PC Merchant not sellling the stopwatch

A

Aeonex_Ashaxei

Terrarian
I love Terraria but some of these spawn/drop rates are aggravating. I have been on an expert mode/medium core world for well over 200 IRL hours and the traveling merchant has never sold a stopwatch every time I have checked.

Maybe my game is bugged? I am playing on vanilla PC 1.4.3.2

Most of my time has been spent building/mining so I usually see the traveling merchant noticification and drop whatever I am doing to talk with him. It is the last item on my cellphone crafting list and I have almost beat the game. So now it feels useless to even bother searching anymore.
😤
 

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Seems like you're just really unlucky, keep trying.
Also, if I remember correctly the traveling merchant can appear again if you leave and re-enter the world before 12pm game time, so if there's still time left when you check his shop and he doesn't have the stopwatch, you could leave and re-enter for another chance.
 
Every day a new merchant comes to town... Build a watch and you don't have to wait for the message. He arrives at the same time and leaves at the same time, every day. (Build the watch at a table, while sitting in a chair. I forget the recipe.)
 
The
ISAWHIM said:
Every day a new merchant comes to town... Build a watch and you don't have to wait for the message. He arrives at the same time and leaves at the same time, every day. (Build the watch at a table, while sitting in a chair. I forget the recipe.)
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Stopwatch can only be purchased from the travling merchant. It cannot be crafted. It is used in a crafting recipe for the goblin tech, however.

I got the stopwatch by cheating, got tired of waiting. Feels bad

Stopwatch
 
Watch and stopwatch are different items. The watch tells time of day, stopwatch your speed if I remember right.

You can craft a watch using starting-tier metal bars plus a piece of chain. The higher tier the metal you put into it, the finer the time resolution you get. The mobile version used to lack watches, at least working ones. The devs seem to have fixed that.

If I understand ISAWHIM's post, he or she advises to use a watch so you know when the traveling merchant will arrive, so you won't miss a possible opportunity to buy a stopwatch.
 
Bethany said:
If I understand ISAWHIM's post, he or she advises to use a watch so you know when the traveling merchant will arrive, so you won't miss a possible opportunity to buy a stopwatch.
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Yes, that is what I was implying. Doesn't hurt to have multiple worlds too...

I remember when small things like "cheating" would bother me, and waiting for the horrible "odds system" to kick-in, was a hopeful possibility. However, like the need for forums and the fan-made WiKi... They are just more tools to get the job done.

You are forced to keep garbage items for too long and good items seem to fly past or seem real insignificant, once they have actually been obtained. The game honestly facilitates NOTHING in-between. It's just do or die... You can either do something, or you can't, until you can, then the things you couldn't do become severely so effortless that they just become an annoyance. (Like the blood-moon and solar eclipses. Sorry, but 4% chance is "per time tick", not "per day"... I'm getting back to back events of blood-moons and eclipses, which is NOT, in the worst "random luck", a 4% result. When you buy 10,000 tickets at 4% each, your odds of winning are not 4%, it's 4%x10,000. If you only bought one ticket, it would be 4%.)

You have a 50% chance of getting heads, when flipping a coin... You have nearly a 100% chance of getting heads (an eclipse or blood-moon or whatever), at-least once, if you flip that same coin 10,000 times. That is why the odds in the game are so buggy. Honestly, just bad programming use of them. I have had the same trader visit three times in a row, having the same exact items, plus one additional random item. That's also why the maps generate almost the same. It wasn't by "skill of programming", it is bad programming that causes the randomness, which is finite, to produce the same results, when it is "trying to actually be random", but failing horribly. That works in our favor too. I get many rare drops, multiple times, which should be 1/250,000 chances. But, on the same respect, I don't get many items that should be dropped 1/250, for AGES, or EVER.
 
I agree that using multiple worlds is a very mild "cheat" and not worth worrying about. But I must speak up on behalf of developers and (believe it or not) pseudo-random number generators.

(N.B.: Since I've not read the source I won't attempt to comment on the code's quality. Doing so without reading and understanding the code would be baseless speculation at best, crass sniping at worst.)

