Terrarium

This is the glass box that turns a netted critter into furniture. Most of what a bug net catches ends up in one, but there are three exceptions worth knowing before you craft a stack of them. The small glowing fliers, the butterflies and the faelings want a plain bottle instead. Goldfish and pupfish need bottled water and become a fish bowl. Jellyfish, which you pull out of the water with a rod rather than a net, get a jar of their own.

Cages are also the only way to display a critter permanently. A caught critter in your inventory can be let go again, but once it is furniture it stays furniture unless you break the piece down in Shimmer.

Caged bunnies, penguins and goldfish are immune to the change that comes over their loose counterparts during a Blood Moon. That matters if you keep critters where you live, because a wandering bunny in your base turns hostile at the worst possible time and one on a shelf never does. Decorating with cages rather than free critters is the difference between atmosphere and an ambush.

Building one of every cage in the game is a serious glass project, measured in thousands of sand rather than hundreds, and there is no shortcut to gathering the critters themselves. Treat it as a display goal rather than a checklist. Craft the ones you actually want on a wall and skip the rest until you have a desert to strip mine and nothing better to do.

There is a loop worth knowing if you are playing Journey. Cage a rare critter, research the cage rather than the critter, then run the duplicated cage through Shimmer to get the critter back out. That gives you an endless supply of something you may only ever find once. It is the sane route to the golden variants, and the Gold Ladybug in particular, which are otherwise a matter of waiting and luck.

The game is named after the plural of this item, or at least one of the two acceptable plurals.