Hi brother!
Terraria is looking like quite an interesting game. I just saw you mentioned that near spawn it is always dark, raining and zombies are spawning continuously. Have you checked the game settings, is there anything that can fix this, fighting zombies is enjoying, fighting, and survive. Is there any significant gem in this game or does every gem have its unique work in this game?
Enjoyed reading your post.
I just did a quick Google search and turns out this is happening because of too many gravestones close to the spawn which is somehow converting this area into something called a gravestone biome. I have to make some kind of shovel and dig all of those graves out.
There are a lot of gems like Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald etc and they have their use cases. One of the use cases was making a tool called a hook which allows us to grab a ledge and helps in traversing. These gems have varying degrees of reach depending on which hook you create. Also, there are some colourful torches that you can make from these gems. There have to be some other use cases that we still have to discover.