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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.

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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.

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