Part 13: Foolish Pride

#12 - Foolish Pride



Hello everyone. Did you know you can turn campfires on and off by just right clicking it?



Anyway, I believe several days ago I promised we would get around to exploring the crimson caverns "soon."



On our way down the very throat-like cavern, we get a new NPC notification. The painter is an NPC that until very recently, I have only rarely used. He moves into an empty house as long as you have at least 7 other NPCs.

As you might expect, he sells a variety of paints as well as tools to use them. Yes, this does mean that if you have sufficient money you can customize the hell out of anything you build.



The red upper building looks rather nice, but the lower yellow one is kind of a miss. There's something that's just classy about brick painted a deep red color.



The painter also sells a variety of wallpapers. This image was taken yesterday and will not reflect in the LP for a while yet, but this is the angler's room. I think the bubble wallpaper is fitting.



That's enough forward flashes for now. We're currently in the middle of a blood-soaked hellhole.



These weird little flesh protrusions are the crimson version of underground pots.



Also to the person who claimed that the blood spiders were ticks, I leave you with this image...

Yes, they do crawl on the background walls.



As you might expect, the underground crimson is full of crimson altars. There's three more in the window that I didn't get in the shot.



Like I said in the previous update, the "throat" eventually empties out into a large cavern.



The larger cavern has a bunch of smaller ones radiating out from it like tendrils. At the end of each of these smaller caverns is one of these little things. This is a Crimson Heart. This particular branch actually has two of them.

These hearts are like gigantic fleshy pinatas. If we can break them open, there are very useful goodies inside. But there's also a caveat. You see, our current pickaxe is entirely incapable of mining crimstone. Crimstone being what happens when the crimson brand of evil infests regular stone. So these hearts are inaccessible to us... unless we have some purification powder.

But there's also another way.



A faster way.



An explosive way.

So, before we continue on, two things happened when that dynamite blew up.



The first is that a gun came out of the heart.



With this weapon, we qualify for yet another NPC. No guesses as to what this one does.



This new NPC will sell us ammunition as well. Which is good, because him and these hearts are the only source of that ammo...

As for the second thing that happened?



I'm sure breaking a fleshy heart locked away in a seemingly impenetrable vault in the middle of of a blood-drenched cavern made of pure evil doesn't have any drawbacks.



Our new gun seems pretty nice. 42 damage on a crit is better than almost anything else we can field right now.



The enemy spawn rate in the crimson can get a little out of hand.



Guns aren't the only goodies we can find in crimson hearts. So let's crack open another.



I'm sure it's nothing.



Words cannot properly articulate how cheated I feel at getting this. The wiki claims the speed boost is +50% movement speed, but... Well, there are better things to get out of crimson hearts.



While I'm making preparations for breaking our third heart, we get this little status message. We'll deal with this in good time, but that's good to know. The wiki has the following to say about meteorites...


Shadow Orbs, if you couldn't guess from context clues, are the Corruption version of Crimson Hearts. They have their own, different, drops.

I'll cover meteorites more in-depth in a couple updates. I want to be adequately prepared before we go traipsing off to investigate it. Right now we have important business to attend to in the crimson.



So like both myself and the game have been very unsubtly alluding to, breaking a bunch of these hearts is a very bad thing. The video game rule of threes is in effect, meaning we're about to suffer the consequences.





Brain of Cthulhu Defeat

If you're unprepared, the Brain of Cthulhu is a very difficult fight. The regular crimson biome enemies will continue to spawn on top of this thing here. Like the Eye, this is a multi-phase fight.



During phase 1, the Brain is completely invulnerable and you can only damage its many eyes. We need to defeat all the eyes to continue.



The Brain also teleports around the battlefield, and its eyes follow lazily along.



The eyes are called Creepers for some reason, and they all have 100 HP each. The wiki claims that 20-30 spawn along with the Brain.



Retreating into the tendril-like passageways is an incredibly bad idea.



As the Creepers start to fall, they drop two kinds of materials. The first, in the upper right corner, we've already seen. That's crimtane ore. The larger material next to the healing heart is called a "tissue sample" and is required to actually build most stuff out of crimtane. The Creepers are the only source of tissue samples.



Because we were woefully underprepared, we died badly. And why did we die after proving the Eye to be a chump?

The short answer is that I got cocky. I didn't think I needed to build an arena, even though I spent a previous update drilling in just how important they are. I also didn't seal off the side passages, which let blood crawlers and crimeras spawn in from the darkness to cause us an untold amount of frustration and distress.

I'm going to call this update here. We got taught a pretty nasty lesson in humility. A lesson I don't think I'm going to soon forget.

NEXT TIME: We prepare and go back for round 2.