Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Terraria - 6/20 hours

Terraria is one of those games that's easy for me to play, but hard for me to write about. Nothing much of note happened in the last four hours. I cleared away a hill to make room for my new house. I added a second story to that house to allow NPCs the room to move in and not get attacked by monsters. I explored past an entire snow biome to discover some weird and sinister red grass area that the wiki tells me is end-game content. I fell down a deep hole and died.

I guess the primary issue is that Terraria doesn't have a lot of what you'd call "plot." You set your own goals and define your own parameters for success, but how meaningful are such decisions to someone who is not also playing the game? Like, right now, what I want more than anything is to upgrade my pickax to a high-level form, so I can potentially mine anything on the map. That involves looking up a lot of stuff on the wiki and then poking my nose into every corner of the map I can find. And that involves upgrading my equipment to fight off monsters, building torches and platforms (and grinding for the materials for the same), and building up a base to have a safe spot to return to between expeditions.

Of course, once I get my super pickax, its primary utility will be that I will be better able to upgrade my infrastructure to allow for more distant exploration. It's a feedback loop that must, eventually, end with me having more power than the world can bear. That's always the stage I like best, though I expect with Terraria, I have basically zero chance of getting there prior to 20 hours.

Oh well, it's the journey that matters, right?

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