Playing Terraria's hardest difficulty with 30x more monsters sounds like a nightmare, but one player is slowly destroying this "impossible challenge"
"I'm like the best player in the game so it should be pretty easy"
One Terraria player is attempting the ultimate challenge: a hardcore, master mode run with a mod that makes 30 times more enemies spawn. If that sounds ridiculous and impossible, well… that's because it is.
But the idea of an "impossible challenge" hasn't stopped Wild lmao. Since November, this YouTuber has been running a video series documenting the journey to defeat a Terraria world using the Hero's Mod to make 30 times more mobs than usual spawn. On top of that, the challenge is played on master mode, which gives most enemies triple their normal health and damage, and it's in hardcore, which means all deaths are permanent.
That means you have to play very, very cautiously, and if you want to make any progress, you need some extreme knowledge of Terraria's most arcane systems. You won't see much progress in the first video, but you will see a lot of lessons learned. With 30x enemy spawns, the few inconsequential slimes that normally greet you in a new world quickly transform into a deadly swarm.
Wild lmao's first instinct is to just build a tall platform where the slimes can't reach, but that doesn't really work - not least because it's nearly impossible to get back down with a legion of angry slimes waiting. So after the first death, the strategy pretty quickly switches to quickly building a semi-underground house with little traps on the side that can capture enemies and let them easily be farmed for loot drops.
But given the sheer volume of enemies spawning, things get weird here and there - like the way mobs will occasionally just slip through one tile walls as if they're not even there. But it's also the ultimate way to test your Terraria knowledge, and as Wild lmao says, "I'm like the best player in the game so it should be pretty easy."
"Easy" is probably overselling it, but there are ways to mitigate the challenge, like with goldfish. There's an upper limit to the number of mobs that can be spawned in at once, so if you capture and drop a bunch of animals around, you can mitigate some spawns - as long as you get your animals out before the monsters appear.
I won't spoil everything here - the videos themselves are very entertaining and well worth your time - but I've gotta say that I'm absolutely in awe of the Eater of Worlds kill that ends the most recent episode. This challenge is truly breaking Terraria and I'm here for it.
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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.