Dart Trap

You do not craft your first one. They are already sitting in the world, wired to pressure plates in cavern corridors and scattered through the Dungeon, and mining one gives you the trap to keep. Slimes cough one up now and then as a bonus drop. A harvested trap is inert until you wire it to something that sends it a signal, and it needs no ammunition after that, which is what makes it the backbone of most early farms. A hammer rotates it in ninety degree steps, so the direction it faces is entirely up to you.

Darts pierce, and a piercing hit puts a short immunity window on whatever it touched. Bunch traps together and most of the volley is wasted on a target that cannot be hurt yet. Give them roughly eight tiles of separation and every dart lands. Flood the corridor with honey and the darts slow enough that four tiles is sufficient, which is why serious farms are usually swimming in the stuff. This one number decides whether a wall of traps does four times the damage of a single trap or barely more than one.

A trap will not fire faster than its own cycle, so a fast timer just throws pulses at a barrel that is not ready. A one second timer only produces a shot every fourth tick, and a string of half second timers gets you closer to the real ceiling than any single timer does. The tidier answer is to stop using timers at all: run the signal through a teal pressure pad placed far enough down the line that the dart itself trips it, and you have a loop that fires at the maximum rate and keeps going until you log out. Chaining traps and pads together like this also gives you precise repeating clocks in a small footprint, which is handy when you want statues or other traps firing as often as they legally can.

The dart appears one tile ahead of the barrel, which has consequences. It passes through a single solid block directly in front, so you can bury the trap flush in a wall and it still works. Two traps in a row both fire without the front one eating the back one's shots. Actuated traps keep firing normally, so you can stack a line of them in the same space. And a pressure plate placed right in front will never be set off by the trap's own dart, which saves you an accidental feedback loop.

Darts fly a very long way before they expire, far past anything you can see, which is why long distance pad loops work at all. They move at half speed through water and a quarter speed through honey. That is a cost when you want reach and a tool when you want density, since slower darts sit in the air longer and let you pack the traps tighter.

A line of traps aimed across a mushroom or herb bed will cut the entire crop in one pass, faster than walking it with any tool. Plant on soil, keep the traps at the right height, and the harvest becomes a switch you flip on the way past.

On the receiving end they are one of the few things in the cavern layer that will genuinely kill a fresh character, and higher difficulties raise both the hit and the length of the poison. Holding any wiring item, the trap itself counts, lights up every wire on screen, which is the free way to spot a corridor before it spots you. A Mechanical Lens does the same without giving up your weapon slot and highlights wire in the dark as well.

• The sprite is a stone face spitting darts out of its mouth, the same gag every jungle temple in adventure film has been running for decades.
• Before Hardmode there are only two reusable traps you can actually relocate, this and the Geyser.
• It is also the base for the Venom Dart Trap, which is the upgrade worth saving spare traps for.