Terraria / Tropes A to H

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List continued at

• Tropes I to R
• Tropes S to Z

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A-B

• Ability Depletion Penalty: Downplayed — The speed of mana regeneration is proportional to how full the Mana Meter is, so a character with no mana has almost no regeneration until they rest for a while. The Mana Regeneration potion grants a buff that always regenerates mana at maximum speed.
• Abnormal Ammo:
  • There is a host of arrow and bullet types that have odd or unique effects from setting an enemy on fire with a cursed flame to arrows that summon a star to hit the target.
  • There are also weapons which fire things such as stars, coins, snowballs, candy corn, stakes and explosive Jack 'O Lanterns.
  • Taken even further with a few bows, the Bee's Knees and the Hellwing Bow, that fire bees and flaming bats respectively. They still use normal arrows, however.
  • The Explosive Bunny takes the cake, however, due to being fired from a specific cannon that has no other use.
• Absurd Altitude: The game lets you visit the uppermost layer of the world, named Space. Depending on your gear and the size of your world, you could reach it in a single leap.
• Achievement Mockery:
  • The achievement "Watch Your Step!", which is awarded for dying to one of the traps that are randomly generated underground.
  • The achievement, "Dead Men Tell No Tales", is obtained by dying within 10 seconds of opening up a Dead Man's Chest — most obviously by being obliterated by the traps the Dead Man's Chest spawns wired to, though technically this isn't a requirement.
• Adjustable Censorship: The "Blood and Gore" option turns off most blood and body effects in the game and replaces them with smoke. It also removes some of the raunchier dialogue.
• Advancing Boss of Doom: The Wall of Flesh in the Underworld.
• After Boss Recovery: Most bosses throw out a whole bunch of hearts upon death. During Frost/Pumpkin Moon events, these hearts can be life savers.
• A.I. Breaker:
  • Enemies only know how to reach you in a straight line, meaning a simple thin lava pit on either side of a house means infinite money as the enemies stroll in and immolate themselves. On the flip side, this will usually destroy loot in the underground areas where the lava is too deep. Enemies are also too stupid to walk around an obstacle when you're above them, since they only target you by the y-axis. This allows to effectively lock some enemies on a higher level of blocks. Most events throw in some teleporting and flying enemies to help make up for their Artificial Stupidity.
  • Doors open in either direction, but zombies normally can't open them if they're shut. This changes during the Blood Moon, but zombies only gain the ability to kick doors in. Due to the way the game handles sprites, putting anything other than a wall tile on one side of a door will prevent it from opening in that direction, meaning that if you simply hang a colored banner or torch behind a door, it only opens outward and is thus zombie-proof. By the same token, if you dig a deep enough pit in front of the door, they can't touch it.
• Airborne Mook:
  • Pre Hardmode: The Demon Eyes, Cursed Skulls ^note Formerly called Burning Skulls, Hornets, Eaters of Souls, Meteor Heads, all kinds of Bats, Demons, flying fish, Vulture, Harpies, Antlion Swarmers, and Granite Elementals.
  • Hardmode: The Wraith, Corruptor, Wandering Eye, Crimson's Floaty Gross, Hallow's Pixies, Gastropods, Elf Copters, Pirate Parrots, Martian Drones, Desert Spirits, and several of the Lunar Event enemies. Besides, Wyverns make an appearance if you go high enough in the sky.
• Alien Invasion: The Martian Madness event, where Martians and their machines attack in a manner similar to the Goblin/Pirate Invasion, and the Lunar event that has you fighting the invading armies of the moon.
• All Deserts Have Cacti:
  • Taken to the Logical Extreme; not only does every variety of desert (normal, corrupt, crimson, and hallowed) have cacti, there is a chance for cacti to grow on any full sand block on the surface and exposed to air, unless it's in ocean range.
  • In the Underground Desert (as of 1.4.0 and later), “rolling cacti” that act like boulder traps spawn naturally.
• All-Natural Gem Polish: Once you mine a gem, it appears in its cut and polished form in your inventory.
• All Periods Are PMS: Most female NPCs become noticeably more irritable during a Blood Moon.^note exceptions the Princess, implied to be a child and just comments on everyone else being on edge, and the Party Girl, who just doesn't acknowledge the event at all Nobody explicitly says why, but a blood-related monthly cycle that gives women a short fuse is pretty obviously intended to be a PMS reference.
• All Your Powers Combined:
  • The entire point of everything in the Tinkerer's Workshop. It allows you combine multiple useful accessory items into a single item. This is extremely useful because players have a limited number of accessory slots. Most of the examples to follow are created using it.
    • The Neptune's Shell and the Werewolf Charm can be combined into the Moon Shell, which gives the player the power to become a Werewolf at night and a Merfolk when submerged. The powers are mutually exclusive, however, so you lose the wolf transformation if you become submerged at night.
    • The Sun and Moon stone accessories gift you with stat boosts only during the day and night, respectively, but when fused together, the resulting Celestial Charm provides the boost all the time. Combine this charm with the above-mentioned Moon Shell and get all their buffs at once in a single slot with the Celestial Shell.
    • Most of the X in a Bottle accessories can be combined with Shiny Red Balloons to make the X In A Balloon items, which can then be fused together into a Bundle of Balloons that gives you three additional midair jumps. The individual balloons can also be fused with the Lucky Horseshoe to form Horseshoe Balloons.
    • Hermes Boots can be combined with the Rocket Boots so you can run fast and fly. Combining the resulting Spectre Boots with the Aglet and the Anklet of Winds creates the Lightning Boots, which increases base movement speed. Then you add the Ice Skates to create the Frostspark Boots, which allow for mobility on icy terrain. Water Walking Boots can be fireproofed with an Obsidian Skull and a Lava Charm. The resulting Lava Waders lets you walk on lava, water, and honey, and grants temporary protection from lava damage. And now as of 1.4, the Frostspark Boots and Lava Waders can be combined to create the Terraspark Boots, giving the player all of the movement benefits in one singular package.
    • For interior decorators, the Extendo-Grip, Brick Layer, Paint Sprayer, and Portable Cement Mixer can be combined into the Architect Gizmo Pack. Combine that with the Ancient Chisel, Treasure Magnet, and Step Stool to get the Hand of Creation.
    • The Diving Helmet and Flippers can be combined into Diving Gear. This can be fused with the Jellyfish Necklace to get light while diving deep into dark waters, and then you can add the Ice Skates to this to also add mobility bonuses while on ice.
    • The Yoyo accessories added in 1.3 (Counterweight, Yoyo Glove, and Yoyo String) can be combined into the Yoyo Bag, which will give you all their benefits in a single inventory slot (namely, additional Counterweight and secondary Yoyo projectiles that will orbit and dance around, plus improved Yoyo reach).
    • The Ankh Shield, which is twelve different items fused into one: the Obsidian Skull, Cobalt Shield, Trifold Map, Fast Clock, Vitamins, Armor Polish, Blindfold, Pocket Mirror, Nazar, Megaphone, Bezoar, and Adhesive Bandage. It grants immunity to 11 debuffs^note Weak, Broken Armor, Poisoned, Bleeding, Slow, Chilled, Confused, Silenced, Cursed, Darkness and Stoned as well as to knockback and fire blocks. You can't get more compact than that.
    • The Cell Phone, added in 1.3, beats the Ankh Shield by two items, requiring 13 different items to make. It combines the twelve informational items into a single PDA which provides the combined functionality of all 12. When held in your inventory it outputs fishing information, weather, moon phase, elevation, distance east/west, time, nearest valuable treasure, player speed, current DPS, number of monsters killed, rare nearby creatures, and number of nearby enemies. Then you can combine the PDA with a Magic Mirror to create the Cell Phone which both displays info and lets you teleport to your bedside. Then 1.4.4 added the Shellphone, allowing you to combine the Cell Phone with the Magic Conch and the Demon Conch.
    • The Angler Tackle Bag combines the benefits of all three fishing accessories, preventing line breaks, adding a bonus chance to save bait, and boosting your fishing power. It can also be combined with the Lavaproof Fishing Hook (allowing you to fish within lava) to make the Lavaproof Tackle Bag.
    • The Multicolor Wrench takes one each of the wrenches of all colors plus a wirecutter and turns them all into a multi-tool. Combine it with a Ruler, a Mechanical Lens, and some wire, and you get the Grand Design, which makes it even easier to work with wiring. You don't even need to keep it equipped; the ruler and wire-viewing abilities function as long as it's in your inventory, though wire cutting and placement require equipping it.
  • Unrelated to the Tinkerer's Workshop is the Night's Edge, which is crafted by combining the Blade of Grass, Volcano (formerly the Fiery Greatsword), Muramasa, and the Light's Bane at a Demon/Crimson Altar. This is followed by the Terra Blade in Hardmode. You have to combine the Night's Edge with twenty of all three mechanical boss souls to create the True Night's Edge, forge Excalibur from Hallowed bars and combine it with 24 Chlorophyte bars to create the True Excalibur, and then combine the two to make the Terra Blade. It's well worth it, though, as the Terra Blade is one of the best swords in the game.
  • And then that got taken BEYOND Eleven with the Zenith, which requires the most items in the game to craft. To note, it requires, in total, a Blade of Grass, a Light's Bane or Blood Butcherer, a Volcano, a Muramasa, an Excalibur, two Broken Hero Swords (All of which is to make the aforementioned Terra Blade, which is one of the Zenith's ingredients), a Meowmere, a Star Wrath, a Horseman's Blade, an Influx Waver, a Seedler, an Enchanted Sword, a Starfury, a Bee Keeper, and a Copper Shortsword. To add to this, the Zenith's attack animation even features all of the swords that build up to it (as well as the Terragrim, for whatever reason).
  • In terms of world seeds, there's the "get fixed boi" seed, which combines all of the other secret seeds (Drunk World, Not The Bees, For The Worthy, CelebrationMK10, The Constant, Remix and No Traps) into one.
• Always Night: The surface mushroom biome; it automatically turns to night whenever you enter. Daytime's still preserved outside of the biome.
• Amazing Technicolor Battlefield: Entering the range of the Lunar Pillars causes a colossal moon to appear in the sky, as well as a special lighting effect and background element corresponding to the pillar (orange and showering meteors for Solar, green and a lightning storm for Vortex, blue with sparkles for Stardust and Purple with pillars of light pulling debris in the sky for Nebula). Thankfully, this makes it significantly easier to see around you at night even without any torches. You can also replicate these effects by activating a monolith (built with the fragments dropped by the respective pillar).
• Amazing Technicolor Population: The players have the option to select some unusual skin colours for their characters.
• American Gothic Couple: The in-game painting "Terrarian Gothic" depicts the Mechanic and the Goblin Tinkerer in this manner.
• Anchors Away: Fishing in a Hardmode world occasionally nets you an Anchor (from pearlwood crates) that can be used as a flail-like weapon.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes:
  • Several rare mobs and mini-bosses can drop clothing items.
  • Defeating Skeletron unlocks an NPC that sells clothing.
  • Two possible rewards from the Angler’s quest are mermaid and fish costumes.
  • During the Halloween seasonal event, enemies have chances to drop Goodie Bags, which can have one of several different sets of...you guessed it, costumes. Non Player Characters will also sell extra vanity items during this time as well, many of them being their own outfits. Same with the Christmas seasonal event and the dropped Presents, although presents have a chance to contain usable items that are quite powerful if acquired early.
  • While playing in Expert Mode, bosses drop bags that contain their boss drops as well as an Expert unique boss item. Bags from the hardmode bosses will sometimes have very rare developer costumes in them, and (prior to 1.4.0) the Eye of Cthulhu's bag will contain a unique pair of Cool Shades if you beat it with a Hardcore character. (In 1.4.0 and later, the shades in question are obtained by beating the Eye on Master Mode.)
  • "Strange Plants" can be traded for dyes. The dyes themselves are usually very flashy and rare, but it's the only purpose the plants have.
• And Your Reward Is Edible: As of 1.4, a wide selection of foods and beverages can drop from fighting various mobs. Killing harpies will give you chicken nuggets, slain skeletons will drop milk cartons, and much more.
• And Your Reward Is Interior Decorating:
  • Bosses can sometimes drop Trophies, which are wall mounts with parts of the bosses hoisted on them (for example, the Eye of Cthulhu's teeth, or Skeletron's bone). Additionally, defeating bosses in Master mode will always give you golden Relics, which you can place as a trophy.
  • For a more conventional example, killing Skeletron has a chance to give you a furniture item called Chippy's Couch.
• Angels, Devils and Squid: The Hallow fills the role of the Angel, The Corruption and Crimson are the Devil, and the Lunatic Cultist, Celestial Pillars, and Moon Lord act as the Squid.
• Animal Mecha: One of the hardmode bosses, the Destroyer, is a giant mechanical worm.
• Animated Armor: One of the enemies is the Possessed Armor. The Paladin may also be this.
• Anime Hair: Some of the hairstyles the player can choose from a character.
• Animorphism: Along with the 1.4.4 update came "Lilith's Necklace", a "mount" item dropped by wolves which lets you turn into a wolf yourself, while still letting you use your regular items. The spoilers for the upcoming 1.4.5 update also feature one for a bat transformation and one for a dinosaur.
• Anti-Air:
  • The Crawltipedes fought around the Solar Pillar. They'll ignore you if you're standing on a surface, but as soon as you take to the air they'll home in on you very quickly, causing crazy amounts of Collision Damage.
  • The Aerial Bane is specifically designed for this: It fires a spread of explosive arrows that deal increased damage to airborne enemies.
• Anti-Wastage Features: Potions and healing items can still be used if even if your buffs are still active or you are at full health/mana, respectively. However, if you try to heal at the Nurse while you're at full health, she'll refuse, so you don't waste your money.
• Antlion Monster: Antlions make up several pre-hardmode desert enemies—not only the larvae that burrow in the sand and newborn larva that hatch from eggs in the Underground Desert, but also the winged adult.
• April Fools: In the form of a joke post about a new boss and new invasion that came alongside it. This becomes Foreshadowing when it turns out the boss, Duke Fishron, is a real thing (sans the invasion). Further foreshadowing with the same boss, the April Fools post claims that Duke Fishron demands a fair fight, and will scale its HP based on how many players are in the server. In 1.3's Expert Mode, this is actually the case, where Duke Fishron's HP will increase the more players there are.
• Arm Cannon: You can get one from the Martian Madness event: the Charged Blaster Cannon.
• Arms Dealer: The Arms Dealer NPC, which sells you guns and ammo once you have found a gun.
• Arrange Mode: In the "Expert" mode, the difficulty is greatly increased, enemies and bosses have new attack patterns, the player takes extra damage and drops 3/4 of their coin inventory in Softcore mode, and bosses drop special Treasure Bags upon defeat, which contains greater quantities of their normal drops, as well as Expert mode exclusive items. In addition, one of these Expert mode exclusive items gives you an additional accessory slot. The Master Mode, added in the 1.4 patch, increases enemy damage and health even further, and has players drop all coins upon death. In addition, when bosses are defeated, they'll drop a Relic statue of the boss, and also have a chance of dropping an item that summons a pet/mount/light pet based on the defeated boss.
• Arrows on Fire:
  • The game allows you both to craft flaming arrows by combining a torch with a few normal arrows, as well as craft a Molten Bow that makes normal arrows fired by it flaming arrows instead. Either way the weapon deals a bit of extra damage and has a fairly high chance to set enemies on fire, something that's quite practical as it makes monsters light up in the dark and be very visible targets no matter ambient lighting.
  • Also includes frostburn arrows and cursed arrows, which are covered in Cold Flames and Hellfire, respectively. The console and mobile editions have spectral arrows, which inflict spectral flames.
• The Artifact: While most songs from the soundtrack have a name corresponding to the place where they sound, the song for the Blood Moon event is not called "Blood Moon", but "Eerie". This is because, in early versions of the game, that song played in pretty much every location of supernatural and unsettling nature (such as the Corruption, the Dungeon, and the Underworld). Most of those locations each received its own unique song in later patches, with "Eerie" currently just playing during a Blood Moon and around a meteorite.
• Artificial Atmospheric Actions: Your NPCs will interact with each other through pictorial speech bubbles, such as playing Rock–Paper–Scissors.
• Artificial Gill:
  • A breathing reed enables the player to stand in deeper water and still access air and also doubles the time they can stay underwater without breathing.
  • Flippers allow the player to swim, meaning it is easier to move around in water and avoid drowning.
  • Diving helmets improve how long the player's air meter lasts.
  • The diving gear — a combination of the flippers and diving helmet — grants both benefits.
  • There's a potion that allows you to breathe underwater for 2 minutes, the Gills potion, which makes you grow gills. In older versions this had the Logical Weakness of making you unable to breathe outside of water, but this was removed for being more annoying than amusing.
  • There's a magical shell that turns you into a merman when you enter water, making drowning impossible and granting normal movement underwater. It is combined to form another charm but retains the original effect.
  • Combining Diving Gear with a Jellyfish Necklace makes a set of diving gear that not only lets you move better and breathe longer underwater, but gives off a subtle glow to help you see a bit better underwater as well. Adding Ice Skates to that creates the Arctic Diving Gear, which has the properties of both the Jellyfish Diving Gear and the Ice Skates' extra mobility on ice (while adding immunity to the Expert Mode-specific slowing effect of water in the Ice Biome).
• Art-Style Dissonance: The game takes much the same philosophy as Minecraft and gives it the backdrop of a cutesy cartoon style. Want to build that nice, big 8-story house filled with expensive furniture and decorations and gold bricks? Well then be prepared to face those zombies and skeletons and Demonic Spiders that made Minecraft a living hell, only this time with Eldritch Abominations thrown into the mix.
• Ascended Meme:
  • The Stardust Guardian summon that comes from the Stardust armor set bonus is not originally a JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders reference; Word of God said that the artist who designed its sprite had never seen Jojo. However, fans kept drawing comparisons between the two, and now as of 1.4, the Stardust Guardian has a new Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs attack style; the devs stated that "all resemblance to a certain anime is purely coincidental."
  • The Moon Lord's Legs, a meme among the fans who speculated that they might be added into the game, is now made available in Journey's End, as a legging item that you can find in chests only if your world seed is "05162020".
  • The "Do it with a Copper Shortsword" meme has been acknowledged as part of the Zenith's crafting recipe, which requires several end-of-game swords, a few rare pre-hardmode swords... and the Copper Shortsword.
• An Ass-Kicking Christmas: Aside from the christmas seasonal event, there are also two other events that are pretty much this:
  • First is the Frost Legion, summoned by using a Snow Globe obtained during Christmas time in a hardmode world^note though it can also be used in pre-hardmode worlds. It's basically a horde of snowman gangsters hopping towards you trying to kill you. Defeating the Legion will temporarily have Santa move in as an NPC.
