Terraria: Sir Digsalot and the Eye of Cthulhu

So I fire up Terraria to take Sir Digsalot and his fancy new phaseblade out boss-hunting, and what’s this? 1.0.5… a new version? The changelog is just crazy. 8 new enemies. Over 50 new items. Potions that give buffs. The guide now has a little spot you can drop an item into, and it will show you all the things you can craft with it. NPC shopkeepers have different inventories at different times. It goes on and on. Some of the new features won’t be seen unless I start a new world, because they’re set during world creation. This really isn’t a big a deal – Terraria is a game where you’re meant to start new worlds, and visit other people’s words, with your continuing character (hence the importance of the piggy bank). Sir Digsalot is kind of committed to this world right now, so we’ll be sticking with Quarteria for a while longer.

Minecraft and Terraria are perfect examples of the new attitude of many game developers. Sure, the games go on sale at some point, but they’re not really “done”. The developers view their game as a service more than a product, and just keep adding and fixing and tweaking, mixing their vision with the player’s requests and ideas. One day, you fire up the game and it’s twice as compelling as the last time you played.

After the jump, it’s finally time to kill that great big eye

Sir Digsalot has been sidetracked from killing his first boss for far too long. I take my 10 lenses, harvested from the corpses of dozens of Demon Eyes, and create a Suspicious Looking Eye. No, really, that’s what it’s called. I also build a battle platform a little ways above the ground near my home base, so I have a nice clear place to run back and forth and can see bosses coming up from below.

Now I just wait until nightfall, use the eye, and…

God damnit! Just when I’m getting ready to deal with a very large ocular enemy, the Goblin Army event kicks off. This happens randomly from time to time, once your character has a certain amount of health. I’m about to get 150 goblins running at my base from the left side. Goblin Sorcerers will teleport around and shoot magic through the walls at me. It’s a colossal pain in the ass. If I had dug deep enough to find lava, I could take a bucket and haul some back to the surface to make a lava moat trap, which is terribly effective. As it stands, Sir Digsalot will have to slaughter them all with good old-fashioned violence.

Goblins drop these little weapons called Spiky Balls, which do very little damage but actually sit around on the ground like nastly little caltrops. And they drop ’em by the bucketfull, so in time, the goblins will have given Sir Digsalot the simplest means to their own demise. As obnoxious as the goblin army event is, it’s at least good money, particularly at this stage of the game. There’s one other possible perk, too: a goblin has a very small chance of dropping rocket boots, but that almost never happens.

Except it did! I’m soaring through the air with the greatest of ease! They should call him Sir Rocketsalot! Uh… Sir Soarsalot? The Bootsateer? I dunno, I’ll work on it.

Once the last of the army is defeated, and night has fallen, it’s time to use the Suspicious Looking Eye.

The Eye of Cthulhu! This disgusting giant Visine ad flies around and shoots little eyes at you, before changing (in typical video game fashion) into a giant flying eyeball with teeth that tries to devour you. With a good platform to battle on, a good weapon, some quality arrows, and a nice stack of healing potions, he’s not too tough. It’s not long until Sir Digsalot is triumphant.

Huzzah! And the bards shall sing 8-bit chiptunes of my victory! Bosses drop good money and loot, but more importantly, they drop demonite ore. Together with shadow scales from the Eater of Worlds boss, you can craft some really awesome gear. In fact, Sir Digsalot is feeling pretty saucy. He’s going to buy a bunch of dynamite and go bust some more shadow orbs, because every 3rd one you break summons the Eater of Worlds, and he thinks he can take him.

On my way back to the corruption, in the middle of the night, I stumble across this dapper fellow.

He seems just like any other zombie, only with more hit points. Oh, and the top hat, which you get when he dies. Sir Digsalot equips it in his “social” head slot – a nice feature of the game that lets you equip something just for looks, separate from the gear you equip for its stats. Just before the corruption, I set a new temporary spawn point, and head out to hunt shadow orbs.