Zoologist

She wants a spare house and a Bestiary that is at least a tenth full. In a normal world that is close to automatic, because ordinary play through the first few hours catalogs enough to clear the bar without you thinking about it, so she usually shows up early and unprompted. The exception is the vampire secret seed, where she replaces the Guide as the resident you start with and her shelf begins genuinely bare, since nothing has been recorded yet. She also defends the town with a clawing melee attack that scales up as you clear bosses.

Almost everything she carries is locked behind a percentage of the Bestiary rather than behind a boss, which makes her the only vendor whose stock is a reward track. Entries do not come from kills alone. Netting critters counts, catching fish counts, and talking to each townsperson once counts, and those last two are what people forget. An afternoon with a bug net and a fishing rod moves the meter further than a boss fight does.

The Leather Whip unlocks almost immediately and is the entry point to the entire whip class, so a summoner should sweep critters before doing anything else at all. A little further along, the Squirrel Hook is a perfectly serviceable early grapple and the Koi Kite is the first of the toys. None of it costs much, so buy each line as it appears rather than saving up.

The quarter mark brings the second pet license and a minecart that tunnels through solid rock instead of running on track you laid ahead of it, which changes how you get around underground. Around a third of the way in the saddles arrive for mounts you caught elsewhere, along with the Jousting Lance in Hardmode worlds and two saplings that grow tree types you cannot obtain any other way. Past that it turns mostly to furniture, globes and novelty gear, which is where the meter stops paying you in power and starts paying you in decoration.

The Universal Pylon needs every single entry in the book. That is a real commitment: every boss, every invasion enemy, every seasonal spawn, and the handful of critters that only exist under narrow conditions, which in practice means finishing the game and then going hunting on purpose. What you get back is a pylon with no biome requirement at all, so one teleport network stops needing six themed towns propped up by residents you did not want living there. If you hate juggling happiness, this is the payoff.

A few of her items run on timers instead of progress. The vanity ear and tail sets rotate with the moon phase, one animal per quarter, so completing that collection takes most of a lunar cycle and there is no way to hurry it. A werewolf transformation item appears only on the night of a full moon. In Hardmode a Blood Moon puts a squeaky toy on the shelf, a party puts out a grenade, and Plantera unlocks a mud pet. The fairy glowstick waits until all three fairy types are recorded, which is its own small errand.

Full moons and Blood Moons turn her into a fox-woman. It is cosmetic. The sprite and the dialogue change and her claw attack switches color, but the stock and the prices do not move, so there is no reason to plan a shopping trip around it. She reverts at dawn. Shimmer gives her a third appearance, also cosmetic, and she is the one resident who refuses a party hat because the ears are in the way.

The developers made her the Golfer's younger sister, and several of her lines are pointed at him. She also carries an unrequited thing for the Witch Doctor and brings it up unprompted. Her name pool includes real conservationists and primatologists, plus one name belonging to a developer's daughter. The credits show her after the curse wore off, which is the only place in the game she appears without the ears.