Best Way to Start a Summoner Playthrough (2024)

Out of necessity I always start as a melee/ranged/magic character and add summoning as it's available. Even a summoner needs backup weapons, since minions are prone to (for instance) chasing off after a Zombie, leaving you to face the Brain of Cthulhu without their help.

My first 1.3 character managed to get a Slime Staff after just a few hours of play, but that was exceptional and entirely unexpected. Even she had plenty of ordinary, non-summoning kit by then.

Bethany said:

See Also

PC - So You Want to Be a Summoner? (1.3.0.8)Terraria 1.4 Summoner Best Build GuideBest Calamity Summoner Build - Terraria Calamity Guide (2024)How do people play Summoner? '-'

Out of necessity I always start as a melee/ranged/magic character and add summoning as it's available. Even a summoner needs backup weapons

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I officially made it thru the moon Lord with my first summoner. Bethany is right, you need to build up enough to get you first level summoner armor & minion (after the slime staff) which is the Bee armor & Hornet staff, made from Queen Bee dropped materials.

I tend to go ranged/magic to back up my minions. Diamond staff is good if you can get the diamonds early.

Doing a bit of fishing for summoning potions (made with varigated lard fish, caught in underground jungle I believe) can also really help out.

Well, some might call this cheating... but if I was going to start a new character to be a summoner only, I would let that character visit my main world first and grab a slime staff... what is the point of saving every item from the time you started playing if they are just going to sit in a chest unused somewhere? Pretend the new characters' grandfather gave him/her the slime staff as a good luck present!

... just my .02

~Jim

SparklySpartan said:

Basically, You would avoid damaging things by trapping them instead until you got an imp staff. Theoretically i think that auto farming slimes killing them with lava would work, but pre hard mode is the least of your worries, I have no idea how I'll take care of mechanical bosses =P

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Start off by going to a spider biome, getting spider armor, a queen spider staff, and a spider staff (I believe it's 82 spider fangs) and then fight twins, use some sort of wings (Leaf are going to be your best option unless you can get a Ice Feather from an Ice Golem) After beating twins, make an optic staff and go back to farm wall of flesh until you get a summoner emblem(unless you got one from your first kill, will need other emblems later on for the avenger/destroyer emblem) use the optic staff to clear out the pirate invasion a few times until you get a pirate staff, and then use that as your general purpose summon.(YOU CAN SKIP PIRATE STAFF COMPLETELY, UP TO YOU) go fight plantera (with the optic staff) hopefully you get pygmy staff first drop, if not keep farming. buy the tiki armor from the witch doctor. Use the pygmy staff and tiki armor to go take out duke fishron, farm for a tempest staff. (Fishron Wings are optional, but an upgrade) use the Tempest staff to clear out a few martian invasions until you get a xeno staff. Kill golem some point through this playthrough, possibly before fishron but its up to you. Before killing the cultist, i'd reccomend farming for a frozen key in the Snow Biome, then heading over to the dungeon to get a frost hydra staff(it's a sentry) Xeno staff will clear out the Lunatic Cultist pretty easily, just make sure you right click the boss to lock onto it with summons. After the cultist, rush the stardust pillar for a stardust dragon/stardust cell. Using your sentries is helpful for clearing the pillars, you should have queen spider still, as well as the frost hydra, considering that they don't take up a summoning slot, and they don't cancel eachother out. Take down the next 2 pillars in your choice of order. If you have any stardust fragments left, id reccomend using 3 to make whatever fragment you dont have out of the other 3, and upgrade to the 200 hp potions(forgot name) After this make sure you have a moon lord arena, and then go kill your last pillar and fight moonlord. Repeat cultist/pillars and refight moon lord in order to get enough stardust/luminite for the stardust armor. If you're stupid lucky you'll get both of the summoning weapons from the treasure bag, (again, forgot the name) after this you should be equipped to do just about everything left you need too

BraedonE said:

I recently started my first summoner playthrough, and for some reason assumed that I would get extremely lucky and just randomly get a slime staff. After playing for a few hours it's starting to become clear that I probably won't be getting any summoning weapons for a while. I was wondering what everyone thinks is the best way to start off, just so I could get some tips.

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Typically, summon is sort of a support class, at the moment, that you can specialize in towards midgame. As others have said, it may be in your interest to start with another method of combat in mind, or to simply start with a slime staff. If you aren't interested in a mod that simply adds the item to your inventory, there is a map you can download which has all of the vanilla items organized into chests, and you can simply plunder that world.

The next update is also going to add at least two beginner summons to the game (Vampire frog and some sort of horror cat that is maybe a cheshire tiger or something.). However, while recent teases tend to imply something significant may happen this year or even this spring, it's important to understand that we don't have a firm date on the update yet, and the update has been in the works for 2+ years by this point.

There are a number of mods which add beginner summoning gear to the game, possibly the most popular/balanced being Thorium.

If you're deadset on a vanilla only-summoner only playthrough, you can do as one person suggested, and fish for a reaver shark, dig, and mine hellstone, which may be difficult without offensive gear. Or you can try to obtain a slime statue, find ANY working trap, and convert it into a slime-staff farming station with a bucket of lava (not without it's own difficulty, and entirely luck based.)