How do the Ents spawn and what's the best way to deal with them?

Question

Sometimes, when chopping down trees, an Ent can be generated. (look at the picture below for reference)

These guys are pretty hard to kill, destroy you in a couple of hits and tirelessly follow you around the map.

My questions are:

• What triggers an Ent generation? Are they spawned randomly or they just stay hidden until you cut down trees near them? If the latter is true, is there a way to recognize them?

• How to deal with them? Do they eventually give up on following you or you just have to turn and face them? In this case what's the best setup? (I've been thinking Logsuit+Torch, but I've never been able to test it)

• Do they drop something valuable when defeated or just the usual logs+pine cones?

Answer 1

Whenever you cut down a tree there is a small chance (larger at night) that a nearby tree will turn into one of these, some call them an "Optimus Pine".

Also, burning trees down will increase the chance of waking it up.

There are several popular strategies to deal with them:

• Lay a campfire and kite the monster over it to set it on fire.
• There is a bug where if you use a tent to change your skin it will stop chasing you.
• Get a pig man to attack it and it will stop chasing you.
• Kite it to a swamp and have it kill tentacles for you until it dies.
• Plant several pine cones between you and the Optimus Pine, it will eventually settle down and turn back into a tree.

I have only killed one once, and if I recall correctly it dropped logs and pine cones. It didn't drop anything special.

Answer 2

I just killed two. I woke them up in the morning and was surprised when two of them came at me (as I thought you were only in danger of them spawning during evening and night). I've never previously survived against even one of them, since they were most common way in which I have died.

What I did was get away from my base. I torched a tree to ignite it and kept on running through the woods, as the other trees caught on, which in turn reignited the Ents. They then, very quickly turned to ash and monster meat, along with the whole forest, but I didn't like it anyway.

Answer 3

Fighting the Optimus Prime head on is another maybe risky option. But if you have the right timing you can kill one without taking any hits. Because the Pine attacks so slowly you can get 3 attacks in, move away to avoid his attack, go back in and attack 3 times, etc. Without too much difficulty. Having a spear to do this would help a lot since the Tree has a lot of health.