Is expert mode even worth it for a new player? How do you manage slimes while caving?

[Mr. Steal Your Gun]

"Terraria is too easy" seems to be the narrative I see everywhere, so I figured sure, I'll pick expert mode, and put it on mediumcore, why not? I fell for the trap of listening to people with hundreds or thousands of hours of playtime.

The thing is, I guess I wasn't expecting it to be so... clunky? Or, I suppose, I didn't expect to be this awful at it? Like, just regular ol' slimes in a cave, and cave mobs in general, why the hell can they spawn in behind you? Long story short five relatively beefy slimes introduced themselves by sliding right down the tunnel I dug and caught me in a corner, so that was a death. Getting back down there is just a pain because more stuff spawns and everything takes a decent amount of time to kill on expert unless you bother making yourself a bow again, which in itself requires waiting until morning so I'm not swarmed by Demon Eyes and zombies with weapons that just out-range early melee weapons. It just feels... weirdly tedious for a game that's so focused on combat. Fighting underground in general is weirdly tedious, with the weird hitboxes on blocks often stopping me from jumping because I bump my head on nothing, while all the mobs can either lunge at you or just noclip through the world. Get hit once and I usually get hit a bunch of times because hey, I'm just *inside the slime* now with almost no way past it. Meanwhile slopes are the bane of all melee weapons (even shortswords, the game's strict enough about "line of sight" that you usually can't hit something below you because the corner of a block is in the way...) and all the while, stuff's spawning in behind me.

Are you expected to make really spacious tunnels and build out caves so that you can move freely enough to fight properly? Is melee really just kind of garbage (ranged weapons seem to do *more* damage which is mind-bogglingly stupid)? Do many people bother with mediumcore, or was the game really not designed to be played that way (gonna take hours to find all that tin for a basic set of armor again)?

[CPT Chthonbeard the Pirate]

Terraria on normal difficulty is a casual experience. This is not to say that playing it on normal is for filthy casuals. It is for players who are new and are seeking to learn at their own pace.

Basically the game is forgiving, will let you make mistakes and allow you to easily make up for them. It will not overly punish you for a bad decision. You are not expected to know how to min/max stats for the most optimal damage output and boss outcomes.

Expert is for those who have learned the basics and now want a challenge. Master mode is supposed to be the ultimate challenge for those who thought Expert was too easy. Right now it is just a scaling of stats. It's up to you to decide if this lives up to it's hype.

[Jostabeere]

Playing expert wasn't a mistake.
Playing mediumcore was.

The hitboxes are very precise. If there is a block, hammered into a slope, you get stuck. Enemies get stuck the same way as you, as walking human-sized enemies have the same hitbox as you.

So what exactly do you expect? All mobs spawning in-front of you and mindlessly walking into your blade? Nonono.
Mobs in Terraria spawn offscreen in a set zone. Max. 47 blocks above or below you and max. 84 blocks left or right to you.
Melee is not garbage. But weaker in a few scenarios.
Stronger in others.

[NightStar]

Very few play medium core characters. Also if your a beginer, then yes it may seem clunky when your not familiar with the games workings. I would recommend your first playthrough be either classic or journey world so you can get the gist of the game. Start easy and build up your skill and familiarity with the game first.
Most of those saying the game is too easy are those who do some of the most rediculous challenges to test or prove their skills or for bragging rights. They are not the majority of gamers but they are the most vocal in my experience.
I don't make spacious tunnels but caution is required in this game. From the sounds of it, you haven't even started encountering the more devious traps. Again start easy and build familiarity for the game and it's mechanics before you decide if it's good or not and weather or not to play expert and master modes. The expert players mentioned above, will make it sound easier than it is and try to convince you and everyone else to take on a difficulty greater than you are ready for as a new player.

[Andy]

thers two types of difficulty in terraria, character penalty on death, and world(game) difficulty....

(world) expert is a very balanced difficulty for a first playtime, my bf finished it and started the game at that... first time.... no issues he do got my tips here and there tho.

