Golfer

He is tied up somewhere in the underground desert, and the requirement is looser than the biome name suggests. Any unsafe sandstone or hardened sand wall behind a spawnable spot is enough, so pockets of the right wall count even where the biome proper does not. He is rare, and easy to walk past in a desert with no real cave system, so bring a Hunter Potion to make him glow and a Lifeform Analyzer to name him before he is on your screen.

The underground desert turns vicious the moment the world flips, and the things living there afterward will find him before you do. He can be killed while he is still bound. If you hear a hurt sound you cannot account for, or catch damage numbers off in the dark, sprint toward it. In Expert and Master this happens fast enough that the rescue becomes a race. Losing him is not permanent, he turns up again eventually, but the second search costs you another hour.

Old worlds made before the underground desert existed can still produce him, and so can worlds where the desert is a solid mass of stone with nowhere to stand. Clear a small pocket where enemies can spawn, then run a tall column of naturally generated sandstone wall up behind it. Converting ordinary walls with a Clentaminator counts, and you do not have to convert them back afterward. The game reads those as world generated walls and lets desert spawns through, him included.

Nothing he sells is gated behind progression. It is gated behind your golf score, and the stock grows in steps as that number climbs: clubs first, then trophies and paintings. He is one of the few vendors you can fully unlock on day one if you feel like it, and one you can also ignore for an entire playthrough. In multiplayer the unlocks are tracked per player, so one person grinding a score does not open the shop for anybody else.

Distance is what scores, so the cheap route is vertical. Put a Golf Cup at the bottom of a hellevator, pack the top with Cobweb to catch and slow the ball, and hit downward. A handful of those covers more ground than an afternoon of honest holes, and it is enough to reach the point where his catalog is complete.

He likes living near the Angler. That specific pairing is one of the simplest early routes to an ocean pylon, since both of them are content at the beach and a pylon only needs two settled neighbors. Getting a coastal teleport running before Hardmode is worth more than anything on his shelves.

Once his stock is full you cannot buy back anything you sold him. Do not use him as a dumping ground for items you are unsure about, because at that point they are gone.

• Almost every name he can be given is a bent version of a real golfer or a character from a golf comedy.
• He is the zoologist's older brother, and his graveyard dialogue quietly says the rest of the family is gone.
• Shimmer turns him into a dog, which reads as a joke about his sister the werefox rather than a curse of his own.
• His quotes talk about wind affecting a shot. It does not.
• Burying him in an underground desert is a sand trap gag.