Terraria Story

They call it… Terraria:

	Hello, if you are reading this, you’ve somehow found my journal. My name’s Darren, I’m 6 feet tall and weigh 198 pounds, I enjoy basketball and watching sports, I can’t remember much else about my life, it’s all like a hazy dream… but I’m pretty sure where I lived looked nothing like this place I’m in now. I don’t know what may happen to me, but so far I’ve just woken up in the middle of some strange woods with a back-pack that seems able to carry more things than physically possible, and without ever changing weight! I’m wearing some gray slacks, blue sneakers, and a red shirt. I found a large copper knife-like thing, a copper pickaxe for whatever reason, and a copper axe. Oh, I forgot: this journal was lying on the ground next to a metal stick with strange markings; it seems to be able to write things on paper, so that’s what I’m using right now. Anyways, I think I should look around a bit; the sun is high in the sky.

	The ground is grassy; there are trees everywhere and hills in every direction. Some rocks litter the surface, flowers and bushes. Then I hear something, it sounds like something squishing in a container, I turn my head and see a large slime-like blob. It’s roughly half my size. I grab my knife just to be safe. It then jumps at me, knocking me over, I get up quickly and stab at it over and over until it finally bursts open, I take some of the fallen gel that looks solid it and put it in my pack, just in case it ends up being useful. I was a little scraped up, but the wounds seemed to be closing at an insanely fast rate.

	As I was watching my cuts close before my eyes, I hear from behind me; “Greetings, Darren. Is there something I can help you with?” I turn around and see some guy leaning on a tree, dressed in worn-looking jeans, sneakers, and a gray-green button down shirt. “Uh, yeah, what is this place?” I ask hesitantly. “Well, this is a land that goes by the name ‘Terraria’, it’s very dangerous if you’re not prepared for the monsters that inhabit it,” the man replies with a cocky grin. “My name’s Luke by the way. I am here to give you advice on what to do next. I recommend that you talk with me anytime you get stuck.” “Alright… what am I supposed to be doing then?” I raise an eyebrow at him. “You might want to start by chopping down some trees to get wood, that’s one of the most important items in Terraria,” he says, gesturing to the trees around me.

	I swing my surprisingly light axe at the bottom of a tree until it bursts into a bunch of wood pieces. “Well, I’m pretty sure that’s not normal…” I mumble to myself. Shrugging off the strange physics of Terraria, I assume that’s just how things are; I continue chopping trees, gathering the wood in my seemingly bottomless backpack. On my eighth tree, I look over at Luke, who is sitting on a stump, petting a bunny, looking up at me with a raised eyebrow. “You have enough wood there?” He asks simply. “Well I guess I do, there’s over a hundred pieces of wood in my pack now.” I reply, looking into my backpack. He gets up and brushes his hands off on his pants as the bunny jumps away at the sudden movement, “Alright, next step is to build a workbench, trust me, you’ll need one to craft anything interesting.” I take out ten pieces of wood and place the wood in a workbench-shape and with a puff of smoke, it becomes a workbench! ‘This is really weird, but I guess I should be glad that it’s really easy to make things.’ I think to myself.

	Standing next to my new workbench I look at my backpack now and there’s another book in it, it says ‘CRAFTING’ in bold letters on the front. I open it up and see a large list of things I can make. Seeing ‘wooden hammer’, I quickly make one of those with eight pieces of wood. Then I make a ‘wooden sword’ because it has much better reach than my knife-like thing. There’s also a way to make torches! I take the gel out and combine it with my wood to make nine torches. “You might want to get started on your house, Darren, the sky is getting darker.” Luke says, leaning on the workbench, looking at me with a serious expression. “What comes at night?” I ask hesitantly. “Things that will kill you due to your lack of weapons or armor,” he replies with a frown. “You’d better build a shelter of some kind.”

	I grab some wood and start placing the floor on the ground, then build up the framework of the house, just high enough that I can reach the ceiling, then fill in the ceiling, grab the workbench from outside with my hammer, put it on my new floor, build some walls, fill them in and then, as a final touch, I add a door on either side of my house and put up two torches so I can see.

	Luke comes inside and looks around, “Not bad, rookie, not bad at all. Could you build us a couple of chairs so we can sit? A table would be nice too.” “Who says you get to live here? Go build your own house!” I yell at him, no way am I sharing my room with a stranger. “Sadly, I cannot. I’ve been cursed, you see. I cannot die permanently, nor can I build or craft things, but I’m filled with all the knowledge of all of Terraria,” replies Luke, looking at a wall grimly. Knowing there’s more behind that story but not wanting to press the issue at the moment, I make two chairs and put them on opposite sides of the workbench.

	“So, what should I do at night?” I ask, trying to make some small talk. “For now, you should just take it easy, ask some questions and such, I’ll answer whatever I can,” says Luke, sitting down and putting his elbows on the table, resting his chin on his hands. Before I can start organizing all the questions in my head that I want to ask, we hear groaning and banging on the doors to the house. “What is that?” I ask shakily. “Zombies, poor souls who lost their way in Terraria before I could find them and were bitten,” Luke cringes while looking at a door.

	“What else is out there at night?” I hold my wooden sword at the ready, should they break in somehow. “Flying eyeballs… they can kill you at the moment in less than ten fly-bys. Just be glad they’re only the little ones. When the Eye of Cthulu awakens… well, let’s just hope that doesn’t happen until you’re ready for it.” Luke says with a worried look. “Wait, you mentioned that you can never die permanently… is that the same for me?” I ask hopefully. Luke shrugs his shoulders. “So far, it seems that adventurers vary, person to person. Some of them die forever; which we label ‘hardcore characters’, some simply lose all of their belongings; which are dubbed ‘med-core characters’, but most of the adventurers who come to these parts seem to be incapable of permanent death, or ‘soft-core characters’. The only thing that seems to be a constant is that death, if you don’t die permanently, will send you back to wherever it is you call home. I met some adventurers that used suicide as a quick way of getting themselves home because all they had to worry about losing was some money.”

	I looked at Luke with wide eyes, “so how do you know who will do what when they die?” He looked at me oddly and got up. Then he reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. “Well, when I touch people, a little name label pops up over them, it shows me what health they have and the coloration of the name tells me about their character. Your name, Darren, is colored white, meaning you’re ‘soft-core’. A green name is ‘med-core’ and a ‘hardcore’ character would be blue.” He pulled away his hand as a large thud hit the roof. “Demon eyes, the flying eyeballs, they bump into things, trying to get at adventurers. They know where you are, but not how to get to you, so they just thud against whatever’s closest.” I sighed and went to the table and sat down, Luke joined me. “You’d better be sure to remember all of this shit, because I won’t be telling it again,” Luke sighed as he leaned back in his chair.

[and that's all I've written so far - Calli L/Kircala]