What Are the Growing Pains of Learning Terraria?

What Are the Growing Pains of Learning Terraria?

Terraria is a great game but despite its success does it teach new players well enough to keep them playing any game can sell a lot of copies with overwhelmingly positive reviews and a frequently on sale for $5 price tag but do the people who actually buy the game and play it stick around that’s where my friend Travis comes in now he can’t answer the question of whether he would stick around because I’m making him play this game at gunpoint for your enjoyment but what he can do is expose points of friction that could drive people away from Terraria the growing pains that could be too much for some people we’re past the very first impressions in gameplay at this point but still incredibly early in the game and we find ourselves talking to the guide on day three in game say there’s a person that let you tell you how to survive in this land oh wait that’s me oh hello on day [Laughter] three uh happiness is a thing crafting I’m quite used to not having a home but I wouldn’t mind getting one okay jerk slime interrupted our conversation away yeah I was talking to this guy now the guide in his impact on a new player’s experience as a whole matter in it of itself and I go into it in much more detail in this video so we’re not going to dive very deep into his interactions with the guide today but the guide from here on teaches my friend many things but at the same time confuses him you you want a home you want to go this way nope the other way okay uh what do you want for a home I don’t know you want a place to hang his hat maybe that’s what he need he need a hat R hat rack yeah that sounds right the hat that he’s wearing yes for now he moved on deciding to explore to the left and it’s wait did it get night time or is that just yes I think that’s night time that means I’m going to go home Dylan I’m going to go to my home you can stay in you’re not home over here until I figure how to make you a home this is a new kind of reaction to the corruption night was falling and so the moderate Darkness effect of going to the corruption made him think that the biome itself brought about nighttime and after previous nights he had learned he is not well suited to survive in them a strange interaction but one that didn’t end up being all that consequential for now instead of exploring the corruption he heads underground let’s get some more tin so maybe I can make a in pickaxe cuz maybe that’s better than copper I think the shiny stuff was something iron okay maybe iron’s better than him isn’t it fair for a noob to assume that any ore would be an improvement tin especially is a lot more confusing than I had thought it would be why would anyone assume that tin is the equivalent to coer of course he would assume it’s an upgrade now technically speaking tin does have some very minor benefits over copper which is good and all but they are still so small of benefit so as to wonder if it would just be better for people to start with tin or copper tools that correspond to whatever or is in your world and make the stats equivalent but I guess since character and World creation are two separate things that might not be feasible now Terraria has some Growing Pains but there’s also just some fun interactions that occur who’s there ding dong nobody night yeah ding-dong they should add the doorbell yeah I didn’t order pizza sir are you sure maybe maybe the one to the wrong house too we get free pizza just open the door do you guys like stars can I throw you a star no that didn’t work last time I’m not going to do that well they aren’t breaking my door yet so no that is a good thing oh he thought mobs could break down doors yeah I I guess that makes sense poor gu is set up for a rude awakening on his first Blood Moon he made a chest to store his items since he hadn’t found a treasure chest yet but before doing anything with it he found the zombies to be annoying well these guys are annoying so I’m going to do this ancient medieval technique called a murder hole no that doesn’t work oh and there’s skeletons maybe I can make a spear maybe that’s a thing someday cuz it has longer reach I don’t know but but to do that I need more iron I’m sure so into the mines we go we’ll ignore those guys he came back and died to demonize that’ll be important later but this is the first night the enemies were becoming a problem at his home oh where’ you come from from Sir something I’m sure many noobs are confused by at first is how things spawn I keep seeing them make homes with very open basements in particular Travis is unique with a base wide enough for enemies to spawn on the outer edges of it while he’s on the other Edge it confuses him when they invade but he never really tried to do anything about it that’s not to say he didn’t do some building my body was donated to science by the demon eye okay do you know what we do as science we put it in the library Travis will start building more later but first he needs more blocks where he encounters his first worm oh oh oh and I ah a worm earthworm but I’m after iron so as long as neither of us die we should be okay tungsten that’s not iron a typical growing pain I noticed are holes in the ground noobs are always wondering how they get stronger and what they should do next and yet they spend the first several hours of their experience pretty high up in the world not being bold enough to venture deeper I genuinely would love to hear from you whether you were bold and adventurous and bulldozed deep into the earth when you first played Terraria or if it took took you a while thinking back myself I think I might have been the same staying closer to the surface but also caves were quite a bit different when I