Outside Context Meteorological Conditions

[wind_on_my_face]

It is a well-known fact that flying into clouds can lead to loss of orientation.

It is a less well-known fact that flying into clouds may lead one somewhere else entirely.

In fact, only one person has learned this so far.

Comments

[wind_on_my_face]

Whole hog, er, floating island, it is.

Okay, the cloud blocks are supporting the dirt. Are the cloud blocks connected to anchors in a conventional fashion? Or are they holding things up by virtue of being cloud blocks?

He's pretty sure he should expect the latter.

[pythbox]

They're holding things up by virtue of something, and whatever it is, anchors don't seem to be involved. On the other hand, the cloud blocks don't have any discernible special properties relative to dirt or sunplate blocks, except for being cloud-like instead of dirt-like or gold-like. Maybe Terraria blocks can just do that and the cloud aspect is a mere aesthetic touch.

He could experiment by placing some blocks and then removing their supports (it's impossible to place blocks in midair; they must be touching at least one other block to begin with), and if he does that, he will discover that dirt and sunplate float just as readily as cloud.

[wind_on_my_face]

He is not exactly in a scientific frame of mind right now. But one does need to know the rules of the game.

One floating block of each type. Make a connection and hang some weight from each one, evenly distributed over the entire interior of the block. How much load can they take before they break out of the grid?

[pythbox]

Dirt: a significant but not outrageous amount, comparable to the load it would take to compress an equivalent volume of ordinary dirt to half its starting size.

Sunplate: a lot more than that - somewhere between four and five times the amount that did in the dirt block.

Cloud: more than he is capable of applying.

[wind_on_my_face]

This is promising. He takes two floating cloud blocks, and instead of working with gravity, he links them to each other and just pulls them together. If they can break, they will break, but at what point?

[pythbox]

Not that point.

Not that point either.



Perhaps cloud blocks are just invincible to applied load.

[wind_on_my_face]

Well, in that case, he's going to just start using cloud blocks for all his anchors. There's plenty of them to go around.

Step one: “mine” all of the cloud blocks around this island. Move all the resulting items up and around and collect them.

[pythbox]

The cloud blocks cooperate with this plan. Now he has a stack of 551 Cloud Blocks.

[wind_on_my_face]

Step two: vent a bit.

He places three cloud blocks at the dirt edges of the island, and leaves them be. They will be his first anchors.

Then he takes all the rest of the island and just yanks, and lets go. (This is more fun than using that “mine” thing.)

[pythbox]

A rain of inventory-sized dirt blocks ensues. Now the island consists of him, three cloud blocks, seven globed harpies, and five floating trees. (None of them contain a partridge.)

[wind_on_my_face]

He has excellent anchors now, so he has no need for wings to keep himself from falling, or in fact to do much of anything. His stuff can just hover beside him instead of being wings.

The blocks: collected after he enjoys the rain for a moment.

The globes: re-anchored to the cloud blocks for now.

The trees: investigated. He found them as hard to claim through the dirt as any wood ordinarily would be, but can he do other things to them?

He touches the trunk of a tree with a hand.

[pythbox]

Mere tree-touching does not yield any useful information or options.

[wind_on_my_face]

Game logic. Let's try — chopping — down — this tree.

He makes a saw and starts cutting through the trunk. Halfway up, because experiment.

[pythbox]

When he has sawn about halfway through the trunk, that grid-section of the tree and all the grid-sections above it spontaneously convert into inventory-sized cubes of Wood. The rest of the tree stays put.

[wind_on_my_face]

Collecting wood cubes feels like cheating. He knows exactly what they are, but he didn't have to find out the tedious way.

(He idly wonders what would happen if he cut halfway through and stopped, but doesn't try it.)

He cuts all the rest of the trees down. Now the original island consists of five floating tree stumps.

He tries punching one of them. Really hard.

[pythbox]

Very hard punching breaks the wood, and breaking the wood causes it to cube.

[wind_on_my_face]

That's the rest of the trees taken care of, then.

He stashes his floating island construction kit and drops to the non-floating ground. Then he unglobes the feathered feather-firers and watches what happens.

[pythbox]

Within a certain distance of the ground, their flight pattern changes from "attempted attack" to "attempted escape"; as soon as he unglobes them they all fly away.

[wind_on_my_face]

Well, now he knows what to do.

Dirt. Poke. Claim. Claim the ground. Take the world. And rip it apart, but only if that looks like it will be helpful in actually getting out of here.

[pythbox]

Dirt dirt dirt dirt dirt. So much dirt.

You can go a long way in Terraria by standing on some dirt and claiming all its contiguous dirt.

There is plenty of non-dirt touching this dirt, though. Occasional small enclosed ore deposits; occasional larger formations of what proves to be stone. Puddles and ponds and lakes of water, which comes in liquid form and not in grid-aligned blocks. Adjacent biomes: deserts made of sand and sandstone, tundra made of snow and ice, jungles made of mud. Weird red areas made of weird red stone that's strangely resistant to claiming. Below all this, solid stone, broken by caves and tunnels.

[wind_on_my_face]

He keeps going, through the dirt and the stone and the mud and the sufficiently still water. The conveniently regular nature of these blocks mean that he's not going to run out of room in his mind to keep it all any time soon.

And in any of these directions does there seem to be an end? An exit? A pocket of sanity?

[pythbox]

Blocks, blocks, and more blocks. The shape of the island above sea level is reasonably irregular, but as he goes deeper into the stone layer and spreads out, the limits of his little universe turn out to be perfectly square - that's probably the fog wall he's running up against.

Deep in the stone layer, there are fewer aquifers and more pockets of a different liquid - Terrarian lava, somewhat less hot and much less viscous than the real-world kind. (There are also miscellaneous other interesting features. A pyramid in one desert, a network of tunnels in another, a huge network of sandstone caves in yet another. A lump of some extremely stubborn stone in an underground jungle area. Oddly shaped crystal formations scattered throughout the caves, along with many more ore deposits and some gemstones and little cave buildings with treasure chests inside. Underground mushroom colonies.)

And past all that, three thousand feet below sea level, the stone layer ends and a new layer begins. This one is made mostly of Ash Blocks, with frequent lava pockets and occasional obsidian buildings.

Underneath that... a flat layer that declines to be claimed. Solid, unlike the fog wall.

[wind_on_my_face]

He sorts through the item descriptions of everything he touches. Anything buried deep underground conveniently labeled The Thing With Which You Win The Game?

[pythbox]

Nope. Lots and lots and lots of different kinds of blocks, and some interesting things like bookcases and exotic chests in the Pink Dungeon Brick tunnels, but nothing that will openly admit to being a victory condition.

[wind_on_my_face]

Time for the last resort. At least he knows how the world is put together, now.

He goes to talk to the person (person?) that he landed next to in the first place.