Tax Collector

He is not a normal move-in and he is not found as a person at all. Once the Wall of Flesh is dead, a rare enemy starts appearing in the Underworld, and hitting it with Purification Powder converts it instead of killing it. Bring powder to your first Wall of Flesh fight and you can have him recruited before you have even walked back up to the surface.

Dismiss your minions before you start hunting. Anything on autopilot will shred the target before you get a throw off, and a whip or a summon will not know the difference. Losing one is survivable, another will generate eventually, but it costs you the trip. Once converted he behaves like any other townsperson, takes a vacant house, and moves back in later if he is killed.

He skims a fixed amount per housed townsperson per in-game hour, which means he is close to worthless in a fresh Hardmode world and quietly good in a fully settled one. Pets and the wandering merchants are not on his books. He holds the money until you ask for it, there is no minimum to collect, and once he hits his ceiling he simply stops earning, so a player who forgets about him for a week has the same pile as one who forgot about him for a day.

Anything that skips time counts. A sundial or a moondial pushes his meter forward exactly as if the hours had passed normally, and so does the Journey Mode time slider, which turns him from background income into something you can farm deliberately. In multiplayer every player accumulates a separate pile, so collecting yours does not take anything from anyone else.

His happiness moves both his rate and his ceiling, so a miserable Tax Collector earns at roughly half speed and caps out at half as much. The problem is that his ideal setup is poison for everyone in it. Parking him in the Snow with the Merchant and the Party Girl maxes him out and makes both of them unhappy, and their inflated shop prices will cost you more than he brings in.

There is no clean answer for most of a playthrough. After Plantera, when the Princess becomes available, she can take the Party Girl's slot, since she is the only person he likes who likes him back. Until then, put him somewhere convenient and accept a middling rate.

Because of what he used to be, lava does not hurt him. He is the one resident you can safely house in the Underworld, which is convenient given where you found him. The transformation also carries baggage over: any debuffs on the enemy stay on him, and in Expert Mode any coins it picked up off the ground come with him too.

He will not attend a party and refuses to wear the hat, though he is still willing to throw one. He fights back with his cane, which he can leave behind if he dies. He responds to the King Statue like everyone else. And when he is as unhappy as the game will let him get, every figure he quotes you is written entirely in sixes.

Remix worlds hand him to you at the start instead of the Guide, and Zenith worlds include him in the opening lineup. In Zenith he may spawn under the name Andrew, which was originally the Guide's, and that name is load bearing: an Andrew has enormous defense and hits about twice as hard as normal, making him the most dangerous townsperson in the game by a wide margin. Zenith and Celebration Mk 10 worlds also double both his collection rate and his storage limit.

He is Ebenezer Scrooge with the serial numbers filed off, which explains the cane, the hunch, the top hat, the preference for snow, and the fact that he cannot stand Santa Claus. His name pool is drawn almost entirely from American presidents and vice presidents. Every townsperson he likes dislikes him in return, the Princess excepted, and his refusal to celebrate anything fits the source material a little too well.