A beginner’s walkthrough for the ranger class – Terraria

I’ve been playing terraria since 1.2 was first released and completed the game using each class on both expert mode and normal mode multiple times. My favourite class out of them all was ranger, and generally if I do a playthrough with my friends I take the ranger class. I’ve aslo taken ranger to PVP servers and finished quite high up in the leaderboards. Hopefully this guide should tell you some advanced tips about the ranger class before you start your playthrough!

I have made some videos on the key points of the playthrough, so I haven’t done one for every boss, but if you wanted to see ranger boss kills then just look it up on YouTube. Also, this is not a character I made for a ranger playthrough that I recorded, but one that I gave certain items to, to use as an example. I played with this character legitimately until hardmode, until I just took some items to save time.

Introduction for new players

A ranger uses guns and bows to deal massive damage per second from far away. This grants a ranger extreme survivability because you don’t need to be in an enemy’s face to kill it. To be a ranger in terraria you generally need to be good at tracking targets and you need to know which targets to kill first. I tend to target the weakest enemy or the enemy closest to me, or the enemy that is the biggest threat to me first.

Guns and bows are the two most common types of ranged weapons. Yes there are others but the ones you want to stick to as you progress through the game are these types. Here are some differences between bows and guns.

Bows generally…

• Do more damage per shot
• Shoot less rapidly (particularly in hardmode)
• Shoot in an arc, harder to shoot accurately
• Are cheaper to use once you get access to advanced ammo
• Are easier to obtain
• Are more reliable. If you run out of arrows while exploring you can simply mine some stone and get some wood and craft some more, the same can’t be said for bullets so more need to be brought.

Guns generally…

• Do more DPS (damage-per-second)
• Shoot in a straight line with a much higher velocity (much easier to use)
• Are harder to obtain
• Are more efficient at taking down high health targets (only outshown sometimes by the phantasm in single target DPS)
• Are more expensive because they use ammo much more quickly
• Are much much better in PVP because bows do less reliable damage than guns.
• Higher effective range.

Here is a comparison between bows and guns.

Don’t stick by this rule but most of the time if you have a gun at a certain tier, it isn’t worth crafting a bow as a secondary weapon.

Strengths and weaknesses of a ranger are as follows.

Rangers are good for…

• Crowd control. With piercing bullets they can make a crowd bow down to you in a matter of seconds provided you have enough space to move around.
• Ranged damage is by far the most effective against the Eye of Cthuhlu and all of the mechanical bosses.
• Once you get to end game ranger is one of the easiest classes to play, and you can mow through the most difficult bosses.

A ranger’s limitations are…

• In a small space a ranger can be easily swarmed by enemies and wil ldie unless they have a clear escape route.
• In pre hardmode ranged weapons can seem weaker than melee weapons of the same tier.
• Rangers need to either bring loads of wood with them on mining trips for arrows if they run out, or they have to bring a lot of bullets.
• Ranger is the most expensive class to play.
• For a new player warrior, mage and summoner just seem a better option because they are so much easier to play.

Tips

Pre Hardmode:

• Although rangers are all about bows and guns, don’t think you can’t bring a sword with you. If you run out of ammo or get swarmed, this could save your life.
• Work on terraforming your land. This means get rid of hills or make them less of an obstacle.
• The eye of cthuhlu can be killed with 100hp and no armour, just make sure you have a long platform and make sure you run all the way along it before changing direction.
• Skeletron is much easier to take down if you kill at least one of his hands first. Now you don’t need to dodge as much and just focus damage on the head.
• Eater of worlds is easier to fight on the surface
• Brain of Cthuhlu is affected by knockback. Use more rapidly firing ranged weapons.
• Queen bee has two phases. A standing still phase and a rage mode phase. Focus on dodging in rage mode and just stand still and shoot at her when she isn’t moving.
• Wall of flesh is an easy boss fight. When you prepare for it, remember that the thing that will probably kill you is lava.

