Pirate Invasion

A pirate invasion is a hardmode march on your spawn point and the friendliest of the invasions to fight. It enters from one side of the world, reaches spawn after somewhere between 35 and 70 seconds depending on world size, and ends once you have killed enough of it. Clear one and the Pirate moves in as a town NPC.

It is also one of the best money events in the game, which is the real reason people keep summoning it long after the Pirate has unpacked.

The natural roll sits behind the goblin army. Each dawn the game checks for goblins first and only considers pirates if that check fails. On top of that you need hardmode, at least one destroyed altar, somebody at 200 or more maximum health, and no invasion already active.

Worked through, the first pirate invasion lands at about 3.3 percent per dawn and later ones at about 1.6 percent, which averages to roughly one every twelve hours of play, then one every twenty hours. That is slow enough that most people summon it instead. A Pirate Map drops from any enemy killed in the ocean during hardmode, and pirates themselves drop maps when the fight happens at the ocean, so one invasion can pay for the next.

180 kills solo, plus sixty for every extra player carrying 200 or more health when the event begins. Some enemies count for more than one, so the bar can move faster than the body count suggests. Progress lives in the world file, so dying or logging off changes nothing about it.

No pirate has a piercing attack. That single fact makes this the invasion you can cheese hardest. Seal yourself behind a wall with a one tile gap and shoot out through it. A Daedalus Stormbow firing Holy Arrows down through the ceiling is the classic version, and a yoyo, Magic Dagger or flying knife through a slot in the wall works just as well.

The exception is the Pirate's Curse. Killing a Pirate Captain spawns one, it travels through blocks, and it hits hard enough to end an unattended setup. Any wall plan needs an answer for it.

The Flying Dutchman is the other outlier. It is a ship rather than a body, it fires from range, and it keeps producing pirates for as long as it is alive.

• Money. A Flask of Gold worn across a full invasion tends to land somewhere around fifty gold, which is a legitimate income strategy for that point in a world.
• Endless spawns. The Flying Dutchman produces pirates continuously. Trap it, or just stop shooting at it, kill only what it launches, and you have a spawner that never dries up. Add a Slime Staff plus a Lucky Coin and the coins accumulate on their own.
• Biome keys. Keys roll off the biome you are standing in rather than the enemy type, so a small artificial biome built near spawn or near a town NPC turns every invasion into a key attempt.
• Accessories. The Discount Card, Gold Ring and the coin-luck accessory all drop here and all feed the same money build, with the Coin Gun waiting at the end of it.

Pirates are individually tougher but strategically simpler. Nothing here teleports the way a Goblin Sorcerer does, and nothing comes close to a Goblin Warlock firing through your walls. Every tactic that worked on the goblin army works better on this one, which is worth remembering if you built an arena for the earlier event and assumed you would need a new one.

One thing is easy to miss: after Plantera is dead, a single completed pirate invasion unlocks Land Mines at the Demolitionist, and nothing announces it.