What was planted in faith? Let's not Dig Up in Terraria!

[nosimpleway]

With the main questline finished, Moon Lord defeated a dozen times over, what qualifies for sidequests done, having crafted the Zenith and earned the Terraprisma, and filled the bestiary to get the Universal Pylon, there's not much left to do. I could build a golf course if I wanted, I guess, but I'm only slightly more interested in video game golf than I am in video game fishing. Unless there's some great building project out there...

a castle but upside-down

Oh. Right.


It occurred to me only well after the fact that everything would probably go better if I had just built a regular castle and then explored it with a Gravitation Potion in effect to flip everything upside-down for realsies. Oh well. Let's get started. With everything I need to craft already crafted, there's really not much point in having a workshop with extensive storage set up, so I've been gradually tearing things down as I don't need them anymore. The Forest Pylon is still up, though, so let's zip over to the new stuff.


This is the Desert Pylon, because when I started this project a dozen updates ago the only biomes I could build into with a new pylon were the Desert and the Snow. I made my call and stuck with it.

The furniture is right-side-up, because I don't have a choice in the matter there. But the architecture's overall design is upside-down, with arches and vaults on the floors and stairs on the ceilings. It's hard to tell with gold-brick-on-gold-wall, but the ramp leading upward is smooth and the ceiling is blocky, to simulate that if this were all flipped over it would be a stairway with a smooth ceiling.

And yeah, it's in gold brick. Part of this project was to find a use for all the golden furniture I got as drops from Pirate raids, so I figured if I'm gonna go needlessly ostentatious I might as well stick with it.


Next room over is the throne room, with the throne itself on a dias, and a bottle of red and a wine glass on adjacent tables. The Princess lives beneath, since, y'know, throne room. And because I need enough NPCs living nearby that the pylon functions, and the Princess and a pet slime is enough.


A big open space with a half-wrecked stairway. Sure, why not. Blue Starry Blocks fill in for the night sky, since I'm building this half a mile underground in a desert cavern. A Meteor Lamp pretends to be a full moon. And this space isn't actually open to the outside, there's a floor here. It's just invisible.


My initial plan was to use this tower, with its little nook-and-cranny rooms, as a new base. I don't really need it, though.


The main convenience is that it's right next to a teleporter room, so I can get around the rest of the Inverted Castle quickly. This teleporter has a bunny statue in it, because lion statues don't exist in the game. Otherwise I'd have put some in the vertical shaft outside, too.


C D


The next room has a statue of a large bat.


With my spawn point a couple rooms over, I intended this hallway to be my new storage/workshop space. But I don't need to craft anything anymore, except for the stuff I needed to make this castle. By the time I started moving stuff over, I didn't need much of it. I did put up a turtle terrarium, just because the little bastard gave me so much trouble when I was filling the bestiary. And I snuck a little pool of Shimmer in here, for ease of breaking down crafted materials. The only other pylon I occasionally used was the Hallow Pylon to get back out to the natural Shimmer pool, and now even that's obsolete.


I can appreciate that the Cog blocks and Cog walls make completely useless but animated and moving machinery for this tower. And when it comes to devices that don't do anything in particular, I figure this is the place to put my collection of Music Boxes.

The Wizard starts selling empty Music Boxes when he moves in, and if you have one in your inventory, there's a chance every few seconds that it records the background music that's playing at the moment. And then you can put those together to craft new music boxes for in-game music that doesn't play with a biome, like the title screen. So make sure you record two of everything so you can craft them all!

Pretty sure all of them that's available in the game are on display here.

Oh yeah. And there's a Medusa Head up there, stuck behind a grate.


C D


Without telescopes or out-of-control elevators in the game, there's virtually nothing to report about this outer wall sort of area. I didn't even fill in the stairs, simply so I could more easily fly up and down the shaft to get where I needed to be. Anyway, there's a teleporter here, marked with a Scorpion statue. It goes to the Rabbit teleporter.


Frankenstein is a monster included in the game, but there's no Frankenstein statue. I just had to pick a big brutish mook statue and put a hammer next to it. Hell, the whole castle is an approximation, good enough. Wonder what that seal on the wall is for...


C D


There's a library. A shopkeeper lives in the office at the far side, peddling a few common wares that may help in any quest you might be on.


C D, to a place that technically shouldn't be accessible from the wall but they ended up right next to each other, so it seemed silly not to make a connection.






Because once I decided that having a really long hallway with the red curtains and the tall windows was a good place to hang all the enemy banners I'd collected, I needed a lot of horizontal space for 'em. Is this every banner in the game? I dunno! I made a list! I might have missed something anyway! I don't care!

