How quickly can I trigger a statue?

Question

I finally found my first Bunny Statue and want to wire it up so that I can farm it for a Bunny Hood when the next Blood Moon hits. However, information on how best to wire up a statue seems somewhat sparse.

I know that each tile of a statue can be triggered individually, so output can be tripled by "checkerboarding" the wires, but I've also seen a diagram (which I now cannot find) showing how to trigger all six tiles by exploiting the rules by which current travels through wires. Similarly, I can't find information on why one would use timers vs. pressure plates or dart traps vs. lava.

What is the most productive way (in spawns over time) to wire up a statue?

Answer 1

Statues (at least in my experimentation of building a fish farm) have a hard delay of about half a second before they spawn another monster, in addition to a limit on the number of alive monsters spawned at once (which is 3, if I remember correctly).

The optimal spawn setup seems to honestly just use a timer (one second, of course) hooked up to part of the statue, then a series of pressure plates near an area enemies are going to walk on. Reason being, their motion will try to trigger the spawn again instantly. This works especially well if you have it hooked up to a dart trap, as enemies will often jump at walls and retrigger the buttons repeatedly as long as they're trying to get at you, sending darts out all the time.

In my experimentation having more than two input lines in this setup doesn't change a whole lot in terms of rate of action.

One thing to remember is that wires in Terraria are not like Minecraft -- they do not have "on" and "off" states. They simply "pulse". So while a lever may look like it changes states, every time you click on it, it pulses a signal again.

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I will say, though, that I haven't experimented with multiple one-second timers. I don't think it'd do much other than provide a more reliable rate (if you can even get them desynced in the first place)...

Answer 2

I have wired up a set of 3, 1-second timers feeding pulses to my bunny and fish statues. During a blood moon, I've seen a significant increase in corrupt bunny/fish production vs. one or two timers. I don't have the "data", but I empirically proved it based on gold generated by a pair of fish statues.

I used something similar to this:

Note: this image does, in fact, touch all 3 statues 3 times. It doesn't look like that wire for the rightmost timer touches the bunny on the right or the fish, but it does trigger them. It's because the space a statue visually uses isn't the target. It is considered to be in the entire 2x3 space. If it helps, put a tall, broad statue there like the Queen or an Armor statue to help visualize where the space is, then replace it.

Since I don't have the numbers, it's merely anecdotal evidence, but I suggest you wire up 3 timers to a fish statue and test it yourself.

On a side note: I think the thin layer of lava is vastly superior to dart traps for killing the bunnies/fish. I tried both, and the lava is much faster and more reliable.