  • Second is the Frost Moon, summoned via a Naughty Present at night during hardmode. It's basically like the Pumpkin Moon, but with Christmas-themed enemies such as elves, gingerbread men, Krampus, living evergreen trees and so on as enemies.
• Asteroids Monster:
  • Mother Slimes, a giant slime which breaks into three Baby Slimes when killed.
  • The King Slime boss, which splits into smaller Slimes as you attack it.
  • The Eater of Worlds, a boss monster that will split in two every time one of its segments is destroyed, unless one would be shorter than two segments. It has fifty segments, and each new Eater of Worlds obeys the same rules. It is entirely possible to have several Eaters of Worlds at once.
  • The Corrupt Slime, which acts much like a stronger Mother Slime and splits into several Slimelings upon defeat. Also, on the old-gen console version, a slightly stronger Shadow Slime that does the same thing.
  • The Star Cells that accompany the Stardust Pillar will split into a few smaller cells when killed. If these smaller Star Cells aren't killed fast enough, they'll grow back to full size, allowing them to split again. They can easily swarm a player with poor crowd control abilities. It should be noted that each regrown Star Cell does count as a kill toward breaking the pillar's barrier, while small ones do not.
  • Similar to Star Cells, there's also the Alien Queens that accompany the Vortex Pillar. When beaten, they split apart into three Alien Larvae, which if not killed in time, grow into Alien Hornets, which if still not killed, develop into more Alien Queens. All of them except the larvae also count towards breaking the barrier.
• Attack the Tail: The Crawltipedes can only be damaged in the glowing spot in their tail.
• Automatic Crossbow: The Repeater weapons that can be earned from Hardmode ores have Autofiring, meaning the player can just hold down the mouse button to fire them.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The Bundle of Balloons gives you a quadruple jump, but requires three Shiny Red Balloons and the three primary double jump bottles (normal, Blizzard, and Sandstorm) to make. Balloons only appear in chests on Floating Islands and even then likely only once or twice. You either have to create additional worlds to farm for more or fish up Sky Crates from Floating Lakes. The Sandstorm Bottle is even worse, as it can only be found in a chest in a Pyramid, a structure which isn't even guaranteed to spawn in a world, and even if it does you may not get the bottle. Getting it means creating world after world in the hopes that one will eventually spawn the bottle. Assuming you do all that, the Bundle of Balloons is actually a really good item that grants even more mobility than most early-mid hardmode wings, with the horseshoe balloons providing the negate fall damage effect, but the sheer utter luck needed to get this item often means that chances of getting it without specifically farming for it are extremely slim. The 1.4.4 update alleviated the issue somewhat for completionists by allowing you to craft the Blizzard and Sandstorm in a Bottle accessories using early Hardmode materials, but as far as utility still goes, by that point, you're much better off investing in a pair of wings to make room for another useful accessory.
  • The Star Cannon is one of the highest-damaging weapons in the game before you hit hardmode. It fires Fallen Stars, which only drop at night in limited quantities scattered across the Surface of your world, and are not reusable once fired. Making a star trawler/hoik bridge to farm fallen stars helps increase its usefulness considerably, with the weapon utterly shredding through even some of the mech bosses and being extremely useful early hardmode... Provided you can bear the sheer and utter tedium of setting said bridge up, with all the effort put into it becoming pointless once you start getting weapons that easily outpace the Star Cannon in damage.
  • The Shadow Orb or Demon Heart. A light pet item that creates a dim light source that slowly follows the player around. Other lighting items and abilities are both more practical and brighter. At best it is good as a backup—even if it's your only independent light source, you'll still find yourself pulling out those torches so you can see more clearly what you caught in the corner of your eye.
  • In the words of the Demolitionist: "Why purify the world when you can just blow it up?" Dynamite and Bombs are among the best ways to clear the Corruption, but you'd need so many of them that you'd quickly run out of money, especially early-game. While bombs can be farmed for free along with the other components to make the upgraded sticky bombs, the more powerful and effective dynamite remains a bit pricey at 20 silver apiece. Averted once you can farm enough money to consistently have enough for dynamite, though, with Expert Mode players being able to afford them much more easily.
  • The Starfury might drop stars on whatever you point it at, but it doesn't work well underground due to potentially frequent cavities above the one you are in. It no longer uses mana, but relying on the falling stars to deal the bulk of your damage becomes less dependable without pure open space or fully solid material above you to the top of your screen.
  • The Sniper Rifle has the highest ranged single-shot damage in the game and the ability to scroll the screen, but it has a very low rate of fire. The weaker, faster-firing weapons can usually dish out almost as much punishment, with less penalty for missing. The Sniper Scope can give any gun the ability to scroll, making it even less appealing. And finally, to put the cherry on top, a new item introduced in 1.3 is infinite basic ammo, meaning you can't even use it to try and preserve your ammo.
  • The Drill Containment Unit. Crafting it requires 40 bars each of Hellstone, Meteorite, Chlorophyte, Shroomite, Spectre, and Luminite, the latter only dropped by the Final Boss and even then you have to beat him at least twice just to get enough. Once you've crafted it, you have a flying mount that chews through all kinds of terrain faster than anything in the game, operates underwater, and is fairly fast (equal to Hermes Boots and slower than the UFO mount). In exchange, precision is extremely difficult, making it less of a tool for mining or building and more for uprooting entire biomes, and it prevents you from using weapons while you're riding it (although that can be mitigated by using summon weapons beforehand to protect you from enemies). And, of course, by this point you've beaten the entire game and killed the Final Boss several times over. (It can be helpful as quality of life for helping out characters in additional playthroughs—e.g. isolating world evils without having to spend money on dynamite.)
  • The Suspicious Looking Tentacle, dropped from the Moon Lord in Expert Mode. It's a light pet whose main function is to inform you of when an enemy or treasure is nearby, but you should already have a Cell Phone that does exactly that, while letting you keep the Wisp in a Bottle, which is a better light pet.
  • Many of the Expert Mode-exclusive boss items can be considered this. While rendering slimes neutral, increasing regeneration while standing still, or making bee-related weapons more powerful sound good in theory, in practice you are unlikely to want to leave one of your more mundane accessories behind to make room for an Expert one.
  • The Coin Gun is probably the ultimate example. Firing platinum coins gives it a base damage rate of over 1700 HP per second, more than almost any other weapon; but this is rather unsustainable, given how long it takes to earn a single platinum coin (you can buy every single NPC store item with less than 20) and the fact that it fires 8.5 of them per second. Firing silver coins instead makes it much more efficient (10,000 silver coins = 1 platinum coin) and comparable in power to the Star Cannon, but this requires a lot of fiddly coin crafting.
  • Gem robes give you a massive boost to your mana pool pre-hardmode, but the defense of them is so paper thin that it's often far more worth it to go for the meteor armor or jungle armor first and skip the robes altogether.
  • The "Djinn's Curse" vanity pants from the Desert Spirit. When equipped as a vanity item, it gives you fancy Fog Feet. If used as armor, it grants a slow fall ability similar to a Featherfall potion. While the latter is cool, the Desert Spirit that drops it only appears in Hardmode, so it's far more efficient to make the effort to earn a pair of wings. You also likely have a Lucky Horseshoe or better, meaning fall damage is not an issue, anyway. On top of that, it grants no defense when used this way, which is sacrificing a fourth of your overall defense for something that wings do even better without that drawback.
  • In hardmode you get access to drills, which look neat and have constant hitbox while in use, making them good for raw DPS. However, their range is incredibly short, making hitting anything with them difficult, and (prior to 1.4) pickaxes ultimately have a higher mining speed than drills, on top of getting melee modifiers, which can further increase their mining speed, which in turn makes drills even more pointless by comparison. 1.4 somewhat averts this by giving drills better baseline speed than pickaxes.
  • Once you've unlocked the hardmode Dungeon, you have access to a wide variety of shiny, new toys... of which the Master Ninja Gear is not one of. It's a combination of the Tabi, Black Belt and Tiger Climbing Gear, allowing you access to wall-climbing, dashing and 10% chance of dodging any attack only taking up one accessory spot. Sounds fine and dandy except you're already about 85% through the main game at that point and more than likely have access to Wings or a mount that offers more mobility than the Master Ninja Gear would give you. About its only use is the 10% dodge chance but the percentage is hardly worth a spot in your incredibly limited accessory slots and isn't as immediately impactful as, say, a medallion suited to your class or the Celestial Shell. It can be situationally helpful in Master Mode and against the enraged Empress of Light, though, as the former is much more likely to you in a few hits (even through defense) and the latter will always one-hit kill you without dodge effects.
  • The Charged Blaster Cannon, an Arm Cannon that lets you fire either Frickin' Laser Beams that pierce enemies or a huge laser beam that deals heavy damage. However, like the name suggests, the weapon has to be charged in order to be used to its full effect (a full three seconds for the beam or just one for the piercing bolt) and fires extremely weak energy orbs if not charged at all, and while firing the beam, you can't change the angle you're aiming at. It's great at slicing through hordes of ground-based enemies, but it's incredibly unwieldy against basically everything else, especially compared to the Laser Machine Gun, the other magic weapon you can get from the Martian Saucer. Patch 1.4 heavily buffed this weapon to now fire increasingly powerful projectiles while charging, making it much less impractical.
• Bad Moon Rising:
  • The Blood Moon event, which happens occasionally. It increases the enemy spawn rate, overrides spawn restrictions in towns, gives zombies the ability to bash doors open, and spawns Blood Zombies and Dripplers (adding Clowns in Hardmode). As of 1.4, you can also fish during a blood moon for special drops and five unique enemies (three of which, including the miniboss Dreadnautilus, can only be caught in Hardmode.)
  • 1.2 brings forth the Solar Eclipse in hardmode, which is even worse.
  • And now we have the Pumpkin Moon! Ghouls, ghosts, and fire-spitting trees of death!
  • Another moon event, The Frost Moon, which makes all your Christmas joys become nightmares, is now available as well.
• Bad Santa: Santa-NK1 is an evil Santa Claus-based Mecha boss that spawns during the Frost Moon.
• Bad with the Bone: The game has bones as an early-game thrown weapon. Given what sorts of enemies drop the bones, you can ultimately end up killing skeletons with parts of other skeletons.
• Badass Cape: The Travelling Merchant can sell the Red Cape, Winter Cape, Crimson Cloak, and Mysterious Cloak. The Hallowed Plate Mail since 1.4 has a cape as well.
• Bag of Holding:
  • Storage items (player inventory, chests, etc.) tend to get ridiculous when you can store spears and swords several times the size of your body in them. The storage items never get any bigger than your character though.
  • There are also the Piggy Bank (and its counterpart the Money Trough), Safe, and Defender's Forge items take it even further. Unlike regular chests which can't be picked up until they've been emptied first, they can be picked up even when they're holding items, allowing you to transport an entire chest's worth of items for the cost of only one inventory slot. They can even be placed inside one another to give you even more inventory space. However, you can't use multiples of the same container to get a massive inventory space, as each of these containers shares an inventory with all others of the same type (i.e., if you fill a Safe with 40 stacks of dirt, every other Safe you go to will have those same stacks of dirt).
  • The Journey’s End 1.4 update introduced the Void Vault and Bag, which functions like the four above, except items will move directly in the Void storage when your inventory is full.
• Ballistic Bone:
  • There are dungeon skeletons that drop bones which you can throw at enemies. They do a surprising amount of damage, far more than even shuriken.
  • The Skeleton Merchant throws bones at non-skeleton enemies.
  • In Expert Mode, defeating Skeletron will net you the Bone Glove, an accessory that throws bones when using other weapons.
• Bandit Mook: In Expert and Master Mode, almost all enemies can pick up money from the ground, and if they escape, the money is lost. Yes, this even includes the money dropped when you die.
• Basilisk and Cockatrice: Averted. There is a type of enemy called the Basilisk in the game, but they are large ceratopsian lizards that attack by charging at you, instead of the traditional serpentine creatures. They also cannot petrify anything.
• Bat Out of Hell: The game has many varieties of bats that all attack the player. Including literal bats out of hell in the game's Underworld.
• BFG: All over the place, ranging from the Chain Gun to the Snowman Cannon, which is for all intents and purposes a full-auto rocket launcher.
• Battle Boomerang:
  • Boomerangs come in several types, such as the basic Wood Boomerang, the Enchanted Boomerang, the Flamarang, and the Frost Boomerang. Other types of boomerang-type weapons include chakrams, throwing hammers, bananas...
  • Boomerangs benefit from melee bonuses. This means that they can be combined with a melee knockback accessory to keep waves of monsters at bay. This also gives melee oriented players some ranged capability that benefits from melee bonuses. Possibly their biggest advantage is that they're fairly easy-to-obtain ranged weapons that require no ammunition at all.
• Beam Spam:
  • Several of the player's weapons enable the player to lay down their own Beam Spam on enemies, such as the Space Gun, Laser Rifle and Heat Ray. The Laser Machinegun, however, surpasses all of them with its extremely high rate of fire.
  • The Necromancer and Ragged Caster from the Hardmode Dungeon both spams beams quite a bit, the former's bouncing off walls and the latter's going homing in on the player.
  • The Solar Eclipse exclusive enemy Eyezor shoots lasers from its eye.
  • The Ice Golem fires lasers from its head.
  • Ice Mermen fire ice beams constantly at the player.
  • The Wall of Flesh begins firing more and more laser barrages as you chip away at its health.
  • Hardmode bosses The Destroyer and Retinazer also engage in this.
  • The Gastropods in the Hallow tend to spawn in small groups and will fire on the player repeatedly.
  • The Golem found in the Lihzahrd Temple fires lasers from its eyes, and fires faster as its health gets lower.
  • The Martian Saucer definitely qualifies. In its first phase, it fires dozens of lasers as part of its attack pattern; in the second phase, it repeatedly swipes a large beam across you and ten tiles around you.
• Beating A Dead Player: All monsters hover around the point where you died until you respawn. Other enemies, like casters and ranged enemies, sometimes keep casting or attacking towards where the player died last. This also has the effect, on Expert mode, of having the enemy who killed you steal the money you dropped, forcing you to track the monster down and defeat it before it despawns.
• Bee Afraid:
  • 1.2 adds miniature bees as potentially harmful enemies, a beehive sub-biome, and a Queen Bee boss.
  • 1.4 added a secret world seed called Not the Bees. This causes the world generation to emphasize bees, replacing most of the world biomes with jungle, replacing most water with honey and stone with Hive Blocks, and making the structure that summons Queen Bee when destroyed generate EVERYWHERE. The loading screen message for the seed lampshades this: “Generating bees.”
• Bee-Bee Gun: A new addition within the 1.2 update, the Bee Gun, obtained by killing the Queen Bee, shoots homing bees at your enemies. The Queen Bee can also shoot smaller bees out of her bottom. A more powerful variant exists that shoots hornets instead. There are also Beenades and accessories that summon bees to attack your enemies when you get injured. There's also the Bee's Knees, a bow that turns arrows into bees when fired.
• Beef Gate:
  • You can enter the Dungeon at the edge of the map anytime you like. You can only safely enter the dungeon after you've taken out Skeletron. If you enter before killing Skeletron, you will have a Dungeon Guardian that that attacks you for 1000 hit points of damage. Players have learned how to kill the Dungeon Guardian regardless of the changes, though (barring glitches) most of those tactics require endgame gear. Even then, it takes around five minutes minimum (one-hit shenanigans with Lances aside), and it'll just respawn if you go back to the dungeon.
  • The Wall of Flesh is the gatekeeper to Hardmode, as such you are either completely over prepared for the battle with it or you are going to die. This ensures you will at least be able to survive the vastly more deadly creatures in a Hardmode world.
• Berserk Board Barricade: You might find yourself doing this when the Blood Moon rises and zombies gain the ability to open doors. In Hardmode you also have to worry about a number of new hostile enemies including werewolves trying to batter down your doors.
• BFS: Most swords above the regular ore tiers are at least as big as your character. The largest sword in the game, the Breaker Blade, is more than twice your own height.
• Big Boo's Haunt:
  • The Dungeon. All but one of the enemies there are undead in origin or hinted to be undead.
  • The Graveyard biome, added in 1.4, which results from placing 6 or more tombstones in close proximity. Undead enemies can spawn here even in daytime.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Many examples, from antlions (including the less common flying form) to underground worms to giant bees and hornets, and of course terrifyingly large spiders. If you're lucky, you can even get the Honeyed Goggles from the Queen Bee boss, allowing the player to summon and ride a slightly smaller giant bee.
• Bigger Is Better: The best melee weapon modifier, Legendary, comes with a size bonus. Another weapon modifier, Massive, is slightly bigger than Legendary, but without the speed and damage boost. The larger blades give an advantage in area they cover with each attack which is useful for certain enemies.
• Bioluminescence Is Cool:
  • In mushroom biomes, the grass and various mushrooms glow almost as brightly as torches. Surface-level mushroom biomes are dark even during the day so they too glow.
  • Additionally, every kind of herb will glow when blooming, though some more so than others.
  • The 1.4 update introduces certain kinds of underground moss that glow in the dark.
• Bizarre and Improbable Golf Game: The 1.4 update adds golfing, allowing players to create their very own improbable golf courses using whatever items and building blocks at their disposal.
• Blatant Lies: The "No Traps" seed. Thought you could make a world without traps like the seed's name suggests? HA HA HA—No... it actually builds more traps in the world instead!
• "Blind Idiot" Translation:
  • The game has multiple languages as of version 1.2. However, at least in the German language, the word "close" as in "close a window" has been translated as "close by". Furthermore, the word "save" as in "save the game" has been translated to mean "save" as in "save money".
  • While not as bad as before 1.3.5 (see the Translation Train Wreck entry), the Spanish translation still has some problems. Among the most egregious examples are: "Star Wrath" as "Espectro estelar" (Star Wraith), "Bloody Tear" as "Osito sangriento" (Bloody Bear), "Stellar Tune" as "Atún estelar" (Stellar Tuna), "Cool Whip" as "Látigo molón" (translating "cool" as "awesome" instead of "cold"), "Jungle Torch" as "Antorcha de fuego" (Fire Torch).
• Bling-Bling-BANG!: You can buy the components for golden bullets, which are fairly powerful and apply the Midas debuff, making enemies drop more money upon death. They pay for themselves, more so the less bullets you use in a kill such as with the Sniper Rifle, which is generally a One-Hit Kill on most common enemies.
