Pigron

Pigrons only exist after Hardmode begins, and only down in the Cavern layer standing on frozen ground: snow, plain ice, thin ice, pink ice or red ice. The ice is only half of the requirement. The game also reads which biome you personally count as being inside, and that reading is what picks the color. Corruption produces the purple one, Crimson the red one, Hallow the pink one, and the type of ice underfoot has no say in it, so a purple Pigron will happily rise out of pink Hallowed ice as long as your own biome reading says Corruption. You do not have to be in the Snow biome yourself, which surprises people who go looking in the wrong place. If you can arrange to be inside Corruption and Crimson at once, each variant rolls its own separate spawn attempt and you see roughly twice as many.

A Pigron that cannot see you fades to near transparency and swims straight through solid rock. It solidifies again as it begins its attack run, which is usually the exact moment you notice it exists. Losing line of sight for a sustained stretch is what flips it into that state, and that is the exploitable part: leave one a permanent view of you through a gap too narrow for it to fly through and it never phases at all. It stays visible, stays stuck on the far side, and can be shot down at your convenience.

They growl when they lock on and start closing the distance. In the quiet of an icy cavern you will almost always hear one before you can pick it out visually, and the noise is distinctive enough to be worth learning on purpose. A Hunter Potion takes the guesswork out completely by outlining even the transparent ones in red.

Pigrons sit under the strict spawn rules the game reserves for its rarer underground enemies, and every one of those rules is easy to break by accident. Nothing appears if a town NPC lives nearby. Nothing appears if the tile at your center has player-placed safe wall behind it, which rules out farming from inside a bricked-up bunker. Nothing appears if you have been standing perfectly still without touching an item or a movement key for the last few seconds, so an idle setup will not work either. Holding or placing a Shadow Candle suspends all of it at once, and that is the difference between a productive afternoon and an empty one.

A Pigron Statue produces them on demand with a random variant each time, which is by far the quickest way to fill all three Bestiary entries without building three separate biomes next to an ice field. The trade is that statue Pigrons are worth nothing. Before Hardmode they drop only banners, and they will never give up Bacon no matter what. Generated worlds occasionally wire a trap trigger into one of these statues by accident, which produces a hallway that answers a pressure plate with a live enemy.

• The name is pig and dragon jammed together, and the design nods at Pommy from the Bomberman games.
• Whatever color the one you killed was, its banner, its minecart and the mount from the Scaly Truffle all come out pink.
• The growl is a warped version of the sound a boss makes on being summoned, which is why it reads as more threatening than the enemy deserves.