The developers at Re-Logic have decided wrap up their work on Terraria and move onto other projects. Developer, Redigit broke the news to fans on the Terraria blog, saying that he wants to spend his time off "recharging and bettering myself as both a programmer and game designer."

"I have learned a lot from working on Terraria and plan on using what I've learned, building upon it, and moving forward with another, even better project," he says. He's also about to have a baby, which tends to get in the way of coding. And sleep. The other member of Re-Logic, Finn "Tiy" Brice has already moved elsewhere to work on Starbound.

Sad news for Terraria fans, but it's had a great run. Terraria was promising on release, but grew enormously with major updates after launch. One patch made it 150% more difficult, another one at Christmas added evil snowmen and many more added new monsters, biomes and spectacular weapons. At £6 / $10, it's probably one of the best value games on Steam right now. If you like the idea of exploring the tunnels of a huge, randomly generated world, finding "megashark" machine guns and taking on giant evil eyeballs, you should check it out.

It's Christmas on Sunday! That means we can expect lots of Christmas events to start appearing in our favourite games. Terraria proves that you don't need the third dimension to get into the Xmas spirit. From now until December 25 newly generated worlds will contain new snow biomes. You'll be able to make houses out of candy, add festive Christmas lights and engage in the traditional Yuletide pastime of smashing a snow globe to summon an army of evil snowmen wielding Tommy guns. What, what?

The snowman army works a bit like the goblin army. They will attack from the East or the West once you've smashed the snow globe. Snow Balla types will throw snowballs, Snowman Gangstas will bring Tommy guns and Mister Stabby jump towards you with a shiv. If you defeat the snowman army, there's a chance that Santa Claus will move into your house. Christmas is weird in Terraria.

The update also makes some bug fixes and performance improvements, and fixes overly sadistic clowns. Check out the patch notes below for an overview, originally posted by Re-Logic on the Terraria Forums.

Bug Fixes / Performance

Reduced the amount of RAM needed to run Terraria.
Added an option to turn backgrounds off.
Improved the automatic game quality adjuster.
Lighting update won’t skip as much on lower quality levels.
Items dropped on death for hardcore and mediumcore characters will retain their conditions.
Space Gun now has a value.
Water Bolt can now have conditions.
Diving Helmet now works correctly.
Walls now correctly show behind Glass Blocks.
You can now untie bound NPC’s with Autopause enabled.
Mediumcore and hardcore players will drop their cursor item on death.
Coins held on the cursor will correctly be dropped on death.
Dryad’s Corruption and Hallow status numbers are correct.
Wyverns are less common and will be less likely to spawn near the ground.
Mana Flower's price has been increased.
Fixed the shadow glitch of trippy lighting.
Music Boxes no longer dupe when placed on platforms.
Fixed an issue that caused stacked coins to go missing from chests during multiplayer.
Cursed Torch item now emits light in water.
Harpoon can now be reforged.
Lighting will now be set to Retro instead of crashing if Terraria is unable to switch to the new lighting mode.
Keybindings will no longer sometimes be set to "None" automatically.
Bombs thrown by clowns will now show that the wall has been destroyed in multiplayer.
Crystal Shards now give off light in retro and white color mode.
Hallowed Armor only has graphical effects with the helmet.
Players now have hair under their hats.
Statues no longer turn into Armor Statues when they are smashed from the top.
Clowns only throw bombs when their target is alive.

 
Items

Added Candy Cane Blocks & Walls.
Added Green Candy Cane Blocks & Walls.
Added Snow Blocks.
Added Snow Bricks & Walls.
Added Red, Green, and Blue Lights.
Added Presents that are dropped by monsters during the holiday season.
Added Snow Globe.
Added Santa’s Outfit.

 
NPC’s

Added Snowman Gangsta.
Added Mister Stabby.
Added Snow Balla.
Added Santa Claus.

 
World

Snow biomes will always be created during world gen during the holiday season. There is a 1 in 3 chance for snow biomes to be created during world gen during the rest of the year.

 

The picture above is an image from Steamgraph showing the player stats for Modern Warfare 3 and Terraria. Terraria is shown in yellow, Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer is in blue and Modern Warfare 3 singleplayer is in red. As you can see, it's been neck and neck since December 1. That's when the huge Terraria 1.1 update landed, adding new items, monsters, bosses and biomes.

The stats were helped along by a Terraria sale last week, but it's heartening to see a fantastic indie game matching the multimillion dollar shooter. Terraria and Call have Duty have been trading places in the top five most played Steam games over the last week. Skyrim remains firmly at the top, with 148,921 players at peak times today.

If you're interested in picking up Terraria , check out our Terraria review, and the many improvements made since then in the 1.1 update. If you've just bought it, check out our Terraria beginner's guide for some early pointers, like how to survive the night without getting killed by a flying evil eyeball.