As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned!
Terraria looks like a very fun and colorful game, just like Minecraft. However, there are more than a few reasons that this isn't very true.
- Night time will likely be a new player's first glimpse at Terraria's true nature. While Minecraft at least has rather cheesy depictions of its monsters, the enemies that terrorize you at night in Terraria are much more visceral. The zombies are bloody, rotten and sometimes have organs showing or dozens of arrows stabbed into them, can easily traverse the terrain despite their slow speed, and are surprisingly durable when you only have early game equipment. Second are the disembodied demon eyes, which can be a very unexpected sight for a first-time player. They're just as tough as the zombies, except that they can fly and are much faster when unhindered by obstacles.
- Ever started a new map on Terraria? Ever visited the Dungeon and talked to the old man who prohibits you from entering? That's strange. The door is unlocked and you can descend into the lower area of the dungeon. Five seconds later, you immediately regret your decision.
- Once you have dialogue choice about "Curse" you may expect that you'll have a sidequest regarding the dungeon. Wrong. That old man explodes and turns into a giant skull with disembodied hands that you have to fight.
- Any time an early boss fight occurs, the scream, especially in the early version of the game (as of now it is considerably toned down) will haunt new players.
- When you die, the death messages you receive can bring up some gruesome imagery.(Player)'s limbs were torn off by (Cause of Death)(Player) was eviscerated by (Cause of Death)(Player)'s entrails were ripped out by (Cause of Death)(Player) watched their innards become outards by (Cause of Death)(Player)'s meat was ripped off the bone by (Cause of Death)(Player)'s vital organs were ruptured by (Cause of Death)(Player)'s was turned into a pile of flesh by (Cause of Death)(Player)'s was brutally dissected by (Cause of Death)
- The Corruption. Full of Eldritch Abomination enemies and disgusting-looking terrain. And it spreads. Moreso if you've killed the Wall of Flesh and triggered hardmode. The eerie music does not help the mood either. It's when you get to this point when you realize that Terraria isn't the cheerful and upbeat game you thought it was going to be.
- The Crimson from 1.2 is far worse. Filled with horrific enemies which embody the concepts of Body Horror and Nausea Fuel with a passion and its armor/weapon set is incredibly gruesome. And the grass is blood-red, with meaty "stone" and darkened wood. And the music? Scariest track in the game by far.
- The Face Monster. Dear god, the Face Monster. Humanoid... things with glazed over eyes, massively distended jaw that gives it its name, and appears to have exposed brains.
- For those with arachnophobia, the Blood Crawlers will certainly be this, especially in the crimson chasms that are filled with the things.
- It's lessened/strengthened if you realize that the entire biome has trappings of a "haunted game" creepypasta. A strange area of the game that shows up at complete random, and is jarringly out-of-place considering everything around it.
- From a lore post from the devs
, you have one other unnerving factor added to the Crimson: It's alive. It's a Hive Mind Eldritch Abomination in biome form. - The giant skull◊ looming in the background, coupled with the brain of Cthulhu floating around the Crimson biome hint that the entire area may be Cthulhu's rotting corpse.
- The background itself is extremely unsettling. While the Corruption at least has foliage in the background, the trees in the background of the Crimson look lifeless and have bits of bloodied flesh hanging off of them. It's like the land itself is sick.
- With the new backgrounds introduced in 1.4 it arguably gets even worse as the new main background for the crimson features a skeletal corpse of an unknown dragon-like entity, giant eyeballs, and massive pools of blood
- The soundtracks for the Corruption and Crimson (particularly Crimson, Corruption borders somewhat on funny yet scary) can be quite unexpectedly creepy for the unprepared. In particular, the more ominous Underground variants of both these themes can sound very oppressive and foreboding.
- The Crimson from 1.2 is far worse. Filled with horrific enemies which embody the concepts of Body Horror and Nausea Fuel with a passion and its armor/weapon set is incredibly gruesome. And the grass is blood-red, with meaty "stone" and darkened wood. And the music? Scariest track in the game by far.
- Every so often, the moon turns blood-red, and it drives everything in Terraria into varying degrees of a maddened frenzy. Zombies start mutating into shambling person-shaped blood clots, Demon Eyes start coalescing into Dripplers that can more accurately track a target, several major critters turn into violent Killer Rabbits (figuratively and literally), several aquatic monstrosities begin to climb up to the surface depths and take any fishermen by surprise. Perhaps most worrying is that this even affects the NPCs, all of them going into strangely foul moods.
