Making your way up to the Terraria sky islands is a great way to boost your power early on in the crafting game, and one resourceful player has highlighted a little-known trick that lets you spot their location easily. Normally, trying to track down the floating island bases among the indie game‘s clouds prior to having some form of flight can be quite a painstaking process, but this reliable tell makes it easy to know when one is nearby – making it a great way to nab some powerful early-game gear.
Reddit user SageWayren posted the nifty trick to the game’s subreddit, where it rapidly gained almost 10,000 upvotes (at the time of writing) from players who were shocked to learn about such a useful method that they hadn’t discovered before. SageWayren says they’ve been using it for quite a while, but decided to share it when they realised that it wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the game’s extensive wiki.
The method is deceptively simple – all you need to do is head out on a scouting mission across your world’s surface layer, keeping an eye out for any small puddles of water that are two blocks deep. When you find one, just run a rope straight upwards from the ground (or whatever your preferred climbing method may be) and you’ll arrive perfectly at a floating island high up above. Here, you can crack open any chests and oftentimes get your hands on some strong equipment such as wings or a sword that summons shooting stars. Just keep an eye out for the harpies!
The explanation, as it turns out, is fairly simple. These shallow puddles aren’t created naturally in the ground-level biomes as part of the co-op game’s initial world generation process. Instead, water spawned around the edges of sky islands when they are generated falls down to the surface below and settles during the later stages of the world’s creation. This also explains why the puddles sometimes show up in biomes such as the desert that don’t spawn water naturally.
There are a couple of notable exceptions, as SageWayren notes. If you’re in the jungle, it may not be a reliable indicator, as the jungle biome can spawn these small puddles by default. If you can also see a clear source of running water travelling down to the puddle, then it also isn’t an indicator of an island above.
Otherwise, however, the method is a fantastic way to power yourself up early on – we tried it out for ourselves, and had our hands on the powerful Starfury sword within just a couple of minutes of setting out. It may not be quite as cool as hurling yourself about with an anti-gravity potion, but it’s a lot faster to pull off.
If you’re a Terraria fan, you might want to check out the official Terraria graphic novel series that was just announced by Re-Logic. A new in-game item coming as part of update 1.4.4 helps stop the spread of evil biomes. Meanwhile, we’ve listed all the best Terraria mods to keep you entertained if you’ve seen everything that the base game has to offer.