Part 25: Tribute
#23 - Tribute
Hello everyone. Welcome to HELL. Today's update starts with a trip to mine Hellstone. If you recall, mining Hellstone is a bit of a hazardous endeavor. Why?
Oh, no reason.
There are three safe ways to mine Hellstone. One is to use obsidian skin potions, which render you immune to lava damage. Each one of those only lasts 5 minutes and requires a single piece of obsidian in addition to the other ingredients, which makes them kind of stupidly expensive.
The second way is as I'm demonstrating here. We're standing in relative safety of one of the many abandoned houses that litter the landscape of Hell. From inside of these obsidian walls, we can mine out nearby Hellstone in safety.
The third method is less safe, but does involves tunneling through the ever-present ash to mine out the harder to reach deposits from safety.
Care must be taken to not take a lava bath.
Manually digging a hellevator makes you a pro at the third method. You get good at creating drainage tunnels that siphon lava away from where you're mining.
The Molten set is the armor made from Hellstone. It's the strongest melee set in the first half, as well as the set that offers the most defensive bonuses. The full set takes 45 Hellstone bars and offers 25 defense, and 17% increased melee damage.
You also look like an infernal Iron Man while wearing it. It's pretty rad. If you don't have any vanity items equipped, the full set also has a fire effect when you walk around, which provides a small amount of illumination.
It's a sad day, folks. Our amazing meteor armor has finally been outclassed. So goes our laser gun to the wall of fame as well.
This next series of screenshots has some crossover with the Halloween overview I did last month. So bear with me for a bit here. This is what the Clothier sells. Right now we're interested in two pieces of clothing in particular, but...
Black Thread - 1 gold coin
Pink Thread - gold coin - (Threads are used in the construction of various vanity sets.)
Familiar Shirt - 1 gold coin
Familiar Pants - 1 gold coin
Familiar Wig - 1 gold coin - (Familiar clothes are the clothes your character started the game with. It's the vanity set that Sam is wearing currently.)
Beanie - 1 gold coin - (It's a beanie. He sells this when he's living in a snow biome.)
Summer Hat - 1 gold coin - (You too can join the Straw Hat Pirates. He sells this during the day.) (Thanks Zeratanis and Yapping Eevee for both answering this fucking random question.)
Plumber's Shirt - 25 gold coins
Plumber's Pants - 25 gold coins - (I can't imagine what this is referencing. He sells this during a full moon.) (Fire Imps drop the matching hat for the set at a 0.2% drop rate. That's 1-in-500.)
White Tuxedo Shirt - 25 gold coins
White Tuxedo Pants - 25 gold coins - (Be a rebel and wear white after Labor Day. He sells this during the night of a full moon.)
The Doctor's Shirt - 20 gold coins
The Doctor's Pants - 20 gold coins - (In case you, for some reason, want to dress like Matt Smith. He sells this the day after a full moon.)
Mime Mask - 2 gold coins - (
He sells this during a Blood Moon.)Fallen Tuxedo Shirt - 25 gold coins
Fallen Tuxedo Pants - 25 gold coins - (
He also sells this during a Blood Moon.)Guy Fawkes Mask - 3 gold coins - (
He sells this during Halloween.)Clothier's Jacket - 3 gold coins
Clothier's Pants - 3 gold coins - (In case you want to dress like the Clothier. He also sells this during Halloween.)
Bundled Party Balloons - 2 gold coins - (Because who doesn't want to stroll around while holding balloons? He sells this during a party.)
Balloon Animal - 2 gold coins - (You can't hold this at the same time as other balloons. He sells this during a party.)
Silly Sunflower Petals - 3 gold coins
Silly Sunflower Tops - 3 gold coins
Silly Sunflower Bottoms - 3 gold coins - (You got me. He also sells this during a party.)
Don't quote me on that last one being a reference, but the rest are pretty spot on. I should also note that the Clothier Voodoo Doll lets you refight Skeletron if you use it to attack and kill him at night.
The Stylist also sells a bunch of hair dyes. Unlike other cosmetic choices, these have actual hidden benefits so...
Hair Dye Remover - 2 gold coins - (Restores your character's hair to its natural shade.)
Depth Hair Dye - 5 gold coins - (Changes your character's hair depending on their depth in the world. It's blue at the top of the map, green on the surface, brown in underground, gray in caverns, and red while in Hell.)