- The Dryad and the Steampunker replace a few items in their stock with their counterparts for the world's evil biome.
- The Clothier starts selling you clothes fit for a funeral.
- The Dye Trader starts selling you dyes that just coat you head to toe in blood.
- The Zoologist can barely contain her lycanthropy and keeps telling you to stay away.
- The Merchant, in a comparative form of altruism, starts selling you throwing knives out of his own self-defense stash.
- The Arms Dealer, having an excuse to mow things down indiscriminately, sells you silver/tungsten bullets far earlier than he typically would.
- The Painter sells you a painting of the Eye of Cthulhu staring directly at the viewer.
- The Cyborg sells you munitions that will cause untold property damage if abused, presumably just to make sure everything stays dead.
- The bosses can be quite scary to those who do not expect them.
- Veterans who are trying Expert Mode in 1.3 for the challenge will find that bosses have new attacks (namely, the Eye of Cthulhu and the Brain of Cthulhu.) Some of these attacks can be rather unnerving the first time they're used.
- You've found the Dungeon's entrance, and then you talk to the old man who warns you about his curse, when all of a sudden he explodes into a gigantic skeletal menace.
- One evening, while setting out to do some night-time Star gathering, you receive a cryptic warning about being watched, and then you hear a deep, menacing roar and this giant eyeball flies out of nowhere. Not bad enough? Wait until it sheds its outer layer to reveal a toothy maw.
- The Eater of Worlds. Full stop. The thing looks scary with its rotten flesh and overabundance of eyeballs, and if you cut it in half, YOU END UP FIGHTING TWO. If you're a new player who doesn't know what smashing Shadow Orbs does? "Hmmm, another Shadow Orb. What's this one drop? Wait - The Eater of Worlds has Awoken? What's that me-" GIANT WORM OUT OF NOWHERE.
- 1.2 introduces the Brain of Cthulhu to the Crimson biome. Going to the Deep Crimson to smash beating, exposed Hearts for treasure? Be careful what you awaken... a monstrous brain that summons eyeballs and teleports while attacking you in various ways and roaring!
- Not to mention the Brain's second phase. It has what seems to be a mouth. A toothy mouth with a heart inside it. Which has a single eyeball staring out of it.
- The Wall of Flesh can be quite the shock for any player unfortunate enough to fail in catching the voodoo dolls dropped by Voodoo Demons, if they unwittingly and/or accidentally kill a Voodoo Demon over the lava...well, have fun dealing with the gigantic fleshy abomination now coming after you. The Wall of Flesh inflicts the Horrified debuff on players when it spawns, so its fear-inducing status is coded directly into the game.
- The Wall itself also radiates Body Horror with a passion, in more ways than one. As some fanart has attested to, you're lucky the game is restricted to a 2D plane...
- Its fight is designed to be panic-inducing. Being the only Advancing Boss of Doom, your only option is to run from it while attempting to fight back. Trying to escape will only earn you either a forceful dragging back if you're lucky, and instant death if you're not. And if it chases you to the end of the map and it isn't dead yet?
- As of 1.2, the three mechanical Hardmode bosses have a small chance of naturally spawning every night as long as they haven't been defeated in that world yet.
- "You feel the air growing colder around you..." (Skeletron Prime)
- "You feel vibrations from deep below..." (The Destroyer)
- "This is going to be a terrible night..." (The Twins)
- The nightmare fuel status of these three grows the more you play Terraria—you know these bastards are coming. You know they want you. But you won't know when, where, or if you'll be geared enough to kill it.
- Just beat the mechanical bosses? Going to look for the new stuff in the Jungle? Don't break the glowing purple bud - unless you want to fight Plantera, the giant-sized aggressive plant boss. Avoid luring it out of the Underground Jungle, too, because it will then go berserk and start attacking more aggressively.
- While you need to go out of your way to deliberately fish up the optional boss Duke Fishron, and it has a rather bathos-filled attack in the Sharknado, it certainly is brutally fast and does a lot of damage if it manages to ram into you, effectively giving the impression that it literally bit you in half if it lands a lethal blow this way. Later balance patches make the Duke go berserk and attack even more relentlessly if you lure it out of the Ocean biome, further heightening its brutality and speed.
- The Celestial Towers. Alien, powerful things that spawn Elite Mooks into your world and make journeying across it hazardous to the extreme. There's also the fact that their background effects make them look like they're either trying to or kickstarting an apocalypse.
- The bestiary, however, reveals that they are actually preventing said apocalypse by keeping Moon Lord sealed away, in the most extreme way possible.
