Traveling Merchant

[two whole chickens]

I have beaten terraria and I have only seen the traveling merchant once. I have tried starting new worlds but i cant seem to get the traveling merchant to spawn.

[Volleyegs]

Very strange, It could be a bug or maybe you are just very unlucky.

[sparatic_thoughts]

how many npc do u have

[two whole chickens]

i have all of them

[Zemecon]

If you have a Journey Mode character and world then you can speed up time and skip from midnight to dawn to midnight again and essentially "force" the Travelling Merchant to spawn.

My method is to skip time to dawn, speed it up until either the Travelling Merchant spawns or until it is 1:00 PM, then skip to midnight, then skip to dawn again and repeat the cycle. But you need to alternate between dawn and midnight; if you only skip to dawn then you stay on the same day and the Travelling Merchant will never spawn.

If you are not in Journey Mode then you should be able to use a bed to advance time. It is slower and you can't skip ahead but it is still faster than letting time go by on its own.

If you are really desperate (and I can understand that - RNG can be a pain in the arse sometimes) then you can either download tEdit and force-spawn the Travelling Merchant or download the Builder's Workshop from Curseforge and look for whatever you want to buy from the Travelling Merchant NPC there. But this should only ever be a last resort when you feel like waiting for the Travelling Merchant is ruining your gameplay.

[two whole chickens]

it cant be rng because traveling merchant is 22% chance every night but thanks for the other advice

[Zemecon]

RNG is short for Random Number Generation. Basically it is a dice roll. If there is a certain chance of anything happening then it will be RNG because that percent chance is the proportionate number out of 100 that the dice needs to land on in order for that occurrence to happen. NPC spawn chance is RNG. And sometimes it gets really unfair and tedious. That is why it never hurts to have a backup plan that will guarantee you get the item.

That 22% chance is somewhere between 1 out of 5 and 1 out of 4 every *day* that the Travelling Merchant will spawn. It is less than 50% so it is more likely than not he won't spawn but if you speed up time you don't need to wait as long between each dice role. That was why I suggested either using Journey Mode or sleeping through the rest of the day and night.

[two whole chickens]

I know it is possible but for the amount of time i've played it is very unlikely

[Zemecon]

Yeah exactly. It is a 1/4 or 1/5 chance he will spawn. That is less than 50%. That is why you find ways to speed up time. Read my first post on how to do that.