Journey Mode Golden Critter Farming Guide

This guide will show you the best techniques and set-ups required for effectively farming every gold critter in the game.

This guide is meant to be used by journey mode players who wish to research them, but could be used to help normal players who are having trouble finding them.

[This guide's information was updated in line with the labor of love update]

Starting Out

The first thing you're gonna need to know, is what tools work best, and what environment you'll need to make all this work, so I'll go over it step by step..

Here's a very basic list for things that will assist with critter farming.

- Village NPCs ( Encourages/Enables Critter Spawning)
- x10 Spawn Rate
- Water candles (+Critter Spawn)
- Battle Potions (+Critter Spawn)
- Walls (Prevents hostile spawning entirely, but can also decrease spawning in general. Not reccomended)
- Garden Gnomes (+Luck)
- Groping ladybugs (+Luck)
- Luck Potions (+Luck)

Firstly, you're going to want your farm to either be on the side of, or ON your village.. NPC'S
completely disable the spawning of enemies, except on expert mode (I farmed on master mode so bleh).
This is a big factor when encouraging critter spawns.
I'm sure it doesn't really have to be said, but make sure the biome you're farming on is
not corrupted with crimson/corruption/hallow.. Farming will always work best in un-corrupted
biomes.

Secondly, for almost all forest-biome critter farming, you'll need a boss arena.. Why? Because having a few layers of platforms will encourage mob spawning. I only had around 3 levels of platforms, all on-screen, and that seems to help a lot. Besides, if you only tried to critter-farm on a single flat plain, that'd make your critters a LOT more vulnerable to a random slime popping up and nomming them.

Next, are water candles and battle potions.. I'm not sure if they stack with the x10 Spawn Rate Slider, but I use them anyway.

Walls are an optional way of discouraging enemy mob spawning, but I've found they also discourage critter spawning to a degree.. Using them at ground-level seemed to help with preventing slimes from appearing so often, and didn't effect ground-spawning critters
from spawning like rabbits squirrels and birds. But, putting walls around the platforms in the air seemed to mess with the spawn rates of ANY mob, hostile or otherwise.

Luck could be an entirely negligable factor in this, but I still use it regardless.. Dot some garden gnomes around your arena, and always have a stack of greater luck potions on hand when farming.. Every little bit counts.

After you've got all this set up, you'll want to grab a "Guide to Critter Companionship" for obvious reasons, as well as a "Guide to Environmental Preservation", and also a weapon that can easily take out mobs from long range, typically something homing. You could use a chaingun with chlorophyte bullets or something, but you're gonna want something that can 1-2 hit mobs, as using anything that doesn't kill them quickly may bounce them back into a critter.
Personally I use the spectre staff, since it kills master-mode slimes in 1-2 hits, and actively homes on them.

Now all that's left is to check your power menu settings. Disable weather/wind changes, freeze the time to noon, and, once you're completely ready and in-position, set that spawn rate to x10 and get farming!

The critters to farm will be listed from easiest to hardest, or in other words, from quickest
to slowest.

Labor of Love Update Info------------

With the new "Labor of Love" update, your critter-hunting life can be made MUCH easier!
You only need ONE of ANY critter now to clone it! Simply catch a critter of any type, and create a terrarium with it. Research the terrarium, make a bunch of it, then find the shimmer and throw the terrarium into it, to deconstruct it into copies of the critter! This will not only make your life hunting gold critters easier, but also the annoyingly rare non-golden critters, like tree nymph butterflies, or the new jungle biome exotic birds!

Other tips------------

Remember to catch EVERY CRITTER you see, regardless if you need it or not, this does two
things. it actively keeps the spawn pool low so more critters can appear, and it helps kill time
and keep you focused.. Plus the movement from going towards them can also encourage
critters to spawn offscreen.

I find it better to stay in one place and occasionally move 3-7 blocks to the left and the right,
rather than run full speed back and forth across a distance, when it comes to encouraging
spawns.. In most cases, staying perfectly still in an optimal location will get you a lot more
critters than moving will.

Freezing Time does NOT inhibit spawn rates.. It does however stop passive terrain generation
like grass from growing, corruption spreading, ect.

Disclaimer-------------------

I am only one person.. All the info I have put here is from my personal experiences.

I have farmed 3 of every single golden critter in terraria on journey mode, on master mode difficulty, using the mob spawn rate slider, time speed slider, and weather options. Besides that, I have used no mods, no cheats, and no exploits to do this..