The nature of randomness is not "always smoothly distributed" . Randomness can, and often does, include a good deal of clumpiness.

Here's a simple demonstration. Which of these sequences of numbers strikes you as seeming least "random"?

4 5 9 0 3 9 8​
1 4 9 3 3 7 2​
5 5 5 5 5 5 5​
6 2 0 9 0 1 3​
3 4 5 2 5 5 9​

I worded this carefully. Obviously the third sequence seems least random. But if you rolled a ten-sided die seven times, each of these sequences would have exactly the same odds of appearing. By this criterion they are all exactly as "random".

The longer the sequence runs, the less likely the run of fives will continue. But any other specific sequence would be exactly as unlikely, regardless of whether it "looked" random.

We notice random events when they seem to fit a perceptible pattern. When the pattern is more subtle or imperceptible (did you notice the pattern "alternate digits of pi"? it might seem random but it's definitely not) we fail to notice it and instead think "well, that was random".

Now, it's true that the software games use is not truly random number generation. It's pseudo-random. The difference is significant for pure maths and philosophical maundering, but for game purposes any modern, high-quality pseudo-random number generator is humanly indistinguishable from a rigorously random one. (I'm rather fond of the Mersenne Twister, if for no reasons better than its name and appealing mechanism.)

When I was young I made several genuine and pseudo-random number generators*, and used them in varieties of game-playing software. I thought they gave different styles of game play, which was a nice thought if somewhat startling.

However, when I increased the number of program runs and used more sophisticated "style" analyzers, the distinction turned out to have been a coincidence, a fluke. The random (and pseudo-random) numbers that got cranked out in the first test just happened to produce game play that seemed to me to be more or less aggressive, more or less speculative, and so on. Random choice from random sequences. A small sample appeared to have certain characteristics. A larger sample "reverted to the mean".

As Hanlon nearly razored, "Never attribute to incompetence that which is adequately explained by the correct operation of common pseudo-random number generators."
_________________

* The pseudo-random number generators used hardware logic gates, counters, and the like, or software methods running on an RCA 1800. Among the true random number generators were ones incorporating a geiger counter and a lump of radioactive Niobium/Tantalum ore, a small radio-telescope, and highly amplified Johnson-Nyquist thermal electron noise. I have a fairly solid background in, and understanding of, the nature of randomness.
 
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Aeonex_Ashaxei said:
I love Terraria but some of these spawn/drop rates are aggravating. I have been on an expert mode/medium core world for well over 200 IRL hours and the traveling merchant has never sold a stopwatch every time I have checked.
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It's difficult to have this dialogue, because something being "too this" or "too that" is subjective, it'll almost always be subjective. What I can say however, is that Terraria is a rare gem in which there are thousands of items and alternatives for one thing or another thing, especially in 1.4+. Do you absolutely need the Cellphone item to beat the game or unlock some secret location(??)... no, not that I know of. Alternatives include, a.) Magic Conch, b.) Pylons, c.) Demon Conch, d.) GPS (incomplete).

Is it a highly desirable treasure, in the same vein as something like the Fountain of Youth, Tabernacle of God or Holy Grain, maybe? When it comes to those treasures, at least when the legends are taken into account, hunters have been searching for centuries, with no luck, until our "chosen hero" comes into the picture. All of this to say, a desirable treasure is meant to be 'rare', sometimes absurdly so, it's a feature.

Honestly, I personally believe more games would benefit from telling the player "no", but that's a whole other discussion.

Aeonex_Ashaxei said:
Maybe my game is bugged? I am playing on vanilla PC 1.4.3.2
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I won't say with 100% certainty "no, your game isn't bugged" because it's totally possible, I will say however, thousands of hours have shown that many of the features in Terraria are working properly, and anything that isn't has already been reported and documented in hundreds of thousands of lines, with adjustments and bugfixes still on-going.

