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Getting Started in Terraria

By ScotUpdated Sources checked

Tactical Quick Answer

Spend your first Terraria day chopping at least 200 wood and killing slimes for gel, then build a fully enclosed shelter with background walls you placed yourself, a door, and torches. A first shelter has no size rule, so seal it and move on. Craft a Wooden Sword, a bow, and wooden armor at a workbench, and put the Copper Shortsword in a chest instead of dropping it, because the Zenith recipe needs one. Stay inside once zombies and demon eyes spawn, and mine a tunnel under your house through the night.

The first few hours of Terraria define your momentum for the rest of the playthrough. You spawn into a new world with basic copper tools and no instructions. If you waste daylight, you die to zombies on the first night. This guide walks you through the exact steps you need to take to establish a secure base and prepare for exploration.

Gathering Initial Resources​

Your first priority is wood. Use your copper axe to chop down the trees immediately surrounding your spawn point. Collect at least 200 wood. This gives you enough material to build a shelter, craft a workbench, and make your first set of wooden armor.

While chopping trees, watch out for green and blue slimes. They are a primary source of gel, which you need for torches. Do not ignore slimes early on. You want a large stockpile of gel before night falls.

Building Your First Shelter​

Pick a flat area near your spawn point. If the ground is uneven, use your pickaxe to flatten it out. Build a simple rectangular frame out of wood. A first shelter has no size requirement at all, so make it big enough to move around in and seal it completely. Size starts to matter later: once you want the room to house an NPC, or to set your spawn point with a bed, it needs at least 60 and fewer than 750 tiles counting the frame. Build with room to grow and you will not have to tear it down.

Once the frame is built, craft a workbench from your inventory crafting menu and place it inside. Stand next to the workbench to craft wooden walls. Fill in the background of your shelter completely. If you leave gaps in the background walls, monsters spawn inside your house.

Craft a wooden door and replace one of the lower wall blocks with it. Finally, craft torches using wood and gel, and place a few on the interior walls.

Note the difference between foreground blocks like wood and stone and background walls. Enemies cannot spawn in front of a safe wall, and almost every wall you place yourself counts as safe. Natural walls do not, even though they look identical. If you dug your shelter into a hillside, the dirt wall already behind you is unsafe and things will spawn straight through it, so hammer it out and put your own walls up in its place. Fill the background tile for tile, because one bare tile is a valid spawn point. Walls only stop spawning, not walking, so the door still has to do its job.

Crafting Basic Gear​

With your shelter secure, focus on gear. The default Copper Shortsword stabs toward your cursor in any direction, so the old complaint about a horizontal-only swing has not applied since 1.4.0.1. Its real problem is 5 damage and about one tile of reach. Put it in a chest instead of dropping it. The Zenith, the best melee weapon in the game, needs a Copper Shortsword in its recipe, and a world that rolled tin instead of copper gives you no ore to craft a replacement.

Stand by your workbench and craft a Wooden Sword, a wooden bow, and a full set of wooden armor. The Wooden Sword swings overhead in an arc with far longer reach, which makes it much better against flying enemies. Craft wooden arrows at the same bench, where one wood plus one stone block gives you 25 of them.

If you have extra time before sunset, dig a small tunnel straight down from inside your shelter. This gives you a safe place to mine stone and copper ore during the night.

Surviving the First Night​

When the sun sets and the background music changes, zombies and demon eyes spawn on the surface. Stay inside your shelter. Ordinary zombies cannot open doors on a normal night, so a closed door holds. Two things change that. Blood Moons let every zombie open doors, and they start rolling at a 1 in 9 chance per night once any player has more than 120 maximum health, which is your third Life Crystal. Goblin Peons and Goblin Thieves during a Goblin Army destroy doors outright. Both have the same cheap fix: enemies can only push a door inward, so set a workbench or a wooden platform against the inside of it and it will not budge.