I only started collecting specific data halfway through farming all these critters, hence why some data is missing on them. I'm only really putting this stuff here to help explain the basic techniques and know-how for farming, and what to expect while doing so. I do not claim my strats are the fastest, or the best.. But, at time of writing, I seem to be the only person who's taken on the task of fully researching ALL golden critters on journey mode. Maybe by the time you read this there'll be a far better guide, but for now, this is all you've got.. I hope it helps..

Worm

Additional/Special Tools Needed: Can of Worms

What I had collected after finishing: N/A

Tip: If you can't find any cans of worms, but have herb bags, you can swap them out for cans of worms at the shimmer!

Research "Can of worms", grab a stack of them, and spam right click.
I got 3 gold ones before I even got through the stack. Maybe your luck will be different, but
there ya go.

Seahorse

Additional/Special Tools Needed: Terraspark Boots

What I had collected after finishing:
66 Seahorses
65 Seagulls

I got this one literally in minutes.. I'm not sure if it was just me, but it felt like the spawn rate
for gold seahorses was just unnaturally high. I had 66 normal seahorses by the time I got my
third golden one.

So, firsty you're going to want to place around 3 NPC houses 3 tiles above the span of the ocean.
(3 tiles so that way you can run underneath them unimpeeded)

After that, place down some water candles and gnomes, and begin the onslaught.

Slimes are your best friend with this one, since there are two critter species here that CANNOT
be captured; dolphins and sea turtles..

Thankfully, they both specifically dwell on the surface, where seahorses specifically dwell a few
blocks beneath the surface.

Know what else dwells specifically on the surface?.. Slimes!

Purposefully leave a few slimes alive, and they will happily mop up all the annoying dolphins
and sea turtles for you, allowing you to farm the seahorses more effeciently.

Additionally, if you're having trouble with getting slimes to spawn, you can also use dart traps to effeciently remove wandering pests from the ocean's surface!

Another factor that makes farming these things a breeze, is that unlike nearly every critter in
the entire game (except dragonflies), seahorses apparently don't need to be offscreen to spawn.
They just kind of appear whenever they feel like it, defying/ignoring most common factors that
apply to critters, or just mobs in general.

I theorize that may also be why golden variants of them spawn so quickly,

Frog

What I had collected after finishing:
999 + 262 Frogs
3 Bunnies

To farm frogs, make a village in the jungle. To assure the best spawn rates and safety of your villagers during construction, build the houses about 7 tiles in the air, allowing you (and frogs)
to travel underneath unimpeeded. This also assures random hostile mobs don't have much of a chance to barge in and murder your NPCs. Do not build any platforms in front of the doors, so as to encourage the villagers to stay inside.

Next, place down a few gnome statues and a water candle, and flatten out the terrain. You won't
need a huge span of land, I'd say about 3 screen-lengths worth will do perfect. Also, get rid of
ANY water you find.. Sponge it up, cover it up, whatever you gotta do, just don't have any water.

To prevent parrots and other jungle birds from spawning, set/freeze the time to midnight, this will assure that only frogs spawn, greatly improving your chances.

Now, sit in the middle of your farm and crank up the spawn rates.. You'll find that enemies have a much better chance of squashing your frogs because of the long flat plain of land, but because frogs are the ONLY critter that spawns in a village-jungle, they will spawn in massive armies.. You'll have an entire stack of frogs in mere minutes..

Yes, you may lose a gold frog or two to a random mob, but because they appear so often, it's really not that big of a slow-down.

Feel free to modify the design of this farm if you think it could use something to help increase its effeciency, but as fast as those buggers spawn, I just didn't bother with a more detailed design since it all happened so quickly.

Water Strider

Additional/Special Tools Needed: Neptune's shell, or an equivelant.

What I had collected after finishing:
760 Water Striders
459 Grebes
40 Ducks
30 Mallard Ducks
94 Black Scorpions
90 Scorpions
475 Pupfish
57 Goldfish
1 Gold Goldfish

For this one, you're simply going to make a very long lake in the desert that's around 4 tiles deep.
Make sure to build 3-5 NPC houses hovering above it, similar to the frog farm.

