History VideoGame / Terraria

** Duke Fishron, a weird shark-pig boss added as something of an April Fool's joke. Fighting him (by fishing in the ocean with a rare mushroom worm) doesn't trigger any other events, and he doesn't drop any special crafting materials. Good thing, too, because he likes to repeatedly launch himself at you faster than you can dodge.

** And then that got taken BEYOND Eleven with the [[InfinityPlusOneSword Zenith]], which requires the most items in the game to craft. To note, it requires, in total, a Blade of Grass, a Light's Bane or Blood Butcherer, a Fiery Greatsword, a Muramasa, an Excalibur, two Broken Hero Swords (All of which is to make the aforementioned Terra Blade, which is one of the Zenith's ingredients), a Meowmere, a Star Wrath, a Horseman's Blade, an Influx Waver, a Seedler, an Enchanted Sword, a Starfury and a Copper Shortsword. To add to this, the Zenith's attack animation even features all of the swords that build up to it ([[TheLastOfTheseIsNotLikeTheOthers as well as the Bee Keeper and Terragrim, which don't]]).

** And then that got taken BEYOND Eleven with the [[InfinityPlusOneSword Zenith]], which requires the most items in the game to craft. To note, it requires, in total, a Blade of Grass, a Light's Bane or Blood Butcherer, a Fiery Greatsword, a Muramasa, an Excalibur, two Broken Hero Swords (All of which is to make the aforementioned Terra Blade, which is one of the Zenith's ingredients), a Meowmere, a Star Wrath, a Horseman's Blade, an Influx Waver, a Seedler, an Enchanted Sword, a Starfury and a Copper Shortsword. To add to this, the Zenith's attack animation even features all of the swords that build up to it (TheLastOfTheseIsNotLikeTheOthers as well as the Bee Keeper and Terragrim, which don't]]).

** And then that got taken BEYOND Eleven with the [[InfinityPlusOneSword Zenith]], which requires the most items in the game to craft. To note, it requires, in total, a Blade of Grass, a Light's Bane or Blood Butcherer, a Fiery Greatsword, a Muramasa, an Excalibur, two Broken Hero Swords (All of which is to make the aforementioned Terra Blade, which is one of the Zenith's ingredients), a Meowmere, a Star Wrath, a Horseman's Blade, an Influx Waver, a Seedler, an Enchanted Sword, a Starfury and a Copper Shortsword. To add to this, the Zenith's attack animation even features all of the swords that build up to it (as well as the Bee Keeper and Terragrim, which don't).

** The Meowmere is a sword that has a hilt depicting a cat's face, and fires rainbow-trailing cats when swung. It also has the highest base damage of any sword in the game.

* GottaCatchThemAll: Although not directly shown, players can make an optional objective of collecting every armor/vanity set or weapon and putting them on display, collecting all of the statues, or recording all of the music tracks in the game.

Eight years after its release, the developers announced at E3 2019 that the original Terraria would receive it's fourth and final major update called [[https://forums.terraria.org/index.php?threads/re-logic-announces-terraria-journeys-end-at-e3.80018/ "Journey's End"]], which released on May 16 2020, the game's ninth anniversary. Some of the major things it includes are an even more difficult [[NintendoHard Master]] mode, a [[MonsterCompendium bestiary]], and golf. [[https://forums.terraria.org/index.php?threads/1-3-tmodloader-a-modding-api.23726/ tModLoader,]] the long-standing mod loader made by the fanbase, was also announced as [[https://forums.terraria.org/index.php?threads/full-steam-ahead-tmodloader-to-launch-as-free-dlc-for-terraria-with-journeys-end.88057/ being added to the base game as free DLC on Steam]].

** The Crystal Serpent, a hardmode staff that can be obtained by fishing it from the Hallow biome. It's a direct upgrade to the pre-hardmode staffs, and definitely not the most flashy hardmode magic weapon, but it's great damage output, ability to deal splash damage, and great mana efficiency makes it easily the most reliable, and can easily carry you all the way up until Duke Fishron.

** If you're good enough and dodging corruption/crimson mobs, you can sneak down into the respective biomes to smash one of the orbs, which in turn lets meteors start spawning. The meteor set is a great early game armor and it's set bonus, the space gun costs no mana, is ''amazing'' early game, allowing you to tear through mobs and bosses rather handedly.

