Darkstar01
Official Terrarian
Queen Bee. Five second kills. Pre-hardmode items only. Master mode. Easy setup. No skill required. Interested?
From my Steam guide (Steam Community :: Guide :: Not the Cheese!, rate it up if you liked this), but I'll reproduce the main points here.
The farm works by baiting Queen Bee into charging through enemies trapped in the box beside the arena. You don't strictly need to build the arena in a hive, but it does need to be in the underground jungle, lest the Queen Bee enrage. Placing a row of platforms at the height of the spawned enemies is advised, as you'll need to make sure the boss doesn't change altitude too much during charges, lest she risk missing them. The key to the strategy is jumping over Queen Bee cleanly, so that she doesn't change altitude too much. To these ends, a balloon or frog legs could be useful. Mimics were used for their high damage and HP, though a different enemy could be substituted if necessary.
A timer is wired to the mimic statues, and to dart traps that hit the mimics, 'activating' them from their disguised state, and making them aggressive. You don't strictly need three statues, as this simply makes it faster. You also don't strictly need to have defeated Skeletron; if you find natural wiring, you can hook the statue(s) to it, and use a pressure plate looted from the environment as a trigger. There is a hard cap of ten enemies that can be spawned and simultaneously alive from a statue, so once you have that number, you're good to go. Due to the way statue spawning works, the statues need to be a little ways away from where the enemies will actually linger, lest their presence clog the statues' ability to spawn. For enemy statues, only three statue-spawned enemies can exist within 12.5 tiles of the statue, six within 37.5 tiles, and ten anywhere in the world. Therefore, your enemy statues should be at least 38 tiles away from where said enemies will linger during the battle.
Although boss stats increase on expert and master mode, enemy stats do, as well. In fact, the mimic's damage (80 - 160 - 240) scales faster than Queen Bee's HP (3400 - 4760 - 6069), thus making this strategy even MORE effective on expert and master mode than on normal. All of the footage from the video was recorded in master mode.
The nice thing about this is that all of the materials required for the farm can be acquired in pre-hardmode. They don't require any especially complicated setups, like hoik engines, so anyone can do it, even without an equipped weapon... though I'd still recommend one to deal with summoned bees if the Queen's initial charge is on a diagonal.
While I cannot 100% confirm what influences whether the statue-spawned enemies interact with the Queen, testing suggests that having Queen-summoned bees alive is likely the trigger. There is evidence from the video that this may be the case, as Queen Bee can only be seen taking damage from the mimics while a lesser bee was alive. One can be seen trapped to the bottom right of the arena during the farming session at the end, and the previous Queen did not take damage from the mimics until after she summoned bees. During my tests, I never observed the Queen take damage from mimics while no other bees were alive, and I never observed her not take damage from them while bees were alive. She stopped interacting with the mimics the moment I killed the last be, giving strong evidence that they are necessary for this strategy. Try making some small one-way walls in the arena to trap bees, and see if that helps.
Happy farming!
From my Steam guide (Steam Community :: Guide :: Not the Cheese!, rate it up if you liked this), but I'll reproduce the main points here.
The farm works by baiting Queen Bee into charging through enemies trapped in the box beside the arena. You don't strictly need to build the arena in a hive, but it does need to be in the underground jungle, lest the Queen Bee enrage. Placing a row of platforms at the height of the spawned enemies is advised, as you'll need to make sure the boss doesn't change altitude too much during charges, lest she risk missing them. The key to the strategy is jumping over Queen Bee cleanly, so that she doesn't change altitude too much. To these ends, a balloon or frog legs could be useful. Mimics were used for their high damage and HP, though a different enemy could be substituted if necessary.
A timer is wired to the mimic statues, and to dart traps that hit the mimics, 'activating' them from their disguised state, and making them aggressive. You don't strictly need three statues, as this simply makes it faster. You also don't strictly need to have defeated Skeletron; if you find natural wiring, you can hook the statue(s) to it, and use a pressure plate looted from the environment as a trigger. There is a hard cap of ten enemies that can be spawned and simultaneously alive from a statue, so once you have that number, you're good to go. Due to the way statue spawning works, the statues need to be a little ways away from where the enemies will actually linger, lest their presence clog the statues' ability to spawn. For enemy statues, only three statue-spawned enemies can exist within 12.5 tiles of the statue, six within 37.5 tiles, and ten anywhere in the world. Therefore, your enemy statues should be at least 38 tiles away from where said enemies will linger during the battle.
Although boss stats increase on expert and master mode, enemy stats do, as well. In fact, the mimic's damage (80 - 160 - 240) scales faster than Queen Bee's HP (3400 - 4760 - 6069), thus making this strategy even MORE effective on expert and master mode than on normal. All of the footage from the video was recorded in master mode.
The nice thing about this is that all of the materials required for the farm can be acquired in pre-hardmode. They don't require any especially complicated setups, like hoik engines, so anyone can do it, even without an equipped weapon... though I'd still recommend one to deal with summoned bees if the Queen's initial charge is on a diagonal.
While I cannot 100% confirm what influences whether the statue-spawned enemies interact with the Queen, testing suggests that having Queen-summoned bees alive is likely the trigger. There is evidence from the video that this may be the case, as Queen Bee can only be seen taking damage from the mimics while a lesser bee was alive. One can be seen trapped to the bottom right of the arena during the farming session at the end, and the previous Queen did not take damage from the mimics until after she summoned bees. During my tests, I never observed the Queen take damage from mimics while no other bees were alive, and I never observed her not take damage from them while bees were alive. She stopped interacting with the mimics the moment I killed the last be, giving strong evidence that they are necessary for this strategy. Try making some small one-way walls in the arena to trap bees, and see if that helps.
Happy farming!
