This guide serves as a reliable source of building knowledge, references, techniques, and designs.
Is there a building situation not comfortably explained here that you aren’t sure how to tackle? Please reply to this topic and I will do my best to provide you with a proper explanation.
I encourage people to add references to the References storage tab.
Planning Your Builds
A lot of people don’t plan out their builds all that well and that’s why some people struggle so much in the end with things like furniture.
Often what I do is draw a crude sketch of the build or general design I wish to replicate, and I brainstorm throughout the day on possible methods I can utilize and what variables should I take into account.
How tall would it be? If I get carried away, what could the build morph into? Which brick design should I use? Do I want to add symbolism? How on earth would I replicate this wall design?
The pre-planning stage is just as vital as anything else. Here are a few questions one should ask themselves when planning a build are as follows:
- “How many other ingame examples of this theme could I compare to?”
- “How hard would it be to replicate this 1x1 in Terraria?”
- “Which blocks & walls should I use?”
- “What would be the appropriate size?”
- “What little details would I like to include?”
- “How long would this take to complete?”
- “What is the mood I am trying to achieve?”
etc.
Gathering References
Firstly, one should always start by looking at inspiration. However, the problem is a lot of people look at other Terraria builds before they build their own, and that makes everyone else’s house look like everyone else’s and it doesn’t look like anything unique.
If you want your house to truly look special, you should look for inspiration outside of Terraria.
References
Grand Architecture
Architectural sketches by the Italian futurist architect Antonio Sant’Elia
Piazza Unità d’Italia
Cyberpunk/Steampunk
![jasza-dobrzanski-jasza-dobrzanski-oml-art-test|690x376]
(upload://fml1xwB9GJmS5wOiZfMxsfkWmlX.jpeg)
How to Teach Yourself How To Build
You may not like this building as a whole, but let’s say there’s one thing you like about it.
Maybe you see the brickwork on the left-most part of it and think “That’s really cool, maybe imma recreate that in Terraria”
So maybe you use Ebonstone Brick Wall or negative painted Stone Slab Wall, or you can get really creative and use 4 different Gemspark Walls with paint applied.
You look at a whole bunch of references and take bits and pieces of parts that you like. You find out why bits and pieces of certain buildings look good and you can apply them on your own.
This factoid isn’t just restricted to exteriors, it can be applied to interiors. You go into a restaurant irl and you see that the kitchen and the counter are adjacent, only separated by a singular wall. However, they have a large entryway and more importantly: a large hole in the wall, typically where the food is delivered fresh from the kitchen for the waiters to serve to the customer.
It’s also a beautiful example of depth in a build.
Example:
It’s in this early stage of learning how to build that I encourage one to look at other builder’s creations and try to think “What was the builder’s thought process through all of this?”. Then if we combine it with outside references you’re going to be much better at building uniquely.
Your first build is going to be awful and is likely going to undergo many revisions. Don’t try to make the best build instantly. Instead, start humble, learn from others, gain feedback, build off of it, and retain that information for future projects. Congrats! You are learning how to build.
Size and Experimentation
This statement is pretty obvious; The more blocks you use the more you have to play with, and it’s the same with rooms. The bigger you go the more you have to experiment with the more segments you add.
A lot of people build really small, which is something I did for a little while with both my exteriors and interiors. It was limiting me a lot in what I could play with, even though I still can play decently well on a small scale.
As said before, a lot of people are playing on the small scale so if you look at most houses, they’re like 1-bedroom houses, but if you want to build a house that looks a bit different has 3 or 4 bedrooms, and then make one bedroom larger so it’s like a master bedroom, give it it’s own bathroom, then build another bathroom downstairs. You can add fake plumbing pipes connecting the bathrooms to a septic tank embedded in the dirt. By doing these kinds of adjustments, you’ve already got a different layout compared to most houses, and you’re going to have more to play with in terms of shape and space.
Houses
A hop, skip, and a world record Olympic long jump away is a builder’s evolution away from shoe box houses to beautiful and expressive living quarters.
Functionality can still be widely prevalent, you just add a metric ton of vanity zing to it.
Stray away from the bland shoe box apartment building and build yourself a lovely piece of architecture.
