As you embark on your journey through the vast and perilous world of Terraria, you will inevitably face formidable challenges in the form of powerful bosses. These mighty adversaries will test your skills and strategies, requiring careful preparation and a well-designed arena. This is why we’re presenting you our top Terraria tips for boss arenas.
Constructing a thoughtfully crafted boss arena can provide you with a significant advantage. This allows you to maximize your mobility, minimize damage, and increase your overall effectiveness in defeating bosses.
Building The Best Arenas For Terraria Bosses
In this article, we will share nine invaluable tips to help you build effective boss arenas. By implementing these strategies, you will greatly enhance your chances of emerging victorious against the toughest foes Terraria has to offer.
Plan Space For Movement
Mobility is the key to defeating Terraria bosses. This is why it’s a good tip to make an arena that is horizontally wide and near-flat to ensure you have space to move. This also ensures that you will not bump into 2-block high obstacles, causing you to lose momentum.
While it’s tempting to make the entire world flat, the time it takes to make it is not worth it. We suggest that you build a flat area that is at least around 150-300 blocks wide. If you don’t want to change your topography, you can make a flat platform above ground to serve as your running area instead.
The key here is to make an arena wide enough to have breathing room, but not too wide as to exit your current biome. This is because some bosses require you to be in a specific biome. Some bosses will either kill you instantly or take almost no damage if taken out of their home biome.
Adding Verticality To Your Boss Arena
While having a wide space to move around in, you’ll find that you’ll also need verticality to switch directions during combat. Having only one platform for movement will mean getting hit while turning in the opposite direction. Make sure that you add enough verticality to your arena so you won’t get swarmed by the boss while moving around.
Based on the image above, your basic jump goes as high as 6 blocks while jumping with the Cloud in a Bottle accessory enables you to jump an extra 5 blocks more. Now, you might think that it’s best to make your vertical platforms 11 blocks away from each other, but that’s if you hit the perfect height on your jumps every time.
For beginners, we suggest building platforms 9 blocks high to make it easier for you to move between your platforms. Once you get a Hook item, it’s best if you remake your platforms to 15 blocks apart since grappling allows for quicker vertical movement.
Positioning Some Healing Stations
Healing potions are rarely enough to keep your health up, especially during long boss fights. This is why it’s great to have healing stations spread around your arena. There are multiple ways to keep your health up, but here are a few of the better options you can use.
The basic regeneration items you’ll have at any point in the game are the Heart Lanterns and Campfires. Once you unlock the Engineer NPC, you can then make use of the Heart statues triggered by either timers or pressure plates. Using the heart statue is generally the better option since each heart can heal up to 20 health, and can pile up so long as you don’t pick them up.
Another method, although frowned upon by others, is with the Nurse NPC. Building a nurse house just below your arena will allow you to heal with the Nurse mid-combat. While this method presents itself as a cheesing, it is highly effective so long as the Nurse does not die.
Getting Proper Buffs Before The Fight
Overpreparing your buffs for the battle is better than not preparing at all. There are multiple ways to get extra buffs for your arena that will help with your boss fight. You can get buffs through stations that give you lasting powers to help with the tide of battle.
Here are some stations you should consider:
- Sharpening station – Increased melee armor penetration
- Bewitching Table – Extra Minion Slot
- War Table – Extra Sentry Slot
- Crystal Ball – Increase mana by 20, magic power by 20%, and reduces mana cost by 5%
- Ammo Box – Gives a 20% chance to not use any ammo
While these stations give class-specific buffs, there are ways to get universal buffs as well. You can get extra defense whenever a boss is alive by having a Dryad in your arena. Another helpful buff would be the Sunflower plant as it increases your movement speed.
Create Teleporter Networks
Your feet will only get you so far in Terraria. Even with the best movement accessories, chances are, the fastest bosses will still get to you. This is why strategic placement of teleporters is a good thing to have in your arenas.
Teleporters are used for instantly moving from one space to another. This makes it easier for you to move around while keeping yourself far from danger. In many cases, a teleporter network can help you with highly agile bosses, but they can also be utilized for slow bosses like Plantera.
