I never got into terraria, I’ve tried a couple of times but couldn’t grasp the game loop.
I really liked minecraft when it came out though.
I’d say Terraria has a lot more… structure in how you upgrade things. Minecraft is a lot more loose and free with how it lets you play, while Terraria expects you explore, collect, create and use the things you discover and create to move the story forward.
Maybe that was why, not entirely sure.
I did appreciate the complete freedom of minecraft.
Should point out I played minecraft during Alpha so it was long before any story was added to the game.
Even after story was added to the game in Minecraft, it allows you to play at your own pace a lot more.
Each stage of the game you trigger in Terraria, it gets more difficult, and new threats arise on the map. If you’re not upgrading all your gear in the designed paths, you’ll be suffering and dying a lot.
Minecraft doesn’t do that so much. It lets you choose which things you want to work on, or if you even want to work on them at all. There’s nothing stopping you from just deciding to build an idyllic cottage and not pursue a path to the Ender Dragon or anything else.
Terraria kind of pushes you along, Minecraft doesn’t and lets you play at your own pace. Definitely for different types of gamers, in some ways.
Terraria is less survival sandbox and more metroidvania. It garnered a lot of surface level comparisons to Minecraft (randomly generated world, building a base, caving required to find ores to smelt into bars to get better tools/armor), but Terraria has all of that as ways to progress and grow stronger instead of just being things you can do in the sandbox for fun/survival. It’s less about survival and more about finding ways to increase your DPS/Mobility/Defense to fight bosses. Although you can still flex your creativity to make visually appealing bases (and you want to have multiple, one in each non-evil biome and one underground, trust me).
