Golf

Golf is entirely player built. No course generates anywhere and none of the gear drops. The Golfer sells all of it, and he has to be found bound underground and freed before he will move in.

You need three things: any club, a Golf Cup to sink into, and a Golf Tee to start from. Balls are optional, since a tee produces one free every time you activate it even with an empty inventory. The only reasons to buy Golf Balls are the colors and being able to start where there is no tee.

Place a tee, activate it to set a ball on top, then hold attack with a club out. A meter fills under the ball from red toward blue and the point where you release sets the power.

The four club faces are different tools rather than tiers. The Driver is the distance club, the Iron and Wedge send the ball higher and shorter, and the Putter keeps it rolling along the ground. The wedge has one job worth remembering: it is the club that does not lose distance on soft ground.

The game counts strokes and announces the total when the ball drops in, with its own line for a hole in one. The Golf Whistle undoes a bad shot by returning the ball to where it sat, at the cost of a stroke that counts against you everywhere.

Stroke count is what you tell your friends. Underneath it the game keeps a lifetime golf score that only ever rises, and that is the number attached to rewards.

The Golfer's stock expands in stages as it climbs and stops expanding at 2000, so that figure is the real finish line for anyone golfing for items rather than fun. Two things outside his shop are tied to it as well: the Football in the Party Girl's stock and the Hunter Cloak in the Clothier's.

Each sunk ball adds a value based on distance, strokes and time. Distance is the sum of straight lines between where each shot started and where the ball came to rest, not the path it traveled, so an arcing shot is measured as though it flew straight. That total, in tiles, is divided by your stroke count plus two and rounded down.

Then a time penalty applies. Sinking a ball drops a multiplier to zero and it climbs back to full over exactly one minute, so twelve seconds after your last putt you collect a fifth of what the shot was worth. Leaving the world and returning resets the multiplier to full.

So long single shots beat short accurate ones, since strokes divide while distance multiplies, and there is no point hurrying. A hundred tile hole sunk in two strokes is worth twenty five points at full multiplier and almost nothing if you repeat it ten seconds later.

• Length beats layout. A long flat run, driver at one end and the cup as far away as you can build it, outscores anything clever.
• Line several cups up in a row with a wall behind the last. Any of them counts, so a shot that overruns the first still lands somewhere and your hole in one rate climbs.
• Mow the strip with a Lawn Mower. Cut grass bounces balls farther than uncut and it costs one pass.
• Reuse an arena. A flat Old One's Army lane is already the right shape for a driving range.
• On a large world a hellevator is a free vertical hole. Tee off at the top with a putter and let it drop.

Surface matters more than anything else. Hard ground like Stone or Gray Brick sends the ball farther, ice makes it skid, and a tee adds distance over starting on the ground. Soft ground eats a shot: sand, silt, slush, cloud and living leaves all shorten it and make the swing harder, unless you are using a wedge. Honey Blocks stop a ball almost dead, Cobwebs drag without breaking, and vines and tall grass slow it down.

Water and honey wreck a trajectory outright. Lava, oddly, does nothing to one. Because a ball counts as a projectile, Conveyor Belts carry it and it will trigger a Teal Pressure Pad. Wind, teleporters, portals and explosives all leave it alone.

Two things will not work. Reverse gravity stops you swinging at all, so a flipped arena cannot double as a course, and Toybreaker Bricks destroy any ball that touches them.

The camera follows a struck ball for its whole flight. Tee off straight upward with an iron or a wedge and you get a free scouting camera that climbs a long way in a couple of seconds, which is the cheapest early method of spotting floating islands over your spawn.