Part 17: Snake Eater

#15 - Snake Eater



Hello everyone. So last time, discounting the explanation for the corruption existing in Rivershire, we found... well, the corruption.



It's approximately a single screen across, and borders an entirely new biome. We'll return to the corruption momentarily. There's a boss and awesome loot to be had within, after all. But because we've found the jungle, there's no reason we can't explore it as well.

Terraria Soundtrack vol. 1 - Jungle

Be sure to give that a listen. The jungle theme is another great one.



Anyway, sometimes the game has some troubles with worldgen. Here we have three biomes intersecting in a very volatile way. There are enough jungle grass blocks to count as the jungle biome, there's enough sand beneath our feet to count as the desert, you can see the regular green grass of the forest biome on the far right of the picture. Oh and there's also the corruption about half a screen behind us.



These worldgen troubles are pretty funny though. Here we have a typical surface jungle scene mixed with the amber water of the desert.



Typically, water in the jungle is a very light shade of blue, almost like water you see in the Caribbean.



First things first, a new biome means a new type of slime. Here's the jungle slime. It's not really different from other slimes, besides having a different amount of health.



If I'm not entirely mistaken, this is the surface entrance to the underground jungle biome. The underground jungle, the dungeon, and somewhere else we have yet to find are all approximately as difficult as each other. All three biomes were endgame destinations in the initial release of the game, back 5 years ago.

We will eventually explore down there, but not today.



This is what traversing the surface jungle is like. There's water absolutely everywhere, and rich mahogany trees as well. If we were here during the evening, we could collect moonglow seeds.

If we destroy the background plants, we also have a lowish chance to get what are called "jungle grass seeds." We can use those to spread the jungle ourselves.



Finally! After what feels like an eternity, we meet another of the enemies that spawn on the surface jungle. This is a snatcher. It's an aggressive plant, it has 60 health and all it does is reach through solid blocks to try and attack us.



As you might expect of a jungle environment, it's pretty dangerous. You see that little thing hanging between the vines? That's a beehive.



If you attack one, it will fall to the ground and break. When it does so, it spawns several small bees and a large hornet. The smaller bees are almost impossible to see, and even harder still to hit with anything but a broadsword swing arc. The larger hornet is more common in the underground jungle, and will shoot venomous stingers at us, which will naturally leave us with a poisoned debuff.



Because the jungle doesn't hate you enough, both the surface and underground can spawn jungle bats. Imagine the common cave bat, but now it can spawn on the surface.



Oh hey, neat, a Pinky.



Never a reason to not kill one as soon as you see it. It's a great source of money.



Finally, the last jungle surface enemy. Yep, piranhas.

That's basically all you need to know about the jungle for now. Moving on...



Past the jungle, we find some more corruption.



We also finally meet a corruption enemy. This is an eater of souls, and it's by far the most common enemy to fight in the corruption. Its crimson counterpart is the crimera, for what it's worth. Early in the game, they're pretty nasty, but now that we have meteor gear, they're not even a speedbump.



There's the far left edge of the world, which means this beach is gonna be wholly corrupted before too long. Pity.



Oh yeah, if you go diving in the ocean, you will occasionally find some not-very-friendly natives. Most of the time, sharks will drop a fin when you kill them. But 2% of the time, they drop an item that lets you stay underwater for up to 30 seconds.



More commonly than sharks, the ocean will spawn pink jellyfish. Other than slightly increased health and a different banner drop, they're otherwise identical to regular blue jellyfish.



Oceans also usually have at least one water chest on the bottom.



If we had found this chest earlier, the contents would have been better. As it is right now, it's barely worth looting.



So now that we've been to both extreme edges of the world, are you all ready for what I promised last time? Because I'm pretty sure I promised a boss fight, and I would hate to be thought of as a liar.



Finding the corruption caverns is not as easy as finding the crimson counterparts are. The crimson caverns are marked by gigantic "mouth" caves.

The surface corruption is marked by several gigantic canyons leading down into the earth.



If you're unlucky, the canyons terminate early.



It takes a few tries, but we eventually find an entrance to the caverns.



By which I mean I make one with high yield explosives and our crimtane pick. Normally it's not this hard to get in the underground corruption. Usually you just mistime a jump across the canyon mouth and wind up falling for an incredibly long distance... usually ending with your character pancaking on the bottom.



