Part 16: The Man Who Sold the World
#14.5 - The Man Who Sold the WorldHello everyone, and welcome to the second Very Special Update. I'm sure you all have lots of questions about what exactly happened last time. I think this should explain everything.
But we're going to get there through a kind of circuitous route. So, to start things off, let's make a new world.
Our Rivershire is at the top, followed by a lot of worlds after. Pretend LP Test World #1 and #2 are not there yet. We'll make those later. At any rate, we're more concerned with the New button on the bottom.
The game asks us to choose from between three options. Large is, as always, the correct choice.
For the purposes of demonstration, we're going to make an expert mode world.
Once you pass a certain spoilery event halfway through the game, you can select the type of evil your world has. Again, for demonstration purposes, we're going with Corruption.
I have such descriptive world names. Anyway, once we hit the submit button, the game spends a couple minutes churning and then out pops a world, ready for us to explore and inhabit.
It even has a neat little progress bar, showing us what it's doing.
Once it's done, we can see the newly created world right there ready for us.
So that's all well and good, right? But what if I told you that there exists a utility that gives us more granular control over the world we make?
Allow me to introduce you to the TerraCustom utility.
Just because we can, let's make a medium sized world.
Seems similar so far, right? This world we're making, by the way, is normal mode because fuck expert mode.
This is a name we almost certainly haven't seen before. (Spoilers: I recorded this stuff first.)
But after naming the world, we're dumped out into this menu with fourteen different options.
I should warn you that from this point, the menu options will have blatant unmarked spoilers. We will see the name of every boss in the game, the name of all the various ores, and even biome spoilers.
Also just because you see something mentioned in the menu options, please don't take that as your opportunity to post about it.
Anyway, let's start with the Terrain menu, as it's on top.
These sliders let us control the size of the terrain in the world. I play with a couple sliders here, but nothing really too extravagant. Mostly I make the dungeon 100% bigger and add a bunch of surface tunnels.
Next is the ores screen. This lets you choose from between the fourteen different types of ores available. The first four options let you choose either Random, One, The Other, or Both. I elect to leave all of these ores as random just for the hell of it.
Next is the graphic styles menu. This lets us tweak how things in the world look.
These are the options for moon style.
We can choose what style of trees we want for the right, middle, and left sides of the map.
We can choose whether we want blue, green, or pink bricks in the dungeon.
We can pick the color of moss that appears underground for the right, middle, and left sides of the world.
The last option, Jungle Shrines, doesn't have any associated pictures. But it lets us pick the type of bricks that make up jungle shrines. We can choose from Iridescent Bricks, Mudstone Bricks, Rich Mahogany, Tin Bricks, Gold Bricks, or a mixture. I choose to leave it as random just to see what pops up.
The next menu is for backgrounds. We can customize both surface and underground background types. There are far too many pictures to show all of them off, so I'll leave it a surprise.
This is the "miscellaneous" menu. Here we can choose what type of evil exists in the world, and even fine tune whether the world has various features. And, yes, like in the LP, you can choose whether or not the world has both types of evil.
So here we have a corruption world, but with crimson biomes as well. We've forced them to be on separate sides of the world, we've forced the game to spawn in more of them, and we've also forced the world to have both Pyramids and Giant Trees.
The last option is a booby trap option. If you set it to yes, then every shrine that the game generates will have a real sword inside.
Don't worry if that last sentence doesn't make a lick of sense. It will eventually.
The next menu is challenge options, which will let you remove certain features from the game. This is a pretty bad and dumb idea, because several of these choices make it completely impossible to progress through the game.
Next we have micro biomes. These let you tweak how many of the smaller biomes and features appear in the world.
You can have a lot of fun with this one. Just ask Zeratanis sometime.
This world is gonna be really dangerous.
This menu lets you tweak the "various spawns." I tend to not mess with these too much.
The next two menu options have MASSIVE SPOILERS. So if you're avoiding those, scroll down past the pictures.
These menus let you tweak which bosses have already been killed, as well as which NPCs have been found. Marking an NPC as found will allow them to move in as soon as there's a room. Marking bosses as killed will progress the game to that point, and NPCs will start selling goods from after that boss.
This next menu lets you tweak the various chests you can find in the world. You should probably leave the first setting at 1.
It's gonna be a pretty rewarding world.
Anyway, that's all of the settings. Once you're satisfied, hit the Create button and watch the game work its magic.
So, now you're all probably asking what settings I used for the LP. To be honest, I don't remember anymore. I'm pretty sure I left most of the sliders at default, and just told the game to add in as much content as possible. So the world generator forced a pyramid and trees, and is a large world.
I look at things this way: if you're going to LP Terraria, you want to show off as much content as possible right? Well the best way to do that is to tweak the worldgen to produce a world that lets you show off as much as possible. So while this does account for some of my weird luck, it doesn't account for all of it. Some of it was just that - luck.
Anyway, that marks the end of this Very Special Update. Before I go, I have a small gift for all of you. I created two worlds with the above settings, one Medium and one Large. I looked at both of them in a map viewer, and both promise to be incredibly fun. I also included the Expert Mode world we made up at the top, though I have not looked at it yet.
If you're on Windows, just extract the .wld files to: "C:\Users\<your account>\Documents\My Games\Terraria\Worlds". Unfortunately, I don't know where the game stores the .wld files on Mac or Linux platforms, so I can't help you there.
You can download the three worlds I made for you all here.
You can find the TerraCustom tool here
NEXT TIME: We explore the Corruption.