You can add a roof using painted and actuated dynasty shingles, supported by shadewood.
Add sections where it shows the exterior while others peer in and have clear access to the interior where you put your stuff and house your NPCs.
Play around with elevation and add variety to the size of your rooms. Make one room really tall and add a custom glass chandelier. Add outside decor so it looks like your cottage is enclosed behind a fence and comfortably nestled in foliage.
Building is an art, bring your aspiration to life, and have fun with it.
Furniture
The easiest way to think is each time you’re building a room, think “What is this room going to be?”
Is it going to be a kitchen, a library, a garage, a lounge room, or is it just going to be a room with a glass door that leads out to the swimming pool?
Or you can think “What am I going to do in this room?”
Say you have a bookshelf, it would make sense to put down a table, chair, and lamp adjacent.
You can do this in a ton of different ways, there’s no one way to do it.
Try to think of each room as you go and what purpose each room is going to be assigned. If you think about each room one at a time instead of looking at all the boxes at the end and trying to turn them into something, you’re going to have a much easier time laying down the furniture, and the flow is going to be much easier to handle.
3D Building
The fundamentals and rules necessary to construct some truly amazing builds.
Basics
Since Terraria is a 2D game we can’t fully make 3D builds, but we can make 2D representations of 3D builds. Due to the nature of needing to represent a 3D object into a 2D voxel-based game with accurate dimensions, we will usually use Orthographic or Oblique Projection (Pic.1-3) so that there are no distortions in the build. The differences are mostly noticeable in much larger builds.
Pic.1
Pic.2
Perspectives & Projections
Due to the limitations of needing to build in a voxel-based game we will be utilising for most of the 3D builds an Orthographical Projection (Pic.1). Specifically we’ll be using what I call Corner Perspective most of the time, where we construct the build in such a way where we can only see 2 sides of it without being able to see the top or bottom (Pic.2).
Pic.1
Pic.2
A very important thing to mention is that it’s easier to imagine a 3D build by looking at it from a top-down perspective. In the given examples below (Pic.3-4) I’ve denoted the Blue arrow as the angle the player is looking from and the Yellow arrow as the direction from which the light is coming.
(Pic.3) Is just a simple cube and (Pic.4) is the cube rotated by 45 degrees so that the Blue arrow represents the screen from which the player will be looking towards the build.
Pic.3
Pic.4
Shaping
Basic Shapes
First, we will start with the most basic shape which is a cube. You can build cubes in 2 ways using pure blocks and walls. Both methods have different ways of being built and also positives and negatives about them.
2D Objects have Length and Width which are L, W or X, Y axis (Pic.1).
3D Objects have a Length, Width, and Height which is L, W, H or X, Y, Z axis (Pic.2).
Pic.1
Pic.2
(Corner Perspective)
A 5x5x5 cube of blocks:
We build a simple 2D 10x5 rectangle where the length is the combined size of the light and dark side of the cube (Green = Side facing the sun, Red = Side facing away from the Sun)
We paint the entire rectangle grey.
And finally, place actuators on the side which will be facing away from the sun and actuate them.
Here we come to our first problem of many which we will need to find workarounds. As seen in the picture the dark side looks fine but the lighter side has shadows inside the blocks. That is because light simply can’t pass through the solid blocks, the same effect can be seen on the actuated blocks too but to a much lower degree because light travels much easier through actuated blocks. If we were to have a giant 100x100 square of actuated blocks the effect will be able to be seen much more prominently.
There are several solutions to this which include:
- Coating both sides in illuminant coating (Side effect where blocks will be fully visible at night and ignore any light sources)
- Putting echo-coated diamond gemspark walls (or any other light-producing wall) behind the blocks (Not recommended unless for stylistic choice)
(Corner Perspective)
A 7x3x5 Parallelepiped (Cuboid) of blocks
To make the 3D Cuboid we will just make a 2D 10x5 blocks rectangle again, but this time notice the size of the light and dark size.
We made the light side 7 blocks to represent the Length of our object, then we made the dark side 3 blocks to represent the Width of our object. The 3D Height is represented as the 5 block Width of the 2D object.
