Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Terrarian Romp!

There’s a new genre that redefines the time sink of the MMORPG in a lower rent, higher brain function way, a genre of strange, procedural, potentially shared open world experiences exemplified by Minecraft. I could never get myself into Minecraft, personally. I was frightened of the commitment it demanded, the scale and scope of even the most minor undertaking in its pixilated arms. It was also kind of ugly, for all its remarkable ideas.

Enter Terraria, Minecraft’s startlingly hot little sister. With 8-bit graphics tarted up for a digital age and big, sprawling 2D worlds that would make Castlevania cream its jeans, Terraria is sort of Minecraft for dummies and younglings, a lower rent game about digging, exploring and building things with the ill-gotten gains of your exploration. Terraria isn’t the original sandbox mine and build game, and it probably isn’t the best. But it is perhaps the most accessible, except when it comes to actually playing with other people, and it is easily the most adorable.

I really wouldn’t have come to Terraria if not for my long-distance boyfriends, Alex and Dan, who recommended it as a lower stress game for us to play on our totally straight game nights together. Minecraft took too much time for most of us to play on a regular basis and share a world where we could collaborate and enjoy ourselves. And most of our normal gaming habits were far too cooperation light to really give us the sort of fix that these massive sandbox games provide. Sure, you’re working together as a team in Starcraft 2, but you’re a team of rivals, competing for map control and resources just as much with each other as you are with the enemy. And god help you if someone fucks up. That person is out of the group permanently. PERMANENTLY, I TELL YOU!

Terraria, by contrast, is a relaxed, sprawling game. It has resources in it, but they’re resources that you really won’t use for yourself too often. I’ve barely logged ten hours in and I’ve already taken to stockpiling precious metals for future use, my weapons all already crafted of gold. There’s money, too, but there isn’t as much to spend it on as you’d expect. Merchants and vendors will occasionally show up in town and offer you goods and services, but aside from a sweet ass mining helmet with a light on it and some prohibitively expensive explosives I haven’t found anything on vendors that I can’t get by exploring the underground.

It’s a unique and fruitful experience, and it seems like the perfect environment to share with a few drunken buddies on Skype, spelunking gaily through the dynamically generated environs of your private little world. Nothing gay about that sentence.

But there’s one problem: getting it to work.

Getting Terraria to work as a server has, to date, involved downloading a VPN toolset, logging in to another person’s VPN, entering their VPN IP into my search as my destination and crossing my fingers that it works at some point in the future. No luck so far.

Terraria doesn’t have a tremendous amount of tech behind it, and there aren’t any game issues I can think of to date, although being killed by completely unexpected dangers like giant screaming skulls and heaps of sand that fall on you while you’re collapsing tunnels has been a little bit frustrating so far. But actually playing with other people, the ostensible purpose behind Terraria, has been completely impossible.

The game lacks any sort of public play options, demanding a TCP/IP location in order to log into a game. This would be fine if TCP/IP worked the way it did in the old days, or if Terraria had a slightly more robust or transparent toolset for hosting and connecting to servers. But its systems, much like the rest of the game, are lean. So lean that they seem to fail whenever I try to use them with my friends. And there’s no community to test them with. In order to find one I’d have to wander into the morass of the internet that is game-centered forums, and I’ve gotten a bit old for that thank you very much governor.

So there’s frustrations, as is often the case with games. But what’s shocking to me is just how enjoyable Terraria is despite the fact that I can’t seem to use it for the purpose I purchased it. That it’s this fun in light of its relative simplicity is quite an accomplishment too. I’ve really been enjoying traversing the depths of my random little world and figuring out just how various walls respond to various stimuli. I’ve had moments of truly divine revelation, like the time I tunneled upwards towards some suspicious illumination and discovered and underground mushroom forest glowing surreally. And I’ve had some truly hilarious moments of discovery, such as the time I found a set of ancient ruins sitting out in the open on one of my long sojourns. An old man was standing in front of them, and I clicked on him assuming he’d tell me more about the features of these ruins. He promptly turned into a giant skeleton with giant skeleton hands and murdered me.

That’s pretty much Terraria in a nutshell. A strange, surreal place you can explore. And I’m sure it’ll be even more fun once I can enjoy it with friends. In fact, I’m positive it will be, especially if I can carry all my fancy new toys over to the world we’re going to build together. But even without the social aspect there’s something wonderful and deeply satisfying about crawling though an 8-bit Eden, ferreting out places of interest, new items and new creatures. It makes me feel like I’m a kid again, like I’m exploring the landscape of Final Fantasy VI. And as was the case with Final Fantasy VI I can’t see the magic leaving the experience any time soon.