Blood Moon Rising

This is a Dungeon painting, and Dungeon paintings are placed by a two step roll. The game picks a size first, favoring the small frames by a wide margin, then picks a specific painting from the list for that size. The small list is short, so the handful of small Dungeon paintings, this one included, turn up constantly on a normal sweep through. The large ones are individually much rarer, and The Guardian's Gaze is the rarest of the lot because it has to win the same unlikely roll twice over.

Paintings hang on background walls, so you need a wall behind them and a pickaxe or hammer to take one down. Nothing stops you hanging one anywhere you like, and a Dungeon painting in a normal house is a cheap way to break up a plain wall. Spotting them underground is the fiddly part, and the usual search tools help: a Spelunker Potion, the Magic Lantern, Spelunker Glowstick and spelunker flares all highlight paintings the same way they highlight ore, which turns a dark cabin into an obvious target from a distance.

Completing the collection is not a single activity. Some of the roster is simply bought, from the Painter, the Princess, the Golfer, the Zoologist, the Clothier and the Truffle, with the Traveling Merchant rotating through a large pool of his own. Everything else has to be found: underground cabins, desert cabins, the Dungeon, the Underworld, floating islands, the Jungle Temple and a living tree, plus paintings caught while fishing, pulled from goodie bags, dropped by Solar Eclipse enemies and handed over as Angler rewards. Biome crates were added to that list later on.

Waldo is the notorious one. It sits in the rare tier of a size group that is already uncommon in cabins, so most players finish everything else long before they see it.

The Catacomb hangs on a wall and behaves exactly like a painting, but the game does not count it as one, because it draws a different picture and frame every time you place it. Trophies, hanging skeletons, racks, animal skins and the Angler's nautical wall pieces all share the wall slot without being paintings either. Banners are the opposite trap: they look like wall decorations and actually hang off blocks.

The names in painting tooltips read like a credits list because that is what they are. Nearly all of them are developers, artists, testers and community figures under lightly altered names, with a few staff from the studios that ported or published the game mixed in. The frames are drawn to match a type of wood or block, and a small number of painting names shipped with wrong capitalization that has never been cleaned up.