(Corner Perspective)
A 5x5x5 cube of walls:
To fix the issues present with shadows we introduce walls into the equation. The process is the same with blocks but without actuators. We make a 5x10 rectangle of walls. But this time we painted the lighter side with grey paint and the darker side with black paint.
Here we notice another problem. Walls are in general bigger than a single block so we use echo walls to fix this issue. We can consider some things with walls, such as corners, which bring up the next segment.
Corners
Usually, you will want the corner of a build to be between 2 blocks, but since walls are bigger than blocks, this allows us to have some stranger corners between the light and dark side.
(Corner Perspective)
A 4x4 cube of walls:
Using the size of walls we can make some odd-shaped cubes, for example, this 4x4 cube is actually made of a 7x3 rectangle (3 blocks for walls, 1 air gap, 3 blocks for walls). Since a wall is actually 2 blocks in Length and not 1 once placed (1 fullblock + 2 half “0.5” blocks) by placing 3 walls we have essentially placed 4 blocks in width.
You can simply confirm this by doing the math and placing 1 wall and 2x2 blocks.
A wall is 2 blocks in width and height (0.5 blocks + 1 block + 0.5 blocks = 2 blocks) meaning its area is 2x2. The same goes for the 2x2 blocks.
Here is an example of utilizing both blocks and walls to create a more interesting shape. You can also mess with the corners if you want to, although this changes the geometry and look of the object.
(Corner Perspective)
A 5x5x9 pyramid:
Here is another example of a pyramid using walls and blocks which starts with a 5x5 square base, for every step the pyramid loses 0.5 blocks per side around the step. If you were to use only blocks, every step of the pyramid would lose 1 block per side (a different block is used so that there is a notable difference between each step).
It’s time to mention how the decoration of a building is affected by corners. And tackle some other minor problems present with them.
Here I will give an example of a simple wooden structure:
First notice how the palladium columns painted brown are repeated in the middle of the corner. That is because realistically the block would also appear on the darker side. After all, it is in the 3rd Dimension. The best way to imagine it is with an example from Minecraft.
Another thing to note is the seemingly random hole in the middle of the walls. That is necessary there because of the earlier mentioned problem with light not being able to pass through walls.
Without it, the simple build will look like this:
Which becomes a VERY big problem in the future so here we introduce some simple solutions to this problem.
The Plus Pattern:
This pattern gives us the ability to let light through without having any Air Pixels appear. All you need is 4 walls in a plus pattern with a missing wall in the center, this way the 4 walls will cover any space that could show the background.
As mentioned earlier this doesn’t work for every wall and for that, there are other solutions.
For example, for Craggy Stone Walls you can use actuated Flesh Platforms:
Furniture:
You can use furniture to naturally block out the background allowing you to let light through without worrying about it in combination with the plus pattern. Sometimes you won’t even need the full plus pattern, just 1 or 2 walls to cover the holes.
Let’s go back to the build and expand it:
Now comes another problem. Looking at the top-down view, what happens when you want to expand the build to the left? Well, you will now need to consider parts of a build preventing the view of other parts of the same build from being seen so let’s see how we can fix it.
Now that we’ve expanded the build to the left, notice how part of it is hidden. The player’s perspective is shown with the Blue arrow and the part which is hidden is shown with the Red painted blocks and notice how they form a 45-degree slope. By applying this rule you can make sure that your builds are accurately represented on a 2D screen.
Shading
Thanks to paints we can use many different shades for builds that use grayscale palettes, sadly when it comes to making 3D colorful builds you will most of the time need to rely on a much-limited selection of blocks and walls to make sure that you can preserve the color.
Grayscale Shading
First, let’s take a look at this simple basic image guide for learning grayscale shading:
- The top left corner represents grayscale shading using only blocks and actuators. The first row represents the paints which will be used and the 2nd row is the blocks and if they are actuated.
- The top right corner represents grayscale shading by combining blocks and walls. 1st row are the paints for either walls or blocks. The 2nd row is whether there is a wall or not. The 3rd row is for blocks and if they are actuated
- The bottom palette is quite an advanced one so for beginners it is not recommended. 1st row are the paints which will be applied to the walls. The 2nd row is the paints which will be applied to the blocks. The 3rd row is whether there is a wall or not. Now the 4th row is a bit special because thanks to the transparency of thin ice we can combine it with walls to form even more complicated shades (Note: Some thin ice combinations are removed because the texture of the thin ice is too strong and it hides the texture of the wall behind it), it represents whether there is a block or thin ice and whether it’s actuated or not.
