Solar Pillar

Killing the Lunatic Cultist drops four towers into the world at once, spaced roughly evenly across the map near the surface. There is no summon item and no way to call one early. They stay put apart from a slow bob, so the event comes to you. Each tower owns a wide circle of world: step inside and the sky takes its color, the background swaps for its planet, and ordinary spawns stop dead. Only that tower's own monsters appear, and they are the real fight.

A fresh tower cannot be scratched. The barrier around it only drops after you clear a hundred of its attendant enemies. You get feedback while you work: each kill sends a colored spark drifting back toward the tower, and once the sparks stop appearing you have already hit the number. The barrier also turns more transparent as it weakens, and on the color lighting modes it throws a visible ring outward when it finally breaks. The boss health bar helps too, since the shield sits as a blue layer over the red one, and switching on the health bar numbers shows exactly how many kills are left.

Dying costs you nothing here. Leaving the world wipes the count, so finish a tower in one sitting. Once the shield is gone the tower is close to a free kill, since it never moves and barely fights back, but enemies keep arriving until it dies. Later runs are much shorter, because the requirement falls sharply after you have beaten the Moon Lord once.

The melee tower has the longest enemy list of the four, and most of it is stuck to the ground. That sounds convenient until you take off. The Crawltipede ignores anyone standing on something solid and hunts anyone who is not, at speed, and only the orb on its tail takes real damage. Platforms, planter boxes and even a grappled wall count as ground for this purpose. Corites dive straight through terrain, so walls never fully seal an area. Selenians bounce anything that is not a rocket back at you mid-spin, which quietly rules out most guns and bows here. The tower itself lobs fire in high arcs, though a single hit destroys those in flight. A two-story hut built at the edge of the spawn radius funnels nearly everything into one killable line.

This is the only tower where terrain protects you properly. Nothing it spawns passes through blocks, so a bunker behaves exactly as you would hope, at the cost of a slow fight since these enemies prefer range anyway. Storm Divers hover and fire spreads that hurt more the further out you are, so closing distance beats backing off. Alien Queens spit goo that locks your vertical movement for several seconds, which exists to set up a shotgun blast you cannot dodge, so kill divers before they reach your altitude. A dead queen leaves larvae that mature into Hornets and then into more queens, so a swarm feeds itself. Pen hornets just outside the spawn radius and harvest them on repeat and that loop becomes your shield break. Watch for midair portals: each one either drops a lightning bolt or spits out more hornets.

The only tower with no attack of its own, and often still the worst of the four, because nearly everything it spawns reaches through walls. Brain Sucklers attach to your head and black out the screen until you kill the one riding you. Evolution Beasts stop and release a slow purple orb that homes, ignores terrain, hits over and over and cannot be shot down, so its whole job is herding you into something else. Nebula Floaters blink around constantly, sometimes directly into your path, and their lasers are fast and accurate enough to end a run in two shots. Predictors hang back and fire tight spreads, and they are the only nebula enemy blocks will stop.

The summon tower spawns things that spawn more things. It draws linked constellations of stars above itself and drops a random enemy out of the final point, and Milkyway Weavers pull the same trick on their own. Star Cells split into smaller copies that grow back to full size, which is either a disaster in a cramped arena or the quickest shield break in the event, depending on whether you planned for it. Drag one clear of the tower, pop it, let the fragments mature, repeat. Splash damage does the opposite and wipes the whole family in one go. Flow Invaders hurl their entire stock of helpers at you the instant they die, so kill them with room to move. Stargazers hit brutally hard but need clear line of sight, which makes yoyos, minions and homing ammo the easy counter.

Set up travel before you kill the cultist. A pylon network or a line of Teleporters lets you choose which tower to open with instead of walking to whichever is closest. Take the one matching your class first, since the weapons each tower gives are a genuine power jump and the first set makes the other three much shorter.

• If your weapon hits through walls, dig in and let them come. That works well at solar and vortex, poorly at nebula.
• A Rocket Launcher fired from a fixed platform at the tower's altitude is viable, though on a large world the travel time runs close to a minute per shot.
• Once a shield is down, Vampire Knives at point blank against the tower heal faster than most of the event can hurt you.

Each tower that goes down prints its own status line, and the fourth starts a countdown: the screen shakes, the music drains to nothing, and the Moon Lord arrives about a minute later. Do not treat that gap as free time.

• Celestial enemies drop no coins whatsoever, which also makes them ineligible for generic rare drops like Biome Keys and Goodie Bags.
• Beds will not skip time while any tower still stands, and town NPCs will not attack one even standing right beside it.
• Towers and their enemies can spawn on background walls, so an area you thought you had built out is not necessarily off limits.