* HarderThanHard: Two of them, Expert and Master Mode.

** If you're lucky enough to find some explosives early on, you can get the Demolitionist to move in, letting you bomb through the Corruption/Crimson to break a Shadow Orb or Crimson Heart. This will most likely trigger a Meteorite spawn, letting you go straight to Meteor Armor with a few more bombs.
** With the addition of fishing we get the Reaver Shark, a rare fish which can be used as a pickaxe, and can mine anything up to the first hardmode ore (either Cobalt or Palladium). So if you get lucky with your fishing early on you can just skip all of the normal mode pickaxe tiers entirely!

** Then there's the TrueFinalBoss as of 1.3, [[spoiler:The Moon Lord. It resembles Cthulhu itself, and WordOfGod states that he's Cthulhu's brother.]]

*** Journey's End added a new, beyond-all doubt Infinity Plus One. A new melee weapon called the Zenith. It requires both the aforementioned Star Wrath and Meowmere, plus a Terra Blade, (A sword with a very long crafting recipe, starting with four Pre-Hardmode Swords), a Horseman's Blade (Drops from Pumpkings in the Pumpkin Moon), an Influx Waver (drops from the Martian Saucer during the Martian Invasion), A Seedler (Dropped from Plantera), An Enchanted Sword (Drops from Enchanted Sword Shrines), A Starfury (Found in Sky Chests) and a Copper Shortsword (The weapon you start the game with, and can be crafted from copper bars). The crafting recipe is insane (and because it requires two drops from the Moon Lord, it's basically a BraggingRightsReward), but with the right modifiers and bonuses only the Last Prism can claim to rival it in power- and bare in mind, the Last Prism guzzles insane amounts of mana whereas the Zenith doesn't require any ammo or mana to use. It truly is a weapon that commemorates your entire journey, beginning to end.

* AscendedMeme: The "Do it with a Copper Shortsword" meme has been acknowledged as part of the [[InfinityPlusOneSword Zenith's]] crafting recipe, which requires several end-of-game swords... and the Copper Shortsword.

** The Zenith is even moreso than [[spoiler:the Moon Lord's]] drops. It requires several of the most powerful or rare swords in the game ([[MyFriendsAndZoidberg and the Copper Shortsword]]), such as the Seedler, Terra Blade, Influx Waver, Horseman's Blade, Enchanted Sword, Starfury, and both swords dropped by [[spoiler:the Moon Lord]]. You're rewarded with the best melee weapon in the game, but by then you've pretty much completed ''everything''.

* HarderThanHard: Expert Mode, a world setting which makes the game significantly more difficult. Enemy and boss AI is improved. Enemies have twice as much health (150% for bosses) and do twice as much damage, which scales with the number of players in multiplayer. Certain enemies may inflict status effects (which will also last twice as long), some have new abilities (zombies may carry a weapon, for example), and bosses have new abilities and their existing ones improve as they lose health. Enemies can pick up dropped coins, and you have to kill them if you want them back. If you lost them at death, you likely aren't getting them back. Player life regeneration is cut in half, and you lose 75% of coins on death instead of 50%. On the plus side, there are several perks. Defense now blocks 75% of damage instead of 50% (functionally, you're still taking more damage because the enemy boost is higher than yours), rare loot is more common, and bosses drop exclusive items and possibly even the normally-unattainable developer items.

** Your reward for catching fish is selected from money, potions, decor, and a few very, very desired tools and accessories, but completely random. However, every fiftieth quest completed, the chance of getting a non-potion, non-decor item increases; for instance, the Tackle Box has a 1/40 base chance, but after the 100th quest it's 1/6.

** The Graveyard mini-biome is created when dead players drop tombstones. Since Hardcore characters die permanently if killed, and thus can't drop tombstones, the game makes it so that worlds containing Hardcore characters will have the [=NPCs=] drop tombstones instead when killed.

** Also from the 1.4 update, fairy spawns. These helpful spirits will guide you toward treasure while you're exploring... unless you've destroyed all of the fallen logs in your surface forests, in which case [[LostForever never see another fairy in that world again]]. Fallen logs are impossible to craft and only appear during worldgen.

