The Worst Mechanic in Terraria
aka: Statue mimics REALLY piss me off
0:00 Intro
0:50 Statue mimics suck
1:31 What is negative luck?
4:13 How negative luck affects your drop rates
5:10 Descriptions are important
6:00 The Negative Luck Mechanics
7:55 Hostile Critters
9:54 Watch breaking
10:32 Graveyard rare spawns
10:59 Statue mimics REALLY suck
12:06 No, really, they’re actually unforgivable
12:47 How did these even make it into the game
13:51 It’s like if you trained an AI on low budget horror movies and asked it for game mechanics
14:47 Jokes at the player’s expense aren’t funny, they’re just mean.
15:53 Owl mimics
16:04 Increased poo production
16:32 Fixing negative luck
18:09 Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate you.
18:45 Giving bad luck the thrower treatment
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#terraria #gaming
49 Comments
Statue mimics are bafflingly awful, I have no idea how those got greenlit without ANYONE on the development team saying "hey, this sucks actually"
How did you encounter a statue mimic??, well me and my friends were playing Zenith seed and reach the "Duke Fishron" time, a lot of walls in the beach and an NPC house, When Duke reached 3rd phase, we got jump scared and killed by a shadow (yeah it was technically invisible) so yeah
Can I just whine about Moss Zombies for a moment? Ok? I did a 100% Journey mode file a while ago where I maxed out everything I possibly could (because I'm nuts) and one of the genuine worst things was Moss Zombies. This was before 1.4.5.7, which increased their spawn rate by more than 6x. Back then, Moss Zombies had an absolutely miserable 1/200 spawn rate, only in graveyards, and negative luck was mandatory. Those last two pieces are still true, the enemies are just more common now.
I was working with maximized spawn rates. Water Candle, Battle Potion, minimum luck, 10x spawn rates through Journey Mode, and I built a graveyard on the edge of the world so I could carefully manage where the enemies spawned. My spawn rates were juiced beyond the pale. You have to kill 50 of them to finish the bestiary entry, because they count as regular Zombies (i.e. are included in the Zombie Banner), and I was getting one maybe every 2 minutes? It took me over an hour to kill 50 Moss Zombies. An hour to kill 50 of an enemy, when I have enemy spawns well over 15x frequency. That's absolutely absurd. You could probably get the Cultist banners faster than that. And that's not to mention that Moss Zombies don't even do anything special, they just drop a tiny amount of moss, which is something you will never need because moss is plentiful and renewable.
Look, I can get behind a rare easter egg enemy, that's always fun, but there is nothing about the Moss Zombie that suggests it was supposed to be this uncommon. You should be getting them all the time in graveyards. Instead you need a black cat to do a triple lutz and sneeze in mid air for it to happen.
To obtain what you desire, you must first relinquish your need for it
the only reason i use bad luck is in skyblock, the poo block can be recycle with exractinator to gain new seeds like mushroom biome, jungle etc
True, but it's funny.
I just wish the items TOLD YOU it gives you bad luck. Luck in general is that one mechanic I feel was never well managed.
its funni tho
I think all of these mechanics are a cool neat idea that just have too many flaws.
Evil critters are funny, but too much of an uncontrollable threat.
Statue mimics are unique and give another reason to destroy graveyards, but man are they overtuned in every aspect, and i get why jumpscares would just kinda suck for some people. They would be a great way to farm statues though! Which brings me to my next point:
Farming. More enemy spawns is something thats very hard to come by and would make farming for mimic miles easier. However, as you said, a 4% increase at max luck is absolutely horrendous. Other than that, bloody tear farming is cool, i guess? sometimes?
But i still think the most egregious evil hook of despair is the fact that nothing tells you that you have negative luck, just as you said.
Overall, i think these mechanics are inherently cool, just… not well executed.
