User blog:Mathmagician/Statue Hunting 102

Introduction
Welcome one, welcome all to Terraria University, where we occasionally learn how to do cool stuff. Today's course is called Statue Hunting 102. If you missed Statue Hunting 101, don't worry, you didn't miss much. In 101, all that really happened was some random spelunking. Anyways, for 102 we'll be looking at some more efficient ways to find Statues in Terraria. In particular, we're going to be combing Dungeons, since they typically contain a handful of statues. For this walkthrough, you should have previous single-player experience killing Skeletron and exploring dungeons. If you don't, then this walkthrough is not for you.

Recommended Equipment

 * Gold Watch or GPS to tell the time.
 * Cobalt Shield or Obsidian Shield, so that you don't take knockback.
 * Wings, Spectre Boots, and some sort of grappling hook, to help you get to the dungeon quickly and be able to move around it easily.
 * Molten Armor or better so that you don't die.
 * A weapon that kills Skeletron and dungeon monsters quickly.
 * Some kind of hammer to harvest the statues with.
 * Healing Potions so that you can heal yourself.
 * Torches, Fairy Bell, or some other method of generating light so that you can see well while inside the dungeon. Statues are difficult to see if it's too dark. Cursed Flames are my personal favorite.
 * Magic Mirror. Optional. Can be helpful for teleporting back to the world spawn point.
 * Spelunker Potions. Optional. Can be helpful if you decide to go mining.

Facts That You Should Know

 * With some minor exceptions, statues appear only in 1.1 worlds and later. This walkthrough won't be very helpful to you if you're playing an earlier patch.
 * Statues are placed randomly at world-generation. Cheating aside, there is no perfect method for finding that Fish Statue that you're looking for in particular. It's completely random.
 * Unfortunately, Spelunker Potions do not cause statues to glow.
 * The Jungle and the dungeon are always on opposite sides of the world. For example, if the jungle is on the far left side, then you automatically know that the dungeon will be on the far right side.
 * Entering the dungeon without killing Skeletron first will cause the Dungeon Guardian to spawn, which will make it impossible to hunt for statues or anything else within the dungeon.
 * Skeletron is summoned by talking to the Old Man during the night. Nightfall is at 7:30 PM in game.
 * When you make a new world, the game time is always set to the default value of 8:15 AM.
 * One minute of gameplay is equivalent to one hour in the game. So, for example, after making a new world, you would need to wait a minimum of 11 minutes and 15 seconds before you can fight Skeletron and safely enter the dungeon.

Statue Hunting in the Dungeon, Single-Player
Are you ready to go dungeon crawling? I certainly hope so!

Step 1: Inventory Prep
In your main world, make sure that you've prepared your character by gathering and equipping all the of the gear you'll need for dungeon crawling. Also make sure that you clean out your inventory so that you have some empty space for collecting statues. See the Recommended Equipment section above for ideas about what kind of gear to bring.

Step 2: Make the World
Create a new small world and name it whatever you want. It's very important that it be a small world, not a medium or large one. Small worlds can be traversed much more rapidly and have more compactly distributed resources. For example, on a large world, there might be 2000 feet of distance between 2 statues, whereas in a small world, it might just be 500 feet.

Step 3: Find the Dungeon
Enter the world with your character and determine where the dungeon is on that world. It's either going to be on the left or the right side. Just pick a direction and start heading that way. You can travel very quickly if you have Wings and/or Spectre Boots. If you don't, well, then this task is going to take you a long time. I've personally decided to head to the east.

If you find the jungle instead, then you know that the dungeon is on the opposite side of the world. To get there quickly, you can teleport back to the world spawn point by using Magic Mirror (or log out and back into the world) and then walk/fly the rest of the way.

Step 4: Wait for Nightfall
You can't fight Skeletron until it's night, so you'll have to find something else to do in the meantime. First, you should check the time in the game with your Watch. For example, in my world, the time was 9:47 AM when I first arrived at the dungeon, so I know that I need to wait for 9 hours and 43 minutes in game before it will be 7:30 PM, which is equivalent to 9 minutes and 43 seconds in real life. If you don't want to do the exactly math, just come back in like 8-10 minutes. That time range will almost always represent how much time is left between when you first find the dungeon and when you can first summon Skeletron.

So, what I like to do at this point is just minimize Terraria in the taskbar and let the game continue running. I glance at my computer's clock to see what time it is in real life, and then I go watch videos on youtube or lurk around this wiki or something for 10 minutes. When those 10 minutes are over, I come back to Terraria to find that it's nighttime.