Life Hair Dye - 5 gold coins - (Changes your character's hair based on their remaining HP. It goes from Red at full to Black when near dead. She sells this when at least one person has at least 400 max HP.)
Mana Hair Dye - 5 gold coins - (Similar to the Life dye, but with mana. Starts at Blue and goes to White. She sells this once someone has at least 200 MP.)
Money Hair Dye - 10 gold coins - (Changes your character's hair based on how much money they're carrying. Requires you to have at least 1 silver coin in your inventory.)
Time Hair Dye - 5 gold coins - (Changes your character's hair based on time of day. Light blue in late night, green in early day, yellow at noon, red in the afternoon, purple in the evening, dark blue at night. This is Sam's current hair color. She sells this during certain moon phases.)
Team Hair Dye - 5 gold coins - (Changes your character's hair based on the team they join in multiplayer. I routinely forget multiplayer has teams, so...)
The Stylist has other dyes she sells, but those have requirements we have yet to meet. If I remember, I'll show them off when we get to that point. If I don't, just know that they're mostly awful anyway.
In really rare instances, the traveling merchant will sell a Companion Cube. This is a pet that is unique in that it will occasionally attack you for 1 HP. This attack can even kill you! You also read the tooltip right, it costs 5 platinum coins, making it the single most expensive buyable item in the entire game.
Today's next major project involves expanding the greenhouse.
This will make 6 rows of 5 of all 7 herbs. 30 herbs of each type should hold us for pretty much the entire rest of the game. Even if it doesn't, expanding now is effortless. We just need to remove the roof and build up!
Because it'll be Halloween for the next while in the LP, there are pumpkins absolutely everywhere. They all have a rare-ish chance to drop this pet-summoning item.
Because this is also our first pet, I'll equip it to show it off a bit.
Pets go in the top slot of the second page of equipment. The third slot is for minecarts, while the fourth is for if you get lucky enough to find a rideable mount. The heart in the second slot is that worthless light item. I've clicked the eye icon to turn it off so it won't get in my way while I'm mining. Something I suspect I'll be doing with the squashling pet as well.
I can already feel that this was a mistake.
Anyway, offscreen I had a trip into the dungeon. It was the exact same trip I glossed over in the Halloween update. In that trip, we found the shadow key in one of the chests, so let's show off the shadow chests!
The Hellwing bow turns regular arrows into bat projectiles that can pierce through an infinite number of enemies. While this sounds awesome, the downside is that it's inaccurate as hell. You can't control where the arrows go, and they fire in a 30 degree arc in front of you. Though on the upside, this bow does auto fire fairly rapidly, making it into something of a machine gun.
Shadow Chests can also contain rare metal bars and silver bullets.
This is literally the fire flower from Mario. It has fairly high magic damage, but... well, it's the fire flower from Mario. Think about how that power-up works, and you can see the downsides to this magic weapon.
If you can make it work, this is a really nice weapon all the same.
Not too bad, eh?
If you get deep enough in the world, the screen stops scrolling. You can get a Steam achievement if you touch the very bottom of the screen.
The Dark Lance is one of the best melee weapons in the first half of the game. My love for spear type weapons all stem from this thing being completely awesome.
The Sunfury is the upgrade to the Blue Moon from the dungeon. It's a ridiculously good weapon, and actually used to only drop from Bone Serpents (Hell's gigantic worms, remember?) very early in the game's life.
I haven't found one yet, but Shadow Chests also drop one more item...
The Flamelash - (A fire version of the Magic Missile weapon from the dungeon. Like its predecessor, it is also ridiculously good, dealing 40 base damage.)
Before I bring this update to a close, I want to show this off. I have two buckets full of water, and I've put two little pools around the alchemy station we found in the dungeon. Filling these pools will let us fill bottles with water without having to leave our alchemy table. Most potions, as you'd guess, require bottles of water.
Someone in the thread already mentioned it, but the traveling merchants will occasionally sell ammo boxes. If you right click them, they provide at 9 minute buff that gives you a 20% chance to not consume ammo.
Anyway, that's a good enough spot to leave off on for now. Apologies for the short update, but I'm writing this early in the morning, and I'm going to be taking a day trip to the northern part of the state today. And nobody wants me to be writing an update after being stuck in DC Beltway traffic for a couple hours.
NEXT TIME: Mass transit comes to Rivershire, as well as the single most impractical farm ever.