Have you tried talking to your guide? Remember for all recipes to show up, be by your furnace, anvil, etc. Maybe its time to try a different area too. you could just look up Terraria craft wiki of course too.

All the recipes.

Yeeaahhh, he started walking away and that was the last I saw of him.

I'll check out the Wiki I guess, thanks.

Well did you build a house with a table,chair,bed, walls, door, and light source?

Wiki has helped me a lot. I borrowed a "highly rated" book through amazon and it was pretty awful. I just started too and was hoping to sit down with a guide instead of clicking through wiki, but I just haven't found anything I've found helpful outside of wiki.

Build a house for yourself, one for your "helper" and put him in it. Use the housing icon by the armor inventory tab on the right side to make sure it meet spec. Then make another. Then go out and explore and most likely get yourself killed. A lot. It at least I have. Just watch how much money you have on you.

And if you have specific questions, people here are pretty awesome :)

I'm actually trying that now, but I keep getting the "does not meet specs" problem.

Watch a build a house terraria youtube tutorial!

Figured it out, thanks.

I live off the wikis and this forum. If I didn't have either I'd still be trying to figure out how to cut down trees. While not as informative as the forum at least I don't have t worry about the wikis telling me to shut up and go figure it out by myself. :P

I KID! One of the wikis actually told me to do that the other day.

The Guide would be more useful if I didn't keep getting attacked by slimes while talking to him, then losing track of which tip he was giving me when I had to fend them off.

With the Wiki's help, in the end I built a house. The Guide meanwhile got stuck in a pit and was killed during the night. (Another Guide has since turned up.)

be thankful they fixed his AI and made him more useful since 1.0, back then the guide was nothing more then a useless dick(all he used to do was just give basic tips and nothing more) who would open the doors late at night, especially blood moons, and let all the mobs in which is why in the 1.1 update Red added the Guide Voodoo Doll which allows players to kill the guide as well as being a summoning item for the hardmode trigger boss. As well as why in all the trailers there is always one scene of the guide getting offed(during the.Alpha demo LP videos Red and "Blue" did on youtube the guide kept letting Zombies into the base)

But the whole wandering around mindlessly getting killed NPC issue should hopefully be fixed in 1.3 as Red and Cenx said that they improved the AI so now NPCs should run from mobs and such.