Terraria Doesn’t Work Without the Guide

Terraria Doesn’t Work Without the Guide

Zaria has a lot of rather complex features that on top of thousands of items and it’s easy to see how a person could quickly become confused how then are players meant to navigate this mess let me introduce the guide okay maybe just one of them this silly man is largely considered to be useless by the more dieh hard community and even many regular players of the game because everything he tells you can often be more easily found in the wiki but this is where I have to ask you and myself to put on our thinking caps and ask whether a regular person picking up the game for the first time would be willing to research how to play a game they don’t even know they’ll enjoy or if they even know that a Wiki exists for these people the guide is their one and only safety net for figuring out the game without having to do endless trial and error and this is why the guide singlehandedly makes or breaks Terraria see I brought two of my friends into Terraria in the last year or so neither of them have ever played the game before and both I told to avoid the wiki wondering if Terraria is designed in such a way to help a new player there’s a lot that could be unpacked here especially the menu screen that I might need to make a whole video about on its own but we’re just going to focus on the guide how does he make or break the game how does he make or break my friend’s experience well the first friend I introduced into Terraria on extra mode because he plays Dark Souls and didn’t want to play on the easiest baby difficulty that’s just how he is and before mountain of people scream at me for Plumping him into xra mode for the first time experience I want you to remember that a noob would have no context for what the difficulties even mean a person like my friend who enjoys the challenge would automatically click off a classic when presented with more difficult options this is a natural choice and an issue most games fall into due to it being impossible for any Dev to anticipate every gamer skill level or even how every gamer will interpret what each difficulty layer even means and so my friend entered the game on extra mode and perhaps unsurprisingly died in an endless loot but we’re focused on the guide why does this matter well it matters because the mobs that killed my friend killed the guide as well his one and only Lifeline was dead before he really had the chance to interact with him what was once a difficult place to be in has now become exponentially worse as he will have to figure out the game’s mechanics all on his own including building suitable housing which is not the most intuitive thing in the world and especially because the new person like my friend would have no context for understanding how to even get an NPC to return whether they are gone for good have to be found through exploration or respawned with an item all of which are ways some games handle it and are fair assumptions to make so they wouldn’t know which of these to actually try the paralysis of decisions and having no reason to suspect one is more valid than the other thus leads most noobs to make a house to suit their own needs only making suitable housing by happen stance that is of course assuming that such a new player has the wherewithal to even continue playing the game my friend was caught in a death loop with no idea how to progress in the game because we’re friends he HD his frustration or disinterest but if I had not been present I’m sure he would have quit then and there and reasonably so this is how the guide breaks Terraria the moment he is gone the only Lifeline new player has disappears leaving them defend for themselves what am I supposed to do what are the flip side then say your guide survives just how useful is he really or does it even matter if you let him be zombie food this is where my second friend comes into play he’ll be here a bit longer so let’s call him Travis this friend of mine likes playing games on their default difficulty quite reasonable and I think the best way to approach any new game with the enemies dealing less damage and having less Health the guide was able to take care of himself even all the way through the third day giving Travis the opportunity to learn from him St there’s a person that let you tell you how to survive in this land oh wait that’s me oh hello on day three uh happiness is a thing crafting clicking on happiness gave him some very good information I’m quite used to not having a home but I wouldn’t mind getting one okay jerk our conversation go away yeah I was talking to this guy you want a home you want to go this way nope goes the other way okay uh what do you want for a home I don’t know he wants a place to hang his hat maybe that’s what he need he need a hat R hat rack yeah that sounds right that’s the hat that he’s wearing yes 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 they 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 a seat so maybe Dylan wants a seat Dylan do you like a seat now nothing was really spelled out and Travis had built a simple structure that had become his home so he was initially unsure why our guy Dylan wasn’t able to move in these were just some of the first messages Travis read and he was propelled into several hours of trial and error trying to figure out the home and I don’t mean he spent the whole time making the house but rather that he continued his Terraria Journey knowing he wanted to make a house but also explore and do other things he definitely wanted to learn some things on his own rather than rely on the guide for everything and that’s good though it also relies on the guide remaining alive the entire time or at least until some suitable housing can be set up while Travis goes about his business let’s investigate exactly what can we learn from the guide and how he even works and boy I did not expect this rap a hole to go so deep for starters there are six dialogue options that can appear