• Blob Monster: The first type of enemy you are likely to see is a slime. They show up everywhere with unique variations depending on the environment.
• Bloodless Carnage: A new option introduced in 1.3 allows you to turn off blood and gibs, instead making enemies and characters disappear into clouds of smoke upon death similar to Minecraft, which can make it easier to spot enemy drops without mountains of body parts in the way. It does cause a few oddities with enemies that constantly bleed (or if you're bleeding) causes those same puffs to appear such as Demon Eyes or the shoulder points of Skeletron.
• Bloody Bowels of Hell: The Crimson. You can also make your own hellish bowels by converting crimstone blocks into flesh blocks and furniture using a Meat Grinder dropped from Hardmode Crimson enemies (you also need the Flesh Cloning Vat from the Steampunker in Crimson worlds).
• Bloody Murder:
  • Despite the name suggesting Urine Trouble, the Golden Shower weapon actually fires a yellow stream of "ichor", which is basically highly corrosive demon blood.
  • The Hemogoblin Shark and Dreadnautilus can attack by spewing damaging blood at players.
• Blow Gun: Multiple:
  • You can find blowpipes in some chests near the surface. While getting ammunition for it is a cinch (it uses seeds that you collect by cutting grass), the weapon is far outclassed by most other ranged weapons, at least one of which you should have at that point.
  • Later versions added stronger weapons like the blowgun, dart rifle, and dart pistol, as well as special darts that can be fired from all blowgun-type weapons.
• Blown Across the Room:
  • Any weapon with extremely high knockback can send enemies flying.
  • The Snow Flinx and Pinky have such low knockback resistance that a hit from any weapon will likely knock them a large distance. Combine that with something like the Slap Hand^note a weapon that possesses one of the highest knockback values around, the Titan Glove^note increases melee knockback and the Titan Potion^note also increases knockback and watch them fly.
• Book Ends: One of the very first bosses (if not the first boss) the player will likely encounter is the Eye of Cthulhu. The final boss of the game is strongly implied to be Cthulhu himself, and he even spawns True Eyes of Cthulhu minions when one of his eyes is taken down.
• Booze-Based Buff: Sake and ale give a bonus to damage at a slight cost to defense.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The Ranger class. While it has the lowest variety of weapon types (Guns, thrown weapons pre-Hardmode, bows, and rockets late into Hardmode, with only a handful of unique weapons), it is also arguably the most powerful class in the game. Their high range and usually high damage output will cause some heavy pain to your foes.
  • The Mining Helmet, while not as bright as a torch and somewhat expensive in the first dozen hours of play, will make your life in Terraria so much easier when you get it. However the tradeoff is that you have to wear it in your head armor slot rather than social slot, which breaks armor set bonuses and can drastically lower your potential Defense score. The mining set as a whole continues the trade off, increasing mining speed with the full set active.
  • Picks also qualify. Did you just find a new, awesome ore to craft with? You really ought to craft a pick with it so you can dig faster. It's also crucial in Hardmode, as you need new picks to get at the better ores.
  • The Cross Necklace doubles your Mercy Invincibility. That's all it does, but it's extremely useful against enemies that can hit you in very quick succession like the Destroyer, the Hardmode worm boss. This is especially important if it allows you to steal more health using certain equipment than lose it due to constant damage from enemies. It can be combined with the Star Cloak as mentioned above.
  • Cursed Torches. They're plenty bright, don't go out in water, and one Cursed Flame makes thirty-three torches. On Crimson worlds, there's Ichor torches, which are made just like cursed torches, only slightly brighter.
  • Campfires. They only cost wood and torches, take about as much space as a crafting table, and passively accelerate your regeneration. Their effect also stacks with the more powerful Heart Lamp. Handy for various situations.
  • The Magic Dagger: Available early on in Hardmode as a common drop from Mimic monsters, you can whip out throwing daggers at a very rapid rate with average knockback. Plus, it only costs 6 mana per dagger before any bonuses, making it a decent backup ranged weapon for non-mage characters.
  • Ropes. Introduced in 1.2, they aren't much to look at as tools, but are very helpful. You can combine 10 lengths of Rope into a Coil of Rope that can be thrown to tether it from a distant ledge, use them to help elevate your home base/town off the ground so monsters cannot invade easily, and even use it to "Indian Rope" upwards into the sky in search of Floating Islands. Chains, which function the same or as a crafting component, are the iron/lead-based counterpart to ropes, only you're also able to forge them from ingots. They're really cheap, and can allow you to climb up them and go down them without taking fall damage. Extremely useful until you get wings, which are in Hard mode (aside from the Fledgling Wings, which are only available on Sky Islands if you aren’t playing Journey Mode and have less than half a second of innate flight time.)
  • Unless you're deliberately sticking to a single damage type for a challenge, there's no reason not to have a Summon with you. Not only is it just a continuous damage output boost, it's great for dealing with mobs while you're trying to build. Having a set of Summoner armor to increase your minion count is practically required if you don't want to be constantly harassed while trying to build outside of the forest biome.
  • Yoyos. Early yoyos are relatively cheap to make (the first wooden yoyo costs 10 wood and 20 cobweb) and deal decent damage since they are much more rapid than swords. Their main selling point, however, is that they can be guided around obstacles, letting fragile newbie characters take on hordes of zombies with some patience.
  • Iron and Lead. The second tier of the basic metals (next strongest after Copper and Tin), they will actually remain relevant to engineers and mechanism builders well into the late game, despite being less powerful/exotic than, say, Cobalt or Mythril, as you will need these mundane metals to continue crafting things like Pumps (which you will want in order to make moving liquid around without resorting to a giant stack of buckets possible/less cumbersome), Chains (which are used to make Heart Lanterns and Watches, the latter of which is an important part of making Timers), and Buckets. They're even more indispensible if you plan to make and use minecart tracks, which require iron to forge.
  • When there is a Blood Moon, zombies can open your house's doors. You can stop them in two ways: put something behind the door or dig in front of the door so that the zombies cannot reach it.
  • Out of all the Expert Mode boss drops, there's the Worm Scarf. It reduces 17% of damage taken. Compared to most of the other pre-hardmode Expert Mode boss items, it sounds rather mundane but it isn't situational (Royal Gel, Hive Pack, Bone Glove, Brain of Confusion). Furthermore, this damage reduction is extremely useful for the increased damage that Expert Mode enemies do.
  • The Bug Net. It is used to catch critters, all of which are useful: things like bunnies and birds get you cash (5 rabbits sell for the cost of the Net) and worms, butterflies and fireflies are bait, required to get fish and, indirectly, some very good objects. If you get a Gold critter, you can either sell it for 10 gold coins, use it as bait (with the highest fishing value in game), or craft the Golden Delight from it (which grants you a powerful buff that lasts for 48 minutes when eaten).
  • Wooden platforms. A simple, semi-solid platform you can jump or fall through with ease. They only require wood to make and don't even need a crafting station. Pretty much every boss strategy begins with the phrase "Build an arena out of wood platforms." There's simply no more cheaper or effective way to put the terrain on your side than several long rows of wood platforms.
  • The Crystal Serpent, a hardmode staff that can be obtained by fishing it from the Hallow biome. It's a direct upgrade to the pre-hardmode staffs, and definitely not the most flashy hardmode magic weapon, but its great damage output, ability to deal splash damage, and great mana efficiency makes it easily the most reliable, and can easily carry you all the way up until Duke Fishron.
  • Early game, with how squishy your character is until near the end of pre-Hardmode, ranged and thrown weapons help immensely with picking off mobs from afar. Grenades in particular can one-shot most mobs, provided you aren't in the range to also take splash damage as well.
  • It's not uncommon to see people go for Warding on all their accessories when one gets the Goblin Tinkerer. While the accessories offer a wide variety of stat buffs, warding gives +4 defense for your character. When stacked together with other Warding accessories, the extra defense that results can be a godsend for squishier classes like mage and (especially) summoner, and with melee armor the character effectively becomes such a Stone Wall that even late game bosses have trouble dealing major damage.
  • Fishing. One of the most tedious tasks in the game given the fact that it also involves having to deal with the Bratty Half-Pint Angler NPC if you want his unique accessory rewards, it is nonetheless not only a major source of ingredients for potions, flasks and food, but also rare tools and weapons that at one point were strong enough to let a player skip several upgrades to their arsenal if diligently performed. However, the biggest advantage of fishing is the acquisition of crates, which contain random accessories, ores, metal bars, money and other items; opening said crates upon reaching Hardmode will randomly yield any of the six different Hardmode ores, allowing a player to bypass having to break Demon Altars for the ores and risk spreading Corruption/Crimson and Hallow as long as they have enough crates in stock. Journey's End somewhat nerfs and buffs this. Crates fished in Pre-Hardmode have been seperated from Crates fished in Hardmode, and as such it's a bit tougher to bypass breaking Demon Altars- you actually have to fish the crates up in Hardmode. On the flipside, the Hardmode Crates will not contain Pre-Hardmode Ores/bars, so you're far more likely to get materials that are worth using from Hardmode crates.
  • Out of all the tools at your disposal in the early game, one of the most crucial items to bring with you when spelunking - especially if you're playing as a mediumcore or hardcore character - is simply a piece of any underground trap, which includes active stone blocks, pressure plates, dart traps, etc. At first glance, they appear to be nigh-worthless when you first start out, since the tools for wiring and making contraptions are not available until you reach the dungeon and free a certain NPC, making them functionally useless for the majority of pre-Hardmode... until you realize that, while held as your active item, they possess an inherent property that allows you to see the wiring of underground traps, which are otherwise very difficult to spot. Considering these traps are one of the most common causes of Yet Another Stupid Death, this is a godsend, as it allows you to scout out danger simply by quick-switching to the trap piece in your hot bar, like a minesweeper of sorts. Furthermore, it negates the need to spend extra time collecting enough resources to make Dangersense potions, the only other reliable way to counter underground traps.
    • Later on in pre-hardmode, once you rescue the Mechanic, you can purchase the Mechanical Lens from her, which acts as an upgraded trap detector, brightly indicating trap wiring even in unlit areas (something most normal mechanical pieces cannot do) while negating the need to keep it highlighted in your hotbar or even equip it as an accessory - all you need to do is have it placed somewhere in your inventory and it activates. It can also be combined using other mechanical accessories into the Grand Design, which does everything the Mechanical Lens does while also allowing you to place and remove said wiring. Once you have either, you never have to worry about falling victim to traps of any sort as long as you're careful.
  • Wood is hardly the most exotic or exciting building material in the game. However, it's also easily the most abundant and easily accessible one, as all you need to do to harvest wood is take an axe to one of the several hundred trees on the surface. It also has the benefit of being completely renewable, as felled trees will drop Acorns that can be planted to grow more trees. Wood can also be used to craft platforms without a crafting station, which is an absolute godsend in the early game, where you have no mobility tools, and remains relevant later on when building arenas for bosses or any other project that requires a lot of platforms. Finally, wood is used to make arrows, which you'll need plenty of if you're using bows, and torches, which you'll need plenty of no matter how you play.
  • A Hellevator, which is just a simple shaft typically from your spawn point down to the Underworld. It takes a long time to set up, more the bigger your world is, but it's a straight shot down to the Underworld that is significantly quicker than having to remember (or continuously checking the map) a specific route you took to get there in the first place. Also, killing the Wall of Flesh has Hallow and Corruption/Crimson spread out in an X shape from the boss's position it was in when it died, so there is also a good chance one of those biomes will intersect with the Hellevator and thus provide a quick path to it for farming materials. If you don't have a Lucky Horseshoe equipped, you WILL have to compensate for fall damage, but still, by the time you dig one, you likely have a way of mitigating it anyway.
• Boss Battle: There are upwards of seventeen different bosses as of the 1.4 Update (that's without counting the mini-bosses from the special events).
• Boss Bonanza: Upon killing the group of cultists outside the dungeon, the boss battle against the Lunatic Cultist is triggered. Killing him immediately triggers the Lunar Events, four fights against giant floating pillars that constantly summon enemies. After destroying all four of them, the Final Boss of the game, the Moon Lord, appears after a minute.
• Boss in Mook Clothing:
  • Wyverns. Thousands of HP, constantly home on you, high attack power, and won't stop pursuing you even if you teleport away. The old-gen console version introduces the Arch Wyverns, which are even more powerful.
  • 1.2 patch introduces various randomly spawning tough enemies in the Dungeon. Especially deadly is the Paladin, who has more HP than all pre-hardmode bosses bar the Wall of Flesh and the Eater of Worlds, sports a titanic 50 defense (more than 4x that of the Wall's 12), and deals triple digits of damage in melee and a ranged hammer attack that passes through walls.
  • The Goblin Warlock of a Hardmode Goblin Invasion has 2000 HP (where all the other goblins have only around 100), moves around a lot, and can shoot powerful shadowflame projectiles. Despite all this, she's only considered a regular enemy, dropping banners instead of trophies.
  • Pirate Captains. They look similar to other Pirates, and in the heat of battle, it's easy to not notice a Captain at first. They have 2000 HP and are armed with a machine gun and a cannon. And if you managed to kill them? They'll spawn a Pirate's Curse to make your life miserable.
  • The Rune Wizard, an ultra-rare Hardmode enemy found underground. It can not only teleport, but it's also powerful enough to kill most players in a few hits, and has absurdly high contact damage.
  • The Ice Golem, a semi-rare monster that only shows up in Hardmode blizzards. Its desert counterpart, the Sand Elemental, only shows up in Hardmode sandstorms.
  • Eyezor of the Solar Eclipse, a zombie with a single giant eye and loads of health, gets faster as it takes damage, and shoots lasers with increasing frequency as it takes damage, Retinazer style.
  • Nailhead of the Solar Eclipse, a Pinhead expy that sports 4000 HP and sprays nails in all directions when damaged.
  • Mothron of the Solar Eclipse, a Mothra expy that has 6000 health, flies around to charge into you, and lays eggs that spawn smaller copies of itself.
  • The Headless Horseman during the Pumpkin Moon has the highest HP of any non-boss enemy in the game (10,000!).
  • The Yeti of the Frost Moon has quite a bit of hit points (3500) but hits for 160 base damage, 30 more than the Headless Horseman.
  • The Hallow, Corrupt, and Crimson Mimics are the bigger, stronger brothers of the regular Mimic: They have 3500 HP, are much more aggressive, and can even go through walls, but can drop unique weapons and accessories. You can also spawn them yourself by placing a special key in an empty chest, but you better be prepared before you do so.
• Boss Warning Siren: Comes in one of two flavours. When bosses occur naturally they are accompanied by an onscreen message (such as "You feel an evil presence watching you" for the Eye of Cthulhu, or "You feel a quaking deep underground" for the Destroyer) each boss having a unique message so the player can tell which one is coming. When summoned a message saying "(Boss Name Here) Has Awoken!" accompanied by a common boss monster roar. In addition to an onscreen message, the screen blurs and darkens and the music fades to silence when the Moon Lord is about to appear.
• Bottomless Magazines:
  • The Endless Quiver and Endless Musket Pouch allow you to use infinite Wooden Arrows and Musket Balls for ammo respectively. Game Mods which add variants for the other arrow and bullet types exist as well.
  • Armor crafted from Meteorite bars will give you unlimited use of the Space Gun.
  • The Toxikarp, a fish/weapon fished up in Hardmode Corruption, is considered a ranged weapon but requires no ammo at all. Same with the Paintball Gun dropped by the Painter.
• Bow and Sword in Accord: This option is quite feasible, as is The Musketeer. This tends to work best with the harpoon or other ammoless weapons that count as dealing ranged damage. Melee specialists can do the same by using boomerangs and similar weapons, as those are distance weapons that count as dealing melee damage.
• Bragging Rights Reward:
  • As of update 1.2, killing the Dungeon Guardian (you know, that thing that is almost unkillable and instakills you when you touch it) nets you a Baby Skeletron, which is a pet that follows you around and does nothing, but makes you look cool.
  • To a lesser extent, a large portion of the available pets count, given how nearly all them require either immense amounts of grinding or seriously unintuitive actions. The Baby Dinosaur, for instance, has a 1 in 5,000 chance of being produced by an Extractinator for every Silt/Slush block you place in it, or a 1 in 1666 chance if using desert fossils.
  • Update 1.2 introduces Boss Trophies, which don't do anything for you as equipment, but make great furniture for decorating. Spares can be sold for one gold coin, which is fairly decent.
  • Players often display the various armors that can be created as bragging rights.
  • The addition of both artwork and hanging banner collectible items can also earn bragging rights for players diligent enough to collect them all.
  • Banners are dropped by enemies every 50 kills, and there are banners for almost every enemy, including obscenely rare ones such as the Nymph.
  • The Axe, an electric guitar which serves as an axe/hammer with the highest Axe and Hammer power in the game. There is a 2% (0.5% in some versions) chance of Plantera (a boss who's hard to farm due to its random location nature) dropping it. It is only moderately faster than other tools of its type and has +1 to range, neither of which matters when hammers and axes simply don't see as much use as the pickaxe.
  • As of 1.3, Achievements have been added. One of them, called "Mecha Mayhem" requires fighting The Destroyer, The Twins and Skeletron Prime simultaneously and emerging victorious.
  • One of the two rewards for killing the last boss, the Moon Lord, in Expert Mode is an accessory that lets the wearer invert their own gravity at will. Because the player is likely wearing a pair of wings or is riding around in a flying saucer at this point in the game, and because there are craftable potions that grant the same effect as this accessory (and are actually better, since those potions allow inversion in mid air, while the accessory doesn't), this item has no practical purpose. Thankfully the other reward is the best light pet in the game.
  • The ultimate armors and weapons dropped by the Moon Lord are extremely powerful, being some of the best in the game. However, to get them, it means having to fight the Moon Lord and the Lunar invasion several times in order get the materials necessary to make them and/or get the rare drops from the Moon Lord and by the time you do get them all, there's nothing else to really use them on and having gone through one of the hardest events in the game several times to get them all, you've definitely proven you don't need them, either.
  • The Zenith is even moreso than the Moon Lord's drops. It requires several of the most powerful or rare swords in the game (and the Copper Shortsword), such as the Seedler, Terra Blade, Influx Waver, Horseman's Blade, Enchanted Sword, Starfury, and both swords dropped by the Moon Lord. You're rewarded with the best melee weapon in the game that bypasses terrain and slices through anything like butter, but by then you've pretty much completed everything.
  • The Master mode, an even more challenging mode added with the Journey's End update, makes all bosses drop relics, which are golden statues of themselves. They will also have a chance to drop items that summon pet versions of themselves. Both the relics and the pet items serve no purpose other than to make your house/character look cool.
