Season 12

Nightklp noticed the slimes almost immediately. The reset had finally arrived on the afternoon of 31 July 2022, replacing the Stone World with something more familiar, but the enemies were still moving much too quickly. Oz explained that it was his modification. When KDY asked much the same question later, there was no suggestion that it would be removed. Ordinary terrain did not mean ordinary inhabitants.

The modified demons had survived as well. Players who went looking for equipment in Hell would have to contend with them, even though the map no longer stacked several secret-seed effects together. DumDum asked whether there was a special gimmick this season. Liby could not name much beyond the altered enemies. After the darkness and stone, a more recognisable world seemed capable of being an event in itself.

On 3 August, the more serious oddity was what players brought into it. Valkyrie joined holding a Zenith and immediately said she should not have it. The server was supposed to load a character's seasonal inventory. Instead, it was allowing equipment from the local character, including things completely out of place in the current progression. A fresh world had suddenly become accessible with the contents of a finished one.

Players warned each other against using the unexpected gear. The anti-cheat could still object to an early-game character carrying late-game weapons, even if the server had been responsible for loading them. Elcroot pointed out that he could exploit the mistake, then said he would not. While they waited for Oz, keeping progression honest depended partly on people choosing to leave an advantage alone.

The problem returned. On 5 August, Bufong and Exe were telling people to leave while Oz investigated. He eventually traced a failure involving a command and the configuration: part of the file could be deleted without the replacement being generated correctly, leaving TShock to fall back to settings with server-side characters disabled. Something players experienced as their inventory going wrong required work well beyond that inventory to fix.

Oz reminded them that many of the plugins were his. There was no separate developer to ask for a patch; if one broke, he had to repair it. Tests, temporary changes and another loaded world interrupted the season's normal rhythm. At one point, players joked that Season 13 had arrived early, only for that supposed new season to end almost as quickly. Through it all, the real Season 12 continued.

There were still useful things to build and people to help. Gronun offered equipment for free, with a firm limit of once per person. Liby explained why bosses were unavailable and when they would return. Purple Demon dealt with damage around community infrastructure, eventually threatening to quit if a particular wire was broken again. Catt became a regular presence around the farms and in the conversation. The world required both technical repairs and the smaller courtesy of leaving somebody else's wiring intact.

The boss schedule gave those activities a frame. A disabled boss was usually waiting for its turn, rather than banned for the whole season. Some fights also needed enough people online; Queen Bee required a group of five. Liby explained the system to players who wanted to summon something immediately. The intention was to give the community a chance to arrive at the fight together, even if waiting was difficult for those already equipped.

Ranks supplied another way to move forward. Dungeon Master counted the last hundred Eco Coins needed for Gold. Catt rose towards Aurora. Lowet set his sights on Cosmic and eventually bought it, though for a while his visible rank remained Aurora after Oz temporarily changed it back and Lowet declined to reconnect. Even an achievement could be followed by a little administrative untidiness.

For Liby and Gronun, the rank system already had a history. Liby could point to several seasons spent as Cosmic, while newer players were still working out the purchase order. Exe admitted spending fifty thousand Eco in a week and finding himself broke. The world might be deliberately slow between bosses, but people could remain busy earning, spending and making plans that extended beyond its end date.

Once Moon Lord was defeated, the familiar argument returned in a different form. Terra72 suggested a permanent survival server that would never reset. Dungeon Master strongly disliked the idea. Other players were already designing houses for the next season. Anyone attached to a build had a reason to want more time, while anyone finished with progression had a reason to want another beginning. Gronun reassured a worried player that Eco would survive, even when the Terraria possessions did not.

On 21 August, the reset finally came. Lowet and Dungeon Master were among the last players in the old world; soon the chat was filling with anticipation for the new one. When Liby entered, the much higher enemy population changed the conversation almost at once. His first practical suggestion was to remain at spawn until daylight. They had spent Season 12 trying to keep the server from forgetting their characters. Now they had correctly reset characters, basic equipment, and rather too many things outside trying to kill them.