I wouldn’t exactly call myself a Terraria megafan – according to Steam, I only have 500-odd hours in it – but I do have this… let’s call it a habit. Every Halloween season, I start a new character and a new world and see how many of the seasonal “Goodie Bag” loot drops I can collect…

…and also rebuild the house from Beetlejuice, at least as well as I can in 2D.

…and as usual, I fell short of that second goal, because I always get sidetracked and don’t finish decorating (despite collecting some freaky statues), and then the house gets crammed full of spare chests and crafting stations and other junk. But I did manage to recreate one of the central plot points from Beetlejuice: moving most of the frigging NPCs out of my frigging house.

As for the first goal, the loot drops?

As usual, I fell short.

Most enemies have a 1.25% chance to drop something, so I was basically waiting for mass mob-spawning events (like Blood Moons, Slime Rains, and Goblin Armies) until I could get into the Dungeon and start slaughtering its undead hordes. And this time around, I went the first couple of weeks without seeing a Blood Moon.

While I’m on the subject of RNG, there is no such thing as duplicate protection. Under normal circumstances this is a good thing; a lot of loot drops that look like they should be duplicate-protected double as crafting components…

I collected 77 Goodie Bags in about 25 hours of play and got 20 out of 26 possible drops. I also have a chest full of duplicate costumes, hundreds of rotten eggs, and three extra copies of the painting “Morbid Curiosity.”

 

This is, like I said, the usual result. And I keep doing it every year.

What can I say? I like Terraria’s early game. And despite there now being an “endless Halloween” world seed, I like the challenge of a time limit.

I don’t like the Christmas loot drops nearly as much, so I might be about to stop playing Terraria again… until about October 10 of next year.