Fallen Star

Nothing summons them and nothing gates them. Once the sun goes down, stars start dropping out of the top of the sky across the entire world, not just near you, and they keep coming at a steady rate all night. They spawn in the band of sky at the very top of the map and fall until something stops them. On the ground they give off light, so they are easy to pick out from a distance in the dark. At sunrise, every one still lying on the ground is gone.

How many fall depends on two things you do not control. Bigger worlds produce more per night, because there is more sky to fill. On top of that the game rerolls a rate multiplier every evening. Most nights land near normal or a little above, but now and then it picks a starfall and throws down several times the usual number. Moon phase does not matter, and neither does where you stand horizontally.

On Expert and above, a share of stars stop falling at random and start coming down near you, angled toward wherever you are. The conditions are mild: you have to have moved or used something in the last minute, and you have to be above ground rather than down a cave. It quietly makes collecting far less of a chore on higher difficulties, as long as you spend the night doing something outdoors.

The efficient setup is a long flat run you can sweep at speed, or a platform bridge strung across the sky at the bottom of space. Keep it level. Diagonal platforms tend to let stars slip past instead of catching them. After that it is a question of covering ground, since they land everywhere and standing in one spot wastes most of the night.

• Sleeping in a Bed fast forwards the clock, so stars pile up quicker in real time. Sleep through most of the night, get up, and collect.
• Journey Mode time acceleration does the same thing harder, and at its top setting a full night of collecting takes almost no time at all.
• A long trip just before dawn is worth more than an early one, because everything that fell all night is still sitting there.
• Hoiking stars to a collection point works, but they have to be pushed into the hoik with active stone or actuated blocks, which makes it an expensive build for what it gives you.
• A stretch of ground that never seems to receive any is usually shadowed by a floating island catching them first. It is a free way to locate one.

The dawn rule applies to any loose star regardless of how it got there, including ones you drop out of your own inventory. Anything you have picked up is safe indefinitely, in your pockets or in a chest. Handing stars to another player during the day therefore means using storage as the middleman rather than throwing them on the floor. If your inventory is full, an ammo slot will take a stack, since the star weapons fire them straight out of it.

The first stars you gather should go into Mana Crystals, and if you plan to touch magic at all you want that done early rather than dribbled out over hours. After that they behave like a general crafting currency that keeps reappearing in recipes across the whole game, so a stockpile rarely goes to waste. The ammo use is real but narrow. Only the star guns take them, and feeding one a stack burns through a night of collecting fast.

A star that comes down on an enemy or a critter deals an enormous amount of damage on its own, far past anything you have access to that early. It happens rarely enough to be a novelty rather than a tactic. In a normal world they cannot hurt you.

Those world types invert the whole thing. Stars falling from the sky no longer leave an item behind when they land, so the night collecting routine is off entirely. Instead you get them out of pots and as a bonus drop from slimes, which turns star gathering into ordinary farming. They can also hurt you in those worlds, which they cannot anywhere else.

Using a star does nothing except hold it over your head with a sound, a leftover from the old versions where they were eaten for mana. Put one in an item frame and it stays fully lit in the dark. Freezing time in Journey Mode stops them falling at all.