Why don't enemies trigger my traps?

[Flying Mage]

I decided to place some traps around my house to help me with various invasions. But monsters don't trigger them. It's a simple dart traps wired to a button. But they (it was solar eclipse event in case it matters) walk all over the button(s) without triggering any trap(s).
Why is that?

PS
Wiring seems to be ok, given that I can trigger traps just fine by walking over buttons.

[Smetrix]

Enemies can only trigger red and green pressure plates. Also, its much better to have a separate area for invasions.

Personally, I put my invasion arena near spawn, which consists of a "pyramid" with a thin layer of lava in the middle. I then have an area dug out underneath, which I can access using trap doors.

[Flying Mage]

Oh, ok. I had a bunch of grey ones, so I used those.

BTW, isn't lava supposed to burn coins and stuff?..

[Smetrix]

Originally posted by Flying Mage:

Oh, ok. I had a bunch of grey ones, so I used those.

BTW, isn't lava supposed to burn coins and stuff?..

If the pool is shallow enough, it will not destroy items, so if your pit is 20 blocks across, 1-2 buckets of lava is all you need.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2946922372
Edit: This is one version of the arena that I made on the getfixedboi seed. If you look closely, you will see that the coins are fine.

[Flying Mage]

Nice.
I've tried to use lava pits for defense, but had to stop, cause losing drops was not fun at all.

[NightStar]

another thing you can do is wire the traps to a switch and a timer. Flip the switch and the timer will activate your traps every whatever seconds the timer is made for. The timers go 1/4, 1/2, 1, 3, and 5 seconds if i remember all of them. Understand that traps do have a cool down period so a dart trap may be wired to a 1/4 second timer but will only go off once every 1 second as a result for example. When your done simply flip the switch to turn the timer and traps back off.

[Flying Mage]

Originally posted by NightStar:

another thing you can do is wire the traps to a switch and a timer. Flip the switch and the timer will activate your traps every whatever seconds the timer is made for. The timers go 1/4, 1/2, 1, 3, and 5 seconds if i remember all of them. Understand that traps do have a cool down period so a dart trap may be wired to a 1/4 second timer but will only go off once every 1 second as a result for example. When your done simply flip the switch to turn the timer and traps back off.

This is what I ended up doing. You don't need a switch on top of timer, cause timer has it built-in. But otherwise yeah, simply wiring a bunch of traps to a timer seem to work best. Although damage of dart traps is basically nonexistent at this point.