tWiki

tWiki is a small modification for the game Terraria. The open-sourced project is written in C# and uses the tModLoader API, a community driven project that speeds up development time required to make mods for the game. It provides access to Terraria’s core functionality through simple hooks and events and can be found in this Terraria forum post.

The mod was designed from the ground up to allow players of all locales to easily search the official Terraria wiki for information regarding in game items, monsters, villagers and more. This is achieved through the use of  a single keybinding (customizable in game) that the player can press while hovering over any item in their inventory or monster in the world. The mod simply finds the localized name of that object, translates it to it’s English variant and then builds a MediaWiki search query that gets opened in the user’s default browser. All links that have been generated by the mod are tracked through a built in link shortening method using bit.ly’s public API, supplying me with nerdy, yet interesting usage statistics.

This modification was developed with the primary goal of making it much easier to get information on items and monsters in the game and allow new players to progress much further into the game much faster. However, the secondary, and in my opinion more important goal of the project was to showcase to newer programmers in the Terraria scene how simple it is to get started using the tModLoader API and working with Terraria’s decompiled C# source code. The project’s source is available to everyone on GitHub, and is heavily commented to help new programmers learn and better understand C#.