** Summons are there to give you a small boost in damage. They even have their own class based around using summons.

*** And then that got taken BEYOND Eleven with the [[InfinityPlusOneSword Zenith]], which requires the most items in the game to craft. To note, it requires, in total, a Blade of Grass, a Light's Bane or Blood Butcherer, a Fiery Greatsword, a Muramasa, an Excalibur, two Broken Hero Swords (All of which is to make the aforementioned Terra Blade, which is one of the Zenith's ingredients), a Meowmere, a Star Wrath, a Horseman's Blade, an Influx Waver, a Seedler, an Enchanted Sword, a Starfury and a Copper Shortsword. To add to this, the Zenith's attack animation even features all of the swords that build up to it (as well as the Bee Keeper and Terragrim, which don't).

** In Expert Mode, any player who fights a boss will get his/her own bag that is filled with boss drops. Outside of Expert Mode, it's a mad grab to try and get boss items, leaving co-operating players always left short of an item, and leaving people who are with more antagonistic or greedy players to hope that they don't get the short end of the stick by someone managing to steal all the boss drops. On Expert, each bag is filled with the full range of boss drops, so every player that fought it will get at least one unique boss item when opening a bag.
*** To keep this from being exploited, Bosses gain more HP based on the number of players participating in the fight.

* BagOfHolding: Storage items (player inventory, chests, etc.) tend to get ridiculous when you can store spears and swords several times the size of your body in them. The storage items never get any bigger than your character though.

** Plantera's battle is pretty much the hardmode equivalent of Queen Bee's battle, except the fact that it's mandatory - both of them are summoned by the player destroying their offspring, are summoned in and fought within the Underground Jungle, have unique battle themes (though Queen Bee's is also used for [[FinalBoss Ocram]] in the console version), and give similar loot - such as how Queen Bee gives the Bee Gun, and Plantera gives the Wasp Gun, a direct upgrade.
*** Plantera giving access to the Jungle Temple and unlocking the hardmode Dungeon is also a parallel to how defeating Skeletron gives access to the Dungeon.

*** The Magic Mirror has a consumable variant called the "Recall potion" that has the exact same effect, but is a far more common drop from chests and pots, allowing players to return to their spawn quickly at any point in the game. The reusable Magic Mirror is somewhat rare, and it's entirely possible you won't find one before hardmode. The potions are practically useless after you get the mirror, but the simple luxury of returning to spawn from any point of the map without dying to quitting is useful any time in the game. They also make a good backup if you died and need to grab your stuff (mirror included) and make a hasty retreat. Compared to the Magic and Ice Mirrors, Recall potions have a much shorter delay before teleporting you back to your spawn point, which makes them a little more convenient for retreating from a hectic battle.

* BossBattle: There are upwards of fifteen different bosses as of the 1.3.4 Update (that's without counting the mini-bosses from the special events).

** If you want the oh-so valuable PDA (and, by extension, the Cell Phone), you're going to need all of its components, which include the three items acquired from the Angler's quests. Doing those quests means you're giving the Angler fodder to pull mean-spirited pranks on the other resident [=NPCs=].

** The Starfury, Star Cloak (and by extension the Star Veil and Bee Cloak) and Holy Arrows are all gear that can summon falling stars to ravage the battlefield.

* EverythingsBetterWithRainbows: Lots of rainbows are in ''Terraria''. One is in the background of the Hallow. Rainbow Slimes (which constantly cycle through the different colors) appear around the Hallow when it rains, and drop Rainbow Bricks to build with. The Merchant sells Disco Balls that give off rainbow-colored light. The Rainbow Rod, Rainbow Gun, and Last Prism are all magic weapons that let you kill enemies with rainbows, and another Rainbow Magic Weapon, The Rainbow Crystal Staff, can also be obtained from the same source as the Last Prism. You can also dye your hair and clothes with rainbow dye.

** Celebration Mk2: A rapid-fire rocket launcher that replaced the Celebration in the Moon Lord's drop pool in Journey's End (With the Celebration being moved to the Party Girl's shop after defeating the Golem). The most powerful rocket launcher in the game, and a massively upgraded version of the original Celebration.

* In the same vein as the Snowman cannon is the Celebration Mk2.