Spend the night mining the tunnel you started. Look for copper, iron, or lead ore. If you find stone, mine it. A furnace takes 20 stone blocks, 4 wood, and 3 torches at your workbench, and it smelts ore into bars. Five iron or lead bars make an anvil at the same bench, and the anvil is where bars turn into better armor and weapons.

Watch the ceiling as you dig. Boulder traps sit in the roof of natural caves wired to a pressure plate, and a boulder deals 140 damage on Classic difficulty against your 100 health. Newly generated traps use actuators and not active stone blocks, so the old trick of spotting an odd block no longer helps. Look for the pressure plate on the floor instead.

Repeat this cycle. Explore the surface during the day, and mine underground at night.

Essential Early Habits​

Using the Guide NPC​

The Guide NPC acts as an interactive database. Show him any item and he lists every recipe that uses it as an ingredient, along with the crafting station each one needs. He works one level outward, showing what your item can become and not a full tree, so work forward from raw materials instead of backward from the thing you want. He also says nothing about Shimmer transmutations.

The crafting window itself does more of this work than it used to. It has a search bar and filter tabs, you can craft directly from nearby chests, and right-clicking any crafting station opens a menu filtered to just that station's recipes.

Securing Your Capital​

Dying causes you to drop hard-earned coins. To protect your wealth, purchase a Piggy Bank from the Merchant as soon as he moves in. The Piggy Bank acts as a secure, portable storage system. Coins placed inside are safe from death penalties.

Building Boss Arenas​

Attempting to fight early bosses on natural, uneven terrain almost guarantees failure due to poor mobility. Before engaging any boss, construct a Boss Arena. Build layered grids of wooden platforms in the sky to allow vertical movement.

Place one Campfire for the Cozy Fire buff, which adds half a health per second and 10 percent to your regeneration rate across a 170 by 125 tile box. That covers a normal arena on its own, so a second campfire only helps if yours is wider than that. Put a Heart Lantern beside it, because the two stack.

Sunflowers cover the same size box with the Happy! buff, worth about 21 percent movement speed and roughly a fifth fewer enemy spawns. They only sit on regular, Hallowed, Jungle or Ash grass, so lay grass blocks down for them. Corrupt, Crimson and Mushroom grass all refuse them, as do wooden platforms, bare dirt, and planter boxes. Clear your tombstones between attempts too. Five nearby start turning your arena into a Graveyard and seven complete it, and each Sunflower you plant cancels out one tombstone, so the two fight each other directly. A finished Graveyard does not raise the spawn rate itself. What it does is weaken the spawn reduction your town NPCs provide, which comes to the same thing if you are fighting near your base.

Frequently Asked Questions​

How much wood do you need at the start of Terraria?

Collect at least 200 wood from the trees around your spawn point. That covers a shelter, a workbench, and your first set of wooden armor.

How big does your first Terraria house need to be?

Your first shelter has no size requirement at all. Seal it and move on. The 60 tile minimum and 750 tile maximum, counted including the frame, apply to NPC housing and to bedrooms where you set a spawn point with a bed.

Why do monsters keep spawning inside my house?

You left gaps, or the walls are natural and not ones you placed. Only safe walls block spawns, and most naturally generated walls are unsafe even though they look identical. Hammer out any natural wall inside your shelter, craft wooden walls at your workbench, and fill the background tile for tile.

Is the Copper Shortsword worth keeping in Terraria?

Keep it, but stop swinging it. Shortswords have stabbed in any direction since 1.4.0.1, so the old hitbox complaint is out of date. The reason to shelve it is 5 damage and about one tile of reach. Store it in a chest, because the Zenith recipe needs a Copper Shortsword and a tin world has no copper ore to craft another. The Wooden Sword swings overhead in a longer arc, which works much better against flying enemies.

What should you do during the first night in Terraria?

Stay inside your shelter and mine the tunnel you dug down from the floor. Look for copper, iron, or lead ore, and gather stone. A furnace takes 20 stone, 4 wood, and 3 torches at a workbench. Watch the ceiling while you dig, because boulder traps deal 140 damage and you have 100 health.