Sometimes, when you’re playing a game and the situation gets a little intense, you forget to pay attention to your health. In Terraria, danger is persistent, and you can often forget to look up at the top-right of your monitor while your house is being invaded during a goblin raid or Blood Moon zombie attack. So, like any sane person would do, modder Bfayer created a vertical tube filled with water that lights up different colors and changes its water level based on your in-game health and mana. Now, instead of having to look all the way up to the top-right of his monitor, he can just see the huge, glowing tube out of his peripheral vision, or estimate his health level based on the amount of glowing light emanating from rig.
Dubbed the Liquid Lifebar, the rig currently only works with Terraria, and can display both the game’s health and mana bars, changing color to help differentiate between the two. As the in-game health or mana levels fall, so does the level of the water in the tube.
Using everyone’s favorite microcontroller, an Arduino, Bfayer spent over 100 hours linking the game up to his water tube. He employed the use of an air pump — as can be seen from the water bubbles, if nothing else — as well as created some custom software in order to control the lights and water.
Unfortunately, Bfayer said that the life bar is quite loud, and he isn’t planning on releasing build instructions for the device. So, you’ll just have to pay attention when you play Terraria rather than haphazardly get slaughtered by hardmode bats.
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