Building a house in Terraria is more than just a base of operations. It can also allow NPCs to move into a valid home. NPCs will fight against hostile mobs, some are vendors that sell useful items, and they can be used to teleport across your world. Building a house is one of the first steps to creating a network across your world that can save you time and teleport you to places of interest.
- Blocks or bricks of any kind.
- Walls of any kind
- Table and chair of any kind
- An entrance of any kind
- A light source
The game will recognize player-placed blocks so you can make a house out of dirt and dirt walls if you would like. As long as you are the one who placed the blocks themselves they can be used for valid housing. Otherwise, you can use any wood, stone, brick, or any other kind of block to make a house.
To have valid housing you need to place walls in each house. Walls will prevent mobs from spawning (for the most part) and can distinguish a house from open space.
Each valid house will require a table or chair of any kind. This means you can use any type of material to make your house. Some furniture items count as tables and chairs; a sofa, and even a toilet, will count as a chair and bars can count as tables too.
NPCs cannot move into a house that is fully blocked off. There needs to be a way into the house, such as a door or a trapdoor. However, a simple wood platform can suffice.
Finally, to make a valid house it will need its own light source. This can be any block that gives off light, like the simple torch or stars or fireflies in bottles.
In order for a house to count as valid housing for NPCs you have to follow certain parameters. A house must have at least 60 blocks of space including the frame and no more than 750. This means, including floor and ceiling, a house must be 5x12 blocks in order to be valid housing.
This is the smallest a valid house can be. Including the frame it is 12 blocks long and 5 blocks tall. To make this box into valid housing craft a table and chair. A table will require 8 of whatever type of table you are making. A chair will require 8 of whatever type of chair you are making. Most tables and chairs can be made with a workbench. Some tables and chairs will require specific crafting stations to make.
Now that your table and chair is placed, craft some walls of whatever type of material you would like. Each block will make 4 walls. Fill in the background with your wall of choice, you can enable the smart-cursor setting with left control to ensure you cover every wall inside a house.
Place a torch inside the house and your house should be valid. To check if a house is valid for housing, open your inventory and click on the house icon to the far right.
This should open a new set of commands which can be used to re-assign NPCs to certain houses, or to check for valid housing. Click on the housing query button denoted by a question mark icon and click on the house you have built to see if the housing is suitable or not.
That’s all it takes to build a house in Terraria.
The minimum requirement for a house to be suitable is 60 blocks of living space. You can arrange many 5x12 boxes that can keep your NPCs in check and in a close compact space.
Placing your NPCs in a row like this can keep your NPCs close together and you will not have to travel far to check various vendors for their items.
Check your NPCs happiness to ensure they are happy with the biome they live in as well as their neighbors. The space they are in or how extravagant their room is does not affect their happiness. Only their neighbors and biomes will dictate whether or not an NPC is happy. This happiness is important to get the lowest prices possible as well as powering nearby pylons for warping.
You can connect rooms and double up on house size if you want to keep NPCs close and section them off.
Just because NPCs only require a small amount of space does not mean you have to build small homes. Houses can be as big or small as you want them to be, as long as the minimum and maximum requirements are met. Try different arrangements, Terraria allows you to be creative, it can be more rewarding creating a nice town than building 5 homes as small as can be.
For valid housing, a house cannot be smaller than 5x12 blocks including the frame. They cannot be bigger than 750 tiles. If you want to create a large castle and have NPCs living in it then section off some rooms with doors or gates.
Zombies will normally bang on your doors at night. Unless it is a blood moon they cannot open the door. Even if it is a blood moon you can prevent zombies from opening the door by placing a torch to prevent the door from opening into the house.
If your guide dies in Terraria he can respawn. Every morning there is a chance that an NPC will move into valid housing. As long as there is a house open for the guide there is a chance he will arrive the next morning. There is a boss that can spawn by throwing a guide voodoo doll into the lava in the underworld biome. This boss is necessary to defeat in order to progress into hardmode. Do not worry, even though this method of the guide dying, he will still respawn.
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