Terraria runs singleplayer without any net connection at all. Just like most of the games on Steam you can run it in offline mode without any net needed what so ever. Far as I know only select UBIsoft games and MMOs (of course) require online connectivity for gaming.

There might be one or two other online demanding games for singleplayer content, but many often have the feature removed or patched out after a few months.
I would argue that with Terraria the main goals are equipment gathering with the view to finding, activating and then beating the boss monsters. In that way its a little more structured than Minecraft is; minecraft is indeed a game where if you've no idea what you want to do you'll find it dull.

Myself I love it for building - dangerous nighttimes make you want to build a little house - then you add a library, a pool - or maybe build a whole castle or somesuch. Other people get stuck into the redstone building and craft complex machines or devices with the redstone and I know some (and these ones tend to be using minecraft more as a builder tool than a game and will often be in crafting mode only where you don't have to mine) will find schematics and try to build minecraft scaled objects - real cathedrals and the like.

Well, Minecraft has had some more adventure elements added within the past year...but it's still very much a game about building. And yes...the creative potential is virtually limitless. Terraria doesn't come close to offering the level of freeform "crafting" that Minecraft does. Thing is, I feel like if I want to create something, I'll fire up Gamemaker or Finale. To me, making stuff in Minecraft just feels...pointless. I loved exploring its world and spelunking for awhile, but there was something about it that also felt a little too empty. I adore sandboxes as much as anyone. I love having the freedom to do what I want when I want to. But Minecraft was almost TOO open... without even the slightest hint of a goal or reason to keep playing. Terraria, in contrast, has a much more addictive drive. Perhaps it's technically less of an open-ended experience than Minecraft, but it's still FAR more freeform than most else out there. And the minute-to-minute gameplay is actually FUN. So while you'll never see computers or 1/1 replicas of the Enterprise in Terraria, I find the whole experience much more engaging.

Again, though... I'm not saying that Minecraft is a bad game, or even that Terraria is inherently better. Just that I prefer Terraria.

Oh also... Terraria is Steam only, but I believe that there's actually a fan-made front end (or something) that will let you run it without going through Steam. Can;t find the thread where I saw that discussed, though, so maybe I'm just nuts.

I think the social aspect is very important to Minecraft. One thing is to build stuff, but it's entirely different when me, my wife and my friend connect into one world and start messing around. We build stuff, wife is nagging about decorating whatever we build, friend starts doing whatever he thinks is pretty and I toy around with redstone. ... It's actually fun!

i played both the games and prefer terraria , i like the 2d to be more simple and easier to enjoy than a huge 3d world , cant wait for the game to full retail they are still adding in stuff and balancing the gameplay, so taking a break from the game

Indeed. I'm part of a local gaming community (local to my country), and we have two private Minecraft servers running, one survival, one creative. We're around 8 people who play regularly. Sometimes we do our own stuff, sometimes we collaborate on larger projects. Our latest project was building a 5-bit decoder to control the track switches in the "metro station" underneath our shared warehouse. Thus, our track system can now be programmed to send a cart to either of 32 different destinations. Getting it to work felt like a tremendous achievement.

Things like that tend to make my mind boggle a little - though I think redstone would be a lot easier to work with it it were on a smaller scale. Half the time I find it a pain to build even simple things because I have to hack of half a mountain to fit the workings inside.

That is completely awesome.

Wanted to check the new version of Minecraft , but i can't even start the game . :(

Is anyone have a gift code ?

Terraria is apparently getting a retail release in March, at least in the UK, for those who absolutely can't stand Steam:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/01/25/terraria-heading-to-retail-but-for-a-price/

I've enjoyed what I've played of Terraria (only the early stage of the game), but can't comment on Minecraft. I do think that the interface of Terraria could be a lot better though, especially when it comes to crafting. Currently it's a bit clunky, which makes it harder to persuade others to see the beauty in the game. I have hopes that this will be polished, as the devs are still working on other things.

This is very true. The game doesn't have quite as elegant a crafting interface as Minecraft does. Although I do like that it provides at least SOME information about what you can and can't craft in-game (whereas Minecraft all but requires the wiki page to be open at all times).

Yeah. Then again, Risugami to the rescue, one of his very nice and useful mods being a recipe book. So, that's 'fixable' in 2 minutes or so ;)

I've never played Terraria, but Minecraft is beautiful with mods. With certain Bukkit plugins like Essentials and McMMO, it reduces a lot of the drag and just makes the game overall a lot more fun to play. Then you have the normal SSP/SMP mods too, like Buildcraft, Industrialcraft, Railcraft, Mo Creatures etc that just adds a ton of content into the game without overpowering the player.

Terraria will go on retail.

http://indiegames.com/2012/01/28/terrariacollectorsed599px.jpg

edit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSwMkW35N74

Thread recycling.
1.2 is nigh.
T'seems big.

Edit : how did I manage that. I found 4 'Terraria' topics with the same name, and I managed to click on another. To be clear, I'm talking about the 1.2 version of terraria which is coming the 1st of october.