Note: Water striders can spawn in the jungle OR the desert.. But if you are on expert mode or
higher, you will quickly discover that arapaimas will spawn en masse in a jungle lake, where as
in a desert lake, only slimes and the occasional mummy will spawn. Arapaimas are extremely
aggressive, and will make it impossible to farm anything in there. If you try doing this pre hardmode, maybe it could be feasible to tolerate the pirahnas, but honestly you're just better off doing this in the desert.

Freeze time to discourage cattails from growing, if they even try to.

The reason you want the lake to be 4 tiles deep, is because even if the entire spawnable area
around you is water, mummies will STILL spawn in the water.. So making it 4 tiles deep assures
that even if one does spawn, it'll be too deep in the water to graze the striders on its own.

Similar to ladybugs, the striders don't move much when spawned in, meaning you need to
do a bit of shimmying from left to right to both encourage them to spawn, and check around to
see if any large groups have appeared.

I've also noticed with the sheer frequency of spawning in desert lakes, the
"running back and forth across the farm" strategy actually works fairly decent as well here, and
while farming I found myself using it slightly more often than the shimmy.

If you have platforms connecting your NPC houses to prevent slimes from jumping down,
you'll inevitably notice scorpions spawning like crazy up there. Make sure to collect them
once in a while so they don't pile up too badly.

I got these relatively quickly, having 760 in total by the time I got my third. The appear very
frequently (as well as ducks and pupfish), so it shouldn't take you more than 1-2 hours to
farm these.

Grasshoppers

Additional/Special Tools Needed: Architect Gizmo Pack (+Tile Placement Speed/Range)

What I had collected after finishing, having collected 3 of them:
453 Grasshoppers
99+99+99+99+99+99+99+99 Mushrooms
51 Yellow Marigolds
11 Blueberries
18 Dayblooms
23 Daybloom Seeds

(The contrast in RNG is absurd)

What I had collected after finishing, during my second 100% run, after collecting ONE:
1474 Mushrooms
10002 Pumpkins
3 Magical Pumpkin Seeds
699 grasshoppers
209 Worms
10 Dayblooms
10 Daybloom Seeds

(Pro tip: Avoid hunting for grasshoppers during halloween event)

Grasshoppers are another very simple gold critter to farm.

Remember that the old trick of using flower boots no longer works for two reasons.

1. Grass doesn't grow if you're standing still.
2. Grass grown FROM flower boots no longer yield grasshoppers

Thankfully, with the power menu controls, there is a way to reliably farm grasshoppers
almost as quickly.

First thing though, crank the spawn rates to x0, and increase the time-speed to as fast
as your comp will comfortably allow (mine set to x12.)

Why turn spawn rates to x0? Because grasshoppers don't rely on natural generation mechanics
to spawn. They are spawned from grass, which means you can turn off ALL mob spawns, and
they'll still pop up when farming grass. (along with worms, rarely)

All you need to do is make a grass highway above your world, as high or as low as you wish. Remember, you aren't going to have to worry about harpies. You won't need to make it
extremely long, only maybe around half the distance from the center of the world to the
dungeon/forest.

Using the staff of regrowth can make it easier to plant grass without needing to use seeds.

Once you have your road planted, make another one 4 blocks above it, with a layer of wood or some other non-dirt material right under it, so that vines can't start growing from above to inhibit grass growing from below.. This effectively doubles the rate of which you farm grass, and potentially obtain gold grasshoppers.

The reason you want to make the road so long, is that because of the time being sped up,
by the time you finish getting from one end to the other, enough grass will have grown back
behind you to keep the process going without slowing down or feeling the need to make the
highway longer.

Lastly, I'm not entirely sure if it's an actual factor, but for safety's sake, make sure your path is at least high enough off the ground that there's no chance of it being converted into hallow/corruption/crimson. With the time being sped up, if even a single bit gets corrupted,
it will spread insanely fast and be annoying to deal with.

The RNG for these little buggers is pretty absurd, as I've witnessed.. It might take you 30 minutes to find one, it might take you 6 hours.. Just remember to chug a luck potion, and stay diligent.

Bunnies, Squirrels, and Birds

Bunnies are the easiest and most common of the golden critters.. I shouldn't have to tell
you how to even farm these, or to farm them in general.. I already had these researched
acquiring them passively before I even began officially farming for gold critters.

As for squirrels and birds, don't bother specifically farming for them, you will inevitably
run into enough to research while trying to farm ladybugs, and butterflies.

Goldfish

There are two ways you can do this..

