Guide:Practical Tips

This is a Guide page. This means the page will walk you through a specific task, strategy, or enemy/boss fight.

There are many things in Terraria which are not evident from the get-go, and many other things that a player would definitely do different on a rerun of the game. It's true that much of the joy lies in exploring, but if that's your poison then you wouldn't be in this wiki now, would you?

NPCs

• You'll be getting a lot of NPCs – arrange a building that you can keep expanding (upwards is best). Also, to avoid possible Corruption/Crimson contamination in the future, it can be helpful to dig a 4-5 block trench around your house.

Items

General

• Stacks of items can be bought and crafted quickly by holding the right mouse button.
• You'll be gathering a lot of stuff, so it's best to separate your chests - one for ores and bars, next to an Anvil and Furnace. One for potion materials, next to a Placed Bottle or Alchemy Table. One for potions, one for weapons, one for equipables next to a Tinkerer's Workshop, and one for crafting materials.
• All Piggy Banks and all Safes share the same space – you can leave one at home, and take one with you, effectively tripling your carry-able items! However, Piggy Banks require flat furniture surfaces to set on, so take a Work Bench or some platforms as well. In the  Desktop and  Console versions, you can get the Money Trough  during a Blood Moon, meaning if you obtain one, you no longer have to carry around Piggy Banks.
• Even with full health, Heart Crystals can still be used to craft Heart Lanterns, which provide health regeneration.
• Don't run around with your money in the inventory. If you die, you'll probably have trouble retrieving it. Consider placing it in a Piggy Bank or Safe periodically.
• Try not to fight Voodoo Demons above lava, otherwise they will drop the Guide Voodoo Doll into it, and the Wall of Flesh will spawn.
• Don't be reckless when exploring areas with Hardmode enemies. Players usually enter Hardmode feeling confident that they can handle anything, but Hardmode enemies will quickly break this illusion. Additional dismay may ensue if you lose your coins and items and be unable to retrieve them.

Equipment

• Make a Hook after getting your first 15 Gems of any kind. This makes exploration of caves becomes much easier, and doesn't require you to get a Hook.
• If you can withstand screen flips, Gravitation Potions can be your best friend for vertical mobility. With precautions and practice, this can easily eliminate the need for an arena and can save you some resources to explore the Space biome.
• Fishing up a Reaver Shark from the ocean, while possibly being time-consuming, allows you to skip all the mandatory pre-Hardmode pickaxes – it has the same pickaxe power as the Molten Pickaxe and is faster.
• Don't jump down a large hole or cave without an extra jump or Lucky Horseshoe. If you don't have those, consider using the Rope to safely descend.
  • As a rule of thumb, you should not jump down if you can't see the glow of a torch or glowstick that you threw down.
• Always upgrade your Pickaxe/Drill in Hardmode. They are mandatory for progressing to the next ore tier. The order is: Cobalt / Palladium, Mythril / Orichalcum and finally Adamantite / Titanium.
• The Wings Ascent speed can be greatly increased by equipping a Frog Leg.
• Every Crystal Shard from The Hallow can be crafted into 100 Crystal Darts , but unlike other darts, these ricochet and auto-aim, making clearing out mobs a piece of cake.

Combat

• Starting the battle as soon as the sun sets (at 7:30 p.m.) will provide the maximum amount of time to defeat nocturnal bosses.
• Prepare your Boss-fighting arena with adequate lighting, Campfires and Heart Lanterns for health regeneration, and Stars in Bottles for mana regeneration if you use magic.
•   Sunflowers provide the Happy! buff to players within a 50-tile radius, which grants a +10% movement speed bonus and 17% reduction in enemy spawn rate.
• Always bring with you at least one stack of Lesser, Normal, Greater or Super Healing Potions  before doing anything: relying only on natural Health Regeneration is not a good idea.
  • The same goes for Lesser, Normal, Greater or Super Mana Potions   , if you use Magic.
• It is suggested to build houses for the Dryad and the Nurse NPCs in your arena. The former casts the Dryad's Blessing  buff, which increases your defense and provides you with a thorns-like effect, while the latter can heal and remove debuffs instantly, at the cost of some coins.
• Bosses are displayed on the Minimap: Follow the boss's icon to track it when you're struggling to find it. You can identify the boss icons by checking their respective wiki pages.
• Once you have freed the Mechanic in the Dungeon, you can use Wire to enhance your arena with Traps and helpful Heart and Star Statues. The former help to damage the enemies, though be careful to set them up correctly in order not to hurt yourself during the battle. The latter will spawn heart and star pickups, respectively. Connect these devices to timers.
• It may be useful to summon and kill the Eye of Cthulhu before summoning any harder boss in order to spawn an extra one-use pool of hearts.
• Remember to use the Sharpening Station , Ammo Box   , Crystal Ball and Bewitching Table  before you go to explore or battle Bosses / Invasions. These will give class-specific boosts that are useful to take. They respectively give Sharpened , Ammo Box   , Clairvoyance and Bewitched .

World

• For quick trips to the various layers or the world, a hellevator can be a very useful structure. Dig a vertical shaft from underneath your base down to The Underworld and consider placing Ropes to conveniently ascend and descend.
• Don't look for Hardmode ores in the Underground Corruption, Crimson, or Hallow when you first start Hardmode unless you are very confident in your skill. Instead, if you have dug one, a hellevator is a good place to start looking.
• Hardmode ores cannot be found in all layers:
  • Cobalt / Palladium Ore can be found in all Underground layers;
  • Mythril / Orichalcum Ore can be found in Cavern layers;
  • Adamantite / Titanium Ore can only be found in lower Cavern layer (which is where Lava replaces Water).

Other

•   Pressing the Left Ctrl (Alt on Macs and pressing down the right joystick on Xbox) key changes your mining style to Smart Cursor, which is extremely useful for strip mining.
• You can descend relatively fast by auto-focusing the mining and digging a 2-block-wide shaft.
•   Make sure not to place Banners around areas where their correlating monsters will not spawn.
• You can right click with any Summon weapon on an enemy or boss to have your minions target it. You can tell an enemy is targeted when a purple circle appears over it and the enemy or boss starts trailing purple particles.
• If your mouse has side-buttons you can rebind them to restore Health, use Buff items or to restore Mana.