What Did We Play Yesterday?

This was inevitable, I suppose, but expedited by the realization the tag only has 1 post asking whether I should play Terraria again and not any posts about actually doing it.

Did you know Terraria is almost 11 years old and still being actively developed? I really got into this game around 2013 and put about 100 hours into it. I returned to it a few times over the years, but never played more than an hour or so. Necesse gave me the itch, so I checked out the Terraria devlog and realized there's a ton of content I've never seen before. I took the plunge, generated a 1.4 world, and got totally sucked in.

Most of my old tricks work pretty well. When you start out it's prudent to build a small wood house so you can survive your first night. It's useful to start building rooms with light/seating immediately so you can recruit NPCs. You start digging down, baby's first mineshaft, to find ores, and once you get some decent stacks of crafting materials the game really start to open up.

• I LOVE the wide range of furniture and how you can craft at theme room after you've harvested enough cactus, palm wood, mushrooms, etc. I can't remember if this was the case when I originally played, but theme furniture was a thing in Starbound and I liked it.
• My arch nemesis is quick-trash. If you press left shift+click you auto-stack items, but if you press left ctrl+click you auto-trash items. Guess who accidentally trashed a bunch of Platinum and Tungsten bars? That's right, this guy. Apparently there was a way to disable the hotkey but the devs removed it from 1.4. Someone on the forum helpfully pointed out the cursor icon changes depending on which button you're holding, so now I just try to be extra careful.
• I got lucky and found a horseshoe early. The horseshoe prevents fall damage, which is vital in a game where power-digging a hellevator to the center of the planet is a major strategy. I vividly recall past instances of falling down a huge mineshaft and splattering my guts (and money) on the floor.
• In Terraria you can manipulate spawn points and save/quit to avoid having to actually travel back to the surface, which I like. I ALSO like how sometimes you will be so deep underground you just have to build a little impromptu workshop and add a bed so you can stay down there a bit.
• Not having to backtrack in games like this is brilliant as it's one thing to dig your way down but another to climb/hook/jump your way back. Most games provide some sort of potion or object that allows this, but in Necesse I kept forgetting my return potion which really sucked.
• After a couple of days I dug my way to hell, found a bunch of furniture down there, and stole it. I put the furniture in my house and a demon, the Eye of Cthulhu, showed up. The eye is a random spawn at a certain level but the sequence felt very much like a "well what did you expect" inciting event in a horror movie.

Verdict: A decade later I still enjoy this game. I like exploring and finding unexpected things below ground, and traveling the surface to new biomes. I like working on my base when I need a little me time. I like adding rooms and seeing what NPC turns up to live there. It is definitely a solid comfort game, which is just what I need right now. The progression has been satisfying, though--as before--without a little wiki guidance you can spend a lot of time wandering. For some people, that's a boon. But the lack of in-game direction means wiki diving can save a lot of time and frustration.

My world has 2 Crimson areas that have hemmed in my surface exploration. This I don't care for but it's a basic part of worldgen. Crimson is an evil flesh biome with a higher difficulty and I dislike having to battle my way through it to reach biomes on other sides. As I level up my character's equipment it becomes less of an issue, but it's still a hassle to casual exploration. Containing Crimson (or Corruption) is an ongoing issue since it continually spreads, and you can dig tunnels to try to contain it and there are a few items that purify it. I was puzzling over this when I remembered a solution from the old days: build a sky road and run right over it! So that will probably be the next order of business.

I'm not sure how deep I'll get into this, but now the game now has a big ol' stack of achievements which ought to help guide my interest for a while.

I am always on the lookout for hot survival crafting action. I picked up Necesse based on the overwhelmingly positive Early Access reviews, not realizing it's in 0.21. Ooops. So we're a bit early in development here, but this game has a very active dev.

This really is "top-down Terraria," described by some as a mashup of Terraria/Rimworld (the latter of which has been on my list for ages). The first few hours of play, it did give me that same feel of spelunking in Terraria and finding little ruins and whatnot.

Instead of digging down into the world, there is a single-level dungeon under each island. You can sail to other islands, including those with NPC villages, dungeons, or pirates.

I did my usual and built a little farm and fenced some livestock. I explored specifically to collect seeds and plant specimens for my island, but after a while travel felt like a burden (you can sail quickly, but the day-night cycle is a nuisance and a lot of the other islands are so big and empty right now). You can steal from villages without consequence so I raided a few to furnish my town. As someone who is primarily interested in exploring, the game is a little lacking that area so far. Most of the islands are kinda boring and once you've seen the 4 terrain types there's not a lot of variation.

At this stage the game's primary strengths are village building/management IMO. I think the people who are enjoying it the most are getting into the ability to recruit villagers and give them a tasklist to automate resource-gathering and farm management. You start on a large but manageably-sized island, so if you wanted to IDK terraform the whole thing you could reasonably do that.

I don't want to sink too much time into this one right now, since I'm already hitting the upper limit of what I personally enjoy in these games. It has a way to go and this is apparently a one-man team, but it was fun to play around with.