started playing meanwhile Travis is trying to figure out housing and maybe build Dylan a house I’m sure Dylan would like that yeah maybe he wants a seat maybe like for at a table or something like that he never he didn’t he didn’t tell me what he wanted but why do you think you’d want a seat just because that’s what houses have have tables and chairs and those are like some of the first things that I could craft and I don’t know why I would want to seat so maybe Dylan wants a seat Dylan do you like a seat oh you ask him about crafting he just opens my crafting inventor okay okay so I’m going to make a wooden table and two chairs any reason for getting two chairs well if I guess I could get three but since it’s a 2d game you can’t put three chairs around a table true true be one chair for each of us yeah I can’t rotate the chair can I maybe try taking a step to the right what okay oh here comes Dylan Dylan you want a table sh be I love how he’s trying to lure the guy like some sort of prey I I do wonder how many noobs are as invested in the guide as Travis is from what I’ve gathered a lot of people don’t end up interacting with him all that much but Travis was a good little Noob and this really helped him a lot with the early game Growing Pains interact with backgrounds use a hammer oh I’m learning so much yeah I just need to talk to the NPC okay wow maybe I should have done that like days ago Merchant I have a green slim Banner what do I do with that now this is a real small thing but Banners are also something that has confused several noobs I’ve introduced to Terraria especially as it’s one of the first items they are likely to get that hangs from the bottom of a block that should let the slimes to know not to mess with my house thanks to the guy though Travis is pushed to go back underground he was saying something about Hearts downstairs in the caves so let’s go see if I can get a bajillion Hearts bajillion or something thing and so for the first time he Braves the caves those guys are red h ah ah what are you doing don’t die cuz I cannot save you oh that’s fascinating is the glowing red things rubies H I don’t know what these are good for but I will hoard them he had hardly gone far at all but already realized he made a classic Noob mistake okay I kind of forgot about getting back up he had a hard time figuring out rope which fair enough that’s pretty normal I do wonder what most noobs do when they inevitably get stuck in caves for the first time though maybe they already found recall potions or magic mirror and it’s no issue maybe they block up maybe they save an exit whatever the case his spunking was very brief and we took a break where his first words on the world Hit Me Right In The Nostalgia because I said this very thing a lot back in the day and still maybe a little bit do what was I doing last time don’t remember I was thinking about it on Monday of what was going on at last he made his way to the corruption once more oh that’s ugly [Music] Beetle oh ow he hits pretty hard apparently oh he’s going to follow me he’s going to follow me all the way back to oh I’m bringing him back to you okay you’re going to have to beat him no matter what I believe you um I brought the beetle back no he he’s big and slow and not so slow I want to go home get him I believe in you ooh he’s parkouring go go go hold the door okay okay you can stay out there door open you Eater of souls H okay is that what is is that what he is is is the Eater of souls yep that’s what it’s called oh an umbrella slime interesting that was when he first discovered he could hover his Mouse over an enemy and learn its name while our Eater of souls friend tried to break inside he started talking to the guide again underground or Crystal you said this twice now that’s interesting smash them with a pickaxe five fallen stars I combine an item magic capacity oh I have one or two I have two ooh also there’s magic okay there are many different ways to attract people to move into our town need to build extra houses eh to my amazement at the time the guide explicitly explains how to make suitable housing and calls out the housing interface the interface was mentioned after he was told how to move people using the interface though so the order wasn’t the best which has me wondering if there are noobs that get stuck on some of the dialogue from the guide that was out of order only for the explanation to come later despite all this super helpful information though it’s still a lot to go through okay there’s a whole bunch of stuff wow how long does this guy talk I don’t know this is the first time I’ve seen someone click through it so much so I’m curious okay I guess you’re learning too okay that’s weird golf you can golf in Terraria before he tries anything he needs to figure out how to kill the Eater of souls get them I believe in you stay over there uh-oh uh-oh come on Travis butt mesh you got this oh no oh fality harder than I unfortunate but now we have a pet look at him he’s so cute is he stuck yeah oh good you got this you got this Travis okay he I believe oh no he’s one hit oh oh he fled maybe I should uh make the rest of that wooden Armory eh matching attire sweet oh the wood did not save him probably because it’s made out of wood and held together with cobwebs or something my my new goal in life is to kill this ugly crab eyeball crab eyeball I just love hearing how you describe all the things well I don’t I only recently learned they have names so one quite unfortunate drawing paint I totally forgot about is that there are things that you can craft only to realize soon after that you really didn’t want them and end up wasting a lot of resources it’s like I have a iron bar uhhuh I forgot it was called a bar cuz I didn’t see tin bar so