Terraria is EASY to Learn

Terraria is EASY to Learn

Terraria is easy to learn we’re all just stupid this is the hot take I’ll be defending today and by the end of the video you will not only realize that I’m actually right but that just about every person who picks up Terraria for the first time is doing it wrong and I have three buil-in game features that will prove to you just how easy Terraria is to learn now one thing I’m going to have to get out of the way right now is that I for the long time would have joined the chorus of people saying Terraria is very difficult to learn and not particularly Noob friendly most people it would seem even argue that the game is a Wiki game so to speak because you more or less are required to use the wiki if you’re going to figure out what you’re supposed to do I was one of these people as well at least that was until I introduced my friend Travis to Terraria and realized there are so many ways that the game pokes and broads you in the right direction that people’s complaints about it being hard to learn including my own no longer made any sense to me with that let’s get to the first point the first built-in feature that guides players to where they need to go and no it’s not the guide It’s the loading screen tips how many times you will see these things depends entirely on the person and perhaps how willing they are to continue playing the game after their first experience or two some people people sit down for 10hour sessions and thus will see these just once in those 10 hours While others don’t have the luxury of being a living potato and so hop on and off for one or 2our sessions the tips are definitely the weakest or at least hle tool Terraria uses to teach new players due to there being no apparent Rhyme or Reason as to when certain tips will appear and the potentially very small number of tips you’ll see during your time playing the game in order for them to be really helpful you will have had to log on and off the game several times and thus the game has to have held your interest for that long and that might not be the case if you’re a new player who has already grown frustrated after the first hour perhaps more glaring an issue than that though is the loading screen can be super short and thus the tips won’t be up for long enough to actually read them perhaps the worse your PC and the longer your loading times the better for learning the game but these tips are far more helpful than you might think and can be responsible for pushing new players in the right direction and by point you in the right direction I mean they directly tell you in-game features some tell you basic things like how you change your spawn point that water breaks your fall and even how to obtain torches others explain how progression works like you need to upgrade your pickaxe to mine certain ores that you need a furnace to craft bars out of ores which is something people unfamiliar with Survival Games might not know and even how to get certain NPCs this text even tells tells you that there is some queen bee out there and that you should keep an eye out for it there are some tips that are more flavor text than anything like how you shouldn’t kill bunnies you can wear a bucket on your head and that time heals all wounds I guess that last one is technically a Game feature as you do heal gradually over time but that’s probably not going to occur to most new players and even took me a moment to think of it as anything other than the typical idiom we recite the next time you join a new world take a moment and look at some of the tips that appear on your screen and think of them as though you had never played the game before so many tips are incredibly helpful and can introduce you to new game features point you in a new direction or reveal game features you would have never known existed the guide is usually pretty vague in what he says only gently nudging the player in the right direction with hints while the tips most often spell them out take a look at this tip that tells you how the lucky horseshoe works that’s nice and all but the second sentence then tells you where to find them if a new player sees this tip they will suddenly learn that floating islands exist in the game which is something I’m sure takes a long time for many noobs to discover because why would anybody waste their time exploring the sky who would think there’s anything up there this is how tips can gradually teach people how to play the game they are the least reliable due to any tip showing up at any time and they require you to be looking at the loading screen but if a new person has their heart set on learning Terraria the tips will become one of their their best friends the second best friend is the guide I just mentioned of course he is one of the three mechanics Terraria uses to teach new players he is the most obvious one after all and is probably the primary way most people learn the game outside of using online resources or hours of trial and error I have a whole video that goes into why the guide makes or breaks Terraria and you can check that out if you’d like to learn more about how the guy teaches new players the game but let’s go over the cliffnotes version here unlike tips the guides dial log options are dependent on certain progression markers in the game before the player has gathered anything he will tell them how to chop down trees to make shelter how a workbench Works how to craft torches and a little information about walls he’ll push you to do mining tell you about ores how to crap them into bars how to make or purchase an anvil make Mana stars and most importantly he’ll spell out exactly how to make suitable housing and will even spell out how to make suspicious looking eyes and that’s just what he does when the player made no progression at all there are dialogue options that point the player to how they get every single one of the NPCs in the game this dialogue not only tells them how to get more people in their world but also tells them there are guns in the game there are giant beasts of some sort in the jungle pretty explicitly he says you should explore the desert and that there is a friendly NPC that can be found underground those are the most direct ones though many of the other dialogues could Point new people into new progression markers if they read between the lines enough it doesn’t stop there either the guide has dialogue options that are dependent on which bosses have been defeated and so he’ll teach the new player how to get certain bosses to spawn he’s more vague about it for example saying that in the middle of the night on a Snowy Evening there is some scary Roar this will take a little interpreting for people as they have to put together that a snow only falls in the tundra so they have to wait for it to snow while also standing around all night but this is a method of getting deerclops to spawn now the guide is viewed as a more prehard mode NPC but he does give quite a bit of information in hard mode as well not as much as pre- hard mode of course but he tells players about the existence of wyverns and hints at where they can be found He suggests the player try and find a treasure map he tells you how to make an adamant tyght Forge and hints at how you can spawn most of the bosses the only boss I couldn’t find him hint at was the Empress of light strangely enough maybe since she’s the last boss that’s been added to the game and they haven’t gotten around to adding a hint for her or maybe I missed it on the list and I am including the moon events when I say that the guide hints at how you can spawn those as well and this is only if you ever use the guide for his advice and never figure out there’s a crafting option this will require a little more work but new players can learn of many things by placing an item into the crafting box and looking through what can be made with different materials especially early in the game there are several very basic materials that are capable of crafting hard mode and late Game Gear by looking through this they can figure out what might be out there the flamethrower is a great example of this it can’t be acquired until after Skeletron Prime but you can learn of its existence after checking what a simple iron or lead bar makes I must admit however there is one potential problem with this and that is that a new player could actually confuse themselves