The open spot in the middle might be a good place to mouth off to your dad's best friend so he steals all your stuff. It didn't feel right to have it all bricked over, but leaving empty space means monsters spawn inside the building. So there's a background wall painted with invisible paint here, too.


Not much to talk about regarding the front gate area.



If you duck through the little trapdoor, though, you end up in some kind of half-assed garden. I dunno, this place just kinda feels... unfinished?


Just beneath the invisible-wall bit in the center is this little foyer. With nothing better to do here I ended up putting all the terrariums (...Terraria?) I'd made of the golden critters I'd caught. There's a gold seahorse, a gold bunny, a gold butterfly, a gold ladybug... I know I'm missing at least one, the gold water strider, but haven't I ground out enough rare spawns for one game?


There's a teleporter here, marked with a Unicorn statue.


For the sake of space, the open area has this aquifer sort of space immediately above it. They really should be a few rooms apart, but eh. Getting the water to stick to the ceiling was no mean feat, lemme tell you.

If you look closely at the bottom-left, you will see one single Flesh Block mixed in with the rest. This castle wouldn't be complete if there weren't some meat in the walls.


C DEEZ NUTS

okay I'm done with the loading room gag

[nosimpleway]

The place with even less :effort: than the outer wall, the cavern. There's no natural-looking wall that doesn't invite monsters to spawn, and damned if I know how I started growing red moss on one side of the space but not the other. Moss grows over gray brick, too, so that's why the loading room for this spot was made of red bricks instead. Moss doesn't grow on red bricks. I dunno why.


I thought I was pretty clever, using blocks that look like they billow upwards and painting them blue to make an upside-down waterfall. But mostly Smoke Blocks just churn in place, so the overall visual effect is kind of shit.


But like the aquifer before, there's a pool of water stuck to the ceiling for the caverns too.


There's a teleporter here. Lacking any kind of snake statue, I had to settle for a Worm statue instead. The Unicorn teleporter directs here, and here directs to the Scorpion teleporter.


A Reaper statue is in the room nearby.


You might have noticed that the colors in the last few screenshots are all desaturated. Here's why! The cavern provides the space so that the entrance hallway of the castle isn't close enough to the graveyard biome I've built here to be filled with ecto mist and start spawning ghosts and stuff. Not only do I need a graveyard here thematically, but some stuff can only be crafted in graveyards -- top left of this screenshot there's a dias with a workbench, a heavy workbench, and a loom for those purposes.


I've also built a house here, because NPCs in graveyard biomes will sell macabre-themed equipment. The Painter is here now, because living in a Graveyard means he sells Illuminant Coating and Echo Coating. Illuminant Coating I've mentioned before, it makes the block or wall space covered with it glow like it's fully lighted by a light source. Light sources in Terraria are kind of terrible at their jobs of illuminating spaces! And while no project can justify having a shitton of wall sconces and torches everywhere like this one, I still think they're ugly. Pretty much everything in the entire castle -- blocks, walls, statues, paintings, furniture -- is painted with Illuminant Coating.
Echo Coating makes stuff invisible. You've seen its effect already.


Anyway. The mausoleum is a dead-end, so back to the entrance hallway, through another C D room...


I was going for "chaotic mess" for this area. I set up all the workstations I don't use, and most of them are animated in some way or another. That wasn't quite enough so I bought some decorations from the party girl and put them up here and there. That's about right, I think.


Like the wall on the other side, I couldn't think of anything in particular to do with this big-ass stairway with little alcoves. After a while I started getting annoyed by having to track down NPCs from the houses I'd built all over the world to buy the one thing I needed from them, so I made this spot into apartments for them. Thematically enough for the castle I have the lizard shaman, the machine-augmented human, the nature spirit, the cursed soul, and a goblin living here.


Bell towers. There's a Medusa statue here.


Completing the loop is a long hallway leading back to my spawn point base. There are some tombstones in the hallway.


Going the other way from the bell towers leads to the last teleporter, with a Gargoyle statue to make up for the lack of a goat statue, or goat anything really, in the game. The Bunny teleporter leads here, and it leads to the Unicorn teleporter.


There's no Mummy statue either, so this is instead a Mannequin I've put a mummy costume on.


Built well before the housing pictured previously, the quarters here were meant to keep the Desert Pylon functional by having a bunch of NPCs nearby. Then I had to redesign what I was doing, moved the quarters up a dozen blocks or so, and that was just far enough to stop the Pylon from working. Oh well. Princess and her slime do a fine enough job by themselves.

