Part 10: Eyes on Me

#10 - Eyes on Me



Hello everyone. It's a rainy night in Rivershire, and we're hard at work already. What are we hard at work making?



Oh, nothing really. Staves are early-game magic weapons, and one for each type of metal and gemstone exists. This makes them one of the only recipes that discriminates between, say, iron and lead. I wanted to make a platinum staff, but those require diamonds, and I have as of yet to find any.



The bolt fired from the emerald staff pierces through up to 2 enemies, and the staff can even autofire. It's a ridiculously good weapon for how early you get it, and it will remain relevant through a lot of the first part of the game.

Also it's kinda awesome that we duct-taped some emeralds to a tungsten staff and made a magic focusing device.



I'm feeling daring. Time to investigate the underground desert.



Antlion Chargers are another type of desert enemy. Like their flight-capable cousins, they also love to swarm you.



They also appear to resist magic damage quite a bit.



Anyway, down here where the charger was, we can find a curious structure. It's not well illuminated, but these are minecart tracks. Right click the tracks and...



Sam is mobile!

Minecart tracks will randomly spawn all over the underground. It's not uncommon to be tunneling through solid rock and emerge next to a set of abandoned tracks in the darkness. We can even make our own tracks for a ridiculously cheap price. 1 piece of wood and 1 bar of iron/lead will net us 50 tracks. Given that iron is stupidly common underground, and that trees are infinitely renewable, you can quickly make a lot of tracks.

Like, say, enough to create a public transit system for your game world, spanning from the left side of the world to the right. With exits to every point of interest along the way. Not, y'know, like I've ever done that or anything.



This antlion nest is already paying off. Look at all of that platinum.



I wasn't kidding when I said these suckers swarmed you. This is just the smallest hint of the hordes we've been fighting for the past two minutes.



This is one of the largest deposits of platinum ore in the game world. I know this because I loaded up a map viewer before recording and looked specifically for platinum ore, because I was tired of hunting blindly in the dark.





Sometimes the game likes to make little traps like this. You'll find an absolutely jaw-dropping amount of ore in the wild, and it'll be next to a TNT plunger. This plunger is connected to a lot of high-yield explosives nearby. I don't know exactly where, but they are always close enough that by jumping on the plunger you will take well over 500 damage.



I don't know how much platinum that was, but it almost definitely wasn't enough.



There's a lot of crimtane in this antlion nest.



There's a familiar sight. Looks like this minecart track ends right over next to the pyramid.



But just because we can survive down here, doesn't mean I want to be here. So let's go back to the other cave tunnels and continue our search.



Even if it's only to avoid fighting these things anymore. God I hate worm type enemies.



Anyway, it looks like we mined out 114 pieces of platinum in the desert. With 4 pieces of ore per bar we have... 28 bars worth in our inventory, plus two left over. That might be just enough.



Counting what we had in the box, that should be just enough to make some nice armor.



Two-thirds of the way there and we are short by seven bars. Because, for some stupid reason, platinum armor requires 90 bars instead of the usual 75. So we have a lot more work to do.



This is approximately the point where I completely lost patience with hunting for this fucking ore. So here I reopened the map viewer and followed it to the nearest platinum vein. Luckily it was large enough to just cover our needs.



20 defense is pretty damn good. Also we're wearing the ninja shirt we found from King Slime.

So now that phase 1 of our preparations is complete, it's time for arguably the more important step. We need to build a boss arena.



Here's the starting point. The arena needs to be floating off the ground.



It should also be approximately half a screen long as well.



It's not the prettiest arena ever, but it will more than adequately serve for our purposes.



We also have a bunch of clay from somewhere, so let's show that off too. You can turn clay into bricks at the furnace.



We're going to line the back of our arena with red brick because it will look pretty.



Uh... close... enough? Honestly, I'm too lazy to go find more clay right now. I'm antsy with wanting to continue with the game, so this will serve just fine.



You might call it 'cheating' because I have the map viewer open, but I'm on the hunt for a specific item. The closest one to our base turns out to be back in the underground desert. So...



That innocuous golden chest has one of the best movement accessories in the game inside. One that is almost certainly critical to progressing beyond the next several bosses. I'm sure some of you have already figured out exactly what it is, and why I looked specifically for it.



Need I say more?





We're ready. Now to wait for night to fall.

While we're waiting what do you say about visiting the surface desert? Maybe those palm trees have finally grown.



Or not. This is a sandstorm, and it is a weather type that was introduced with the patch that revamped the desert. The wind will blow us around, and if we're running against the wind, it can be almost impossible to make any meaningful progress.