if the player has no Tools in their inventory what is a tool well pickaxes axes grappling hooks a bug net and even buckets count as tools according to the wiki considering how the player spawns with a tool in their hot bar it’s hard to imagine these dialogue options ever appearing if indeed they don’t appear at all when any one of these tools is in the inventory four of these options are pretty easy to figure out without any help however one tells you how to break background and another tells you to place walls when making shelter both of which are incredibly helpful information that should be more easily discoverable both of my friends took a long time before they discovered how to use hammers partially due to one of them making an underground house where none of the walls were connected to the surface making the walls impervious to hammers something that would confuse anybody if the first walls they tried to break are underground once ores come into play we get a few more options if you have an or the guide can tell you about furnaces and even how to make one without using the crafting menu if you have a bar he’ll tell you about the Anvil and how to get it both are very helpful but let’s take a step back and take a closer look at that crafting menu something the guide is meant to be helpful with what happened when my friend clicked on the guide Dylan’s crafting option oh you ask him about crafting he just opens my crafting inventory okay I never thought about this but the menu that opens when you click on Crafting is only marginally different from when you were normal normally trying to craft there’s exactly one more box and for a new player like Travis who is not very familiar with how the UI normally looks this can easily be missed this is why we’re hardly going to talk about The Crafting menu and whether the guide giving you recipes is helpful because Travis didn’t learn about this feature now this is something that could very easily be more unique to Travis perhaps others notice the new box lot and Travis was just not very observant in that moment that is very possible but it’s hard to say that it’s not just a tad bit confusing for a new person to click on a menu option from the guide only to see their crafting menu open and think nothing other than just that the menu had opened and nothing else making a more obvious UI and a more front and center place for the player to check for recipes could greatly help new players even making the UI much larger wouldn’t necessarily be a bad idea as it’s not like you’ll be searching for recipes in the middle of some paddle where the UI can get in the way some simple changes could go a long way to making this function of the guide easier to understand even adding a slot in the guides dialogue box where items could be placed could be a Simple Solution even if it might admittedly get a little Annoying after the fact having to place the item in the dialogue box at the top center of the screen when the items that you will be able to craft are on the middle left little considerations like this are great quality of life for current players we just need to find where the balance is so new players can learn and current ones can Thrive that said the guy does do a good job at teaching many things interact with background use a hammer oh I’m learning so much yeah I just need to talk to the NPC okay breaking walls is definitely a sticking point for any Noob as I talked earlier it usually takes them a hot second to figure it out now my friend would continue to learn more from Dylan as he played the game and there were even times that he had a hard time understanding him but I just want to go over what exactly the guide could teach my friend Travis and what some potential points of confusion are for noobs in general even if Travis wasn’t necessarily confused by them because even if the guide is responsible for making the game for noobs is his information actually going to be helpful or should you again just let him be zombie food we’ll start with the more helpful information that the guide could potentially give ignoring the likelihood of these messages ever actually appearing in game we’ll start off with these very early game messages that inform the player that there is a way to increase maximum health where to find them and even how to break them which theoretically shouldn’t be an issue as the pickaxe is used to break most things but there was once a time that hammers were used to break uh the hearts so I’m happy this is spelled out how to increase Mana is mentioned with it expressly noting that it relates to Magic and that’s helpful for a non-gamer who might not understand what Mana even is and the functions of stars are a little more vaguely explained the way the Housing Works is perhaps the most important information I think that the guide can give and everything you could ever hope to learn about housing is spelled out here though I’m not sure if there’s a particular order as it’s Express here the noob would have everything that they need to know and in the right order however my friend was given the information about the banners and moving NBCS without the knowledge of the house icon it’s possible he skipped through or missed the dialogue but if these are not presented in this exact order talking about the banners and moving people before explaining what and where the house bton is doesn’t work very well the guide is dialog for how to get almost every other NPC but there are some that I think are more interesting than others as they drive the player to do a certain thing or at least give them a task to accomplish such as the one with a witch doctor which appoints players to explore the jungle several others are helpful in this way as well but overall it’s just good that there is dialogue explaining these things several times in the adventures of any of my friends who I’ve introduced to Terraria they will start to wonder what to do next that is what some of these dialogue options are for pointing the player