Aeonex_Ashaxei said:
Most of my time has been spent building/mining so I usually see the traveling merchant noticification and drop whatever I am doing to talk with him. It is the last item on my cellphone crafting list and I have almost beat the game. So now it feels useless to even bother searching anymore.
😤
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I mean, I get your frustration but... that's just the nature of things when it comes to videogames (especially games that use RNG as a mechanic/ feature). Unless you're doing a planned checklist, 100% walkthrough for an audience on YouTube, Twitch or Facebook, you're likely to miss something. Does that mean your playthrough is suddenly ruined? Unless you have thousands of entitled fans, waiting to eat you alive for not giving them what they want, I'd hope not, especially if you're just playing for your own personal enjoyment.

There's more important things in the world to worry about, so I wouldn't get too bent-out-of-shape over a Stopwatch item in Terraria. If it bothers you that much, I'm sure someone here on the forums wouldn't mind trading one with you, as that's honestly how some of the more scarce items are supposed to be obtained, by working together (co-op or trading [i.e. servers]).

Fun Fact: Did you know that the Eucalyptus Sap is a 1/1000 (0.1%) drop, from tapping/ shaking trees. I actually have footage of me getting one to drop and walking past it, only because I thought it was just a regular fruit/ apple.
 
Interesting you should mention Eucalyptus Sap. In the first game I began after this item was added, while chopping down my third or fourth tree to make a crude house, this odd thing dropped before the tree went poofle. I'd no idea what it was, and didn't discover its use until later by accident. I figured it must be some common substance, an adhesive maybe. Kept it. I keep everything.
 
Bethany said:
Interesting you should mention Eucalyptus Sap. In the first game I began after this item was added, while chopping down my third or fourth tree to make a crude house, this odd thing dropped before the tree went poofle. I'd no idea what it was, and didn't discover its use until later by accident. I figured it must be some common substance, an adhesive maybe. Kept it. I keep everything.
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I'm normally the same way, I'd keep everything! In this case though, I was intentionally searching for rare fruit, namely Blackcurrant and Elderberry. 🫐 I was trying to craft the Smoothie of Darkness, in Journey Mode, so I'd gotten to the point where I started to ignore common items, for the sake of storage-space.

I think, I was also testing to see if the Finch Staff dropped from Overworld Trees, along with Leaf Wand and L.W. Wand; I still don't have all the Food Items 'til this day, and I was searching for most of them, the entire second-half of my playthrough, LoL! It's not unusual to search for something in this game, and simply never find what you're after... happens all-the-time.

Still Missing:
  1. Golden Delight (didn't know about it at the time, I do have plenty of Golden Worms though)!
  2. Monster Lasagna (didn't think they'd bother with World Evil, crossover items... surprise, surprise)!
  3. Piña Colada (not enough Palm Tree tapping).
  4. Prismatic Punch
  5. Tropical Smoothie (again, not enough Palm Tree tapping).
  6. Terraspark Boots
  7. Super Star Shooter (couldn't figure out how to craft it at the time).
  8. anything Empress of Light related (couldn't figure out how to summon her at the time).
 
Hange[On break]OS said:
Speaking of rare occurrences, on a newly made world that me and me friend booted up, on the first Crimera I killed, I got the Tentacle Spike. What are the odds of that?
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...actually, this is an amazing start! I'd almost forgotten that the Tentacle Spike got buffed! 🤔🥤

Question: Obtaining this item so early on, in your opinion, where/ when did you notice the power of it start to drastically "drop off"?
 
Toxophilite [East] said:
...actually, this is an amazing start! I'd almost forgotten that the Tentacle Spike got buffed! 🤔🥤

Question: Obtaining this item so early on, in your opinion, where/ when did you notice the power of it start to drastically "drop off"?
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Well, we aren't that far in yet, we just beat BoC, and it's still incredibly powerful, which is ironic, because neither of us is going melee
 
Hi folks, just a friendly reminder to keep the messages on topic - in this case, about Aeonex’s stop watch. I know that the talk then tangentially went more broad with discussing RNG/drop rates which did relate to the stop watch issue, but now it seems we’re even further afield.

There‘s definitely room on the forums for this latest topic of getting items early, not getting items at all after looking, unexpectedly lucky drops, but this thread isn’t the best spot. Share your RNG luck here! might be a better spot.
 
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