Bossing in Path of Terraria

[CollinHerber]

I was hoping to change the "Normal" bossing process in Terraria with something a bit more "ARPG-ish" with this mod and the first idea I had was to include it within the questing process and have "Boss Maps" where you would go and complete the map to get the boss completion.

For example I'm thinking we could have a quest after the initial class quests that could be given by the "Mayor" of Ravencrest where the "King Slime Domain" could be discovered/given to the player as a map and they complete the map for the boss completion.

This could be an introduction into the mapping system while also giving a fun new way to do bosses.

The boss domains would not just be the boss either - It would be a full map where they need to fight their way to the boss and then defeat the boss. Upon defeating the boss we can set the main world progression kingSlimeDefeated or whatever to true.

Any other thoughts/ideas around this? Some challenges include

• Disabling all boss spawning items / normal means of spawning boss.
• Preventing other mods from spawning bosses the "normal" way
• How do we handle world-specific bosses - Such as Skeletron. - Do we just keep em?

[benj7126]

How do we handle world-specific bosses - Such as Skeletron

wdym "world-specific bosses"?

Disabling all boss spawning items

could also just disabled them until they have been defeated in a map (thought that might trivialize item farming, idk - could probably do something about that though)

[benj7126]

It'd be pretty simple to IL edit the vanilla spawning methods away, and replace them with some equivalent reward. For example, shadow orbs could have their "summon EoW after 3" mechanic replaced with, say, spawning a vein of Demonite. Something like that, where it's still rewarding, just not with the boss.

Well, yeah, but should we and how should we do it? - idk how all terraria players do this but iirc, i normally go there and take two items so as to not spawn the boss, but just removing the boss spawn lets you take as many items as you want, right?
That might be alright though, idk

replaced with, say, spawning a vein of Demonite

Should probably still have that locked behind beating the boss - quest reward, or just from when you actually kill it / parts of it while doing msq.

[CollinHerber]

Should probably still have that locked behind beating the boss - quest reward, or just from when you actually kill it while doing msq.

It matters a lot less since the majority of vanilla gear is going to be vastly underpowered in comparison to the PoT Items. However yea it's something to keep in mind as we add/change these things

[GabeHasWon]

The Demonite thing was an example, we could definitely think of something better. And yeah, Demonite will be less relevant.

[benj7126]

It matters a lot less since the majority of vanilla gear is going to be vastly underpowered in comparison to the PoT Items.

Was normal gear not going to have affixes as well or something..? - think i recall this being talked about at least... maby?

[CollinHerber]

Yeah I was thinking about that actually after I sent that. I remember us wanting to make it so the normal items rolled.
I think it's important to allow the vanilla items to roll with affixes. We will want to make sure any vanilla item's crafted will be rolled as common items and have the ability to be rolled.

I'll spin up a separate discussion around this.

[CollinHerber]

Does anyone know off hand if Boss Checklist works by checking the world state ? Such as downedBoss1?
Wondering if things like Boss Checklist will continue to work if we are manually setting the state of the world instead of actually killing it

[GabeHasWon]

Yeah, the way it's written just has a delegate like () => NPC.downedBoss1. This is also true of modded bosses, if relevant.

[CollinHerber]

Do we think that boss domains should be randomly generated or have specific worlds built for them?
Maybe a mix of both? The world is random gen but the boss arena itself is a set biome?
Not super familiar with worldgen and it's potential

[shnakamura]

Personally as a player I've always disliked non-procedural world generation, it somewhat kills the feeling of being able to explore throughout different playthroughs and scenarios. It's obviously got its own use case for content like arenas, buildings, etc. but even then placement also matters a lot. Making a mixture of a random world with a prebuilt set of structures is probably the most reasonable thing to do. I'd like to note that what I mean by prebuilt is the structures themselves, not the whole structure map having the same positionings.

[CollinHerber]

I agree. So then tickets would become something like "Boss Domain - Create Boss Arena" and then "Boss Domain - Create Prefabs"

And then programmers could come in and create any tiles , placeables, etc, to fit the needs of the builder?

[shnakamura]

Yeah, that sounds good.

[shnakamura]

So, while this isn't really on the topic of bosses, are we keeping Ravencrest as a singular world? I'm all for making it a procedurally generated town, kind of like Minecraft villages. Same structures and all, but a different world. Obviously it'd be a different world per main world, so it wouldn't regenerate every time you enter it.

[GabeHasWon]

I also pitched a procedurally generated town, but both Collin and catNull argued strongly for a preset world. I'm still biased towards procedural, but I do think it's fair to go pre-built for story structures. I believe their argument was, and I could be misremembering, the amount of work would not benefit the resulting variance in player experience when the quests & npcs are ultimately the same anyway.

[shnakamura]

Thinking about it, that makes a lot of sense. There's not a point to make a procedural world if the main focus is not exploration, but rather the quests. I think It'd still be a nice addition nonetheless. Not sure if swapping world files is the most performant approach, but so far it works.