to different things they can do and what they might expect when doing so if their defense is too low the guide might even yell at them to get better gear now one thing I love about the guide is that not every hint is necessarily direct but rather detailed nudges in the right Direction but other times he spells everything out for you like look at this the name of what must be broken where they can be found what happens when you break too many and even what could happen after you kill the boss it it just introduces the concept that meteors are even a thing in this game this might be the most detailed dialogue I’ve seen yet from the guide if maybe even the most detailed of all of them but before fighting those bosses make sure you have enough health because if you haven’t found 15 heart crystals in reach full health you don’t stand a chance against the evil bosses that’s for sure now it could go on and on about every line of dialogue but I doubt you’re interested in that and if you want to see what they all are then you can look them up on the wiki needless to say most of all the dialog options are very helpful to the player assuming they are read in the correct order if a new player frequently goes to the guide they can learn everything they might need to play and enjoy the game that’s not to say however that the guide will always be helpful there are some that I found that might be pretty unhelpful orh even misleading for one there’s dialogue that talks about bringing lenses to demon altars this of course is meant to teach players how to make an I summon presumably in the event that they have not found or have already used all their suspicious looking eyes the issue with this is that the demon altars are not explained by any of the guy dialogue anywhere my friend upon reading this was interested in making the summon but since he had no idea what a demon alter was he didn’t bother searching blindly for something he couldn’t even recognize if he saw it if the guy just included a that demon alars are primarily found in the corruption or Crimson then I think that might help new players out immensely as I remember it took forever for me to even learn that these altars could be used for crafting at all although upon a second look I did find this dialogue option that does well exactly what I just said it should do the wording is slightly different so my word search for demon altar didn’t pick it up would the slight difference in language have any kind of effect no I I highly doubt it and I’m glad this is explained but similar to the potential issue with the order of dialogue from housing my friend friend had the guide tell him to find demon Alters before this dialogue appeared and so he was just confused ensuring the right order would have gone a long way for him on a similar note the guy tells you how to make the bloody spine in worm food but doesn’t mention the crafting station perhaps that could be deduced by the player at this point but it’s still relatively early in the game and I don’t expect new players to remember most of the game’s smaller features or details because there are just so many adding at a demon alter could clear a potential confusion here to my surprise surpris there was only one other dialogue I don’t think was very good and it’s the one explaining where to find Souls of light and night it says to go to the dark or bright areas of the world and a person could assume that it’s a reference to the hollow and Corruption but if I’m going to be totally honest setting aside my current knowledge of the game I could absolutely have read this and understood it much more literally and ended up trying to find a place that is really bright and really dark because underground the hollow is only moderately brighter than most biomes I would have been searching for something as bright as the surface okay that that’s what I’m referencing so maybe it should be a little more clear but maybe that’s just me so what does this all mean the guide provides a treasure Trope of useful information for new players that could easily make the game for people but if the new player happens to lose their guide very early in the game for whatever reason they are left up the creek without a paddle and so it’s not really that the guide breaks the experience as much as the lack of the guide can very easily break it for new player even with that said though this is ignoring the type of person who’s playing the game in the first place new and more casual people may not be interested in returning to this guide over and over again to learn how to play some may see him and never think twice about it others will love him to death whatever the case may be Terraria does start the player off with someone who can hold their hand and does a pretty good job at teaching and pushing the new player if they have the patience to sit down and learn from their teacher the only thing I can think of that should be added is a basic starter home or even just an option on the world creation screen for there to be one just so the new player has want to lean back on in the event that the guy dies immediately happy accidents could occur by placing torches in the houses underneath living trees or Sky Islands but there’s no guarantee a tree will be nearby or even in the world and Sky Islands will come much later in the game for most people even without the addition though I think it’s safe to say the Terraria really does do a fine job at teaching new players if they are willing to or I guess even notice the mechanisms that it has put in place to teach them the guide who makes or breaks the experience

Have you ever wondered if Terraria does a good job at teaching new players? What in game systems are responsible for making sure the noob knows what to do? Well the Guide is the most important feature Terraria has, in fact, he’s so important, that he makes or breaks the Terraria experience.
________________________________________________
*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