Part 36: Jungle Boogie

#34 - Jungle Boogie



Hello everyone and welcome back to Rivershire. Today we're catching a minecart track over to the jungle. We're also wearing the spider armor because I have an addiction to summoned minions.



Something about this shot brings to mind a quote from Robin Williams. Suddenly I feel right at home....



While you could visit the underground jungle at any point after entering hard mode, there's very little to be found here until where we are now. The enemies are heads and shoulders way above what you should be dealing with on a fresh hard mode character, and all you'd be doing is grinding these badass jungle creatures for a couple low percent drops.



The derplings on the surface are perhaps somewhat weak for our gear, but that will soon change. The hard mode underground jungle is one of the few places in all of Terraria that I give a wide berth until I absolutely have to. The hard mode dungeon and hard mode hell are the others.



Moss hornets are the most common thing to find down here. They're just souped up regular hornets with a lot more life and damage. They also have a 0.67% chance to drop a tattered bee wing that you can use to make your own set of insect wings. Their stingers deal 60 ranged damage, and if we didn't have our Ankh Shield, they would also poison us. They're also just as deadly in melee range, as contact damage with them deals 70 damage!

These guys here are going to account for most of our lost health down here. They're like winged venomous snipers in that they can perfectly aim those stingers to hit you from clear across the screen, while hidden by vines.



So if the underground jungle is so dangerous, why are we here? Well, three reasons. First are the boss fights I've been alluding to for half of hard mode. Those biome keys are locked by a boss fight down here, after all.

The second reason is pictured right here in the shot. See that weird little plant on the far right of the image?



When you've defeated at least one mechanical boss, these start growing down here. Life fruits increase your maximum HP by 5 points, and you can have a maximum of 500 HP. So, we need to find 20 of these bad boys.

That's easier said than done. Don't expect to see Sam with maximum HP until we're ready to actually fight that boss. It takes me a disconcertingly long time to find 20 life fruits.



1 down, 19 to go.



While we're chowing down on healthy fruit, on the right side of the screen, a new enemy is reaching for us. This is the angry trapper and it has a unique weapon drop we'll see before too long. You do not want these guys to touch you, as they deal 100 contact damage.



Out of the darkness comes a new enemy. These spidery enemies have no worthwhile drops, and only exist to poison you. They deal 50 contact damage, which is honestly less than their black recluse cousins we test new weapons on.



Giant tortoises are the jungle version of the ice tortoise we saw last time. These guys are also pretty badass. Just touching them deals 80 contact damage, but these guys occasionally spin their shells around like a top and bounce around the environment. Touching them in this state deals 160 contact damage. Their only drop is a turtle shell item at a 5.88% chance.

You only ever need 3 turtle shells, and only to craft the next tier of melee armor. With that said, the turtle armor is awesome. It has 65 defense and has an innate 100% thorns effect. If you want to get up in an enemy's grill, it is absolutely the set you should pursue.



So you remember when I said we were down here for three things? Here's the third now. This green ore is Chlorophyte Ore, and it starts growing at the beginning of hard mode. It's the next step up the progression ladder, and is something you absolutely should build a farm for.

Chlorophyte has some very odd spawn conditions. It will grow on its own in underground jungle biomes, but only so much can be on a screen at once. So a patch like this is impeding the growth of other nearby Chlorophyte.

It's also the jungle's defense mechanism. Chlorophyte will actively resist the spread of evil and good, and in some cases even reverse it. Yes, nearby Chlorophyte can turn corrupted grass into jungle grass, and dirt into mud. It's not a fast process, but it can and will happen. Because of the weird limitations in how much Chlorophyte can grow on a single screen, don't expect to see the jungle overtaking the world anytime soon.



Before you get any funny ideas about running down into the jungle and mining out a bunch of Chlorophyte on a fresh hard mode world, hold up. While Terraria's progression can be bent and even snapped in a lot of cases, the endgame stuff is one area where progression is strictly enforced. To even mine Chlorophyte, you need a 200% power pickaxe or drill. That means you need a Drax or a Pickaxe Axe, which means the mechanical bosses need to die first.



We get a surprising distance down through the jungle before we finally see this. This cute little pink bulb is the spawning item for the next boss. Unlike the bee larvae, it can't be destroyed by an errant shot, but you still want to be careful around it all the same. If you destroy it with a mining tool, or destroy the block it's sitting on... well, I'm sure I don't need to explain what will happen.



Moving on, we have a new entry in the DoubleNegative is fucking blind department. The yoyo on the ground in front of us that I only just now saw is the Yelets. It starts dropping from enemies down here at a 0.5% chance once a mechanical boss is dead. It deals 60 base damage.



