Fixing FPS drops/issues in Terraria 1.3: How to do it.

Welcome to my first guide.
This is a quick guide on how to boost your FPS in Terraria 1.3
I made this guide because i experience these FPS drops myself alot and it's been bugging me until i found this solution.
Leave feedback in comments, I appreciate it very much.

-=DISCLAIMER=-

BEFORE SCROLLING DOWN, READ ME FIRST:
This guide was made from personal experience in Terraria and other games and i try lots of things to get my FPS as high as possible. I worked with a very low-end laptop for years and basically every game lagged on it.
Anyway, I have never touched a Mac/Linux. This guide is made for all Windows devices. However, if you know how to do some of this on Mac/Linux, feel free to post a comment below so i can add it.

Thanks!

The easy way (for all PCs).

This is basically the easiest way there is to get some extra FPS. You guessed it: Game settings.
In Terraria (main menu, or Settings in-game), go to Video and follow these steps:

• The most obvious thing is Quality. Try putting this to Low.
  
• Turn Multicore Lighting to Off.
  
• Turn Lighting to White.
  
• Turn Background to Off (needs confirmation).
  
• Lower your resolution (Go down one by one and see how much it improves). Thanks to UnstoppableHero for this one!

Frame Skip is also in there. This needs some explanation.
Frame Skipping doesn't affect your FPS as much as the other settings. Basically what it does WHEN TURNED OFF , is make sure you see every frame that a computer running on 60 FPS would see. Since you're reading this guide this is not the case, I imagine. Because your PC runs at a lower pace, it'll still do for example 30 FPS. One in-game second would take 2 seconds on screen, since you need the 60 frames to appear over 2 seconds (2*30=60) That's why it looks like your game is slowed down. If you don't want this 'slowmo BS', turn it on. It then skips the frames you miss like any other game.

tl;dr: Turn Frame Skip ON if you don't want your game to run in slow motion. It doesn't affect your FPS that much, it just a quality of life setting.

EDIT: This is a step that can bypass the 'hard' way. Before launching Terraria, right-click it in your Steam library, click Properties, in the General tab, click 'Set launch options'. in the text box, type '-high'. Huge thanks to Kavas for this!

The HARD way! (Read disclaimer)

If that didn't help enough/at all, then this is the more advanced way of dealing with the low FPS. You need to go OUT THE GAME for this; that's right, you need to use the one thing everyone uses to close programs which are not responding: THE WINDOWS TASK MANAGER. For those who don't know how to open this very handy program, here's a quick instruction:

• KEEP TERRARIA RUNNING DURING THE WHOLE PROCESS!!!
  
• Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete on your keyboard.
  
• Click 'Start Task Manager'.
  
• A window should pop up. That is the WINDOWS TASK MANAGER.
  
• (there is also a really quick way: Just press Ctrl+Shift+Escape)

Now we're in the Task Manager. Now we're going to do something a little risky, so if you're a scaredy-cat, leave this guide now. What we're going to do now can cause program instabiltiy -> more crashes, but that's none of my business. I didn't have game-corrupting crashes, and the ones who just threw me back to my previous save weren't ones caused by what we're going to do now. Anyways, here's how to do it:

• REMEMBER TO KEEP TERRARIA RUNNING!!!
  
• Go to the 'Processes' tab.
  
• Search for 'Terraria' in the Description Column.
  
• Right click the process.
  
• Point your cursor on Set Priority... and change it to 'High'.
  
• A warning will pop up. Click 'Change Priority'

Your game now gains more attention by your PC, giving it a good FPS boost.

Test your game on the changes!

Now that we're done boosting our game, close the Task Manager and resume your game. It should
run smoother now. If it doesn't, try setting priorities of other processes (such as Skype, Steam, etc.) to 'Low'. If it still doesn't work, well, I guess you'll have to buy a new PC, or wait for a performance update for Terraria.



AND THATS IT! You have successfully boosted your game to maximum priority! I hope this guide was clear enough for you. Please leave feedback/problems in the comments below and I'll see you in-game!

[SGFI]

Thanks!

[XST MultiKultiTuttiFrutti]

Even funnier is how I was 14 when I made this guide and it gets reactions to this day

[catix⁧⁧(certified cat) 🐈]

it's funny how this guide goes from being a general guide turning into microsoft-only guide

[whitydco]

Thanks! Made Terraria playable again on my M1 Max MacBook Pro.

[Man]

thanks dude

[BlueStaggo]

Another tip: Don't play on large worlds if your PC is that bad. Play medium or small instead.

[Syx]

you can go into the settings, then put in "launch options" and type "-high" which should automatically put the game on high priority.

[Classy Car]

Basicly, turn the lighting to retro, turn the resolution to 1280x720 and turn background off, works well for me in 1.14.2. Weirdly its harder to run terraria then minecraft

[LemonPie]

tnx man that processor priority change helped me a lot (^_^)

[therealdex]

instructions unclear. died to an eater of souls.