Traveling Merchant

He will not visit an empty homestead. Two other residents have to be living there already, and the Guide counts toward that pair; the Old Man and the Skeleton Merchant do not. He also skips the day entirely if a Solar Eclipse, Goblin Army, Frost Legion, Pirate Invasion or Martian Madness is running. He never asks for a house. He simply appears next to whoever is around, town pets included, and spends the day wandering among them.

Most events roll once per day. He does not. The game keeps checking through the whole first half of every morning, which works out to somewhere around a one in five chance of him showing up on any given day, arriving between dawn and noon and leaving at six in the evening. Sleeping pushes those checks past faster in real time, though an active Enchanted Sundial or moondial suppresses him completely.

The useful consequence: if he turns up in the morning without the item you were waiting for, killing him puts the roll back in play and a second merchant can still arrive before noon.

Whatever he is carrying is locked the instant he spawns and nothing changes it while he is standing there. Raising your luck does nothing to a merchant who has already arrived. Neither does beating the Wall of Flesh during his visit, which is the one clean way to buy a Gray Zapinator in Hardmode: he keeps selling the earlier version even after the world has flipped underneath him.

The number of items varies from visit to visit. Hardmode permanently adds a slot, a Peddler's Satchel used anywhere in that world adds another, and a couple of special world seeds add more on top. Luck nudges the count within those bounds without ever pushing past them. Hardmode also guarantees at least one item comes out of the less common pools, so later visits are worth checking even when the front of the shop looks like furniture. One painting is always included and always sits at the very end of the list, separate from everything else he rolled.

The information accessories are the reason to stop what you are doing and check. The Stopwatch, DPS Meter and Lifeform Analyzer come from nowhere else and all three feed the Cell Phone, so a run that keeps ignoring him gets stuck partway up that chain.

Everything else is optional. Team blocks only matter on a server, and he stocks a single color at a time with its matching platform, so a full set takes several visits to assemble. Dynasty Wood always arrives alongside both shingle colors, which is the only way to build in that style at all. The animal hides, the chalice and the fancy dishes are decoration, and the sake is a cheap food buff.

He leaves by vanishing, and he can only vanish while nobody is looking. Keep him on screen through the evening and he stays put. Push that far enough and he is still there the next day, waiting for you to glance away after six. It does not refresh his stock, so this buys time to scrape coins together rather than a second roll of the shop. He also refuses to leave while an event is running.

He is not helpless. Before Hardmode he pulls a revolver on anything that comes at him, and once the world flips he upgrades to a pulse bow, which handles the stray zombie that wanders into town at night without you needing to intervene.

His stock leans heavily on goods from the era of European trade with Asia, which is also where the outfit comes from, and his shimmered look doubles down on that without changing anything mechanical. Willy is a nod to Death of a Salesman. His street patter borrows the One Pound Fish jingle from a viral market trader, and the line about a combination hookah and coffee maker comes straight out of Aladdin. His pitch for the angel statue is the game making fun of its own most useless drop, a joke the Merchant, Dryad and Wizard all take turns on.