Terraria is EASY to Learn

For me the path of knowledge was this:
1. I played with friends first, and when I had a question they usually had an answer because they played a bit before me.
2. I got curious about something and it has been quite some time in game without me finding a hint so i just googled it.

I did use the guide crafting feature, but did not read any of the game's text on my first playthrough.
I was fairly young when i first played oldschool terraria, so i didn't really have the interest to rely on reading cryptic messages in game to progress

the methods of Learning in game suck and are boring to do and its so much more fuin just looking it up on the wiki

wiki is more accesible...

Crafting was by far the hardest learning I had. That was before the guide even had the option to help. I've played mobile since release. At that point I could read 3-4 tooltips when loading into a world, and those were the only things that guided my initial game knowledge

I think even if you never use the achievements or the guide to find out what to do, you can still find out everything to do to progress in the game. I first played it on the PS3 and know it was a game about mining and exploring so that’s what I did. Blood moon, EoC, King Slime and Goblins all happen naturally so you find out that way that these exist + EoC is findable in chests. When you get a better pickaxe you will find out you can mine ebon stone so you will encounter EoW. Queen Bee and Skeletron are both to be found if you accidentally trigger them by breaking the hive/just going in the dungeon. WoF could be difficult to find out on your own maybe a voodoo doll could accidentally drop in the lava I guess. In hardmode mechs spawn naturally and after defeating them the game tells you to go in the jungle again in the chat so you will discover plantera. Since she drops the temple key you know to go into the temple next to defeat golem and the cultist is also easy to discover.

I fully agree with you bro, but i think mostly the wiki reputation is because there is items like rare drop chance and if you don't know that this peculiar mob will drop it you won't know unless your lucky or you explore everything, knowing where to go and finishing the game is pretty easy yes but doing it at 100% by obtaining every item obtainable in the game can be rather challenging

I’ve said it for several games before where it applies, and I’ll say it for Terraria: if dumbass 8 year old me was able to learn the game just fine, the game isn’t the problem

Tips are also appearing on a screen when you are creating a new world. It's a good chance to read them 😉

Obsessive reader here.
The only times I stopped and said, "okay, now what" was when I was trying to avoid a grind or making a farm.
I was looking for something to do that was more fun for me then clearing out 5 screens of jungle to make an arena and huge paths to move plantera through.

I think the in-game guides are GOOD.
But as someone who works better with long-term goals, just looking up "big gun" on the wiki let's me make a much better plan for what I should do and makes me actually understand WHY I'm doing things.

I started playing on an I pad back when the game had first came out on mobile I played with a freind who basically showed me the ropes and I’ve love the game ever since now have over 700hr on pc and a lot on Xbox

I watched Stampy up to wall of flesh originally, then bought the game. I read. I even look at the controls to see what potential actions exist. Hotkeys for grapple and heal are located there. I am the only of the handful of people I talk to about games, who does these things. I encourage others, but nothing changes. I've pinned it as subconscious reluctance to read. But if Travis also did this eventually, then perhaps the amount of excess and poorly timed advice is repellant. Even I only ever read the guides dialogue as an artificial social gag.

Filtering the fundamentals from the noise is a challenge, something I seem more practiced at. When learning a new card game, I was asked to summarize the instructions. I think the game was one of the numerous versions on uno.

I would suggest promoting the achievements as a fallback when people run out of ideas, and try make a habit of asking the guide 1 hint each time, framed as a goof. Then the rare gold will come at a lower intentional cost.

Most of Terraria's marketing and social media presence makes you think its a "pick up and go" kinda game so having to actually pay attention isn't something new players consider. On the other hand, that might be one of the game's strengths since new players ask around and become part of the community instead of just experiencing a completely contained game.

Personally I blame minecraft slop MLG content for making me assume that Terraria's community would be a similarly screaming pile of children - I only found out that housing was essential to game progression thanks to an autoplay on the second monitor when I wasn't paying attention.

When I started playing terraria my cousin helped me learn. He himself learned from a friend.
My friend had played terraria for years and never beat WOF for 7 years (400 hours of playing). Than he learned and grew. Never used any wiki. When we started playing with eachother he learned a lot from me and I learned a good amount from him. My info was more about bosses and accessories and grinding. His was more about mechanics of the game.

