Part 15: Through the Fire and Flames

#14 - Through Fire and Flames



Hello everyone. Today is going to be kind of long, so be sure to get comfy. We're going to start off today with yet another tutorial that's pretty necessary for playing the game.



This is the tree just to the left of our base. We're going to build something on top of it.







We're also going to need some planter boxes. The Dryad, by the way, is now selling Deathweed Planter Boxes now that we've killed the Brain of Cthulhu. The type of planter box you buy is entirely cosmetic, so we'll stick with daybloom ones for now.



20 is more than we're going to need. We're going to set up a starter farm, and as such, we won't need many planter boxes.



Indeed, we only have 3 types of seeds in our potion chest: blinkroot, daybloom, and shiverthorn.



Because it's just a greenhouse, we don't need a fancy room. So a square gray box will work wonderfully.



We also make a little staircase and a walkway at the bottom to help guide future expansion of the treefort.





Now that the basic shape of the greenhouse is taken care of, we can place our planter boxes.



Greenhouses can be in any style you like. I like to leave enough room to walk on top of each row of planters, which means 3 blocks minimum between each row. I also like to make each column of planters 5 tiles long.

If left alone, the planters will grow random wild flowers that look pretty but do nothing. They also act like regular platforms, so we can quickly move between rows.



Planting seeds is as easy as using the seeds on the planters. We don't need to water them or anything. They'll grow on their own just fine.



You can't really see the sprouts, but we've now got three types of herbs planted.

Daybloom: Found all around the forest biome. Blossoms during the day. Fully grown plants will look like a small yellow flower.

Blinkroot: Found all around the underground and cavern biomes. Blossoms whenever. Fully grown plants will subtly glow with yellow light.

Shiverthorn: Found all over the snowy biome. Blossoms whenever. Fully grown plants subtly glow with blue light. I've also found that Shiverthorn plants take longer than any other type of plant to fully grow.

There are also four other types of plants out there. We don't have the seeds, but I'll cover them now.

Moonglow: Found all over the jungle biome. Blossoms during the night. Fully grown plants will glow in the dark, and have a small blue bulb on the end.

Waterleaf: Found all over the desert and beach biomes. Blossoms only in the rain. Rain happens rarely enough that you won't have trouble distinguishing a fully grown plant from an immature one.

Deathweed: Found all over the Crimson and Corruption biomes. Blossoms only during a full moon or a blood moon. Like with waterleaf, the blossom conditions happen infrequently enough that you won't have any difficulty telling a fully grown plant from an immature one.

Fireblossom: Found in a very hot place. Blossoms only during the afternoon, between 3:45 and 7:30 PM. Will not blossom during the rain. Fully grown plants have a little red bud on top and will apparently shoot streams of sparks into the air.

All seven plant entries discuss blossoming conditions. Plants will often fully grow before the blossom conditions are met. But a harvested plant will only give up a seed for replanting during the appointed time.



Anyway, while we were messing around with a greenhouse, another meteor landed. We should really get out and see if we can find where they landed. But before we do that, we want to be prepared.

See, meteors are incredibly hot and touching the blocks will burn us pretty badly. Some people suggest explosive mining, but I have a different tactic. We're just going to make the fire a non-issue. But to do that, we need to return to our mine and go deeper than we ever have before. We need to find lava.



Let's retire our tungsten pickaxe. It served us well, so we'll give it a place of honor on our wall.



Alright, so this is the deepest we've ever gone. We were last down here while killing time before killing the Eye. That seems like ages ago now, doesn't it?



Digging straight down sounds like a great idea that can't possibly backfire. We even have our little rainstorm protecting us from above.



By the way this is approximately how much light the crimson heart gives off. It's better than nothing, but not exactly as good as a torch.



After a couple more minutes of digging, we broke through to another cavern.



We also found a yoyo at some point. This is the Rally, and it drops from underground enemies.



Yoyos are incredibly good melee weapons. I have never used them too much because they were introduced after I had long since stopped trying to play as a melee character.



Anyway, a little ways under the house up above we find this little beauty. Lava only starts spawning when you're very deep under the ground. As you might imagine, it's extremely hazardous to your health to touch it, to the tune of 60+ damage every second you're touching it plus 7 more seconds of a burning dot effect.



Now this is what we were looking for. This gargantuan lava lake is perfect for our needs. Now we just need to find some nearby water. We're going to make obsidian.



Don't fuck with lava, folks.



Anyway, the world map shows that there's some deposits of water up above us. So we just need to convince it to flow down to the lava.



Every little bit of water will help, even these shallow pools.



It's already worked! We're talking on top of a very thin sheet of obsidian. We only need a few pieces, so this will be more than adequate. I should also point out that using the auto-mine tool (the ctrl button) will get you killed when you're mining obsidian.



Fucking slimes. It's not worth going back down. We have more than enough obsidian, and those coins are long since gone. They burnt up the instant they touched the lava.



Back in our base, we can turn 20 piece of obsidian into this accessory. Now we can stand on meteor blocks without catching fire. Now that we're properly equipped, let's go find that meteor.

We just have one problem: we're in the middle of a large world. Even understanding the mechanics of meteors, there's still a fuckton of places it could be.

Now I know you're out there saying, "But DoubleNegative, you didn't describe how meteors work." and you'd be right. But this is a perfect time to do so.

First off, the center 16% of the world is completely protected from meteors. They will never crash in the middle. They will also go out of their way to avoid the 25 tiles nearest a player, an NPC, or a chest. So you can protect certain areas of the world by placing chests down and meteors will never strike there.

