Terraria Has a Tutorial?

Terraria Has a Tutorial?

did you know Terraria has a tutorial yeah I didn’t either as a member of the PC Master Race I have never seen the tutorial of Legend why because it’s only available on console and mobile I think now I’ve been bringing my friend Travis through the game for the very first time and analyzing how well Terraria is designed to teach new players the ropes little did I know that this tutorial existed and could have done all the work for me or at least that’s what I would say if I hadn’t played the tutorial what does the tutorial actually teach the player and is it of any use at all let’s find out looking around my house there is only one console in sight that isn’t my ancient original Wii that console that’s still around is the Nintendo Switch so that’s the version we’ll be experiencing the tutorial on ooh hello Andrew welcome to Terraria to start the tutorial come talk to me l to move r to aim z L D that’s Z L maybe I should just start pushing buttons boing there’s my aim okay learning some basic controls through randomly pressing things is helpful but we’re here to see what the tutorial actually teaches us and the first hurdle is figuring out what button we need to use to actually talk to the guide like he suggested all right talk to you [Music] um oh uh okay b okay most important thing we need is shelter to get wood we need to chop down a tree take this copper axe oh we didn’t even start with anything we had nothing in our inventory okay the choice to prevent the player from having anything in their inventory is actually a great design choice at least if you ask me it prevents the player from getting confused or overwhelmed with too many items and forces them to return to the guide for basic materials and yes three items is not overwhelming but Terraria quickly overwhelms the player with its number of items so introducing them one by one I see as a purely good decision all right now I need to craft this wood into a workbench very good press X to open my inventory okay a to craft uh X all right there it is boom workbench acquired now place it place it okay maybe I have Maybe it has to be in there and then oh wrong button [Music] no there we go most of the struggling there was me trying to figure out the controls and some of the confusion is due to me already knowing I can place items while the inventory is open on PC a new player might not be as confused but initially I’m concerned that you can only use items that are in your hot bar like classic Terraria and that was painful but the guide teaching the player how to actually craft something is very good all right what else do you got for me buddy the house to live in i started this one here but to be valid house and use a chair a table workbench and a door you make these crafting by You can make these from the crafting panel by standing near a workbench oh figuring out how to manage my inventory is going to be a good time um for you Terraria enthusiasts you might have already noticed that it’s missing one key detail that you need a light source don’t worry the tutorial will get there i just wish that the guide also mentioned the need for walls noobs like some of my friends tried making houses underground and so couldn’t have walls there that were suitable because they couldn’t figure out how to break those walls you know the ones that naturally generated and put in their own in fact a noob would likely see the walls in the caves and assume that they must be suitable and that’s not even being too generous because the guide didn’t tell the noob the need to make the walls it is shown here which is good so the new player could figure it out through trial and error by copying the guide but those who build bases underground might become a little confused this is a good way to introduce combat however i need a torch my dude okay now we need lights okay craft torches combine gel and wood draw by slimes let’s take off your shortsord eat a slime all right going to put a slime nearby how do I Oh right a is a different button the first slime you give me is a pinky hold up do they just turn on spawns and then I get what I get or is this just happen stance oh right i can aim can aim come on aim we’re We’re killing the pinky darn it okay so the combat maybe should have been explained a little bit more because there is an autolock feature oh that Wow that launched that makes using the shortsword in particular significantly easier to use but I’m going to assume that a pinky is not meant to be the first slime you encounter and a pinky is also just a confusing mob for a new player to run into they are told to kill a slime and then the first one they encounter is stupidly strong funnily enough this is exactly what happened to my friend Travis so I guess it’s not unprecedented for this to happen but for a tutorial with a more curated experience I think forcing the first mob to be a regular green slime would likely be a good idea as a total noob would probably have died to the slime and dying in the tutorial would be a little silly the control of my weapon is seriously diminished come on we can do this we can do this all right you know pin it pin it pin it with Ow pin it with fire ah there we go i’m pretty in pink let’s go all right um now we can make torches love that here we go and place ah so far mostly good next up the guide teaches us the basics of mining and exploration now it’s hard for me to not immediately know exactly what the guide wants me to do i simply know too much about the game but this