Fun mode is a self-imposed challenge I started work on after returning to Terraria after a short absence. I decided to attempt it after my fairly long time between my last Calamity guide upload and now, with my last run recorded being Bricks Only a few months back.

The rules of the run are as follows:
-GetFixedBoi
-Master Mode
-Death Mode is active
-Rage and Adrenaline are banned
-Doubled Boss health
-Most Potions are banned
-Most Exploits are banned
-On-demand teleportation banned

The first three rules are the most basic difficulty boosts you can think of; the hardest seed, the hardest vanilla difficulty, and the hardest Calamity difficulty setting.
Rage and adrenaline are banned and boss health is doubled, in-turn making all boss fights longer and preventing me from being able to skip any phases through use of the meters; a common tactic for dealing with tough phases. Also makes timed bosses like Providence, EoL and the Mechs even more of a threat.
Most potions and exploits are banned. There are a few small exceptions for both that I will address as we go, which were likely necessary for specific bosses.
Food isn't banned due to the hunger mechanic and buffs from 'placeable' items like campfires, candles and the class-specific 'tables' are also permitted.
On-demand teleportation through the Rod of Discord, Rod of Harmony, Normality Relocator and Spectral Veil are banned. Most of them spawn something awful on-use anyways but figured I should mention it.

In-short, I made an unnecessarily complicated Calamity run for no reason. Normally I'd recommend trying out these sorts of runs for yourself but... maybe don't do that for this one unless you like becoming angry at Terraria challenges because... things get rough...


Anyways, onto Pre-Hardmode we go

My description of every boss will come with three notes at the top of the page, some notes from before and during the fight, and some from after the fight.

The two latter points are somewhat self-explanatory, while the notes at the top of the page will be broken down further into three points:

Difficulty: How difficult is the boss compared to others. Broken down from 1-6 with 1 being 'basically free' to 5 being 'insanely difficult' while 6 is reserved for bosses that might actually be impossible without some sort of exploit
Attempts: A rough estimate as to how many attempts each boss took to defeat. Numbers may not be entirely accurate as I did not write down the specific number of attempts for all bosses in my notes
Time: The amount of time needed to defeat the boss on my first successful run

Difficulty: ooo
Deaths: ~20
Time: ???

Pre-Boss exploration on GetFixedBoi is always a gruelling task giving the very unforgiving nature of the seed. Spawning in the underworld to start, crumbling ash above, lava-filled crispy honey beyond that and, at the very top of the world, both evil biomes. That is all without mentioning the enemies that deal insane damage and can potentially 1-shot you even with the ash wood armour you're likely ascending in.

My first goal was to find a nearby Draedon lab and a mimic to drop money: 50 gold to be exact. I need this before the end of the first day for 1 reason, being the Princess' ability to sell the Resonance Sceptre. The Sceptre is normally a Hardmode weapon, so getting it now would be a gargantuan boost to my damage that I would struggle immensely without.

I managed to get my hands on the Sceptre after some trouble, though shortly after all the NPCs died. While I had potential for high damage, I still needed to get health, mana and much better gear to be comfortable. Life Crystals weren't too bad to come by, with only a few Life Crystal boulders catching me off-guard. Hunting down slimes carrying Fallen Stars got me enough for ~180 max mana, and I got Iron Armour after a short while that I eventually upgraded to Platinum.

My first goal was Desert Scourge, the usual candidate for a first boss in a challenge run, but this did not go according to plan. After some failed attempts there, I decided to instead look to the other early-game boss King Slime to see if things would go differently...

Difficulty: oo (?)
Attempts: 6 (?)
Time: 2:10


The Fight:
King Slime: the first boss in the run and I am already having to explain some small quirks in my measurement system due to how it works. King Slime gets a gargantuan boost to its size from the doubled boss health; making it nearly the size of the screen. Normally this wouldn't be too bad, but it turns out it seems to measure its distance from the player by its centre rather than its entire body, in-turn meaning that simply by being outside of its hitbox it will determine the player to be 'too far away' and teleport... which is unavoidable and does half my health in contact damage.

