Angler

He starts the world asleep on the Ocean, either lying on the sand or drifting on the water surface, and he shows up on a random roll the same way the other tied-up NPCs do. Neither shore is guaranteed, so you may need to sit at a beach for a while, or leave the area entirely and come back later. Click him to wake him up, give him a spare house, and he moves in. A Lifeform Analyzer will flag him before you can see him, which turns a boring patrol into a quick check.

Nothing gates him. No boss, no Hardmode, nothing: he can join on your first day, which puts him in a tiny group with the Guide, the Stylist and the Golfer. Killing the sleeping version does not lose him permanently, and if the moved-in version dies he comes back once a house is open. He also fights, throwing Frost Daggerfish at anything that wanders near, and he scales up as the world does.

He is not a vendor. His entire function is handing out one fishing request per day, and that request is picked at dawn whether you talk to him or not. Skip a day and it is simply gone. Ask him for the quest anyway, because he tells you which biome and which depth the fish lives at, and hunting blind wastes an enormous amount of bait.

A quest fish will only bite while its request is active, and only when you are not already holding one. Handing it over is the whole turn-in; it makes no difference whether you caught it that morning or a week ago. You can even hook a quest fish before he has appeared in the world at all, though most of them live somewhere specific enough that stumbling onto the right one is pure luck. One quirk of multiplayer worth knowing: the day's request is tied to the character name, so two players sharing a name cannot both claim in one world.

The inventory restriction is the thing to work around. A chest, the ground and the trash slot all sit outside what the game counts as carrying one, so park your first catch and the next cast can produce another. Quest fish stack, which means a stack parked in the trash slot has no practical limit. Holding one on the cursor does not count as carrying it either, though sliding it back into a real slot blocks the next catch again until you move it out.

Save the awful ones. Anything living in the Corruption, the Crimson, the Jungle or the Underworld costs a real trip, and a shelf of spares turns a future request into a short walk to a chest. He will never ask for the other world evil's fish, so you only ever need to cover the one your world actually has.

Every completed request pays one item, some coins, and often bait. All three improve with your lifetime quest total, and that total belongs to the character rather than the world. Bring a veteran into a brand new world and the rewards start where you left off instead of at the bottom. Achievements work on a different counter again, pooling every character and every world you own, so a second character still pushes the same milestones forward.

Coins grow with the counter, then get multiplied in Expert and again in Hardmode until they hit a cap. Bait begins as a coin toss on whether you get any at all and becomes automatic after enough turn-ins, with the quality creeping toward Master Bait. The useful items follow the same curve: the listed odds are the worst case, and every quest behind you pushes the roll toward gear and away from potions. His mood is folded into the calculation too, so a Love Potion before you hand a fish over is a cheap, immediate improvement.

The list of things you actually want from him is short. Three of the information accessories he gives out combine into a sub-assembly of the Cell Phone. A different trio builds the Angler Tackle Bag, which the Lavaproof Tackle Bag is built on top of. The Bottomless Water Bucket is handed over on a fixed quest number rather than left to luck, and it no longer waits for Hardmode. The Golden Fishing Rod is the long-term prize.

Duplicate protection is on your side. Keep the accessories you already have on you and he will fill the gaps rather than repeating himself, right up until you own the full set. If you deliberately want a second copy, strip the originals out of your inventory and your personal storage before turning in. Furniture is rolled separately on top of the main reward, and it becomes guaranteed once your count is high enough.

• Build small copies of the awkward biomes near your base. Travel, not fishing, is where the time goes.
• Keep the information accessories you already own on you when you turn in, so the duplicate protection works in your favor rather than handing you a third copy of something.
• Shimmer will cycle one of those accessories into another, which is a way to finish a set without waiting on more rolls.
• If the game has not autosaved since a turn-in, quitting without saving lets you reroll the reward.
• In multiplayer, jumping the clock to dawn does not clear the cooldown. Setting it to midnight and letting it run through does.
• Journey Mode removes the problem entirely, since you can research a quest fish and skip the day outright.

He is a child, and the game goes out of its way about it. He puffs into smoke instead of dying properly and his death notice says he left rather than that something killed him, almost certainly to protect the game's rating. His lines make him an orphan, he is allergic to bees, the Tavernkeep will not pour him a drink, and he is openly unbothered by whether you survive the errands he sends you on. Drop him in Shimmer and he turns into a kappa, the river child of Japanese folklore, which lines up neatly on both counts.