seems like pretty clear instruction you’re told to go to this nearby cave given some light and you should have a general idea as to what a torch does you know from real life experience the rope might take a noob a little more time to figure out as nothing else has been climbable thus far and there was no mention of how to climb by you know hitting the up key in theory it should be mostly self-explanatory but I do know some noobs have taken a second or two to figure out rope but usually not too long so it’s not necessary that it get explained placing rope We’re doing it we’re doing it oh I did not mean to mind the torch uh no uh there there we go i do like that there’s a treasure chest down here too that a new player is very likely to find it’s good teaching them that there is loot available for them to find and I love that it is taught very subtly although half or more of the noobs I’ve introduced to the game would walk past chests all the time and by half I mean all of them so maybe um looting chests and knowing what they look like is actually something that needs to be spelled out destroy the chest destroy the chest darn it come on there ah there we go next up the guy teaches me how to turn ores into bars only issue is that he hands me a furnace this I think is a big mistake it’s a very important crafting station and so I think the player should be required to go out gather the materials and craft the materials needed to make one either that or given the materials that they are then told to craft into it the materials are so simple to find that any noob will learn pretty quickly how to make a furnace but there’s a lot of seemingly obvious things that noobs miss and as this is a tutorial giving them all the information possible I think would be best next we’re told how to make an anvil craft an iron anvil at the workbench and place it by your furnace okay okay i will Andrew i will man this guy is good here let’s move this bad boy if just destroy the blocks where it is that’s the is the only solution the anvil is usually the crafting station that is hardest for noobs to figure out mostly just because of the extra step of crafting bars first again not the hardest but I’m glad this one has to be crafted unlike the furnace i also learned that there’s a way to search for an item to craft this is handy I suppose but typing on a controller sucks but I also guess that this wouldn’t be nearly as much of a problem if you’re playing handheld with a touchcreen i do wish however that there was an option to open up all the possible recipes with a little hammer thing like you have on PC even if that opened a whole UI that took up the entire screen on console I think that’d be really helpful but that’s a more a console thing than a tutorial thing all right grab this close now we can place it right there wow we’re good at this the next step according to Andrew is to make copper armor for this one thankfully he gives us the bars to craft the copper armor with rather than handing it to us i wonder why i mean why does it teach you the copper armor like real logic you need to make it so copper armor is actually useful again cuz now wood armor is basically the same why not just tell me make wood armor were you trying to rope them into the original experience where like copper was just the way to go really the only way to go i wish I had thought of this before but I wonder what would happen if I accidentally made two chest plates or something in the tutorial would I have to go and mine copper ore somewhere maybe I should try to break the tutorial next time but for now the tutorial itself is broken enough because although it gave me the ore to craft the armor it never informed me how to equip it terraria why have you betrayed me wait wait what what why didn’t the helmet go there it worked that one worked there’s got to be a way to fast equip right okay what what am I missing what am I missing oh DL there we go to the tutorial’s credit the bottom of the screen does have a little pop-up with the controls informing me how to equip something to continue pointing out the tutorial’s flaws a new person still might not know how this all works i’ve seen many noobs take a long time to figure out equipment slots and although the control does literally say equip my noob friends will read equipable on a lot of items and never equip them or even think that they are equippable more stimuli is probably required when you have an item which can be equipped from your inventory for Z equip oh okay now you tell me alternative you can press A to pick it up and navigate there okay oh now you look ready to take on a few more challenges this has gone dark out and at night some terrible creatures come to bang at the door feel brave you can take this iron bow and these wooden arrows and go kill a few zombies i mean you’re you’re telling me I guess what to do you’re teaching me some basic skills you’re not really telling me even how to get arrows and stuff uh wrong one uh that there we go that’s the attack button i just noticed that the controls at the bottom tell me how to lock onto a target and I’m counting what’s down there as part of the tutorial so even if I think that the whole equipping thing wasn’t clear I think autotarget probably is so let’s see how aimbot works all right lock on target easy money and that’s when the guy taught me something I didn’t expect and then you can find out which enemies drop what loot opening the Oh tells you about the beastiary okay i don’t know how the beastiary but not the guides