we brushed against last time. There really isn't a lot to say about these, other than you can use the marble to create nifty looking blocks. Also Hoplites, like assholes, will spawn for a wide radius all around them.

Believe it or not, but marble biomes used to be a hell of a lot more dangerous when they were first introduced. They used to have yet another enemy that spawned in them, and this enemy could instantly kill you without you ever seeing them nearby. Thankfully the devs realized this was a dick move and made these other enemies spawn much later in the game.



Half submerged under the mushroom cave, we find another cabin.



The Hermes boots are one of the better accessories you can find, and they can be upgraded several times throughout the game, adding even more features.



I can't believe the number of cabins in this world. I know I said I wouldn't call them out anymore, but I'm just astounded at the sheer number we've found.



This one at least has a new potion for us to try out sometime.



Another cabin, yet more loot. This time we find a flare gun. These are semi-permanent fixtures in my inventory once I find one. You can use them like you would a glowstick, except the flares are shot out of a gun, and they don't bounce through solid blocks. Both have their uses, and we'll keep both in our inventory as the game goes on.



Between flares, torches, and glowsticks, we're now pretty well covered as far as illumination goes.



Our inventory is getting full again, so I drink a spelunker potion to make room. This is what that does. It turns out there's a lot of minerals all around us. In this case, there's a fairly large deposit of platinum just underneath us here. The potion's effects last for 5 minutes, which can be very handy. But they're also rather expensive to create.

Remind me in the future when we have a greenhouse up and running, with all 7 flavors of herbs being grown. I'll have to show off making as many potions as we can.



While looking for yet more platinum, we get this notification. I've been expecting this to happen for a while now, but it's still at an inopportune time. Slime rain is a random event that can happen in the world. To qualify for it to start happening, we need 140 HP and more than 8 defense.



Then while I'm out getting ready to kill slimes, the nurse and the dye trader decide this is the perfect opportunity to throw a party. Parties are a relatively new event for the game, being added back in May with the 1.3.2 patch. They were added to commemorate the 5th anniversary of the game's launch.

They have a 10% chance to happen on any given day, as long as a party hasn't happened within the past 5-10 in-game days.

All NPCs have unique dialogue during parties, and some even sell new stuff.

Both parties and slime rain are events that affect the background layer. Slime rain causes slimes to fall in the background, while parties make balloons rise. If the dice roll causes both to happen on the same day, then both effects will stack.



So I've written at length about parties, but what about slime rain? That particular event has, according to the wiki, an approximately 4.9% chance to occur any given game day. But because we haven't yet beaten the event or its boss, that chance is doubled. So the first slime rain, once we met the criteria, has a 9.8% chance to happen every day.

I'm not particularly good at probabilities. I took a single statistics class ten years ago, and I barely got out of it with a C. So while I'm certainly no expert, it looks like the odds of both happening simultaneously are less than 1%? If the calculator on the Internet is to be believed, it's a 0.98% chance of happening.

So that's pretty cool. For the record, the calculator claims that if both criteria are met, and we've already defeated the slime rain event at least once, there's a 0.49% chance for both to happen.

So the takeaway is that you're incredibly unlikely to see both events happening simultaneously.

So with all of that out of the way, the mechanics of slime rain are incredibly simple. A bunch of non-aggressive slimes will fall out of the sky and it's our job to kill them. We need to kill at least 150 slimes before the event will end.



The good news about the slime rain event is that it makes spotting Pinky here a lot easier. Pinky is a rare slime that occasionally shows up on the surface. It has a lot of health and a lot of defense, but almost no knockback resistance, and if it hits you, it deals barely any damage.

Some players make a game of seeing how far they can hit a Pinky, like a demented Smash Bros. style homerun contest. The wiki claims that Pinky has a 1/180 (~0.5%) chance to spawn in place of a blue slime. It is the only source of pink slime in the game, and has a much higher chance to drop an incredibly rare weapon.

Because it's highly unlikely that we'll ever see the weapon, I'll just discuss it now. It's called the Slime Staff, and it has a 1-in-10000 chance to drop from any slime you kill. That's a 0.01% chance to drop. Pinky, though, has a drop rate of 1%.

What makes this weapon so nice? I've mentioned before several different play styles. You have your melee fighters, you have casters, and you have ranged attackers. We have at least one of each type of weapon in our inventory. But the Slime Staff is the first chance to get a fourth class of weapon. The staff summons friendly slimes to attack our enemies for us. Before the second half of the game, summoner weapons are incredibly rare. I think, counting the slime staff, there are only three in the first half.

Eventually once 150 slimes are killed, the event ends. Kinda.



You see, the slime rain is the first opportunity we have to fight a boss in this game.

Terraria Soundtrack 1 - Boss Theme

Listen to that theme. It is awesome.

Boss fight video here.



Meet the King Slime.



We are not remotely prepared.



38 contact damage, and it's gigantic. Melee weapons are not an option. We can use our platinum broadsword to clear the trash slimes, but for the boss man we need to use ranged attacks. Getting close is simply too dangerous.

I should point out that King Slime is one of the few bosses in the game that will continue to harass you after you've died. Many others will instantly despawn once you die to them.





Oh yeah and King Slime can follow us by teleporting around. So there's no cheesing him from a high ledge. You also do not want him inside your base.



Being outdoors doesn't help either.



Thankfully I have it so that opening the inventory pauses the game. So this offers us a chance to loot our potions chest for anything that will help. We wind up grabbing a regeneration potion, an ironskin potion, and an archery potion.



Three deaths. This is why you don't want to bring King Slime indoors.



With our buff potions active, and now that we're outdoors, we can just kite him back and forth across the ground. With the archery potion active, we want to be using our bow as much as possible.



There's a lot of tedious back-and-forth.




Finally after about 5 minutes, the bastard goes down for good.



We get one heck of a haul, too. The ninja shirt is a vanity item, while the slime gun shoots a harmless stream of goop. The Solidifier is yet another crafting station, and one I don't believe I've ever used.



With the defeat of King Slime, the slime rain ends as well.



As a very hectic day ends with rain beginning to fall, I think that's a good place to call it for now. We were not remotely prepared for that boss fight, and it showed. There's no better way to put it, we got our ass kicked. Hard.

But despite that we still emerged victorious. King Slime was just the first - and easiest - boss in the game. We're very nearly ready to take on the second. We just need...

NEXT TIME: We need a proper boss arena and better gear.