King Slime is one of two bosses in this run where death is unavoidable and so mods/modes that automatically despawn bosses on death are essentially unusable. From what testing I got to do you actually have to die to King Slime in this fight and trap him in your arena as, for some reason, he doesn't like teleporting away and so will get stuck easily inside blocks and walls.

Once King Slime gets to about half health the fight can actually begin as his size won't simply fill the whole screen anymore; this is the point where you actually get to fight him. King Slime is still quite a big problem even with powerful items like the Resonance Staff at my disposal; outside of King Slime's own abilities, it spawns tons of Rainbow Slimes that litter the arena and deal over 400 contact damage; making contact with any of them immediate death. By this point King Slime can also likely escape your arena better with its smaller size, so you can't cheese him by this point.

Ultimately, though, King Slime isn't too awful, especially compared with what is to come.


Post-Boss:
King Slime has its usual pool of drops for the most part. Slimy Saddle is, as ever, an amazing mount for its boost to fall speed and the slime hook can be good if you haven't crafted a faster one by this point. The Solidifier is also useful for later.

I also got TModLoader dev wings from the item bag. Normally I wouldn't ever consider this in a run (and ultimately didn't use them) but this will come back to be important a little later in the challenge...

Difficulty: ooo
Attempts: ~20
Time: 2:30


The Fight:
Desert Scourge is another interesting fight, taking a page from King Slime's book in having extremely annoying minions and making the start of the fight significantly harder than the latter half.

The Desert Nuisances spawned at the start of the fight are the biggest hurdle to overcome. Their massive size makes dodging both them and Scourge incredibly difficult and awkward, while their buffed health means they get to persist a lot longer than normal. Most attempts will end before the Nuisances are defeated, forcing you to return to the arena and inevitably clean up some sand left by the ever-present Antlion spawns.

Thankfully, having the Resonance Sceptre grants me an absolutely astounding weapon for dealing with worm enemies, so within around 30 seconds I could handle both Nuisances and could also deal significant damage to Scourge himself who has 76,800 health; nearly the same HP as normal mode Destroyer on the second boss of the run.

Scourge itself isn't too complicated overall. I'd recommend making two rows of platforms for the fight and staying on the top row until it performs its lunge/leap attack where you can then drop to the bottom row until it burrows again, where you return to the top. Staying on the upper row during the leap sometimes allows Scourge to coil around you, leading to near-certain death.

Overall, not too bad but still very annoying. If it weren't for the Resonance Sceptre I genuinely don't know what other available weapons would even be worth using against it.


Post-Boss:
Most of Scourge's drops aren't admittedly all that useful for the run. The Resonance Sceptre invalidates all of the weapons in terms of raw DPS, so the main things to look out for are the Aero Stone as a decent buff to mobility, and the Fish Finder materials for making the Cell Phone later.

Difficulty: oo
Attempts: 2
Time: 2:05


The Fight:
Eye of Cthulhu is the first shred of sanity I've seen in a boss this entire playthrough. Not stupidly oversized, not trying to spawncamp us, not forcing me to rebuild half the arena because of regular enemies in the biome destroying it. Just a fairly straightforward, if a little challenging, fight.

One thing I'd like to make note of is that, some time before the fight, I got my hands on a Bladecrest Oathsword while dealing with the underworld's denizens. As it turns out, this weapon is pretty brilliant for this fight as the sheer spam of scythe projectiles allow us to keep the Servants of Cthulhu at bay while slowly chipping down at the eye in a manner slower, but safer, than the Resonance Sceptre allows.

However, my first attempt technically did have a problem where I missed the 'Evil Presence' text and ended up having to fight 2 at once; a fight that I did lose, but during the rematch I only had to deal with the intended 1, which made the fight possible.

Most of my dodging for phase 2 and beyond involved me moving in a rhombus shape between two layers of platforms, moving horizontally during EoC's chain dashes and more vertically during EoC's horizontal dashes.


Post-Boss:
The Shield of Cthulhu is always a great accessory, but I didn't end up using it this run. By the looks of things Calamity just added a built-in dash for the player from the get-go at some point since I last played, and with my limited accessory slots I didn't actually have room for it for once as the ability to ram enemies doesn't seem all too useful when I'm trying to generally keep away from them.

