Editor’s note: I originally started writing this the night before 1.4.5, let’s see how long it takes me to finish this
Hey, friends! Hope you’re all doing okay especially with Bigger and Boulder out now. It looks great. Honestly I haven’t even opened Terraria since the update, I was off doing some other stuff first and I wanted to try and keep my game on a stable version for weekly Survival maintenance, but then I subscribed to a Steam workshop item and that forced the update first so there goes that. But I wanted to do some kind of small writeup for things to expect going into 1.4.5 with the game likely being heavily transformed again, partially looking back at the last custom world and some comments I saw about it as well as some other things related to Survival in general. I can’t be bothered to go get screenshots of each individual thing, but you know who you are.
Loot density was a major problem in Stars in Shadow
Yep. Can’t agree more on that with all the major progression skips packed into one place. It was just that on a time crunch it was a lot easier for me to edit new chests I placed in the Rapture instead of going around to find and change existing ones without a way to highlight them, since for TEdit you have to edit items in a chest one at a time. I’m also not very good at building with it in general (case in point: I didn’t know how to scroll with the cursor until I tried searching for it a few days after the run started in the TEdit Discord), I much prefer hands on stuff and most of the work on the custom world was a mix of both.
Thematically, it… kind of fit? In Epic Battle Fantasy 5, the source material, the Rapture area is one of the final parts of the game, and while I don’t quite remember how loot dense it was since my last complete playthrough was years ago (especially not having lots of strong stuff there, you get plenty of other strong equipment throughout other parts of the game too) I thought the lategame part was fitting to have progression skips in the Terraria world there with how contained the area was in EBF5. For less experienced players I imagine it would take some more time to explore fully, but in an announced special world there’d be a lot of talent showing up to play, so one player sweeping through quickly to get everything happened in the first 2 hours of the run starting and soured the mood for everyone else. Especially with the wide skill gap on here I’d need to get better at spreading things out more, make sure there’s more opportunities for people to find something special instead of finding the one big structure and having to pick at the scraps left behind. Didn’t have time for more with how much I kept putting off working on it.
The general idea is still there, though, and even if it was super rushed I mildly enjoyed putting it together, so maybe later on when the server is more stable I could revisit it and try to balance the experience some more, spread things out. After all, this is a multiplayer server. Not a singleplayer JRPG, like EBF5, which… well, the way the world was set up, caters way more to singleplayer than anything else, instead of a large world shared by 15+ players at any given time.
Don’t Dig Up seed sucks
Yeah, that’s understandable. Free warps like we have here I’d like to think made it… slightly more tolerable? But it’s all really dark and closed off most of the time, the surface is wacky and questionable if not taking precautions to set up for random falling stars sniping you (which isn’t really practical with world regen every 12 hours), so for setup on Don’t Dig Up I guess I should try and find ways to make it more palatable instead of having earlygame slow to even more of a crawl if you don’t get ahead early. Honestly the main reason I went with it for Stars in Shadow is just because it fit thematically for the Rapture based on how the area formed in EBF5.
Why is a Jungle Temple the replacement for hell?
You can blame me at least twice for that. And I’m not referring to the early version of the world where I did the same thing of underworld loot in the main jungle temple with no fun progression skips, I’m referring to hell stuff in the jungle temple in general as an idea. Originally it was a last minute addition to Legolas#1’s Dementophobia world where he removed all the Hellstone from the main hell area, then he realized there needed to be a way for people to go for stuff on the Terra Blade crafting tree. I suggested putting Hellstone in the temple, and he made that change before the world went live. We never saw anything come of it because the chests were broken and I replaced it before Hellstone was relevant, but I wanted to give it a proper shot since it got skipped last time, and adding the rest of the tile based loot was the next logical step for stealing all of hell.
