Terraria is a fantastic sandbox game; most people can agree with that. There are members of society that have been addicted to it like cocaine for almost a decade. I mean, we’re talking about a community of people that have played this game for thousands of hours.
Now, I’m no idiot (debatable). I’m not going to act like I know every single reason why the game is so successful. Someone could literally write, and probably has written, a book about it. But one of the reasons is definitely because it allows you to tell your own story . . .
Story. Okay, cool. What does that mean for a sandbox game, though? Well, to answer that, first we have to understand that to have a story and to have a plot, you have to do something. You can’t have a story by sitting around on the couch doing nothing. And sandbox games like Terraria (and Minecraft and whatever else is out there) are really just about doing three things: collecting stuff, killing stuff, and crafting stuff.
To craft stuff you have to collect stuff, and there’s a ton of ways to do that. Pretty much everything you see on your screen can be harvested as some kind of material. And most of that stuff can be found by digging. The game is really just 90% underground, that’s where you find the really cool stuff.
I’m talking about underground jungle biomes, with weird beehives and a . . . lizard temple? Ice caves. Groves full of light up mushrooms. Desert tunnels with really nasty bugs. A bunch of minecart systems that can potentially take you halfway across the map. Molten lava pockets. I mean, eventually you just go to straight to hell. Seriously.
All those areas are full of materials to mine and collect. Then you go back to the surface once you have a full inventory to craft and store things away. The cool thing is, ‘The Guide’ NPC makes figuring out what you can craft super easy. You just place an item in his slot and he gives you a list of everything you can make.
I mean everything. That’s a really important part of your story. You get to decide what you want to make: what interests you. And what you actually can make is a result of your previous adventures delving into the great unknown. There’s a certain satisfaction knowing that what you’re crafting is because of what you attained with your own blood, sweat, and tears. It’s like a ‘How to Make Everything’ video.
This is where as players, and as humans in general, our individual paths diverge. Because not only is what we decide to make a crucial turning point in our own stories, but the items you can craft are just so insanely different. And each item sends you on a different wild goose chase-adventure to collect it’s crafting components.
Here’s an example from earlier on in the game to demonstrate. You might end up accidentally picking up a stinger from a dead hornet in an underground jungle (man, that sounds weird). When giving it to your boy, The Guide (there might be girl versions, but I’m not sure), you’ll probably discover something called an ‘Abeemination’. That’s an item you can use to summon a boss called the ‘Queen Bee’. Now, you might know at this point that bosses drop some seriously cool weapons and armor, as well as rare crafting materials to make even more stuff. At this point, most people will enter a wild frenzy to get the rest of the components, which consist of bottled honey, a piece of hive, the stinger we mentioned, and a honey block.
To make bottled honey, we need a bottle. That means going out into a desert somewhere, digging up a shit ton of sand, and melting it in a furnace. Then we’d have to pick up the actually honey itself from some gigantic beehive deep underground in the jungle (which would also require you to fend off some bees. And also, just not die by falling). That also checks of the piece of hive needed too. To make a honey block…I think you have to mix water and honey together? It just goes on and on. I mean, it really is a lot of work. Even setting up the arena to fight the Queen Bee is work to consider. If you don’t have an item that lets you float (like to hovercraft), you’d have to construct a bunch of platforms to even have a good chance with the boss.
Yet, once you complete the ‘sting operation’ (. . . I’m actually not that clever: it’s the name of the achievement), and you get all those rare crafting materials and weapons and whatever else it drops, it feels good.
People get that kind of feeling all the time in Terraria. That’s a part of your story. You decided to do that. And the items you tear from that stinking bee carcass will push the plot of your story even further.
A really important part of cultivating that kind of personal experience is because of The Guide. Being able to easily see what items we can craft from all the foraging we just did is huge. It gives us goals to work towards. It motivates us to go back into the world to look for even more stuff. We’re driven forward only because of our own curiosity and interests; we set ourselves on our own path.
But telling your own story is hard . . . you need to want to do something, to change something. “One thing that defines a story is when characters make decisions that change who they are as a person”.
That’s from Just Write’s video called ‘What Writers Should Learn from The Lord of the Rings’. I think it really paints a good picture about what the ‘story’ is in sandbox games like Terraria. While we aren’t really changing anything about ourselves when we decide what to craft, we are learning a little bit about ourselves.
The plot is all the crazy shit we did to summon and defeat the Queen Bee. The story is how we came to the decision to do it in the first place, and what that says about us. That’s what pushes the plot further. All the delving and killing and crafting is meaningless if there’s no story, no reasons unique to ourselves to make an interesting decisions.
I feel like that’s an important element (out of the thousands of reasons people like the game) of what makes or breaks a game like Terraria for people. If the decisions you need to make in the game don’t interest you, if they don’t engage you and make you think about what you really want, then the rest of the game is pointless. There’s nothing driving us forward to really get addicted to the gripping gameplay loop of delving, crafting, and killing, over and over again.
If those decisions do interest you though, as it has for millions of other people . . . you might have a story on your hands.
Slickaria! 