Terraria House Guide: Requirements, Tips and Tricks, and More

Building a Terraria house is essential. It defends your character from enemy attacks, and it’s a requirement if you want Terraria NPCs to spawn. However, this task isn’t really the most simple to accomplish. There is a list of requirements you need to keep in mind before you can build a house in the game. Plus, there are endless options to choose from when planning out your 2D home’s design and structure.

Luckily, we’re here to help you out. In this guide, we walk you through the requirements of making a basic Terraria house, give you tips on how you can improve its structure, and provide you with a few cool design ideas.

Everything You Need to Build a Basic Terraria House

Unlike in Minecraft, building a Terraria house isn’t as simple as stacking up blocks or partly hollowing out a hill. In Terraria, a house you build can either be valid or rejected. There are a set of rules and requirements you need to keep in mind in order to build a house that NPCs can inhabit.

Below, we lay out everything you need to build a basic Terraria house, from the size requirements to the furniture you need in your new abode.

Materials

The easiest materials you can use to build your Terraria house are wood and dirt. But as you move forward in the game, you can also start using materials that are harder to obtain or produce. Some examples are stone slabs, rich mahogany, mudstone bricks, palm wood, and candy cane blocks.

Size Requirements

Including the frame, your Terraria house needs to have at least 60 blocks but fewer than 750. Excluding the walls, floor, and ceiling, your house must meet one of these minimum dimensions (number of blocks wide x number of blocks tall):

• 3 x 10
• 4 x 8
• 5 x 7
• 6 x 6
• 7 x 5
• 8 x 4
• 10 x 3

If you include the walls, floor, and ceiling, these are the possible minimum dimensions of your house:

• 5 x 12
• 6 x 10
• 7 x 9
• 8 x 8
• 9 x 7
• 10 x 6
• 12 x 5

Structures

Building a valid Terraria house doesn’t stop at just using the right materials and having the right dimensions. There are a few structural requirements you have to meet as well. We list them down for you below:

• Your house must have an entrance, such as a wooden door or a trap door. Take note, though, that enemies and NPCs are not allowed to use trap doors.
• The house must have a minimum of one solid block for your NPC to stand on.
• You must have walls on all sides of your house. Keep in mind that naturally occurring walls do not count. That means you need to have built all the walls yourself.
• There must be a distance of at least 10 blocks between your Terraria house and a true world edge.
• Your Terraria house should be free of corruption.

It’s also important to note that you don’t need to have a full back wall for your house to be valid. However, it’s also good to avoid leaving gaps in your walls as much as possible since enemies can spawn in through them. If you want to place a window (or windows) in your house, you can use glass blocks for those instead.

Furniture

A Terraria house would not be complete without furniture. To have a valid house, it must have at least one of each of the following:

• Comfort item
• Flat surface
• Light source

If you’re a beginner starting out with your chosen Terraria class, the easiest way you can have all three is by placing a chair, a table, and a torch. However, if you’ve already progressed in the game and want to add some variety to your furniture, here are other items you can place in your house:

Tips and Tricks for Upgrading Your Terraria House

Now that you know the basics of building a Terraria house, you might also want to learn how to make it look nicer and a more suitable home for your NPC. In this section, we list a few tips and tricks on how you can upgrade your house.

1. Vary the Shapes and Sizes of Your House’s Rooms

When you start to add levels and rooms to your house, your instinct might be to make them all symmetrical. While that’s totally fine, you might want to add a bit of variety to your rooms to make your house look more interesting.

You can start by playing around with the size and height of each of your rooms. Not all of them need to be square or rectangular, and their floors don’t always need to start at the same height. If you want, you can make a sketch of the general shape of your house on a piece of paper first, and then break them up into rooms. That way, you can work out the best design for your house with ease.

2. Build a Foundation

It’s not at all necessary to build your Terraria house on top of a foundation, but you might want to consider doing it all the same. You need a steady foundation when building a house in the real world since it keeps your house above the ground. And although that doesn’t really apply in the world of Terraria, placing a foundation underneath your house gives it a more polished and legitimate look.

To build a foundation for your house, you can start by laying out your floor first. Then, dig out the dirt underneath the floor you just placed. Once you’ve done that, you can fill in the hole with any kind of blocks you want and paint those blocks to give them more defined edges. However, if you want your foundation to blend in with the ground, you can leave the blocks unpainted.

3. Make Your House More Structurally Sound

Beginner Terraria players also tend to make their walls and ceiling one block high and call it a day. However, doing so makes your house look flimsy and less structurally sound. Although your Terraria house’s structural soundness doesn’t really affect your gameplay, it does help to add a bit of depth to your house.

So when building your house, you can bring the walls and ceilings out by making them two blocks thick instead of one. If you want, you can also add blocks on either edge of your floor so that your walls aren’t hanging over them. That doesn’t sound like much, but it makes a huge difference in terms of making your house look more stable.

