Drops
Banner
Every 50th kill of this enemy drops Antlion Banner.where they wait
Antlions are not summoned and no event brings them out. On the surface they only appear in deserts during daylight, which is backwards from most of the game, and in the underground desert they turn up at any hour. That daytime restriction means a surface desert is at its worst when you would normally feel safest, and crossing one after dark is the quieter option.
the firing arc
One sits buried with only its head above the surface. When you come into view it swivels to face you and lobs a ball of sand every few seconds, but the throw only covers a cone above it, roughly forty five degrees to either side. Anything approaching from level ground or from lower down is mostly outside that cone and the shots sail over. Dropping into it from a ledge is how people take the damage.
only the head counts
The body behind the head is scenery. Shots pass straight through it without registering and walking into it does nothing, so an attack that clearly connected and dealt nothing hit the wrong half. Aim at the part sticking out of the ground and ignore the rest.
the sand it throws is real sand
Every ball that misses becomes an actual block where it lands, the same way the Sandgun works. Over a long fight that quietly builds a slope around your feet and can bury the spot you were standing on, which matters more than the damage in a narrow tunnel. It also makes sand renewable, at a pace nobody would call farming. The projectile cannot hurt other enemies, but the sand it turns into can once it starts falling.
one odd behavior
Faced with a wall that runs straight up toward you, an antlion climbs it instead of burrowing back down. It is very slow about it and it looks broken, but that is the only situation in which the thing moves at all.
trivia
- Real antlion larvae dig funnel pits and flick sand at prey trying to scramble up the sides, which is exactly what this does. The adult form is in the game too, as the Antlion Swarmer.
- It is one of the very few things besides you that can put blocks into a world at all.
- The head has a numbered enemy ID like everything else. The body does not, and is filed under its own name in the game files.