However, EoC drops the Optic Staff this run; another Hardmode weapon now available in Pre-Hardmode. I opted to use it for exploration and for a little extra DPS against bosses, since it seems a waste to not use it.

Difficulty: ooo
Attempts: 18
Time: 5:05


The Fight:
For the Eater I ended up carving out a colossal underground arena, with the surface's low gravity and innumerable enemy spawns being a massive hindrance if I had fought it above-ground. The arena itself only had 1 row of platforms high off the ground to minimise EoW's own mobility while I could still reach it with my own. Somehow, while carving out this arena, I stumbled upon not 1, but 2 Dirtiest Blocks; giving me a silly pet for the remainder of the run and generally distracting me enough for bombing/digging out the arena to not become to monotonous.

The first attempts at EoW were not good. While the Resonance Sceptre had decent DPS my limited mana meant I could only fire a few shots before having to wait for my mana to reload, in which time EoW would make considerable ground towards me and bombard me with projectiles. However, I noticed that like the Eye before it that the Eater actually dropped Light Discs occasionally, which I thought might be useful later.

After a few more failed mage attempts I decided to instead try out the Light Disc and get some melee armour to go along with it. My thought process being that the Light Disc's high speed, good damage and lack of mana requirement would make it by far the more consistent choice.

I aimed for EoW's head as much as I could to minimise how often it could split up, as dealing with a single large enemy would likely have been easier than if it had broken up into multiple, smaller ones.

Gradually I chipped it down, prioritising its Eater of Souls spawns as its segments broke apart, and after some trial and error managed to defeat the overgrown worm without excessive hassle.


Post-Boss:
The Eater of World's drops allowed me to craft the Shadow Armour, which paired nicely with the Light Disc acquired during my other attempts. The Worm Scarf was also fairly handy as ever.

I also managed to get a developer set from the treasure bag again. As before I initially assumed it was a mistake of some sort, which was my assumption with the first time a dev set dropped, but then I remembered that a feature of the Celebration seed was that dev sets could drop Pre-Hardmode... and in-turn that GetFixedBoi was a combination of all the special seeds... meaning that I actually had a powerful pair of wings this early in the game and was, in fact, allowed to use them.

Difficulty: oooo (?)
Attempts: 30
Time: 1:43


The Fight:
Brain of Cthulhu is another very interesting boss in this run due to also seemingly being affected by the health scaling in a very bad way.

In Phase 1 the Brain teleports around, invulnerable, while its Creeper minions attack the player. Normally, as the player damages/kills the Creepers, the Brain is intended to gradually speed up its pursuit very gradually.

However, on this seed, I learned that it isn't scaled up by health percentage taken, but instead the speed ramping seems to be based on damage taken directly... now, given that every boss has double the intended health (on top of the added health from the various stacked difficulties) the Brain's scaling speed went, perhaps, a little too far.

By the time 2/3 of the Creepers had been defeated, the Brain's acceleration was faster than the player can normally achieve; In fact, a Sandstorm in a Balloon's jump was still slower than the Brain. Combined with its ability to telefrag the player, I assumed this phase would be impossible but then I noticed something...

Taking a page out of King Slime's book, the Brain sometimes refused to flee and despawn after I had died; instead lingering in-place until I respawned. This didn't always happen, but when it did it meant that Phase 1 actually had a chance of being possible.

Even though the scaling speed is removed after Phase 1, Phase 2 was not free. The constant application of the Confused debuff, the Brain's teleports and Death Mode attacks, and being flung to the ceiling made the second phase a tough challenge in and of itself.

Overall, the hardest fight of the run so far, even while being the fastest.


Post-Boss:
Brain of Confusion was nice, but I decided to keep the Shadow Armour as opposed to swapping to Crimson Armour. The increased acceleration for dodging seemed more useful than buffed regeneration when all the bosses are able to deal triple-digit damage even this early in the game.

Difficulty: ooo
Attempts: 12
Time: 5:03


The Fight:
Introducing what might be my favourite Pre-Hardmode boss in the challenge, the Perforators are harder than before, but not in the same absolutely stupid ways some other bosses proved to be.