Most of the Guide's advice wasn't around when Terraria was new, and he was massively outdated until a 1.4 update gave him lots of hints (and reflected changes in game progression since then), achievements didn't exist until... 1.3 I think?, and you've already mentioned logistical issues behind loading screen tips (alongside assuming that they weren't in the game at release yet)

A lot of the people who learnt Terraria learnt it before any of these systems were in place

But even with them in place, Terraria was and always will be a wiki game, as it'll always just be More Convenient™ to just check the wiki for something, and this - coupled with many wiki games setting up the expectation that the game just won't teach you - will likely lead many players to just checking the wiki

I think a combination of those two factors is why Terraria still has the reputation of being hard to learn, because a majority of the people who would play it learnt from old Terraria or other survival games that if you want to learn you must check the wiki

And, as a supplementary point, the bestiary didn't even come across as a passing mention in the video, which mentions where enemies can be found and (with enough kills) what they can drop (though this part is largely useless after 50 kills, with particularly rare items it can give some clarity that yes this enemy can indeed drop that item)

In summary;
Terraria offers the tools to learn, but a mixture of many of those features being relatively new and Terraria players being preconditioned to not trust the game to teach them leads to these systems being largely ignored, and they never notice because external means still wind up being more convenient

I would say that a lot of the same stuff with Trevor happened with me. I didn't really notice that achievements helped for a long time, I stayed a lot on the surface, and when I discovered autoselect for mining, I either got bored of mining twice (since autoswing so often selects above the stump) or I didn't think it was worth it, and therefore not replanting. I also didn't know the different uses for the pickaxe or the demon orbs. I think I chanced upon the housing tool after researching how to build suitable housing and after building one by chance (or not because I don't think I would've built chairs or a table (they seem rather useless, especially the chair and I could've used a crafting table, I know)). Some of these things are fine for new players to figure out over time by themselves, but most games don't require you to look at achievements for progression, and if the guide dies, as you acknowledge, they probably won't respawn unless you went through the legwork of building a house.

Honestly. the tools you mentioned are very missable, sure, you might hover over the achievement section and find something from 5 progression stages earlier (like kill queen bee) and just move on without bothering, or getting prompted to build suitable housing, which might've been why I was able to make one house, since it prompts the use of a chair. The guide can be quite difficult at times, since sometimes he'll bring up something you've already observed, like the jungle changing in hardmode without mentioning the boss until a separate message.

every single new player on the motherfucking planet when playing terraria

-doesnt read anything from the guide
-doesnt explore their UI
-hwat is a bestiary
-"guys this game needs a tutorial"

I feel like I had a odd way of entering into the game. I watched the old HappyDays videos, where he did his themed weapon runs, and that taught me the basics that your friends seem to struggle with. Because I knew the basic progression, I would mostly explore biomes, trying to find things that were outside basic to get stronger. All-in-all my first biggest hurtle was being actually good at the skills for the game.

calamity ?

as someone who is new to terraria, I've never used wiki or googled anything, and i still reached Hardmode after which i gave up cuz i didn't had any organised building or anything so i couldn't progress.
if i talk about my experience with terraria then i would say that i loved it, I've rushed the boses but now I'm trying to do everything before Hardmode, and sometimes i just stand inside my home for a whole terraria day listening to the background music and trying to come up with something to do.

This may be a personal thing, but way back when when I first started playing terraria I had to get a kid on the bus to tell me you can right click on the guide to talk to him. This was after the weekend when i had gotten the game and was telling everybody about it at primary school. I had seen the speech bubble but only tried left clicking, after all, that worked for everything else. Also I remember being so shocked after my very first session when mum told me to get off of the computer, and I figured the escape key would get me to the menu, but instead it brought up my inventory! That being said, once i figured out the UI, I don't personally recall terraria being particularly hard to LEARN as a new player, like you say, the guide answers a lot of questions, and I often had a fairly decent idea of what I could do to progress. What put me personally off of the game was how GRINDY it was a a newbie. I'd spend whole session running into the caverns to find a single gold ore vein, die to a black slime and have to run all the way back to the same spot, finally finish mining it, then go digging for 5-10 minutes to find a new ore vein. And then after 2-3 sessions of work, i'd try my fancy new gold gear against skeletron and realise it's not even that good (could potentially have been a skill issue, it was my first time playing after all), and i needed to go digging again to try and get something better. I did end up making it to hard mode on that world, but the power jump of the enemies and realising i'd have to essentially play all of easy mode again before i could get to the next part of the game eventually put me off of terraria... at least until high school, where i made friends with some veterans of the game and decided to give it another whirl. I will say playing with friends made a HUGE difference in sustaining interest in the game.
Anyway, that's my rant about my first time terraria experience. hope this gives some insight.

