The Purifier (Wrath of the Gods)

The Purifier

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Statistics

Type	Explosive
Placeable	✗
Use time	8 (Insanely fast)
Tooltip	Resets the entire world to its original state This process can take a while, so don't be alarmed if the game idles for a bit Once thrown, the bomb takes 15 seconds to detonate If you accidentally throw it, you can save and quit to prevent it from exploding 2012
Rarity
Sell	0
Research	1 required

 Obtained from

Entity	Quantity	Rate
Nameless Deity of Light	1	100%

The Purifier is an item dropped by the Nameless Deity of Light. When thrown, it it hurled into the air where it hovers for about 15 seconds, rapidly flashing white, before exploding and beginning to reset the entire world.

Content

After The Purifier detonates, a white screen pops up along with descriptive text as wavedash.ppt by Lena Raine begins playing:

Hi! This white background is natural. Your game is not broken. Please do not report the long wait as a bug. Please. Just sit back, relax, and drink some water if you haven't done so in a while. Or just focus on something else. Your call. Anyway, as you might've guessed, the world generation is being done all over again from scratch. Let's talk about that, shall we? Why this process takes so long and is so strange, to be specific. For starters, did you know that Terraria's worlds are just a giant 8401x2401 grid of tiles? It's sized such that all worlds up to large can fit within it. That grid exists in memory from the moment you start the game up until the moment you close it. Dozens of megabytes of memory, to be exact. There is some form of "chunking", or splitting them up into subsections, but that's really only used in multiplayer, because sending the entire world across the network to clients would be terrible and very likely cause crashes. This is why when servers are about to die you can fall off the map. That's you walking outside of the bounds of one of these "chunks" because the server can't send you the other chunks. Back to worldgen, everything has to operate with this grid. Unlike, say, Minecraft, the world generation isn't something that can be done on the fly. It must be done all at once. Furthermore, many of the worldgen steps are done synchronously, or one at a time, instead of having multiple happening at the same time. Of course, you couldn't do the latter for everything, since in a lot of cases you'd run into conflicts. But as you can imagine, having this run in parallel where possible would be a really desirable boon for performance. In some cases, certain steps just aren't very efficient. Certain situations can result in Settling Liquids steps taking several seconds at a time. The Desertification step from what I can tell boils down to a concerning amount of looping. First horizontally throughout the entire desert. Then vertically from top to bottom. Then through all "clusters" throughout the desert, and then through all tiles inside of the cluster. I attribute most of these inefficiencies to modders and not the vanilla game, however (and I'm also guilty of this). An old, weird practice I used to do was using recursion (aka having a function that calls itself. It's a bit weird to explain) to calculate all water in a given area for the Sulphurous Sea, and then doing that many, many times repeatedly. It's... a mess. Anyway! I'd go on further but it's possible that your world is almost fully wiped. Wouldn't want to get abruptly cut off! I'll give you this monologue again the next time you have worlds to reset. See you around!

Tips

• It is recommended to be extremely cautious with using The Purifier as the world's former state will be nigh-irrecoverable once it detonates.

Trivia

• The 2012 tooltip is a reference to the 2012 doomsday phenomenon.