The quarters are populated by a practitioner of the dark arts, a ruthless murderer and bandit, another cursed soul, and a lycanthrope.


There's a narrow little passageway leading out of the quarters area, with not much to say for it.


It leads to a very large clock. Again, a goat-head statue would look great here, but a Corrupt statue -- one that requires rather more clearance around it than is at all aesthetically pleasing -- will have to do. The clock hands are made of grating for that wrought-iron look.


This castle project started as a way to use up the golden furniture that was overflowing my storage chests dedicated to housing items. Shortly after my weapon and clothing storage chests also started to overflow, which gave rise to my idea to put it all up in a gallery. A gallery made of marble. Some kind of... Marble Gallery.


Of course, once I decided to do that I couldn't have an incomplete collection, so I did have to go back and grind out some things I'd missed before. Here are rooms for the finds and drops from the Dungeon, and below, the Pirates. The fish and mermaid costumes, and the anchor weapon, are there simply because they fit the nautical theme.


At left, all the various prizes from the Dungeon Defenders crossover -- accessories, weapons, trophies, clothes and armor, masks from the bosses, and the Eternia Crystal stand in the center. At right, Duke Fishron's various drops. He really does not like dropping the Fishron Wings!


Christmas stuff from the Frost Moon. Stuff from the actual Christmas event is omitted because it only just now became December and I haven't been killing a ton of monsters for the past few days, focusing instead on getting this castle done. I assure you the Candy Cane Pickaxe and Fruitcake Chakram are not that interesting.


Spooky stuff, crossing over the Pumpkin Moon with the drops -- mostly costumes -- from the Halloween event. The Solar Eclipse horrors have their stuff here, too, such as Dr. Man-Fly and the Butcher's costumes at left and the weaponry from that event in the lower chamber.


Plantera and the Martian Madness event drops. The Seedling was the pain in the ass to get here, since Plantera isn't terribly easy to summon, having to wander around the jungle looking for a bulb.


On the other side, more galleries. Here is Golem.


The eyes, bones, and worm/brain bosses on the left, including their Mechanical remixes, and the Lunar stuff on the right. Props to the Lunar stuff for being almost entirely crafted or purchased, without a ton of grinding.

The Twins masks are both red. I had to dye one of them green to get the right eye color.


A room for King Slime and Queen Slime. I put the Slime Hook here instead of the Slime Gun that the King Slime actually drops, so that the item frames each have a saddle and a hook, purely for symmetry. Slime Hook and Slimy Saddle for King, Gelatinous Pillion and Hook of Discord for Queen.


Buy two Plumber's clothes sets when you find them for sale, and dye one green. It looks like crap, but if at any point the Guide has dropped a Green Hat, at least you don't have to dye that part.


Left: Empress of Light, including the spare Terraprisma I managed to get.
Middle: all the Don't Starve crossover stuff I could find. Most, but not all, are drops from Deerclops. The clothes (Wilson and Willow's costumes) are crafted.
Right: Queen Bee's stuff. Somehow the Bee Shirt was the hardest one to get.


Right: the various prizes from the Wall of Flesh.
Center: Mimics. So many goddamn mimics, this game. Top left are the drops from Corrupt Mimics, center are from Hallow Mimics, right are from Crimson Mimics, and the bottom rows are from regular Mimics and Ice Mimics.


In this room, the weird, not-terribly-useful junk from the monsters that can be fished up from a Blood Moon. At top, I knew I wanted a spooooooky eyeball to stare out from one of the long hallways in the gallery, so I put aside this wall hanging to go up here. Then I put down a bunch of mannequins and it looks like the spooky eyeball is officiating a wedding. Oh well.


It's not at all a secret passage and doesn't require visiting the rooms with the bat, golem, reaper, Medusa, or mummy statues first, going up from the clock leads to a narrow passage made of Luminite brick. At left, the Ancient Manipulator. At right, a rack with the Moon Lord Mask hanging on it. At center, a completely dark Void Monolith. Yes, that's what it looks like even with a varnish of Illuminant Coating. The void is dark.


And that narrow passage leads to the room showcasing all the drops from the Moon Lord. Obviously the final boss stuff goes here, where else would it go? What else could be here in its place?


That was a big project! It's a big castle! There's still no Colosseum!

Until I can figure out how to make an eternally-pooping butt, that's that. One more LP in the can.

[Silversong]

/me applauds

[zaratustra]

jesus that's impressive