  • The Terraprisma is the most powerful summoning weapon in the game, even beating out the Stardust Dragon in terms of power. However, it can only be acquired if a player manages to beat the Empress of Light during the daytime, when all her attacks would insta-kill the player like the Dungeon Guardian would. (And no, you can't wear her down at night and finish her off during the day, all of the damage dealt to her has to be done during daytime.) While it can be useful if you manage to beat her during the day, doing so without cheese tactics is nigh-impossible. Any player who can obtain the Terraprisma (especially with Plantera or Golem gear) should be skilled enough to not need it to beat the Moon Lord.
• Brutal Bonus Level:
  • Once you kill off Plantera, a whole new set of enemies starts spawning in the Dungeon. If you enter, you can expect hordes of heavily armored skeletons, teleporting mages, giant cursed skulls, spirits that spawn out of dead bodies, and Paladins that have boss-level health and can out damage Skeletron Prime.
  • The Old One's army, a tie-in with Dungeon Defenders 2, features a seven-wave assault that puts even the Frost Moon to shame. In order to trigger it, you have to buy a platform and summoning crystal which must be placed in an arena that is almost totally flat. The crystal must be protected from enemies that can resist even an endgame character effectively. Triggering it gives the player a debuff that shuts off almost all ability to place blocks (there are a few limited exploits). Even if you do manage to place blocks, the enemies have the ability to go ethereal to pass through them, nor are they affected by conveyor belts. Finally, the ranged attackers have piercing attacks that will hit the crystal regardless of what's in the way.
• Bubble Gun:
  • Actually a magic weapon in this game. It's also extremely powerful and fires very rapidly, but has short range.
  • The Toxikarp, a ranged weapon that fires poison bubbles that float upwards and doesn't require any ammo.
  • The Xenopopper, found as a random drop from the Martian Madness event, it creates a bubble that (after a short delay) pops to reveal a shotgun spread of projectiles which will converge at your mouse cursor, making it one of the most accurate (albeit mechanically unusual) weapons in the game, with or without the homing Chlorophyte Bullets.
  • Duke Fishron uses homing bubbles as an attack.
• Bucket Helmet: You can craft a bucket out of iron or lead, which can be equipped as a helmet, and is worth a grand total of one defense point.
• Bullfight Boss: Partially. The Eye bosses use this as a method of attacking frequently in addition to other abilities.

C-E

• Call-Back: There are plenty of gameplay elements and progression from Hardmode that mirror similar and equivalents from Pre-Hardmode.
  • Mining hardmode ores is a simple and obvious one: Cobalt/Palladium corresponds to Copper/Tin, Mythril/Orichalcum to Iron/Lead, and Adamantite/Titanium to Silver/Tungsten or Gold/Platinum.
  • Destroying altars is comparable to smashing Shadow Orbs and Crimson Hearts: both of them give loot and enable progression, at the cost of chipping apart at your world's health, as altars seed more corruption/crimson at random locations while orbs/hearts cause meteorites to fall in the surface, destroying whatever they find.
  • Pirate Invasions mirror the Goblin Invasions. Aside from their similar premise, clearing either invasion rewards the player with a new NPC (Goblin Tinkerer for Goblin Invasions, Pirate Captain for Pirate invasions). The invasions also only occur once an altar or orb/heart is broken for the first time.
  • Finding mimics is similar to finding a chest, as they both give valuable loot according to the stage (with the variants found in the ice biome giving different loot in both cases). Besides, the special mimics found in the Corruption/Crimson and the Hallow give loot that resembles the one available from Shadow Orbs/Crimson Hearts: a melee weapon, a ranged weapon (with the Dart Rifle and Dart Pistol being very similar to the Musket and the Undertaker, respectively), a magic weapon, an accessory and an utility item (a light pet and a hook, respectively).
  • Queen Slime is an obvious mirror to King Slime, being a Distaff Counterpart to him with incredibly similar loot that includes an armor set, a mount, a hook, and a fun, albeit useless method of sliming things. Both are meant to be fought before any of their fellow bosses, though Queen Slime has to be summoned rather than sometimes spawning at random, or after a Slime Rain.
  • The three mechanical bosses, besides being obvious parallels to their pre-hardmode counterparts, drop Hallowed Bars, an ore that allows you to get stronger armor and weapons and can't be found in the world naturally. It parallels to how the Eye of Cthulhu and the Eater of Worlds/Brain of Cthulhu drop Demonite/Crimtane ores - both of them are based on an infectious biome and although they can be found naturally, they are much faster to acquire by defeating the bosses. The fact that Hallowed weapons require souls from all three mechanical bosses to prevent skipping their fights mirrors how you need Shadow Scales and Tissue Samples from the Eater of Worlds and Brain of Cthulhu to make Demonite/Crimtane weapons and armor, preventing you from farming the Eye of Cthulhu alone to get the tools needed to skip the two bosses.
  • Gaining wings is the equivalent of gaining a Cloud in a Balloon and its derivatives or Rocket Boots - they can be both gained by going to sky islands or purchased for a hefty price, and give extra mobility.
  • Hunting for Life Fruit is the equivalent of hunting for Life Crystals, although they are much rarer and less efficient.
  • The Solar Eclipse is the equivalent of the Blood Moon, though the Solar Eclipse is much more difficult and includes more unique enemies. In fact, a red moon is actually an effect of a real-life lunar eclipse, making the similarities between the two events all that more obvious.
  • Plantera's battle is pretty much the hardmode equivalent of Queen Bee's battle, except the fact that it's mandatory - both of them are summoned by the player destroying their offspring, are summoned in and fought within the Underground Jungle, have unique battle themes (though Queen Bee's is also used for Ocram in the console version), and give similar loot - such as how Queen Bee gives the Bee Gun, and Plantera gives the Wasp Gun, a direct upgrade. Plantera giving access to the Jungle Temple and unlocking the hardmode Dungeon is also a parallel to how defeating Skeletron gives access to the Dungeon.
  • An alternate equivalent to Queen Bee can be found in Duke Fishron. Both bosses are unrelated to progression, found in specific biomes, have names that imply nobility, tend to attack by either charging or shooting smaller life as projectiles (bees for the Queen Bee and sharkrons for Duke Fishron), and drop items that directly relate to their attack methods. Both bosses also have the ability to drop mounts of themselves, though Cute Fishron is restricted to Expert Mode. As of 1.4, Fishron even has his own battle theme just like the Queen Bee does.
  • The Lunatic Cultist's battle is, in an odd way, similar to the Wall of Flesh's fight. Defeating either of them triggers an irreversible change in the world - Lunar Events for the former, Hardmode itself for the latter - which are both very difficult and easy to slaughter the unprepared. Both bosses also require a sacrifice to get them to appear - the Guide for the Wall of Flesh and the other cultists for the Lunatic Cultist.
  • And lastly, destroying the Lunar Pillars is another equivalent to smashing Shadow Orbs and Crimson Hearts - both of them cause your character to go through pain, yield some loot, and spawn an Eldritch Abomination when enough of them are destroyed.
• Canines Gambling in a Card Game: The painting "Goblins Playing Poker" replaces the dogs in the original painting with, well, goblins.
• Cap: The game has caps for how many items and stats:
  • For items, Blocks and Ammunition have the highest cap of 999, though this has since been changed to 9999 for most, if not all items.
  • Mana's maxiumum capacity is capped at 400, with boosts from items.
• Cape Wings: In versions before 1.4.1, due to their sprites occupying the same slot, if a player equips a cape and wings at the same time, the cape will show on the ground, but be overridden with wings when the player goes into the air.
• Car Fu: Ramming into an enemy with a minecart will inflict damage if the minecart is travelling fast enough. There's an achievement for killing an enemy this way.
• Carrying the Antidote: A lot of monsters inflict various nasty status conditions. However, they have a small chance of dropping an item that gives you immunity to their respective debuffs. Even better, you can combine several of them into one item for maximum immunity.
• Cast from Hit Points: The Rod of Discord allows you to Teleport Spam at will, but using it too often causes it to take a significant chunk of health. Its Shimmer upgrade, the Rod of Harmony, has no such issue.
• Cast from Money: The Coin Gun will shoot coins at enemies, dealing damage depending on the value of the coin.
• Chainsaw Good: When you have access to Cobalt/Palladium, Mythril/Orichalcum, Adamantite/Titanium, or Chlorophyte, you can make chainsaws. Like most axes in the game, they make good impromptu weapons. As of the Fishing Update, you can also fish up a Chainsaw Shark and use it as such. The Butcher of the Solar Eclipse wields a chainsaw, and occasionally drops the Butcher's Chainsaw, which is not only the strongest chainsaw, but also releases damaging sparks when it hits an enemy.
• Character Class System: While not in the traditional sense, the game still has this in a sense. Weapons have different damage types ranging from melee, magic, summon, ranged, and even thrown damage. While it's possible for a character to use them all, most armor has a Set Bonus that increases damage and other buffs that support each damage type. As such, it's often best to focus on each one specifically, with one or two odd weapons of other types to cover the sets weaknesses.
• Charged Attack: Both the Charged Laser Blaster and Medusa Head can be charged up to perform much stronger attacks, at the cost of using more Mana.
• Cherry Tapping:
  • The game introduced Snowballs as a 'throwing weapon', though they generally do piddly damage and even the Snowball Cannon is hardly any danger. The thing is, given the way the game calculates damage, any hit still does at least one point of damage to a target, and the most important hit point is the last. It's possible to pelt a target with 'harmless' 1-damage snowballs until they explode in a gory spray.
  • The Journey's End 1.4 update introduces paper airplanes, which are mostly just for fun but also qualify as a ranged weapon. Even setting aside their unpredictable trajectories and slow speed, making them incredibly unreliable beyond melee range as a weapon, they will rarely do more than 1 damage per hit against any enemy.
• Chest Monster: Mimics show up in Hardmode, dropping fairly useful accessories but being reasonably tough to somebody who just started Hardmode. The 1.3 update added Hallow/Corruption/Crimson Mimic minibosses which are stronger and have unique loot drops. Unlike normal Mimics, these can be summoned with craftable keys and an empty chest. Pre-Hardmode, it's possible to summon normal Mimics through the use of a chest statue, but these won't drop any loot.
• The Chew Toy: The Guide. He must be killed each time you want to summon the Wall of Flesh, and since the Wall has roughly half a dozen possible drops, you're going to be doing it quite a bit. The developers even showed a pic using him as a guinea pig for testing the new conveyor belt in 1.3.1... by using the conveyor belt to throw him to the lava.
• Christmas Elves: The game has an army of elves in the Frost Moon event. Some know archery, others ride helicopters shooting a Gatling gun at you, and there's even a zombie variation.
• Clothes Make the Superman: The only thing "intrinsic" to characters is how many hit points and mana points they have, so you can start a new character and immediately make him Death, Destroyer of Worlds by giving him your old character's gear.
• Cobweb Jungle: Giant Spiders lurk in mini biomes riddled with continuously regenerating cobwebs.
• Cognizant Limbs:
  • Skeletron and Skeletron Prime's limbs. They attack the player on their own when in range separate from the main head and can be destroyed by the player.
  • The Golem's fists. They launch out at the player on their own while the rest of the boss shoots fire balls, lasers, and jumps at the player.
  • The Moon Lord's eyes and hands also have separate HP bars and will attack viciously if another part is destroyed.
• Cold Flames: The Frostburn effect (and its stronger Hardmode variant, the Frostbite effect), which the player can utilize with several icy items: the Flower of Frost, frostburn arrows, the Amarok (an icy yoyo), the Cool Whip, the Elf Melter, and the set bonus of the Frost Armor.
• Collision Damage: The bulk of enemies will run into the player to do damage to them.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: Rarity, a statistic applying to all items, that loosely indicates their value and the difficulty with which they are obtained. An item's Rarity is indicated in-game by the color of its name text, as displayed, for example, when rolling the cursor over the item in an inventory slot. An item's Rarity can be raised or lowered by up to two tiers depending on its Modifier. There are 13 tiers of Rarity which go from gray (the lowest) to purple (the highest), plus three special tiers not normally available (rainbow, exclusive to Expert mode items, fiery red, exclusive to Master mode items, and amber, exclusive to quest items).
• Color-Coded Multiplayer: In multiplayer, the Dye Trader sells special team dye that changes the color your equipment to your team's color if you're on one. The Stylist sells team hair dye that makes your hair change color in much the same way.
• Color-Coded Stones: The game includes purple amethysts, yellow topaz, blue sapphires, green emeralds, red rubies and white diamonds, which can be made into robes, staves and phaseblades of the same color; the value, rarity and the quality of items crafted with those gems are in that same order (as in a diamond magic staff or grappling hook is superior to a ruby one). Orange amber can also be found, mainly by putting silt, slush or desert fossils into an Extractinator (although since 1.4 they can also be rarely found on underground deserts).
• Concealed Customization: The game allows you to choose a hairstyle and hair color (sometimes with facial hair) for your character. It even lets you use the entire 24-bit color spectrum to do so. But once you get that first helmet, kiss that hair goodbye (including the facial hair), as there's only one sprite for each equipped helmet and that sprite has no hair. Fortunately averted once the Clothier arrives and sells you an item that conceals your helmet.
• Conjoined Twins: There's a boss literally named "The Twins" that takes the form of two giant eyeballs. A band of flesh runs between them when they're close together, but this is purely cosmetic and they still have free movement.
• Continuing is Painful: The game is similar to Minecraft, with differences between difficulty levels:
  • Softcore mode: You only drop a percentage of the money you're currently carrying. ^note It's half of each type of coin, rounded down to a minimum of 1, so you can lose anywhere from just under half of your money to nearly all of it. It's quite easy to avoid this, by keeping all your money stored in a chest or a safe, as your money isn't needed when you're exploring.
  • Medium-core mode: You drop everything you're carrying, including items. This can be problematic if you managed to die while deep underground, as the items might be very difficult to reacquire (or might be even lost forever if you happened to drop them in lava). Update 1.3 added a big red X on the minimap to show where you died last, to make it easier to find your dropped items.
  • Hardcore mode: Permadeath. Everything you were carrying or wearing, everything in your safe and piggy bank, and all your mana and health upgrades are lost forever. However, you can create a new character in the same world, and retrieve anything you had stored in a chest.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: Mostly averted. The majority of bosses are vulnerable to debuffs, proper use of which can make them much easier. The Destroyer is an exception, being immune to all debuffs. The Moon Lord is another exception, having a tentacle that causes the moon bite debuff, which keeps Life Drain attacks from working. If you can outrun the tentacle however, you can use them.
• Convection, Schmonvection:
  • The player can survive in a full suit of heavy armor near lava or exposure to fire just fine. Even the various fire weapons do not cause damage by exposure to heat but strictly on contact with the item in question.
  • You can carry lava around in iron buckets. And lava doesn't damage wooden blocks or walls, just wooden platforms, and it only knocks them out of place, allowing you to pick them up and place them back afterwards. You can even craft glass blocks and walls with lava inside that won't melt and spill it all over the place (although, since these are crafted with a Crystal Ball, there's presumably magic involved).
• Cool Helmet: Many of them look cool to wear, especially the hardmode helmets.
• Cool Shades:
  • Demon Eyes have a very low chance to drop a dark lens, which can be used to craft these. If you wear them, the sun gets a pair, too!
  • A hardcore character opening a Treasure Bag dropped by the Eye of Cthulhu will find 0x33's Aviators, vanity headwear that the devs created to honor a Terraria streamer.
• Co-Op Multiplayer: Built from the ground up to support it. It can make fighting some particularly tough bosses easier, though it should be noted that the game scales up difficulty based on how many players are in a world.
• Couch Gag: When the game is in windowed mode one of a number of silly subtitles will be displayed next to the title, such as "Terraria: Shut Up and Dig Gaiden!"; "Terraria: There Is No Cow Layer"; and "Terraria: Terraria: Terraria:"
• Counter-Attack: With the Brand of the Inferno, if the player raises their shield a split-second before taking a hit, they'll nullify the attack and gain a buff that greatly increases the power of their next Melee attack for a couple seconds.
• Crapsaccharine World:
  • Terraria looks friendly and cheery, but you will quickly learn otherwise. Undead roam the land at night and are constantly active underground, and a land disease called the Corruption is filled with many an Eldritch Abomination as it slowly consumes all in its path. And this is to say nothing of the bosses, especially Wall of Flesh.
  • The Corruption's Suspiciously Similar Substitute, the Crimson, is even worse. See Bloody Bowels of Hell above.
  • Unless you install elaborate quarantine measures before defeating the Wall of Flesh, your entire world is doomed to become a mixture of two different Crapsack Worlds in hardmode: the Corruption/Crimson is still there and made harder, and then there's also "The Hallow" which plays Crapsaccharine World much more straight.
  • To be more precise, The Hallow is a biome filled with pearly sands and stones, pretty cyan grass, trees in all colours of the rainbow, constant actual rainbow in the background, populated with pixies and unicorns who will murder you with extreme prejudice.
• Crazy-Prepared:
  • Players can invoke this when they do a lot of prep work before boss fights, such as setting up an arena with wooden platforms you can jump around on. While it does take a long time to set up such things, it can often mean the difference between dying repeatedly, or the boss being a walk in the park, to the point that fighting a boss unprepared borders on Self-Imposed Challenge.
  • On a similar note, preparing one area with traps for the goblin/pirate invasions will make the otherwise long slugfest easier, such as setting a lava trap to force them to walk on it to get to you on both sides. If you build it correctly, virtually all of the invaders will die before even reaching you. If you're worried about the safety of your NPCs, you can build your house/fortress high in the sky, or well away from the center of the map. You can also build said traps far away from where your house is, and the enemy will follow/spawn near wherever you're at.
  • Players who are savvy to the way the Corruption and Crimson spreads can cordon off sections of their world in order to minimise the spread, and can also deliberately induce Hallow to the landscape to protect certain biomes, like the Jungle.
• Creepy Cemetery: The Graveyard mini-biome in the Journey’s End 1.4 update is a player made one, in the sense that it's made when several tombstones of dead players are placed next to each other. In the Graveyard, the sky turns dark, the colours are desaturated, a thick fog covers the ground, mobs that otherwise only spawn at night can spawn at day, such as zombies. The otherwise Halloween-exclusive Ghost and Raven enemies also spawn in graveyard. Npcs in the graveyard will sell unique items, and you can even craft special items in it.
• Creepy Centipedes: Crawltipedes fought at the Solar Pillar. They fly around, ignoring grounded players, but as soon as a player goes airborne they rapidly home in like a missile on crack, dealing incredible Collision Damage to them per hit. And like Moldorm, their only weak spot is the tail.
