@Leadhead
On this subject, as has been mentioned several times before in a few threads:
1. The new monster statues have low drop rates, primarily because most of the newer monster statues have some pretty nice drops. You can see the choice this leads to; we could have gone with the old style of the Skeleton/Jellyfish/Etc Statue system, where they had full drop rates and led to heavy exploitation, or we could have gone with the old Mimic Statue system, where they don't drop anything at all. The old statues weren't changed, but rather than be forced to pick between two undesirable choices (either no reward at all or excessive reward), a compromise decision was made to offer the drops but at a significant drop rate to represent how incredibly easy farming statues is. So yes, seriously.
You can still farm Granite from Granite Golem statues without diving underground, but expect to have lessened returns for the low investment of energy. They weren't going to have full drop rates; among the new statue drops are some pretty rare items, and even a mount. If anything, they would have no drops at all, like the Mimic.
Its also worth mentioning that the new statues require the player to actively damage them to get drops. Why this system wasn't retroactively applied to the older statues, I don't know; it might just be a legacy thing, or because most of the older statue loot is pretty weak. It wasn't my call.
2. The Critter statues are meant to be decorative. Even more so than monster statues, critter statues are a literal zero threat, extremely minimal investment source of infinite bait. Fishing is a very, very potent gameplay mechanic that is extremely easy already, with bait acquisition being its only real balancing feature. These statues would completely trash that if they gave bait. So it merely boils down to a difference in opinion about their
intended use: critter statues are intended as decorative items, which can both be used as literal furniture, and to spawn critters as desired for background flavor (as can be seen in the Tales of the Terrarian map). This IS their use, so they are hardly worthless, as are a number of any other purely decorative items. They are not intended to grant a mechanical or loot benefit to you as the player. You can call that worthless/pointless/useless, but its little different from any of the other multitude of decorative elements of Terraria, which is a huge focus in the game.
Can we know more detailed info on this, like the droprates?
My two cents on this statue issue:
One of the main points of statues was to make some basic ressources easily accessable, such as gel or glowsticks, while you can theoretically use them to sell the dropped items, you won't be really getting that much profit from it, and I really hope that this isn't considered an issue.
As for items, you won't be really able to use statues until you do the dungeon(sure there are some trap setups in the underground that work but still), until then most loot isn't that much of an issue, either the items are already common drops that you probably have enough of already(gel/glowstick), outclassed by then(Chain Knife, Hook, Slime Staff, Bone Sword, Zombie Arm, all the armor drops) have limited use(Diving Helmet, Shark Fin, Shark Tooth Necklace) or vanity/info items(Skull, Depth Meter, Compass).
The Unicorn Horn as well as the Medusa Head and Bacon are hardmode drops, the only big issue here would be the Medusa Head, but it's droprate is low and it's probably not a hardmode item that will be in your hotbar for the end of the time. While it's not bad weapon and does have it's uses like the Frost Staff, there's just so much more stuff out there. As for the Unicorn Horn, I can see why it would be an issue if players could get a lot of them, but what should they use them for, many holy arrows? They do have their uses, however there are other arrows and with endgame bows you have such a high chance of not using ammo that it probably won't matter all that much, in the end it just speeds up the farming which is what the slime and jellyfish statue did as well.
The Mimic was always the statue that was a bit off compared to the others, never dropping anything(does it have a low drop chance now or not?) however that made sense as it would instantly give you a (to that time) high tier item, so I didn't mind that it wouldn't drop anything.
I don't exactly know why the Unicorn now drops the Blessed Apple(other than the fact that it fits with the theme), not sure if other enemies in the hallow still drop it(including statue spawned ones), but it seems to be kinda counter intuitive, also not sure why the KO cannon just can't be dropped by statue spawned enemies, unless you get it very early in hardmode it won't have that much of an use, for me it falls into the "useless" items category because there's just way too much other stuff that works better or is easier to get.
