I'd say Terraria has a lot more.... structure in how you upgrade things. Minecraft is a lot more loose and free with how it lets you play, while Terraria expects you explore, collect, create and use the things you discover and create to move the story forward.
Terraria is less survival sandbox and more metroidvania. It garnered a lot of surface level comparisons to Minecraft (randomly generated world, building a base, caving required to find ores to smelt into bars to get better tools/armor), but Terraria has all of that as ways to progress and grow stronger instead of just being things you can do in the sandbox for fun/survival. It’s less about survival and more about finding ways to increase your DPS/Mobility/Defense to fight bosses. Although you can still flex your creativity to make visually appealing bases (and you want to have multiple, one in each non-evil biome and one underground, trust me).
It's among the least intimidating games I ever played. You statt super simple and progress at your own pace. At any time you have different things you can do but you're free to focus on what you enjoy most.
Now you can optinize and rush certain rewards etc. But for the first playthrough just do whatever looks cool. It's such a fun game.
I played it with my kids in coop mode.
What's great is the progression system. You start very poor, having to cut wood, with nowhere to go that far. The areas and what you can do unfold themselves step by step.
Well, not for long. 1.6 is the very last update ever (unless it breaks something and needs a hot fix) and then he's working on Haunted Chocolatier full time.
Ginger Island was phenomenal. They took everything that made the game suck and fixed it without disrespecting players who liked doing things the old way, plus they added in some cool content which added a lot to the end game. Fairy dust is single handedly the best feature ever added since once you get a room full of Statues of Fortune you can just pump out any item you want at breakneck speed. Fairy Rose goes from being a niche flower you use for bees to a genuine powerhouse of a crop during a season which is normally a massive lull in production. The only thing that sucks about them is that they stack really badly. I really hope next update fixes that because that is unacceptable game design.