• Critical Hit: Each weapon has a chance of inflicting one for double damage.
• Critical Hit Class: With the right equipment and accessory modifiers, you can boost your critical hit chance to around 70%, making attacks that much more devastating.
• Critical Status Buff:
  • The Frozen Turtle Shell provides a 25% damage reduction once a player drops below half health.
  • The Cute Fishron, an Expert Mode mount, gains a huge speed boost (turning it into the fastest mount in the game) and provides the player with 15% more damage once the player is below half health.
• Crossover:
  • The 1.2.4 update had a crossover with Pixel Piracy, introducing several pirate-themed items.
  • The 1.3.4 update was one big crossover with Dungeon Defenders 2, complete with a tower-defense-style invasion event featuring Etherian enemies and bosses, and piles of weapons and armor as rewards. Dungeon Defenders 2, in turn, received its own Terraria-themed crossover update.
  • The 1.4.3 update had a crossover with Don't Starve, introducing the Deerclops as a boss, Don't Starve-related pets and items, and even a unique seed called The Constant that has Don't Starve mechanics. In turn, Don't Starve received its own Terraria-themed crossover update, including the Eye of Cthulhu as a boss.
• Cruelty Is the Only Option:
  • You're gonna have to sacrifice your Guide by dunking a Voodoo Doll of him in the lava pools of the Netherworld if you want to summon the boss that allows you to progress into Hardmode. You'll then have to do it again if you want to farm a specific drop from that boss.
  • Likewise, repeat battles with Skeletron require using the Clothier's voodoo doll to kill him.
  • Ditto if you want to "rename" NPCs.

• Cumulonemesis: The Angry Nimbus, a Hardmode enemy that spawns only during rain, tries to harm players with a rain attack. They have a small chance of dropping a Nimbus Rod, which allows players to create raining clouds of their own.
• Cursed with Awesome: The Clothier, after you save him, still can use Shadowflame to defend himself.
• Cute Monster Girl: The Harpies. Despite their appearances, though, they are otherwise the hateful creatures you would expect them to be. There are also "Lost Girls" who turn out to be vicious Nymphs.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: Broken Armor, Withered Armor and Ichor reduce defense, causing enemy attacks to deal more damage. The player can also do this to enemies, inflicting Ichor as well as the more powerful version Betsy's Curse.
• Damage Reduction: Defense essentially acts as this- for every 2 points in Defence (1.5 in expert), the player or enemy takes one less damage from attacks. Attacks will still inflict at least one point of damage, however.
• Damage-Sponge Boss:
  • The King Slime is essentially just a larger and much rarer blue slime. Its only attack is to slowly hop at you. In 1.3, the King Slime was given the ability to teleport to your position if it can't reach you, meaning you can't cheese the fight by sitting in a hole in the ground any more.
  • The Destroyer has more health than anything in the game save the final boss, despite being one of the first three hardmode bosses. This is balanced out by all of its sections sharing a single health pool, so it loses health faster than a single, non-composite entity would.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
  • Intentional steps seem to have been taken to avert this for immigrating Minecraft players; the WASD controls map intuitively, and even the discard button is in the same place.
  • There is the fact that destroying items and placing them are the same button but it depends on the item/tool held.
  • ESC brings up the inventory and the option to quit or change teams, while the E key brings up the inventory in Minecraft, although fortunately, there's a control config, so you can map map the inventory to F, E, or whatever you want.
  • Since 1.1, the control for throwing a held item (not in inventory) has been changed.
  • The default keyboard "drop" key is T in Terraria, while in Minecraft T is the chat key. Now, enter a multiplayer server...
  • In 1.2 the Mana Regeneration key has been changed to J, with the map now being allocated to M, Unless you have a Mana Flower, you'll be accidentally pulling up the map every time you want to use a magical weapon for extended periods of time
• Dangerously Garish Environment: After defeating the Wall of Flesh, the world becomes infected with two new biomes: the Corruption or Crimson (depending on the world), an Evil Tainted Place filled with nasty beasts, and the Hallow, a brightly-colored fairy-and-unicorn-themed world that is every bit as deadly as its Evil Counterpart.
• Danger with a Deadline: Played straight with three of the six nocturnal bosses (Eye of Cthulhu, The Twins, and The Destroyer), who only appear at night and despawn if the player manages to outlast them until dawn. Subverted with Skeletron, Skeletron Prime and the Empress of Light; if Skeletron or his mechanical counterpart are not killed by the time dawn comes, it sends its head flying into the player at high speed and obtains immeasurable defenses, dealing enough damage to kill the player near-instantly. The Empress of Light meanwhile becomes so powerful that all her attacks are instant kills... but her defense doesn't change, meaning that it's less of an assured death sentence than it is a Bonus Boss From Hell.
• Dark Reprise:
  • The Underground Corruption theme is a trippy, sinister remix of the Corruption theme combined with elements from the regular Underground theme.
  • The Underground Crimson theme is an even more creepy and sinister remix than the Underground Corruption, combining the Crimson theme with the Underground theme.
  • The Graveyard theme is a darker and more depressing remix of both the Town Day and Night themes.
• Deadly Discs: The boomerang-class weapons, the Thorn Chakram, Fruitcake Chakram, and Light Discs.
• Deadly Dust Storm: The 1.3.3 update adds sandstorms as an event that may randomly happen in a desert biome. While it lasts, a strong wind pushes the player, and special enemies appear (such as sand sharks and sand elementals).
• Death from Above:
  • The Starfury, Star Cloak (and all accessories crafted from it) and Holy Arrows are all gear that can summon falling stars to ravage the battlefield.
  • Also, at night stars will randomly fall through the land, instantly killing any monster on the way and, with some luck, severely damaging bosses.
  • When mining straight down, it's not uncommon for monsters to spawn out of sight above you and dive down the mineshaft.
  • Players can trigger a trap that drops a boulder upon you and cannot be survived without decent gear, making it literal Death from Above.
  • Various flying or jumping enemies utilize their mobility to deliver attacks from on high.
  • The players can use cannons to rain fire on enemies.
  • There are any number of situations where the players will find themselves at the mercy of an enemy attacking them from above.
  • At least two traps found in the Lihzahrd Temple come from above. The Spiky Ball Trap which rains bounding spiked balls from above and the spear trap which shoots out spears that stab from above.
  • The player can do this once they acquire the Blizzard Staff and/or the North Pole. Both can be manipulated to wipe the screen of enemies due to their endgame-tier damage.
  • The Lunar Flare. Similar to the Blizzard Staff, except that it has even higher damage, block-penetrating ability, and can be manipulated to hit a specific or general area of the screen.
• Death Is Cheap:
  • Subtly subverted with the NPCs as they respawn, but it's a different NPC with a different name that just happens to look the same and do the same job.
  • The penalty for dying in softcore mode is loss of coins, though it may not seem cheap if a player loses a piece of platinum or two. The upside is that players can attempt to recover their lost coins, mitigating the loss. Unless the player's coins fall into lava and are destroyed.
  • Medium core causes loss of inventory items and, much like the lost coins, can possibly be reclaimed unless they fall into lava. Fortunately, most of the rarer items can tolerate a dunk in lava no problem.
  • Averted for hardcore players. Should you die, you're Killed Off for Real, and while you can wander around the map as a ghost, upon exiting the world that character gets deleted. And since leaving a world destroys any items that are left lying around, you can't get your equipment back, either.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: The only way to bring down the Dungeon Guardian, as his defense reduces all damage to 1.
  • The Modus Operandi of the Blade Staff summons, as on their own they do just 6 damage... but do that damage multiple times per-second, stay very close to their target, and ignore most defense, meaning that they can tear things apart within seconds.
• Death World: Don't let the colorful, 2D graphics deceive you—the randomly-created worlds are Death Worlds, one and all. Killer slime can be found in the safest environments. Vultures, sharks, hornets bigger than you are, killer bats, and even piranhas await you above ground. Razor-sharp feather-slinging harpies inhabit the upper atmosphere. The underground is filled with skeletons, killer roots, vampire bats, and far enough down, demons. The hills and caverns are steep enough that you can die from fall damage just by traversing the terrain, not to mention the risks of drowning or falling into pits of lava. Meteors and Hellstone will burn to the touch unless you've built a charm to ward them off. Legions of zombies and enormous, disembodied eyes will pound at your door all night, every night. Eventually, an army of goblins will descend upon you with little warning. And every night has a chance for the Blood Moon to rise, increasing the number and might of the zombies, and turning even the harmless bunnies of the wilderness into walking horrors. The first instructions you get upon starting the game are on "surviving your first night."
• Dem Bones: The list of skeletal enemies in the game goes as follows: the Skeleton, the much tougher Angry Bones, the Dark Caster, Tim, the Undead Miner, the flying Cursed Skull (and the Dragon Skull on the console version), the burrowing Bone Serpent, the Armored Skeleton, the tougher Heavy Skeleton, the Skeleton Archer, Skeletron, formerly the game's toughest boss, and his mecha-version, Skeletron Prime. You spend a lot of time battling skeletons in this game. Version 1.2 introduces skeletal Necromancers, Tactical Skeletons, Bone Lee, and Skeleton Commandos, as well as others.
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  • Before a fix, there was an NPC during Christmas called Santa Claus the Santa Claus.
  • Due to the way item reforging works, you can end up with:
    • Demonic Demon Scythe
    • Demonic Demon Bow
    • Armored Armor Polish
    • Spiked Shoe Spikes
    • Lucky Lucky Horseshoe
    • Lucky Lucky Coin
    • Deadly Deadly Sphere Staff
    • Hurtful Ball O' Hurt
  • One of the possible splash texts you can get at the top of the game window is "Terraria: Terraria: Terraria:"
  • Because Goldfish are classified as Critters, they have golden variants. So yes, it is possible to find a Gold Goldfish, and the game is aware of this according to the tooltip.
    'Not to be confused with the elusive Gold Gold Goldfish'
• Depleted Phlebotinum Shells: While better ranged weapons do more damage, so does better ammunition. As you fight increasingly stronger enemies, wooden arrows and plain musket balls won't be enough. Players will soon find themselves creating or looking for Jester's Arrows and Silver Bullets. Once you hit Hardmode, players begin to look forward to Cursed Flame Rounds, or even crystal shards to make fragmentation rounds. 1.2 ups the ante of unique rounds such as explosive bullets, chlorophyte bullets, high-velocity rounds, nano bullets (confusion), venom bullets, ichor bullets, golden bullets and confetti bullets just to name a few. Yes, it is as cool as it sounds.
• Depth Perplexion: Fire Imps and caster-type enemies can throw fireballs in front of blocks, but most of your projectiles get blocked by them.
• Destructible Projectiles: The Dark Caster, Fire Imp, Goblin Sorcerer, and Tim create wall-penetrating projectiles that are coded as One Hit Point Wonders.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Although impossible without hacking, if you manage to get a second Princess NPC in your town either Princess will take note of this, saying that the other Princess is "a little unsettling to be around, but terribly cute!", treating them like an Identical Stranger.
  • The Nurse's ability can heal any damage and cure any debuff, except the Tongue^note Inflicted by the Wall of Flesh to prevent the player from escaping, which has a specific parameter that prevents the Nurse from healing it.
  • Many achievements are based on things the player would likely never do or has no reason to do. These include:
    • The Frequent Flyer - Unlocked by spending over 1 gold being treated by the Nurse. When it was first introduced, it was pretty rare to have something that damaged you that much but didn't kill you.^note Nowadays, however, this achievement isn't that long to get as it sounds, since 1.4 changed the nurse's prices so that she charges more money as the game progresses, and even doubles the prices in Expert mode. After the first mechanical boss kill, she charges that 1 gold needed for the achievement just by healing 100 HP - and that's in Classic mode (in Expert mode, she already charges that much right after entering Hardmode).
    • Unusual Survival Strategies - Drink bottled water to heal yourself when drowning. The achievement tagline even lampshades how it makes no sense.
    • Supreme Helper Minion! - Unlocked by completing 200 fishing quests for the Angler. His quests are merely side bonuses and aren't part of the game's progression, only giving you side items like furniture and fishing equipment. The odds of not getting every useful item you want by 200 quests is, while possible, extremely unlikely.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?:
  • Many of the bosses are bits of Cthulhu (such as the Brain or Eye) or have titles that convey some kind of eldritch power.
  • Then there's the True Final Boss as of 1.3, where this can done quite literally with the Moon Lord, aka Cthulhu himself.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • In General:
    • Expert Mode, of course. All the enemies are insanely buffed (not to mention can steal your money) and the bosses are much harder to kill, but in exchange some of your equipment becomes more effective, everything drops more loot, and you can get expert-exclusive items from the bosses.
    • Crimson Worlds. While the Crimson's enemies are often considered harder than the Corruption's, and the boss is much more confusing and deadly, the weapons you can get from it are generally much more effective (read: Crimson Armor and Golden Shower).
  • For Classes:
    • Among all classes, Summoner definitely requires the highest skill floor, due to being a Glass Cannon just like Mage yet having to engage their enemies at a close distance just like Melee. If you don't want to die every five minutes as this class, then you need to have a great understanding of enemies and bosses' behavior and how to dodge their attacks, meanwhile knowing which exact gear to pursue and which to avoid. It'll definitely take you a while to acquire all required knowledge, being forced to get good at the game through other classes while experiencing a full summoner playthrough (which means only using whips as a primary weapon) at least once. But once you finally reach the required level, the Summoner can easily start feeling like one of the strongest classes in the game, providing some of the most efficient methods of getting through pre-hardmode, while allowing to skip most parts of pre-mech checklist, trivializing idle farming, and offering incredibly high DPS against anything.
  • For Weapons:
    • Flails can be incredibly fiddly to use and awkward to aim^note well, they were up until an update made them easier to use, but once you master them, especially the Dao of Pow, you can become almost unstoppable. They pierce foes, rebound, and deal lingering damage around the ball head, making them incredibly deadly against larger and/or segmented foes. The second-best damaging flail, the Dao of Pow, also has a chance of confusing enemies. The Flower Pow does slightly more damage and its flower (which is the spiked ball) shoots petals at nearby mobs as long as it is out.
    • The Star Cannon in Pre-Hardmode. It deals absolutely ridiculous damage and pierces, but requires Fallen Stars as ammo, which are incredibly hard to get a large supply of. If you farm enough though, you will be able to easily demolish even the Wall of Flesh, and it can even be used effectively on Hardmode bosses.
    • The Coin Gun is normally an Awesome, but Impractical money waster. However, if you only shoot Silver Coins, it can become a completely self-sufficient weapon, easily making back the money it shoots. Shooting Silver Coins, however, is trickier than it sounds, and requires constant attention to your coin count.
    • Yoyo-class weapons introduced in 1.3 have some major drawbacks: limited spin time ^Explanation except for endgame yoyos, which have unlimited spin time, lack of auto-swing to re-release them when they wind back, and relatively small hitboxes. This is balanced out by the fact that they deal continuous contact damage like flails but with much greater control, they follow your mouse cursor so you can easily track enemies until the yo-yo retracts, and their small hitbox combined with mouse control allows you to guide them around corners and even through 1-block wide holes, allowing you to attack from behind cover. They also have a number of accessories that improve their usability ^Explanation like Counterweights that add more orbiting projectiles, the Yoyo Glove that can cause a second yoyo to be deployed when you attack a monster, and the Yoyo String that improves the reach of your yoyo, and all of them can be combined together into the Yoyo Bag to save equipment slots. Once you're kitted out and fully-familiarized with Yoyos, they can easily rival or even surpass Flails under certain conditions.
    • Pre-hardmode, grenades can deal out insane damage against enemies, but will only trigger if they make contact. It's easy to accidentally miss a lot (or even worse, blow yourself up), but if you have good aim, they can rack up damage against enemies and bosses at a very quick rate.
• Directionally Solid Platforms: Wooden platforms which can be crafted. Players can jump up through them like it's nothing, and walk across them fine, or choose to drop through by pressing down. Some monsters are also incapable of passing downwards through them.
• Discount Card: Present as a rare drop during pirate invasions; equip it as an accessory to get 20% off on all purchases. Normally it wouldn't be anything too major, but it also applies to the Goblin Tinkerer's prices for reforging equipment, and there are some items completely unique to NPC vendors such as purification powder, yellow pressure plates (a unique variant of pressure plate not found in a game world), and certain crafting stations. There are also items that are findable but rare, like bullets, making a Discount Card very handy for maintaining an inventory. The Discount Card can be combined with a Coin Ring (itself a combination of a Lucky Coin and Gold Ring) in order to create the Greedy Ring, which gives enemies a chance to drop extra money when hit and attracts dropped coins in a wider radius in addition to reducing shop prices.
• Disk-One Final Boss: The Wall of Flesh is the strongest boss until you realize that killing it is going to turn the surface into a mixture of Crapsack and Crapsaccharine World roamed by twisted, powerful creatures...
• Disk One Nuke: Has its own page.
• Dismantled MacGuffin: The Broken Hero Sword, which drops as a crafting material and is used to craft the Terra Blade. Strangely, there is no "Repaired Hero Sword" or "Hero Sword" item, meaning the capabilities of the broken sword are never revealed.
• Divergent Character Evolution: A weapon variation. The 1.4.4 update revamped several melee weapons, one of which being the Terra Sword, a weapon that had remarkable similarities to the Influx Waver unlocked in the Martian Invasion event, both firing sword-shaped beams at enemies. The Terra Sword has a much wider projectile with limited range that is now affected by the swing speed of the sword itself.
• Doppelgänger Spin:
  • The Lunatic Cultist will occasionally summon copies that, if struck, will cause an extra minion to be summoned. Certain visual cues allow you to pick out the real one.
  • In Expert mode, Brain of Cthulhu will create three illusionary copies of itself in its second phase to confuse the player as it charges. They start out transparent to make them easy to tell apart, but as its health gets lower, the copies become solid and harder to distinguish from the real one.
• Double-Edged Buff: Drinking alcohol will apply the Tipsy debuff, which increases your damage, attack speed, and crit chance, but also lowers your defense. Although this is downplayed, since all of the positive effects scale with the power of your weapon while the armor debuff is a negligible -4.
• Double Jump:
  • A Cloud in a Bottle allows you to double jump. Doing so will also negate fall damage if done near the bottom of a long fall. Version 1.2 adds more Elements In A Bottle, a Blizzard and a Sandstorm, which are improved versions of the Cloud. You can combine these items with the Shiny Red Balloon to get even better jumps, and them fuse them all together into a Bunch of Balloons to get a quadruple jump, and combine that with the Fart in a Bottle/Balloon to get a quintuple jump. Version 1.3 adds the Tsunami in a Bottle, which can be combined with a Balloon Pufferfish to get the Sharkron Balloon, which will let you achieve six midair jumps. Watch out for fall damage though. Or, don't, if you have a Lucky Horseshoe equipped.
