Devourer

The Devourer is a burrowing worm that appears in the Corruption. There is no summon and no trigger, it simply spawns while you are inside the biome, and it does not need corrupt blocks under it to do so. It is the rarer of the two things you meet down there, well behind the Eater of Souls, and once you are in Hardmode it gets scarcer still because World Feeders take most of its spawn slots.

It is covered by the standing rules that suppress spawns around an idle player. Hold completely still, use nothing and press no movement key for a few seconds and it stops appearing. A town NPC living nearby shuts it off too, and so does standing with safe background wall behind you. Being shoved along by a conveyor belt does not register as moving, and holding a kite does not register as using an item. A Shadow Candle cancels all of it, held or placed, which is exactly what the candle is for.

You get warning. There is a distinctive digging sound as one closes in, and dirt kicks up along the path it is tunneling. Every segment shares one health pool, so anything you hit counts, and weapons that stay in contact along a line do the most work. A spear, the Wooden Boomerang or a flail like the Ball O' Hurt all handle it well. The Tally Counter only ticks over visibly when you finish one off by hitting the head, though every kill is counted either way.

• Its banner and bestiary entry complete at half the kill count most enemies need.
• In a Purify this world it cannot spawn near the center of the map. The game measures that from the world spawn point rather than the true middle, so any other seed that relocates spawn moves the dead zone with it. Turn on Royale with cheese at the same time and Devourers never spawn anywhere at all.