Hey all, picked this up on steam a long time ago but really didn't give it any serious time until recently. I've started a couple games on my laptop and desktop. In both, i'm pretty comfortable exploring surface caves and making some short tunnels (deepest i've gone is to the point where i notice the music change from the default surface music. I just need to know a few things. I've gotten a merchange, steve, demolitionist, and a nurse and built them houses. I've made an anvil, furnace, worktable, etc and regularly encounter copper,iron, and to a lesser degree silver and gold ore. What should my next move be? Do i keep trying to go down lower? Should i be trying to farm for a certain piece of gear? I've got some upgraded equipment and keep upgrading as i can but is there something that will speed up the digging? I'm using a gold pickaxe last i looked. Any tips or direction you could send my way would be appreciated.

Why, build a Hellevator of course :)

Personally, whenever I needed a goal I would just fire up a wiki, pick a piece of gear to make, an NPC to spawn, or a monster to summon and work on that.

(Also just in case you don't know, if you felt like playing your laptop world on your desktop, vice versa or focusing all your time on one world and character, the files can totally be transferred from one device to another.)

Keep in mind that I'm not a pro or anything, but I've spent a fair bit of time with the game:

- Focus on getting some decent (silver/gold) armor and weapons. Going deeper increases the rate at which you'll see higher-quality minerals. From the sound of it, you've only just barely scraped the top of the Underground stratum, so you've got a ton of room left to explore.

- Going deeper will also let you find some life crystals, which will raise your maximum health. (Be careful, though, as the first boss can have a chance to spawn if you have at least 200 health, so stop at 180 until you're prepared.)

- Your next goal will probably be beating the first boss, the Eye of Cthulhu, which the above-mentioned gear will make pretty easy. If you don't mind spoilers, read a guide on how to prepare for the encounter, as it'll make things a lot easier. After that, the second boss won't be too far out of your reach either, and both bosses drop materials that allow you to craft even better gear.

- If you happen to come across a Hook, make a grappling hook. It's invaluable.

- You should probably start thinking about how to protect your home against things like blood moons and goblin invasions that will start to happen to you before too long. There are lots of ways to do this, but my favorite is just to build your house in the air, so you can pretty much ignore all ground-based enemies that don't have ranged attacks. (To do this, build your house upwards, then demolish the bottom section.)

Look for jungle.

you guys just gave me a ton of good stuff to search for in the wiki. Thanks! I have to admit, i did cheat and use terrafirma a bit to find some gold and silver deposits to see what was on the other side of the gold/silver find fence.

@mcghee: Then once you get there do a 180 and run the other way because that place sucks so much.

Play Terraria with more people.

When I was playing with my bro, we just farmed specific items. I was on heart collecting duty while he found iron/gold/etc metals. After we got into Hardmode, we farmed a lot Souls. And potions...

Nah, that's where you go to farm crafting items for cool shit like the Sword of Grass and that grapple hook that throws out three vines at once.