Angel Statue

For most of Terraria's life this was deliberate junk. It could not be placed, could not be equipped, and its tooltip said outright that it had no purpose. The Merchant still refuses to take it off your hands, and other townsfolk needle you for carrying one. Redigit has since confirmed the original plan was a double jump, a job that went to the Cloud in a Bottle instead. In 1.4.4 it finally got a real function: drop one into Shimmer and it becomes an Aether Monolith.

Statues are dug up rather than crafted. Worldgen scatters them through the underground and cavern layers, inside underground cabins and heavily through the Dungeon, and the Angel Statue is one of the few that also sits in chests. A world only seeds a couple of each type, a few more on larger maps, with cabins adding extras on top. Some never generate at all: the Lihzahrd trio only exists in the Jungle Temple, and the Turtle, Owl, Boulder and Bast statues have to come from elsewhere.

The Metal Detector does not read statues, but it reads the chest in the cabin beside them, which amounts to the same thing. A Spelunker Potion does the job visually. Both get less reliable once Hardmode ore and Life Fruit start outranking chests for the detector's attention.

All six tiles a statue occupies accept wire, and they all share one cooldown, so running six timers into a single statue gains you nothing. Spawners also survey their surroundings before firing: if enough of the thing they produce already exists within a circle around the statue, the pulse is wasted. Pre-placed Slime Statue, Bat, Skeleton and Crab Statue finds always arrive already wired to a pressure plate as a trap, and other statues occasionally get caught in nearby trap wiring by accident.

Statue enemies are a farm with rules. They never drop coins or food, and they are cut off from the shared loot pool, so no souls, no biome keys, and no Dungeon Spirit either, since that spawn keys off dropped coins. Most also require that you land damage personally before they die. Minion and sentry hits count as yours; lava, traps and town NPCs do not. Kills still register on the Tally Counter, in the Bestiary and toward banners, so grinding a banner out of a statue works as long as you are the one connecting.

Bunny, Fish and Penguin statues change character during a Blood Moon. Anything they produce converts to its corrupt or vicious form immediately, and the converted version is invisible to the spawn cap, so the statue never stops. Goldfish that start walking in the rain do the same, as do the explosive bunnies of a For the Worthy world. That is the standard Bunny Hood farm. The Bomb Statue dodges the cap by a different route, since bombs merge into one huge stack and the game counts a stack as a single object.

Blue Slimes, Crabs, Wall Creepers and Armed Zombies all keep dropping hearts and stars from statues even when something else kills them, which turns a timer, a statue and a strip of lava next to an arena into a supply line. It sidesteps the tight radius the Heart Statue and Star Statue enforce, with one catch: nothing banks up while you are full, the pickups only appear once you are already short. Half a second is the right timer interval for a lava pit, which is roughly how long the lava needs per spawn.

Life Drain also works on statue spawns, so a pit of weak enemies beside a boss arena doubles as a healing station. Slimes from a statue count toward the Slime Rain tally that brings out King Slime. And because cheap spawns are harmless, they get used as bodies to soak a heavy hit, or as the moving parts of bird and crab engines.

Roughly half the roster is pure decoration, letters and numbers included. Those and the critter statues are crafted rather than found, and the critter ones need Ecto Mist nearby, which means putting the assembler in a graveyard. Critters that come out of a statue cannot be netted; try it and they vanish in smoke. Statue spawns also refuse to transform in Shimmer and simply despawn instead. If you would rather not go looking, the Statue enemy drops statues, which makes the supply renewable.