Dig, fight, explore, build! Nothing is impossible in this action-packed adventure game. The world is your canvas and the ground itself is your paint.
PC
In all seriousness I want someone to break it down for me. I have both but I have yet to play Minecraft for any significant period of time.
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Terraria is an RPG with sandbox elements
Minecraft is a sandbox with rpg elements
Concise. I like it.
Just to add, because I read that you haven't played Minecraft
Minecraft has a much different appeal. In terraria it's about the difficulty, setting up the boss arenas and preparing, moving up loot tables, seeing what cool things you can find.
Minecraft is different, you can get endgame gear in an hour and then kind of stagnate in terms of power. There are boss fights, but they don't feel as involved. You're not really going to be kiting and dodging projectiles, theres not really different builds. The appeal for Minecraft,instead, is building for the sake of building. It's fun to flex your creative muscles, make cool redstone contraptions, massive farms just to say you have everything automated. At least that's what it is for me, lots of building with expeditions here and there. Exploring is also more appealing in Minecraft imo, more biomes and they're in 3d. Minecraft can generate some really beautiful structures that you can't quite get naturally in terraria
And a final point, summing it all together, Minecraft is a lot more peaceful, and a lot slower. You can relax playing Minecraft, and its easy to last week's in hardcore and you only die f you really mess up.
Terraria will kill you and do it repeatedly. It's made to do so. Just different feels all around
terraria has the smallest bit of a story and a class system
minecraft doesn't have either one
terraria tools don't break
minecraft tools do
What hasn't been mentioned yet is the modding side of both games.
For Terraria, most mods expand on the RPG side of the game. Mostly adding more weapons, armour, bosses and sometimes even classes.
Minecraft however is quite different when it comes to mods.
There are many many mods, and mod packs and even mod added game modes that end up completely changing Minecraft into an almost different game.
Many of them are either technology/engineering based, or magic based.
I lost interest in the vanilla/unmodded version of Minecraft a very long time ago (like early beta days). But I've probably put several thousand hours into playing modded versions.
They are both sandbox adventures. The obvious difference is that minecraft is 3d and terraria 2d. As for gameplay, terraria has a lot more rpg elements, like upgrading weapons, tons of bosses and a lot more, while minecraft has a lot more sandbox elements, with way less actual gameplay, but a lot more room for creativity. Not to say that terraria isnt a sandbox or minecraft isnt an adventure, but that is the main difference
You the MVP, good sir. Thank you!
Note: I might be biased with some points.
Terraria is 2D side scrolling, minecraft is 3D. Both have pixellated graphics. I know some people is turned off by 2D side scrolling games so..
Content focus
Terraria focuses more on the RPG-side, while minecraft focuses more on the sandbox side.
The main content of terraria is the RPG with tons of bosses, equipments, items, etc, while The main content of minecraft is the sandbox with 3D buildings, redstone/automation, and tons of blocks, with some of them having special properties/unique interactions with each other.
This is not to say terraria is bad for sandbox, though. The existence of paints and sloped blocks makes terraria full of potential for building.
This is also not to say minecraft is bad for RPG, either. The data-driven approach by mojang allows tons of customization, though sadly a normal vanilla playthrough won't get to see this. But even then, there's still things like enchantments, rare drops, and potions in minecraft that works perfectly fine in normal vanilla.
Both have exploration as a main activity in certain parts of the game, but i'd say they each did a pretty good job on it, using their own ways.
Modding scene
Terraria mods are typically more focused on more bosses, more items, more progression, more biomes, etc.
Minecraft mods are more varied and there's so much more minecraft mods than terraria mods (simply due to the size of playerbase), but it's often more focused in tech/automation. Minecraft is also way better at non-mod custom content, due to the reasons i said (data driven approach allowing customization), along with the existence of data packs, resource packs, and command blocks.
Both modding scene do have various things (terraria has furniture and building mods, while minecraft also has RPG mods), but if you look at the most famous mods for each game, it's fairly different.
Content/worldsize
Terraria has a finite world with procedural generation, this somewhat ensures that the world doesn't get boring because finite world allows you to fill them with content (dungeon, jungle temple, underworld, etc), and allows for things like "only one exists in the world", which is something interesting that infinite world can't really have (or at least struggles with).
Minecraft has infinite world (technically not but i'm not going to debate about this), also with procedural generation. This allows for endless exploration and sometimes unique world generation structures occasionally appears (whether due to wonky world gen or even glitches), and there can be an infinite amount of them.
Multiplayer
Directly affected by worldsize/content, minecraft is fine with public servers and huge amount of players in one world due to the infinite world size, terraria is total chaos with even 25+ players due to the world being relatively small and resources being finite. There's also the "only one in a world" structures in terraria which won't exactly work for public multiplayer, unless everyone is cooperating on the same team.
Holy shit man lol
PEOPLE SAY that Minecraft is 1million times better than Terraria BECAUSE its the original and first game and that its got cool servers BUT NO: 1) The first full game Minecraft version was made on November 2011 WHILE TERRARIA'S FULL VERSION WAS MADE ON MAY 2011 and Terraria has more bosses, blocks, mobs, decorations, weapons and armor, WHILE MINECRAFT ONLY HAS 5 TYPES OF SWORDS (BRUH). so Terraria Vs Minecraft = Terraria beats with no effort.