Welcome to the underground corruption. These ugly things in front of us are Demon Altars, and they're the corruption equivalent of the crimson altar we already found.



The corruption also has shadow orbs instead of crimson hearts. The same caveat exists, though. Break three shadow orbs and we get to fight a boss unique to the corruption.



The corruption ore equivalent of crimtane is called demonite. It glows purple in the dark, making it pretty easy to see. This is also not the first time we've seen demonite in this LP. In fact, demonite has been in several screenshots in multiple updates, usually on the far edges of an image. Every time I posted a screenshot of it, I wondered if someone would notice and call me out on it, but nobody ever did.



The last enemy we'll meet in the corruption is a giant worm type enemy called the devourer.



Because the worldgen has a sense of humor, there's some crimtane ore under the corruption caverns. Conversely, there was also some demonite under the crimson caverns.

So that's enough exploring.



Time to get blasting.



The messages for breaking shadow orbs are the same as for breaking the crimson hearts.



Though the loot is different. This is the Vilethorn, and it shoots out a magic spike that utterly wrecks enemies with multiple segments, like the devourer we fought earlier. It's the corruption counterpart to the Crimson Rod, even filling the same slot as early-mid game powerful magic weapon. Between both of them, we're going to utterly humiliate this next boss.



It's pretty good.



The Shadow Orb is the corruption counterpart to the Crimson Heart light pet we have. It's probably the better one to use, honestly.





Eater of Worlds Boss Fight

So you might notice that I didn't prepare an arena. We don't need one. Not at our current gear level, anyway. This boss is kind of easy already, and with our weapons, we can absolutely shred him.



The Eater of Worlds is an incredibly long boss. It's comprised of 50 sections: 1 head, 48 body pieces, and 1 tail piece. So there's absolutely no way we'll ever get the whole thing in one screenshot.



As such, this is my strategy. It works pretty well. The boss only has one AI pattern: to act like a gigantic worm enemy. If the head hits you, it deals more damage than if the body does. According to the wiki, the entire monster has 7485 health. While that seems like a lot, that's spread across 50 parts. The head only has 65 life, while the body segments have 150.

You should always aim for the head, for two reasons. One being that it has less health and dies faster, creating another head below it and lowering the boss's overall health. The second reason being that you can destroy body sections, and if you do so, the boss splits in two at the broken part. This means you now have two bosses to watch out for where before you only had one.

This can get out of hand quickly.



The good news is that the damaged body parts make it pretty easy to track the boss.



While I say you should try to not kill the body, it's going to happen. There's no way to avoid it. The damage from multiple strikes with piercing weapons is going to add up, and the boss is going to split. Just stay on top of killing the heads, and you won't have a problem.



If you do what I do and hang from the ceiling, you can kinda manipulate the boss's AI to always try and strike from below. So you can sometimes get a perfect storm scenario like is happening here. The boss is coming up directly under us, right into an awaiting rainstorm and barrage of vile spikes.



Like I said, the Eater isn't a very tough fight.



Killing the various heads and sections will drop a bunch of demonite ore and shadow scales. Shadow scales, as you might imagine, are the corruption equivalent of the tissue samples.



Finally, from that last shadow orb, we got this. I could see this being potentially useful if you're going for a magic build.

So in addition to these drops, the corruption also has two other items. One is a musket, a ranged weapon that deals 31 base damage + the damage from bullets. It's a little slower than the undertaker we found, but it's a pretty good choice for your first gun otherwise.

The other item is called the Ball O' Hurt. It's another melee weapon, and the first flail type one in the game. It deals 15 damage per attack, and when you attack with it, you launch the spiked ball end out and it can hang in place as long as you hold the mouse button down. This is pretty devastating to the Eater of Worlds, as it deals contact damage every tick that an enemy is in contact with it.

The Crimson also has one more drop that I didn't get, a spear called the Rotted Fork. Like the Ball O' Hurt, it is also pretty handy at absolutely shredding the boss summoned by the things it's dropped by.

That's also enough for now. I doubt I'll be making any of the demonite equipment intentionally, so if any of you want to talk about that, feel free.

From here, there's a bunch of places we can go to for progression, so updates for the next while are gonna be about exploring our options. We'll delve into the uncharted depths of the underground jungle, we'll explore the forgotten hallways of the dungeon, and somewhere in between both, we'll finally achieve the thread's title by journeying to the center of the earth.

NEXT TIME: The jungle grows restless...