crafting menu became part of the tutorial but I see this as a purely good thing teach the player about all the things in their UI that’s a basic tutorial necessity beast Jerry nice okay that’s a good thing to teach people cool cool then use an array of options i customize game especially your play style you find it hard to see your inventory you can edit the layout okay very good information world is just a temporary place which resets when you exit now go create your own unique character and world to explore wow that’s all huh that’s a really short tutorial not a lot to go off of well I just mentioned how teaching the player the UI is a basic necessity and yet it taught me nothing about the journey mode buttons all over the place it taught me nothing about the housing or PvP buttons they taught me nothing about how to interact with treasure chests even if I did find one because guess what most of treasure chest basic features like loot and deposit all are not UI buttons you push but controls you have to map to your controller but this is when the tutorial ends at least according to Andrew here he tells me to head into a world of my own and I imagine any new player would simply take that advice and go for it how well did this tutorial actually teach the Terrarian noob then well they know about the three main crafting stations how to make most of them they understand chopping down trees a little bit about exploration how mining ores and crafting works and most importantly how to make NPC housing or at least a general idea i mentioned how I think that part of teaching them how to make a house leaves something to be desired but it’s a lot better than getting no information at all now all this information can be pretty easily gathered from the guide in a regular run but based on the experiences of all of my friends except one kind of the likelihood of a noob engaging with the guide at all seems to be slim at best and my friend who did utilize the guide quickly grew bored of talking to him especially after receiving several of the same text boxes from him having something specifically called a tutorial for a game as open-ended and overwhelming as Terraria is fantastic and any new person who finds themselves lost can at least fall back on this to get their bearings on how to start the game the issue really is just how limited the tutorial is the NPC housing is the only really important thing the tutorial teaches that would be a little harder to learn through the guide normally but there are so many more mechanics in the game that I wish there was a tutorial for here is what I would propose for the tutorial instead of opening up in a world immediately they should instead be presented with four tutorial options these would be called getting started world evil hard mode and NPCs the getting started world would be exactly what we just experienced world Evil would explain what demon alter shadow orbs and what shadow skills are with their respective crimson counterparts of course it would also explain that there are two world evils and that the worlds spawn with one of the two of them and of course yes there are secret seeds but there’s no need for a noob to be bombarded with that information it should also tell them that the blocks here are minable not how to destroy them or mine them just that they are destructible and finally it should explain that the biome will spread after the wall of fresh is dead why a tutorial for the world evil you may ask well for one it’s a pretty important part for a noob’s progression and of well the game’s progression the pickaxe from the world evil is pivotal for a noob to mine hell stone and even obtain hard mode ores which is something that noobs are going to do speaking of one of the options is for the underworld i’ll be going into this in my video about how the underworld is designed but voodoo dolls in particular are never explained in any way the only way that a player learns of the wall’s existence is by accident and although this is kind of cool it also means that they may never know of the wall’s existence or maybe if they do how they even get it in the first place and for people like my friend Travis who knew that the wall existed but weren’t sure how to spawn it having some sort of hint as to what to do with the doll would go a long way explaining hellstone hell forges and what they do how to destroy them what platforms are immune to lava obsidian skin potions having all these explained could be a big help and I know for a fact that the wall and the underworld are a massive hurdle for new players to cross without relying on online resources and finally there should be a tutorial world that has each of the NPCs and dialogue explaining what they are all for you could even exclude how to get them just show the player what they are capable of at the very least i have known way too many noobs not pay any attention to NPCs who spawn because the NPCs before them were not useful my friend Travis missed that the guide had a crafting UI he figured out reforging but never used the Goblin Tinker shop or ever bought rocket boots and for the NPCs with larger shops having a way for a player to learn how to use the items in their shops could go a very long way heck look at the tavern keep how many attempts did it take you to make a suitable Old Ones Army Arena now you might argue that having tutorials explain these things takes away from the adventure discovery and learning that a player can do and I would agree it’s great when a player can learn these things on