All of that to say, “hell temple was an expansion of my idea for another world that you guys never got to play out, so I put it in because I wanted to.” I guess for how lategame the Lihzahrds are, though, the rewards didn’t really match the effort trying to get in for basic hell loot, especially since in the main world I made the passages a lot smaller and linear and much more often you’d be boxed in with nowhere to go. If I do it again I’ll adjust the space or loot accordingly, might even do some other stuff like another alternate Dungeon structure instead for hell loot. Something less annoying. Or not if the world is meant to be evil. Sorry. Not sorry. Or don’t tell me about it if someone else puts that in their world
Puzzles in custom worlds?
Those would be fun. I’m just not good at making puzzles (or game design in general really), and more importantly I worry too much about making sure they still will be playable even if someone tries to break them up. If you make a custom world yourself, feel free to put some stuff in for that.
What’s happening to challenges?
For the ones already on the server, just delays. I’m still watching stuff related to them, whether it’s players pushing for a first completion or marking another off the big list, I’m keeping tabs on everything. The only major pacebreaker right now is a lot of stuff being broken with the update, which… uh, I haven’t looked at anything personally yet, but I’ve seen some of the screenshots being shown in the Discord server, and it’s definitely not pretty. Lots of false bans, basic mechanics being completely nonfunctional due to system changes, it’s a real mess right now.
So, time based challenges will be on hold until the server is a little more stable. This mainly affects Son of Liberty (10 weeks in a row getting Zenith, Ankh Shield, Rod of Harmony) since I’ve heard of at least 2 players going for it, though since I don’t remember stuff for all the challenges off the top of my head so there might be some others to look into. Those will go on a case by case basis, but for Son of Liberty at least if you have a streak going it’ll be frozen until the server’s working a bit more.
As for new challenges… well, as mentioned, joining is supported and everything else is a diceroll with the server still mainly running on 1.4.4.9. I don’t feel comfortable pushing out new challenges as a result, especially since I promised there would be at minimum a 3 month advance notice so that Son of Liberty isn’t immediately locked out, so I’ll just keep writing down ideas for now. I briefly mentioned on the server but to repost it in a bigger place, if you’ve got suggestions, send them out. I won’t be responding to most of them because I don’t want to give too many hints in advance, but I’ll read them as I see them and add the good stuff to the list.
When will the next custom world be?
No clue. Like everything else I’m waiting for the server to be working a little more before even trying to do anything major on it, I… assume some tools would still work for making worlds at least? I can use an old version of TEdit (if it’s updated already anyways), the program we use for generating/uploading the worlds is still based on 1.4.4.9, but full support for 1.4.5 stuff will likely come much later. I’d imagine custom worlds would still work on that older version but we’d have to do everything in TEdit, loading newer version stuff would probably break a lot of things.
Honestly, though, once that support is implemented, I’m interested in seeing how much there is I could cheat. Of course there’s the the different world properties to combine and all that jazz, but at least from non hidden world generation just being able to generate older special worlds with the same seed is a blessing, since previously all you could input was the text for world seeds. You couldn’t turn individual flags on/off during generation, you could only access them by overwriting the seed field, which means every world generated on a special seed was different on a vanilla client since the actual seed used that the unique world properties are applied to, that couldn’t be controlled. Because of that, in previous custom worlds based on a special seed, you had to either deal with completely different worldgen between the worlds (mainly relevant for warps) or compromise with only one world that you added the alternate evil into somehow. Now, I think they can be mostly the same? And even if they can’t, you could just take the lazy route and turn the drunk flag on during world generation, which would add both evils into one world.
If you read all of me rambling here, thanks! Hope you found something that interests or at least is relevant to you as a player on Dark Gaming. I hope you got some insight into some of the stuff that’s been happening, I always want to try and least be a little transparent about Survival, to go back and forth with you guys on discussions. Even if it’s not a lot happening, I want you all to know that I’m listening and watching and I’d like to improve. Keep your feedback rolling in, the bug reports, everything. Thank you for your time with it all, with this community, to make something better. And enjoy the Terraria update, even if it’s not with the wider server immediately!