What is the largest possible Terraria player savefile?

What is the largest possible Terraria player savefile?

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:49 Why we only need to focus on a few "variable-size" things in the save file
01:38 What are these "variable-size" datapoints that we need to maximize?
01:46 Part 1a: making the player name as long as possible
02:07 Part 1b: using as much space as possible with Chinese
02:33 Part 2: unlocking all the research
03:28 Part 3: recording two hundred spawnpoints
04:22 Part 4: the secret 59th and 60th inventory slots
05:01 Conclusion and outro

Icons from Freepik and inkubators via Flaticon

Music:
Terraria - Alternate Underground
Terraria - Morning Rain
Terraria - Town Night
Terraria - Aether

What is the largest possible Terraria player savefile?

[Terraw]

The file sizes of the .plr files shown in the video will be a few bytes off, since Terraria encrypts its player files. With a 128-bit (16 byte) block size, all player file sizes are rounded up to the nearest 16 bytes.

The final file size was 121, 792 bytes, but the decrypted player binary was only 121, 777 bytes.

[jsnUejhrsbOQmwJqwbLgoP]

that would be a mild inconvenience 30 years ago

[cgaog]

For anyone who is curious, the Chinese character in the video is "吃"， which means eat. So the character name is basically "eat eat eat eat eat eat eat

[horizeonguy]

Didn't know about that mouse item being an inventory slot itself, neat

[GuyThePerson]

the fact that a terraria character, a low quality jpeg, and some really good retro games take up the same space is crazy.

[MyraTerrariaOfficial]

pretty impressive how much data can be stored in such a small file

[Acid.Amplifier]

As someone who's starting a game dev journey these type of videos are both entertaining and interesting

[joe_the_zombie]

Honestly, completely useless video, never ever needed to know this, but i absolutely loved it, and thats why ive been a subscriber all this time

[Palemis]

My +200 hour player is 3.64kb, but my journey mode character is 100kb 💀

[Yharim]

You should do a video on which theoricaly difficulty / world hardest terraria would be, consider world gen and things such as chest loot and pot generation, on top of overhaul structure

[linhero]

For perspectove on how small this is file really is.

Pokemon was famously finished with only 30 bytes remaining on its ROM cartridge, which was on a 1 MB cartridge.

This is a few Kilobytes smaller then the original Legend of Zelda on thr NES. Which held a total of 128 Kilobytes of Rom.

For more perspective. GBDK, A C framework for compiling GB/GBC games in the modern era. Lists the GB's MMC5 chip as being capable of of handling a ROM thats 8 entire MBs in size. Which is 4 times the ROM size of Pokemon Crystal. And the NES could handle, similar-ish sizes.


This type of inefficent save file make up may have been an issie 30 years ago. (As things like the GB, at their best, only could support 128kbs of Save RAM)

But in the modern day. This is perfectly fine.

Its insignificant. But it is really fucking fun to think about.

[TouhouFumo]

2:14 Damn your pronunciation is perfect, I am truly amazed

[angeldude]

Does Terraria accept astral-plane characters (yes, that is an actual term used for characters with a code point above 65535)? They take up 4 bytes in UTF-8 rather than 3, which should increase the size a little bit. In addition, there are emoji and similar characters where a single glyph is made up of multiple coffee points. If Terraria counts code points, then this wouldn't change anything, but if it counted grapheme clusters, then it would be able to inflate the size tremendously since grapheme clusters can get arbitrarily long (just look at Zalgo-text).

As someone who frequently plays Journey Mode and usually tried to research every item I can, the fact that items are stored by text ids rather than numerical ids is a travesty that I demand be corrected.

[Diamond_Squid]

I love these types of videos, honestly very interesting on topics I’ve just never really considered much

[purplehaze]

I'm curious if Re-Logic will change how save date is stored for researched items specifically because of this video, or if it's such a minor issue that they couldn't be bothered.

[davidci]

Was just messing around with Terrasavr earlier and had this exact question lol what timing

[yech]

interesting, I was expecting map progress (how much of each world a player has explored) to be covered here. Map progress doesn't seem to be stored per world (if you copy a world file directly the copy of the world will have 0 map progress for all characters) so either it is stored per character but doesn't contribute to file size or works differently than I thought.

[CaidenTMG]

fun little video lol i love it! subscribed

[prinnyzawa]

That was a very interesting and educational vid

[DZac]

You should check out some of the other file formats... like I mentioned in the discord, TML has a world format that is literally just Minecraft's NBT format, but also Old Console editions have it's own format for worlds and players.