Colorful Shading
Due to the limit of not having as many paints compared to the grayscale one you have to be a little creative so here are some things to look out for:
- Brightness
Blocks & walls have different brightness levels so you can use that to your advantage when building.
- Saturation
Blocks & walls have different saturation (how colorful they are) meaning that they are affected by paints differently, especially the non-deep variants. The more saturated they are the more painting them will change their colors.
- Texture
Not every block & wall has the same texture so you need to be careful with choosing them.
- Actuation
You can still use actuators to make blocks naturally darker.
- Blocks + Walls
Combining blocks and walls is also a good idea because most of the time walls are naturally darker than their block counterparts.
Slopes
When making slopes you usually have to consider 2 things, whether they are facing down or up and that’s about it.
Let’s start with a simple example and make a pillar of Ancient Blue Brick Wall:
Slopes work by specific rules:
- If the slope is on the light side, then only the dark side of the wall will change in size and the white side will stay the same.
- The slope won’t change in size unless you are changing the geometry of the build.
- If the slope is facing upwards then from bottom to top the object is becoming thinner.
- If the slope is facing downwards then from bottom to top the object is becoming thicker.
- Upward facing slopes are brighter than the 3D side they are on (White painted as an example).
- Downward facing slopes are darker than the 3D side they are on (Gray painted and actuated as an example).
- Slopes will take up 1 more block than their actual size. For example, since slopes are angled, the slope of a 3-block-in-length wall will take up 4 blocks (2 regular blocks and 2 sloped blocks).
Now let’s make the pillar curved inwards on 1 side by adding upward and downwards-facing slopes:
This is good but not symmetrical. Let’s try mimicking the shape of the slopes from the left part of the dark side to the right side too.
Here we come across a problem, since we’ve been using walls for everything except the slopes we can’t just slope it the same way with air and here we use the shading guide and actuated blocks to fix this issue using Ancient Green Brick blocks:
Thanks to the help of echo blocks we can make a smooth connection between the walls and the actuated blocks on their top and bottom parts.
Let’s do a quick example with a curved outwards pillar:
Corner Slopes
Unlike regular slopes. Slopes which touch each other create some problems, since they can’t make the fully diagonal shape those slopes actually shrink or expand the blocks for 0.5 blocks per corner (or 1 block in total)
In the given example we can see that we go from 5 blocks to 4 blocks to 3 blocks, how this is possible by essentially shrinking the 5-block ring by 1 block in the 3D space so that we can make sure the symmetry is preserved. We can see an example below if we make a top-down view of each individual layer but instead, 1 block is represented as 2x2 blocks. We can see that after the first slope we are left with 8 blocks which divided by 2 give us 4 blocks per side.
If we want to directly skip over those 4 blocks directly to 3 blocks there are 2 methods:
- Using 2 corner slopes for a total of 2 blocks being removed per side.
- Using 1 regular slope without making the slopes touch each other in the corners.
Shadows
Now it’s time to learn proper shading. There are 2 methods to shade your builds, mostly concerning the darker side. First, let’s try making an example of a proper usage of them:
Make a simple 5x5x6 cuboid
Let’s give it window shapes by outlining it.
We will make the window shape be 1 block deep inside the cuboid, so that means the inside parts of the windows and their slopes will be 1 block in width (technically the slopes will take up 2).
We use the same rules as the previous example with the pillar for slopes but we also need to use different walls inside the window shapes to make sure that they can be differentiated from the regular walls of the cuboid, we also use yet again echo blocks to make sure the blocks have a smooth connection to the walls.
Now it’s time to introduce the 2 types of shadow designs and the explanation of how we got this shape.
Regular Shadows
This is the first of the 2 techniques for making shadows. We will use the previous example for the explanation for the first.
We first begin with a light side which is facing towards the sun, and then the side facing against the sun will be our dark side.
Now I will introduce you to the 2 main actions which you will be using most of the time when adding more shape to your 3D builds.