However, not 20 seconds later we pick this up from an angry trapper. This is the weapon I was talking about, and you can get it as soon as you get into hard mode provided you're lucky.





We're packing heat now. Sure it's not as powerful as our Megashark, but there's a certain awesomeness in packing a machine pistol. Here's a fullscreen webm version if you're into that sort of thing.



Let's fast forward to the end of the first jungle trip. My inventory got full and there wasn't anything I could easily trash, so it was time to come back.



Requiring 6 ore per bar, Chlorophyte bars are one of the most expensive in the game. We have 197 ore, which is enough for 32 bars and 5 ore left over.



Like most other armors before it, Chlorophyte Armor takes 54 bars, so a suit of that is still out of our reach for now.



Chlorophyte digging tools only have a slightly increased range over the hallowed versions, so there's no point in upgrading there.



We can make an automatic hammer as an upgrade to... whatever the hell it is we're using right now. Probably the Hammush. But there's still better things to spend this precious green ore on.



This, on the other hand... this we can work with. It looks unassuming enough, but this crossbow is one of the best ranged weapons we've seen yet in the game.







I don't really have an opinion on these weapons. I've never used them before, to be honest. But my feelings on previous melee weapons still stand: namely, I don't see a point in using them when it's safer 100 times out of 100 to go with a ranged option. So we'll stick with our Shadowflame Knives and Light Discs for now.



For the next thing I want to show off, we're back down in Hell. This is the safest place to set up our next farm, which has to be underground to work.



I like building a 5x5 box out of mud, but other sizes will work as well. The key here is to use mud and to not make the box too big. Also be sure that you leave the center empty.



You then take a spare piece of Chlorophyte ore and stick it in the middle of your mud box. Congratulations, you've successfully set up a Chlorophyte farm. You'll want to place several such boxes at least half a screen apart down here in Hell. The distance is the key, so the weird growth mechanics don't impede each individual box.



Also just because you've killed a few bosses doesn't mean you should stop dodging. This is going to hurt. A lot.



Red Devils are dangerous as hell. Never let yourself get hit by their tridents.



Jumping ahead, something some of you in the thread said you wanted to see was Sam taking on a normal mode boss, just to see how far we've come. Given that when I played wow, most of my playtime went to randomly crushing old dungeons, I'm always happy to humiliate early game bosses for no particularly good reason.

To that end, I present to you the Queen Bee "rematch." It's guest starring the podcast I was listening to at the time.

Queen Bee Rematch



I mentioned these moths several updates back, but these are the last enemies in the underground jungle that we haven't seen yet. It has a 50% chance to drop the butterfly dust, which lets you make a set of butterfly wings.



I've never seen this item before in my life, and I just found it randomly in a jungle shrine while scouring the entire jungle for life fruits.



Finally, to end this update, on one of my return trips to the treefort, it's raining heavily. I've been waiting for this. Let's head back to the snow biome...



Heavy rain in the world means a blizzard in the snow biome.



Ice golems are miniboss enemies that only show up during blizzards. They have a 33.3% chance to drop an ice feather, a 100% chance to drop a frost core, and a 2% chance to drop a magic weapon called the frost staff.

We need 3 frost cores.



That's two down, as well as an ice feather. So we'll have all the drops that I care about once we get the last golem.



Let's get the hell out of here.

So why was I so eager to get ice cores?



We're gonna need about 54 titanium bars, but here's our answer. The Frost armor is good. It has more defense than the hallowed ranged set, and causes all melee and ranged attacks to inflict the frostburn debuff. Its equivalent is the set made from forbidden fragments in the desert, except that set boosts summon and magic damage.



We look awesome now.



Even our basic shots from our bag of infinite ammo have the frostburn effect attached.



Same with our light discs. Like I said, it's all melee and ranged attacks.



Because it's a shared melee and ranged set, it doesn't have any ammo conservation bonuses. It does, however, boost our damage output by quite a lot.



Let's have a little fun. Sure the magma stone only affects melee attacks, but our light discs count, which is good enough for me.



Now our chakrams have high damage, and inflict both frostburn and regular burn.



If you think back a ways, you may remember that I mentioned the Wall of Flesh can drop emblems that boost a type of damage by like 15%. Well, if you take one of those emblems and combine it with 5 of each type of boss soul, you can turn it into a universal emblem that boosts all damage types by 12%.



Also if you take a titan's glove (dropped by mimics) and combine it with feral claws (found randomly in jungle shrines), you can get a power glove.



You can then combine the power glove and the avenger's emblem into a mechanical glove that does everything both accessories did.



You can then combine that mechanical glove with a magma stone to create one of the most amazing melee accessories in the game. Sure you lose 2% damage bonus, but I think it's worth it, don't you?

NEXT TIME: We face the master of the Jungle.