Dye Trader

Two things have to be true. You need a spare house, and you need a dye, a dye plant, a strange plant or a dye vat sitting in your inventory while four other townsfolk already live in the world. Most players trip the item half by accident while gardening, so in practice he is gated on town size rather than on anything you have to go and find. The count is generous: the old man, the traveling merchant and town pets all add to it, while the skeleton merchant does not. None of this applies twice. If he dies later he comes back on his own without you having to hold anything.

The Dye Vat is the reason to visit. Everything you find in the world, the gems, the plants, the strange loot from fishing, only becomes a dye once you own one, so buy it the day he arrives and the rest of his shelf becomes optional. What is left is a thin handful of colors you cannot make yourself, and several of them are behind a condition rather than a price. A full moon brings out the two dramatic ones, a blood moon brings a red, and standing in a graveyard unlocks a fogged look, so if you want any of those specifically you are waiting for the world to cooperate rather than saving up. Team Dye only exists on a server, which is easy to forget when you are shopping in single player.

Once you reach Hardmode a quest option opens, and handing him a strange plant returns a stack of vials of one animated dye. That exchange is the only source for those dyes: no recipe makes them and no vendor sells them, so if you care about how your character looks at all, this is the part of him that matters.

The reward is random out of a pool that grows as you clear bosses, which cuts both ways. Turning plants in early gets you dyes sooner, from a short list you will fill quickly and then keep drawing duplicates from. Sitting on a stack until late gives you access to the ones that only appear near the end, at the cost of much longer odds on any single color. If there is one specific dye you are after, wait until it can appear and then hand in everything at once. Strange plants themselves come from ordinary gathering, so collect them as you go rather than farming for them.

He swings a curved sword at anything that gets close, and like every town NPC his numbers grow as you beat bosses, so he holds his own in a late blood moon better than his sprite suggests. That sword is also a drop from him, and it is the only way to get one, which puts it in the same awkward category as the other NPC weapons: obtainable, but you have to kill the shopkeeper to collect it.

Several of his possible names belong to Phoenician royalty. Phoenicia grew wealthy on purple dye harvested from coastal sea snails, and in Terraria the sea snail is the source of the purple dye ingredient, so the naming is a straight nod to that trade. He is written as snobbish and greedy about color, will criticize your outfit even when you are wearing his own clothes, and can be permanently restyled by dunking him in shimmer if you prefer the alternate look.