Terraria doesn't need an introduction. Many people made their Steam account to buy Terraria exclusively. The “2D Minecraft” that became something much more. Usually, my reviews focus on a completionist perspective, but I want to give Terraria my full attention.

I've been playing Terraria on and off since it came out. I started in 2011 and have come back for every major update. As a completionist, I try to avoid games that update perpetually. I would rather not keep checking to see if they added new achievements each patch. Some games are too irresistible, unfortunately. Terraria, Stardew Valley, Core Keeper, and to a lesser extent, Minecraft, keep me coming back to finish off. Terraria 1.4.5: Bigger and Boulder will be the last update I play. I removed all my prior achievements, fully preparing for this playthrough to be my final farewell to Terraria.

This playthrough, I played with three other people; two online friends and my partner. As always, I ended up playing some version of melee DPS. Ever since the late 90s, melee DPS is the only thing that interests me in RPGs. My final build was a glass cannon build, focusing on single-target damage using the yo-yo. Yo-yos have been a fixation for me since they were added to Terraria.

Having gone through the start of Terraria so many times, I had trouble keeping focus. The beginning of the game hasn't changed, so I'm always eager to get past the Wall of Flesh. It's also challenging on multiplayer because multiple people are going to rush the easily accessible chests and take the loot for themselves. Until the Wall of Flesh, most of the upgrades I got were people giving me things while I mined for ores and fished. Something about the prospect of knowing how powerful I'll get keeps me from enjoying the aspects of the early game.

Getting into hardmode, I started farming everything I could think of. I farmed wings for everyone, I farmed a ton of ore, I got some class-based accessories for myself and my friends. I also farmed a lot of the social accessories that provide your party with information, such as the P.D.A. Additionally, I built some bases in other biomes for the villages, as well as greatly expanded our storage, since things were getting cramped. Post-Wall of Flesh but pre-Golem is where I have the most fun in Terraria. The power level feels perfect for exploring, traversing the map, building, killing enemies. This is where we spent most of the time during our playthrough, and I was really in my element. You can feel yourself get stronger and faster here to a noticeable degree. Gearing up to fight Plantera is very fun. I know many people have complaints about farming three new ores, and I do as well to some degree, but I'll talk about that later.

I don't have much to say about post-Plantera. At this point, the game is moving incredibly fast, and everyone does so much damage. Nothing on expert difficulty feels like a real threat at this point. Aside from some minor accessories, I didn't have any upgrades after Plantera that I didn't already have. All the strong items that made me invincible came once the game was over. Killing the Golem, the cult, the pillars, and the Moon Lord was fine, but they don't feel strong enough to matter. They turned into checkboxes to finish rather than an epic final fight.

Overall, I think Terraria is an outstanding game with a lot of content to allow players to play how they want. One critique I have is that the pacing doesn't fell thought out past the Wall of Flesh, something that's been a problem for over a decade. In the past, you got the new ores too slow, and it was too much a focus of the game. Now, you get the new ores too fast, and they feel like they don't matter. You rush so fast into the post-Plantera ore that it makes you question why there are two ores you think about for less than 10 minutes. Then, when you're in that post-Plantera state, the game becomes a boss rush where you aren't even getting that many upgrades to make the extended gameplay worth it.

I want to thank Fia, Foss, and my partner for getting me my first ever full Terraria experience. I beat Skeletron solo during 1.1, but it's difficult to count that as beating the game, despite it technically being the end.

So, is it worth completing?

All achievements were obtained on the second hardest difficulty, expert mode.

There are two sides to completing Terraria, and one of them may feel like cheating to you. On one side, you spend 1000 hours doing multiple playthroughs. On the other, you beat the game once, then use that character to get the rest of the achievements. I, personally, chose the latter because I don't have 1000 hours to dedicate to one game. The majority of Terraria achievements are gotten during your main playthrough, but there are a handful of achievements that require you to play on specific world seeds that change the game significantly. Moreover, there is one achievement during your main playthrough that's so ridiculous that it shouldn't be in the game anymore.

For context, much of my hours in the game are during 1.1 and 1.2. The peak of Terraria for me personally was when the Golem was the final boss. There were no achievements back then, although, you retroactively got them when 1.3 released. While I played a bit of 1.3 to initially go for 100%, my group fell apart. This initial wave of achievements felt perfect. Every achievement was part of the experience of beating the game, with some harder option ones you have to work towards. No additional worlds needed. Then, more content came, including new achievements. When the next two waves of achievements came out, you had to make a new world each time because they're tied to the generation of the world. I didn't mind as much because each friend group I had at the time was willing to do playthrough years apart, and I ended up getting them naturally. This — hopefully final — wave of achievements takes it to an unbelievable level.

In Terraria 1.4.5, they added achievements that expect you to do 4 different worlds. Some of them require you to play for a couple of minutes, but some of them ask for full entire 100+ hour long playthroughs assuming you don't use your main character. Listen, I get wanting to add achievements for specific people to feel special about the way they want to play, but this instantly makes this way lower on the completionist tier list. Before this update, I'd say it was a perfect completionist game on top of being one of the best video games ever made. This update knocks that down to being one of the best video games ever made that wasn't meant for completionists. Allow me to explain.

Trash Compactor - Research 50% of all items in Journey Mode.

