how to stop wraiths without redoing your whole base?

[Jatopian]

Entered Hardmode for the first time in a long time - I haven't played Terraria since it was introduced, aside from some servers that deliberately avoided Hardmode. I thought I had some pretty decent base designs - they wouldn't get corrupted, they had lava pits I could open with actuators and some dart traps to knock enemies in there, NPCs are all cooped up above the ground floor so they won't wander out into danger. Basic stuff.

But what I apparently didn't and couldn't plan for is wraiths. They just spawn below base and float up into it, or to the side and float right thru my walls.

Seems awful, but it seems they can't float up without a path of solid blocks. So I need a gap. That'll look ugly, I think, but I'm aiming for practicality first, though I'd be upset if I were aiming for aesthetics. So, 2 or 3 tile tunnel around the base, done.

It's not enough. I look on the wiki. 6 whole tiles of vertical clearance are needed. Really ugly, and feels like a waste of space. But okay, at least they still can't just fly freely as I feared.

It's still not enough. Wraiths don't float slowly and fall straight down the way ghosts seem to; they get a lot of horizontal momentum going. With a basement, I can't just have a shaft in the way for them to fall down. In fact, I need more than 6 tiles of horizontal clearance or they'll fall diagonally across the gap and float right back up thru my basement. A lot more than 6 tiles. I have some building adjacent to my base, a tree farm and such, but it can be moved, thankfully. Good thing my base isn't that sprawling. It still rankles that I have to put the base floating in what is basically a steep valley, because it's ugly even for the environs of a survival base now, and I'm going to have to dig it out more if I ever want to expand downwards. Which I will. That's where all my chests are, and it'd be even more work to move those.

What's more, it has to be a total separation - any stilts or walls seem to form a path for wraiths, so forget about underside entrances to the base, because without side walls I'm just gonna get demon eyes and bats coming in. Has to be side doors. In the air.

What about other biomes? Maybe wraiths are just a forest thing? No, anywhere on the surface seems to do. Every base will have to contend with them, even on Hallowed ground.

To top it off, NPCs won't attack wraiths. It's not just me; the wiki says so too. Just... what? How's that make sense?

Wyverns are bad enough, but at least they're up in the sky where you aren't likely to have a lot of development.... though they seem even worse if you did.

So what am I missing here? Surely "screw you if you built on the ground and god help you if you built a bunker in the ground and also don't go too high in the sky either" isn't actually the devs' intent, right? There has to be something that makes wraiths and wyverns not the colossal game-degrading pain they seem? Some talisman you can hang up to repel stuff that teleports and goes thru blocks, maybe?

 

[Gotcha!]

When designing houses, my NPCs always live one story above the ground, ~10 tiles high, so wraiths and reapers can't reach them. The room on the ground floor is empty, aside from aesthetics.
I also fill up any big gaps that might be hiding below the ground where I'm building, so enemies can't spawn underground to begin with.

Unfortunately, once the pillars are out, NPCs in villages die left and right anyway. But oh well, at least I tried.

Someone once made a suggestion to have some sort of ectoplasm block that would block wraiths and other wall-hacking enemies. A pity that we sort of have ectoplasm blocks now, but that they won't ward off any ghosts.

 

[Sora_92]

As far as I seen, town NPCs do attack wraits, but most of them aren't perticularly good against these floating menaces. Melee NPCs seems to be able to protect themselves quite well from them though.

Nevertheless, wraiths are horrible creatures regarding creating safe houses for NPCs. luckily they don't normally spawn in towns, but they can be a huge problem at blood moons - as so are reapers in ecplipses.

There are a few monsters that will just get in in you build normal houses. really, the only way I think it would be easy to just ignore these, if there would be an option to toggle town NPCs being invulnerable or not. Players only really have troubles with wraits at the start of hardmode, after that, they become quite trivial foes (at least when alone). but they still can murder your NPCs even off-screen, even before you would have the slightest change to act and save them. that's just annoying.

that older "ecto block" idea sounds interes interesting too, but I think it would be severely limiting builds. plus the code might just can't work that way? like, maybe all these enemies going though blocks share the same thing in their code, and such a thing would likely interfere with bosses. their AI is quite good, but they probably would behave quite dumb, if they would have things blocking their path.