Terraria + Minecraft Adventures

We took advantage of the midweek Steam sale wherein Terraria was 50% off, and buying four copies would only cost the same as three discounted ones. Basically, everyone in our circle of friends now has a copy of said game.

True, it was a fun game. Pretty challenging too when you still have low health and weak gears, attempting to build and mine while a hoard of zombies hound you. Also, reaching the different areas in the world and fighting the various bosses or triggering the many random events makes Terraria less repetitive than most platformer It is very fun as a multiplayer side-scrolling action/platform game. But as a sandbox game, there is one huge limitation: the lack of a third dimension.

This limitation caps the creativity aspect of the game. Pictured above is one of the most creative things you can do in game. Playing Terraria made me miss Minecraft.

Luckily, the weekend after, Notch, creator of Minecraft, got married. During the weekend, they offered a free gift code when you buy the game, making a single copy of the game worth roughly 500 Php. I thought this was too good a deal to pass, since normally the game would cost 1000 Php, and will cost us nearly 1500 Php once it's officially released.

Finally, we are able to have custom skins on our characters. But more importantly, we are now able to play without the unlicensed watermark on the top left. We also manage to generate a pretty decent world filled with hilly islands, perfect for our planned project of a castle in an epic scale. Of course, first, we had to do some preparations, the basic stuff so we can skip the night and not run out of our basic needs of wood.

So, we searched the island for a suitable place for a castle. We settled a beach-side with a seemingly-manageable hill. We started excavating and building the outer wall.

The main challenge aside from the exceedingly hostile world generated for us, was excavating. But because of that, we had enough stone to build a high enough wall and docks.

 

At first we outlined the wall with the island, but realized it would be better if the walls had odd numbered corners. After that, we started working on the docks.

Pretty soon, it rained. The last patched I played didn't have any weather effects, so this is new to me, but boy was our castle looking like a castle.

While this project has probably been done many times before by many other people, it's still a much more satisfying creative experience, similar to creating something epic using Lego.

True, this is just the facade, and we really want it to be epic. But I must say not a bad job for one day and two guys working on it. Hopefully in the following days there will be more hands on board.

Next step? Well, maybe we'll start working on the inner courtyard. Then we'll extend the castle to maybe span the entire island.