Nurse Overhaul
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A while ago, I wanted to apply what I had learned from programming to my own project. There were recommendations out there for projects you could do, like making a tic-tac-toe game or calculator, but I wanted to create something more personal. I aimed to develop something useful for myself and publish it for others who might also find it beneficial.

At the time, I was playing through the game Terraria. If you’ve never had the pleasure of playing it, Terraria is a 2D game where you build, craft, and fight to survive in a sandbox world (basically a 2D version of Minecraft). The game is one of the highest-selling games of all time and is a wonderful experience in its base form. But there are a bunch of community-made modifications you can add that change the base experience by adding functionality, harder difficulties, new bosses/items/environments, and much more.

One simple thing that I’ve always found annoying about the game is the Nurse, a non-playable character who will heal you to full health and cure your ailments if you pay her money, is that to heal, you must right click on her then left click on a dialogue option to heal yourself. However, the times you want to heal from her are when you are low on health fighting things. Doing this chain of clicks during the middle of combat can be hard to execute correctly, especially if the player is engaged in a complicated fight.

Healing without the Nurse can be difficult, although many players use a wide range of tactics to try to solve this (potions, honey, life statues, heart lanterns, etc.). Sadly, even though the Nurse was made to heal, the difficulty in actually using her pushes players towards concocting their own solutions to restoring health. Because her only function is to heal, this essentially makes her useless.