The Let's Play Archive


by DoubleNegative

Part 11: Crimson and Clover

#11 - Crimson and Clover

Hello everyone. Welcome back to Rivershire. Boy it feels like a weight has been lifted from our shoulders, doesn't it? We've taken down the first major stumbling block in the game and now the world is our oyster.

I didn't want to say anything at the time, but we had found an item last time to summon the Eye of Cthulhu. So in the off chance that we got gibbed, I was ready with a backup strategy. We can take 6 Lenses to the Crimson Altar under the tree and turn them into this summoning item.

You can't use two of these Suspicious Looking Eyes to get two bosses, but if you get the "You feel an evil presence watching you..." message, you can quickly use one of these to summon the Eye. Then while you're fighting the Eye you summoned, the one that was going to appear anyway will show up.

There's no practical reason to do it beyond "it's fun."

Today we're going to start off by going up. This gravitation potion is pretty fun. You'll understand why in a moment.

Here we are on top of the base. Chug the potion and nothing appears to happen. But if you press the W (or up) key...

A gravitation potion will reverse your gravity. Instead of falling down to the ground, you're now pulled toward the top of the map instead. Today we're going to explore the skies and see what's up above us.

The shot is incredibly dark, but we've fallen more-or-less straight up and we're now passing a solid cloud with what looks like ore sticking out of it.

Doing this at night was not my smartest move ever, but we're standing on top of a floating island.

I'm being very careful to not put a torch inside this building. These count perfectly for NPC housing, and if we're not careful, one will move inside if given half the chance.

For what it's worth, the clouds do support our weight.

I had a thought of putting rope back down to the ground, but I learned here the hard way that rope will only go so far away from our character before the game refuses to place more.

Another shot of the house on the island. This is a sky chest, and it contains items that are unique to floating islands. These are all incredibly helpful, so searching them out is a great idea.

The item description says it all. With this equipped, we are more than able to jump into our tree fort without using the ropes on the sides.

Moving on to the left, we come across another floating island.

These are sky lakes, and if we had a fishing pole, we could catch fish up here. We'll just move on for now. The gravitation potion is wearing off and I want to find more islands before it does.

Here we are, yet another island.

Bingo! This is the item we were looking for. Again, the description says it all.

Now, before we jump down and look for something else to do... (because the potion ran out) I want to discuss sky chests for a moment. Before one of the previous patches, these chests were locked. The game does have keys, but they only drop from a specific part of the map. A part of the map guarded by yet another boss. There are weapons to be found in sky chests, but they're not so great that they will impress you over what you find in that other part of the map.

So basically, the developers made another awesome move in unlocking these chests. As a bonus, the sky chests will occasionally contain an item called a "Sky Mill" which lets you build the incredibly colorful blue and yellow decor you can find in these houses.

I knew it was bound to happen eventually. The upper parts of the skies have an enemy as well. We were pretty lucky to go this long without seeing one.

For not minding her own business, we filled her full of arrows with our new bow.

In case you were wondering, the third island was right on top of the border with the desert. So we didn't have to go very far at all to find some really powerful accessories.

I don't know about you all, but I'm feeling pretty daring. Like we could take on anything. So let's do some explosive mining.

How about to the tune of 30 dynamite?

We get about as far as the boss arena when this message pops up. The Dryad is an NPC that moves in once we kill one of the game's major bosses. For most players, she will move in once they kill the Eye, but really any of the first four major bosses will do.

Being the smart one, she decided to move into the only room with a bed.

She also sells some items, but her specialty is the Status screen. She'll tell us how much of our world is consumed by the crimson biome. More on that in a moment. But there's no point in clicking on Status in the first half of the game. So we'll leave it sitting for now.

Being a dryad, her stock of items are all nature themed. So let's do like old times and start from the left...

Purification Powder - 75 copper coins - (Purifies the crimson in a small area around where you throw it)
Grass seeds - 20 copper coins - (Plants grass)
Sunflower - 2 silver coins - (We can buy these now)
Acorn - 10 copper coins - (Same)
Dirt Rod - 5 gold coins - (We can use this to move dirt. There are a lot of uses for this, not the least of which is triggering traps)
Pumpkin Seed - 2 silver, 50 copper coins - (We can plant pumpkin plants on the ground. We'll cover pumpkins next time in A Very Special Update)
Grass Wall - 10 copper coins - (You know the grass colored backwall in that small cave under our tree fort? We can place it)
Flower wall - 10 copper coins - (Same as above, but it has flowers)

Next we get into the interesting items.

Daybloom Planter Box - 1 silver coin - (We can use any planter box to provide farmable ground without spending clay on pots) - Available after we defeat King Slime
Blinkroot Planter Box - 1 silver coin - Available after we defeat the Eye of Cthulhu

It really doesn't matter what planter boxes you use. Once I have all seven varieties unlocked, I like to use them for the associated plant for aesthetic purposes. But now that we have the dryad and these planter boxes, we can now build a functional greenhouse.

So yeah, once we get back from our expedition, we've got some building to do.

Let's go pay the crimson a visit, shall we?

Oh... shit. So this is what I was referring to when I said that the crimson biome will consume Rivershire. If you think back to the early updates, this entire outcropping was pure and green. The crimson was only the barest hint just out of sight. So it's time to explain.