now I have lots of tin bricks there was a way to uncraft things I thought okay I have tin bricks I bet they look pretty cool don’t they I bet they do do they better oh yeah oo really quick I want to mention a unique obstacle Travis had to overcome before the game started I completely moved all of my key bindings oh cuz I’m left-handed how does one play Terraria left-handed in fact how do most left-handed people play video games you just learn to play the games with your less dominant hand or end up changing the controls to fit you every single time try said he remapped the numbers on his hot bar so the number one slot was seven or something like that it’s really interesting and weird I guess as normal right-handed P oh wow I just called left-handed people weird you are um I’m growing to have to ask him to send a screenshot of how he’s mapped his keys in the meantime he’s run into the most obvious and consistent groin pain of all the question what do I do next yeah looking around trying to figure out what the next step is cuz like do I go for more find more people I kind of want to have a better way to kill all these things that probably requires better equipment but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet we having more resources but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet where do you get the the resources you have but every time I have a bunch of them I don’t know if I have enough cuz I don’t know crafting recipes and then I always run out of wood but I have 41 wood right now not knowing how much you need is something I’ve heard from all of my friends have introduced to the game and since Travis still hasn’t figured out the guy’s crafting function he has even less to go off of noobs seem to fit into two camps either they spend forever in the mines endlessly searching for materials because they don’t know if they have enough or they go for quick trips thinking that they probably have gathered enough only to realize they barely have anything at all maybe this will push Travis to go deeper oh I forgot there’s worms down here worm worm kill it Travis I didn’t mean to run away so far but I know there’s iron and stuff up here so let’s just say Travis likes surviving and not dying a lot pretty sure that’s the same for a lot of people dying means failure nobody likes failure becoming numb to death is something all terrarians have to do as death is the natural part of learning but that’s something he’ll have to learn sometime in the future for now he’s staying high up in the world to gather his materials is there a particular or that you’re after or is it just I whatever the usually the most easier one to get is the next progression in materials for crafting building so iron was the idea I don’t know if iron is next or tin is next or what it’s a fair question before having actually made anything there isn’t exactly a way to figure out what ore is the most valuable or strongest maybe with enough time they can figure out which ones are rarer and deduce which is better that way but for those initial mining trips no Noob will have any idea what or is best unless they get only the original ores in fact let’s think about that Terraria started with copper iron silver and gold a very obvious line of progression can be drawn from one to the other based on the real world value of each with tin lead tungsten and platinum being toss into the mix Things become a lot more fuzzy especially if you start with copper tools as great as it is to have these varant es in the ores it would appear to me that the game design that subtly tells the players what or is more valuable has become muddy moving on my friend encounters another very common question for noobs can I not swim no yeah I can okay no I cannot aha drown nope I can’t swim I can only jump really high in water something more strange is that Travis appears to have a problem distinguishing the ores from each other ah this one is a different color what is it is is iron but I can only ever I can only see the difference when they’re next to each other I don’t really have an explanation for this do noobs have a hard time distinguishing the different ores and blocks from each other is that normal since they are not used to seeing them and don’t have trained eyes to notice them I don’t think so but you can let me know if you struggled noticing the difference when you started playing maybe it’s just a Travis thing I I don’t know the size of his monitor even while struggling to notice the difference he did gather enough to craft some things heavy duty workbench what the zombie with the puddle on his head now I have lots of materials wow okay I now I have too many options so what is better tin is 10 melee iron is definitely better oh broadsword shortsword very fast average weak so why make a shortsword when you can make a broadsword that doesn’t make sense okay I can make a toilet oh out of any iron bar that takes a lot of iron okay okay well let’s just make some tools where did the iron stuff go that use that much things well let’s make a tin pickaxe see how much better that is and maybe a tin ax [Music] e ah look at him this sword works so much better okay I like this sword oh this is a lot of stars this is more my speed you can actually do damage I’m going to figure out what to do with these stars now maybe possibly oh Mana Crystal hey now I have three things not that I know what they do or how to use them but I have them that clear’s inventory space aha got to have lots of resources to do anything I think quite a bit of this battle is learning how to manage my inventory he’s definitely not wrong about that managing the inventory is kind of a big deal for new players and I noticed many times that he would totally miss new items he’d gathered presumably