Back in March 2020, Microsoft did something mischievous to Xbox Game Pass quests. Instead of the familiar 'unlock an achievement' chore, the company began demanding specific in-game tasks. One monthly assignment was simple on paper and mildly sadistic in practice: collect 1,000 resources in Terraria. For the uninitiated, Terraria is often described as Metroid meets Minecraft, a 2D side-scrolling sandbox where players dig, build, fight, and hoard. Collecting 1,000 resources was not hard. It was just tedious enough to make a player question their life choices while holding a virtual pickaxe.

The Quest That Turned Players Into Gophers

Microsoft's quest system had shifted toward weekly and monthly tasks, with the longer challenges assigned as monthly quests. March 2020's Terraria quest asked for 1,000 resources. The task sounded harmless. Terraria is built on resource collection. Every cave, every hill, every patch of dirt is basically a piñata for crafters. But 1,000 is a big number when a player is also trying to avoid slimes, cave bats, and the occasional explosive bunny.

Wood: The Forbidden Resource

Here is the twist: wood did not count. At the time, community testing confirmed that chopping trees, a sacred Terraria tradition, did nothing for the quest. It was unclear whether this was deliberate or a bug. Either way, wood became the useless cousin at the resource family reunion. Players could hack down an entire forest and still stare at a quest tracker that refused to budge. The lesson was clear: if a player wanted credit, they had to get their hands dirty. Literally.

The Dirt-Holding Method

According to the wisdom of the time, the fastest route was not glamorous. A player needed to dig into the ground for about five or six layers. Then they picked a direction, left or right, and held the right trigger. The character would keep digging through dirt, collecting dirt itself, ores, and other resources along the way. Dirt counted. Ores counted. Gems and stone and whatever else got caught in the excavation counted. The player became a human drill, a mole with a controller, a tunnel-boring machine with a quest tracker.

After a bit of horizontal excavation, the 1,000-resource finish line would appear. It was not a boss fight. It was not a speedrun. It was a patience test disguised as a mining trip. The quest could be completed in a single determined session, or spread across the month. Microsoft gave players an entire month, which was generous, because Terraria has a way of turning a quick resource run into a question of where the last six hours went.

Why It Worked Anyway

Players who did not want to grind for the sake of a quest could simply play Terraria normally. The game earned strong reviews when it launched nearly a decade before 2020, and it had only improved since. There were biomes to explore, bosses to summon, NPCs to house, and an unreasonable number of ways to die. Resource collection happened naturally. The quest merely nudged players toward the dirt with a slightly judgmental timer.

March 2020 also offered plenty of other Xbox Game Pass games to try, so no one was trapped in Terraria. The service had new titles arriving, and the monthly quest list gave subscribers options. Still, the 1,000-resource quest stood out because it was so wonderfully mundane. It did not ask for a no-hit boss kill or a speedrun. It asked for dirt. Lots and lots of dirt.

The 2026 Verdict

By 2026, that specific Xbox Game Pass quest is a relic. Microsoft's quest system has continued to evolve, and Terraria has continued to be Terraria: a game that refuses to age gracefully because it never needed to. The wood-doesn't-count quirk is now a funny footnote in Game Pass history. It is also a reminder that the best quests are not always the hardest ones. Sometimes they are the ones that make a player look at a pile of virtual dirt and feel a strange sense of accomplishment.

Terraria remains available on a variety of platforms, and its resource-collecting loop is still dangerously addictive. For anyone who missed the March 2020 quest, there is no need to mourn. The dirt is still there. The ores are still there. The wood still probably does not count for anything except building a nice house. And somewhere in the gaming afterlife, a player is still holding the right trigger, digging sideways, and whispering, 'Just 200 more.'

Details are provided by SteamDB, and they help contextualize why grindy, number-based goals like “collect 1,000 resources” can feel both oddly compelling and strangely punishing: platform-side tracking and player-activity signals often reveal that sandbox staples thrive on repeatable loops (mining, crafting, inventory churn) even when a quest’s rules are quirky—like March 2020’s infamous “wood doesn’t count” wrinkle that pushed players into sideways dirt-tunneling for reliable progress.