Torturing myself in Terraria

Someone end my suffering

I recently beat the entirety of Terraria the other day, which you think would mark me as something of an expert in the game mechanics. Afterall I started playing all the way in 2013; how could a guy with that sort of history with Terraria still be a scrub? Well, throw in about 6 years worth of truancy and by the time I got around to stabbing the Moon Lord in his weak points I was barely anything more than a bare basic rookie with the knowledge of a semi intelligent foetus. I could just about guide another player through the process of beating the game, but that doesn't make me a master of the game mechanics at all. Which is why it would be the utmost of folly, the height of moronic intuition, to decide that with the bare basic knowledge of how this game would be played, I would go on to then play the single most difficult challenge that this game has to offer. What kind of absolute moron would I have to be in order to come to that sort of conclusion? The type you see before you today, it would seem, because indeed I have done exactly that and it has been a tortuous experience.

If you don't know exactly what I mean by the most difficult challenge the game has to offer; allow me to elucidate. With the release of 1.4.4 of Terraria, the team have marked their move away from development of that game so they can move onto their next, presumably Terraria 2. (Yes, seems I unintentionally picked the perfect moment to finally wrap up my affair with this game.) But the developers didn't want to leave their old game behind without slapping a little something special on the box, and that's exactly what they ended up doing with their Special Seed. Now world Seeds are little codes you can punch into the world generation when making the map in order to tell the game to generate the land in a very specific way. Secret seeds are special seeds added by the developer which apply special rules that render the final generated world as functioning differently to a standard Terraria world.

Perhaps you would end up typing the 'For the Worthy' seed, which automatically scales up the world difficulty by one notch, (so if you choose 'normal', the world would be on 'expert' difficulty.) alongside throwing in a bunch of surprise traps and Boss tweaks to make the game more painful. Maybe you would enter in the Don't Starve crossover seed, which adds in a hunger system (a painful addition for a game that doesn't exactly have a robust food acquisition process) and a deathly entity in the dark that slays anyone who remains in there too long. Or perhaps you'd try the 'don't dig up' seed which flips the world totally on it's head so it starts in the underworld and progresses upwards towards a nearly inhospitable version of the overworld. Or maybe you'd try the brand new 'Everything Seed' which basically takes the most painful elements of all those seeds I just mentioned and a bunch more and slaps them altogether in a horrifying amalgam of torment. And maybe you'd also set the difficulty of that world to 'Master', which is unofficially known in the community as 'Legendary mode'. Maybe that's what I did to myself.

Why did I decide that I wanted to stick my neck into Terraria's Legendary difficulty? Because I'm an idiot, evidently. And maybe some degree of hubris in acknowledgement of some of the absolutely painfully idiotic things I've already endured to get as far as I did in normal Terraria. For example, once in an attempt to grind The Wall of Flesh so that I could make the Avenger Emblem (something I waited to do until pre-Moon Lord, greatly hurting my chances of spawning the requisite mob with his Voodoo doll summoning item) I got bored of averaging one boss fight every thirty minutes or so to get a 25% chance on an item. So I looked it up and ended up downloading a 'For the Worthy' seed world after learning that one of the world changes it did was switch all demon spawns to Voodoo demons. (Without studying any of the other changes.) So can you guess what happened? Allow me to lay out the scenario for you.

I dig all the way down into the underworld and then glide my way across the lava lands ripping through Underworld huts and stocking up on useful items. And then I explode. Hindsight tells me I must have broken a pot, which in 'For the Worthy' has a chance of dropping a bomb on your head; leading me to a predicament. You see, I had literally just spawned in that world and dug down without preparing anything. Meaning, I didn't set up a base, bring any back-up gear, or literally place anything down to make a recovery journey plausible. And I was playing in Mediumcore, so I had dropped all my items. Now I could have either given up and gone back to my world (which would have cost me dearly, but not impossibly) or spend the next 5 hours trying to get to my gear in the most hostile environment this pre-hardmode 'For the Worthy' world had to offer. That was five hours painfully spent dying a simply unreal amount of times and giving up hope countless times. But I got my items back, and I delighted in deleting that world the second afterwards. What pain could that Legendary seed throw at me that I hadn't already suffered?

Oh god; I never realised how painful Terraria is without cobblestone! You literally can't do anything without it- can't make armour, can't make furniture; and the 'Everything Seed' made getting it a herculean task. Every enemy can, at the very least, two shot you. Trees sometimes drop bombs when you try to harvest them. The ash ground you spawn on is affected by a brand new, and very temperamental, cave-in system so you can't dig under the enemies or you'll get squashed. Ghosts spawn on the underground layer for some inane reason, circumventing any walls and barriers you set up. The Wall of Flesh might suddenly summon itself randomly for some reason. (I have no idea what that was about.) I was unlucky enough to spawn under an ice biome, meaning that even if I dug all the way to the surface, I wouldn't get any cobble- forcing me to go spelunking far out from spawn. And I hate the food system.

I wouldn't call Terraria itself a painfully difficult game, in fact there are mods created specifically to try and make Terraria into that style of rage game with awfully balanced bosses and ridiculous upgrade paths that extend the game into twice it's natural length. But the 'Everything Seed' does a damn good job of providing that experience sans mods. Even a semi-literate Terraria player who knows all the ins and outs of the game would grind their teeth working through that pain-in-the-ass of a world, and I'm nowhere near that level; so what in the hell was I thinking? I was thinking it would be fun, and I was thinking that I deserve the anguish. And you know what? For starting this I absolutely do. I deserve all the pain I meet upon myself. Because those who play with fire must, for their own sake, be burnt.

Will I continue with the world? Maybe. Looking up some other playthroughs have reminded me that, idiot I am, there's no need for me to plant my base on the ashy death-lands if I don't want it there. So maybe I'll give it another shot, or maybe I'll nuke everything and start again with an easycore character because I not sure if I'm even having fun struggling through a game I barely even understand as I currently am. Then again I am a masochist; and will I even be able to appreciate the game if it isn't peeling back my eyelids so it can snuff out a lit cigarette bud in my pupils? I don't know. It wouldn't be the first horribly unfair challenge I ended up throwing the towel on. But that Xcom Iron man playthrough does haunt me every waking day... (Maybe going back to that would be a cop-out I can live with.)