Tips

Every time the game loads a world it prints one line of advice at the bottom of the screen, drawn at random from a fixed pool. Nothing about the choice adapts. It has no idea whether you are ten minutes into a first character or two hundred hours into a Master world, so a new player gets told about mounts and a finished one gets told what a torch is made from. Loading is fast on most machines, so a good chunk of the pool is text you will never happen to catch.

Read as a set instead of one flash at a time, it is more useful than it looks. A few of these lines are the only place the game states a mechanic outright. Plenty of the rest are jokes, and some are out of date.

These are worth acting on, and most of them are interface features the game never mentions anywhere else.

• Information accessories work from your inventory. A depth meter or a watch never needs an accessory slot, and in multiplayer it feeds nearby players too.
• Block swap replaces one tile with another in a single click instead of mine, swap, place. It is a toggle in settings and it changes how building feels.
• Auto select is a held key, not a mode. Hold it and the game picks the right tool for whatever is under the cursor, a torch in the dark, or a glowstick underwater.
• A Safe and a Piggy Bank hold storage only you can open. Anyone can loot a chest you left lying around, and the Void Bag catches items once your inventory fills.
• You can aim your minions. Hold a summoning weapon and right click an enemy, and everything you have out drops its own target for that one.
• Double clicking the world map pings the spot for everyone, which beats describing a location out loud.

A large slice of the pool is move-in conditions for town NPCs, and outside these lines the game never tells you any of them. The shape is nearly always the same: carry an item, beat a boss, or rescue somebody, then have an empty valid house waiting.

Coins in your inventory bring the Merchant. An explosive in any container brings the Demolitionist. Using a Life Crystal puts the Nurse in play. Killing Queen Bee brings the Witch Doctor. Two are not move-ins at all: the Stylist is stuck in a spider nest until you cut her free, and the Tax Collector wanders the Underworld as a Tortured Soul until you purify him.

Two housing lines catch out most new builders. A room can use wood platforms for its floor or its ceiling, but the resident still needs one solid block to stand on. And a room with no background wall behind it spawns monsters inside itself, which is why so many first houses feel haunted.

Some of the pool is not advice. Sand is overpowered. Time heals all wounds. The line about a pet being your best friend. The flat verdict that killing bunnies is cruel, period. Those are there for tone, and the sand one doubles as a title screen message.

One reads like a gag and is actually a hint. The tip saying a normal hammer cannot break demon and crimson altars, and that you have to pwn them, points straight at the Pwnhammer that the Wall of Flesh drops.

• One tip asks for three Fallen Stars to build a Mana Crystal. Current versions want five. Three was true on the 3DS build and the line was never fixed.
• Another says to watch out for falling meteorites. You cannot see one land. You get an announcement, then a crater exists somewhere. Newer versions draw a meteor in the background beforehand, but it is decoration and does not mark the site.
• The old console and handheld pools were mostly written before the Crimson was added, so nothing in them mentions it, and they still describe hammers as the way to clear furniture, which stopped being true long ago.

The potion tip borrows its closing line from the witches in Macbeth. The torch and glowstick tip lifts "light for you in dark places" from The Lord of the Rings. The line about summoning the boss in the Underworld calls the Wall of Flesh him, which is about the only time the game gives it a gender, and it is also the clearest instruction anywhere on throwing a Guide Voodoo Doll into lava.

Two of them settle arguments. The Clothier tip states outright that the Old Man chained outside the dungeon and the Clothier are the same person. And the tip about the moon points at the Sextant, which reads the phase, which decides what the Skeleton Merchant is carrying on the night you find him.