by going through all the possible items they can craft they have no concept of a prehard mode and hard mode and so they might end up seeing something like a flamethrower want to craft it and spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how to get Souls of fright and a mythal anvil so there’s a bit of a danger I suppose in confusing the new person by checking out crafting recipes but there’s still lots of craftable items that can be acquired in prey hard mode that will help the player out big time and they can learn of their existence and how to craft them by looking up recipes using the guide and finally perhaps one of the best and most unorthodox methods of learning how to play Terraria the achievements this is something I suspect won’t even occur to most people but these achievements are actually really good at pointing the player to their next step in progression and since these achievements appear in the UI right next to your inventory it’s not like it’s hard to find them if you’re the kind of person who actually tries to learn the game and fully explores your UI now these achievements often don’t spell out the steps required to get them but they are very explicit in what a player needs to do and perhaps most importantly in a noob friendly order first chop down a tree then get an NPC to move in this teaches the player that won NPC’s can move in and two that they need to make shelter they are then told how to make a hammer and that they should go mine ore to discover and smash a heart Crystal obtain an anvil and from what and there is treasure underground to make Mana stars and a hook all of these are fantastic progression markers for a new player and achieving them is simple enough while also pushing the noob to explore the world which often leads to some of their own discoveries there are achievements that tell the player to defeat every single boss in the game while giving some hint as to where they can be found or or when they can be found even with the evil bosses there is another achievement that tells them to break orbs or hearts with queen bee they’re told to find hives in the jungle there’s an achievement for reaching the Underworld for making the very necessary Molten Pickaxe to mine the new hard mode ores make wings and so much more honestly if neither tips nor the guide existed looking at the achievements alone would be enough for players to learn the game because it gives very clear indicators as to what else they can do it’s not how I would have thought to learn the game and I guess a good number of the more intermediary progression markers are not in order and that could cause a little confusion but the achievements have all the basics right at the top and call by name every different boss and event and many of the most important accessories and tools that can be found many of them are more or less pointless or for those people who just want to 100% the game but it can’t be denied just how helpful so many of these achievements are in guiding the new player and so all this begs the question why does Terraria have the reputation of being a Wiki game why do so many people struggle to learn it why have all the friends have introduced to the game had such a hard time getting a grasp of it there is one question one question that sums up what may very well be the single most difficult hurdle for every Noob to clear don’t know what else to do right now I’m at a loss I’m out of ideas but I just outlined three different ways that Terraria goes out of its way to teach the new player if you play the game on console and maybe mobile as well yes I know there’s a tutorial but the PC player base is the largest one and thus is how most people will first experience this game and I see comment after comment of people expressing how hard it is to learn and get into Terraria people don’t take advantage of these built-in systems they’re right there or perhaps more accurately why do they never notice them sh 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 well I’ve been bringing my friend Travis through the game recently and have been using his experience to dive deep into terraria’s game design and a very intentionally taken a very hands-off approach to introducing him to the game and glean as much as I can from observing him I can confidently say that the tips are not something every person is going to see it took about five sessions before he even noticed the tips were appearing on the loading screen and since then I’m unsure he’s ever bothered to read them again despite one of the ones he actually did read having some useful information for him then there’s the guide it took him three in-game days to notice the guide was there but when he did he utilized the guide heavily and learned a lot of the game’s features however the guide is the least direct and least consistent with pushing players to their next progression marker that on top of the fact that he has a lot of dialogue options that aren’t even necessarily shared in the proper order and he found himself rereading the same dialogue options or reading ones he didn’t have any context for he took what he could but it didn’t take long for him to start ignoring the guide or else use him significantly less finally with the achievements he is actually the first person I’ve ever introduced into the game who gave any thought to these things and he even looked through them before joining the world for the first time even so they did not appear to guide his decision- making in any way perhaps this is because he looked at them too early and then forgot or maybe he just didn’t understand what they were talking about even if I would consider them quite simple the only time I noticed him utiliz achievements to push progression was when he notice the achievement for breaking Shadow orbs this pushed him to the corruption where he quickly deduced what a shadow orb was and started breaking things until a worm spawned giving him a mission to accomplish the unique thing about Travis though is that he is an Avid Reader and of all the people I’ve introduced into the game he has done the single best job at utilizing the game’s features to learn the game even so he frequently wondered aloud as you heard earlier what should I do next why how all that a person needs to know is spelled out out in three different ways all that the player needs to do is read you don’t even need to open up a Wiki just read the dialogue the game provides you but even my friend who loves reading is unwilling to read or is perhaps just disinterested in reading the available information then what is Terraria supposed to do to teach new players the robes how else can it teach people without holding their hand and spelling everything out if it did that would terrari even be a Sandbox anymore would the game lose it term It’s Magic I think so if it went out of its way to tell you what you should do then what’s the point perhaps the beauty of Terraria is that there is no right way to play it and although the game tries to push you along the intended route it doesn’t bash you upside the head with it trusting the player to figure it out themselves that’d be a nice and Steppy way to end the video but I’m not satisfied with that answer I need to know why is Terraria hard to learn I spelled out all the systems it provides enlisted and shown examples of what it teaches you I find no excuse for the struggle even if I myself ignored all these offerings when I first learned the game so this is where it comes back to you are you surprised Terraria has so many methods of learning the game did you know they existed or did you know and found them utterly unhelpful were you impatient and use the wiki rather than search the games features my friends have taught me a lot but you’re the only ones who can answer this question for me was terrari hard for you to learn and if so why [Music]

Terraria is actually pretty easy to learn when you start to look at all the different ways it tries to teach you the game. And so, that begs the question, why do new players think it’s so difficult to understand?
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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
*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
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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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