Well, so I finally bought Terraria when it was on sale this week on steam, going to be trying it out when I get home from work today... been watching a bunch of videos and reading the wiki to get some idea of what to do, anyone else new or restarted with 1.2?
Yeah, restarted with 1.2, built a skycity and skypirate ship, conquered hardmode, got most of the endgame stuff. Hmm, starting out your first goals should be a workbench, chair, small house, and some chests to store things. Make wood armor immediately, then a forge for metal bars. Then start digging down til you find some cave systems to explore for metal ore to make into bars and then armor/equipment. You may also find a bow and large numbers of flaming arrows useful in the early game. Once you have a decent (iron/lead or better) armor set it's pretty much more exploring until you get enough life to spawn the first boss, and kill that with shurikens for better tools. Don't forget to keep building housing for all the NPC's (counting hardmode there's 18 I think, and each one needs a house with a table, chair, light source, and back wall).
Yeah been playing for a bit, currently got gold tools and iron armor. Been world-hopping a bit because the corruption/crimson ended up too close to, and already corrupting, some important biomes(like jungle, important to me because I want the craftables, thorn chakram, jungle armor, and ivy whip). Currently built a fairly large flying house, going to add some zombie traps and flyer traps to it.
Don't worry too much about biome spread. In non-hardmode nothing spreads, and in hardmode there's a very handy tool that can be used to manually spread biomes wherever you like.
I actually had corrupted jungle pretty much right off the bat, including corrupted underground jungle. But this latest world is good, already been down far enough in the underground jungle to see lava, found several mushroom biomes too. Went from 200 to 400 hp in one spelunking trip, only missing the jungle helmet for the set now, got the ivy whip(it's great) and a thorn chakram too(also nice). Also got an emerald staff, water bolt, and gold bow(tons of burning and frostburn arrows), as weapons go. Oh and a flare gun, very useful! Just bought a mining helmet too. Oh and found the dryad's door, don't have the key of course... and found the golem's spawn room(can't reach it of course). Also cleaned out the cheats in the oceans... no diving helmet. :/ Oh well, got fins and reed at least.
The biomes can spawn adjacent/overlapping, but corruption/crimson won't actually spread until you kill wall of flesh. You can test it by placing ebonstone on a patch of isolated grass and keeping an eye on it. Also, the diving helmet is a 1 in 50 drop from sharks, so you can still get it via farming if you don't want to wait and craft the seashell. The flare gun is probably my favorite low-level addition this last patch. It's incredibly convenient, forever.
I thought they spread before hardmode, and hardmode just speeds it up, guess I learned something new. Btw this latest world has a crimson right smack in the middle of a quite large ice biome. Only found two sky islands though, and didn't get much useful from them(specifically, no horseshoe! I did get a starfury, but I was unimpressed by it). Killed a bunch of cthulu eyes/brains, built all the crimtane stuff I want, Btw: totally underwhelmed with bows, even the crimtane one, and even with fire arrows. My ruby staff on the other hand is non-stop murder, only ever run out of mana against bosses(and then briefly), the thorn chakram is kinda nice too and a good backup. The stafff outperforms water bolt against the bosses too due to massively greater mana efficiency(mine's 28 damage for 5 mana, my waterbolt is like 18 for 14) and projectile speed, despite signifcantly lower fire rate. Mining meteor is REALLY annoying, gotten killed twice, burning to death.
Started hardmode... yeah no kidding. I get killed trying to get anywhere aboveground at night. 3 deaths in short order, the last one was to a wyvern... (I've got 400 hp, full crimson armor). My weapons now feel inadequate...
Make sure you use the pwnhammer to smash up some evil altars to get the new ore to spawn, then have a sprint around the caves you've already explored to grab some cobalt or palladium (whichever you get). Spelunker potions help immensely, especially since ore clusters are now marked on your map for later. You'll notice a huge difference with the new armor. There is one more huge boost you can get in hardmode without having to kill any bosses, but I'll lock it away behind spoiler tags just in case: Spoiler: Danger, Will Robinson! Build a house in a glowing mushroom biome (above ground works, now) to get the Truffle NPC to show up and buy the mushroom spear from him. It's VERY powerful for reasons I won't spoil.
Waiting for daytime to do it worked better... got myself a palladium pick and gathering stuff... also my weapon of choice is now a laser rifle, fueled with a mana flower and a couple of stacks of mana potions...
I'm a bit late to the party, but I restarted come 1.2 as well. Worked my way back up now and have been co-opping with a friend. At this point I'm about done with the game again, not much left aside from grinding the Pumpkin Moon for missing drops, and a few from Plantera I haven't found yet, as well as finishing some teleporter wiring that I've simply been too lazy to actually just go ahead and do. All that said, 1.2 was a great update. Far better than 1.1 which I pretty much hated.
