Stylist

She will not move into a spare house until you have freed her from a web in a spider nest down at cavern depth. The part that catches people out is that she is generated the way an enemy is, not placed when the world is made, so there is no marker to walk toward and no guarantee the nest in front of you contains her right now. Interact with the web to free her. From then on she takes any vacant house, and if something kills her later she returns on her own once a room is open.

Do this before you break into Hardmode. Wall Creepers are an inconvenience you can shrug off; Black Recluses turn the same errand into a fight you did not sign up for. Nothing gates her otherwise, so she can join a fresh character on day one.

Because she spawns on enemy rules, enemy tricks work. Sit with the nest just off the edge of the screen, wait, then step in and look, and repeat. Running in and out beats standing still. A Battle Potion and a Water Candle raise the rate while you do it, and a Lifeform Analyzer names her the instant she exists nearby.

There is one more tell. The spiders attack her while she hangs there, so red damage numbers drifting up from an apparently empty stretch of cave usually means she has spawned. That is also the risk: take too long and they finish her off, and you are back to waiting.

Worlds generated before nests existed can lack them entirely, and you can build a substitute. It has to be the unsafe spider wall, the kind you get by breaking a natural nest, placed behind eligible blocks at cavern depth. The safe placeable version does nothing, since the game treats player-placed walls as no-spawn zones. In Remix and Zenith worlds the depth requirement moves up a layer.

Her main job is appearance. Choosing the hair option opens a preview where changes show on your character live, and you only pay when you confirm, so you can browse the whole list and back out for nothing. Style and color are billed separately and can be redone whenever you like. Her mood shifts those fees the same way it shifts any vendor's prices, so an unhappy stylist charges noticeably more for the same trim. The Discount Card now applies here too. She also defends herself with her scissors and can leave them behind if she dies.

The dyes are the interesting half of the shop, because they animate hair rather than just tinting it, and each one keys off something the game is already tracking: depth, health, mana, coins on hand, the phase of the moon. That last one matters practically, since the Time Hair Dye is only on the shelf during certain moon phases. Several other lines are conditional in ways worth knowing: the health and mana dyes only show once your maximums are high enough, the money one wants a platinum coin in your pocket, the party one needs the Party Girl in town, and the team one only exists in multiplayer.

Hardmode opens the rest in steps. A biome dye arrives with the world flip, a speed dye after your first mechanical boss, the Rainbow Hair Dye once all three are down, and the two Martian dyes only after you have beaten a Martian Madness. If you checked her once early and never went back, half her shop is stock you have never seen. She sells a pylon like other vendors when placed in the right biome next to a neighbor.

She is one of the easiest townspeople to keep happy. The Ocean is a safe place to build once you have reached it, the Dye Trader is easy to obtain and pairs with her, and the combination drops her prices and pushes what she pays for your junk well above the standard rate. Given how much you sell over a run, that pairing is worth setting up even if you never buy a haircut. Being trapped in a nest did not put her off living underground, so a cavern base is not the problem you might expect.