Glow Tulip

Every glow tulip in a world was placed when that world was generated. They never regrow, they never appear later, and nothing drops one. A small world holds a couple, a large one a handful, roughly split between the two ends of the map. Once they have been picked, that world is finished as a source and the only way to get another is to make a new world.

They sit near the far left and right edges, below the surface layer. The band worth searching starts a short way in from the world border and runs a couple of hundred tiles inward, from where the underground begins down to just short of the bottom of the world. They grow on open tiles with dirt, grass, mud, hive, stone or the evil stones underneath, and never in liquid, so flooded caverns can be ignored outright. The game also spaces them far apart, which has a practical consequence: combing one small area thoroughly is wasted effort, because finding one tells you nothing about where the next is. Cover ground instead.

A Metal Detector picks them up, which turns an aimless dig into a directed one and is close to mandatory. Without it you are relying on catching a glow at the edge of your torchlight, and the glow is a trap. Its light is almost exactly the shade that Xenon Moss gives off, so beside a moss patch the plant effectively disappears. Treat every stretch of that moss as somewhere you have to stop and look properly rather than run past.

A caveling gardener that trails along behind you. It is a pet, so there is no combat value whatsoever. The nice touch is how it keeps up: when you fly or outrun it, rather than falling behind, it drags itself through solid rock hanging off a snare plant and pops out beside you. It is a crossover with Core Keeper, where the tulip is a common crop and the gardener is something that plants those snares to kill you with.

• If both edges come up empty after a real search, the world may simply have none. There was a run of versions that generated worlds without any at all, and no amount of digging fixes that.
• The Rubblemaker can put a tulip back down as scenery, so you can decorate with them if you find more than one.