Meteors will also strike the highest altitude block they encounter. So one could conceivably hit one of those floating lakes we saw a few updates back. Finally, when the meteor does land, it spreads out about 20 tiles from the epicenter of the crash, and converts all the surrounding tiles into meteor blocks.

So now that we're armed with this knowledge, like I said, there are still a metric fuckton of places a meteor could have landed. More than half of the surface is still in the fog of war. So I think the best place to start is by going left and looking that way.



We also finally ditched the ninja shirt, so now we're looking stylish. So, shall we?



Here's the main entrance to the cavern and no meteors yet.



Here's the backside of that hill.



This is the meteor in its entirety. That is a lot of blocks.

Terraria Soundtrack vol 1 - Eerie

This is my absolute favorite track on the soundtrack. Give it a listen.

Now, normally this would be the forest biome. But meteor is a special case.



You see, when there's more than 50 blocks of the stuff in one screen, the game says "okay you're in the meteor biome" which causes the music to change to the theme above, and makes these guys spawn. These are meteor heads, and they have almost no health. But they also don't have clipping either, and can phase through solid blocks in their desire to get to us.



Like I said, not a lot of health, but they are completely unstoppable. The crimson rod is a wonderful weapon to have while mining these blocks, because it deals just enough damage to juggle them and protect you from one side entirely. If your pickaxe is fast enough, you can also just change the direction your character is mining from and kill the meteor heads that way.

These guys will drop the usual coins, but will also occasionally drop chunks of meteor like we're mining here.



So while mining progress is kind of slow, it's not boring. It would be a lot more frustrating had we not gone out of our way to get the obsidian skull. Otherwise, just touching this block would have set us on fire for 7 seconds, which would have been a very nasty constant drain on our health.



After about a quarter of the meteor is gone, we get the best news I've seen in a while. Remember that these banners let us deal extra damage to, as well as take less damage from the monster in question.



It never gets old.



The meteor is mostly taken care of when...



The Goblin army is another random event. It can trigger at any point as long as...

1) At least 1 player has more than 200 HP
2) A shadow orb or crimson heart has been destroyed
3) A goblin invasion is not already happening

Once the criteria have been met, there's a 1/3 chance every day for the army to invade. Once we've defeated the goblins at least once, further invasions have a 1/30 chance to happen. The wiki claims "On average, a random Goblin Invasion will occur about every 12 real-world hours of playing."

Anyway, you know that goblin we found a few updates back? The one that dropped some cloth? We can manually summon a goblin army by combining 10 pieces of that cloth with some wood.

So let's head back to base, see what we can do with this meteor stuff, and then repel some goblins.



Each bar of meteorite takes 3 pieces of "ore" and we currently have 499 pieces. That's 166 bars with 1 piece of meteorite left over.

Meteorite gear is really good. How good?



We can combine 20 bars together to create a hamaxe, which... well, look at the description. A hammer and an axe together.



Or how about a fucking laser gun?



How about new armor for 45 bars? The armor increases magic damage done, and look at that... the laser gun deals magic damage.



We lose a little defense, but we look awesome. Also, the meteor armor's set bonus is very important.

It makes firing the space gun absolutely free. So we now have an incredibly powerful pistol weapon that deals magic damage - that the armor is boosting -, that pierces through an infinite number of enemies, and costs nothing to fire. How could this get any better?



Do I need to say more?



We have a goddamned lightsaber. And, yes, it makes the noise.







Goblin Army video

Terraria Soundtrack vol. 3 - Goblin Army



Let's go meet these goblins head on.



These goblins are a bit overmatched.

Normally I'd describe that there's three types of goblins: warriors, thieves, and mages. Except...



Does it really matter? This isn't an invasion... it's a massacre.



The goblins drop spiky ball items. I've never really used the, but according to the wiki they're kind of like caltrops?



So yeah, in almost no time at all, we've completely wiped out their invading army. This means that we now partially qualify for a new NPC. We actually have to go out and find him first, so that'll be something to throw on the to-do pile.

I was also momentarily disappointed after the army was defeated and I didn't get two items. I didn't realize until later that one of those items no longer drops from the invasion. We'll have to instead buy it from the new NPC.



Also not naming names, but someone forgot to equip the obsidian skull and didn't realize it until it was too late. And yes, that meteor block is dealing 5 tick damage to us as long as we're standing on it.



So while running back, I take the time to put the crimson scalemail set up on a high shelf to look at.



Anyway, this is all the meteor block that's left. We've done a pretty good job of mining it out quickly.



In fact, this little guy arriving shows that we've now mined enough out that we're no longer in the meteor biome.



This massive pit is kind of dangerous. We ought to build a bridge or something.



Close enough! At least nobody can intentionally fall in now.



Here's that pit next to the first pyramid we found. Let's head off into the unknown!



When it comes to deserts, worldgen occasionally does crap like this. Remember that sand is a gravity-affected block. So worldgen will create little sub-surface caverns and then when it applies gravity, the sand all falls down and creates weird hiccups like this.



I never tire of seeing lush grass next to sandy wastelands.



Seriously, what is it with this world and hollow trees?



Looks like another cavern entrance. And... what do we have here?



I... see. Purple landscape? That can only mean one thing!



We found the second meteor.



We also found the corruption biome.

NEXT TIME: I explain what the fuck just happened. (If you know, please don't share.)