Other Petition to the devs: I've researched 4966 out of 4979 items; the last 13 are just plain not fun. Please throw completionists a bone

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has a 1/400 chance of being a gold grasshopper (value determined from the decompiled source code; the wiki is out of date on this).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.
  • 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.
Terraria is a great game, and one worthy of being completed 100%. Sadly, doing so is currently impractical from a time or even physical health perspective. Please throw completionists a bone and make some minor tweaks to make getting the final handful of items not a complete exercise in frustration.
 
I just registered this account to talk about the Angler rewards too.

Specifically, the new "improved chances" for accessories is way overtuned, and potentially not intended. Once the bonus chances kick in, he rarely gives out anything but accessories. It's very bad after 100 quests, and absolutely worse after 150.

Which is ironic because this change was supposed to make him give out more useful stuff, but the player really only needs one of each accessory, whereas there is actual value in getting more of the decorations and potions.

Either the chances need to be reduced, or the duplication protection needs to be extended.

The only sane way to get the decorations now is to make new characters before their "improved chances" bonus kick in. There used to be a "bug" that resets this bonus after 150 quests, so everything becomes obtainable again, but this is "fixed" in 1.4. I don't imagine this is the intended way of play.

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As for the other golden critters, the grasshopper is eluding me too but the other two I can offer some tips. I got them relatively quick.

For the waterstrider, just dig out a long stretch of 2-tile deep water trench in your jungle. Build a few floating houses above it to house some NPCs to convert it into a town. This prevents hostiles from spawning. Do the other usuals like luck and water candle as well, and then turn up the spawn rate to max. Equip your water-walking boots and golden net and just farm away. You will get a lot of frogs, but there will be waterstriders too. Their spawn seem dependent on time of day/weather? I'm not sure about the exact conditions, but if they aren't there just try a different time. When they do spawn, they are plenty and definitely not rare.

Don't do this in the desert/oasis because you'll get lots of grebes and dragonflies and scorpions there.

The mouse is easy too. You can set up an AFK farm for it. The design I used is similar to HappyDays' "Terraria Step By Step Farm" on YouTube. The only addition I made was adding a row of platform above the lava to catch the mice. The regular enemies will still jump into the lava to die, but the mice won't. (I had some minions and sentries up too to help with hostiles that don't jump into the lava.) After a while you'll get a lot of mice accumulated on the platform and you can catch them all in one swoop with your net.

===

Of the golden critters, I'm missing grasshopper, butterfly, and dragonfly. For the grasshopper I've set up a huge grass farm with multiple rows, and I'm sure I'll get it eventually.

The butterfly I've seen it on my radar a few times, but it's really hard to tell where it actually is, and it just despawns when I look the wrong direction. It seems to be similar in colour as the regular yellow butterfly too, so it's confusing for me.

The dragonfly seems dependent on the cattails, but the cattails get destroyed so easily, I haven't figured out to farm these properly.
 
I was about to submit a bug report on the Angler decorations actually, that doesn't seem intended.. your calculations were about spot on for me, I got my last decoration after my 1022th quest. I figured out a very streamlined system to do them in journey mode, but God help anyone who wants all the decorations in classic! (I'll describe my system at the end if anyone's interested)

As for the gold critters, I mostly agree on the grasshopper- I built a massive structure with teleporters to rapidly farm grass, and it still took about an hour after completing the build. They're pretty painful to get even with maxed luck.

Water striders and dragonflies were pretty easy though, I built a simple wide shallow desert oasis for that, and used a regular bug net to avoid destroying cattails. I think I had actuated dart traps arranged facing the player on a timer while I let enemies spawn with a battle potion, which killed grebes and pupfish off but not dragonflies or striders (since those mostly stay in the same place)

Golden seahorses were way more annoying for me, since I don't like destroying my ocean biome and half the critters there are uncatchable.

As for mice, there's a neat way to autofarm those by abusing the fact that they can go through one tile gaps, Lana mentioned it already, it worked wonders for me ^^

Oh but one thing I hate is farming the Lunar Cultist, since it also means killing the Pillars unless you savescum. It's definitely less awful than farming the Terragrim, but it seems completely in-flavor for Terragrim to suck to farm lol.

~~How I did the awful Angler grind~~
1: Research every quest fish on one character for a given world, but not the opposing evil fishes. If you already researched the opposing evil fishes that's ok, just put two chests filled with one copy of each possible fish and let a new character research them all.

2: completely empty the inventory on that character, including ammo and hotbar, type "quest" into the duplication menu, and add *every* fish that comes up. Easiest to do with holding left shift. There are enough inventory slots for every fish including hardmode fish.

3: Loop angler quest turnins with day/night time flicking until about half the fish are used up, ignoring when you don't have the right fish.

4: throw away non-stackable rewards, put bait into ammo slots and other stackables in hotbar for convenience.

5: In the duplication menu, hold left shift and readd any fish that have the "quick add" cursor appear. These are the fish you've turned in already!

In this way, you minimize clicking and menu searching and maximize quest turn in speed. I also built an isolated room to keep Angler in my interaction range.

Hopefully that helps until this stuff gets patched! (And I do think it will get patched)
 
OMG I'm so used to the golden net I didn't even think to switch back to the regular net. I've destroyed so many cattails. I shall try that.
 
It took me a while to think of switching too, I was trying all kinds of silly setups with platforms and such to avoid hitting cattails until it dawned on me that there might be a simpler solution lol
 
I haven't seen this anywhere, was gonna create a thread on it, but basically I'm having the same problem with the Beastiary: see Sand Sharks.
I can kinda get behind getting all the zombie variants, but the Sand Shark is extreme. First of all, it's variants are all Evil or Hallow and it only spawns in the desert, which basically means at some point you need every type of desert in your world. Not only that, but it only appears during EXTREMELY rare sandstorms. I haven't even seen a sand storm yet and I'm 90% on the Beastiary, actually, after Halloween and Christmas event there basically is nothing left for me to do but farm Blizzards and Sandstorms and finish out the Super Rares, the Tim, Nymph, Bloodmoon baby bosses, etc, the stuff that has conditions that are so rare they can't be farmed or predicted.

They need to add some type of item that forces Windy conditions or add some way to trigger wind to occur because Blizzards and Sandstorms are super are, their spawns are more rare than the Nymph for me at this point.
 
In general the Angler stuff could be fixed if he wouldn't give you stuff that you have in your inventory/equip slots (not piggy bank etc.) or its upgraded forms.

Critter stuff is bad too, especially as you have to fill out the bestiary anew for each world.
 
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It's very helpful and convincing to see all the stats in this suggestion.

I'd like to reiterate the point about 2% of players getting the 200 angler quests achievement. In the three weeks since your suggestion that number has only gone up to 2.1%. That's well below other achievements, except for the other two unpopular achievements. Which are also for angler quests! Clearly people are not that fond of them, which is okay, it's fine for things in the game to have niche appeal. But the jump from do 25 quests, to do 50, to do 200, is insane! That is so many in-game days, so many repeated rewards. It's encouraged me to stash up on quest fish and keep duplicates next to the angler, because I know I've got a long grind ahead of me to get that achievement.

OP is clearly very determined and has put in an exceedingly impressive effort (in many things besides the fishing quests too). I don't think they should have to look at the angler again after doing 200 quests. Everything should drop by the time you've put in that much effort.

Apparently new achievements are coming in a future version. I really hope they change Supreme Helper Minion to 100 quests.
 
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