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The official wiki contains the following bit of advice regarding meteors:

Note that if you have built a single-block bridge in the sky in search of Floating Islands it is possible for a meteorite to land on that bridge and you will end up getting only a small amount of Meteorite. It is suggested to destroy any paths in the sky before smashing a Shadow Orb in order to get a normal amount of Meteorite.

As it happens, I went searching for floating islands using bridges made of wood platforms. (No, I have no idea why I did that. Bridges you can fall through seem less useful than the usual kind.) I just smashed a shadow orb and am now wondering whether I need to rush to destroy my bridge before the meteor arrives.

So, can meteors land on wood platforms? I see three possible outcomes:

  1. The meteor ignores the platform (as does water) and lands on the terrain below.
  2. The meteor impacts the platform, partially replacing it with Meteorite.
  3. The meteor impacts the platform, but as it is not "solid", no Meteorite is created.
Private Pansy
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Ben Blank
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  • Somebody is probably going to have to fill the sky with wooden platforms to figure out what happens. – Chris Rasys May 27 '11 at 00:52
  • @Chris — Well, I've decided to go on playing without destroying the bridge. If the meteor happens to try to come down on/through the bridge, at least I'll have my answer. ;-) – Ben Blank May 27 '11 at 01:34

3 Answers3

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During the day which consists of 15 minutes, when a shadow orb has been smashed that has caused no other events there is a chance of 1 out of the 50 on every second that a meteor can be enabled.

If a meteor has been configured it will spawn in the middle of the night which consists of 9 minutes, so it will spawn 4,5 minutes into the night. It spawns as follow:

  1. There must be an active player (on a server), so that it is aware of the Meteor drop.

  2. There should be less than a certain number of meteor tiles (small world: 401, medium world: 601, large world: 801), or the Meteor is not eligible to spawn.

  3. The meteor will land within 672 blocks to each side of the spawn, so that it's close to the player.

  4. A maximum of 100 attempts will be made to land the Meteor in a place where it is eligible:

    1. It may not land 50 blocks close to the borders of the map.

    2. It may not intersect with a Player, a NPC or a Chest.

    3. The top most solid block will be tried.

  5. Drops will be stopped, tiles will be killed and meteorite tiles will be placed.

Now is the question, is the wooden platform a solid block?

Yes, a wooden platform is considered solid, and also has a solid top property. Water only flows through objects that have solid tops, but this doesn't happen for meteorites which check if the object itself is solid. Other items that have this effect include workbenches and tables...

Below 100 from the top they will always stop meteorites, between 50-100 only by a chance.

a cat
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Tamara Wijsman
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    Very detailed! No meteor yet, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed. – Ben Blank May 27 '11 at 15:24
  • @BenBlank: I'm also keeping my fingers crossed, it wasn't easy to figure these things out... – Tamara Wijsman May 27 '11 at 23:21
  • A couple of in-game weeks have passed since I smashed the orb, and still no meteor. I've scoured the entire breadth of my world, including the floating islands. Either the meteor didn't spawn at all (I don't know whether that can happen) or my platform bridge ate it entirely. :-( – Ben Blank Jun 02 '11 at 01:53
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    @BenBlank: You should get a message when the meteor has landed, smashing an orb doesn't necessarily spawn a meteor each time. You could try smashing some more... – Tamara Wijsman Jun 02 '11 at 12:14
  • @Tom — I don't think I'm prepared for an Eater of Worlds just yet. Smashing just one orb seems to have earned me the enmity of the Eye of Cthulhu, who now shows up every few nights to kill me. :-D – Ben Blank Jun 02 '11 at 15:21
  • @BenBlank: Store your money in a piggy bank or a chest, you won't lose anything else when fighting it so you have nothing to lose. I do agree that you probably couldn't beat it at a lower level but you can still manually spawn them if you want to. Or well, just play and we'll know it in the near to far future... – Tamara Wijsman Jun 02 '11 at 15:48
  • @Tom — Oh, I never leave the house with cash on me — I'm saving up for a Minishark. I'm also currently working on replacing my silver armor with gold in the hopes it will help me poke out the Eye. – Ben Blank Jun 02 '11 at 22:54
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    I don't think that's right. I downloaded a flat dirt map, then edited a wooden platform bridge over a good part of it and bombarded the world with meteorites using TShock. This is the result (meteorite blocks in magenta). – a cat Jun 16 '11 at 14:38
  • @TomWijsman TShock's /dropmeteor simply calls WorldGen.dropMeteor(), and I only know the one map viewer. – a cat Jun 16 '11 at 16:38
  • @TomWijsman Okay, I can not get that one to work at all. Here's another improper render of the same experiment, but this time the bridge is only 1 block high (TEdit is not a good map editor). This time, the meteors fell through -- except for this one. Clearly there is some weirdness going on we're both missing, but one-block sky platforms seem to be fine, for the most part... – a cat Jun 16 '11 at 17:35
  • @lunboks: I converted the images to see what tile the wooden platform was. Apparently they will always stop when the wooden platform is under Y = 100, they will stop it by a chance between Y = 50 - 100 and they will not stop it when above Y = 50. Where the top of the map is Y = 0. – Tamara Wijsman Jun 16 '11 at 18:34
  • The code seems to take world size into consideration when calculating the maximum number of meteor tiles; I added something about that. – a cat Jun 21 '11 at 01:37
  • Your last sentence has me quite confused. Are you suggesting that wooden platforms closest to the top of the map will not stop meteors? – Raven Dreamer Jun 21 '11 at 02:19
  • @lunboks: They probably changed that in a patch. – Tamara Wijsman Jun 21 '11 at 11:32
  • @Raven Dreamer: Yes, that's what I'm suggesting. It can also be seen on both screenshots by lunboks. – Tamara Wijsman Jun 21 '11 at 11:32
  • I don't think the ~600 blocks from spawn is true (anymore?) -- we had one come down partway into a medium world's ocean around 5000 feet away. I've placed over a thousand rail blocks and am still pretty far. – Weaver Dec 15 '14 at 00:19
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No, the platforms do not allow meteor rock to go through them.

This just happened to me with a floating island bridge. I got almost no meteor rock (9 blocks total).

Mathias711
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player232
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Yes, meteors are perfectly capable of landing on wood platforms, and may do so if you have a large one. Wooden platforms are considered solid, so meteors can and will land on them. However, the presence of a wood platform near the top of the world does not guarantee that a meteor will land on it.

aaay
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