- Perhaps even worse are the Brown Note they are implied to inflict on the player (sadly/thankfully not represented by debuffs). The first beaten tower gives the message "Your mind goes numb...", the second one "You are overwhelmed with pain...", and the third one gives "Otherworldly voices linger around you...".
- The Moon Lord, the Big Bad and Final Boss of the game. An incredibly powerful Eldritch Abomination summoned after the Celestial towers are beaten, his presence is felt before he appears. When he does appear... This◊ is all you need to see to understand why. Word of God has stated that he is actually Cthulhu himself, albeit in an incomplete physical state. Imagine how powerful he would be if he ever regained his true form and strength...
- His entrance is possibly even worse than the fight itself. You see the message "Impending doom approaches..." and the music starts to slowly fade away, until you can't even hear it. Your view starts going a bit screwy, too.
- When 1.4 added support for Razer Chroma keyboards, the functionality means that your keyboard dynamically changes color based on which biome and depth you're in. When you fight the Moon Lord, the keyboard's lighting is animated to look like an eye gazing up from beneath the keys. He can see you.
- The old-gen console version's hardest boss, Ocram, who is debatably worthy of final boss status, is hands down the boss most worthy of being called an Eldritch Abomination, at least aside from the Moon Lord himself.
- Hell is somewhat creepy, as to be expected. But the scariest part is the music, fittingly titled "Eerie" on the OST. The new soundtrack for 1.3 makes it even more unearthly.
- In Pre-1.4.4 Hardmode, smashing a demon altar caused a single block anywhere in the world to become corrupted/crimsoned or hallowed. There is NO indication of this when you smash the altar, so anyone who read this and didn't know beforehand just had a My God, What Have I Done? moment.
- The Solar Eclipse from 1.2. Extremely fast, tough, and hard-hitting renditions of classic cultural monsters quickly hunt you down on the surface. Without the new high-end equipment introduced in 1.2, you are likely to run into difficulty surviving. Oh, and since a Solar Eclipse takes place during a day portion, it can happen right after or before a blood moon.
- Though some players particularly late in the game want a Solar Eclipse to happen, since the boss of the event, Mothron, drops the Broken Hero Sword, which is required (2 of them, actually) to craft one of the strongest swords in the game, the Terra Blade.
- Spider Nests are this for those with arachnophobia. There are Giant Spiders that spawn there very frequently. The worst part? An NPC is held captive there.
- Thankfully for them, said NPC is completely optional and does not sell anything that actually helps you progress in the game. In Hardmode, though, some of the best immediately-obtainable summoning equipment must be crafted from Spider Fangs.
- The background objects that naturally occur in Spider Nests appear to represent pale, drained human corpses. One of them also strongly resembles a blonde baby.
- The Nurse's quotes. While they are mainly jokes, they can lead to Fridge Horror as to what actually happens to your character."You look half digested... Have you been chasing slimes again?"
- 1.3 adds the Marble mini-Biome, which has the Medusa mob. True to the Mythology influencing this monster, she can petrify you. What takes this further and makes this actually fairly scary is that the petrification negates any Fall Damage protection you might have from Wings or the Horseshoe, so if you tried to avoid Medusa by flying up and away, you might find yourself taking a very damaging, and potentially lethal fall. Prior to the bug-fixing patches of 1.3, Medusa could petrify players from offscreen even without being in direct line-of-sight.
- The Underground Desert sub-biome in its entirety: huge, branching colonies of vicious motorcycle-sized antlion larvae and adults along with the occasional Tomb Crawler which are bigger than the worms encountered in the normal Underground. Better hold on to a light source while you're traveling down there.
- If you're unlucky you may find Antlion Swarmers scouting the surface. If you're really, really unlucky in multiplayer, after being killed by a group of them they may nonchalantly search for other players, going so far as to leave the Desert and into other surrounding biomes.
- The Hardmode enemies are no slouch either; Basilisks, Sand Poachers, Ghouls, Lamias and Dune Splicers, which are an even bigger and uglier version of Tomb Crawlers.
- You can buy a Companion Cube pet, the rarest item sold by the Travelling Merchant for a whopping 5 platinum coins. It might seem like a silly Shout-Out at first, but if you let it fall in lava, it will make the death sound of the Lunatic Cultist. If the cube is submerged long enough, it has a chance of making the death sound of the Moon Lord. It has been noted for catching some players, new or not, off guard due to this.
- The Companion Cube will never threaten to stab you and, in fact, cannot speak. It will, however, stab you randomly and without warning when you're in the dark. It does very little damage but can be a startling experience if you're not expecting it.
