How do i stop the skeleton merchant from spawning in my afk mob farm?

[Hottox]

This dude just comes in, starts decreasing my mob spawns and killing mobs before they get in the lava and then dies by being knocked in 5 minutes later, only to respawn and come back to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with me near instantly. It sucks. Can i stop him from appearing? I added dart traps so he gets murdered if he just doesnt go in the lava but they only do 1 damage to him so it doesn't help much.

[whatamidoing]

I don't think there's a way to stop him from spawning entirely. Boulder statues murder him pretty quickly, though.

[Onymous]

You can also teleport away and back to clear most enemies and non-town NPCs, like the skele merch.

If you go sorta far away (like a couple hundred blocks), it'll take about 13 seconds to despawn everything. If you go real far away (like more than 1200 vertically or 2200 horizontally on 1080p), they despawn instantly and you can tele back very fast.

[Diamond Dog]

Imposible

[dandinks]

shadow candle stops town npcs from preventing enemy spawns

[whatamidoing]

The skeleton merchant isn't a town npc and isn't affected by the candle.

[K13Cove]

Skeleton Merchant is harder to get rid of if your arena isn't completely flat and composed of solid blocks. If you have a teleporter near your arena, then you can quickly warp to-and-fro to despawn everything in the arena, including the merchant.

I found that Hardmode mobs kill the Skeleton Merchant quickly if you drag them to him. Pre-Hardmode might be a more of an issue, since the mobs are weaker.