What are the Difficulties in Terraria

Difficulty levels, in Terraria, describe how challenging the gameplay is. Terraria has different forms of difficulty for both its characters and worlds.

Difficulties in Terraria

• The actual difficulty mode is a character setting selected during character creation. There are the following options: Journey, Classic (Softcore), Mediumcore, and Hardcore, all modes changing the penalty upon death. Journey characters start with extra equipment and can only be played on Journey worlds. Classic characters drop coins.
• Mediumcore characters drop items on death. Hardcore characters cannot respawn, and drop all items on death. Once a character has been created, its difficulty cannot be changed. On the Nintendo 3DS Version, there are no options, and all characters are created as Classic characters.
• Another form of difficulty is the world modes. Players can choose between Journey, Classic, Expert, and Master when creating a new world. This is a different setting that applies to the world, rather than the character, and similarly cannot be changed once the world has begun generating.
• A third form of difficulty is the transition pre-hardmode to hardmode, which also applies to the world. This is a gameplay advancement and is thus non-optional.

In Expert mode, enemies are allowed to pick up the player’s dropped coins, of which the drop is rounded up.

Mediumcore characters may benefit from storing their second-best equipment in a Chest in case they die, as backup.

Hardmode can be utilized to liberally explore a world by dying, and then subsequently flying through the sky and the ground as a Ghost. One thing to note is that Ghosts do not generate light, which means that exploring non-lit areas may prove to be a challenge.