Hardmode:

• Buffs! Always!
• Get a clockwork assault rifle fom the wall of flesh every time you enter hardmode. Also get the ranger embelem.
• Defense defense defense! At least in early hardmode.
• Make sure you have accessories which help mobility.
• Minions will help increase your DPS.
• Smash demon altars straight away, and get palladium armour, if you end up with cobalt, it’s probably not worth crafting and you should get the next tier up instead.
• The machanical bosses should be killed in this order, the destroyer, twins, prime.
• The destroyer is probably the hardest boss fight for a ranger. Just make sure you are moving and aren’t caught by the destroyer’s head. Explosive or Crystal; bullets help with the fight. Once he is killed craft a megashark! Another strategy which makes him the easiest boss is if you are lucky enough to get a daedalus stormbow.
• The twins are countered by a long platform. They also don’t move much. Run along the platform and get rid of spazmatism as soon as possible before putting the other one in his second form.
• Once the mechanical bosses are killed, chlorophyte bullets with a megashark and hallowed armour melts plantera.
• Get the witch doctor in the Jungle and buy wings from her once you get a platinum coin to make the next battles easier.
• Golem is easy. The temple is what kills you. Get rid of all traps before fighting him.
• Duke fishron is easy if you have mobility. Using a megashark and crystal/chlorophyte bullets melts him.
• Moon lord requires an extremely large arena to fight and a chain gun with chloropyte bullets is what killed him for me, but a vortex beater or phantasm is just as effective.

PvP:

• Invisibility potions are your best friend.
• Always bring a sniper rifle. Even if you only use it once or twice, getting that pinning shot to either one shot kill a player or make it easy to finish off with another gun is so satisfying,
• If against another ranger, focus speed over damage. The outcome will be who hits the most shots first. Don’t bother going into stealth mode with shroomite or vortex armour.
• The SDMG is so overpowered! Make sure you take advantage of it in servers that haven’t banned it.

Pre-Hardmode

What you should accomplish by day one:

• Make a wooden bow and some flaming arrows to survive the night
• Create a house for the guide and yourself to share. I recommend designing the house in a way that is easy to expand so you should have a full on base by endgame
• Explore until you get to a desert, corruption, crimson or snow biome and make some armour using cactus, ebonwood, shadewood or boreal wood. If you want also make a bow using these types of wood.

This is how my first day went.

What you should accomplish by day ten:

• Mine some ores to craft armour. At this stage it’s about endurance and not daage output. Anyway, if you craft a platinum bow or something it will become obsolete in the next step.
• Venture into your corruption or crimson, smash a shadow orb or heart. It will drop either a musket or undertaker respectively
• Make sure you have an available NPC house for the arms dealer, who will be your main friend during this playthrough
• Buy a ton of bullets, don’t bother crafting silver bullets
• With six lenses (from demon eyes) craft a suspicious looking eye at a demon altar in the corruption or crimson, then with about a stack of platforms create a single long platform across your world. It will make boss fights a lot easier.
• Add a campfire to it as well.

What you should accomplish shortly afterwards:

• With your suspicious looking eye kill the eye of cthuhlu using your gun and your arena. The flat ground will make this fight really easy.
• Also make platforms like this near the dungeon and in the underground corruption or crimson. Summon the bosses in each place (smash 3 orbs/hearts in the underground corruption or crimson or ask the old man in the dungeon)
• In the underground you should be able to mine some life crystals. Always use these as soon as you get them.

As an example I showed my first fight with the Eye of Cthuhlu. I did this third night, but I got a little cocky during the fight when I knew he was at low health and played more aggressively, The result was me barely winning the fight with 1hp remaining.

Later you should:

Accomplish most of what’s here before beating the wall of flesh. The lower your skill, the more you should accomplish to make life easier for you.

• Gather enough crystals to get 300hp or more
• Gather enough gold coins to buy a minishark
• Venture into the dungeon to get a handgun
• Gather meteroite to get some bullets from there (don’t bother with silver bullets)
• Get hellstone to craft a pheonix blaster, molten armour and a molten fury
• Go to the jungle to get a boomstick

Remember you aren’t prepping for the Wall of Flesh fight, you are preparing for hardmode.

I battled the wall of flesh with a mixture of accessories which gave me greater movement and defense, with necro armour. I made a big bridge in hell and used that to protect me from the lava.

