Character

A character and a world are two independent files and neither owns the other. You can take a finished endgame character into a brand new world, or run five characters through the same world. Only one character loads at a time, and the game always asks which one before it asks which world. On desktop each character is a .plr file in the Terraria players folder, with a folder of the same name beside it holding that character map exploration. The file name is fixed at creation while the name shown in game lives inside the file, so renaming in the menu does not rename anything on disk.

Everything in your inventory travels, and that covers more slots than people expect: the hotbar, armor and accessory slots, vanity and dye slots, the ammo row, and the contents of any portable storage you happen to be carrying. A Safe, a Piggy Bank, a Void Vault and a Defender's Forge all move with the character. Anything sitting in a chest belongs to the world and stays behind. That is why a Hardcore death only costs what you were carrying, and why it costs so much anyway.

Difficulty is the only character property that affects gameplay and cannot be edited afterward. Name, gender, hairstyle and every color are all adjustable in game: the Stylist handles hair and sells styles the creation screen never offers, a Dresser handles colors, and a Gender Change Potion handles the rest. Difficulty is fixed the moment you press create and stays that way.

There is no button for it, but there is a procedure, and it is usually done to turn a Hardcore or Mediumcore character into a Classic one. Make the new character, then move everything across through chests placed at the world spawn, because the new arrival appears there with no movement accessories at all.

• Budget up to seven chests. One takes the main inventory, up to two more take the hotbar plus equipment, vanity and dye slots, and up to four take whatever was inside portable storage.
• Set the permanent upgrades aside separately: up to fifteen Life Crystals, nine Mana Crystals and twenty Life Fruits to bring the new character back to the same maximums.
• Expect to repeat any Stylist purchases and any dresser work, since none of that transfers.
• Map exploration does not survive. The new character starts with a blank map of a world it has already cleared.

Names are capped at twenty characters, and chat tags render inside them, so color and item tags work in a name if you want them to. There are ten character styles, five per gender, and they are mechanically identical, differing only in how armor sits on them and in a handful of NPC lines. Voice is set separately from gender, with three hurt sounds and adjustable pitch on each, so nothing forces the two to match. The screen also has five preview slots showing your character under different armor and vanity sets, plus copy, paste and randomize buttons that move an entire appearance around as a block of text.

Permanent power comes from three places and only one of them is gear. Life Crystals and later Life Fruits raise maximum health, Mana Crystals raise maximum mana, and none of that is reversible or losable. Weapons, armor, accessories and minions are the part you replace constantly through a run. Buffs are the part most people underuse, and in Expert or higher the Well Fed line alone decides whether you regenerate at all.

• Favorite a character to pin it to the front of the select screen and make it impossible to delete by accident.
• Moving a character to Steam Cloud lets it follow you between machines, and moving it back off again is equally easy.
• The camera stays centered on you almost always. The exceptions are Binoculars and scope accessories, golf, flying a drone with the goggles on, standing at the literal edge of the world, and riding a horizontal Rope.