Terraria's a fullscreen game, so images are going to be cropped to unusual and inconsistent sizes so the forum CSS doesn't automatically scale them down to fit in the window. Maybe if you're curious about details you can click on an image to see it full-sized? I dunno, I didn't design the forum software.
As promised, the earlygame hell of Terraria is made quite literal. There's nothing but featureless ash beneath my feet, and I'm pretty sure if I dug straight down, all I'd find is more ash before the impenetrable bottom of the map. In a mercy, Don't Dig Up includes ash trees to provide wood for earlygame crafting, and the only monsters spawning around are lava slimes. Which are more dangerous than non-lava slimes in vanilla seeds, but a lot less dangerous than the demons, imps, bone worms, and other midgame critters that show up in vanilla seed hell.
I still start with a copper shortsword, a copper pickaxe, and a copper axe. A new feature of the latest update: shortswords no longer poke out straight ahead from the player character, they poke in the direction of the onscreen cursor, meaning they can be aimed. If a slime is about to jump on your head, you can jab straight up to knock it away. Previously, only spears could do that kind of thing.
Eventually I run out of ash to walk on, and a lake of lava is about as dangerous to swim in as you'd expect it to be. So I box myself in using some planks of ash wood I've picked up, hew a few more into a workbench, and get started on making stuff out of... well, out of ash wood and ash blocks and the gel that the slimes drop. There's not much.
As the lava slimes slosh up to the door of my little wooden closet, I vaguely remember something about slimes having trouble staying on wooden platforms. So I dig a pit for them to fall into and make a wooden platform bridge for myself. As you can see from this picture, I'm either misremembering slime behavior or they've been updated to be more formidable. I did have enough time to get some barebones furnishings in the shed, and to craft some wooden armor for myself. Ash wood armor, it turns out, reduces the damage taken from falling in lava. That's sure to be helpful!
It takes a frankly absurd amount of time to get the Lava Slimes off my nuts enough to do much else than fight Lava Slimes. Discovery: there's no meaningful day/night cycle this deep underground, even in the Don't Dig Up seed. Nighttime is a difficulty spike in vanilla seeds, to the point that finding any shelter before the sun goes down for the first time can be kind of difficult.
Since there's only so much I can craft out of hellwood, I'm going to climb upwards and see if I can't find any iron deposits in the ceiling. I also start a little block of apartments for NPCs, since recruiting those is still probably a major factor in the game even starting in hell.
Then I fall through my stairs and into the lava lake and die. Ash wood armor doesn't provide all
that much protection against lava.
If I had the ability to make a bed, I could set my spawn wherever I wanted. Until I do that, it's back to the middle of the map each time I die. At least walking back to the lava lake I have a chance to chop down some more ash trees, since I'd run out of wood.
NPCs have standards for where they live. A house has to have a place to rest, a flat surface of some sort, a light source, and a filled-in back wall before anyone can move in. Having taken my freshly-felled lumber and made some decent apartments, a new NPC has already moved in: the Merchant.
As you might expect, the Merchant has an inventory of items he can sell, and will purchase items spare items from me for cash.
The top-right apartment is reserved for the Tax Collector, who apparently is the starting NPC for Don't Dig Up seeds instead of the Guide. The bottom-left apartment is empty -- it's a pretty good idea to have a spare house in case you meet the qualifications to have an NPC move in while you're away from your home base.
There's a little bit of iron to the right of the new apartments, but it looks like there's better stuff to the left. So up I go, into the first new biome I've found. I started in hell, and right above it is a Glowing Mushroom biome. As you can see, the moss and mushrooms that grow here emit a little bit of light. The glowing mushrooms make good potion ingredients, once I have the ability to craft potions.
The Glowing Mushroom biome also starts spawning enemies I'd have seen by now on the surface in a vanilla seed, including Slimes that aren't made of lava, Zombies, and flying Demon Eyes. There are still lava pools here and there from being this far underground, including one that I drained away through the channel on the left side of this screenshot to reach this deposit of iron.
While I was mushrooming, the Guide moved into the spare apartment I built. The Guide gives generic advice, mostly about how to recruit other NPCs anymore. But more importantly, he has a feature where you can show him an item in your inventory and he'll tell you everything that can be made out of that item. I'd forgotten how to make a Furnace to smelt the iron ore I've found into usable ingots, so I had to ask him about a hunk of stone for him to remind me of the recipe. Some wood, some stone, and three torches. I don't remember torches being a factor, so maybe that's a new change.
With a smelter and an anvil I can start making stuff out of iron -- start with a better pickaxe for quicker digging, a better axe for quicker chopping, a steel sword to replace the wooden one I'd been using, and some sturdier armor.
Behind me, hanging from the ceiling of the hallway I'm in, is a Lava Slime Banner. You are awarded a banner for a particular monster after defeating 50 of them. I earned this one before I even built the wooden stairway. I've been fighting Lava Slimes for a
while.
The map so far. The green arrow at left is my starting spawn, the faces floating on the right side are the current position of all known characters -- me and the three NPCs, all bunched into our tiny barely-furnished wooden apartment building oddly hovering over a lake of lava. Above is the Glowing Mushroom cavern I'd briefly poked into looking for iron to start with.
Right now the to-do list is the usual earlygame Terraria chores: expand the NPC housing so others can move in, meet the qualifications to get other NPCs to move in, explore the map for new biomes and new materials.
As is typical for crafting-centric games, there's a hierarchy of building material quality. Earlygame Terraria starts with stuff like wood, then copper or tin, then iron or lead, and a few more real-world elements to make weapons and armor out of before getting into weird fantasy stuff. I forget exactly what comes next, above iron. I think it's silver? Unless I find a big vein of tin ore I can't possibly do worse than what I've got.
It'd be pretty cool if I could find a hook or some gems, since the next mobility upgrade is a grappling hook, and I've got the iron chains for that already.
But hey, it's a game about pulling up terrain, strip-mining anything of value that can be found, and building stuff for myself. What kind of massive project should I undertake? What should I build?