I learned the game back in 2018 through the wiki, reading it when i had nothing to do in school, like at lunch time. I read just about everything the wiki had pre-1.4

It,s has to many thing to learn every one of us use wiki because in every game when we don,t have any idea we use wiki it.s very easy to learn what we don،t know

even tho i started about 2 year ago, remembering me playing with my cousins in north macedonia almost makes me cry, because we havent seen eachother from then. i am lucky i am going to go there in half a month

Long time lurker but just subscribed recently. I downloaded the game after a long time when I saw your first video about introducing a noob to the game.(So about a month ago) I got my friend into the addiction and she's never played it before. It was so fun learning together. We're struggling but I'm about to finally go into hard mode. Thanks for inspiring me to start playing again! It's so fun to see how much the game has changed over the years and figure out how to get things I've seen in playthroughs


To answer your question: Its not hard to learn theres just ALOT. I have experience through playthroughs so i know what to do somewhat. I still made ny crafting station wrong and didnt realize until a month in. Who knew platforms cut off proximity to crafting or a living loom wasnt the same as a regular one. My explanation is its overwhelming. Learning through the game is possible but i still looked on the wiki to make sure i beat all the bosses in prehardmode. If you know absolutely nothing you dont know whats next. Plus if you get an absolutely terrible world with little to no surface caves it makes it worse. I started in a large world and had to start over in a medium one because of that

funnily enough, me and my brothers actually got really far in the game as little kids without online guides and stuff, and this was back on the old mobile version as well. Funnily enough, old mobile actually had a really helpful feature where by having a crafting material, you'd gain access to all of the recipes that use that crafting material, which is missing from modern terraria.

Also people that complain about it being a wiki game either automatically assume it's as obtuse as minecraft or are too impatient to pay attention to details in game.
I don't mean the tips & guide either, I'm referring to nearly every items' description saying 'material' &/or 'equipable', similarly how most items drop from something sensible.
It's frustratingly depressing how unwilling gamers are to explore and read these days, to think for themselves even.

when i first played terraria my only source of information about how to progress were the achievements and because of them i learned the games progression

I think a part of it comes down to the type of player someone is. An impatient player who just tries to speed through things might think Terraria is difficult to learn. You just need to slow down a bit and pay attention to the hints laid out for you. And yeah, that requires a lot of reading. The guide is great and people need to stop hating him. And for the love of Moon Lord, people need to learn how to read item tool tips! The amount of times I've seen new players ignore items because they didn't properly read the tool tips...

Personally I didn't find Terraria that difficult to learn. The game does teach you the basics, if you just pay attention. Now, to be fair, I had seen some videos of Terraria before I started, so I wasn't going in completely blind. But I did learn the majority on my own. And I only looked at the wiki after learning the basics. Or watched more videos. And I started playing before achievements were a thing so I didn't have those to guide me.

Speaking of learning how to play, currently doing death + legendary, first time playing Calamity, first time trying to beat Terraria in above normal difficulty.

This s**t is DIFFICULT, and I disallowed myself from using the wiki.

Lord have mercy on my soul, because the Eye of Cthulhu will not. 😂😂

Ngl i just bought terraria aaaand i cant figure out how to live longer than 2mins

I don't think it's stupid easy to learn
But, it's one of these games that you'll keep seeing and learning new stuff each time you play, so your first time playing will be nothing like your 10th or even 5th time

With me, I had already watched a full playthrough of the game before I decided to play it. Only now I am starting to play games more blind. 😂

it is kinda obvious why it is difficult to learn Terraria. The tips are out of the way and require a new player to look for them other than the guide. The guide suffers because no one even considers him as a help.

New and Old players got TOO tied to the Wiki , I myself played in offline so i had no wiki so I always tell new people, Use the Guide! Exploring and figuring it out makes the game fun, else its just a kill X to get Y so you can kill boss Z and then moonlord

It's called Exploring

really tho, if you don't know what to do, maybe build something? take your mind off progressing and have fun being creative. it might urge you to find new materials or locations.

