On Medusa

[Korin]

I'm gonna ignore your passive-aggressive tery for now, but the Medusa (and subsequently Hoplites) are ridiculously strong enemies for folks digging into cavern layer.

They tend to spawn more often than not with their little Greek (Why're Grecian soldiers wearing Roman uniforms/colors?) boyfriends and when they Stone you, their boning buddies (pun intended) get to impale you on spears that hit for almost 100 damage, thus killing you because you're frozen for 3-6 seconds at a time. Way more time than is necessary to make short work of someone with even anywhere close to 400 HP.

There is nothing in the way of a "challenge" in fighting these enemies and their cronies. You hit them, they stun, they die. Sometimes they get lucky and you die before they do, it boils down to luck and possibly arena preparation for a trashmob. Which is silly in and of itself.

 

[daimoth]

Nah, you don't need a whole arena. Any old spawning pad you have around will work, just throw a marble veneer over top and suddenly you have an really effective medusa farm. In other words, they don't require the whole biome to spawn, just the marble itself. The wiki claims they'll spawn if YOU stand on marble (no marble spawning pad necessary) but I couldn't get that to work.

But yeah, these things are so dangerous that I wouldn't even attempt it until well into hardmode. They are gnarly.

 

[Korin]

Nah, you don't need a whole arena. Any old spawning pad you have around will work, just throw a marble veneer over top and suddenly you have an really effective medusa farm. In other words, they don't require the whole biome to spawn, just the marble itself. The wiki claims they'll spawn if YOU stand on marble (no marble spawning pad necessary) but I couldn't get that to work.

But yeah, these things are so dangerous that I wouldn't even attempt it until well into hardmode. They are gnarly.

Lol I was saying that building an arena just to fight off these things would be silly.

Thinking about making myself a medusa farm just to have a 2nd magic attack. They're silly strong when their boyfriends are around.

 

[daimoth]

Yeah, they're tough. Worst thing is dropping down to the spawn pad from your AFK perch, you can get petrified on the way down and die from the fall, and there's no way to stop that from happening aside from wiring up a teleporter. Which... well, that would only take a second, but there's only like five different items to be had from the whole damn minibiome.

 

[Korin]

So do I need a bunch of marble to start up spawning Medusas/Hoplites? How much marble do I need exactly.

 

[MegaMage314 🌳]

In my experience, Medusa seem like pretty common enemies. I've never run into two at the same time (thank red), but I can almost always expect to see at least one show up every time I go near a granite biome.

 

[daimoth]

AFK platform 40-ish tiles up. Had one of my janky summons kill everything. Was done with the entire minibiome in less than five minutes.

 

[Korin]

AFK platform 40-ish tiles up. Had one of my janky summons kill everything. Was done with the entire minibiome in less than five minutes.

I am not far enough into Expert Mode to have "janky summons" to AFK with. How much marble do I need to make a minibiome.

 

[daimoth]

80 is the old minimum for artificial biomes, but I didn't do the math. The entire platform is pictured there, though. There's none hanging offscreen.

Marble caves are best left until mid to late hardmode. You can try to strongarm your way through earlier, but expect righteous pwnings.

 

[Korin]

I've been lucky in my dealings with the Marble Caves, I think. As soon as I zone into the area I make a bee-line for the exit. They seem to be pretty common occurrences though, just about every tunnel I've dug I've come across varying degrees of marble-ness.

It's very, very disheartening. Especially in ExpertMode.