15:13 terraria already has loud noises and horror elements in vanilla tho
I cant really see anyone defending statue mimics or critters attacking you. Theres much better ways to implement renewable statues than statue mimics
Yeah it's just obnoxious and feels as if the devs have it out for the player. I'm not fun of such mechanics, or honestly the downtime mechanics like the boulder rain or thunderstorm that they added recently..
wait what I never seen statue mimics or those hostile critters before 😮
I was gonna write a whole paragraph but my issues with luck overall is that
1) It's subtle enough that you would need wiki to know it exists (a lot of players do have wiki open so superstition idea Red initially proposed as justification for this mechanic is down the bin already)
2) It's culturally specific and vague enough that a good chunk of luck modifiers I wouldn't be able to figure out if not for wiki. (capturing ladybugs counts as killing them btw and released ladybugs don't give the buff, at least that's what wiki said last I checked)
3) The game has enough randomness that I feel like having lightning follow the player or having a statue randomly come to life to kill the player while the player is potentially already struggling or add anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour or two to my farm session because they didn't know farting while playing the game gave you -6.7 luck for 67 minutes. While being silly and superstitious is kind of the point, when it's culturally specific it's like, why?
In defense of statue mimics: theyre the only way to get more statues for farms, as its extremely unlikely youll get 2 of all statue types in a single world
Nah this is fun and statue mimics are the GOAT. Nobody got any whimsy anymore 🤷
All very compelling points. I applaud your braveness to be negative for a good reason.
Having watched the video and read the comments it seems like I am in the minority here, but I feel like a variety of opinions on this topic is good so I'll yap away.
Yes, statue mimics suck. Full stop. Put them away in a secret seed that fits the theme of them way better.
If not that, just let us attack them without agro-ing them. If you attack them first then they could get halved hp, halved damage, and stop the jumpscare noises.
As for every other effect of negative luck, I absolutely love them, I just wish that Relogic would add some way to track your luck like how you can track other stats with stuff like the radar and metal detector and lifeform analyzer and so on. If we had a Luck: +/- 0.XX number next to the other stats I would be 100% fine with this stuff.
It also provides an opportunity to teach players how important luck can be. If you are a new player and somehow magically have +0.5 luck you probably wouldnt notice a slight increase in drop rates or some things happening to work out if your favor and in turn the "luck" stat would seem fairly nebulous and not understandable.
If I were at 0 "luck" and dropped into negatives and suddenly my critters and friends started attacking me it would impact me in a much larger way than positive luck ever could, allowing me to get a better grasp on how important luck can be.
I feel like any current issue with negative luck would go away with a way to track luck, and unfortunately I cannot respond to every counter in one comment without making this thousands of words long. So, if you have anything you would like to say in return, I'll try my best to respond to your comment asap.
Preemptive reminder to keep things civil :3
I thought about the "benefits" bad luck can bring and how they could work if just adjusted correctly, but then I come to the conclusion that there are way more logical approaches to getting those benefits without involving bad luck at all
i think statue mimics should only attack when player is trying to remove it with a pickaxe, acting like a normal statue otherwise without clogging active spawned enemies counter or despawning…. or if negative luck stuff would be entirely removed i would not miss it
“”There’s not even a vague comment about bringing misfortune” the wilted clover being made out of a luck item, alongside the laundry list of well-known superstitions about bad luck from half of these things: (the mirror has no other purpose from what I know too what tf else do you think a seemingly useless and breakable mirror could do)
From what little I've interacted with the community, it seems to me that Red loves trolls and similar mechanics that exist solely to piss you off and make you feel bad, where anyone who likes these things can just say "oh you're just being a soft bitch baby" to anyone who doesn't.
And that's why this is a thing. Because the lead dev thought it was funny
1:28 but it IS funny
To be fair with Raven Feather, a raven is often a sign of ill omen in many cultures, so a lot of people know that its unlucky, especially when you're lugging around something from said ill omen. It also says "What manner of ill doth this portent?", hinting at you that you are carrying something that is gonna give you a bad time.
man thank god that when i came back to play some terraria after a long time i chose to play modded where (and i pray it stays this way) the bad luck effects do not happen
this all seems extremely "haha look the streamer got screwed over" randomly for the one funny clip and then it will go on to make every single person genuinely angry or disappointed over it while playing. i really hope this gets removed or at least overhauled to have a reason to exist
i think this has been a general thing since ive seen a couple people talk about it that the newer updates really look like attempts to make content for streamers and youtubers "funnier" by doing random humor
I do like the idea of a luck system where 0 luck is effectively the worst and both positive and negative luck are advantageous – like in flash Isaac where negative luck made chests spawn more (this was entirely due to flash isaac being a jank mess and was intentional but you get the idea).
