I'm trying to play it but I'm whatever appeal the game has for millions of people is somehow lost on me. I play Minecraft, Factorio, Valheim, Project Zomboid etc., having all the fun with exploration, combat, base building, loot hoarding and roleplaying but I can't find fun in any of these aspects in Terraria, maybe except exploration.

Looting has QoL stuff like quick stack to all nearby chests, but with the amount of vanity and variety items in the game, it feels like one would be better off with using whatever there is currently and not even using a base. Decoration and furniture, along with all the random material or unknown-purpose items possibly being just another form of decoration could have been properly annotated or colored imo.

Base building is rather frustrating with how the block distribution of any desirable chunks other than dirt or stone is scattered all around the place, with too much unnecessary mining going on.

For combat, sure there are quite a variety of weapons with different mechanics, but after a while they do boil down to melee, ranged and magic with seeker missiles, and the whole weapon rarity and weapon types thing quickly boils down to having mostly the same tier or worse tier stuff clogging inventory.

Exploration can be fun with the gravity being the main movement influencer and tools to traverse are nice. Most biomes have a good feeling of exploration progression, but after going down to a biome once, it feels like there is nothing else to expect from the same biome somewhere else.

Roleplaying with like 9-pixel characters and maybe some pets is just an unmentionable aspect I guess.

Hard mode looks like it offers more than pre-Hardmode, but I'm not sure if there is anything to do after grinding the base ores and then hunting specific sets or weapons.

The arena thing looks very much fun once then just nothing else.

Back to the looting topic, all the crafting benches and combinations and transmutations and terraforming is just completely unintuitive and a slog that requires checking the wiki constantly. Probably the most boring part of the game for me. In comparison, completing Valheim by going in totally blind was the most intuitive and fun exploration+combat+item progression I ever had, and that game also does not have any in-game progress trees or tutorials either.

What am I missing with Terraria?