What horrors and delights lie beneath the pixelated earth? In Terraria, these improbable things are yours to discover. Grab your tools and get digging. You’ll find ore and precious treasures, but also corrupted netherworlds, monsters, bosses and near bottomless mysteries. Just be careful when night falls.

Now you can dig into the game’s development itself with Terraria: Design Works. Based on in-depth interviews with Andrew Spinks, the singular individual who created Terraria, along with the fascinating team who have worked with him to keep the game thriving for the last fifteen years, this is the story of a game developed with passion, ingenuity, imagination and generosity.

It’s easy to lose yourself in Terraria when playing, and now you’ll discover the challenges of charting a development course through such a rich, sprawling, and surprising game. You’ll meet the people who have worked with Spinks to evolve his original design, and you’ll come to understand where many of Terraria’s legendary elements come from, whether that’s a biome, an end-game monster or just a really cool sword.

Where did Terraria come from? Why does it work the way it does? And, as several of its team like to joke, why won’t it die? These are just a few of the questions this lavishly presented and illustrated book will explore. On the screen, Terraria is pure chaos and delight. It turns out the story behind the game is just as thrilling.

Written by: Christian Donlan