Part 18: Welcome to the Jungle

#16 - Welcome to the Jungle



You know, harvesting these plants is kind of tedious. We have to individually "mine" each plant with our pickaxe, and when we do, we only get one seed back. So we can never expand our farm like this. There is a better way, but it requires us to delve into the jungle.



But before we do that, there's a second type of farm I want to set up first. So let's return to the underground.



A salamander enemy drops us a depth meter. With this we can see just how far underground we are. We don't even need to have it equipped! This is also 1/13 of a much more complex item, and one that I intend to get.



Bingo! The blue seed is called mushroom grass seeds. With just one of these, we can grow our own mushroom biome. This is what we ventured underground for, but while we're here, why not explore some more?



I don't believe I've shown this off yet. This is a granite biome, and its enemies are kind of annoying to fight.



Like the marble biome enemies, granite enemies will spawn for about half a screen around their respective biomes. So often the first time you realize you're near one is when you're being harassed by a golem or an elemental.



While exploring a marble biome, we find this fellow tied to a stalagmite. This is the goblin NPC, and we qualified for him once we beat the goblin army.





While we could buy cool stuff from him right now, our inventory is full. So we'll wait until he moves into our base. The reforge option lets us reroll the modifiers on our items for a price. Usually it's pretty expensive, with the most powerful weapons in the game taking somewhere north of 1 platinum coin per reforge. Platinum coins, by the way, are the fourth type of coin, and require 100 gold coins to create.



Back on the surface, we're going to build a small room over to the left of our base. We're placing mud in the air above us, as the mushroom grass seeds need mud to create grass.



We're gonna go with three rows of mud, with mushroom grass seeded into each row. The grass will slowly spread across the mud and mushrooms will grow automatically over time. The reason we're doing this, is that a glowing mushroom farm is incredibly important to have.



This is the reason why. If we stand at our workbench-with-a-bottle-on-top, we can brew potions. So if we take a stack of the ever present lesser healing potions, and stuff glowing mushrooms inside, we can double their effectiveness.

For what it's worth, you can stuff a regular mushroom and a gel into a bottle to create lesser healing potions. Regular mushrooms, I should add, are fairly hard to farm. You can set up a farm similar to what we have for glowing mushrooms, but you have to regularly go through and clear out the grass and ambient plants that sprout up instead of mushrooms.





Six more rooms added to the house. I know four of them are boring square rooms, but this should be enough rooms to last us the rest of the first half.



My recording of the play session ended after that last screenshot, and this next one picks up 45 minutes later. In that time apparently the goblin NPC moved in, and I bought some stuff from him. This is going to be kind of a running theme for a while now, where stuff keeps happening and I'm not recording at the time.

As annoying as it is to read "this cool thing happened off camera," imagine how teeth-grindingly frustrating it is to realize that you forgot to record it.



We purchased these from him off camera. These boots let us fly for a few seconds.



We also placed this down in his room. This furniture object lets us combine accessories. We have already done so with the rocket boots and those dash boots I've been wearing for a while now. So now we can run fast and fly as well! In fact, there's several other accessories we could combine right now, though I don't think I do so for a while.

The NPC also sells...

Ruler - 1 gold coin - (Overlays a grid on the screen, which helps immensely with building)
Grappling hook - 2 gold coins - (In case you're INCREDIBLY unlucky)
Toolbelt - 10 gold coins - (Increases block placement range. Part of a larger accessory)
Spiky ball - 80 copper coins - (The spiky balls the goblins drop)

Basically, the goblin NPC is one of the better guys who will move into your town.



Another NPC moves into town while we're dicking around. The arms dealer is the guy we qualified for once we found a gun. We'll look at his inventory later. Right now we're off to the jungle to see what all's down there.



Before we do, though, here's our triple jump and flight in action. We're pretty mobile now!



Because the entrance to the underground jungle is just an unassuming hole in the ground, I find it's handy to place a bunch of torches around what you suspect is the entrance.



The way forward is often disguised by tiny passageways obscured by vines. So if you hit a dead end, you've almost certainly overlooked something somewhere.



The good news is that the underground jungle is pretty well lit. Moonglow flowers and other goodies will show you where other passages are.



By the way, this whole time until now? We've been in the aboveground jungle. This little line here shows we're about to actually go underground.



The underground jungle has a new type of enemy. This looks like the snatcher from last time, but this guy is the Man Eater, and it has almost double the health.



A few updates back, I mentioned jungle shrines. This is what those look like.



Jungle shrines always have pretty awesome stuff inside. This one had an accessory that lets us swing faster, which is never a bad thing.



It also had a honey dispenser furniture object, which lets us craft furniture out of honey blocks. We won't be seeing honey for a while to come, but we can find gigantic beehives down here in the jungle.



One of the hornets we kill drops this. A bezoar is an accessory that prevents us from getting poisoned, and like the depth meter we found earlier, it's part of a larger accessory. Though at the end of this road, we'll eventually have an accessory that renders us completely immune to every status effect in the game.

I seriously doubt we'll ever get it. I've got it before, and it requires so much farming that it's not even remotely fun. The vast majority of the drops for this accessory can't even be gotten in the first half of the game. In fact, the bezoar is only one of two pieces we can get in the first half.



Rarely when you destroy a pot, a portal to the gold dimension can open up. This portal spits out a bunch of gold coins and then disappears. Here, we got 10 gold coins, which isn't too bad.



The farther underground we get, eventually spores are going to start spawning. These only spawn in the cavern level underground jungle, and are required for crafting any of the jungle weapons and armor.



Combining the shoe spikes and climbing claws let us cling to walls like we're in La-Mulana. Though we can also slide down them at will.



Something very important to note: if a beehive falls and hits water, no bees or hornets will spawn.



Back in town, the traveling salesman is here. We buy both a stopwatch and a DPS meter from him, so we can now see how fast we're moving and what our DPS is.



We can combine the depth meter, the compass, and a clock (made from some chains and 10 gold/platinum bars) to make a GPS. These have to be combined at the goblin NPC's workshop. We don't yet have the item we can combine with the stopwatch and DPS meter.



The tiger climbing gear is that accessory I mentioned earlier, the one that lets us slide down walls and cling to them.

That's enough for now. Unfortunately, we didn't get the one item I wanted to get out of the jungle. So we'll have to go back later. But that's a good survey of the underground jungle for now. We'll be back in a few updates, when you least expect it.

NEXT TIME: Journey to the Center of the Earth