It's so funny that they keep adding new Negative Luck effects then keep removing them when they realize it sucks. And then in the next hotfix they add one more
Now this is anecdotal, but I played a doubt a 30 hour play through with my friends and we had intentionally built a graveyard to mess with our friend by spawning a statue minic. We only got one or two spawns after like 5 hours lol
Combined with this being toward the end of the year, I'm really curious if the statue mimic got changed at all in its spawn rate, even accidentally during one of the later hot fixes
Sometimes it feels like you can't catch a break for even a minute in Terraria
Isn't the worst mechanic Deerclops' shadow hands?
I lost a hardcore run to an owl mimic, never again. All owls are shoot-on-sight
Graveyards in general have been kind of a shitty addition. It isn't just the statue minics that punish you for dying, its the ghosts and general hostile spawns.
If a new player dies a bunch why the hell are we spawning shit that have absurd stats for a day 1 player?
Especially since it can happen at spawn. Some multiplayer sessions genuinely get so miserable when graveyards form.
Ill say this again but in 2020 when users on reddit complained about base torch negative luck, Redigit had a meltdown in the comments of one post and called the players fucking tryhards trying to optimise everything.
Apparently my luck extends into video games (I have never seen a statue mimic)
No but really, just do some research and raise your luck???
How do you even GET negative luck? I've tried to get it actively several times, can't seem to get it down. Crow feather, killing ladybugs, etc. it cannot be THAT easy to get negative luck.
Critters attack you?!? You learn something new every day…
statue mimics are the phantoms of terraria
YOURE THE BEST SORBET CAFE
You know, after playing Warframe for a month and seeing all of the insane esoteric bullshittery there, suddenly this mechanic doesn't seem all that bad.
Never played Terraria. Negative mechanics should always be learnable in some way. Like if your luck is below a certain threshold you get notified every single time your luck drops even further. That would give negative luck a reason to exist, which is to teach the player to detect itself.
negative luck should nake neutral mobs hostile only when you have a LOT of negative luck, like when you have less than -0.5 luck, not when you have less than -0.01
what if "negative luck" was split off into it's own "stat"?
so you could maximize good luck AND bad luck in order to increase enemy spawns AND their drop rate
and add an item like a "mood ring" that let's you read your luck stat like the PDA gadgets do.
and ofc bad luck debuffs should appear as a debuff, when a villager dies you could get a debuff titled "feeling sad: the world seems more hostile to you"
i think having good luck and bad luck as seperate stats would be a really good solution for encouraging maximizing the upsides and the downsides of luck
Had no clue that ladybugs being killed near you at all effected luck negatively (I thought the player specifically killing them caused it), damn. Also thanks for being genuinely critical of the game I have my grievances with some of the baffling choices Relogic has and continues to make and I feel heard
I don;t understand, is this a mod, a vanilla feature?
this mechanic is really emblematic of my problems with terraria. the game is just full of needless bloat, it feels less like a sandbox and more like wading through mud. maybe this is on me for playing on the higher difficulties but the sheer number of mechanics upon mechanics (many of which aren't communicated at all!) you have to deal with past the wall of flesh gets echausting. I like to play games optimally but when I have to spend as much time looking shit up on the wiki as actually playing the game it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Hey don't you dare slander my goat the moss zombie. I love moss
>every tooltip tells you it gives you bad luck, either explicitly or not
reddit complaint. yawn.
i dont care that itst bad game design i enjoyed watching you getting mad over it and now believe that it is the intended outcome
Honestly if its communicated better its a very fun gimmick
Yeahhh bro is NOT getting over that crossover only run any time soon
As for the raven feather… how many of you flunked english… or otherwise didn't have an english 3 class. The works of Edgar Allen Poe speak for themselves, and the recall of them should tell one all they need know of the feather.