Firstly, you can just lock the weather to permanent rain so that walking goldfish spawn.

Or, you can just catch them passively while farming for dragonflies.

By the time I finished farming gold dragonflies, I had 3 extra gold goldfish, aside from
the other gold critter's I'd obtained doing that.

Both ways are equally viable, but if you haven't done either yet, I'd suggest the dragonfly
farming.

Dragonfly

Additional/Special Tools Needed: Guide to environmental Preservation, Terraspark Boots.

What I had collected after finishing:
732 Blue Dragonflies
694 Green Dragonflies
727 Red Dragonflies
1 Ulysses Butterfly
1 Sulfur Butterfly
20 Birds
13 Blue Jays
10 Cardinals
15 Red Squirrels
12 Squirrels
82 Bunnies
201 Turtles
442 Goldfish
404 Ducks
363 Mallard Ducks
3 Gold Goldfish
1 Gold Bird
1 Gold Bunny
4 Gold Squirrels


Carve out a very long lake in a forest biome. You want to make sure the water is only 7 tiles deep, any deeper and cattails won't grow.

Don't put it too close to a village, as being close to a village will encourage ducks to spawn a LOT
more often. A good way to tell that you're far away enough is when you don't hear the village
theme (the theme that plays when more than 2 NPCs are around)

Now speed up time to x12-x24 (Whatever your comp can handle. Mine is stable at x12 but chugs going any faster), and just wait for the cattails to grow.. Once you have at least one
fully grown cat tail every 6 or so blocks along the lake, you're ready to go.

Pause time, crank up the spawnrate, and enjoy the farming.

Those cattails are precious.. The dragonflies will only spawn if they are fully matured, so making sure to avoiding breaking them is extremely important.

Prior to the labor of love update, you'd have to specifically use very exact weapons that would have as little chance of destroying the cattails as possible, like medusa's head, or life drain, and you'd have to use the old normal bug net because it wouldn't destroy grass/cattails when swung, but with the "Guide to Environmental Preservation", you no longer have to worry about that! Use any weapon, use the golden bug net, and go nuts!

Once everything is ready, remove ALL platforms around the area, as they will encourage non-dragonfly critters to spawn, as well as slimes.. Seal off the edges of the lake to prevent slimes from spawning off screen and skipping across the lake to nom your bugs.

Mouse

Basically the only way to farm them is to sit in the caverns with a decent mob-farming setup and a special spot to filter out the mice, and wait..

What I had collected after finishing:
999+441 Mice
6 Snails
12 Worms
2 Extra Gold Mice

At best, I got about 14-25 mice for every few minutes.

WARNING: You can NOT AFK-farm this in multiplayer.. For some unfathomable reason,
mice do not spawn under the same rules/mechanics in a server, and thus will never appear.

This means you're just gonna have to wait it out.. You can still AFK-farm it, but only in single
player, which means just walking away from your computer for 5-30 minutes at a time to go
do something else, and checking back to see how many mice are ready to be collected.


For exact measurements, those platforms on the map screen from edge to edge are 45 tiles
long. There is a 7 tile space between the end of them and the hole that the mice fall into.
The conveyor belt is 31 blocks long. The rows of platforms are 36 tiles high, the 'roof'
functioning as another platform.

The measurements don't have to be exact though, the point is to just allow plent of space
and platforms for enemies to spawn, a place that can safely seperate mice from mobs,
and a pool of lava with a conveyor belt for a floor to kill mobs and funnel non-burnable loot.

The dart traps are there to help aggro the mimics/nymphs in the offscreen platforms so they
don't just sit there. They are lined up so they aim along the floor of each platform on the left and right.

The platform below is specifically designed to funnel mice in it, but not other mobs. The reason
you need a 2-block barrier down there is because some mobs can clip through 1 block
when dropping down there.

The banners help to weaken the mobs, and make them die quicker to lava.. I think..
I'm not entirely sure if it works that way, but I have them there regardless.

Though I simply put it there to store mice to collect spawn data whilst doing this, the chest also
helps function as a deterrant for fairies, since if one spawns, it will immediately detect the chest,
float around it, and then despawn.

Thier rates of gold spawns seemed similar to frogs, in that I'd gotten all 3 after obtaining a little over a full stack of mice. I'd leave for 30 or more minutes at a time, come back and have about 50-75 mice collected per bunch.