he would hover his Mouse over them briefly when he first gathered them and then forgot they existed by the time he returned home because by then he had collected other new items so the Highlight was gone and there was a bunch of other stuff distracting him many times I’d watch sorting or crafting and failed to notice some important new item for quite a long time with that said he felt emboldened and now that he had a better sword I don’t want to go mining again I want to go exploring see what’s out here I can actually kill things oh also this sword is not stabby like the other one I had okay sir rematch time all right ooh good one ow ow ow ow ow what don’t step on those specific plants I guess ah you sir our lunch meat now oh there’s a lot of them oh yeah ow ow they’re hurting me again oh this is not good oh that was just got absolutely devoured yeah there’s like six of them a I killed a bunny I did not mean to do that how dare you you’re a terrible person person I know do I go down or not I don’t know I don’t know the only problem is going down I’m not so good at getting back up especially when it comes to stressful situations okay now there’s two of you I’m just going to go away now there three of them why is there a worm up here I think some there’s like something watching us right now like an eyeball okay I’m on one H I almost got him he was still struggling to cross the corruption and back at home he’s created an Ecto Mist without realizing it he’s noticed it ster but isn’t sure why at the moment he’s just collecting his tombstones because he likes having them as a sort of Memorial or to keep track of his deaths I even told him about how if you type SL death in the chat it’ll tell you how many times you’ve died that works in single player by the way if you don’t know but even so he still wants to collect the tombstones I get it but it has an unfortunate side effect he also thought this was suitable housing he just forgot like most noobs the need to add walls okay well maybe someday someone will come to that house we’ll see he wanted to explore again but still isn’t confident at night this time he wanted to go right but the desert is right next door look at all this gold I mean sand sand falls down well that’s going to be really annoying to go really far in I don’t want to do that so he went underground instead did you know that a bush a thing of bananas is called a hand what can have a hand of bananas please like a murder of crows it’s a hand ofas I’m just connecting the world now well this is a better place I know there’s no sand this way let’s go this way and we found more drowning places yay look a puddle of water if you to drown in don’t don’t drown too much bye no once again he didn’t go very far but he did find himself a gem corn and made a mistake I made for a very long time and I feel Vindicated seeing this gem corns not only don’t grow in dirt but also don’t grow on the surface but it’s an acorn so of course a noob would assume that an acorn would be planted like all the other acorns he’s found I’m not sure how someone is meant to learn this other than then through observation I guess not that it’s a bad thing to have game features like that just that it’ll take much longer for someone to learn the mechanic that way it’s a uh what do you call it defective Acorn back to the corruption where the inevitable call of the corruption chasms becomes too much it’s so tempting oh okay yep we’re going yeah I guess you got no choice now oh wa on the next trip he had the foresight to place some rope not enough to get all the way down but enough to help him land in a pool of water okay we’re going far hey he lives um good thing I got some wood oh wa this stuff is tough H will it break ever not might be screwed what happened next made me think of the days before recall potions if you ended up in a hole like this and didn’t want to die you either had to climb out or save an exit Travis didn’t really know about or maybe doesn’t want to use the save and exit strategy and so he very slowly tried to climb his way out that is until a worm attacked ah I might just drown SE worm gives up I’m succumbing to the water well maybe I’ll go to the desert instead instead of going that way let’s try it obviously not have the right equipment yet H I can’t swim and we found some water well this this problem solving have they identify the problem first yeah I didn’t expect him to think of this small Oasis as an obstacle but he crossed it no problem after he had a moment to think okay they just keep coming and don’t stop coming I’m just going to annoy him back yeah I mean run away at the end of the desert Travis found his very first Treasure Chest what would happen to be inside a step stool that has to be one of the most disappointing first chests ever but at the same time I suppose a radar would be even more useless for a noob so it could be worse then again I think he actually found an aglet earlier what whatever the case maybe a second chest we’re in the candy caves or whatever flower caves that star just smashed a zombie oh what you end up doing with that step stool you found uh I have it in my inventory he ate it nice I think somewhere oh he fell into a zombie hole bye Travis good thing I have a sword sword I have a not diamond sword day and night cycle like super duper long this is a really long night okay I wanted to look at this pink tree to see if it’s like the uh the ruby gem corn tree or whatever see if it’s planted on something different but it looks like dirt oh I never would have thought of that the pink trees do have a similar trunk style to the gem corn trees so much so that Travis thinks the two are the same type of tree and thus gem corn should grow the same way that this one has I have no idea what