metacide wrote:To get others to move in you have to meet the conditions for them.
For a Nurse, find and use a heart piece.
For a Demolitionist, make a sticky bomb.
For a Dryad, kill the Eater of Worlds (I could be wrong on that one).
For a Tailor, kill Skeletron.
For a Gunsmith, find a gun.
The Dryad shows up on the defeat of any major boss. It's more likely that you'll face the Eye of Cthulu before the Eater of Worlds if you're starting out, as you need the dryad's purification powder to get to the EoW's spawner.
The game starts out relativly slow. The best thing you can do is to explore your generated world. Bring a pickaxe, sword, and other essential supplies (leave your money in a box at home however) and just explore the randomly generated caves. More than often as you explore caves, you'll find mineral deposits. Similar to Minecraft, you can harvest them and create stronger weapons, tools, and armor (though unlike Minecraft, Gold items are superior to Silver or Iron). As you dig your way around the extensive cave systems, you'll often come across randomly spawned chests, some of which are gold. While all chests contain useful goods (and the chests themselves can be taken with a hammer), the gold boxes often contain rare items that make your life easier.
Exploring your world on the surface is a good idea, so you can get a sense of where to find things. There are five major locations to find:
Corruption: This area is marked by a change of music, purple grass, evil looking creatures, and a dark, murky sky in the background. The area is swarming with flying monsters, and is abundant with throny plants and deep chasms. It's a good idea to stay away from here until you have some better equipment. However, once you do have good equipment, there are some major things you can perform here.
Dungeon: The entrance to the dungeon is on the surface. It resembles a temple entrance like in Zelda 2. There's an old man standing in front of the place. Talking to him at night starts the Skeletron boss fight, which can be a very difficult battle solo. You cannot enter the dungeon until Skeletron is defeated, attempting to do so causes your character to have a heart attack, or something. The dungeon is filled with numerous monsters and traps but also contains some pretty rad treasures.
Desert: From what I gather, the desert currently serves no purpose, unless you want to build a gigantic sand castle, or something.
Jungle: The jungle is not found on the surface. To find it, you must explore in the underground in the OPPOSITE direction of where your world's dungeon is located. The jungle is filled with vicious monsters, but impressive treasures. Take note that the monsters here aren't quite as strong as the dungeon monsters, but they spawn frequently, so you might find yourself outnumbered frequently. The jungle is also where you can find the components to make the godly Ivy Whip, so fighting around here is a must when you've got the gear for it.
Underworld: When you think you hit rock bottom, this is beneath that. The underworld is extremely deep unerground, and bears a strong resemblance to Hell. When you start finding pockets of lava while digging, you're not far away. Take extreme care about exploring down there, as many tiles will damage you just by standing on them, and the fire imps spawn rapidly and shoot fireballs at you. Don't come down here unless you've gotten yourself a good amount of cool stuff (I didn't go down there until I had Meteor armor)
When I was playing my first world, I spent a lot of time just spelunking in caves, finding cool stuff, minerals, and whatnot. It's more efficent just to look for caves and cherry-pick the minerals, as opposed to digging your own mine, as randomly generated cave systems are massive. When I had gold armor and weapons, I moved into the jungle, where I found Jungle Armor (stronger than Gold), as well as some sweet weapons. After meeting the dryad, I took my jungle equipment into the Corruption and killed everything there, which game me lots of Abbysite ore, which makes even stronger weapons.
I'm sure that'll cover the basics.
On a side note, I found
This Steam Forum post extremely helpful when I started out. Though when I started, several things weren't implemented yet.
