In Terraria, a house is a structure built by the player containing various things such as rooms for NPCs to live, crafting stations, chests, etc…

There are some requirements for a structure to be considered a house:

• Size requirements: a house should have a minimum size of 60 tiles. The standard minimum size usually is 7 tiles wide × 5 tiles high in Terraria.
• Furniture requirements: a house should contain at least a light source (torches, candles, …), a flat surface (tables, bookcases, dressers, …), a comfort item (chairs, beds, benches, …), and an entry item (doors, platforms, trap doors, …)
• Corruption/Crimson: a house should not be too close to Corruption Biome or Crimson Biome.
• Walls: there must be walls in the background of a house for it to be considered valid.

The housing menu

To know whether a house is valid or not, you can use the question mark icon in the housing menu.

Just click the question mark and click in your house. It will display whether your house is valid or if there are things to change to make the house considered valid.

In the housing menu, you also see the NPCs living in houses. For example, in the screenshot above there is the guide. If you click on an NPC’s head, you can assign him to another house.

How to build a good starter house

In the very early game, as a beginner, your objective will be to survive. So, when beginning a new game, you want to quickly find materials and build a little rudimentary house. Hopefully, you start the game with a sword, a pickaxe, and an axe. That’s all you need to build your first house.

Collecting materials

You can begin by cutting some trees. This will allow you to get Wood, which is the main material you will use to build your starter house. You can collect approximately 150 Woods, it’s never too much as Wood is useful for many other things than just building a starter house.

If you meet slimes, you can try to kill them and drop some Gel. You won’t need a lot for your starter house, but if you can get more than 1 Gel it’s nice because you will need it anyway for exploring your world or to craft a Furnace. Gel is used to craft Torches. With 1 Gel and 1 Wood, you can craft 3 Torches.

You have a pickaxe, so you can also mine stone. It will give you Stone Blocks, which are useful for crafting a Furnace. The Furnace is important because it will allow you to melt your ores to get bars. You need 20 Stone Blocks and 3 Torches to get 1 Furnace.

If you are lucky enough to find ores near your spawn, you can mine them with your Copper Pickaxe. If you have enough, you will be able to craft bars which will be useful to craft an anvil, and a better sword or some pieces of armor. Mine all the ores you see.

Building the house

Once you have all the required materials, you can start to build a house. Find a flat area near your spawn, or flatten the area if you can’t find anything good. If you’re happy with a location, you can mine the first layer of dirt. You can make it as wide as you want, the minimum being 7 tiles wide if you’re building a 5 tiles high house, or 8 if you’re building a 4 tiles high house. To be sure, you can mine at least 10 tiles wide.

Then, you can fill the blocks you’ve mined with Wood. Once you’ve filled the first layer, you can craft a workbench and place it on the wood. At this workbench, you can craft furniture such as a table and a chair. You can also craft walls, torches, and platforms. If you have the resources needed, you can craft a Furnace. Place it next to your workbench. If you have ores, you can turn them into bars thanks to the Furnace. If you have 5 Iron Bars or 5 Lead Bars, craft an anvil.

Once you have all your furniture, your walls, your torches, etc… you can place them. Place one door on each side of the house, place the table and the chair on the ground, and place at least one torch. Then fill the rest of the house with wood, and cover the background with walls.

You should have something like in the picture below:

You can now check with the housing menu if the house is suitable for NPCs. Open it, click on the question mark, and click on your house. A message should appear: „This house is suitable“. If something else appears, just do what it says to you to make your house suitable.

Improvements

This starter house is good, but we can optimize it a bit. The first night, you probably won’t explore outside, so you can start to make a tunnel to go underground. Just break two tiles constituting the floor of your starter house and put platforms here. Then you can start mining a tunnel of 2 tiles wide and you can place platforms at some interval in the tunnel.

You can also make a small room below your house, like a room to craft things or just a room to store chests later.

You can also add a room above the main room so that the Merchant will be able to live in your starter house later when you will meet the requirements for him.

And obviously, you can also make the starter house more beautiful. Here it’s just the most basic starter house possible, but you can make it more beautiful just by using Stone Blocks or adding a ceiling, or anything you can think about. You can also find design ideas for starter houses on the web.

For more guides or tutorials, be sure to see our other articles as LANTERNS – TERRARIA WIKI FULL GUIDE (2022) or TERRARIA’S BEST PRE-HARDMODE ACCESSORIES FOR EACH CLASS (NON MASTER MODE).