A compendium of marginally-useful Terraria strats

A compendium of marginally-useful Terraria strats

This is a compendium of 5 mostly useless  but sometimes marginally useful tips for   the Terraria player, in ascending  order of usefulness, starting with  1. GetFixedBoi trap minimization You might know that when you   create a GetFixedBoi world, there’s a star  minigame that you can play to get more loot. 

When generating the world, your cursor is replaced  with a smiley face moon. When this moon hits the   stars that are flying around the screen, a brief  “meow” will play, and generation slightly changes.  For every star hit, Life Crystal, Statue,  non-cabin Chest, Gemstone Cave, Pot,  

And Trap spawns increase by 0.1%, up to +20%  with 200 star hits. Considering how much 20%   more of these good spawns can help in the  early game, it’s a minigame worth playing,   even if it comes at the cost of extra traps. But, what if we don’t want those extra  

Traps? Well, there’s a way to get  slightly less of them in your world.  You see, this booster applies at the stage of  generation. It uses the star score at that time.  Let’s say you parried 90 stars by the time the  game gets to generating Life Crystals. That  

Equates to a 9% increase in Life Crystals, cool.  But, by the time the game gets to generating Pots,   you’ve parried 120 stars, so you get  12% more pots. The star boost it uses   is the amount of stars you’ve parried at the  time of generation for that particular item,  

Not the total amount of stars you parry. This means that once all the beneficial   items (Life Crystals, Statues, Pots, etc.)  are done generating, there’s no point parrying   more stars. All the good stuff’s already done  generating and set in stone, so at that point,  

You’re just creating more traps for yourself! The last beneficial step that takes advantage   of the star minigame is “Pots”, so once you  see the steps that come after it, which are   “Hellforge” or “Spreading Grass”, you want to  immediately stop parrying stars. Any parrying  

After “Pots” are done generating won’t create any  more beneficial spawns, only more traps, so don’t!  Each star you save yourself from uselessly  parrying will save you from adding an extra   1.05, 1.6, or 2.1 traps, depending on world  size. So, if you really, really, hate traps,  

Not parrying a few useless stars could save  you a few traps in the sea of hundreds.  2. Drill-boosted blockswap Unmodified, drills are faster   than pickaxes, but in turn have many other  disadvantages. That is, they are barred from   all mining speed bonuses – which actually  makes them worse than pickaxes in most  

Situations – and they have a permanent -1 range. But what if those disadvantages just… went away?  Well, when using block swap, drills  not only receive mining speed boosts,   they also don’t have penalized range. This means  drills grant abnormally fast block swapping,  

Much faster than a pickaxe can, with no drawbacks. This is great, but it doesn’t really help much   since block swapping doesn’t actually let you  mine anything. Regardless, this tidbit may still   be marginally useful for some of you out there.  Pickaxes, though? I think they’re still better. 

3. More walls means NPCs move in faster There’s a lot of stuff behind NPC   spawn mechanics but basically… the way that NPCs work is that,   once they are ready to spawn, they begin  to scan the world for suitable houses.  

This works by choosing tiles at random (with a  bias for Surface tiles) until a tile is chosen   that is the wall of a suitable NPC house. Once  a suitable wall is chosen, the NPC will move in. 

Logically, this means that more walls = more  chance to get chosen in the random sample = faster   NPC move-in time, with diminishing returns. So if your house is teeny or missing walls,   and no NPCs are moving in, you might  want to consider building a larger house  

Or simply building more houses, which will  increase potential wall area for spawning.  Speaking of missing walls though… 4. Wall-less houses  Believe it or not, this is possible. Houses don’t  actually need background walls to work if you  

Place them right – as long as there is no wall gap  four blocks or greater, a house can be suitable.  In this house, we take advantage of this by using  platforms as floor, ceiling, door, and walls.  These platforms act as the siding, while  these platforms act like background walls,  

Bisecting the house in a way where there  is no wall gap four blocks or wider. Note   how the inner wall is offset to make it act like a  background wall and not a siding wall – otherwise,   it would simply say the room is too small. This house and other similar designs work as  

NPC housing, but NPCs will never spawn here.  If you remember from last tip, NPCs move in   based on background walls, so a wall-less house  will literally never naturally spawn NPCs. So,   to make use of this house, you have to make  sure to manually assign NPCs to live there,  

Otherwise they will never fill. And lastly,  5. Single NPC pylons Ever found it slightly   inconvenient to get two NPCs to move in to  make a pylon? Well, you actually only need   one NPC to get a pylon. Managing just one NPC’s  preferences is much simpler than juggling two,  

So this makes the process much easier. This is because town slimes count as an   NPC for pylon eligibility, so simply move in  a town slime with any NPC in their house. Note   that this doesn’t require you to build a new  house can share a house with an existing NPC. 

As town slimes also have no happiness, as long  as the one NPC likes the biome it’s living in,   it should be happy enough to sell you the pylon. Once you get the pylon, it should work with just  

The two there, so this can be a great way to  set up camps and pylon outposts quickly and   efficiently. Huzzah! Hello!  If you enjoyed this video consider  subscribing, as it helps out the   channel and myself greatly. I appreciate it. Credit to mhykhol and the Terraria speedrunning  

Community for much of these strats; links  are given below, so thank you to them.  Either way though, thank you for watching as well,  and good day and good bye. See you next week.

A compendium of marginally-useful Terraria strats
wall less house
discord: https://discord.com/invite/yJrCt9YFz5

#terraria

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:10 1. Getfixedboi trap minimization in star minigame
2:10 2. Drills with mining speed boosts! (But only in blockswap)
2:56 3. More walls means NPCs move in faster
3:40 4. A house… with no walls!
4:37 5. A single NPC pylon setup

Credits:
mhykhol
Terraria Speedrunners’ document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vwoYSicbUg0jIBHizFIkDdCpIK7hg5hhyvEGqB7L3pM/edit

Music:
Terraria – Mushrooms
Terraria – Alt Underground
Terraria – Town Day

Mods and Packs:
Foundry & Alchemy (Pack) – https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2440505684
Fancy Lighting [Ultra Preset] (Mod) – https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2822950837
Stanberry Font (Pack) –
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2559652586
Stormdark UI (Pack) –
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2448259079
DragonLens (Cheat Mod) –
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2939737748

A compendium of marginally-useful Terraria strats