For this achievement, you need to play Journey mode, which is Terraria's creative mode. To “research” an item, you need to find a specific amount of it, and put it into the research menu. You can then spawn it infinitely. There's around 6100 items in the game, requiring you to research around 3050 items. I spent around 20 hours getting all the quick wins and I only got to 2500. The last 550 felt so painful and took another 20 hours. I can't imagine in any world how someone would get all 6100 items if it took me 40 hours to get 50%. I never felt so much relief once I completed this, mostly because I had no interest in playing the creative mod right after playing a full expert playthrough. This can probably be fun if you treat it like an actual playthrough AND you have any desire to build creatively in Terraria, but I don't.

Boulder Lord / Queen Machine / Mini-Me / Grave Mistake - Various achievements on the Zenith seed.

Listen, I love Terraria, but I absolutely “cheated” here. Zenith is a seed that combines 7 seeds and some other changes into one world. It's similar to playing a chaos mod or a randomizer in a video game. The game is entirely different and looks absolutely nonsensical. It also forces you to play on the hardest possible hidden difficulty. Even attempting to play this mode on my main character that has all the best equipment, I died an insane number of times. You very often get one shot by random explosives, and the bosses do so much damage, they might as well be a one shot.

In a different life, I'd be all for doing this legit. Unfortunately, I like playing more than one video game, and this achievement is for those who are overly dedicated to one game. I don't even think I could get a single friend to attempt this seed with me, and Terraria isn't a strong solo game. I have no doubt in my mind this is a 500+ hour set of achievements.

Extra Life / It's Shaling Outside / Fear The Sun - Various achievements on different special seeds.

Extra Life can take a couple of minutes, but it does require a new world with specific seeds selected. All you need to do is join the world and find a way to die.

It's Shaling Outside can take anywhere from a couple of minutes to an hour. You load up a new world and wait for it to be windy and rainy, and hope it rains boulders. It's completely random.

Finally, Fear The Sun either requires you to do a 10+ hour playthrough, or use your main to farm the items. You need to wear a set of vanity items that you can get in any world, or you can find the set in chests in the seed itself. Of course, this could fall under the “cheating” I referenced before, since you'd be bringing your main into a new world for the specific purpose of getting this achievement. It's either asking too much of your time for an RNG achievement in a seed that makes the game harder, or makes you feel like you're cheating.

Unfortunately, even with those three points out of the way, I still have one final thing to gripe about. The And Good Riddance achievement requires you to remove all the Corruption, Crimson, and Hallow from your world. This achievement wasn't part of the first set of achievements, but later added in 1.4.4. Back in the day, this used to be an unspoken achievement. In my early days, I was excited to do this, even before it was an achievement. Unfortunately, my excitement was naive.

To make a long story short, it's almost impossible to find every block and tile that's been infected without using a map editor. I drilled into our large world 75 blocks apart, spraying the world with purification spray. This took me hours to do on my own. Naturally, none of my playmates wanted to help because it's boring and tedious. It wasn't until I started getting pissed off at the jank in the group chat did people come to help me. Even after they joined, they couldn't find it either without using a map editor. Without loading a new small world and using your main character to clear out the tiny amount of corruption or crimson, you're going to drive yourself mad not using external tools. I cannot convey how frustrating this achievement was. I ended up spending about 10 years spraying the entire world, then trying to figure out how I could have possibly missed something. I hate this achievement more than any other in the game, and I wish they gave you better tools to deal with it. Having to manually spray an entire world is a complete joke, and contends for one of the worst achievements I've ever done. Maybe I should write a blog post about that, my top 10 worst achievements.

A part of me wishes I wrote this review last update. Everything I wrote would have been positive, aside from purifying the world. Even with all the bad things I had to say, I still think Terraria is worth completing, but only if you use your main character to do it all. If you're a completionist like me, I encourage you to save your time. There's so many other amazing video games in the world, it would be a shame to waste so many hours on this one game when there's an avenue to cheese some achievements. Terraria is one of the best games ever made, and the achievements you'll get while doing a normal playthrough are worth the struggle.

Achievements that stood out 3/137

• Hero of Etheria: Repel the strongest forces the Old One's Army can muster.
• Sea You Later: Craft the final upgrade to the Cell Phone.
• Book Worm: Catalogue every creature in the world.

As I said before, Terraria has many achievements that you get while playing the game. This isn't a bad thing; however, it ties the achievements to the enjoyment of the game, which my reviews typically aren't about. If you enjoy Terraria, you'll enjoy 90% of the achievements, simply because they're used as a progression marker or encountering a semi-rare enemy while playing.

Hero of Etheria is a crossover achievement with Dungeon Defenders II, of which Dungeon Defenders I has a special place in my heart. It was endearing to see Dungeon Defenders content in Terraria, which is the only reason this is on my list.

Sea You Later requires you to combine all the information items into one powerful tool. Getting all the items gives you a sense of accomplishment. You get all items you need to fuse just by playing the game, but they come from various sources, not just killing enemies. Requiring you to go the full depth of the game to get a completely tertiary item is what being a completionist is all about.

Book Worm requires you to encounter or kill every spawned entity in the game. If you're doing a playthrough with friends, you'll get 90% without trying. However, the last 10% requires you to have intimate knowledge of Terraria, which, again, is what being a completionist is all about. Some final mobs require you to make specific biomes to farm; otherwise they'd never spawn. I enjoyed being forced to interact with the world that way, even if most people would find this a tedious achievement.

_{Published 14 February 2026 @ 3:10:04 PM UTC}

End of Game Information

Total Time Played: 733 hours from 2011 to 2026