#hardmode

Hardmode is the one part of the game that breaks Terraria's flow.

The gameplay loop of Terraria is as follows: Explore > Gather resources > Craft gear > Battle

Then it repeats. It's a super good loop, but once you enter hard mode a step gets removed: exploring.

At first that sounds stupid. Don't you have to explore for the hardmode ore? Isn't there corruption/crimson and hallow that you need go to? What about going back into the dungeon and the temple?

All true, but there's a problem with most of that. You already explored most of these places in pre-hardmode. The environment itself is no longer a threat to your survival since you have gear for flying around and negating fall damage. The biomes can no longer offer you equipment that is worth your time. Yes, there are a plethora of new enemies to encounter and defeat. However, outside of that there is not much new to discover unless it exists in an area of the map you haven't looked at yet.

To find the hardmode ore, most players will just retrace their steps in areas they have already explored to see if there's ore there.

The infected areas of the map may bring you to unexplored locations, but at this point of progression those locations are unlikely to provide anything new outside of an enviornment to fight the hardmode enemies.

The dungeon was likely fully explored in pre-hardmode, so the biome chests have already had their locations revealed. There's nothing new to find there, only something new to fight.

The one exception here is the jungle temple. You cannot enter it in pre-hardmode without some shenanigans. There isn't much to find in there, but it is a place where the environment itself will challenge you. It's a nice buildup towards a boss and the lihzards are enemies that you haven't dealt with anywhere else until that point.

Okay so....what's the big deal? Exploring doesn't net you as many rewards anymore, but there's plenty of new content to play with! There's all of these new enemies, events, and bosses that happen in hardmode.

Well, each step in a gameplay loops feeds off of each other. Exploring and facing the environment feels great because it pays off with allowing you to gather resources and fill up your inventory. Gathering resources and managing inventory feels great because it pays off with allowing you to craft better gear. Crafting gear feels great since it allows you to fight stronger enemies and bosses with much less difficulty. Fighting bosses is great not only because the fight is fun, but once a boss is defeated it usually opens up new avenues to explore.

So lets remove the exploring step, now you're just revisiting areas. How do you gather resources? Ore and fighting. You're no longer charting unknown territory so most of these enemies are just getting in the way of your task. Survival is way easier with the new movement tools you have when revisiting. While cathartic, you're just trying to dig and these pesky enemies keep bothering you. Either that or these pesky enemies aren't dropping the resources you want. For efficiency, you may carve out an area to farm the enemies because it's too much of a hassle to chase these pesky enemies around in tight spaces. Defeating bosses feels great, but now I gotta go to the jungle again? To the dungeon again? To the Jungle again? To the mushroom biome again? (For Duke).

Doesn't this sound like a chore now? This would not happen in pre-hardmode.

Fighting enemies and ore digging is still a part of it, sure, but in pre-hardmode you also find a lot of chests with useful resources. Ores are just the breadcumbs to reward you while you keep moving along. Enemies do still get in your way, but they're not just halting your digging. You gotta fight through them to discover more of the land. It's harder to just run away in pre-hardmode as your movement is more restricted and there's plenty of dead ends since you haven't been digging anywhere yet. You're not just fighting them for resources, you're fighting to survive down there because you may find something super useful and you don't want to go through the rough journey of getting back there if you die.

In hardmode though, death isn't as much of a theat. When you die in one location, you can just shrug and go somewhere else after you respawn. It wasn't that important to be there, you could gather the same resources in another location especially if you're in a large world. (Lowkey this is part of why I like mediumcore playthroughs. It makes the threat of death so much more meaningful in hardmode).

Alright so, that's the problem. What's the solution here? Is hardmode just an inherently inferior experience to pre-hardmode in Terraria? No! Of course not! The idea is great, it's like you get to play a new game+ with a crazy amount of new content. The idea is fantastic. We just need to bring exploration back into the loop.

Right when hardmode starts a bunch of infection spreads right? Make it generate some structures too! The corrution/crimson biomes could have these new shadow/crimson hearts in random locations within the infection that have this tough outer shell. It takes a while to dig through and bombs won't work, but getting inside and blowing up the heart can net you some of those rare drops from the enemies in the area. Speaking of which, you would be fighting them for the right to dig into there. Naturally, sitting in one location to dig will make more enemies surround you. This may sound like a repeat of the problem with the "pesky" enemies, but now you're trying to survive here. You must secure this opportunity since breaking that heart may let you skip hours of farming. You got here because you explored, now we're feeding into the loop again.

For Hallow, there could be a large castle/spire structure that generates on the hallow surface. You can only enter through the bottom. Scattered all over the castle/spire could be rainbow chests that have some useful hallow gear that you would need to grind for otherwise. At the very top there would be multiple chests to reward getting all the way up there. This place could function like the jungle temple where there's tons of traps and idk, maybe there could be locked doors too. Obviously you shouldn't be allowed to dig any of the tiles from this structure until you reach the top. Since this would be a big structure, there's a solid chance it could just absorb a town you built for NPCs. I like the idea that in the event this occurs, your town NPCs could be held hostage in there until you save them.

You know what bothers me? It's the fact that mimics appear in hardmode. Mimics exist solely to exploit a player's excitement when discovering treasure. Yet, they only appear when chests no longer matter! Crimson/Corruption/Hallow chests don't even exist! The only player that would be fooled are ones who have NEVER seen a mimic like that before. So.....what if those chests did exist? Some chests could be generated in the infected biomes when hardmode starts. Just being able to open them sounds a little too easy though, so what if you need the a Key of Night/Light to open them? You could even get these keys from the previous locations I already mentioned.

Honestly there could be a bunch of new chests that generate in hard mode for all biomes. They'll have essentially any item that you would need to farm/grind enemies for, but you gotta find 'em. Maybe they could have hardmode bars too! (I know this makes less sense lore-wise since pre-hardmode chests exist to imply that people have explored the world before you did. But lets just say the mimics wanted an excuse to make you actually want to approach them.) Heck shadow more shadow chests could show up in hell with hardmode hell items just to give that biome SOMETHING for hardmode. besides enemy grinding.

What about the dungeon though? EZ. You know the jungle key right? Well lets have the dungeon generate with a bunch of jungle doors deeper into the dungeon so part of it is locked off until you can beat plantera. There could also be a harder dungeon slime with jungle keys so you don't have to farm Plantera for more keys. There's a more than a solid chance that the biome chests will generate behind those jungle doors so you you're not just retracing steps.

For the jungle.......it would be really funny if the underground jungle just re-does its worldgen after the mech bosses are defeated, but now with chlorophyte. You gotta start that exploration from scratch, but luckily the temple, surface, and pre-existing mini-biomes will remain unaffected. Idk I don't have any good ideas to make the chlorophyte hunt more interesting.

That aside, I feel a change like this would do wonders for hardmode. There's already a good amount of content mods that implement ideas similar to this. Stuff like Calamity, Spirit, and Shadows of Abaddon feature world gen that only happens/is accessible in hardmode. Other mods have been utilizing subworlds to introduce new areas to explore. A great example of this is The Stars Above which has you visiting other planets. It's a shame that vanilla hardmode Terraria is lacking in terms of this aspect. (Although I do think several mods, including the ones I mentioned, still fall into the trap of removing exploration at certain points of progression.)