What's the difference between tools from the Crimson and the Corruption?

Question

In Terraria, almost 90% of the time I make a world it is a Crimson world. I have heard that corruption is worse than crimson, but I've also heard it the other way around. So, what's the difference? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

There are 3 main differences IIRC.

In the pre-hardmode, Crimson worlds have Crimson Armor, Deathbringer Pickaxe, Fleshgrinder Hammer, The Meat Ball Flail, and the Crimson Rod. Corruption Worlds have Shadow Armor, Nightmare Pickaxe, The Breaker Hammer, The Ball O' Hurt Flail, and Vilethorn. In Hardmode, Crimson worlds get access to Ichor, where Corruption worlds get access to Cursed Flame. In post-Plantera Hardmode, the Crimson gets Vampire Knives while the Corruption gets the Scourge of the Corrupter.

I expect that the reason you get different answers is because the answer is different at different points during the game. It might also vary depending on your play style and whether you are playing multiplayer or single player.

Let's break it down:

Pre Hard Mode

Armor

+---------------+-------+-------------------------+-------------------------------+
|     Name      | Armor |         Bonus1          |            Bonus2             |
+---------------+-------+-------------------------+-------------------------------+
| Shadow Armor  |    19 | +21% Melee Attack Speed | +15% Movement Speed           |
| Crimson Armor |    19 | +6% Damage              | Greatly Increase Health Regen |
+---------------+-------+-------------------------+-------------------------------+

The attack speed will likely result in higher DPS than the damage increase if you are melee. If you are ranged, Crimson armor is better. Movement Speed is quite nice before you have wings, but the Health Regen obviously wins out here. Comparing those together, I think the Shadow Armor is slightly better for melees (DPS is really important), but it depends on your playstyle.

Pickaxes

+----------------------+---------------+--------+--------------+
|         Name         | Pickaxe Power | Damage | Mining Speed |
+----------------------+---------------+--------+--------------+
| Nightmare Pickaxe    | 65%           |      9 |           15 |
| Deathbringer Pickaxe | 70%           |     12 |           14 |
+----------------------+---------------+--------+--------------+

The Crimson pickaxe is slightly slower, but requires one less hit for higher end ores. This means that for high end ores, it ends up being better, but it is slightly slower for low end blocks. The difference between these is very negligible.

Hammers

The difference for hammers is likewise very small.

Flails

The Meatball is 1 more damage than the Ball o' Hurt (15 vs 16), so there is not a lot of difference here.

Spells

Both spells cost the same amount of mana. The crimson Rod has slightly more damage, but I think Vilethorn is the clear winner here because it can attack through walls. That is a pretty unique trait in Pre-Hard Mode.

Hard Mode

Ichor vs Cursed Flame

There are many things that you can make from these ingredients, but I am going to group them together since they all serve to apply the ichor and cursed flame debuff. The ichor debuff lowers the armor of enemies by 20. Cursed flame applies a damage-over-time effect that stacks with "On Fire" and cannot be put out.

In general, the ichor debuff is much stronger, although it depends on your weapon fire rate. Armor in Terraria works very simply. Evert 2 points of armor reduces the damage from a hit by 1. The ichor debuff makes every attack hit for 10 more damage. This is a large increase in DPS for high fire rate weapons (Minishark and Megashark for example), but is less effective for low rate weapons. Still, though, the Cursed Inferno Debuff is 4 DPS, so you would need to hit less than once every 2 seconds for Cursed Inferno to be better than Ichor.

For melee, ichor is quite good even through the end of the game, since it can be applied by using any melee weapon by using a flask of ichor. For rangers, the high end bullets tend to outclass the ichor bullets.

In multiplayer setups, it is useful to have the melee player use a flask of ichor while having the ranged player use a higher damage bullet like Crystal or Chlorophyte.

Dungeon Items

+--------------------------+--------+---------------+-----------+-----+---------------------------------------+
|           Name           | Damage | # Projectiles | knockback | DPS |           Secondary Effect            |
+--------------------------+--------+---------------+-----------+-----+---------------------------------------+
| Vampire Knives           |     29 | 4-8           | 2.75      | 653 | Heals player for 7.5% of damage dealt |
| Scourge of the Corrupter |     64 | 2-4           | 5         | 505 | Secondary Projectiles are homing      |
+--------------------------+--------+---------------+-----------+-----+---------------------------------------+

Both of these are melee weapons, despite having projectiles. While the scourge of the Corrupter is nice in that it has homing capabilities, the life steal from the vampire knives is so incredibly strong that many, many pages of text have been written arguing about it. Because of the lifesteal from the item, melee players are able to itemize much more offensively. Typically, it is used in combination with a higher DPS weapon like the Terra Blade or Flailron, where you switch to the Vampire Knives when low on life. The scourge of the corrupter becomes obsolete once you have the Flailron (accessible on both worlds) because the Flailron has homing projectiles and much higher DPS.

Conclusion

For casters and rangers, I don't think there is a huge difference between the worlds because you will probably be using other items that are available on both worlds. For Melee users, the crimson is far and away better because the Vampire Knives are incredibly strong and ichor is a much larger DPS increase than cursed flame.

Answer 2

Well, each armor posses different effects based off of whether it's corruption or Crimson. The Crimson posses more stronger enemies and different weapons to acquire. The armor effects for the Crimson armor (sry forgot name) are, %6 increased dmg and a greatly increased health regen which, as I think and understand it, it helps with battling those enemies and help regenerate life after battles. In the corruption there are few enemies which have a slightly high health and less dmg but they mostly back off or travel such as eater of souls and Devourers. A great thing to have help are the movement speed effects since they move around a lot. Having these effects make it easier to travel up to them when they move away and the melee speed can help put more hits in, especially with their low health. So, in my honest opinion Crimson armor is better since with corruption monsters having lower hp the hits u do get will be increased in dmg to help defeat them and when they spam hits or such like the Devourers the health regen is useful but the shadow armor in Crimson wouldn't make a great performance since its most likely to keep more hits in on the Crimson monsters and be able to escape them in bad situations which is sort of wise for the face monsters and most Crimson enemies have high movement so they'll keep up and in most situations their high dmg could kill u quick with no time to escape plus the more hits might not help on their high hp though it is possible to score lots of hits on them but knockback won't do the trick since well as mentioned several times, they have a high movement speed to outrun the knockback. So over all Crimson armor can overrun and take over the shadow armor. In a battle shadow armor will score lots of hits but the regen will help and for the extra dmg or Crimson armor it will do a higher dmg but the shadow armor could outrun it but with no regen it will make no use (though normally u could escape enemies with shadow armor and fight and kill enemies with Crimson) so after chasing u could sneak hits onto the shadow armor and once and for all defeat or kill it so in conclusion despite the shadow armor so speed and hits per second the Crimson armor could kill it and do a higher dmg so even if u had a slow weapon without backing off u could regenerate quickly and do a high dmg so pretty much nimble forges make good equipment and things on weapons to help but primarily weapons like nights edge and terra blade have a fast speed so it would make no difference but higher on in the game u could argue shadow armor for weapons like nights edge and terra blade but by then you'd be on a different level of armor like cloryphite and hallow.So like said Crimson armor is better.