Another option you have available is that you can walk back to last chasm/cave/etc. that you passed and start exploring underground. If you have a powerful pickaxe/drill, you can explore rather quickly. You can use some spelunker potions to help find ores and chests and stuff. Oftentimes when I do this I manage to at least find 1 or 2 statues. Of course, you need to keep an eye on the time with your Watch. When it's getting close to 7:30 PM, you need to get back to the dungeon.

Step 5: Kill Skeletron
Now that it's 7:30 PM or later, you can summon Skeletron and kill him. This should be trivial for you, since you've done it before. Hello one-way ticket to the dungeon! This step shouldn't take more than a minute.

Step 6: Explore the Dungeon
Dive right in. The gear I listed above will allow you to explore the dungeon quickly. Ignore all the gold chests. You can kill the monsters, but for maximum speed you should be running through them with your knockback immunity and not caring about the damage they do. I prefer to spam Cursed Flames everywhere, because it kills monsters and lights up the dungeon at the same time.

Search every room, looking for statues. The dungeon should have a handful of statues in it, and you'll want to find all of them. I usually find at least 4 statues per dungeon. Sometimes there are less, and sometimes you can find upwards of 7 or 8. The amount of time your search takes will vary depending on how fast you can move, how good you are at remembering where you've been (so that you don't backtrack too much) and how exactly your dungeon was generated. Searching the dungeon usually takes me about 5 minutes. You should be able to do it in less than 10 minutes.

Step 7: Iterate
Once you're done searching the dungeon, exit the world and delete it. Then go back up to Step 1 and repeat the entire process as many times as you want to. I'm going to throw some numbers around now--not perfectly accurate, but they correlate with my personal experience:

Ideally, each run-through should take you no more than 20 minutes, and you'll typically find about 4 statues on average. Since there's about 40 statues in the game as of patch 1.1 and 1.1.1, that means that you have about a 1 in 10 chance of finding the exact statue you're looking for. If there's 2 statues that you really want (say Fish Statue and Heart Statue), then you have a 1 in 5 chance of finding one of them. For a 20 minute endeavor, I'd say those odds aren't all that horrible. Especially when you take into consideration how awful the odds would be of you finding them in 20 minutes while spelunking at random in the underground layer.

Statue Hunting in the Dungeon, Using a Server
For this method, we're going to use a server to gain access to console commands. By making it nighttime instantly, the ~10 minute wait time between when you find the dungeon and when you can fight Skeletron can be eliminated. This run-through is at least twice as fast as the previous one. You should expect approximately 4 statues in 10 minutes with this method. It may be considered cheating, but it is certainly very effective. Follow the guidelines of the above method, but substitute in the following steps for the ones used above:

Step 2 (Server)
Find your TerrariaServer.exe program and run it. I have a PC running Windows 7, so mine sits in this directory:''' '''
 * C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steamapps\Common\Terraria\

This is a command-line program that is used to set up a dedicated server for Terraria. To learn more about how to use the console, visit the Server Console page.

Once you've made your small world, use the console to set up a server with that world. I usually choose 1 for max players, 7777 for the port, and a very simple password. The server isn't going to be up for very long, but I don't want anyone else to be playing on it since I'm just going to use it for statue farming.

After the server is up, leave the console running and go back to Terraria. Join your server by selecting Multiplayer -> Join, then pick your character. You will be prompted to enter an IP address. Enter 127.0.0.1 for the IP address--if you want to know why, read about localhost on wikipedia. Type in the port and password and you will join the server. In the console, you should see a message telling you that your character has joined.

Step 4 (Server)
Type "dusk" or "midnight" into the console and press Enter. This will make it nighttime instantly.

Step 7 (Server)
In Terraria, have your character disconnect from the server. Pull up the console again. The server is still running, and we need to shut it down. There are effectively two options.

1) Type "exit" into the console. This will save the world and shut down the server. Now delete the world, either in Terraria or from the console. Go back to Step 1 and start all over again if you want to find more statues.

2) Type "exit-nosave" into the console. This will not save the world, but it will shut down the server. If you go back to Step 1 and then start up the server on that same world again in Step 2, the world will be in exactly the same state as it was when you first created it. All of the statues will still be there, and you can harvest them again. However, the previously harvested statues will remain in your character's inventory. So, basically, you've just duplicated items by doing this.