I Don't Think I Can Play Terraria Anymore....

So the original goal was to corrupt the entire world. Once I had started corruption in various places in the world, I set out to get rid of the hallow, since corruption can't spread into hallow. I think I spent two or three days doing that.

Well, after the last update, I was working on remaining hallows. There was some left at the bottom of the world and within the dirt layer. It was pretty methodical at that point. No big problems there.

Once I was certain that I had removed all natural hallow, I decided to go for absolute 0% hallow and started changing the tower's material to neutral ones -- cobalt bricks mostly, since I had 500+ of cobalt ore at that point. Once I replaced the tower, I grabbed some vile powder and neutralized the blocks of pearlstone I embedded in the dirt and hallow grass growing above it, as well as the garden I made above the towers. I was pretty thorough and made sure that not a single block of hallow remained in the world.

And apparently the game unloaded itself. It went through the saving process, like you would see when you save and exit. I was taken to the main menu. It was pretty abrupt, so it took me by surprise. I've never seen Terraria do that before, even after ~300 hours of playing it.

I initially figured it was a glitch. So I load the world again with my main chara.

There was nothing in it.

I just spawned mid-air and started falling. There were no blocks. Not even BGM. There was background, but beyond that... nothing. I just... fell. My inventory was empty, too. Once I got past the outside layer, I saw the underground layer background advance from below. There was no background illumination anymore... so everything was just... dark.

I don't know how long I fell, exactly. I couldn't see anything in complete darkness, so there was nothing to compare to. It was just darkness, silence and emptiness. I expected to get hit by a bat on the way down, but that didn't happen either, so maybe there weren't even creatures in the world anymore.

Then I reached hell. I don't know when I crossed the boundary. I could only tell that I was at the bottom of the world because it was illuminated from below the screen. When I landed, I didn't take any damage from the fall or touching the bottom of the screen. I just fell there.

I was... freaked out a little. But I eventually decided to explore, since there's no point in just standing there. I started walking to the right. To my surprise... there was a Merchant standing in the middle of nothing. But I couldn't interact with him -- he just stood there and looked at me, as he would in normal game. I tried to talk to him, but no dialogue or shopping screen popped up.

I continued on and saw yet another Merchant, alongside Nurse. I could not interact with them either. They just stood there and looked at me. After that there were two Guides. All the NPCs I encountered just stood in one spot, staring at me.

I started walking to the other side for some reason. Even as I was weirded out by what I was seeing, I was curious what was on the other side. I backtracked, walking by the same NPCs I saw before, all looking at my direction. I returned to where I fell and continued walking. I saw a Mechanic and another Nurse.

Then I saw Dryad.

She was walking toward me, from the right side of the screen. I started running the other way. Suddenly seeing a NPC move really, really unnerved me. I just didn't want to know what would happen if she reached me.

Usually you move faster than NPCs when they ambulate aimlessly, right? I thought I had outrun Dryad. I moved far enough to the left that she was not on the screen anymore. For some reason, I decided to pause and see if Dryad would show up again. Curiosity. Never saw anything like this happen in Terraria.

As expected, she showed up again. She was... faster. I resumed running away from her. She was gaining speed. Not noticeably so, but I could tell because she was following me only slightly faster than I could run after a while.

I was at the end of the world. The screen stopped scrolling and I had driven myself into the very bottom left of the world. As soon as I stopped moving, Dryad rushed at me. Her eyes were bright violet.

The moment Dryad touched me, the game unloaded again.

When I went to play the world again, it was gone. My character was fine -- he had full inventory again just as I left him, before this episode. But Metaphorland was not there anymore. I looked at the save folder and there were no world4.wld or world4.wld.bak there.

I figure Terraria deleted the world, but, man. What the fuck happened? I have no idea. I tried loading another world. Dryad had vanished. The house I made for her was empty and I couldn't see her in the NPC home menu either.

The best explanation I could come up with was that this event was a "punishment" for letting Corruption win or something. I think the NPCs I saw at the bottom of hell were ones that died when I was fighting bosses and wyverns at the top of the tower. It could be something else, maybe. It's... strange. I don't even know why Redigit even implemented something like this, if this even is something he intended in the first place.

I think I'm gonna put off playing Terraria for a while. It's exciting that Terraria for XBL was released a few days ago, but I... I don't know. I feel weirded out by the game now. I'm pretty sure I'll return to Terraria sooner or later (I definitely want to see how 1.2 is going to pan out) but until then? I think I'll just stop thinking about Terraria.

Still, I want to know. Has anyone else come across something like this? I think this was too elaborate to be a bug, so it has to be an intended feature. Still, I wonder about the percentage of Terraria players who were obsessive enough to get rid of all hallow in a world...