  • There's also the unicorn mount, which has a double jump of its own, bringing the potential number of jumps up to a whopping seven.
• Dual Boss: The Twins. One of them, Retinazer, shoots Frickin Eye Beams while the other, Spazmatism, pursues you and breathes hellfire at you.
• Dug Too Deep: Players can dig right into the Underworld, a hellish biome composed of ashen landscapes dotted liberally with lava pools and chock full of demons, hellbats, imps, and lava slimes. It's also the area that the pre-hardmode boss is found and fought in.
• Dungeon Crawling:
  • The Dungeon is located on the far left or right side of the map, and you must defeat a boss to enter it with out being One Hit KOed by a flying skull. The Dungeon holds many rare items that can't be found in other places, and is filled with traps and dangerous enemies.
  • The Lihzahrd temple in the depths of the jungle. Although much smaller and more linear, the enemies are even stronger and the traps are easily capable of killing players not watching where they step.
• Dungeon Shop: The Skeleton Merchant NPC randomly spawns underground, selling basic supplies and a few unique items, and allowing a player to sell items without returning home. However, he never appears if the player is actually in the Dungeon.
• Early-Bird Boss: Several bosses can summon themselves after fulfilling some requirements. This means they can appear before you're ready to fight them.
• Early Game Hell:
  • The early game is extremely hard, as you start out with only 100 health, the weakest sword in the game, and the weakest pickaxe and axe. Gathering resources in the early game, especially on expert or master difficulty, can be incredibly difficult. The underground is plagued with traps that'll easily kill you, mobs that can quickly overwhelm you, mobs that can kill you very quickly, mobility is heavily limited until you get a hook, fall damage is a major hazard without an accessory to negate it, and most of the early armor defense is paper thin and only offers the slightest bit of protection. May the great Terraria Gods above help you if you spawn with a Corruption/Crimson biome on either side of your base at that. The difficulty gradually tapers off as you acquire more and more helpful items to get around easier, counter or avoid hazards, kill enemies more quickly, and take more damage, while your threats don't get any stronger outside of bosses. And then hardmode starts, and you're practically in a second Early Game Hell as you have to deal with new and much more powerful enemies, with that equipment that made you feel invincible before suddenly becoming utterly insufficient.
  • This trope is especially true for summoner playthroughs. In 1.3, their three pre-hard mode staffs are either an extremely rare drop that you pretty much need a mob statue to grind the mobs to get (slime staff), acquired by beating a boss (the Queen Bee, which also must be beaten for one of the only pre-hardmode summoner armors), or is made from hellstone, which requires the second best pre-hardmode pickaxe (corruption/crimson, which requires beating their respected bosses to craft). You could also sequence break using the Reaver Shark, an item acquired by fishing, to get hellstone before fighting a boss, but this was changed in 1.4. Fortunately, 1.4 also gave summoner some other early game options, such as the Finch Staff, Flinx Staff, Vampire Frog Staff, and whips that give them better options to control their summons. This gives the summoner a much easier way to start out, though the lack of early summoner armor or accessories and the weakness of the early weapons leave it still one of the hardest classes to start.
  • The Easter Egg seed "not the bees" makes the beginning of the game significantly more challenging by making almost all of the world a Jungle, one of the hardest biomes in the regular game. It also has other nasty gimmicks such as honey replacing water to greatly slow down the player, Hornets being able to spawn anywhere instead of just the Underground Jungle, and several Larvae being dotted around the world making it easy to summon Queen Bee by accident. It is more difficult for an early player to get around a "not the bees" world than even a "for the worthy" world, which was deliberately designed to be a leap in difficulty. Once the player gets enough progress to get through the Jungle normally and has tools strong enough to regularly farm Queen Bee, the difficulty sinks like a stone until Hardmode. And even in Hardmode, the player by that point would have likely found a way to build several safe spots or have easier access to other biomes from late Pre-Hardmode movement gear. Meanwhile, "for the worthy" worlds continue to scale with the player and reach the point where Hardmode bosses can one-shot those with endgame gear. The "get fixed boi" seed combines the both of these, and if the player wants to leave their starting point in Hell, they'll have to do some crafty maneuvering of the crispy honey blocks that litter the world.
• Easter Egg:
  • Instead of quacking and hooting, ducks and owls (1.4 only) have an extremely low chance to instead play the sound of a human saying "quack" and "hoot" respectively.
  • The Last Prism's lasers change to different colors depending on your character's name. Most of these names are beta testers for 1.3 who worked in secret before its release. This is how the official subreddit busted moderator Aeroblop's secret - he was part of the testing team, and so characters with his name shoot blue lasers with the Last Prism.
  • The 3DS version contains a neat one in the Underworld. All the way at the bottom right of the world, the camera typically stops panning as your character reaches it but using the precision placement mode on the bottom screen lets you see past the boundaries and, with it, you can see a Fire Flower straight out of Super Mario World.
  • Journey’s End, the final major content update, has introduced three secret, specific world seeds and resulting worlds:
    • The world seed 05162020, which is the release date of Journey's End. Its world generation prompts all turn into random numbers (except for "Placing traps"), and once the world is created, you'll start out with the Party Girl, you can find Moon Lord Legs and the Red Potion in chests, both the Corruption and Crimson are generated naturally, its Dungeon is located below a dried up Living Tree, and much more. Finally, the Party Girl permanently gets a option to switch between normal music and the soundtrack of the cancelled Terraria: Otherworld accross all worlds.
    • Another custom world gen seed that gives a unique result is "not the bees". The results are rather self explanatory◊.
    • A third secret world seed "for the worthy", makes the map much harder on top of the base difficulty setting. For examples, some of the water is lava, enemies and bosses have way more health and damage, among other things that make the experience more unfriendly. By the way, you'll start out with the Demolitionist.
    • A fourth secret seed was added on Terraria's tenth anniversary, either "celebrationmk10" or "05162021". The entire world is painted in bright, happy colors; the Princess, the Steampunker, the Party Girl will all immediately spawn alongside the Guide; the spawn point is located on a beach instead of the world center; many underground cabins are made of rainbow bricks; many rare items are much easier to obtain; the desert is guaranteed to have a pyramid; and two Dummied Out enemies can spawn (Jungle Mimics and Golden Slimes), though they do not have Bestiary entries.
    • The Don't Starve update added another new seed, "the constant," applying mechanics inspired by Don't Starve, including hunger mechanics and Charlie attacking the player in darkness. Crossover items also have a higher chance to drop from enemies.
    • The 1.4.4 update added "no traps," doing the exact opposite of what its name suggests, throwing traps all about the world and adding even more dangerous ones, even converting some normal items into traps such as gravestones and heart crystals.
    • 1.4.4 also added "dont dig up" in which you start in the underworld and have to make your way up to a surface-like layer underground. The real surface is entirely corrupted by the world's evil, and there are a few changes in weapon and item stats to fit where and when you'll obtain them.
    • The "get fixed boi" seed combines all of the secret seeds' effects. The Mechanical Bosses cannot spawn separately anymore either, and instead must be fought as Mechdusa, a combination of the three bosses.
• Easy Levels, Hard Bosses: The bosses are orders of magnitude harder to beat than anything a player will have seen up to that point. Some bosses are so difficult that an accepted strategy is to set up an entire arena (usually out of wood planks) solely for the purpose of neutralizing some of their advantages. Fortunately for the player, most of them have a specific trigger event and won't show up unless you deliberately summon them, or at least until you do something you shouldn't be able to do until you're reasonably well-equipped, though you can easily break that if you choose to prioritize making better tools over making better armor and weapons. A good example is the Eye of Cthulhu, the first boss in the game. It is summoned automatically at night once your character has certain values of health, defense, and three NPCs, which is very easy for a player to do without having the weapons necessary to fight it off. It can fly and travel through solid objects, so early game characters are likely to have a hard time even hitting it, let alone killing it.
• Ectoplasm: Ectoplasm is a material dropped by Dungeon Spirits, hostile ghosts that pop out of killed undead in the Dungeon after Plantera is defeated. The Ectoplasm is primarily used to make Spectre equipment.
• Elaborate Underground Base: You can, of course, build one. The Dungeon itself also qualifies since it goes from the surface to near-Underworld level.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Eye of Cthulhu, the Brain of Cthulhu, the Wall of Flesh, and The Moon Lord are the most extreme, but most of the bosses qualify.
• Electric Jellyfish: 1.3 gives the Jellyfish enemies an electrical shock attack. On Expert, they can also electrify themselves for temporary invincibility.
• Elemental Crafting: You start out with Wood, then move up through Copper/Tin, Iron/Lead, Silver/Tungsten, Gold/Platinum, Demonite/Crimtane, Meteoric Iron, Hellstone, Cobalt/Palladium, Mythril/Orichalcum, Adamantite/Titanium, Hallowed metal, Chlorophyte, Shroomite, Spectre metal and finally Luminite.
• Emergent Gameplay:
  • A number of player-created innovations, including the Hellevator and the Skybridge/skyway.
  • Monster/invasion proof housing which may include teleporters for both the players and NPCs.
  • Various housing defenses and monster grinders.
  • Lava, water, and honey generators which make infinite amounts of each liquid as well as the results of mixing the liquids together.
• Encounter Bait: The Battle Potion, which increases the spawn rate by 50% and doubles the maximum spawn limit (the amount of enemies on screen). Holding a water candle (in 1.2, also just being near a placed one) out also does a similar effect. There's also the Calming Potion and Peace Candle, which does the opposite.
• Energy Bow: The Pulse Bow changes any arrows it uses into energy bolts that can ricochet and pierce through enemies.
• Epic Flail:
  • There are several large morningstar-style weapons in the game, the best of which can set enemies on fire or confuse them. The player can craft some of them, like the Meatball and the Dao of Pow. As of 1.4, they can be spun around yourself before being thrown at enemies.
  • While different mechanically from other flails in the game, the Solar Eruption is a giant flaming spear head on a chain. It does extremely high damage, goes through solid blocks, and can hit a target multiple times. It also causes explosions centered on any enemy it hits and inflicts Daybroken, which is a more powerful version of On Fire debuff that can't be put out by water and even spreads to other enemies.
• Equipment-Based Progression: Most of your character upgrades will come from armor, accessories, tools, and weapons. The only improvements that don't stem from items are Health and Mana upgrades, as well as the extra accessory slot offered by Expert mode Wall of Flesh.
• Equipment-Hiding Fashion: Not only is one able to cover their armour but their visible accessories as well. Accessories can also be made invisible through the menu. Vanity armor is designed for this in mind, usually coming in a head, chest and leg set to equip.
• Escape Rope:
  • The Magic Mirror and its upgrades, as well as its Ice counterpart, which send you back to your spawn instantly.
  • The King and Queen statues can be used to rescue stuck/endangered NPCs.
  • Version 1.2.4 adds the Recall Potions, which work like the Magic Mirror only they activate slightly faster and work as an alternative until you find the Magic Mirror.
• Eternal Equinox: Daytime always starts at exactly 4:30 AM and ends at 7:30 PM, for a total of 15 in-game hours (or 15 real life minutes) of day and 9 hours of night.
• Event Flag:
  • Simply getting 120 health, which means using your first life crystal, makes blood moons possible. Getting 140 health allows slime rains to happen.
  • Getting 200 health without fighting The Eye of Cthulhu (along with other conditions) can trigger an event where the Eye can spawn by itself. If you force summon him after you get the event flag but before he shows up, two Eyes can show up.
  • Destroying a Shadow Orb in the Corruption with a hammer enables the chance of a meteor falling in your world and is one of the necessary conditions for Goblin Armies to begin appearing. Shattering three of them summons a boss monster called The Eater of Worlds. After it is defeated or you die you have to smash another three to do this, or just use an easily crafted item to summon him at will. In a world with the Crimson, smashing the beating Demon Hearts will do a the same thing, although they will summon the Brain of Cthulhu instead.
  • Defeating the Wall of Flesh activates Hardmode, where more powerful enemies spawn, and old bosses return with a vengeance, as well as making new ores available by destroying demon/crimson altars with the Pwnhammer dropped from the Wall. Destroying said altars allows random appearances of the mechanical bosses and pirate invasions.
  • Defeating one of the mechanical bosses allows solar eclipses to happen and life fruits to grow in the jungle, and causes hardmode level enemies to spawn in the world's Underworld.
  • Defeating all three mechanical bosses at least once each causes Plantera bulbs to spawn in the Underground jungle.
  • Defeating Plantera causes hardmode level enemies to spawn in the world's Dungeon, and the spread of Corruption/Crimson and Hallow is slowed.
  • Defeating Golem causes the Cultists to spawn at the entrance of the world's Dungeon, martian probes can be encountered, and the Old One's Army reaches its final tier of difficulty.
  • Defeating the Lunatic Cultist causes the four Celestial Towers and their minions to spawn.
  • Defeating all four Celestial Towers, in any order, causes the Moon Lord to spawn.
• Everything Fades: The gibs from dead creatures disappear after a few seconds.
• Everything's Better with Rainbows:
  • Lots of rainbows are in Terraria. One is in the background of the Hallow. Rainbow Slimes (which constantly cycle through the different colors) appear around the Hallow when it rains, and drop Rainbow Bricks to build with. The Merchant sells Disco Balls that give off rainbow-colored light. The Rainbow Rod, Rainbow Gun, Last Prism, and Rainbow Crystal Staff are all magic weapons that let you kill enemies with rainbows. You can also dye your hair and clothes with rainbow dye.
  • The Journey's End 1.4 update adds the Empress of Light boss, which can kill you using colorful rainbows of prismatic light. Defeating her allows you to have several rainbow themed weapons of your own, such as the Nightglow which summons rainbow colored magic projectiles. The Celebration MK2's rocket projectiles, introduced in the same update, also cycles through the colors of the rainbow.
• Everything's Better with Sparkles: Most types of magic sparkle, some weapons sparkle when swung (others leave fire trails), and the Mythril armor (and the Hallowed armor it is crafted into) is special in that it generates sparkles in response to light. Ores, gems, coins, golden/shadow chests also sparkle up when a light source is cast on them. Hunter potions cause enemies and NPCs to glow and sparkle while spelunker potions cause any sort of treasure to glow and sparkle even without a light source.
• Evil Is Not Well-Lit:
  • When going into the Corruption or Crimson, the sun will become dim.
  • There's also solar eclipses in hardmode, which are about as dark as night and spawn hordes of old movie monsters that want to tear your face off.
• Evil Is Visceral:
  • The Wall of Flesh.
  • The Crimson Biome too, which is a fleshy, Meat Moss alternative to the Corruption that also spreads into its surroundings. Inhabitants include flesh-based monsters like the Blood Crawler, Face Monster, Crimera, Herpling, Ichor Sticker and the Brain of Cthulhu.
• Evil Tainted Place: There are three biomes that behave in this fashion. One bears the exact same name as a similar trope, the Corruption. The second is the Crimson which, while differently-themed and with different enemies, also spreads. The third is Hallow; a spreading "light biome."
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin:
  • Many of the herbs:
    • Daybloom blooms into a small flower during the day.
    • Moonglow glows with a blue aura during the night.
    • Blinkroot flashes rapidly when ready to be harvested.
    • In the non-PC versions, Fireblossom blooms while partially submerged in lava.
  • Several bosses get this as well.
    • King Slime is a slime with a crown.
    • The Eye and Brain of Cthulhu are, well, the eye and brain of Cthulhu.
    • The Wall of Flesh is a giant wall constructed entirely out of flesh.
    • Golem is a Golem.
    • The Lunatic Cultist is this in both senses. He worships the moon, and he’s completely insane.
• Exclusive Enemy Equipment: Several sets of equipment that only drop from rare enemies who wear them, like the zombie bride's wedding set or Tim's wizard hat. Most are vanity items which only change the look of your character.
• Expecting Someone Taller: Lampshaded by the Goblin Tinkerer:
  Tinkerer: I thought you'd be taller.
• Expy:
  • The character sprites in alpha were rather blatantly based off of Final Fantasy V combat sprites, but they were thankfully changed for its release on Steam to avoid a lawsuit from Square Enix.
  • The Moon Lord is obviously Cthulhu.^note Word of God formerly claimed that he is Cthulhu's brother, though this was probably a joke, as later statements just refer to him as Cthulhu.
• Eye Beams:
  • Retinazer shoots lasers and in the second stage form turns into a giant laser gun.
  • The eyes of the Wall of Flesh.
  • The Solar Eclipse enemy Eyezor fires lasers from its giant eye.
  • Ice Golems encountered during a blizzard in the ice biome fire lasers from their eyes.
  • The Lihzahrd Temple boss The Golem fires lasers from its eyes.
  • The Moon Lord fires one from its middle eye. When the eyes get detached, they each can fire a smaller one too.
• Eye Scream:
  • A common enemy at night is the Demon Eye and its variations, which splatter into chunks when killed. Hardmode introduces Wandering Eyes, which, when injured enough, sprout a mouth in the center.
  • The Eye of Cthulhu, one of the earliest bosses, especially considering its second stage replaces its pupil with a large mouth.
  • The hardmode boss The Twins, a pair of giant evil eyes connected by what looks a nerve cord. When each eye reaches their second stage, they pop in a spray of gore. One sprays fire from its gaping maw and the other turns into a giant flying laser gun.
  • Some plant life in the Crimson biome are eyes in piles of flesh that pop when hit with a player's weapon or projectile.
  • The final boss of the console and mobile versions, Ocram, loses his main eyes and grows a third once he Turns Red.
  • The Moon Lord, whose first stage consists of attacking the eyes in his hands and forehead until they come loose, leaving fleshy sockets behind.

F-H

• Faceless Eye: The Demon Eye enemy that torments players who venture outside at night, and its King Mook the Eye of Cthulhu, which starts of as just a giant Demon Eye. It then grows a mouth. In hardmode, we have Wandering Eyes, which are somewhere between Demon Eyes and the Eye of Cthulhu, and The Twins, twin bionic upgrades of the Eye of Cthulhu.
• Fake Difficulty: It's not as bad as some games, but there's quite a few cheap shots out there.
  • Master Mode is considered by many players to be a prime example of this trope in the game. It's essentially Expert, but with enemies and bosses having three times the damage and health, instead of two. The difficulty setting doesn't offer much to deal with the increase aside from an extra accessory slot and a 4/3s boost to the Defense stat. There are no changes to the AI at all, and the only non-cosmetic Master-exclusive rewards are mounts, of which only one (Black Spot) is considered better than mounts you could acquire at the same time periods in easier modes, and even that got nerfed.