Adding support is also equally important when building your Terraria house, although the laws of gravity don’t always apply in Terraria. For instance, it’s completely possible to build a room that’s hanging over the edge of your house’s first floor without support. However, the best way to go is to add support to overhanging walls as well as ceilings. This not only makes your house look more realistic, but it also makes it look less boxy. You can start by adding posts underneath overhanging structures or in the middle of rooms. You can also add reinforcements to the corners of your ceilings.

4. Play Around with Different Materials, Colors, and Textures

Another handy tip to keep in mind is to play around with different materials, colors, and textures when building your Terraria house. If you’re new to Terraria, one of the traps you’ll want to avoid is using a single material when building your entire house. While that can work aesthetically sometimes, it tends to make your house look bland in most cases.

You’ll definitely want to add some variety to your builds; one way you can do so is by using different materials when making your walls and ceilings. For instance, your walls can be made entirely of wood, while your ceilings can be made of stone. If you want, you can also add accents by making some parts of a structure a different material from the other parts.

If you don’t want the materials of your house to be drastically different, you can still add variety by using different textures of the same material. For example, you might want to use mudstone bricks together with gray accent slabs and gray bricks. You can also paint blocks with different colors if you want distinct layers.

5. Make Base Defenses for Your Entrances

Making sure that your walls have no gaps in them is a great way to keep enemies out. However, it’s not enough to ensure that your NPCs stay inside when enemies start to show up around your house. One of the ways you can remedy this is by building a base defense for each of your entryways.

To fortify your entryways, you can place blocks in front of your door (make sure the stack of blocks and the door are the same height). Afterward, place an actuator on each block. You can then wire the actuators and install a switch to activate the blocks. When enemies appear, you can actuate the blocks to keep your NPC from going out.

Some Cool Terraria House Ideas

Once you’ve gotten the hang of building basic houses in Terraria, you can then jazz your town up a bit by building Terraria houses with different designs. Since NPCs now have housing preferences, you’ll want to set up your houses in different biomes as well. Here are some awesome house design ideas to check out. If you have enough experience and materials, you can try your hand at building one of these:

1. Underground Terraria House

Aside from being cool, underground Terraria houses are also fairly easy to make. You can even build one from an old ruin, just like what YouTube creator Boii did in the video above. Of course, you can just build a simple underground house if you’re just starting out. But if you’re up for a fun challenge, then you can add as many items and floors to your house as you want.

Underground houses and caverns are a favorite of several NPCs, including the Demolitionist, the Clothier, and the Goblin Tinkerer.

2. Underwater Terraria House

If you can make your house underground in Terraria, you can definitely build one underwater as well. That said, it isn’t as easy to build as an underground house. This one takes much longer to construct and isn’t really the most efficient for housing multiple NPCs. Plus, you’ll need to obtain equipment to ensure that your character can breathe while building underwater.

However, if you want to build a shelter underwater that isn’t a ship, then you’ll definitely want to try this one. Plus, it’s handy if you’re looking to learn how to fish in Terraria. Housing NPCs like the Angler, the Stylist, and the Pirate in an underwater house like this one will increase their happiness.

3. Terraria Castle House

If you want to make something a bit more like what you’re familiar with but still magnificent-looking, then you can’t go wrong with a Terraria castle. You can build your castle entirely above the ground. If you want, you can also hollow out the ground and build portions of your castle in there. Castles are great structures for setting up shop. Plus, you can be as intricate with the details of your build as you want.

4. Jungle House

Lots of players like setting up shop in the jungle biome. However, it can be quite challenging to construct a house there, especially if you don’t want it to look out of place. The best way to go, therefore, is to build a jungle hut that’s made of leaf blocks and grown blocks, such as wood, palm wood, and bamboo. This is a great place for the Guide, the Merchant, the Golfer, and the Zoologist to stay in.

5. Desert House

Building a desert house is handy if you’re looking to increase the happiness of NPCs like the Arms Dealer, the Dye Trader, and the Steampunker. You can make your desert house as simple or as complex as possible and add as many intricate details as you like. If you want your house’s look to fit the desert biome well, try incorporating warm-colored materials into your build, like sandstone and gold bricks.

These are only a handful of the house ideas you can build. There are hundreds of others out there, especially if you head to the Terraria Community Forums. The trick to making your house look as striking and put-together as the ones we showed you is to build the shape of your house first. Once you’ve nailed the outline down, you can then start filling out the spaces with walls, stairs, furniture, and other items.

Final Thoughts

Building a Terraria house requires more than just placing bricks on top of one another. There are certain standards you have to meet and nuances to take note of before your NPC can call what you built a home. That said, learning how to make one is easy enough. Plus, once you get the hang of building a basic house, you can move on from constructing shoebox homes to big, elaborate castles, cavern homes, and jungle huts for multiple NPCs to live in.

What other Terraria house designs have you made? Feel free to share your insights with us!