The antlions from the underground will also come out to play during the sandstorm.



Angry tumbleweeds will also come to harass us while the sand blows.



Back at the base, night falls and makes a liar out of me. Looks like we've gotten a brief reprieve.

So with another free night, let's go spelunking some more. This time not for ore, but just to see what we can find.



Like this. You can see the explosives and detonator in this shot.



We even managed to avoid blowing ourselves up, and got a bunch of ore and stone with no effort required.



A life crystal! We can use these for things other than increasing our health, you know. I'll show this off when we return to the surface.



While exploring, we find one of the game's more odd crafting stations. We can feed trash blocks into this thing to potentially get useful ore out.



I'm also not entirely sure when, but we managed to find a compass at some point in our explorations. This is a rare drop from a large number of enemies that all spawn in the caverns.



The heart lantern is another buff-providing object. It requires a life crystal and 4 iron chains. While that seems kind of expensive, it does provide a life regen buff that stacks with a regeneration potion and the campfire.



The arena is done and dusk is here. We can stand in any corner of the arena and still be in range of not only the life regeneration buffs, but also the movement speed provided by the sunflowers below.



Last time we fought King Slime, an enemy that the wiki refers to as a miniboss. You saw just how much it kicked our ass. Are you guys now ready for the first real boss in the game?

This boss is one of four in the game that can be spawned randomly once we meet the criteria. In this case, we need...

1) 200 HP and more than 10 defense
2) 3 NPCs in our base
3) That the boss not have been defeated previously

Once all three criteria have been met, the game will more often than not display that status message at night. Once that message appears, we have somewhere between 20 and 40 seconds before the boss spawns and starts attacking us.

If you see that message and are not ready, that's your cue to get underground and not return until the night has passed. The boss will not spawn if you're underground, as fighting it down there would not be fair.



Boss Fight Video Here



You know those demon eyes we've been defeating all game? The Eye of Cthulhu is their big brother, and it wants a word with us. It's glowing red because one of the buff potions I drank lets me see where all nearby enemies are, and it highlights them in red.

So, the Eye fight has two phases.



In the first phase, it floats around and spawns smaller eyes to harass us. These things don't have a lot of health and tend to die quickly in the crossfire.



After spawning several smaller eyes, it decides to try and ram us instead.



This is why I went out of my way to find the Cloud in a Bottle. Double jump is, while not of critical importance right now, still extremely useful.

EDIT AFTER THE FACT: The Cloud2Butt Chrome extension briefly changed the text of this post to something a lot funnier.



You know that rainy day we've been saving all our shurikens for? This is it.



This is also a wonderful time to use any javelins you've found.



Don't neglect the bow, either. We drank an archery potion, so it's going to be our biggest damage dealer.



When it's lost half of its health, it gets pissed off and the fight enters the second phase.



In the second phase, the cornea and pupil of its "eye" are gone, and replaced with giant fucking teeth. It also no longer tries to spawn smaller eyes, and instead spends all of its time charging at us. In the second phase of the fight, the Eye also has lowered defense.

As long as you can continue to dodge the Eye, it should fall in no time at all.



Like so.



This, by the way, is how we get our first crimtane ore. The Eye always drops a bunch, usually enough to make at least one item.

Crimson seeds are seeds that spread the crimson biome. Because that doesn't sound like a bad idea at all. Joking aside, there are reasons we would want to do this, and it involves - you guessed it - potion making.



We have enough ore to make 15 crimtane bars.



We also got a second black lens just before the Eye fight. We can combine two of those at a chair-workbench to make some sweet shades.



Aw yeah, we're looking good now.



Normally I would advocate building a pickaxe first, but that requires some additional materials on top of raw crimtane bars. So we're making a bow instead. Other options included a fishing rod, an axe, a sword, and a yoyo.

Yoyos are melee weapons you can use at range. They are pretty powerful, and I will show them off eventually. But the MVP of that last fight was our bow, so I think we should upgrade it first. Not the least reason of which being that it gives us another 10 base damage on top of what we already had.

I also think that is a pretty good place to stop for now. The Eye fight wasn't so much a fight as it was an absolute curb stomp. I don't really show it well in the screenshots, but we barely took any damage, and thanks to our arena and the buffs we had, whatever damage we did take was almost instantly healed.

So what happened between last time and now? We were much better prepared, and we were fighting the Eye on our terms in a specially built arena to take advantage of our ridiculous mobility.

NEXT TIME: Up to the highest height!