Terraria's long-awaited 1.4.5 patch finally has a release date, and it's this month: 'start the countdown'

It's happening. After three years of development, Terraria's highly anticipated and supposedly final 1.4.5 update finally has a release date. It's also imminent. Developer Re-Logic has set the date for January 27, less than two weeks away.

Re-Logic announced the release date earlier this week via a Steam post. "We have a few more things to get done between now and then," the studio wrote on Wednesday. "But start the countdown because Terraria 1.4.5 will be in your hands in 13 short days!"

While a specific release date has proved elusive up to this point, update 1.4.5 has been nearly finished for some time. Back in August, Re-Logic revealed that it was "in the endgame" of development for the update, having defined an internal launch window that it confirmed with various partners. Re-Logic wanted update 1.4.5 to be a global launch concurrent across all platforms, which is partly what has held things up.

Indeed, Re-Logic had hoped to release update 1.4.5 in December last year. But in another Steam post published on Boxing Day, it said that this "wound up being impossible" as it was "not possible to get every platform and global partner together in time".

Basically, Re-Logic realised that committing to a launch in December would have meant releasing in the same week as Christmas, and as a decidedly anti-crunch company, it didn't feel comfortable "asking all of our teams to forego time with family and friends and skipping the holidays." That's a fair perspective, especially when it only makes a few weeks' difference.

As for what to expect in update 1.4.5, the short answer is: a lot. Its main features are two crossover packs with Dead Cells and Palworld, adding weapons, items and entities from both games. This includes a "summonable Digtoise" from Palworld that can mine through blocks, which sounds neat.

There's also a ton of non-licenced additions coming in the update, including music blocks, numerous special boulders that do weird things like "fall" upwards and bounce between ores and chests, several "transformation mounts" that turn the player into creatures like bats, rats and velociraptor", new entities such as a pufferfish and six new types of slime, plus dozens more items and features. It may have been a long wait for 1.4.5 but, going by the list of what's being added, it seems like it'll be worth it.