As a new player to the world I have been amazed by how much there is to do here. Like dying.

Bloody bat got me right when I was finally deciding that sleep was necessary, so I had to save and close.$
My question is, so I dropped money when I died: will it still be there the next time I start? I have read that I lose 50% of my money when I die, which is either wholly or partially recoverable I think, but nothing on whether it stays or goes between game sessions.

Many thanks in advance

Don't remember aswer outright but it's generally adviceable to store your money at your base as that's pretty much only place you need it to minimise money loss upon death.

Cheers, this is what I am expecting. And thankfully I was already operating on that assumption and had stored most of my coins in my house. Unfortunately prior to death I had found a few of the higher value coins... and now I suspect they have evaporated like fairy gold. Ahh well. Such is the cost of never truly dying!

Half of your money goes when you die UNLESS you keep it at home OR in a piggy bank which I just leanred about myself. The piggy bank is great because unlike a trunk, you can fill it up and still carry it around so it's basically like doubling your inventory.

Thanks guys. Suspicions confirmed! Ahh well, at least I can head back there and find if more stuff has appeared since last time. Was a pretty blue glowing mushroom cove place. With violent undead miners and murderous bats.

The bastages!

I strongly, strongly recommend carrying a safe (not available right away, iirc) and a piggy bank everywhere. Regularly empty your inventory into them when you get a breather. The safe can be placed anywhere, but the piggy bank can only be placed on furniture surfaces so you'll want to carry platforms as well to be able to place it (which is a good idea anyway, at least until you get... activated vertical/360 movement items). Once you get coins in whichever one you want to store them in, it's just a matter of placing it and hitting the quick stack button to safely stash your coins (and any other stackable items that are already in it).

I actually recommend carrying 2 of each. This is because they stack, so when you pick it back up it'll go back in the same slot, so you don't have to hunt your inventory to find it later.

It is also important to know, that there is an upper limit to dropped items in general. If you start to go crazy strip mining with dynamite, you will hit this limit very fast ;)

What is the limit, roughly? Is it piles or quantity? Would a pile of 85 spiky balls count as one or 85? Could getting close to the limit bog down a dedicated server to the point of significant lag? Is that why things are so laggy after the goblin invasion until I get around to cleaning stuff up?

I had to restart my server a while back because of lag, but it hadn't occurred to me that maybe it was because I wasn't picking everything up. Maybe the imp minion isn't such a good idea after all...

According to the wki, the current limit seems to be around 400: http://terraria.gamepedia.com/Item. I would assume that to mean 400 stacks or partial stacks, but i can't verify that at the moment.