Early Hardmode

Early hardmode is by far the hardest stage in Terraria. Mechanical bosses have a chance of spawning each night and monsters that are much stronger than anything in pre hardmode spawn in their hundreds every night.

Building a base:

The first thing you want to do is build a base. Make it look nice but also function well. I’ve put examples of bases that I have built over my years of Terraria below. Remeber the balance of fuction and aesthetics is important.

This is the base I made on the world I used on my walkthrough. At the time of writing this, it is in development. Need to get more tin! Later on hopefully you will see this base thrive!

This is a base me and two friends built for my friend’s YouTube channel which he made a few Terraria videos on.

Here’s a base I built at end game. The NPC houses are all identical, there’s a farm above them and below them is where all of my storage and crafting stuff is.

I could show you much more, but I think this section is a bit full on pictures now. Anyway here are some tips on building bases at early hardmode.

Early hardmode bases tips

• Always build it out of a block that looks nice, but isn’t hard to come by.
• Usually the best thing to do is have the nice looking bit above ground and have the functionality based stuff underground. Examples of this are in most of my pictures, the crafting and storage areas are underground.
• Wiring always makes a base better.
• If you gathered any statues while mining, a base is a good place to make an AFK farm with them.
• Never use doors! I know it sounds strange but actuators or teleporters grant greater protection against hardmode enemies.

Once you have a decent base destroy demon/crimson altars in the corruption/crimson. In an ideal world you would get palladium, orichalcum and titanium, but it doesn’t make much of a difference so long as you get palladium.

After the base is built you should…

• Go underground to hell, and travel along the roof of hell. Lots of ores spawn there so thats your best bet at finding cobalt/palladium. Use a molten pickaxe to mine the ores. If you still need more just go in some caves and mine some more.
• With palladium, make a full set of armour (make the armour set ranger or melee) and with cobalt make a cobalt pickaxe and mine the next tier of ores. With either orichalcum/mythril make a set of armour.
• Kill the destroyer.
• With destroyer’s drops make a megashark with your minishark, souls of might, shark fins and illegal gun parts.
• Now kill the other bosses easily. Use crystal bullets for the best effect.
• With all three bosses dead make hallowed armour, a pickaxe axe and a hallowed repeater (optional).

Late Hardmode

By late hardmode I mean after the three mechnical bosses have been taken down.

Sooner or later you should…

• Locate a plantera bulb and create an arena there to kill plantera with. The arena should be quite big. Use bombs or something to make a big area and then fill in any holes so you cvan move around easier. Mine was a rectangle approximately 200×300 blocks. Some other Terraria players use teleporters and make a long line (50×300 blocks) and use teleporters to teleport back and forth so plantera can’t get to you. I will put a picture from google images showing this (sorry I didn’t make one myself).
• Kill plantera with a megashark and chlorophyte or crystal bullets. This is exttremely easy, just make sure you have good mobility and you can dodge all of her attacks. Make sur eyou stay in the underground jungle biome! If you leave it pkantera will become enraged and the fight will become harder.
• Open up the lizhard temple and kill golem using the tips I gave on how to kill him previously. The golem fight is so easy you don’t even need an arena just shoot his arms before you kill his body. Keep killing him until he drops a Stynger. Its a great ranged weapon for some endgame events.
• Get a truffle worm.

Here’s that arena I talked about earlier.

Now you should focus on getting shroomite armour by getting the truffle NPC. There’s a video by Yrimir on how to do that here, or if you don’t want to go onto YouTube the basic steps are.

Kill plantera

• Build an overground mushroom biome (mushroom grass seeds are found by smashing plants in underground mushroom biomes).
• Build a house in there once the music changes and it definitely registers as a mushroom biome.
• He will move in.

With the truffle buy the autohammer and place it down. Then you should go to the jungle and mine chlorophyte and make it into shroomite bars. This gives you shroomite armour. Previously the best ranged armour set in the game.

Then kill duke fishron, make sure you have a good arena first! Again, a megashark and crystal or chlorophyte bullets is ideal, but if you manage to get hold of a venus magnum and don’t mind constantly clicking it will do slightly more DPS. Duke fishron drops the Tsunami, an amazing bow for late hardmode.

