Terraria
I'm hooked. I really am.
The last couple of days I've been sitting at home1), doing little else but playing the everliving cr*p out of this little indiegame called "Terraria" that was released like 10 days ago on Steam.
It's an exploration/survival/building kinda game, allowing you to explore a randomly generated world including different biomes such as forests, deserts, oceans and such, but also deep cave systems leading down to “hell”. Of course, you are not alone in this world and are constantly fending off different kinds of enemies inhabiting the biomes (Slimes, Zombies, Skeletons, …). If that sounds like Minecraft2) to your ears: Yes, there is a strong resemblance. However, Terraria adds a couple of real ingame goals in the form of bosses to defeat and in game events like Blood Moon, Goblin Invasions or falling meteorites. Besides that, I'm happy to have something like 2d Minecraft, as sadly the original triggers my motion sickness pretty hard.
So I already built a stone castle thingy:
Click to enlarge.
As you can see, I've got a mushroom farm in my cellar, a little well/pool thingie and portcullis made from sand for my outer doors in case of the occasional Blood Moon (where Zombies can open doors and therefore invade my house and slaughter my NPCs).
Speaking of NPCs, I already got a couple of them to move in (a merchant, a nurse and a demolitionist and of course also the obnoxious guide3)) which provide me with different services (e.g. buying and selling items from the merchant).
Below the house is the entrace to a quite complex tunnel system where I go to explore and gather ores and such. I've just hit the -800 feet mark there and encountered my first spots of lava4). Sometimes, I also accidentally trigger waterfalls:
Additionally to my single player map, I'm also playing on a small multiplayer world together with a couple of friends. We just stole a couple of books from the Dungeon and died a horrible death when trying to defeat the first boss.
So, anyway, I can only give a full hearted recommendation for this game. It cost me 10€ and already provided me with more than a day of constant entertainment. If you happen to like sandbox environments and building your own stuff, give it a try 
Discussion
You got to love this game <3
Nice blog entry! But who is this very attractive guy called “Peter”, but on the other hand he looks like the type of guy having a kinky relationship to nurses?!
Sounds amazing. But it seems there is no way to get this game without Steam? I guess it won't run on Linux then?
There are people who successfully got it to work using a recent wine version, see this entry on steamgamesonlinux. I just tried it, and it looked fine up until the point where it complained about not being able to find a valid Direct3d device – that might be my notebook's fault though. You might want to give it a try. If you want, I'll gift the game to you, so no risk
Wow, thanks for the offer
. Just to make sure I get how this could work (never used Steam before): Would I need to run Steam in Wine and then download the game through that? Or could I boot into Windows (or a VM), run Steam there and download the game and then copy the game itself back to my Linux system where i'd run it without Steam? Is that even possible or are they using some DRM crap that require Steam to play the game?
You'll have to first install Steam in Wine, then buy it there (or tell me your Steam ID and then redeem the gift I'll send you
), then follow this guide and hopefully be able to play it. I'm not sure if it would work if you copied the game files onto Linux as there's Steam integration embedded into the game which then probably wouldn't work.
You could also try to use a VM – Terraria isn't that ressource hungry so it might work, given that you have working 3d acceleration in your VM. Haven't tried it yet though.