Strange Plant

A Strange Plant does nothing on its own. It is a turn-in. Talk to the Dye Trader, pick the Strange Plants option in his dialogue, and he takes one off you and hands back six vials of a single dye that has no other source in the game. Which dye you get is random, and the pool of possible results widens as you beat more of the game, so plants handed in early can never produce the later colors. Thirty-three of these dyes exist in total, which is a lot of turn-ins if you are chasing all of them.

You can hand over a whole stack in one visit and he pays out for every plant, so there is no reason to space the trips out. There is also no reason to sell the plants raw. One plant is worth twenty silver at a vendor. The cheapest dye it converts into is worth seventy-five, and you get six of them.

They only start appearing once the world has entered Hardmode. After that they turn up at any depth and in most biomes, growing on Dirt, on any grass that uses dirt as its soil, and on moss covered Stone. Everything else on the list below is a hard refusal, and most empty farms are empty because of one of them.

• Never in the Underworld, and never sitting in lava or honey.
• Never within 240 tiles of another one, measured both across and up and down. A small area will only ever hold a single plant no matter how long you wait.
• Never in the outermost 95 tiles of the map, which works out at roughly 44 tiles in from the edge you can actually walk to.
• Never in the middle fifth of the map, measured left to right, at surface level or in space. That restriction lifts once you are underground or in the caverns. Remix and Zenith worlds allow the middle fifth up top as well, just at a lower rate.

Two things spot them for you. A Spelunker Potion highlights them the same way it highlights any other dye plant, and a single run along the surface under one covers ground faster than any amount of careful searching. A Metal Detector also registers them, which is the better option underground where you cannot see far ahead.

Floating islands are the sleeper source. They count as valid ground, and most people visit each one exactly once and never go back, so a lap around the islands you have already mapped often turns up several plants that have quietly grown in the meantime.

When you reach one, aim at the bottom center tile. The sprite fills what looks like a three by three space, but only that single tile is really there, and swinging at the leaves accomplishes nothing.

Because bare dirt qualifies, a farm is nothing more than a long flat run of Dirt built out in the open air with nothing else on it. Deliberately leave it grassless. Grass sprouts weeds and flowers, and every one of those sits in a space a Strange Plant could have taken, which drags your rate down. The same bare strip also produces Blinkroot on its own, since that wants the same conditions.

Size it around the 240 tile spacing. A short platform is capped at one plant forever, so length is the only thing that lifts the ceiling, and stacking two runs close above each other gains you nothing because the spacing applies vertically too. One long strip beats three short ones every time.

• There are four different sprites and the difference is purely cosmetic. Any of them can appear anywhere they are allowed, so do not go hunting a particular look in a particular biome.
• They cannot be replanted. A Clay Pot will not take one, so there is no way to grow them on demand.
• In Journey Mode the four sprites research separately, so full unlock costs you four sets rather than one.
• Picking up your first plant counts toward the Dye Trader moving in, so finding one before you have him is not wasted.
• Worlds made before these plants existed still grow them. It just takes a while before the first ones show up.