What to do on the first day to prepare for nighttime in Terraria

Last Updated on: 25th June 2022, 10:18 pm

Whether you’re returning or entirely new to Terraria, it’s helpful to have a day one plan to get some prep done before the first night. With that in mind, I’ve thrown together 5 easy steps that’ll help make a difference to how badly things can go when the zombies start showing up.

What to do on day one to prepare for the first night in Terraria

The difficulty in Terraria varies heavily between night and daytime. Slimes during the day are mostly a nuisance more than a threat, but when nighttime comes the zombies and demon eyes can cause a fair few more problems.

This means that using the comparatively peaceful daytime to prepare yourself for the first night is probably a good idea. As such, here are a few steps you can take to make that first nighttime experience a bit less difficult until you can figure out your own plans for it.

There aren’t any achievements for surviving it, but it might be better than dying a few times on day one.

Step 1 – Gather plenty of resources

As mentioned above, Slimes are the main problem during early game day time, and they aren’t too much of a threat. This leaves you with a fair bit of time to gather resources without much in the way of competition.

While there are plenty of things you could try to obtain during this time, one of the best bets is gathering quite a lot of wood from the nearby tree line and some gel from the local slimes. You’ll need both shortly. Aim for the larger trees to gather more wood quickly, and click on the very bottom of them to cut down the entire tree at once to speed the process up.

Step 2 – Build a wooden work bench

Using that wood, you’ll want to craft the wooden work bench. Placing one of these nearby allows you to craft far more items than what you can manage by hand, and you only need 10 wood to throw one together. There are also a huge number of styles of these if you have other materials nearby, such as other types of wood, bamboo or even pumpkin and cactus.

This is one of the things you should really always be doing unless you have a specific challenge run in mind. The number of crafting options this provides is huge, and you’d need to make use of one for our next step.

Step 3 – Replace your starting sword in Terraria immediately

Your starter weapon is the fairly lacklustre Copper Shortsword. And by lacklustre I mean the decidedly weakest weapon in the entire game.

It starts with a base damage of 5 before it gets adjusted by any possible modifiers it might have, but modifiers aren’t enough to save it even if you randomly spawn with a Legendary one.

This is because the attack animations on the Copper Shortsword are short-range pokes, making it difficult to use in a manner that won’t make you take damage from common nighttime enemies such as Zombies. As such, you’ll want to swap this out as quickly as possible, even if it’s just for a basic wooden broadsword as that has far safer attack animations to work with come nighttime.

Don’t lose your Copper Shortsword though, you’ll want that later.

Step 4 – Build your first house

When nighttime comes, it helps to have a shelter built, even if it’s a fairly basic one.

You can use the wood from our first step to put together a basic house using the work bench you made earlier. If you add a light source, a chair and a table alongside some background walls, you can even move the Guide into this first house immediately. All of those can be made at the work bench as well, you just need wood for them, and gel in the case of torches.

Do be aware that Zombies can push open doors if they’re left to hit them long enough at nighttime – and they’ll do faster on expert modes and above – although if you don’t want to fight Zombies you can always block up the doors entirely at that point and make it impossible to enter your improvised wooden shelter.

Step 5 – Throw together some basic armor

If you do intend to do a bit of Zombie slaying come nighttime with the Guide cowering away in his small wooden box of a home, you’ll find you probably want some armor first.

You can read up on crafting a basic set of armor here, but it’s an easy enough process if you have some wood spare and the work bench nearby. While each piece of wooden armor will only offer a single point of defence each, that still means taking less damage when you get hit later on.

Now that you’re geared up for surviving the first night or at least dying less, you’ll also want to head out at night time and gather up some Fallen Stars while they’re available, which can be used to increase your maximum Mana.

That’s it for our day one guide to Terraria, if you’re feeling particularly brave after surviving that first night it might be time to head underground and see if you can locate some Heart Crystals and Accessories early on.