The Hive itself isn't really any different outside of the HP scaling, so not much to add there

The small worm will attach itself to the Hive and heal it. This isn't really that big of a deal as our DPS from the Light Disc means we can fairly easily negate its healing and kill the worm.

The medium worm requires a little more thought as it has EoW's ability to split up. Like with EoW I decided to make a lengthy arena for it and solely attack the head and tail. Running across one of my arena's platforms 2-3 times allowed me to deal with it relatively safely.

The hardest part of the fight comes from the large worm's changes. Its new lasers make it very awkward to deal with, and means it is very easy to get hit here. The worm itself is also surprisingly tanky, even with help from the Optic Staff and Light Disc.

After that you have to actually fight the worms again in reverse order, making the middle of the fight the hardest part as you end up having to kill 2 large worms back-to-back while also keeping an eye on the Hive's own attacks.

Once the large worm is downed a 2nd time the hardest part of the fight is over and you just have to make sure you play carefully and victory should be yours.


Post-Boss:
Most of Perforator's drops are weapons, yet I'd still say it has some of the best loot available for the entire run. Why is that? Because they allowed it to drop up to 9,999 Bloodfins every time you defeat it. This invalidates basically all other health potions until the endgame and allows me to heal over half my health in a single potion; an invaluable benefit for a run like this.

It was also at this point where I realised I had forgotten to fight a certain cavern-crawling crustacean...

Difficulty: oo
Attempts: 5
Time: 6:23


The Fight:
Crabulon is a fight that, in short, hurts your eyes more than your character. Everything has rainbow images so half your screen is permanently flashing or phasing through colours... or both.

Crabulon itself isn't much harder than other runs. As always a single high-up platform keeps Crabulon at bay for most of the fight, with the only time he can reach you being the jump attack which can, in-turn, be avoided by dropping below your platform during the second jump so he falls back through.

The Oathsword gets its second time to shine in this fight by hitting the Crab Shrooms Crabulon attacks with, as well as the numerous crabs it spawns. While this is slower than using the Light Disc, it does generally keep you a lot safer.


Post-Boss:
Crabulon, like the Perforators before it, mostly has weapon drops that I don't need while also being given an invaluable bonus drop on GetFixedBoi; in its case up to 9,999 Odd Mushrooms.

Now because winners don't do drugs I'm not going to be using those, but they do sell for an insane amount of money given how many Crabulon drops - making it the best form of income in the entire run without any competition. This, in-turn, becomes important later.

Difficulty: ooo
Attempts: 8
Time: 9:10


The Fight:
A lot of fights have started out tough and gotten easier or had the peak of their difficulty more towards the middle of the fight, but I'd argue Hive Mind is definitely a boss where the difficulty snowballs more towards the end rather than the beginning, which given its length may lead to a lot of infuriating last-minute deaths.

The first phase of Hive Mind has a lot going on visually but isn't too challenging. Lots of rapidly-moving Hive Blobs spawn that swarm around Hive Mind but they don't yet respawn when killed. With our banners from making the arena and dealing with Eater of Worlds, the corruption enemies it spawns are also not a problem. The main things to watch out for here are thus the Dank Creepers and Hive's teleportation.

When you get into Phase 2, however, that is when things become a problem. Hive Blobs spawn in in huge clusters, the boss teleports constantly, and most importantly the Hive Mind will begin spawning other Hive Tumors that will spawn other Hive Minds if killed.

With our main weapon being the Light Disc, these Hive Tumors it spawns are a huge issue as we do significant chunks of their health every hit, especially on crits. It is inevitable that multiple other Phase 1 Hive Minds will be spawned in this phase, so I'd recommend aiming slightly upwards whenever you attack so that the additional Hive Minds spawned never make it into Phase 2 themselves.

As the fight progresses enemies will be everywhere spawned by all the active Hive Minds. It is futile trying to kill most of the 'lesser' enemies since they respawn nearly immediately, but killing the Dank Creepers may give you extra breathing room which is appreciated. Aside from them, focus all your damage onto the main Hive Mind for a shot at victory.


