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[Server Loading]
The big 1.1 update just arrived so my friend David thought we should finally try a multiplayer server. Adventure-Sandbox games like this are always a lot more fun (and significantly less dangerous) when played with friends. Work gets done faster, leaving more time to mess around. They share good ideas, like mushroom farming methods. They have your back when night falls and the zombies come out to get you. Zombies suck.

[i’m going to go mine a tree.]

[really? is that how you do it? you MINE TREES?]

[why yes, yes I does :D]

[NIFTY PICKLES!]
David is a lot more experienced in Terraria than I am. He bought the game a couple of months back and had played it a lot. He had a bunch of rare weapons, like the space gun and the Muramasa sword, and he even had a complete gold armor set. But for this brand new adventure he started completely over with a new character. I had also just created my own character the day before so we were both going to have a hard time starting out. When you first spawn a character, all you get is a copper short sword, a copper axe, and copper pickaxe. You don’t even start off with a hammer. Essentially, you start off with the slowest and worst tools available in the game. This makes the first day you spend in-game very frantic.
The new world finishes rendering and I take notice of the new background images of the forest biome, as opposed to the plain blue backdrop before the update. We get to work, collecting wood, stone, slime gel, and dirt. Dirt is actually a lot more useful than you would think. You can make a quick wall to keep monsters at bay, use it as a ladder or stairs if you fall in a hole and don’t have a double or high jump accessory yet, like a shiny red balloon or a cloud in a bottle. Dirt is also easy to remove, unlike stone or wood which require you to switch between your axe and your pickaxe. You get slime gel by killing slimes, obviously. It’s one of those items you don’t really think about because you get so much of it, but it is absolutely a necessity. Gel allows you to craft torches, the essential light source once you head underground. Gel also allows you to make a low-grade healing potion, a very handy item. We make a quick shack out of wood, throw a door in, a crafting table, a stone forge, a chest, and David found some iron so we even got an anvil on the first day. The house looks terrible, but that was fine. The first day is about one thing only: Survival.
Dying doesn’t really have a negative effect on play, but you lose money and it’s kind of a hassle, especially at night if you spawn next to a horde of monsters. We don’t have the supplies to craft a bed in order to set new spawn-points, so we have to wait inside until morning. Zombies and flying Demon Eyes scurry around outside the house, trying to get in by knocking at the door. Lots of waiting time is in store so this is a good time to grab a soda or take a bathroom break. David suggests that we should go adventure the overworld a little more once the sun comes up. Sometimes you can find pots with money in them or even chests with loot in them, aka “teh L00tzes!” Some of the best ones you can find at ground level are the Hermes Boots and the boomerang, sometimes even a cloud in a bottle or a magic mirror. Hermes Boots give you the ability run really fast, making them very useful when you need to get away quickly. The boomerang is a good item because it allows multiple hits when thrown and when it returns. One level higher than that is the magic boomerang which does even more damage and produces a light in dark areas. Having a cloud in a bottle enables double-jump which greatly increases maneuverability in tight spaces. Having a magic mirror can be a lifesaver. When used it teleports you back to your spawn. When me and David were trapped underground between about 12 slimes and a thin wall keeping us from drowning under a flood of water he tossed me his money and dove into the mob, giving me enough time to teleport back to the house and save our stuff. It kind of sucked that he died, but the overhead message was pretty funny:
[David, nooooooooo!!!!11!!!1!!!!!!1]
[AAAAaaaaaaah!!!!1!!!!!!]
*David has been digested by SLIMES*

Once we had some iron tools I started working on a Hellevator. It follows the basic principle that you can fall for an infinite amount of time, meanwhile gaining a staggering velocity, but if you have at least 5 feet of water to land in you won’t be turned into flesh-paste when you hit the bottom. Hellevators are a good thing to have because if you were to try and walk down stairs to get to the bottom of the world (Which, incidentally, is Hell itself, hence the name) it would take up to an hour or more. This way, you can just jump into the hole and fall to the bottom in about 2 minutes, all the while in free fall.


[Is this going to work?]


[It should :D]


[I’m FAAALLIIIINNNGG!!!!1!]


[Weeeeeeee!]


*David didn’t bounce*


[OH CRAP!]


*Tony fell victim to gravity*

After the first six or seven times we died we finally got around to fixing it.

Allocation of items really affects game-play, especially when you get the rare ones. Not a lot of people can say that they qualify as a ninja-wizard-werewolf-dwarf-engineer-demon overlord, mostly because it’s a very long title but also because the items to get that status are so rare. Fortunately, the God of all games has given me some sort of natural talent for finding rare things at random. David sometimes thinks that I’m cheating but I don’t have enough expertise to actually hack a game like that.

We will be taking on the Eye of Cthulu next, the first major boss. We’ve built an arena to fight him in and we’ve stocked up on plenty of potions and weapons. The next arc of our journey starts here. The battle has truly begun.