  • Underground traps can be absurdly punishing, most notably in the early game. The only way you can notice any trap reliably is by spotting the pressure plate, a small rectangle the size of a few pixels, or by carrying any wiring related item with you. The main offenders are Boulder traps, Rolling Cacti, and Explosive traps. Boulder traps drop a giant boulder on players, immediately lethal to anyone without any health upgrades and can roll to finish anyone off. Rolling Cacti are generated on the ground, but there's always lots of them in the underground desert, and they force players to trigger them, as they make it hard to navigate through tunnels because of dealing contact damage. Explosive traps create a powerful explosion, leveling a wide area around the trap and creating a blast that's unsurvivable without the maximum health limit. Yes, you cannot survive that trap until Hardmode. And don't even get us started on the Dead Man's Chests...
  • Medusas frequently spawn in Hardmode marble caverns. They can turn you to stone without warning from a great distance away. In and of itself, this won't kill you, and it only lasts a few seconds; but until it wears off you can't do anything at all, and you're more vulnerable to the already-unforgiving fall damage. If you're not standing on solid ground (jumping, grappling, or riding a minecart) when Medusa sets her sights on you, you're likely to become a pulverized pile of gravel without getting a chance to defend yourself.
• Fake Longevity:
  • Getting sufficient gear from mining ore in the early game is painful, especially if playing with friends who also need their own armor and weapons. And then there's the need for everyone to max out on Life Crystals...
  • The early game itself is unbearably slow. First, you chop wood, then build a work bench and housing, then go exploring to find loot (Hermes Boots in particular can be especially hard to find), mine for a bunch of ore to forge a full set of gear, craft a hammer and travel to the Corruption/Crimson to find more decent weapons from breaking Shadow Orbs/Crimson Hearts, hunt for Life Crystals (already a problem for reasons stated above ^), build a sufficient arena for each boss (e.g. Eye of Cthulhu, Eater of Worlds/Brain of Cthulhu, Skeletron, etc.), and at this point, you should be getting tired. It gets even worse in Expert Mode and Master Mode, where enemies deal increased damage and kill you in just 20-30 seconds, and the respawn time is increased to 15 seconds, longer than Classic Mode's 10 seconds, which means even more slow waiting time.
  • Some items are only sold by the Skeleton Merchant and the Traveling Merchant, who don't make consistent appearances; the latter is worse about this, as his selection of wares is randomly chosen from a large pool of items, and unlike the former, his inventory can't be manipulated by the phases of the moon.
  • Too many examples of equipment with 1% or worse drop rates that can make getting a perfect character far more frustrating than it should be. What might be the most prominent example of this is the Cell Phone; its base components include the Compass and Depth Meter (1-2% drop rates), the Metal Detector (drops from the Nymph only 50% of the time in regular mode; thankfully, it drops 100% in Expert Mode), and all the ingredients of the Fish Finder (three of them, each one has 2.5% drop rate, and you can do only one of the Angler's quests roughly every 24 real-life minutes).
  • To get an enemy's Bestiary entry, it needs to be killed once. To get the complete version, it needs to be killed 50 times. This does not include bosses (which only need to be killed once), but it does include minibosses such as the Dreadnautilus and rare enemies like Nymphs and Clowns (although those enemies have reduced requisites, they still need several kills). Only getting the barebones entry is required in terms of "completing" the Bestiary overall and getting the unique items sold by the Zoologist, but if the player wants to unlock the text descriptions of every monster, it will take a lot of farming.
• Fake Ultimate Mook: Cursed Hammers, Crimson Axes and Enchanted Swords are rare, startling, and look dangerous, but they can easily be stunlocked by smacking them with whatever weapon you have on hand. Rainbow Slimes are the largest non-boss slime and flash random colors; they do a lot of damage, but they have no special abilities and relatively low health, so they're not very difficult to kill.
• Falling Damage: Present; the damage you take increases depending on how far you've fallen. There's even a few death messages for when you die due to falling damage.
  <Player name> didn't bounce.
  • Fortunately, there's several ways to negate fall damage. Landing in 2-block deep pools of water or cobwebs does not incur damage (neither does falling in lava, but that has its own problems). This can be exploited by placing a block of liquid or a cobweb underneath you while falling.
  • Using an item like a Cloud in a Bottle, Rocket Boots, or a grappling hook resets your fall distance. Amusingly, grappling hooks still prevent fall damage even if you grapple onto the ground.
  • Featherfall potions and the Umbrella item slow your fall to speeds that don't incur fall damage. The Frog Leg increases the distance you can fall before taking damage and decreases the damage you take from falling.
  • Finally, some items completely negate fall damage when equipped: the Lucky Horseshoe (and its variant, the Obsidian Horseshoe), the Djinn's Curse, and all types of Wings.
• Fantasy Gun Control: You have enchanted swords, water staffs, and Mario's fire flower, along with a shotgun, the laser rifle from Aliens, fully automatic crossbows, magic star cannons, and a minigun that looks like a shark.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: the game has everything from handheld missile racks and energy swords, to people and animals made out of mushrooms, a fiery underworld, magic lethal harps, spreading evil biomes, martian armies, giant enemy bees, Krampus, blood-slinging giant flying squids, zombie brides, three different types of Mecha-Cthulhu, and a lot more.
• Fantasy Metals:
  • The game has several made-up metals, such as "Meteorite," "Demonite," and "Hellstone," all of which can be melted into strong armor and weapons.
  • In 1.1, Cobalt, Mithril and Adamantite were introduced, as well as a boss-dropped metal, Hallowed. In 1.2, we were gifted with slightly stronger alternatives to each: Palladium, Orichalcum, and, strangely, Titanium. Also added was Chlorophyte, a new jungle-based ore stronger than even Hallowed, and Crimtane, an alternative ore to Demonite, found in worlds with the Crimson instead of the Corruption.
  • Later, the Chlorophyte can be refined into Shroomite using Glowing Mushrooms or Spectre bars using Ectoplasm, but that would be the last you'd see of this trope from that point up until the True Final Boss, which drops Luminite ore to be crafted into bars for getting the best-of-the-best armor.
• Feather Flechettes: The Harpies attack this way, and can be difficult to deal with without a ranged form of attack back at them.
• Featureless Protagonist: The game sports a numerous amount of customizations for your character, meaning that you can add your own personal touch to the character so it looks the way you want it to. It's played straight in all of the NPC dialogue; the only aspect of your character which NPCs will comment on is gender, and even then not always. The only time when this isn't true is when Dryad tells the player that they "don't age well", but even then it's a very generalized description.
• Fertile Feet: 1.3 added the Flower Boots item, when worn it causes flowers to grow on grass that the player walks on. It can also be combined with the Spectre Boots to make the Fairy Boots.
• Fetch Quest: Want to have that supremely convenient Cell Phone? Better set some time aside from your busy schedule and do lots and lots of fishing! Oh, and the rewards are random. Hope you don't mind getting another Sonar Potion instead of something you actually need!
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: And Summoner.
  • Although there are no real classes, armor bonuses tend to benefit one weapon type with bonuses to damage and extra effects suited to that playstyle.
  • The many varieties of Melee, ranged, magical and summon weapons cater to varying play-styles especially when matched with accessories and certain complete armor sets.
  • Melee tends to be more focused on close-combat and tanking hits, ranged is more focused on long-range single-target attacks, magic has the most variety with attack patterns, but suffers from having low-defense armors and having to manage your mana supply, while summon focuses on being The Minion Master but also has low-defense armors.
  • 1.3 introduced a fifth damage type, Throwing weapons (which were formerly Ranged). However, it never received any armors and weapons to support it beyond some in the early parts of the game, and so the damage type has been "reverted" back to ranged in 1.4.
• Final Boss: The Moon Lord on the desktop version, Ocram in old gen Console/Mobile versions.
• Final Death Mode: There's a difficulty system that increases the penalty for death the higher up you go. In softcore, you drop half your money. In mediumcore, you drop items. In hardcore, you die permanently, meaning if you had any items on you at the time, they're gone for good unless you're playing multiplayer or you had some stuff stashed in a chest.
• Fire and Brimstone Hell: The Underworld, which contains flame-shooting fire imps, burrowing bone serpents, slimes made of lava and literally bats out of hell, and flying demons that relentlessly try to make you dead.
• Fishing for Sole: As of version 1.2.4, one of the "failure" items that can be fished up is an old shoe.
• Fishing Minigame: Once you acquire a fishing pole and some bait, you can fish in any pool of liquid (even lava, although you'll need either the Hotline Fishing Hook or the Lavaproof Fishing Hook/Tackle Bag to fish there). You can fish a lot of different fishes: some of them are used for potions; others can be used as tools, weapons or food; and the Angler will give you special rewards if you give him a specific fish he's asking for. You can even get some crates, which may contain money, metal ores and bars, and potions, as well as a few special items.
• Fish People:
  • The player turns into one if you equip the Neptune's Shell and enter water, allowing you to move through it as if it were air.
  • Creatures from the Deep, which spawn during Solar Eclipses. They can move around fine on land, but they're faster in water.
  • Icy Mermen are found in the ice biome underground in Hardmode.
  • Zombie Mermen can be fished up during a Blood Moon
• Flaming Skulls: One of the numerous varieties of Goddamned Bats is one of these, and can usually be found in dungeon areas. Skeletron may drop a Tome that lets you cast these.
• Flaming Sword:
  • The Volcano. Sunfury is a flail version.
  • Having a Magma Stone equipped and swinging any melee weapon will add a fiery particle effect to the weapon (and its projectiles) and set targets on fire.
  • Equipping the Flame Gauntlet, wearing the full set of Frost Armor, or downing a Flask of Cursed Flames will add regular, frostburn, and cursed fire, respectively to your melee weapons. And yes, all three can be applied at the same time.
• Flechette Storm:
  • A group of harpies can easily inflict this on you if you're not careful. Some holiday-themed bosses also attack this way.
  • Spiked slimes gain this as a special attack in Expert Mode by scattering spines all around them when a player gets up close. Said spines can also inflict status effects depending on the type of spiked slime that uses the attack.
  • Nailhead uses a spreading needle projectile move whenever he is struck, making it dangerous to engage him head on.
  • There are also weapons that can allow you to do it as well, one prominent example being Vampire Knives.
• Floating Continent:
  • The game has floating islands, which are found a few hundred feet above the ground, resting on beds of clouds. These islands often have a small house built of exotic materials, decorated with banners and Skyware furniture, and containing rare items in the chest inside. There are also large bodies of water resting on clouds, called Sky Lakes.
  • As with Minecraft, it is not hard to make your own: build a small wall, mine out all but the top, and the top will just float there. This can be important in Hardmode, when the Corruption and the Hallow begin to spread, since they will not spread through a thick enough air gap—so if they become or are completely surrounded by these, they are contained. Or just mine out below the spawn point, so that anyone joining the world or respawning starts off somewhere safe.
• Floating Platforms:
  • Played straight as well as justified in turns. Justified that underground you can place platforms attached to the (destructible) background wall. Played straight when the background wall is the sky.
  • With the Ice Rod weapon, you can make very temporary ones. However, you can use them as a wall to attach your not-so-temporary platforms to.
• Floating Water: Can be accomplished with bubble blocks, which are impenetrable by liquids but otherwise intangible, allowing water (or honey, or lava) to be effectively suspended in mid-air and dived into from the sides or bottom.
• Flushing-Edge Interactivity: Toilets can be crafted out of various building materials, and they can be wired to explosively spew out feces all over the floor.
• Flying Dutchman: The mini-boss for the Pirate Invasion event, a flying ship that shoots with four cannons and can throw more pirates into battle. All four cannons must be destroyed to defeat it.
• Flying Saucer: The Martian Saucer in the Martian Madness event. It can drop a Cosmic Car Key which allows you to ride your own Flying Saucer- a very useful mount with infinite flight time.
• Flying Seafood Special:
  • Flying Fish and Duke Fishron. Ichor Stickers and Gastropods may count if you consider them squid and sea snails respectively.
  • There is a very rare chance of obtaining the Zephyr Fish pet item from fishing. As the name implies, it's a pet fish that flies and follows you around.
  • Additionally, fishing during a Blood Moon in the Ocean can spawn the Wandering Eye Fish and, in Hardmode, the Blood Eel as well as the Dreadnautilus mini-boss, which also summons Blood Squids.
• Flying Weapon:
  • There are three enemies that fit this: the Cursed Hammer from the Corruption, the Enchanted Sword from the Hallow, and the Crimson Axe. There's also one, the Flying Knife, which the player can use which follows the cursor, can be deployed indefinitely, moves erratically and slashes at the target as it waves back and forth.
  • The 1.4 update adds two new summoner weapons: the Blade Staff, which summons flying blades not unlike the Flying Knife that homes in on enemies, and the Terraprisma, which summons a fast flying sword made of light.
• Free-Range Children: The Angler. Could explain why he's such a brat.
  Angler: I don't have a mommy or a daddy, but I have a lot of fish! It's close enough!
• Friendly Fireproof: Notably also applies to explosives that can hurt the user, but not their teammates.
• From a Single Cell: Once Hardmode hits, the Corruption and the Hallow spread constantly. As long as one block of Ebonstone or Pearlstone exists within three blocks of a block of grass or stone, they will continue to spread. Additionally, destroying a Demon/Crimson Altar to spawn the rare ores will create a block of Corruption/Crimson somewhere in the world, meaning that it can literally grow from a single cell.
• Full-Frontal Assault:
  • The aggressive Nymphs aren't actually wearing anything at all. No anatomical 'details' are visible since this is a relatively low-res sprite-based game.
  • Both types of Lamia enemies are topless and look threatening, complete with shadowed faces and red eyes. They still drop "tops" for their costume in the form of bandages.
• Fungus Humongous:
  • There are mushroom forests underground. You can even chop down the mushrooms and use them in a Healing Potion.
  • 1.2 allows you to make mushroom houses, and the Glowing Mushrooms can now be grown on the Surface, producing a Mushroom Biome when you do so.
  • The glowing mushrooms are treated as blocks and when placed next to each other as building materials can make giant mushrooms.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • The Vita version, as of the 10/22/15, has a bug on saving that causes a crash to the Vita's main menu.
  • After the 1.3 update, ordinary walking (defined as the character's walking animation being used) can cause a significant frame rate drop for some users.
• Game Mod: Two variants. First there's the tModLoader method, which uses a custom launcher to mod the game and add new objects and features in addition of replacements. The second is modding the native game, which is still eligible for achievements, but the modding capabilities are considerably limited (only able to replace existing assets instead of adding new ones). Both have their own Steam Workshop as of 2019 onwards, with tModLoader being considered a free expansion pack for owners of Terraria with its own Steam entry.
• Garden Garment:
  • The Dryad NPC has leafy clothing. She also can sell replicas of her clothing as vanity items as of the 1.2 Halloween Update.
  • The Jungle Rose vanity item is a flower found in the jungle biome.
• Garden of Evil:
  • The Corruption blights the landscape, turning the sky a sickly purple, causing plant life to become twisted and thorny, spawning nasty monsters called Eaters of Souls, and turning the nearly harmless Giant Worms into the deadly Devourer (and a much deadlier King Mook called the Eater of Worlds). Ditto for the Crimson, which features fleshy vegetation, spiderlike Blood Crawlers, Face Monsters, and the floating Crimeras.
  • And for a version that disguises its true nature, we have its equal and opposite number, the Hallow. Pretty, calm, has a giant rainbow in the background... and spawns warring Pixies that shred your hearts like a hot knife through butter, Unicorns that are eager to impale you, and, at night, Gastropods that riddle you with laser beams.
• Gatling Good: The Minishark, which can be bought at the Arms Dealer. Although thanks to a nerf, it's not quite the best weapon in pre-hardmode, it can be upgraded into the impressively deadly Megashark. The Travelling Merchant sells the Gatligator and Santa-NK1 drops the Chain Gun, which have an impressive fire rate but are rather inaccurate. Finally, the Moon Lord drops the Space Dolphin Machine Gun: it came from the Edge of Space (which itself is be a reference to the game of the same name).
• Gelatinous Encasement: The unfortunate fate of the Ninja that apparently fought the King Slime before the player arrived.
• Gelatinous Trampoline: Downplayed with Pink Gel Blocks, which cause you to bounce when you land on them. They can't be used to gain height, but they do negate fall damage.
• Gender Bender: 1.3 introduces Gender Change Potions crafted from all 7 herbs and a bottle of water.
• Ghost Pirate: The Pirate's Curse is enemy that spawns whenever a Pirate Captain is killed. Being a ghost, it can fly and phase through blocks.
• Giant Eye of Doom: The Eye of Cthulhu, and The Twins in hardmode. The True Eyes of Cthulhu which appear during the Moon Lord fight are quite big too.
• Giant Hands of Doom: Skeletron is composed entirely of a head and two hands that collectively try to murder you.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: Pretty much every boss, though you do have to summon most of them intentionally.
• Giant Spider: Wall Creepers, Jungle Creepers, Black Recluses, and Blood Crawlers, enemies that are about as long as the player is tall and can walk on background walls. The immobile spider summoned from the Queen Spider Staff is about as large but fights for the player.
• Girls with Moustaches: The pool of possible hairstyles to choose for a character isn't limited by gender, so it's possible to have a female character with a beard.
• Glass Cannon:
  • Some enemies, such as the Meteor Head, deal unusually large amounts of damage for when they're encountered, but are otherwise fairly easy to kill.
  • The Crawltipede, an airborne worm summoned by the Solar Pillar, does an absurd amount of damage relative to most hardmode enemies and has very high mobility, but its tail takes ten times normal damage, making it extremely easy to kill if you can get a bead on it. However, it can only be damaged by hitting its tail.
  • On the player side, dedicated Magic users shape up as this as the game progresses, as Magic-oriented armor sets tend to have the lower defense than Ranged and Melee armors, while Magic weapons are capable of dealing large amounts of damage.

• Godiva Hair: The Nymph.
• Go for the Eye:
  • The Wall of Flesh can be attacked in the eyes or the mouth, but the eyes have no Damage Reduction and hence take much more damage from attacks.
  • When fighting Moon Lord you can't attack anything but his eyes during the first phase.
• Goggles Do Nothing: You can craft goggles out of two lenses (as in the organ itself), they do nothing more than give one measly point of defense so they're more for decoration than anything for your character. During Halloween, the Steampunker sells steampunker goggles that are completely vanity only, and they're not even worn over the character's eyes compared to the former example.