While I understand why critters can't be caught(some of the best bait would be really easily available) I think that this could've been solved way better instead of the usual used "brute force" method by Terraria. If it's that much of an issue, then why not let the (high percent) bait critters spawn a version that can be catched but not used as bait and make the non bait critters catchable? This would make it way easier for people to create those decorative animal cages, would it be that much of an issue if people could farm goldfish, ammo for the bunny cannon, or are the light sources(glowing snail, which always gets killed by hardmode mushroom enemies, for some reason mice get to be immune against enemies while those don't ?, lightning bug/firefly) that much of an issue? If that's really the case I gotta ask if we are back in 1.0.2 where the molten/meteor armor particles as well as the orb of light gave off light which apparently was such a big gamebreaker.
Do you really need to hit the enemies? I've seen people do statue farms and it still worked, would be a rather stupid change imo if you actually had to defeat them yourself.
The low drops wouldn't be that much of an issue if all the statues were craftable(which they honestly should be), but now they've kinda lost some of their value.
In the end, the farming for common ressources(as well as some rare items which are more or less a collectable at the point you can obtain them or have limited use) isn't that great and you're better off diving into any of the granite biomes underground and farming there instead of using statues.
There is a point where 'balance' starts to impose upon fun though. I was seriously happy to see the critter statues, because honestly there's a lot of times where I have to really go out and hunt to find specific critters if I want to make an animal cage. Nuking the ability to just 'spawn' them with the statues that were put in? Honestly makes me just want to go 'screw it' and resort to inventory editors or tshock server commands to just spawn stuff in instead of earning it. And I didn't have this desire before. So I don't know, if anything this change kind of took away some of the enjoyment I got from the game. Oh, and as far as infinite bait goes? There's plenty of existing exploits to get such a thing as it is. All stuff like this does is punish people who are inventive/creative/think outside of the box. And as far as being decorative... How about letting us freaking position them then? You know, instead of having them facing the exact same way no matter what? Being able to have a left OR right facing statue is sorely needed if they are to be used for decoration purposes. This is not a thing.
It wouldn't be the first thing, don't think I've ever enjoyed Terraria as much as back with version 1 up to 1.0.2 where the nerfs started in 1.0.3. I've spent some hours trying to improve my moon lord strategy and make a easy one available to all players(so you don't need to waste 30 platinum to get warding on everything or farm for that one accessory/weapon that just doesn't want to drop), however after about 4 hours(some days ago, spent more time on moonlord a long time ago) I came to the point that completely standing still and healing from the nurse right next to you is a better strategy than trying to dodge everything just to be hit by 3-4 projectiles and die. The 1.2 updates with the moon events and fishron didn't help either, while defense still has it's uses it feels like you just need to dodge everything with fishron and can barely be hit(funny enough both issues have to do with regeneration), let's not forget the 1.2 healing, I think they could've solved all that much better by making the healing based on BASE DAMAGE of a weapon(without any modifiers and all) instead of full damage, in the end emblem users just abused that and now the weapons require you to use at least one or two if you want any decent healing. Why would we even need emblems and damage boosts in the first place, why can't we just use any weapon we want and it will deal decent damage just like it did before this was all put into different classes.
As for bait, this would allow you to get high tier bait(sure the tree nymph butterly and buggy aren't always spawned but I can imagine it still being easier than manually catching them or using easy bait farms to get low end bait). As for fishing I think it's not that great honestly, sure has it's uses but if you only fish once in a while and dont' spend multiple terraria days on it, the rewards won't be that great, caving is more rewarding and offers more loot.
For your soup bowl issue I highly recommend to just use fishing instead, as the most common fish can be turned into food. Goldfish were quite effected by this critter change, first no longer dropping on kill and now this. There's also pumpkin pie which lasts for a long time. Sadly nothing for the bunnies, but I doubt that they would want us to be able to easily craft ammo for it, given how the crafting recipe once changed.