A great tip for building boss arenas in terraria is with a single-level teleporter network. This means there are only 2 teleporters stacked either horizontally or vertically. Horizontal networks are great for using minecarts for max speed, while Vertical networks are great for trap box setups.
As we mentioned in our previous example, Plantera can easily be juggled left and right with a horizontal network, making the challenging boss laughable.
Building Trap Boxes
Fighting bosses head-on is not always the best solution. Sometimes, you have to learn to build trap boxes. This type of arena relies solely on the damage of your traps to deal damage to the boss itself. Now, although this might seem like a “perfect” solution, there are some caveats.
Some bosses will teleport toward you if you get too far from them. In the image above, King Slime will always move to your space and deal large damage if you’re not prepared. Have a health station nearby so you won’t die easily.
A good way of mitigating damage would be to stack 3 slime statues near you and allow yourself to be hit by them. This allows you to be safe from big damage as you’ll be taking damage at such a high rate that you’ll be abusing the after-damage invincibility frames.
Bonus tip: You can benefit from both the continuous healing by the Nurse and the buff provided by the Dryad by caging them with you.
Create Some Bubble Blocks
Bubble blocks are passable blocks that can hold any liquid in the game. They are bought for cheap from the Party Girl NPC and can go a long way if used correctly. This allows you to have certain liquids spread across your arena, even if you built it above ground.
Each different liquid type can help you in various situations. Lava bubbles are mainly for damage. Water and Honey bubbles can slow down enemies, up to an extent, but the latter is mostly useful for regeneration. Honey gives you a 30-second regeneration buff, but it does slow your momentum down to a drag.
While some of you consider this a niche Terraria tip for boss arenas, combine these bubbles with the Shrimpy Truffle and you’ll be zooming across the area. The Cute Fishron mount from the said item is a relatively slow, infinite-flight mount. Although, the mount gains tremendous speed when wet from any liquid. This allows you to maintain top speed while still receiving the bonus regeneration.
Minecart Tracks For Extra Speed
As we have hinted at the beginning of this article, mobility is important in any boss fight. One of the common ways to get enough speed would be through minecart tracks. This is a great way of creating a platform without the fear of mobs being on your level. This is due to mine cart tracks not allowing anything but mine carts to be on top of it.
Tracks are a great way to fight against agile bosses such as The Twins, Skeletron Prime, Empress of Light, and even the Moon Lord. Mobility is important in these fights as the bosses shoot fast projectiles and chase you with fierce veracity
Using tracks is a great tip for terraria boss arenas, especially if you’re using a summoner build where your minions stick to bosses. This method also pairs well with a trap box above or below the rails since there are Pressure tracks that work like pressure plates that activate when your mine cart runs above it.
Lay Down Some Asphalt Blocks
Asphalt blocks are the only placeable blocks that increase your base movement speed. For example, using the Terraspark Boots boosts your movement speed up to 34 mph. Running on the asphalt blocks with the boots equipped will increase your running speed to 60 mph.
The speed boost reduces your reliance on grounded mounts such as the Basilisk (40mph) and even the faster Unicorn mount (60 mph). Asphalt blocks are the building material of choice for fast bosses like the Empress of Light Day battle and Duke Fishron.
For the Duke fight, asphalt blocks are preferred since you can only fight the boss in the ocean biome. Running on top of the ocean with a Water Walking potion is fine, but accidentally pressing the ‘down’ key will cause you to drop into the liquid and be slowed down. Thus, having a solid road above the water is a better choice. For the Empress Daytime fight, she will kill you in one hit, making mobility a very important factor in the battle.
Conclusion
These are our nine Terraria tips for boss arena building, but this doesn’t mean that this is the only way to play. Sandbox games like this are meant to be played with the utmost regard toward creativity. Have fun trying out new things and don’t hesitate to stick out of the mold. If you have better suggestions, let us know in the comments below! Cheers, and happy hunting!
