FalconNL
Terrarian
I figured the release of 1.4 and its Journey mode would be a good reason to go for a completionist run in which I would research every available item. After having spent 173 hours, I've almost reached that goal, with 4966 out of 4979 obtainable items researched. Most of those were fun to get. The past 200-odd items have been somewhat tedious to obtain, but I can understand the desire to not make 100%-ing Terraria a walk in the park. Which brings me to the last 13 items, which are simply not fun to try to obtain. Specifically, they are:
Decorative Angler quest rewards
Specifically, the Life Preserver, Ship's Wheel, Compass Rose, Wall Anchor, Pillagin Me Pixels, Treasure Map, Goldfish Trophy, Bunnyfish Trophy, Swordfish Trophy, Sharkteeth Trophy, Ship in a Bottle, and Seaweed Planter. Running a simulation using the decompiled source code revealed that you have around a 0.1% chance to get any of these as a quest reward, meaning that completing the full set takes about 1000 completed fishing quests on average. I have completed over 200, and have gotten 5 out of these 12 so far. Even when you can duplicate every single quest fish and can speed up time, turning in another 800 fish is a mindless, repetitive strain injury-inducing task that I have no interest in undertaking, and likely neither does the rest of the player base, given that a mere 2% of them even bother getting to 200.
Gold grasshopper (+ Gold grasshopper cage)
A grasshopper has a 1/100 or 1/50 chance of spawning from a destroyed short or tall grass plant, respectively. Let's call it 1/75 on average. Each grasshopper has a 1/400 chance of being a gold grasshopper (value determined from the decompiled source code; the wiki is out of date on this). You need 3 gold grasshoppers to research them. All of which means that you have to destroy on average 75 * 400 * 3 = 90,000 grass plants to research gold grasshoppers, which is far beyond what is reasonable.
Gold water strider (+ Gold water strider cage)
An average of 1200 water striders will need to spawn before you see the three golden ones needed to research them. With how rare these are (I figure I average about 1 every extended visit to my oasis), this takes far too long to get.
Gold mouse (+ Gold mouse cage)
The only golden critter that doesn't spawn near towns, which means that if you use the default strategy for encountering rare creatures, i.e. setting the spawn rate to 10x, any mice that do spawn, golden or not, will be killed by enemies before you've even located them on screen. And I have no intention of spending a couple dozen hours of waiting for the required 1200 or so mice to spawn at the normal spawn rate.
Getting to the petition part of this post, I would suggest the following changes. Naturally, alternative solutions are perfectly acceptable as well.
Decorative Angler quest rewards
Specifically, the Life Preserver, Ship's Wheel, Compass Rose, Wall Anchor, Pillagin Me Pixels, Treasure Map, Goldfish Trophy, Bunnyfish Trophy, Swordfish Trophy, Sharkteeth Trophy, Ship in a Bottle, and Seaweed Planter. Running a simulation using the decompiled source code revealed that you have around a 0.1% chance to get any of these as a quest reward, meaning that completing the full set takes about 1000 completed fishing quests on average. I have completed over 200, and have gotten 5 out of these 12 so far. Even when you can duplicate every single quest fish and can speed up time, turning in another 800 fish is a mindless, repetitive strain injury-inducing task that I have no interest in undertaking, and likely neither does the rest of the player base, given that a mere 2% of them even bother getting to 200.
Gold grasshopper (+ Gold grasshopper cage)
A grasshopper has a 1/100 or 1/50 chance of spawning from a destroyed short or tall grass plant, respectively. Let's call it 1/75 on average. Each grasshopper has a 1/400 chance of being a gold grasshopper (value determined from the decompiled source code; the wiki is out of date on this). You need 3 gold grasshoppers to research them. All of which means that you have to destroy on average 75 * 400 * 3 = 90,000 grass plants to research gold grasshoppers, which is far beyond what is reasonable.
Gold water strider (+ Gold water strider cage)
An average of 1200 water striders will need to spawn before you see the three golden ones needed to research them. With how rare these are (I figure I average about 1 every extended visit to my oasis), this takes far too long to get.
Gold mouse (+ Gold mouse cage)
The only golden critter that doesn't spawn near towns, which means that if you use the default strategy for encountering rare creatures, i.e. setting the spawn rate to 10x, any mice that do spawn, golden or not, will be killed by enemies before you've even located them on screen. And I have no intention of spending a couple dozen hours of waiting for the required 1200 or so mice to spawn at the normal spawn rate.
Getting to the petition part of this post, I would suggest the following changes. Naturally, alternative solutions are perfectly acceptable as well.
- Once a player has completed 200 Angler quests, thus earning the 'Supreme Helper Minion' achievement, the Angler gains an additional speech option that leads to a vendor interface, where he sells all possible quest rewards. If this is too complicated from a coding perspective, an alternative solution would be to skip any quest reward that is in the player's inventory or storage after the 200th quest, similar to the way the accessory rewards are prioritized currently.
- Reduce the research requirements for golden critters from 3 down to 1.
- Increase the spawn rate for water striders.
- Make mice spawn near towns.