* BossWarningSiren: Comes in one of two flavours. When bosses occur naturally they are accompanied by an onscreen message (such as "You feel an evil presence watching you" for the Eye of Cthulhu, or "You feel a quaking deep underground" for the Destroyer) each boss having a unique message so the player can tell which one is coming. When summoned a message saying "(Boss Name Here) Has Awoken!" accompanied by a common boss monster roar. [[spoiler: In addition to an onscreen message, the screen blurs and darkens and the music fades to silence when the Moon Lord is about to appear.]]

** The ultimate armors and weapons dropped by the [[spoiler: Moon Lord]] are extremely powerful, being [[InfinityPlusOneSword some of the best in the game.]] However, to get them, it means having to fight the [[spoiler: Moon Lord]] and the [[spoiler: Lunar invasion]] several times in order get the materials necessary to make them and/or get the rare drops from the [[spoiler: Moon Lord]] and by the time you do get them all, there's nothing else to really use them on and having gone through one of the hardest events in the game several times to get them all, you've pretty much proven you don't really ''need'' them to begin with, either.

** [[spoiler: The Moon Lord's]] eyes and hands also have separate HP bars and will attack viciously if another part is destroyed.

** The Minishark's tooltip describes it as "Half shark, half gun, completely awesome". There is also a hardmode variant called the Megashark and [[spoiler: The Moon Lord]] has an 11.11% chance to drop the Space Dolphin Machine Gun. Finally, the Travelling Merchant has a chance to sell the Gatligator in Hardmode, which is basically a Megashark but [[InfinityMinusOneSword easier to obtain and with lower accuracy]].

** Then there's the TrueFinalBoss as of 1.3, [[spoiler: The Moon Lord. It resembles Cthulhu itself, and WordOfGod states that he's Cthulhu's brother.]]

** Another custom world gen seed that gives a unique result is [[spoiler: "[[Film/TheWickerMan2006 not the bees]]". The results are [[https://i.imgur.com/M4jUbYP.png rather self explamatory]].]]

* EldritchAbomination: The Eye of Cthulhu, the Brain of Cthulhu, the Wall of Flesh, and [[spoiler: The Moon Lord]] are the most extreme, but most of the bosses qualify.

** [[spoiler: The Moon Lord]] is obviously [[spoiler:Cthulhu]].[[labelnote:note]]According to WordOfGod, he is Cthulhu's brother.[[/labelnote]]

** [[spoiler: The Moon Lord]] fires one from its middle eye. When the eyes get detached, they each can fire a smaller one too.

** [[spoiler: The Moon Lord]], whose first stage consists of attacking the eyes in his hands and forehead until they come loose, leaving fleshy sockets behind.

* FinalBoss: [[spoiler: The Moon Lord on the desktop version, Ocram in Console/Mobile versions]].

--->'''Nurse''': "Why are you even here? If you aren't bleeding, you don't need to be here. Get out."

--->"Keep your hands off my gun, buddy!"
--->'''Mechanic''': "[Arms dealer's name] keeps talking about pressing my pressure plate. [[ObliviousToLove I told him it was for stepping on.]]"

** The angel statues. The tooltip even says "''It doesn't do anything.''" Except for [[spoiler: taking up inventory space. They ''really'' don't do anything.]]

* NothingIsScarier: After defeating the second-to-last group of bosses in the game the message "Impending doom approaches" appears on screen, and everything starts going dark. All remaining monsters flee, and the music, which in Terraria never stops even in the creepiest of occasions, grinds to a halt, leaving you with a empty, silent screen periodically darkening and flickering. This goes on for about a minute until [[spoiler: [[EldritchAbomination the]] [[FinalBoss Moon]] [[Creator/HPLovecraft Lord]] appears]].

** [[spoiler: The [[FinalBoss Moon Lord]]]] fires one from its middle eye that sweeps in an angular motion and is ''incredibly'' painful. When its eyes are detached, they all can randomly use a smaller and slightly less painful version.

** Attempting to warp away from [[spoiler: the Moon Lord]] now makes him teleport right to your spot instead; though [[spoiler: the Moon Lord]] can be outrun, if the player gets too far, [[spoiler: the Moon Lord]] will teleport to them.