Having some fun with Terraria’s housing guidelines (unlivable)

Having some fun with Terraria’s housing guidelines (unlivable)

There’s no shortage of people wanting to skimp on NPC housing. After all, fancy houses don’t give you any tangible benefit, so it makes sense in most cases to do only the bare minimum needed to move an NPC in. If you wanted to do that, there’s no shortage of skimpy house designs. There are classic designs like the 4×8 dirt hut, the 3×10 tall shared-wall mini, or the dynamite hole. If you’re a bit more creative or crafty, you might even go for the speedrunner platform shack, converted cabin or even something wallless like the bisected platform or the underground snake. Regardless of your situation, there’s always a cheap-and-dirty house design for your needs. However, the reason you’re here today isn’t to learn about cheap and efficient house designs. There’s a nonillion videos and guides about that. What we’re here to do today is to flaunt the Terraria housing code – that is, not to create the most efficient house, but the most unlivable one. It should be the most annoying, deadly, hazardous, and impractical house imaginable – one that nobody would want to build in their run – but one that is still deemed suitable by Terraria’s exalted book of building guidelines. So, what is this house? Well, let’s follow the book. The first thing a house must satisfy is a size & wall requirement. The size requirement is relatively absolute – there isn’t any getting around the minimum tile requirement, but we can mess with the wall requirement. You see, you don’t need to fully wall a house – you only need to fill in walls so that there are no gaps wider than four blocks wide within your house’s structure. By being deliberate with our house’s frame design, we can achieve the minimum house size requirement while never needing to have a gap larger than four blocks, so we don’t need any walls. This ensures the NPC has a terrible experience – in fact, they’ll actually never move in without walls. This also has the added benefit of making the house’s exterior warped and annoying, so that’s a plus too. The second thing we can flaunt is the block requirement. Terraria houses, like all houses, are meant to be built with solid walls to form a cohesive separation between inside and outside. So, what if we just didn’t? Bubble blocks are a true, full block, but unlike any other block, they are completely pass-through – You can even fall through them unlike platforms. Despite this, they are a valid building material. By building our house out of bubble blocks, we are now making a house that effectively has no physical walls. Combine this with the fact that it has no background walls and we get a house that has basically no permanence at all and fails at the main purpose of "shelter". Unfortunately though, we can’t build the entire frame out of bubble blocks, since we can’t place furniture on them. While this is sadly non-negotiable, we can still goof around with this requirement a bit. You see, normally, a house would require some kind of door to be valid. However, we can make these three solid blocks pull double duty and replace one or two of them with platforms. This achieves the same original purpose of supporting the furniture, but at the same time, these platforms are now considered valid doors. Despite the fact that no NPC will ever be able to fit their inflexible, terribly wide body through this one-tile opening, it is still considered a "door", and as such we are able to create a house without any "official" entrances or exits. Take that firefighters! And lastly, we have ambience. You’d think that nobody wants to live in the inside of a steel mill or at the bottom of Lake Superior, but the housing code says it’s absolutely A-OK. What I mean is that liquids are excluded from house calculations completely. This means, that, yes, I can pull a 2024 hurricane and drown my house in water, and NPCs will still be dying to move in on account of the sub-$1,000 rent and board certification. Other liquids, like honey, shimmer, and yes, lava also show the same effect of being left out of calculations. Watch as this newly minted salesman teleports home on his own for a good night’s sleep and gets immediately gets incinerated by forty tons of molten-hot lava. Remember kids, it isn’t murder if he did it by himself. In the end, this lava-filled shape-accursed wall-less door-lacking minimally-spaced bubble home is the most cursed functional house that I could create within the bounds of suitability. Bonus points for managing to make the NPC move into an evil biome using sunflower spam, though I guess he won’t really be thinking of that while burning to death in lava. So, next time you have a bone to pick with the Angler, simply offer to reassign his unit. You won’t get any complaints from him afterward, after all, you are a good landlord, aren’t you? Hello! If you enjoyed this episode of NPC sadism, consider subscribing, as only a quarter of you currently are. Similar videos are on the left and right. Either way though, thank you for watching, and good day and good bye. See you next week!

Having some fun with Terraria’s housing guidelines
corn worship
pointless dead hole: pointless dead discord: https://discord.com/invite/yJrCt9YFz5

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:04 1. A labyrinth without walls
1:45 2. Who needs solid walls?
2:32 3. Impassable “doors”
3:04 4. Air is optional (and so is your life)
3:45 Conclusion

Music:
Terraria – Town Night
Terraria – Town Day

Mods and Packs:
Foundry & Alchemy (Pack) – https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2440505684
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
Better Zoom (QoL) –
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2562953970
Character Stats (QoL) –
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3033200611

Having some fun with Terraria’s housing guidelines