Extrusion
With this method, we will be adding more to the geometry of an already existing object.
Example:
Looking at it from a top-down view (Blue arrow = Player’s perspective, Red blocks = Blocks hidden from player’s perspective), all we did was just extrude outwards a 3x4 area of blocks by 1 block (you can see this by the 1 block in size dark side of the extrusion.
Let’s give it some slopes and add another extrusion on the dark side.
Insetting
With this method, we will be carving inside the object itself essentially removing parts of it. We will use the same setup from the previous example.
Looking at it again from the top (Blue arrow = Player’s perspective, Red blocks = Blocks hidden from player’s perspective) we can see that all we did was just create 3x4 holes in the cuboid with 1 block depth. Notice how the dark side has an even darker side, that is because we already have a dark side and it’s simply made darker to represent more depth. You can also use the other variant which will be shown in Realistic Shadows.
Realistic Shadows
Unlike Regular Shadows, Realistic Shadows are much more complicated because you have to consider parts of the objects casting shadows, global illumination and other minor factors. Before we start I’ll be using the 3D modelling software Blender to show you how the 3D objects will look with realistic lighting.
Extrusion
Extrusion remains relatively unchanged.
Insetting
For inserting, we will need to change a couple of rules for the shading of the darker parts of a 3D object.
You will need to make the insetted wall in the dark part which is facing away from the sun to actually be brighter, and the one facing towards the sun to be darker due to the way light works and how it bounces (Global Illumination).
If you take a close look you will see that that is indeed the case for the rendered object in Blender (I recommend you open this image in a separate program to have a better look).
Shadow Casting
Shadow casting can happen on a large scale or small scale and it highly depends on how you want to make your build appear and your imaginary sun’s position.
Here is an example of a shadow being cast on the light side of the insetting example:
Another 2 examples of shadows being cast:
Sun is located at the horizon:
Sun is above the build:
Shadow Holes
There are times when we have holes in our builds which would actually let light and illuminate parts of our builds which would usually be dark.
Examples:
Advanced Shaping
Cylinders & Cones
Time for some simple cylinders, they are quite easy to understand so let’s begin with a simple example.
All you need to do is just choose a place where the cylinder will be the brightest and make sure it becomes gradually darker as it reaches the edges. Most of the time it’s recommended to not have the center of the cylinder be the brightest but somewhere to the side.
Using the advanced shading palette with thin ice we can make much smoother pillar gradients.
Cones are quite simple as they mostly have 1 light side and 1 dark side with a very small color transition line where the 2 sides meet.
Domes
For domes, you are essentially making half a sphere, so you will need to pick the brightest spot for it and make it gradually darker from there. For colored paints, you can use a combination of blocks and walls with similar textures to add the necessary shading.
N-Gons
N-Gons are like a more simple dome, you will need to carefully split your shades among 3 sides.
Example of an octagon:
Let’s make a more complicated example:
Isometric Projection
Unlike Corner Perspective with Isometric Projection, we have 2 perspectives we can choose from:
3 Face Perspective
We use this perspective when we want to display 3 different sides of a 3D object. Usually, you have which is the brightest, then a middle color, and finally a dark color. You have the top side, bottom left side, and bottom right side. You can also use this perspective with shapes different from a cube.
2 Face Perspective
This perspective focuses on only 2 sides of the object from a top-down view since it’s much easier to work with in general.
It is easier if you try to look at the build you want to make from just 1 side so that you can get an idea of where things need to be.
With the extrusion example let’s take a look at it from just the side (Blue arrow = Player’s Perspective):
We can see that if we add 45-degree slopes we get the areas that are not visible to the player.
Let’s build a bit more complicated example:
Due to the way isometric works we need to make the front facing slope to be 2 blocks instead of 1 and the back slope is hidden.
Depth Building
This isn’t really considered 3D building but it’s a good honourable mention. Instead of adding depth to a build by making it 3D, we add layers where each layer becomes darker and darker to add the perception of depth. Usually, this is done through a combination of walls, actuated tiles, and grayscale paints.
The End
Here are some more builds that you could use for inspiration and to test yourself if you can spot any mistakes in those builds.
by: Solorion
By: Orange
by: Solorion
by: SpeeQz
by: Iris