Multiplayer support on 3DS
Currently, multiplayer is supported on 3DS, but only locally. It means you can’t play online with other people, but you can just host a world locally so that people on the same network can join it. It’s not like Terraria 3DS online multiplayer.
After selecting a character, you can choose „Multiplayer“ and „Start Game“ to host a world locally. Your friends wanting to join your world just have to select „Join World“ instead of „Start Game“ and select your world. Up to 4 people can join your world.
Online multiplayer in a future update?
According to Terraria’s official Twitter, there won’t be other updates of the 3DS Terraria version due to systems limitations (find the tweet here). Deanzor, the publisher of the 3DS version said on Terraria Forums:
Deanzor:
I’m not sure unfair is the right sentiment here. If you’ve gone into 3DS expecting it to be a 1:1 port of the PC experience, there was no way we could ever achieve that. I think we’ve been pretty upfront about that fact. The 3DS is much less powerful than than even old smartphones like the iPhone 4. We make the compromises we had to make to get onto the platform while delivering an authentic experience. Any feature in a game costs you an amount of time and money, and for various reasons online multiplayer didn’t make the cut.
The one thing we can guarantee is that the single player game will get played, so we focused there. Nintendo 3DS online play isn’t as widespread as it is on home consoles and PC. Also, Nintendo is VERY strict when it comes to users being able to share user generated content. And with good reason: Nintendo is a family-orientated platform, and the potential for abuse there with how Terraria works is massive. When we were looking to gain exceptions to Nintendo’s regulation in this area, it definitely helped us that we could say that when other players joined you in multiplayer, they would be sat in the same room as you. They’d be people you know. It would be easier to police people that griefed in your world, because you’d just not play with them again.
Nintendo wanted Terraria on 3DS because it’s a cool game, but if they’d applied the letter of the law to the strictest extent it could not exist on those platforms.
The way we coded the multiplayer component left the door open to us to add online multiplayer in the future, should that make sense. My own personal opinion is that it would be great if 3DS had online. But I know the issues we’ve had on 3DS keeping the code stable with squashing everything to fit on 3DS. Adding online play adds a load of potential instability, and would it be worth it now? It would cost money, and 505 would need to have a good idea that was an investment that would pay for itself. When we started Terraria 3DS, Switch wasn’t announced. We didn’t know anything about it. It’s now three months from launch, and looks like an even better portable platform for this game. More screenspace, better specs, etc.
PC Terraria isn’t restrained by the shelf life of the target platform. PC will be around forever. The required specs might get higher, but your Steam copy of Terraria will run as long as you have a machine capable. In three months, Switch could kill 3DS player numbers dead. Or the two might happily co-exist, we don’t know yet. I suspect a lot of publishers are waiting to see how it pans out. I think a year after launch, full online multiplayer on 3DS is now unlikely. But if the game continues to sell, you never know.
Sorry, that ended up being a bit longer than I expected!
So, we can’t expect to see the online multiplayer one day on Terraria 3DS version.
For more guides or tutorials, be sure to see our other articles as DART TRAP: A GOOD TRAP TO DEFEND YOUR BASE IN TERRARIA or TERRARIA OVERHAUL: A COLOSSAL MOD TO ENJOY THE GAME IN A NEW WAY.
