A Guide To AFK Farms

[chewythebigblackdog]

This farm already has 2 different ways of dealing with biome mimics (shown under the "souls of light/night" farm section). The first one involves lowering the surface that you stand on so that the mimics won't aggro and will just die in the lava. The other option is to not be in a full evil/hallowed biome which prevents mimics from spawning (the other biome enemies only need the spawning surface to spawn).

 

[dafolkhy]

Does this trap work on the floaty gross? They just seem to float downwards into the lava and stay there

 

[Kellam Yoshikage]

I don't really like either of the ways of dealing with biome mimics in this farm, lava killing everything is slow and seed-dependent while eliminating biome mimics entirely also blocks all normal mimics and drastically limits what enemies you can get in general. Besides spiders, you can also use unsafe sandstone walls in the same way to farm ug desert enemies; this is more convenient since the ghouls in this context will actually drop ichor and cursed flames while you farm, but you really need walls to block Dune Splicers and generally I would prefer just farming Ichor Stickers if I can. The horizontal farm setup lets you kill biome mimics with your usual repeater and unholy arrows, along with everything in the kill chamber, and you can even isolate and trap biome mimics indefinitely to allow for normal mimics to spawn at a better rate while still farming souls.

Floaty Gross and other floating enemies like wraiths will float up or down to your horizontal height as they try to approach you; they can fall through blocks, but they need solid blocks going upwards to be able to approach you. In general I would just use safe background walls to block floaty gross entirely, as ichor stickers are more generically useful for ichor at this point and actually catching floaty gross is annoying with a vertical farm setup like this.

I would also recommend the wiki guide for Enemy farming in general, knowing me I've probably already linked it in this thread, but there's a lot more detail on whys for why farms are built this way and what goals they try to meet, as well as various different farm contexts and farms you can use for them. It does still have some silly parts, the critter farm section kinda sucks and I learned about some weird border conditions for height-based spawn rates since then that have some weird implications for surface farming, but otherwise it's good.

 

[Opensilk]

Why is he standing at the bottom of the arena instead of on the side, where he could shoot at the enemies more effectively?

https://forums.terraria.org/index.php?attachments/capture-2024-07-14-13_49_09-png.476020/

 

[SkinnyDev]

I'm abit confused I made the artificial jungle but I'm not getting any jungle creatures only jungle bats

 

[chewythebigblackdog]

I'm abit confused I made the artificial jungle but I'm not getting any jungle creatures only jungle bats

For most monsters, you need an appropriate spawning surface instead of an appropriate biome (and sometimes you need both). Block swap the spawning surfaces with mud, then add jungle grass.

 

[SkinnyDev]

Diggers keep spawning and taking up the NPC count

 

[Kellam Yoshikage]

You're not standing in front of safe walls in that case. Use safe sandstone walls and stand in front of them for the best spawn rates and no worms.

 

[chewythebigblackdog]

You're not standing in front of safe walls in that case. Use safe sandstone walls and stand in front of them for the best spawn rates and no worms.

Shadow candle (which this farm does use) allows worms to spawn when in front of safe walls. I'm a little confused myself why worms aren't an issue, I've built a similar farm and I don't see many worm spawns.

 

[SkinnyDev]

You're not standing in front of safe walls in that case. Use safe sandstone walls and stand in front of them for the best spawn rates and no worms.

safe sandstone how so? don't I need the Treacherous Sandstone Wall?

 

[Kellam Yoshikage]

Yup, there it is. You should not be getting any desert enemy spawns unless you put unsafe sandstone walls behind the tiles enemies are spawning on. Desert enemy spawns depend on exact wall types and thus require unsafe variants, but desert spawn rates only require that the walls be in the hardened sand/sandstone wall conversion groups, which includes all safe variants.

Also, I don't think the shadow candle is actually mentioned in text here? It does show up in the design, though, but so does using safe sandstone walls. Either way, though, you want to usually keep the shadow candle off and only turn it on if there's an enemy you need it for.

 

[mish20011]

I need help in making artifical underground corrupt dessert, how do I do it? I can't spawn anything even though I replaced the platform and the ebonstones with hardened sand block

 

[Kellam Yoshikage]

I assume you are spawning enemies, just not ug desert enemies. Like I said in the message above, you get desert enemy spawns by putting unsafe sandstone walls behind the tiles enemies are spawning on. If a corruption biome is present, and enemies have sandstone walls behind their spawn tiles, you get corrupt ug desert spawns. What block type they spawn on doesn't matter.

 

[mish20011]

I assume you are spawning enemies, just not ug desert enemies. Like I said in the message above, you get desert enemy spawns by putting unsafe sandstone walls behind the tiles enemies are spawning on. If a corruption biome is present, and enemies have sandstone walls behind their spawn tiles, you get corrupt ug desert spawns. What block type they spawn on doesn't matter.

i did exactly that, I put hardened ebonsand and walls but I still only get cavern enemies for some reason, do I just put unsafe sandstone walls for it to work? Because maybe the mistake I made is putting hardened ebonsand walls

 

[Kellam Yoshikage]

Did you make sure the walls were unsafe? As in, did you toss them into the shimmer before placing them? If you hammer the walls, do you get them back? Odds are you do.

I would have thought that hardened ebonsand would give you corrupt enemy spawns at least, though.

