Create a Terraria Character on PC

Every Terraria world, yours or a friend's server, asks for a character before you can play. You make one on your PC in the character selection menu, pick how it looks, then pick how harshly it is punished when it dies. This guide covers the PC version and the choices that matter once you join a server.

Checked against Terraria 1.4.5.8 on PC, October 2026.

Start a new character

1. Open Terraria. The official Terraria wiki says the game shows the character selection menu before you enter a world, in single player or multiplayer.
2. Press New to start a character.
3. Work through the appearance menus, then name the character and confirm.

A character is separate from any world. The same character is the one you pick when you join a server by IP.

Set how the character looks

The wiki describes the menus this way. The character style menu sets the gender, style and voice, and has a few editing options. A separate hairstyle menu holds the hair choices, and the remaining menus change the colour of each part of the character: hair, eyes, skin, shirt, undershirt, pants and shoes. Randomize rolls the gender, style and every colour in one go.

Terraria 1.4.5 added a large batch of new hairstyles, so the hairstyle list is longer than it was. It also lets you choose the type and pitch of your character's hurt sound when you create the character.

Choose a difficulty

The difficulty belongs to the character, not to the world. The four options are:

• Classic: when the character dies, it drops coins and keeps its items. This is the default.
• Mediumcore: the character drops its items when it dies, then respawns.
• Hardcore: the character drops its items and dies for good. It becomes a ghost, which the wiki says can watch a world but cannot affect it.
• Journey: the wiki says a Journey character starts with extra equipment and can only play in Journey worlds, and Journey worlds only accept Journey characters.

Use the character on your server

Once the character exists, joining a server is the same for every difficulty. Pick Join via IP, choose the character, then enter the address and port. The steps are in How to join your Terraria server.

Check that the world and the character match before you invite anyone. By the Journey rule above, a Journey character cannot join a Classic, Expert or Master world, and a non-Journey character cannot join a Journey world. If you want a Journey server, see Enable Journey Mode on your Terraria server. The Worlds tab and its New world option are covered in Terraria getting started.

If a friend cannot join a Journey server, check first that they made a Journey character. A character made on another difficulty has to be replaced with a new Journey one.