• Gold Makes Everything Shiny: Gold chests have a special sparkly effect.
  • The highly rare gold critters also emit sparkles.
  • One of the many special dyes, Reflective Gold Dye, gained for trading Strange Plants with the Dye Trader makes your armor and accessories golden and shiny.
• Gold–Silver–Copper Standard: The game uses copper, silver, gold, and platinum coins. 100 coins of a lower denomination are equal to one higher-denomination coin. In fact, for ease of storage, 100 coins of a lower denomination can be crafted into a higher-denomination coin and when collecting coins, they automatically turn into the higher-denomination and the opposite occurs when buying from an NPC. How you craft a lot of copper into a little silver (or silver into gold, etc) is best not thought about too much.
• Good Luck Charm:
  • The Lucky Horseshoe looks like a traditional good luck charm. However, instead of affecting any luck-based aspect of the game, it negates fall damage. It can also be fused with certain Double Jump balloons to prevent fall damage from the bigger jumps or the Obsidian Skull to block contact damage from hot blocks like Meteorite and Hellstone.
  • The Lucky Coin is a rare drop from the Pirate Invasion. It grants a chance for any enemy to drop money (anywhere from a single copper to several gold coins) on a hit. Note that because it activates on a hit rather than a kill, it can be used to farm vast amounts of money from enemies by doing minimal damage, so it takes as many hits as possible to kill them.
  • Any accessory can be reforged to have the "Lucky" modifier, which increases your overall critical hit rate by 4%.
• Good Wings, Evil Wings: You can craft a pair of each. But besides material and appearance, they do exactly the same.
• Goomba Stomp: The Slime mount makes it possible to jump on top of enemies, damaging them and bouncing back up for another stomp.
  • The Derpling and Herpling enemies use this as their main method of attack against you.
• Gotta Catch Them All: Although not directly inferred, players can make an optional objective of collecting every armor/vanity set or weapon and putting them on display, collecting all of the statues, or recording all of the music tracks in the game. 1.4's Zoologist expands her shop inventory as you unlock more entries in the bestiary.
• Grappling-Hook Pistol: From the lowly grappling hook all the way up to the anti-gravity hook. Once you get one, it becomes an essential part of your arsenal.
• Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: It is extremely easy to fall to your death if you're not careful. Enemies are immune, of course.
• Green Hill Zone: The normal overworld style until the Corruption/Crimson starts taking over.
• Grid Inventory: Similar to the one in Minecraft. However, it also has 4 slots that you can use to store money, and 4 to store ammunition.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Finding the Floating Islands is often so ridiculously time-consuming that many players simply cheat by downloading a map viewer. For those who view this as against the spirit of Terraria, good luck. Floating Islands can spawn anywhere above a certain altitude, and it's incredibly difficult to tell where they can be found without building a skybridge (which takes a ton of resources), using up a lot of rope, or flying around in the sky with a Gravitation Potion.
  • The Water Bolt, a spellbook hidden in the dungeon. It's hidden on the bookshelves in the dungeon, of which there are dozens, with nothing to draw attention to it other than its specific blue color. The only hint you get to its existence is that, if you're right on top of the shelf containing it, your mouse cursor will change when you mouse over it.
  • The 1.4 update added a hidden luck stat, which affects many parts of the game such as drop rates, damage rolls, and creature spawns. Among other things, bad luck could be caused by using the wrong torches for the biome, and there is absolutely nothing suggesting torches do anything other than provide light. Widespread negative player reaction lead to torches no longer having any negative effect on luck, however, using the "right" torch in its associated biome will still grant a positive luck bonus.
  • Also from the 1.4 update, fairy spawns. These helpful spirits will guide you toward treasure while you're exploring... unless you've destroyed all of the fallen logs in your surface forests, in which case you will never see another fairy naturally spawn in that world again. Fallen logs are impossible to craft and only appear during worldgen. Fairies can only spawn otherwise by hitting trees in the Hallow, which is not alluded to, and by the time the Hallow is around, most players would have little reason to cut down trees.
  • Putting certain codes in to the world seed bar on the world generator will make a "special" world with changed mechanics. This is required for an achievement, yet nothing in-game hints that this is a feature, let alone tells you the codes^note "Not the bees" and "Don't dig up," two valid seed codes, could appear as title bar names, but they are just two out of several with nothing indicating that putting them in the world seed would mean anything. The information about this pretty much needs to be found online.
• Gusty Glade: There is a wind mechanic in the game and viewing the weather using the weather radio or cell phone items can list it as getting pretty high, with speeds up to 70 mph being fairly common during storms. It affects the movement of clouds in the background, the way that snow, rain, and bubbles move, and the direction of the North Pole's snowflake trail, but it has no effect on player movement or even ranged weapon effectiveness. Since the 1.3.3 update, sandstorms now may happen in the desert, blowing in one direction and making it harder to move against it., and since 1.4, wind moving over 20mph causes Windy Days to happen.
• Hair-Raising Hare:
  • The game has cute little bunnies that wander around the landscape and frequently get killed by enemy slimes or inadvertent player actions. However, during the Blood Moon, they transform into vicious purple Corrupt Bunnies (or Vicious Bunnies in Crimson worlds) with glowing red eyes. Both bunnies can potentially drop a wearable bunny hood as loot.
  • In the mobile version, you fight Diseaster Bunnies on Easter. They're just as dangerous as Corrupt Bunnies, and they may drop a Suspicious Looking Egg. If that is used, it summons Lepus, a huge rabbit boss that lays eggs that spawn more Diseaster Bunnies or a weaker version of itself.
• Hand Cannon:
  • The Phoenix Blaster, the most powerful gun pre-hardmode. It can even out damage the minishark with a fast trigger finger.
  • 1.2 introduces the Venus Magnum, which is even more of a Hand Cannon and fires every bullet with a higher velocity than normal. It also has a faster fire rate than the Uzi, but because it lacks autofire, you'll have to spam-click to make use of it.
• Harder Than Hard:
  • Expert Mode, a world setting which makes the game significantly more difficult. Enemy and boss AI is improved. Enemies have twice as much health (150% for bosses) and do twice as much damage, which scales with the number of players in multiplayer. Certain enemies may inflict status effects (which will also last twice as long), some have new abilities (zombies may carry a weapon, for example), and bosses have new abilities and their existing ones improve as they lose health. Enemies can pick up dropped coins, and you have to kill them if you want them back. If you lost them at death, you likely aren't getting them back. Player life regeneration is cut in half, and you lose 75% of coins on death instead of 50%. On the plus side, there are several perks. Defense now provides 75% instead of 50% Damage Reduction for its value (functionally, you're still taking more damage because the enemy boost is higher than yours), rare loot is more common, and bosses drop exclusive items and possibly even the normally-unattainable developer items.
  • Master Mode takes Expert Mode and cranks it as high as it will go. Enemies have 1.5x the HP compared to Expert Mode (and 3x compared to Normal), Bosses have even more health than in Expert Mode, players drop all their coins on death, NPCs have far less health making them easily killed, and their prices are also 50% higher. On the plus side, bosses drop Master Mode exclusive items along with their Expert Mode bags, you get an extra accessory slot which stacks with the Demon Heart, and defense now provides 100% Damage Reduction to its value.
  • The seed "for the worthy" generates an extra-difficulty world (which you can then play in Expert or Master mode for even more pain). All enemies have boosted health and damage (which stacks with Expert/Master), bosses have doubled health and are either larger or smaller than normal, whichever makes them tougher to fight. Live bombs can drop from pots and shaken trees, Explosive Bunnies spawn instead of regular bunnies, lava pools generate as high up as the Underground layer, and every single demon in the Underworld is replaced by a Voodoo Demon, making it extremely easy to accidentally summon the Wall of Flesh. Also the Dungeon faces the wrong way. If you do stack this seed on top of Master, the difficulty becomes Legendary to drive the point home.
  • For added masochism, take whatever gimmicks "for the worthy" offers, and throw it into a blender along with the "Drunk world", "Not the bees", "Celebrationmk20", "The Constant", "Don't dig up", and "No traps" seeds. What you get is the chaos and misery of the "Get fixed boi" seed, which also throws in gimmicks such as making Hellbats and Lava Bats spill lava when killed, and combines all three mechanical bosses into the Mechdusa, unique to this seed. Due to including the "for the worthy" modifier, it also turns Master into Legendary.
• Hard Mode Mooks:
  • Expert Mode and higher difficulties have a unique Spiked Slime enemy spawned by King Slime.
  • The "Celebrationmk10" secret world seed makes worlds with Gold Slimes that drop extra money, and Jungle Mimics that drop joke items and vomit blocks to clutter the inventory. The "Get fixed boi" seed has both of those enemies and includes a new boss in the form of Mechdusa, the three Mechanical Bosses joined together.
• Hard Mode Perks:
  • The best materials won't spawn until the Wall of Flesh is killed, turning on Hardmode for the entire world.
  • Expert Mode rewards players by adding Expert Mode exclusive boss drops, which have a unique rarity tier of their own and have some amazingly powerful effects; King Slime drops Royal Slime, rendering all slimes everywhere neutral towards you, Eater of Worlds drops a scarf that reduces all incoming damage by 17%, Wall of Flesh gives you an extra accessory slot, and that's just pre-Hardmode. It also makes certain drops more likely than they would be on a normal world.
  • Master Mode grants all the perks of Expert Mode, plus additional trophies and bonus drop items from bosses, in order to reward players willing to brave even more ferocious enemies. It also grants an additional accessory equipment slot that only works in Master Mode worlds.
• Harping on About Harpies: The game has harpies as a relatively common enemy on the heights where sky islands usually form. Their feathers are used for Gravitation potions.
• Have a Nice Death: The game mocks you this way but also does this to avoid confusion. Deaths leave tombstones that players can read, and even re-edit for the sake of comedy. Some of them are humorous; a lot are horrific.
  Redigit was turned into a pile of flesh by Blue's Dynamite.
  [Player] tried to swim in lava.
  [Player]'s face was torn off by Unicorn.
  [PlayerX] was brutally dissected by [PlayerY's] Excalibur.
  [Player] didn't bounce.
• Head Pet: One of the items sold by the Zoologist is a bunny that sits on the player's head.
• Healing Factor: Don't get hit for a while, and your health regenerates faster and faster. There are many ways to improve the rate, such as campfires and bands of regeneration.
• Healing Potion:
  • There are varieties of Health and Mana potions the player can brew at an Alchemy Station. The lower-end potions can be bought, taken from pots and chests, or found in the dungeon. Higher-end potions must be crafted or looted from Hardmode bosses in large quantities.
  • Players can combine the lesser or standard kinds to make a restoration potion, which restore both life and mana at once.
  • Jars of honey now grant healing.
  • Honeyfins grant a straight 120 health per use. They're a decent alternative to normal Healing Potions until you start collecting the Greater version.
  • Turkor the Ungrateful in the Mobile and 3DS versions can drop the Horn 'o' Plenty which is a single, infinite use item that heals 120 health like the Honeyfin. A very helpful item all throughout Hardmode to save the Greater potions for boss fights.
• Heal Thyself:
  • The game has standard healing potions in varying strengths. Hyperactive Metabolism is also at play in the forms of mushrooms and goldfish. However, all healing items come with a 60 second "Potion Sickness" debuff that prevents you from using another in that time.
  • The Moon Lord can spawn enemies called Moon Leech Clots when the player is held by his tongue. They do no damage, but if one reaches the Moon Lord, it'll heal one of his damaged parts by 1000 hp.
• Heart Container:
  • The heart crystals, which when broken by a pick-class tool, give you a gem that increases your life by one heart (20 points) up to a maximum of 20 (400 points).
  • 1.2 now has Life Fruit, which are found in the underground jungle during hardmode and can be eaten to increase maximum life by 5 (1/4th of a normal heart). Unlike Life Crystals, the fruit can only be used at 400 life or above, but they also extend your maximum life to 500.
  • The same system is used for mana with mana crystals you can craft out of 3 fallen stars.
• Hearts Are Health: Played straight. Enemies, pots, and certain powered statues generate a small red heart, that when picked up heals a portion of the player's health (unless it's during Halloween, in which the hearts turn into Candy Apples, or Christmas, where they turn into candy canes).
• Heart Symbol: Used to represent health in most cases. Crimson Hearts, found deep in the Crimson, are more anatomically correct in comparison, while the light pet they can drop are somewhere in between.
• Hellevator: The term is used to describe any pit, shaft, or tunnel of any kind that leads directly from the surface (or very close to the surface) straight down to the very lowest level of the game world, Hell itself. No map is really complete without one. Digging several of them is also the easiest way to stop the spread of Hallow/Corruption after hardmode is activated.
• Hellfire: Cursed flames from the Corruption, apart from the name, fit this trope quite well: water won't put them out, and they hurt a lot more than regular fire.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: The game features such in the character creation, and NPCs refer to the player by their name when talked to.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: With the addition of the familiar clothing items. Players themselves can invoke this by wearing their armor like normal but hiding their helmets via the familiar wig item or goggles in the social slot. Often used by players who chose a hairstyle with a beard, as wearing a helmet disables your beard.
• Hit the Ground Harder: Falls are annoyingly lethal without items that mitigate fall damage, but you can use a grappling hook to avoid damage by speeding into it quicker.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • The various traps in the Lihzahrd temple can be used against the Golem, provided you harvest and rewire them to your benefit. It helps to set up a wall to protect yourself from the traps.
  • The Turtle armor, when equipped with its set, returns received damage.
• Holiday Mode:
  • In pre-1.2 versions on the PC, generating a new world during the Christmas season will have a chance to spawn you inside/near a Snow Biome. After the 1.2 Big Update, Snow Biomes spawn naturally in any new Worldgen. In addition, there is a special event during the season, the Frost Legion, that spawns a mob of killer Snowmen monsters, as well as the chance to invite a Santa Claus NPC to stay in your village. The 1.2.2 update added a special Christmas-themed event, the Frost Moon, triggered with a special item that can be crafted any time of year, and clearing enough waves activates the usual Christmas effects for the next in-game day.
  • After the Big 1.2 Update, there was a supplementary Halloween Update that added Pumpkins, in-season Goodie Bags, and a graphical change during the holiday that causes Zombies, Slimes, Demon Eyes, and Rabbits in costume to spawn. A special Event, the Pumpkin Moon, was also added to the mix, as well as a whole parade of holiday costumes. Like the Frost Moon, the Pumpkin Moon can be triggered any time of year, not just around Halloween, and will bring back the other Halloween effects for a day if you clear enough waves.
  • The Mobile edition gains several minor holidays with their own special items and, in the case of Easter and Thanksgiving, special bosses. These include: The Chinese New Year in January, Valentine's Day in February, St. Patrick's Day from March 5th to 31st, Easter throughout April, Oktoberfest from September 27th to October 31st and Thanksgiving throughout November. Valentine's Day, Easter and Thanksgiving is also shared with the 3DS version. (The Wiesnbräu of Oktoberfest is present but not the rest of the items in the 3DS version and while the Guide mentions St. Patrick's Day, it also doesn't occur in the 3DS version).
• Hollywood Darkness: The game attends carefully to lighting effects. Dim illumination persists during the night, emitted from the open sky background. Underground or in enclosed buildings, however, it can actually become pitch-black in the absence of immediate illumination. This makes bringing lighting on expeditions not only helpful, but necessary.
• A Homeowner Is You: It may be 2D, but it's pretty similar to Minecraft. You have so many items to pick from when customizing your home, and, like Minecraft, you build it from scratch, so it truly is your home.
• Homing Projectile: Every weapon category gets a taste of this early on with the Bee weapons that drop from the Queen Bee, which release homing bees that will chase after enemies once released. By middle and late Hardmode, many of the strongest weapons come with some homing projectile component.
  • Magic users get the Magic Missile, a Player-Guided Missile that tracks the cursor until it's released, whereupon (in version 1.4) it turns to track the closest enemy if there is one nearby. The upgraded versions, the Flamelash and Rainbow Rod, continue to provide this functionality well into Hardmode.
  • There are many homing options in late game magic weaponry, including the high-speed, super-persistent Razorblade Typhoon, slow-but-deadly Nebula Arcanum clouds, and the rapid-fire Nebula Blaze.
  • Ranged users can create Chlorophyte ammunition, which provide homing capabilities for any weapon that can make use of special ammo effects. Chlorophyte bullets seek out nearby enemies mid-flight and boast a tight turning radius, making them effective for aiming offscreen or around corners, and maximizing the damage of shotgun weapons even at a range. Chlorophyte arrows provide more limited homing abilities with a "smart bounce" effect. These special arrows will automatically re-target the closest enemy if a shot misses and hits the wall.
  • Rockets do not have a homing variant, but the Snowman Cannon is a late Hardmode rocket launcher which shoots homing rockets with a high rate of fire to create impressive missile swarms.
  • Melee users get their dedicated homing weapons last, starting with the Scourge of the Corruptor - a javelin which releases tiny little corruptors that seek out nearby enemies. Later on, the Possessed Hatchet acts as a homing boomerang which can curve to strike enemies around walls.
  • Nearly every late Hardmode melee weapon comes with a projectile component. The Flairon and Terrarian release dozens of short-lived projectiles that can converge onto anything that gets within range for massive damage.
• Hornet Hole: Bee hives are randomly generated within the underground jungle, containing honey and a larva that summons the Queen Bee boss.
• Hot Bar: The game allows you to lock it to prevent items from being selected by an accidental click.
• Hot Wings:
  • The Flame Wings, crafted with Souls of Flight and a Fire Feather, are available as soon as you defeat one mechanical boss, and they're better than most wings available at that point.
  • The Solar Wings, one of the four end-game wings craftable after beating the final boss. As far as wings go, they have the absolute best stats, their only downside being they cannot hover.
• Hospital Hottie: The Nurse NPC is very attractive.
• Human Sacrifice: This, of all things, is present in the game. Quote from The Guide: "In order to summon the keeper of the Underworld, you have to perform a live sacrifice. Everything you need to do so can be found in the Underworld." Little does he realise that what drops down there are Guide Voodoo Dolls...
• Humongous Mecha: The Destroyer, a giant mechanical worm simulacrum of Cthulhu’s spine which stretches extremely long, fires lasers everywhere, and will release probes when damaged.
• Hungry Jungle: The Jungle biome, especially in Hardmode, is one of the most dangerous places you can go aside from the Underworld and the unlocked Hardmode Dungeon. However, certain goodies are only found there, including the ultra-material known as Chlorophyte. It is also home to the special bee hive and Lihzahrd biomes that hides powerful loot behind a boss.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: The player can pack in a shocking number of weapons, ammo, explosives, and munitions into their personal inventory space.