- Pigrons. You're exploring the ice biome, when you suddenly start to hear some horrible growls, much unlike any other sound you've previously heard in the game. You check your surrounding to find the sound source, but you don't find anything. A bit worried, you continue doing whatever you were doing... and suddenly, a monster half-pig half-dragon literally appears out of nowhere, just next to you, and starts attacking you!
- While not in the game, one of the developers tweeted a video of her character and a ghost speaking in morse code. That's a bit unsettling, but what takes the cake is the noises - while only beeping, they can be unnerving, even more so in this vague context. The morse code, when translated, says T3rr4rian5. When that code is used on a file lock in the description, you can download a world file. This can also be scary, as you do not know what that world holds... Fortunately averted; the world itself, "Sandurheim", is just a quest world, with the end reward being a link to back-then-new video by Yrimir.
- The Empress of Light, a Knight Templar fae goddess who wants to purge the land of all impurity, which knowing the Hallow, likely means everything else. Visually gorgeous, but she comes packing an absolutely vicious boss fight that's totally unlike anything else the game has to offer, and her theme song sounds downright chaotic; Light Is Not Good indeed.
- In the Journey's End update, die too many times around the same spot while forgetting to pick up your gravestones, and the area will become a graveyard mini-biome, complete with ghosts, ravens, maggot-filled zombies, and haunting music.
- Imagine living as one of the NPCs in a typical Terraria game. Your only potential shelter from all of the horrors described above lies with the player, an immortal and power-hungry Blood Knight who can casually summon the deadliest of said horrors near the place they decide to house you in at any time they please, all for the sake of getting stronger. Not to mention, you're disposable. Another person with the exact same skills and profession as you can move in at any time if an unfortunate accident happens. Pick your poison: face the many horrors of the world alone, or be at the mercy of an all-powerful maniac who would easily sacrifice the world, let alone you, just for better equipment.
- The Journey's End update added an ability to type in and share seeds for worlds, which Red showed off by having a screenshot of the game that had the scheduled release for the update as the seed for a Small world, 05162020. Entering this seed for a world yourself results in what seems like a nightmarishly glitched mess for its world generation, with the bar flickering between Crimson and Corruption, virtually every bit of text flashing as numbers (except for it hanging for a distressingly long time as it announces that it's setting up the traps), Red's face imposed into the clouds, and the moon changed into a knowing smile with pinprick eyes. The world itself is bizarre in its generation, with the loading bar graphic flickers revealed to be because the Corruption and Crimson are both active at the same time. Furthermore, one of the Evil Biomes has subsumed the Dungeon, leaving the Old Man forced underground. The ocean to either side has vast trenches carved out underneath itnote , and to top it all off, you have the potential to find... A piece of the Moon Lord; His missing legs, as armor you can wear all to yourself.
- One couldn't be blamed for using a third-party map viewer to take a good look at the world, its secrets, and layout. It's an incredibly useful tool to find things such as ores, treasure chests, and secret rooms. It also leads to Paranoia Fuel upon defeating the Wall of Flesh, unleashing the rays of evil and Hallow, and destroying the evil altars (pre-1.4.4), finding more and more infected blocks in the middle of nowhere. All the while the existing evil/Hallow grows...and grows...and grows...and there's little you can do to stop it.
- The 'Remix' secret world seed added in 1.4.4 initially begins as a neat little reverse-romp through the game's normal progression—as in, you start in the Underworld and have to dig upward to progress through the game. Strangely enough, the seed needed to access the Remix world is 'don't dig up', which is a bit counter-intuitive advice considering the player HAS to do just that to get anything done. Upon finally reaching the surface, it becomes clear what the seed itself was warning about—the entire surface of Remix worlds are entirely covered in Corruption or Crimson. Not just that, but the world is stuck in an eternal night with no sun, enemy spawns are heightened on the surface, the Dungeon and Jungle Temple (which is now located on the surface for whatever reason) are both painted either purple or red depending on the world evil, and all living trees are generated without any leaves, making them appear dead. Suddenly, it becomes abundantly clear that your character starts underground for a reason...
- Oh but it gets so much worse when Fridge Horror kicks in. The seed starts you at the absolute bottom of the world, which may seem strange since normal Terraria doesn’t start you in Space. But the fact that the entire surface is overrun by an evil infection that endlessly spawns extremely hostile monsters may give the reason; you’re starting in Hell because you and likely every other NPC were killed.
- Screams echo around you...
