Spawn

Every world has a fixed spawn point decided during generation, and every player has a personal one that starts out pointing at it. Placing a bed inside valid housing and activating it moves yours. Activating it a second time, or breaking the room around it, hands you back to the world point. On the map the world point is a green arrow and your own is a bed icon.

That point is where you land after dying, where a magic mirror, recall potion or cell phone drops you, and where you appear when you enter the world or join a server. In multiplayer everyone arrives at the world point until they set a bed of their own.

World width is always an even number of tiles, so there is no single center column, only a seam between two. The generator picks a random column within five or six tiles of that seam and takes the highest block in it. If that block sits below the surface layer, or if there is liquid resting on top of it, the pick is discarded and the game tries again with the search widened by one tile on each side. It keeps widening until something passes.

The outcome is that the world spawn is always on the surface or above and never under liquid, usually within a handful of tiles of the middle of the map though occasionally further out. It is almost always Forest, because the harsher biomes cannot generate at the center of a world in the first place.

Two seeds break the pattern. Celebration Mk 10 anchors the spawn to one of the beaches instead of the center. Remix picks normally and then drops it to the lowest open air, which in those worlds means the ash island.

Building over the spawn does not break it, but the recovery logic is worth knowing before you dig anywhere near it. The game checks the three by three space above the spawn tile. If anything solid or any liquid is in the way, it scans up to thirty tiles straight up looking for a clear landing and drops you at the first one it finds. If nothing qualifies, it puts you inside the blocks anyway.

If the spot is clear but hanging in midair, because you mined the block itself, the search runs downward instead through a column three wide and fifty tall, and stands you on the first solid block it hits. Come up empty and you appear in midair and fall.

The shellphone set to spawn is the one exception. When it cannot find a clear landing above, it clears the obstruction instead: the blocks in the three by three above the spawn point are broken and dropped as items, and liquid there is removed. Chests and the blocks holding them up are left alone, so you can still end up standing inside something.

• Roof and light the world spawn early. Anything that breaks your bed sends you back there, and arriving in an unlit forest at night with whatever you were carrying is how early characters die twice in a row.
• Do not run a hellevator through the spawn tile. Anyone who respawns there falls the whole way down it.
• On rare worlds the spawn lands on a floating island. Build a staircase before doing anything else, or check the skyware chest for fledgling wings or a lucky horseshoe and jump.
• Keep the three tiles above the spawn clear even if you build around it, since that is the exact space the game tests before it starts searching.