(character) medium core is a weird difficulty settings, its not related to the game difficulty but the penalty you get on death, you lose the items and some items are not infinite in the world (making you have to get more worlds)

the game also don't reward you in any way for playing (character)medium core.......... it is like they jsut put that option for people that play minecraft, but terraria is definetly balanced in the softcore, it hurts the economy instead...

just go expert/softcore and you will have a great time if you like challenge,

i don't recomend master mode as a first time tho because i don't consider it a "True" difficulty settings as its more just stats boost.

you can go on classic difficulty as well and you will have a good time/challenge too terraria is a very well balanced game in general just a few issues here and there.

[Elvarion]

Starting out on Expert is fine even for the very first playthrough. Take it slow and steady while learning the ropes of how the game works.

Melee in general at the very start of the game is not all that fun. If you can get a Spear/Trident or any Boomerang it gets better. But Ranged is a much more enjoyable experience imo at the start of the game.

Enemies can spawn almost anywhere outside the range of your screen pretty much (may vary slightly depending on screensize, but you always have a safe area of about 45 blocks up/down and 75 blocks left/right around your character)
Blocking routes behind you / making places you need to use some rope to get up/down could limit the amount of monsters that will try and murder you.

From my experience people tend to either just go Softcore or Hardcore. Mediumcore is pretty much just Hardcore but you keep Health and Mana when you die. Since if playing Hardcore you could just make a new char and keep playing the same world.

[solidsoldier2]

To me, Expert is the quintessential Terraria experience. The whole world is now a consistent threat, rather than being a walking simulator in pre-hardmode only for the bombs to be dropped once you first fight any of the mechanical bosses - all without the ridiculous and lazy health/damage scaling that turns every Master mode enemy from a well-balanced threat to an annoying bullet sponge.

That being said, my first playthrough was on Classic. I switched over because I had steamrolled the pre-hardmode bosses, only to face the Twins for the first time and get floored. I wondered why every boss wasn't that hard, so I switched over to Expert and never went back.

Your problem, like others have stated, is that you played on Mediumcore.
Never play on Mediumcore, ever.

Stop it.

You have exactly the right idea, the game wasn't designed around Mediumcore, it was designed around Softcore or "Classic" as it's now called. Not to mention that once you're far enough along on a Mediumcore character, it basically becomes Hardcore without restarting with an entirely new world, which is for all intents and purposes exactly the same thing.

Also I think you just got really unlucky with those enemy spawns, I've never had that happen to me and I once had a Master world with every pre-hardmode boss defeated.

[Blargo]

For a new player, maybe not. It all depends on how you feel about the game's difficulty when you start.
There's an enormous amount of stuff about the game that new players have to figure out, and it's usually only after figuring everything out that the game becomes easy.

I never touch mediumcore either. I just find that it doesn't work well in a game like this where you have so many levels of progression that you spend hours upon hours getting up to. Maybe it works better in multiplayer.

Expert softcore should still be a fine choice for new players though.

[ImHelping]

This is yet another reason for both new and returning players alike to play Journey mode.

Unsure? Slide the difficult up to Expert in a journey world!

Then you won't need to throw your entire world into the garbage if you find Expert is merely "annoying" instead of "challenging", and instead are allowed to turn the difficulty slider back down.

And in the other direction, if you find expert too easy, you won't need to throw your whole world (and bestiary progress) to make a brand new Master world instead. Because difficulty slider.

Still, a lot of people put a ton of value on wasted time and checkboxes = challenge. It's why you see people defend game breaking bugs that corrupt entire worlds or save files across countless games.

"But if I don't play Subnautica on hardcore mode it won't count!"
"Just delete your own save file if you feel it's deserved if you want a permadeath run."
"... But, but everyone says it won't count! That's why I restarted five times over bugs and... I just fell through the ending cutscene and died before it credited me with clearing the game."

It keeps happening. Poor gullible bastards.