Endgame

By endgame I mean post Duke Fishron. I know this isn’t what the community considers endgame to be but for the sake of this guide this is what I mean.

First of all…

Kill the frost moon. The pumpkin moon isn’t really beneficial to a ranger but the frost moon is. You don’t need to get to a good wave, you just need to kill a few Santa NK1s to get a chain gun.
Make a massive platform. One that spans the whole world. Make sure it is covered with campfires and put your nurse in the middle of it. Every 50 blocks or so add a little room. It doesn’t need doors or anything, just a roof, you’ll know why in a bit.

Then…

Kill the Cultist. He’s at the dungeon. It’s an easy fight with a chain gun and chlorophyte bullets.
Kill 3 celestial pillars. Make sure the vortex one is included.
With the vortex fragments make a new gun and bow.

The moon lord

As of 1.3 the moon lord is the final boss in the game, and by many people in the Terraria’s community is considered to be the hardest boss to kill (with the current weapons the game offers you). Killing the moon lord on expert mode is nearly impossible.

So, if you listened to the last part of the guide, you should be at the far side of your arena now. To fight the moon lord you need to always be pressing A or D. Run the full length of the arena before running the full length back. Whenever you pass the nurse use her, no matter what your health. The moon lord’s basic attacks can be easily dodged by doing this, but his other attack will always be the way you die. Sometimes he fires a beam from his eyes. This thing can two shot you so must be always dodged. When you think he will use this attack, use on of those roofs to take cover. He can’t touch you then, and once its over you can keep going.

Get all three of his eyes low before killing them. You want to spend as little time as possible with his second form.

Once all three eyes are dead, they come out and shoot lasers at you. These are hard to dodge, so now it just becomes a DPS war. Use your chain gun and chlorophyte bullets to melt his heart so he will die before you die.

Getting the ultimate ranger loadout.

Kill the moon lord a few more times so you can get the Vortex armour. Head to the hardmode dungeon to get the sniper rifle (always good to have) and also try to get the SDMG from the moon lord. These are the two best ranged weapons in teh game, in my opinion.

Accessories can be whatever you want. I put all of mine to the menacing prefix.

Questions

If any questions pop up, they get answered here. If you have anything to ask, put them in the comments and I will answer them! If they help, remember to thumbs up this guide! Still not answered the question? Tell me and I will update it here. This section is mainly to stop me clogging up the comments section with my own comments, and more focusing it on you guys 🙂 Once the comment has been answered, I may delete the comment. Still not sure on that though.

What about the endless musket pouch and quiver?

These items are quite useful, but are not effective. They can only be crafted in hardmode, when more special ammunition is available. Musket balls are pracically useless, and so are wooden arrows.

What about the ranged weapons that consume mana?

They are magic, or mage weapons. They are for another guide! Most ranged weapons consume some type of ammo and none of them use mana.

I didn’t get a musket from the Shadow Orbs…

Yes, you did. It is a guaranteed drop from the first orb, the same goes for Crimson Hearts and the Undertaker. You must have binned it or something.

Just listen to Yrimir, there!

There is one video and one image that I haven’t made. Everything but those two things were made by me, and where they haven’t been made by me I show where I got it from and gave credit. And even though I showed a Yrimir video, I still summed it up in my own words and didn’t put it on preview, just provided a link. What’s your problem?

What shroomite helmet should I use?

What’s the weapon you use the most often? Make the headset for that. Don’t make the rocket headgear because it’s useless. I’d generally use the bullet one.

You can’t choose your drops from the wall of flesh…

You can farm them though can’t you.

Destroyer is the easiest if done with this sort of arena…

If you build a platfrom out of the destroyer’s range its not really a legitimate kill in my eyes.

Summoning is harder than the ranger class.

When have the summoner peasants even thought that they could be a class? Thats why I have such a low priority on those guides.

What’s your opinion on shotguns?

I think paired with chlorophyte bulltes they’re viable, but RNGesus hates me so all of the pellets are guaranteed to miss when I use them :/ In early game the boomstick is incredible good against king slime and eye of cthuhlu because they are big targets, and up close they are able to one shot.

Original Link – Continuation of discussion