 

[Zeypheron]

Biome mimics are the main reason why I prefer a purely horizontal farm setup. They jump down from above and will hit you if they don't have line of sight. I would recommend a box to catch them in, like in the enemy farming guide on the wiki.

View attachment 501010

As long as you stand with the center of your character below the hole, and at least one side of the hole is hammered to not be a full square, enemies in the box can see you. When a biome mimic stomps down, it can't go through blocks if it can see you, so it gets stopped. Make sure to not let skeleton archers into this box, though.

How effective is this farm compared to the farm in this post or WaffleTime's pyramid farm? Cause I've genuinely never seen this horizontal farm appear anywhere except for the wiki page for enemy farming.

 

[Kellam Yoshikage]

Its effective spawn rate could be marginally higher than this farm since the spawn surface is lower, but the difference is negligible, as is the time difference for getting enemies into the kill chamber. Compared to the pyramid design, though, enemies enter the kill chamber far faster and there's no problems whatsoever in processing mimics and skeleton merchants; this farm and the wiki farm are substantially better than the pyramid design. The main advantage of the setup compared to the farm in this guide is that it deals with biome mimics safely, allowing you to easily farm them along with other enemies, and you're able to use a wider variety of weapons to attack enemies directly since you can open a block gap. The downside is no lava, since my design doesn't drop enemies down at all, though a drop of 1 block would be easy to add if you really want the extra damage. Personally I play a lot of GetFixedBoi, where the lack of lava doesn't mean anything, and usually I can still get the DPS needed for maximum farm efficiency either way.

As to why it's on the wiki and nowhere else, that's because I'd rather point to a wiki guide than to a forum post, so I put it on the wiki instead of in a forum post. Ideally the wiki guides are a place where new players can go and learn good information about the game, and that's the goal I had in mind when I was rewriting a handful of them. Don't really have the motivation to work through the boss strategy guides rn, though.

 

[Zeypheron]

Its effective spawn rate could be marginally higher than this farm since the spawn surface is lower, but the difference is negligible, as is the time difference for getting enemies into the kill chamber. Compared to the pyramid design, though, enemies enter the kill chamber far faster and there's no problems whatsoever in processing mimics and skeleton merchants; this farm and the wiki farm are substantially better than the pyramid design. The main advantage of the setup compared to the farm in this guide is that it deals with biome mimics safely, allowing you to easily farm them along with other enemies, and you're able to use a wider variety of weapons to attack enemies directly since you can open a block gap. The downside is no lava, since my design doesn't drop enemies down at all, though a drop of 1 block would be easy to add if you really want the extra damage. Personally I play a lot of GetFixedBoi, where the lack of lava doesn't mean anything, and usually I can still get the DPS needed for maximum farm efficiency either way.

As to why it's on the wiki and nowhere else, that's because I'd rather point to a wiki guide than to a forum post, so I put it on the wiki instead of in a forum post. Ideally the wiki guides are a place where new players can go and learn good information about the game, and that's the goal I had in mind when I was rewriting a handful of them. Don't really have the motivation to work through the boss strategy guides rn, though.

I feel like the wiki guide could probably use more exact measurements for the farm itself then, beyond just giving the tile ranges where enemies can and cant spawn. Cause that farm was a headache to build without any dimensions provided, especially when the pictures provided build the farm with blocks like dynasty wood which have no distinction between tiles.

 

[Kellam Yoshikage]

Oh, I didn't put any exact measurements because they're really loose. As long as nothing spawns outside of the farm, the kill chamber is wide enough to avoid things clipping out on your end (depends on the enemies, but 4 wide is usually what I go for, you can do up to 8 or so before treasure magnet stops working), and you can stand below a box that blocks biome mimic stomps, the worst eyeballing it can do is force a bit of extra time on swapping an extra wide spawn area to be certain. And I sometimes have to do that too, because I can't be bothered to stick to exact measurements with it usually. The biome side of things, I just do based on background and counting blocks.

So, that would mean I should probably mention minimums and maximums for certain elements of the farm. Guess I'll look into that, then.

 

[sms070]

Its effective spawn rate could be marginally higher than this farm since the spawn surface is lower, but the difference is negligible, as is the time difference for getting enemies into the kill chamber. Compared to the pyramid design, though, enemies enter the kill chamber far faster and there's no problems whatsoever in processing mimics and skeleton merchants; this farm and the wiki farm are substantially better than the pyramid design. The main advantage of the setup compared to the farm in this guide is that it deals with biome mimics safely, allowing you to easily farm them along with other enemies, and you're able to use a wider variety of weapons to attack enemies directly since you can open a block gap. The downside is no lava, since my design doesn't drop enemies down at all, though a drop of 1 block would be easy to add if you really want the extra damage. Personally I play a lot of GetFixedBoi, where the lack of lava doesn't mean anything, and usually I can still get the DPS needed for maximum farm efficiency either way.

As to why it's on the wiki and nowhere else, that's because I'd rather point to a wiki guide than to a forum post, so I put it on the wiki instead of in a forum post. Ideally the wiki guides are a place where new players can go and learn good information about the game, and that's the goal I had in mind when I was rewriting a handful of them. Don't really have the motivation to work through the boss strategy guides rn, though.

Is the farm in the wiki AFK, or can it be made AFK?