Post-Boss:
Hive Mind doesn't really drop much that helps with the run at all, so there isn't too much else to say about it specifically. The Emblems GetFixedBoi adds, while nice, are competing for accessory slots and so I cannot currently use them but they may be useful later.

It does worry me, however, that we're already getting fights that take nearly 10 minutes and we're not even in Hardmode yet...

Difficulty: oooo
Attempts: 16
Time: 2:47


The Fight:
Queen Bee proved to be another highly-volatile boss; high damage and speed but low durability (at least compared to the last few bosses). Queen Bee has 2 distinct phases in this fight, unlike the gradually-scaling Queen Bee seen normally.

Phase 1 has the Queen Bee on fire, spawning Fire Bats that drop lava when killed. Normally this would primarily be a problem due to it destroying platforms, but for some reason all the liquids in my world lagged and would get stuck in the air; essentially creating little death pockets all around my arena. Even with Terraspark Boots landing on/in one of these while Queen Bee was charging was essentially immediate death given the Queen's speed and contact damage.

At half health Phase 2 began, making the Queen Bee a diet Plaguebringer: exchanging her stingers for missiles and bees for Plague Seekers. Every attack at this point did immense damage so I had to effectively no-hit the latter half of the fight for a chance to win.

After quite a number of attempts I did manage a win, though I imagine it'd be far worse for someone less experienced with the Queen Bee fight as it was one involving a lot of dash timing and muscle memory.


Post-Boss:
The Alchemical Flask Queen Bee drops on this seed is very helpful for its debuff and extra homing projectiles, so that's nice.

Most of the other weapons are simply outclassed by a lot of the other special drops I have and I'm not going summoner right now, so most of the Queen Bee's other drops aren't all too useful to me.

Difficulty: o
Attempts: 1
Time: 2:15


The Fight:
Deerclops seems to be relatively unchanged in this run, making it a very welcome breath of fresh air compared to the other horrendously tedious bosses I've had to face before now.

Its attacks don't hurt too much, the attacks aren't that tough to dodge thanks to my wings granting me far more mobility than I should otherwise have, and it doesn't have the stupid durability of other bosses.


Post-Boss:
Deerclops doesn't drop anything I particularly need, so there isn't anything else to add here. It doesn't have any special drops for the seed, either, so there's a chance that Calamity will update it and this part of the page will become irrelevant in the future... we'll just have to wait and see...

Difficulty: oo
Attempts: 22
Time: 1:34


The Fight:
Skeletron effectively has three phases thanks to how you have to summon it initially. The first phase I call the 'arena dash' as it is essentially just the process of getting the newly-spawned Skeletron to my arena without dying, as I often build mine on the surface because I'm getting a little sick of having to dig colossal arenas for every boss.

After getting Skeletron up to the arena I have to deal with the hands. While Skeletron's own attacks are very similar to how they are in Death Mode, it additionally spawns Dark Casters and, seemingly thanks to Calamity, Diabolists rarely as well. I would honestly recommend farming Dark Casters for a couple of banners before any serious attempts since it greatly reduces their damage output.

Phase 2 is a bit of a tightrope walk. It is generally quite short as Skeletron proves to be the least durable boss thus far when using the Light Disc, but it is also very easy to die here by having a Dark Caster bolt knock you into one of Skeletron's headspin attacks and kill you nearly instantly. With careful maneuvering, however, you should be alright.


Post-Boss:
With Queen Bee, Deerclops and Skeletron taking so little time to defeat I ended up checking my Calamity settings to make sure boss health was still doubled and, yes, it apparently still was. I guess my loadout was just very efficient at dealing with the last few bosses.

Skeletron drops the Flamethrower, but I find that the Light Disc is doing completely fine so I don't end up using it.

The other benefit from defeating Skeletron is dungeon access, granting me the Cobalt Shield (that I immediately upgraded into the Obsidian Shield). I also grabbed the Muramasa for later, though again didn't need that much else from the dungeon. Even looking for just these 2 things it took hours because of all the extra spikes forcing me to mine a lot... and trapping me in rooms with the buffed Flaming Wheels that essentially ensured instant death. Not fun.