their own but these are the three main sticking points for people reasons for why they abandon the game these are the features explained the least and are the most important to the new person’s progression now not all people are looking for progression that’s fine they likely will find little use in these tutorials but say you’re a player and you get stuck in the underworld with no idea what to do if there was a tutorial world that explained these things you could unstick yourself without relying on the internet is the internet an easier method yes and probably plenty of people would use it but I think games should be self-contained there are plenty of times I’d rather give up on a game than be forced to look up the answer to something because the moment I do I feel as though I am now locked into looking up the solution to future problems I encounter and I don’t want that if you wanted you could probably remove the tutorial for world evils because that I think is easier to figure out than the underworld but there’s a number of things you have to learn about the underworld in order to progress and there is either nothing or very specific things that teach the player these important details this tutorial in particular would function as a safety net for new players to fall into heck maybe the tutorial should even tell the player to look at the achievements when they are lost achievements alone will give them a general path to follow and finally there’s one other issue with the tutorial that’s much more specific to console and maybe mobile as well there are so many actions you can take in PC that you can’t take on console unless you map your controls like for chess I mentioned earlier there’s no deposit or loot all buttons those must be mapped and this is the case for a lot of other incredibly helpful controls like quick stacking one of the best quality of life additions to the game you have to map a control to it now mapping a control is not what my issue is but the fact that the game and tutorial never tell you about these options you have to go to the controls yourself and figure it out and as a person who’s played the game for a long time I knew what these phrases meant but to a new person they have no idea so a new person on console is probably still stuck manually sorting everything like they’re in 1.1 personally I found that some 25% of the first four or so hours in my run on the Switch was spent in the menu adjusting the controls and mapping buttons it was honestly very painful and made me want to quit right then and there i’ll forgive the game for this because I’m used to the conveniences of PC and I know what you should be able to do while the new player would maybe be content with the options shown to them because that’s all they would know but having a way for them to learn but the very many unmapped features of the game are would be great it’d also be helpful if you could save multiple layouts maybe you can though I haven’t looked into that i I just know it would be helpful but I know that I would change what a button or action was mapped to several times and sometimes I’d forget what setting a button was mapped to and bounce back and forth and sometimes a button I never intentionally messed with would become unmapped and the only way to figure out what its original mapping was would be to reset all the custom buttons I had done and I no longer knew which ones those were all that to say that although it’s good that there is a tutorial I think it doesn’t go far enough to teach the new player the ropes of the game and doesn’t even do a great job at teaching them how much control and what options there are and for a sandbox game I admit it can be really hard to create a tutorial that pleases everyone some people want more information so they know what to do and some want less information so they can learn it themselves if the tutorial brought the player step by step through the whole game I think that’d be awesome having the same dialogue box from the guide telling them to continue to their own world but have them immediately follow that up with “But if you don’t want to stick around I can show you more about the world.” That would be awesome showing those who don’t want too much spoiled that they have learned the basics and offering an open door to those who are still overwhelmed a way to push forward and enjoy the game at their own pace would be the best with that you should join my Discord and Reddit links in the description and if you want to see what it’s like for a total noob to join the game on PC and try to figure things out all on their own you should check out the video appearing on your screen

Did you have any idea that Terraria has a tutorial? If you have only ever played on PC, you might not. It’s something you can only find on Terraria console, maybe mobile but I never actually checking that. So just how effective is Terraria’s tutorial when it comes to teaching the player how to play the game?
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MUSIC I USE
*Terraria Original Soundtrack:* https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBO2h-GzDvIazWs1jFf0QwzLjKqTW5w5a
*Terraria Otherworld Sountrack:* https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIkIdl6mePBshFxcxazePZxgBNq2oxWo2
*Core Keeper Soundtrack:* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDCZZR-i5z4
*PeriTune*
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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
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