While many players may go the usual route for their NPCs by building the casual wood square huts to satisfying the "valid housing" requirements, some will even build tall jail cells to make them easily accessible to the player. While this makes sense, these NPC houses provide some of the best areas to flex your creativity as a builder and designer! Terraria also has (a far too intricate) NPC like/dislike system allowing players to adjust shop prices based on biomes and neighbors further diversifying the intricate homes you can create for unique NPCs in your world.
Terraria NPC Suitable Housing
There are several factors that decide whether the house you create for a NPC in Terraria is defined as "suitable" which can change at any point, even while the NPC is currently living there. The NPC must have a proper light source, a chair to sit on (or a comfort item like a bed), and a flat surface item for their things (such as a table). Just like a proper landlord, be sure to handle any missing walls or nobody will be interested in living there.
While they can technically in square jail cells, your towns are going to look absolutely pitiful as you pass through them to interact with the proper NPCs. Suitable NPC housing is not bound by square requirements either, allowing for a wide variety of shapes and sizes for your housing creations. Consider alternatively shaped houses to accommodate bunkmates that like each other in the proper biomes. Fans have made an incredible NPC town happiness-to-discount calculator available online so definitely check that out before building!
Terraria Mushroom House
One of the coolest houses in Terraria (and coolest NPCs in Terraria) is Truffle's, the Hardmode exclusive Mushroom man who sells mushroom exclusive gear. He is also one of the exclusive ways to unlock Shroomite armor, the second-most powerful ranged gearset in the game. In order to actually cause him to move in though, you need to setup an entirely man-made biome by collecting blue-mushroom pieces from an underground mushroom biome.
This mushroom biome must be an ABOVE-GROUND mushroom biome though, meaning you'll have to plant blue mushrooms around, and mud to establish a completely man-made biome. Once done, you can setup a suitable housing area inside of it, and after not too long (if no other NPC chooses to move in first) Truffle will eagerly move into the area. The Guide might be less happy about it, but if you move the two in together, you'll only be paying 80% on Truffle's wares.
Terraria House Designs
Building in Terraria can be a tedious task, provided you're playing normal vanilla Terraria online with friends. Even with so many hands working on a project, it will still require actually obtaining the resources, and that can be an arduous process. Shockbyte provides an extremely easy process to integrate modding into your Terraria dedicated server, and one mod that significantly improves the building experience is called "Cheat Sheet". This mod is essentially the Terraria equivalent of Creative Mode in Minecraft, which Terraria has needed for a long time.
Using Cheat Sheet is a great way to unleash your creativity in a form that Terraria has long since deserved. Terraria mods have been an incredible addition to the game, but unlike Minecraft, Terraria map creation has forever been a craft lost to time. Due to lacking this accessibility, many classic multiplayer PvP maps, and adventure maps cease to be created in Terraria, with only a handful of masterfully crafted maps out there. Fortunately, there are hundreds of incredible house designs shared by the community, such as this one by Dylanc828 on r/Terraria.
Terraria Perfect House for all NPCs
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the collective hotel the Terrarian community always creates during their Terraria playthroughs...well it's extremely bad practice. From what you can see below, mixing each of the NPCs together into a single town actually shoves all of the most hated NPCs together into one spot, consequentially maxing out all of their prices. If you were ever wondering why items were so expensive, but sold for so little...now you know why! It's how you built the town!
No matter the biome, when combining NPCs together, NPCs have a compounding negative effect when stashed together and crowded into a city. When more than 3 NPCs are together in a city, they suffer a negative effect of crowding that gets worse with each extra NPC involved. With more than 6 NPCs in close proximity, the stashing negativity is even further compounded, causing almost all non-Princess NPCs to suffer massively from this form of NPC hotel.
I just want to build a Terraria House
I get it. You're not here for all this modding, or NPC optimization, you're just here for some good ol' Terraria gameplay, and looking for a nice idea on how to spice up your newest Terraria multiplayer playthrough with the boys. Well, provided you're on a Shockbyte server, you should absolutely get your hands on some wiring once you're in hardmode. Wiring allows a multitude of incredibly cool additions to your home such as teleport pads, wiring the lights in your home, and wiring the statues across your cities.
Once you start wiring up some complex situations though, if you aren't on a reliable server, you might see the quality suffer. There's nothing quite like finally rigging up a teleporter 5 biomes away, only for you to have to wait for the server to catchup once you start using it. Let your imagination run wild, and let Shockbyte handle the rest!
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