Terraria – Golden Critter Farming Guide (Journey Mode)

This guide will show you the best techniques and set-ups required for effectively farming every gold critter in the game.

This guide is meant to be used by journey mode players who wish to research them, but could be used to help normal players who are having trouble finding them.

Journey Mode Golden Critter Farming Guide

Starting Out

The first thing you’re gonna need to know, is what tools work best, and what environment you’ll need to make all this work, so I’ll go over it step by step..

Here’s a very basic list for things that will assist with critter farming.

  • Village NPCs ( Encourages/Enables Critter Spawning)
  • x10 Spawn Rate
  • Water candles (+Critter Spawn)
  • Battle Potions (+Critter Spawn)
  • Walls (Prevents hostile spawning entirely, but can also decrease spawning in general. Not reccomended)
  • Garden Gnomes (+Luck)
  • Groping ladybugs (+Luck)
  • Luck Potions (+Luck)

Firstly, you’re going to want your farm to either be on the side of, or ON your village. NPC’S completely disable the spawning of enemies, except on expert mode (I farmed on master mode so bleh). This is a big factor when encouraging critter spawns.

Secondly, you need a boss arena.. Why? Because having a few layers of platforms will encourage mob spawning. I only had around 3 levels of platforms, all on-screen, and that seems to help a lot. Besides, if you only tried to critter-farm on a single flat plain, that’d make your critters a LOT more vulnerable to a random slime popping up and nomming them.

Next, are water candles and battle potions.. I’m not sure if they stack with the x10 Spawn Rate Slider, but I use them anyway.

Walls are an optional way of discouraging enemy mob spawning, but I’ve found they also discourage critter spawning to a degree.. Using them at ground-level seemed to help with preventing slimes from appearing so often, and didn’t effect ground-spawning critters from spawning like rabbits squirrels and birds. But, putting walls around the platforms in the air seemed to mess with the spawn rates of ANY mob, hostile or otherwise.

Luck could be an entirely negligable factor in this, but I still use it regardless.. Dot some garden gnomes around your arena, and always have a stack of greater luck potions on hand when farming.. Every little bit counts.

After you’ve got all this set up, you’ll want to grab a “Guide to Critter Companionship” for obvious reasons, and also a weapon that can easily take out mobs from long range, typically something homing. You could use a chaingun with chlorophyte bullets or something, but you’re gonna want something that can 1-2 hit mobs, as using anything that doesn’t kill them quickly may bounce them back into a critter. Personally I use the spectre staff, since it kills master-mode slimes in 1-2 hits, and actively homes on them.

Now all that’s left is to check your power menu settings. Disable weather/wind changes, freeze the time to noon, and, once you’re completely ready and in-position, set that spawn rate to x10 and get farming!

Other Tips

Remember to catch EVERY CRITTER you see, regardless if you need it or not, this does two things. It actively keeps the spawn pool low so more critters can appear, and it helps kill time and keep you focused.. Plus the movement from going towards them can also encourage critters to spawn offscreen.

I find it better to stay in one place and occasionally move 3-7 blocks to the left and the right, rather than run full speed back and forth across a distance, when it comes to encouraging spawns. In most cases, staying perfectly still in an optimal location will get you a lot more critters than moving will.

Freezing Time does NOT inhibit spawn rates.. It does however stop passive terrain generation like grass from growing, corruption spreading, ect.

Bunnies, Squirrels, and Birds

Bunnies are the easiest and most common of the golden critters.. I shouldn’t have to tell you how to even farm these, or to farm them in general.. I already had these researched acquiring them passively before I even began officially farming for gold critters.

As for squirrels and birds, don’t bother specifically farming for them, you will undoubtedly run into enough to research while trying to farm ladybugs, and butterflies.

Don’t be discouraged by this lackluster entry, the rest go into great detail!

Worms

Additional/Special Tools Needed: Can of Worms

Research “Can of worms”, grab a stack of them, and spam right click. I got 3 gold ones before I even got through the stack. Maybe your luck will be different, but there ya go.

Ladybugs

Make sure the weather is set so wind never changes, and set the wind to maximum in one direction.

This will enable ladybugs to spawn.

Stay in one place, and shimmy a small distance from left to right to encourage spawning, and eventually some clusters will appear for you. They’ll usually appear on boss-arena platforms a lot more than on the ground, I find.

I obtained all of my gold squirrels and birds while farming for ladybugs, and my collection chest had 3 extra gold bunnies, and 2 squirrels. That should help give you an idea of how long it took to farm these suckers..

Don’t forget to “touch” some of them once in a while to get that invisible luck buff!

Butterflies

Butterflies have a random spawn rate set per day. So to get the setup you need, pause time, and flip back and forth between midnight and noon, waiting a minute at noon to see how many tend to spawn.

Make sure to give this some time.. You might get 1-2 in a group, and have nothing happen for a minute, then suddenly see a group of 7, so give it a few solid minutes before deciding to skip to another day if you think the spawn rates aren’t high enough..

You can tell you have a good day for farming if you’re getting groups of 2-5 about every other minute, or faster.

Stay in one spot, and let them spawn offscreen, only going to catch them after it looks like a full group has appeared on screen.

This will take a VERY long time, but I got it done over the course of 2-3 days, so it’s not that terrible.

You won’t have to worry as much about mobs killing the critters, since most of the time they’ll spawn in the air.

The wiki says there is a 1/150 chance for a golden butterfly to spawn.. During my entire time farming for them, I kept a chest where I put all critters caught in it from start to finish. You tell me if this sounds like 1/150 to you..

[This does not include non-butterfly mobs caught]

  • 344 Monarch (5% bait)
  • 344 Sulphur (10% bait)
  • 265 Zebra Swallowtail (15% bait)
  • 209 Ulysses (20% bait)
  • 152 Julia (25% bait)
  • 84 Red Admiral (30% bait)
  • 32 Purple Emporer (35% bait)
  • 10 Tree Nymph (50% bait)

Dragonflies

Additional/Special Tools Needed: Normal Bug Net, Medusa’s Head, water-walking potion/effect.

Carve out a very long lake near a village. You want to make sure the water is only 7 tiles deep, any deeper and cattails won’t grow.

Now speed up time to x12-x24 (Whatever your comp can handle. Mine is stable at x12 but chugs going any faster), and just wait for the cattails to grow.. Once you have at least one fully grown cat tail every 6 or so blocks along the lake, you’re ready to go.

Pause time, crank up the spawnrate, and enjoy the farming.

Those cattails are precious.. The dragonflies will only spawn if they are fully matured, so making sure to avoiding breaking them is extremely important, but this is where medusa’s head and bug net come in..

Medusa’s head is one of only two weapons in the entire game that can deal non-physical damage, meaning it can damage mobs without breaking grass or other things. The other weapon is “Life Drain”. Use either one you prefer.

As for the normal bug net, unlike the golden net, it will NOT break grass/cattails when swung, allowing you to run at the dragonflies full speed ahead without worrying about trimming the cattails.

Helena Stamatina
About Helena Stamatina 1520 Articles
I love two things in life, games and sports. Although sports were my earliest interest, it was video games that got me completely addicted (in a good way). My first game was Crash Bandicoot (PS1) from the legendary studio Naughty Dog back in 1996. I turned my passion for gaming into a job back in 2019 when I transformed my geek blog (Re-actor) into the gaming website it is today.

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