Guide

Every ordinary world hands him to you at creation, standing next to your spawn point before a single wall exists. He does not need a house in order to be there, only in order to stay, and the first valid room you finish is the one he claims. Valid means enclosed by background walls with a floor and ceiling, a door, a light source, a table and a chair. There is no progression requirement and nothing to unlock first.

If something kills him he comes back on his own, provided a free house is standing and the sun is up. No town NPC returns at night. He is also not completely helpless: he shoots a wooden bow at anything that gets close, and switches to flaming arrows once Hardmode begins.

Show him an item and he lists everything it can be made into, along with the station each recipe needs. That is the fastest way to work out what an unfamiliar ore or drop is actually for, and it stays useful long after the advice stops being relevant. Two limits are worth knowing. The damage and critical figures shown on weapons in that list are adjusted by whatever you have equipped, so take your gear off if you want to compare base values between two options. And he knows nothing about Shimmer, so transmutations never appear in the list at all.

His advice tracks your progress, so the same option gives different answers before and after each boss and will point you at content you have not touched yet. If you are reading a database like this one you will outgrow it quickly. Still worth clicking once after each major kill, since it occasionally names a mechanic you had not met.

He is the reason your front door is open at three in the morning, and that joke is old enough that the developer built a way to take revenge on him. With the Guide Voodoo Doll equipped you can attack him directly, which is otherwise impossible for a town NPC. Kill him in the Underworld while holding it, or simply let him die down there with lava touching him, and the Wall of Flesh rises.

That makes him a progression gate wearing a friendly hat. It is the only route into Hardmode, and it happens on your schedule rather than the game's. Killing him also leaves a small temporary luck boost behind, which is a strange consolation prize but a real one.

He sells nothing, so his happiness cannot change a price and there is no reason to build around it. Put him wherever is convenient and ignore the complaints. The one placement with an actual payoff is the glowing mushroom biome next to the Truffle, who likes having him as a neighbor, which is a cheap way to make that corner of the world worth a pylon.

He is given a random name from a fixed list when he spawns, and one of them is Andrew, after the lead developer. A Guide carrying that name drops the Green Cap when he dies. The check runs against the internal English name rather than what you see on screen, so playing in another language does not break it, and renaming a different Guide to Andrew with a resource pack will not fake it.

Several special seeds replace him as the starting NPC. For the Worthy opens with the Demolitionist, Drunk worlds with the Party Girl, Not the Bees with the Merchant, Remix with the Tax Collector, and Vampirism with the Zoologist. He still exists in those worlds, he just is not the first face you see.

• After the Wall of Flesh has been beaten, any replacement Guide who moves in refers to his predecessor suddenly going up in flames. That is as close as the game gets to confirming the long running theory that the Guide and the Wall are the same being, and the Voodoo Demon bestiary entry backs it up by describing him as the one whose soul is tied to the world's guardian.
• He and the Arms Dealer do not get along, and will argue at each other through emotes, though neither one's mood is affected by it. The Mechanic and the Goblin Tinkerer flirt in the same way. Those four are the only NPCs with reactions to a specific neighbor.
• Dunking him in Shimmer gives him an alternate look based on the lead developer's own avatar. It changes nothing else, and putting him back in reverses it.
• He has the first entry in the bestiary, and appears in two of the game's paintings.