All the learning methods you've mentioned are flawed in some way:
- Loading screen tips - Terraria isn't the only/first game to introduce these tips, many other games have them, and in the vast majority of cases (like 99%) those tips are utterly useless, so why would anyone even consider reading them in this specific game? On top of that, these tips only appear while the game is loading, which is a very small window for a game like Terraria, making this method unreliable in the best of cases or unfriendly at the worst (like people with Dyslexia).

- NPC tips - I haven't played a lot of Terraria, but I've played enough to conclude the NPCs are useful at most 10% of the time, and even then it's in a very boring way.

- Achievements - The video mentioned "these achievements appear in the UI next to the inventory" while showing a screen half full of boxes and stats, meaning a player would already have to know what they're doing to even find the damn list! Also, the beauty in games like Terraria and Minecraft is that you are working to advance the game world and your own character; so working towards an achievement you've read on a list defeats the whole purpose.

3min in and 1 complaint already - "loading screens can go by rather quickly unless you have an old or bad computer" - i have a super high end pc, load times have always been long enough to read the tips and then some when loading into the world

Another problem is the reputation. I was making good progress using all of those things (Terraria takes forever to load on my computer, o.o) but when I was working out gear for the WoF, my friend all but told me that the wiki is the only way to play the game.

I have 900 hours in the game and just learned there are achievements beside the inventory.

Terraria was hard but my brother help but I also had to learn things myself because he would do a lot of things that I didn’t know how to do and doing myself would teach me. Also I’m doing summoner only master mode rn and I just beat the last mechanical boss such a struggle doing summoner though. Bye have a great day

while i had plenty of ideas of how to play Terraria at a 'higher level' thanks to watching random stuff about it (manhunts being interesting ways to learn about weapon potentials) or even it coming up at events like GDQ so seeing a speedrun some things do stick. but when i play games, i see no reason not to look through an achievements page (i'm not a crazy must complete EVERYTHING kind of player unless a game really hooks me with good gameplay and music) and even seeing some Modded playthroughs (which does make me wish modding was something more easily available for console players; i very much enjoy having a controller in my hands when i'm playing though Terraria does have some 'interesting' ideas for controller layouts that are more annoying then anything)

It's not just flavor text. You can literally wear a bucket in your head in game. Same with fish bowls.

Modern gamers are just the kind who get stuck for one minute and google it is what made the echo chamber of "terraria is a wiki game"

First time comentong here so bit nervous, I bought terraria recently and the gide helped me so much when i notice the help button also i was using the achievements to know what should i do next. I personaly felt that the wiki for me was useless as from my experience if you dont know what you are searching the wiki is not going to give much besides verry specific stuff. So i just did and im doing at the moment, following what the gides tell me to do and only now i have a idea what i can search in the wiki because of what i learned in the game, also i mostly dont use the wiki because the guide just tells you what items you need and what conditions or where you should be to craft anything! I mostly say this as im also a new player (sorry for any spelling mistakes english is my second language) great video keep going man!

Terraria is NOT easy to learn.

- The loading tips are not reliable - a player needs to be hooked within the first few hours, and even if you are playing an hour at a time, that's only a few chances to see something you need.
- The guide is not reliable. He has a LOT of dialogue, even early on, and it varies from useful to vague to "to get wood, chop down trees." It's easy to see a few "useful" tips and write him off. And even if you don't, if he dies early (and he might!), he doesn't respawn until you build a house. Which you don't know how to do. Because the guide teaches you how, and he's DEAD.
- Achievements are not reliable. I would never open the achievements list in a game like this BECAUSE I would worry that they would tell me what to do. They are spoiling the game.

But none of these are the REAL reason Terraria is hard to learn. The real reason that Terraria is widely viewed as difficult to learn? It's because the early game SUCKS for new players. Even if the tutorial were incredible, the simple fact is that doing anything in the early game is terrible. You dig slowly, you climb slowly, you kill things slowly, and worst of all, you progress out of the early game slowly. Veteran players know how to deal with these problems and where the shortcuts are, but the real problem with early game terraria is that a new player can play for an hour and the game still feels like molasses, so they drop it. The game is hard to learn because the bad confusing part is very front-loaded, and that turns people off.

Before you complain about being called stupid, watch till the end of the video and also ealize I'm also calling myself stupid. It's not literal, I'm just trying to get a point across.