Difficulty: oooo
Attempts: 12
Time: 6:47


The Fight:
The Slime God fight is one where you have to both be fast and cautious, as well as being prepared for another lengthy fight that could go wrong at any minute. I'd recommend a long arena with a few rows of platforms reasonably far apart from each other.

The Core regains the ability to inflict Distorted, a debuff that is effectively a death sentence, so keep away from it at all costs. It may fly into you at awkward times, so there's a good chance at having a few attempts lost in ways that feel quite unfair.

Pick a large slime to prioritise in this fight, whether the Crimulan or Ebonion one, and hard-focus on it. Avoid splitting them both at the same time at all costs as the sheer quantity of slimes in such instance will nearly always mean death. The minions spawned can be despawned by simply moving quickly across one of the platforms from one end of the arena to the other and so are rarely a problem.

You may notice that, upon splitting the first big slime, that it becomes three smaller slimes instead of two. This is overall the hardest part of the fight as you have to contend with 3 small slimes, a large slime, and the core. You again want to focus on killing the three smaller ones but you don't really need to focus them down one at a time; just avoid trying to hit the remaining large slime. The number of slimes here also risks many of them teleporting into your path at unfortunate times, so this is the other point in the fight where unfair-feeling deaths are common.

Once one of the large slimes is completely taken care of the fight becomes noticeably easier for a while, though again becomes a little larger once the second slime is split. At this point you don't need to worry about specific targeting, so just aim at what you can hit until you can claim victory.


Post-Boss:
Statigel stuff is the main bonus for winning this fight for now, which is a decent armour upgrade. You may want to go Molten, but it's up to you.

Its unique drop on GetFixedBoi is the Gelatin Crystal; an item useful when you get into Hardmode but not right now.

Difficulty: o
Attempts: 2
Time: 1:50


The Fight:
The Wall of Flesh is quite a polarising boss in challenge runs; either being a fairly simple fight or an absolute nightmare to combat. Given the challenge rules of this run you can probably guess that I was dreading this fight since I was definitely expecting the latter.

To my surprise the Wall wasn't actually that bad. I did prepare a lot with a gargantuan arena and imp banner farming, sure, but even still the Wall wasn't that much harder than normal. In-fact, it didn't even seem to accelerate as fast as it normally does; one of the other features I was dreading given how the Brain of Cthulhu reacted to the health scaling.

Overall the Wall wasn't that bad. Once I got a nice pattern for avoiding the lasers it was only a matter of time until... the Wall of Flesh, and Pre-Hardmode as a whole, was beaten...


Post-Boss:
The Heart grants another accessory slot which will be invaluable moving forward. The weapons are alright but still generally a little worse than the Light Disc, the emblems are dropped by Hive Mind and so aren't too important, and the Eye of Magnus is nice and I will use it in the future, sure, but not right now.

And with that Pre-Hardmode ends and the true challenge of this run begins...

oh boy.

First of all I'd like to say thanks for giving this a read-through. I know it has been a very long time since the last one of these since I was stuck on a computer unable to run Terraria for a while, but I'm finally back.

This was my first 'proper' challenge run in a long while, as the last one was actually Bricks Only when I uploaded that, so I may be a bit rusty. There are probably safer methods for dealing with some of the bosses, King Slime and Brain of Cthulhu especially, so please don't take this as the be-all-end-all; people may come along with far more sophisticated ideas long after I finish this run.

Also, speaking of changes after the run ends, there is always a chance that Calamity updates/tweaks the bosses, so as time passes things on this page may become outdated or strategies might change, but hopefully nothing else breaks entirely.


One more thing is that this run isn't being written-up after the whole thing has been completed this time, but instead during. I'm currently in late Hardmode so even I don't know what's coming up next. I haven't tested anything beforehand so there is a small chance I run into a complete brick wall in terms of progression, but hopefully with enough trial and error I can persevere and make my way all the way to the end of the game.



[6/10/23] Update: So apparently King Slime and the Brain of Cthulhu are just like that in GetFixedBoi and it wasn't anything to do with the health scaling breaking things. Good for me but bad for anyone who wants to play the seed...


Anyways, thanks again for reading, and hopefully I can be back again soon with part 2

See ya then 'v'