During worldgen, the game will place one of two types of evil in the world. Some worlds have the putrid purple of the corruption. Rivershire has the disgusting red of the crimson. Throughout the game, the evil will spread and consume and blight the very land. We can already see the process in action here.

However, it's important to note that we can impede the spread of this evil with the use of sunflowers. If the crimson or corruption hits a sunflower, it will stop spreading in that direction. The evil biome will only spread through grass, rock, sand, mud*, and ice. Dirt and wood will halt the spread of any type of evil altogether. Mud is a special case in that any evil that hits mud will convert it to dirt and then corrupt the grass on top of the dirt patch.

The evil will also only "jump" up to, I believe, a compatible surface 3-5 tiles away. Some people go to no small amount of trouble to dig a massive 5-tile wide trench around their base to isolate it from the world's spreading evil. I personally think that's a bit much, but hey - you do you.

As for the nature of the evil, the corruption is just what it sounds like. It's the form of evil in the world corrupting the land and making it a very unhealthy purple. Corruption has been part of the game since the beginning. Crimson, on the other hand, was added with the 1.2 patch back in 2013.

Crimson is the world being corrupted with blood and gore.

Eventually the land will start to sprout teeth and bones.

Crimera are a flying enemy from the crimson. They're otherwise unremarkable.

The crimson also has spiders. These are blood crawlers, and they are pretty creepy.

When you're in an evil biome, you really should keep moving. The game is all too happy to swarm you with enemies, and it can be very easy to get bogged down.

These blights on the landscape are actually crimson "dungeons." The fact that the entrances are shaped like mouths makes them pretty creepy. Not helping matters is that the tunnels underneath are like a giant throat, finally emptying out into an expansive cavern.

We... we'll just move on for now. We'll be back later.

Here's a new biome. Right on the far border of the crimson is the snowy area.

The crimson can infect snow as well. That's not ore... that's bloody ice.

I also want to take this moment to appreciate the giant creepy ribs in the background of crimson infected areas. Also pictured on top of the bloody ice is a new type of growable herb - shiverthorn.

Look at the world of difference between crimson snow and regular snowy biome.

I'm no expert in climates, but I'm pretty sure a sandy desert shouldn't be next to a snowy winter wonderland.

So there's two things here in this image. The first is yet another pyramid. The second is the disgusting black and brown sand. Evil biomes spread like wildfire through sand.

I don't have the numbers in front of me, but a second pyramid is pretty freaking rare.

You see those two spilled objects? Pyramids can occasionally spawn with bags of spilled silver or copper coins. If you "mine" them, you get a bunch of that type of coin as a reward. So that's pretty neat.

So I'm pretty sure that about half of you are now researching ways to kill via the power of hate. Yes, it is a different item from our first double jump. So that means it stacks. Yes, we now have triple jump.

Wheeeee! *ahem* Moving on...

Before we delve into the crimson "dungeons" I want to walk to the edge of the world.

Rivershire has been hit pretty hard by the crimson.

Though the world does present some pretty stark biome changes.

Yawn. Yet another giant hollow tree.

Oh, hello.

So in the outer two-thirds of the map, goblins can spawn infrequently. They aren't much of a challenge to kill, and always drop the same item.

We can combine a bunch of pieces of tattered cloth together to make an item that summons a combat challenge. If I'm not mistaken, it's 10 pieces of cloth and several pieces of wood.

Moving on, we come across this curious structure. Even without me telling you, I bet you guys could instantly guess this was the dungeon I wrote about several updates ago.

We can even talk to this old man who seems to live here.

Okay... sure thing, buddy. We'll be back much later. I'm not going to show it off, but we absolutely do not want to enter the dungeon without breaking this guy's curse. If we do, a guardian monster will spawn that has a metric fuckton of HP and only takes 1 damage from attacks.

Oh and that guardian monster instantly kills anything it hits. It's bad news all around, and we want nothing to do with that.

There's a reward for killing the guardian monster. I will not be doing this because... fuck that noise.

We'll just walk over the dungeon instead.

Abundance of water in the background, islands with moai heads, and palm trees? I do believe we've found the beach!

There's even seashells and starfish on the ground.

The ocean is as far as we can go in this direction.

That is unless we feel like going for a swim!

There wasn't anything worthwhile in the water.

I'm not crazy, right? This sleeping dude wasn't here before, right?

So this is Matty, the angler NPC. He shows up sleeping at the beach, either in the water or on the beach near the water. Once we talk to him once, he'll make his way over to the treefort back in the middle of the map and claim a bedroom. His whole deal is fishing. Once per day, he'll offer a quest for us to go somewhere in the world and catch him a fish. If we do enough of these quests, he'll give us rewards.

The problem is that you can only do one quest per in-game day. So if you finish the quest, you have to wait until 4:30 AM at the earliest to get the next one. One quest per 24 real world minutes is pretty bad, not gonna lie.

So just in the interests of full disclosure here, yes I will show off fishing at some point. When I show fishing quests off, I will be doing so with a multiplayer server running. And every time I finish a quest, I will use the server console to move time to 4:29 AM.

Otherwise I will go crazy waiting half an hour in between fishing quests.

Anyway, that's enough for now.

NEXT TIME is going to be a Very Special Update covering a time-limited event in the game. But after that? We're going to be going into one of the crimson caverns to fight the next boss of the game.