Terraria Per Player Loot

A TShock server plugin which makes naturally spawned loot chests have a separate inventory for each player on your server. Every player that finds a chest can loot it for themselves, even if it has been looted by someone else before.

The Problem

Terraria multiplayer has one big issue - the world you play on is finite, and there are only so many items and resources to go around.

When you start a new world to play on with your friends, the few people who choose to go surface exploring or caving are likely to find most of the chests, and, as a result, most of the early game loot.

This is not a problem with bosses in Expert or Master mode, because they drop a loot bag for each player that damaged them, and everyone can be happy.

This plugin makes it much more viable to run large Terraria multiplayer servers, as there is always an incentive for exploring and caving - the loot is still there for you to find!

Installation

1. Copy PerPlayerLoot.dll into the ServerPlugins directory of your TShock server. You can download this from the GitHub Releases of this repository.
2. Start a new world from scratch (yes, this is important, read below) and play!

[!WARNING] If migrating from version 1.0 of the plugin, you need to move perplayerloot.sqlite from the server root directory to the tshock folder. You should see the file as tshock/perplayerloot.sqlite. If you do not do this, your existing world chests will behave like loot chests!

How it Works

This plugin aims to not modify the server-side chest state (Terraria.Main.chest) on chest interactions, in the hope that it can be as least destructive to world save data as possible.

It works by intercepting the ChestPlace, ChestOpen and ChestItem packets and spoofing the contents of a loot chest by sending carefully crafted ChestItem packets from an internal database.

The per-player loot data is written on disk to the SQLite file perplayerloot.sqlite on every world save, alongside a list of all player-placed chest X and Y coordinates. If your player-placed chests are not in this exclusion list, they will be treated as world-generated loot chests.

This means that In order for player-placed chests to be unaffected, you need to have the plugin installed from the very beginning of your server. If you install it halfway through a playthrough, all chests in the world will be treated as if they were generated and will duplicate their inventory contents for each player.

The only time when the Main.chest array is modified is when a loot chest is possibly broken (which should rarely happen). In that case, the real chest in Main.chest has its items zeroed.

Debug Commands

• /ppltoggle - Toggle the plugin packet hooks globally. WARNING: using this command is unsupported and can lead to desynchronization of the Main.chest array and the internal plugin state.

  Debug use only! When in a disabled state, any chests you place will become loot chests, and any chest inventory accessed will be its real inventory, not a per-player instanced one!