to make of this I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the similarity between the two I I never noticed what I can however wrap my mind around is how Travis thinks NPCs work well we haven’t run into too much over here just more foresty things there’s supposed to be more people out here ain’t there somewhere maybe possibly there are games where you find people out in the world and I guess there are some of those in Terraria but most move in just from making housing after certain points in progression the guide spells out how to get just about every NPC but Travis didn’t really get to any of those other than one simply stating he needed to make more homes and for the time being he didn’t want to do a bunch of building he wanted to explore ouch that was you’re almost dead I know time die do not die Travis oh and I just told you not to do that I can’t hit my ankles now that he was back home he did read what the guide had to say again if you combine lenses with a demon alter you might be able to find a way to summon a powerful monster oh cross any demon altars I know this some like weird Stone platform things if I put together my lenses on a demon altar I can summon a monster but I do not know what a demon alter looks like so we shall not do that and talk more about this interaction in my video about how the guide makes or breaks Terraria but put simply he was told to use a demon alter as a crafting station before he was told where they could be found the order or dialogue the guide offers makes a real difference in how a noob interacts with the game because now he’s been told to find something without being given a single clue and so he ignored it I went to open a can of worms I’m going to go over here I have no idea what it’s going to do over here on the library we’re going to learn what can of worms do yeah it gave me [Laughter] worms what was I expecting you I don’t know if it was going to be some like fancy thing that opened up like a Pandora’s Box these are some of the initial Growing Pains many Terraria noobs experien Travis has plent more he’ll encounter and I’m sure that you ran into some different problems while learning the game as well as many of the same problems before we end Travis asked a very good question that could speak volumes I was thinking about that earlier this week is like I mean I I’ve never actually killed the End Dragon in Minecraft so I never actually beat the game so I was like hm I wonder do Terraria have an end game so that’ll be something I’d like to figure out what is the uh d direction that it goes yeah cuz right now I haven’t figured that out yet no right now it’s uh find people talk to people or whatever this is a very big question after a couple of hours in the game Travis hasn’t made a whole lot of progress and so he is asking the question what am I even doing this for is there a point he’s been enjoying himself he wasn’t wondering when he could stop playing he just wasn’t sure if there was a point to it all or if he was just aimlessly exploring and collecting things for their own sake or maybe there was a greater goal now Terraria is a Sandbox so in the end a person could have just as much fun never killing any bosses and building for all of their days as they could if they RAC to every single boss sandboxes reveal two types of Gamers the ones who want to hang around and the ones who yearn for Conquest depending on a new player’s expectations and what they want from the game this could lead to some frustration especially for those who want to progress because it takes a very long time to do so as a noob it forces the noob to ask several times after the first hour or two if the time invested is going to be worth it the answer to that question will determine whether someone leaves forever or continues until the point that they learn what makes Terraria truly special and the guide is the one who’s most responsible for making sure the noob actually knows what they’re doing so much so that he’s the one who really makes or breaks Terraria and if you want to see me explain that in Greater detail you can watch the video right here [Music]

There’s a few hurdles every noob has to overcome in order to learn Terraria. Can my friend Travis overcome those hurdles and exactly how is he going to do it?
________________________________________________
*Affiliate Links*
Need Terraria Merch!?: https://www.eightysixed.com/throarbin
________________________________________________
*Check Out my Other Channel!*
My gaming channel:​ @ThroarbinGaming
________________________________________________
Join my discord!: https://discord.gg/mkjrvrMTDC
Become a channel members today!
________________________________________________
MUSIC I USE
*Terraria Original Soundtrack:* https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBO2h-GzDvIazWs1jFf0QwzLjKqTW5w5a
*Terraria Otherworld Sountrack:* https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIkIdl6mePBshFxcxazePZxgBNq2oxWo2
*Calamity Mod Soundtrack:* https://soundcloud.com/dm-dokuro/sets/the-calamity-mod-ost
*Mod of Redemption Soundtrack:* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzKXyrhs_w8UC0yQ7p42XTwgAplYw4SnR
*Core Keeper Soundtrack:* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDCZZR-i5z4
*PeriTune*
*Spirit Mod Soundtrack:* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCkwVAc-9De6WE43Yu_Y35KtngkswAGF7
________________________________________________
TEXTURE PACKS
– Axolotl Pet, New Animations, New Shields, Shadow Armor Revamp, Color Buffs, Colored Emblems, Chinese Moonlord, Tomes retextured, Desk dragon, Better World Icons, Colored Boss Relics, Pylon, Crabby Angler, Dryad Deer, Eevee Fennec, Cyborg, Clockwork Dragon, Kobold Invasion
________________________________________________
#terraria