For about 4 hours of doing this, I only found one.. Then on another bunch 5-6 hours in, I checked on it to find 4 gold mice wandering around among a group of almost 100 of them.

You might be luckier, you might be worse, but at least there is my experience to get a loose
basis off of.

It's a LOT more tedious to collect these than butterflies or ladybugs considering you have to offline AFK farm them, but considering the total amount of time taken to farm them all, this one would technically rank easier than those.

Here is a setup I used for my 100% run on the labor of love update.. This is actually a pre-hardmode setup, hence why there is no conveyor belts. I was much luckier that run, and got a gold mouse only 450 or so mice in.

Butterfly

What I had collected after finishing:
344 Monarch Butterflies
344 Sulphur Butterflies
265 Zebra Swallowtail Butterflies
209 Ulysses Butterflies
152 Julia Butterflies
84 Red Admiral Butterflies
32 Purple Emporer Butterflies)
10 Tree Nymph Butterflies
175 Birds
129 Blue Jays
127 Cardinals
514 bunnies
147 Squirrels
104 Red Squirrels
33 Scorpions (My center-village has a small neighboring desert)
39 Black Scorpions
18 Ladybugs (I had begun this farm immediately after finishing ladybugs)
4 Fireflies (when skipping through a few days, a couple spawned)
2 Gold Birds
3 Gold Bunnies

Butterflies have a random spawn rate set per day. So to get the setup you need, pause time, and
flip back and forth between midnight and noon, waiting a minute at noon to see how many tend to spawn.

Make sure to give this some time.. You might get 1-2 in a group, and have nothing happen for a minute, then suddenly see a group of 7, so give it a few solid minutes before deciding to skip to another day if you think the spawn rates aren't high enough..

You can tell you have a good day for farming if you're getting groups of 2-5 about every other minute, or faster.

Stay in one spot, and let them spawn offscreen, only going to catch them after it looks like a full group has appeared on screen.

This will take a VERY long time, but I got it done over the course of 2-3 days, so it's not that terrible.

You won't have to worry as much about mobs killing the critters, since most of the time they'll spawn in the air.

After you are finished farming for butterflies, make sure to skip a day or two ahead to assure the butterfly spawn rate is low again, so as to help other mobs you may be farming appear more often.

Ladybugs

What I had collected after finishing:
756 ladybugs
2 Gold Bunnies
1 Gold Squirrel
1 Gold bird

Make sure the weather is set so wind never changes, and set the wind to maximum in one direction.

This will enable ladybugs to spawn.

I have noticed ladybugs follow a similar spawning logic to butterflies, in that some days nearly none will spawn, and others they will spawn extremely often. So if you're not getting any ladybugs
in decent amount, flick the time to dusk, then back to noon, and look around to see if they're
more bountiful! The best day possible will have you scooping up 20-40 of them running from
one end of the boss arena to the other.

Stay in one place, and shimmy a small distance from left to right to encourage spawning, and eventually some clusters will appear for you. They'll usually appear on boss-arena platforms a lot more than on the ground, I find.

I obtained all of my gold squirrels and birds while farming for ladybugs, and my collection chest had a stack and a half of bunnies, 3 extra gold bunnies, and 2 extra gold squirrels. That should help give you an idea of how long it took to farm these suckers..

Don't forget to "touch" some of them once in a while to get that invisible luck buff!

[terraknight, actual eevee]

for seahorse farming, you can use lava to kill dolphins and sea turtles
lava can sit directly on top of water if you put a layer of chains at the highest point of the water

[Sushi]

lifesaver, golden water striders suck

[colorless_noob]

pretty sure the reason seahorses don't need to be offscreen is because spawning stuff is dependent on the player position, so when the player gets to the edge of the world, the camera doesn't follow it completely so you can start to see critters and enemies spawn on the opposite edge of the screen

[Katyusha]

Thanks for compiling all of this! I've been trying to complete Journey Mode with all items since 2020, but I gave up at the time precisely because of the golden critters. Now I'll finally be able to do it! Thanks again.

[Blinky]

Weird Steam guide shenanigans

[Squishybrick]

@kawaii Desu-chan even after uploading a new screenshot, it's still giving the invalid url error, I'm not sure what to do about that.. I'm sorry!

[Blinky]

I understand, plus the measurements you gave were perfect. I got a gold Mouse mere minutes after finishing building the farm, and though I accept that was lucky, I still got quite a few mouses before then. Thanks for making this guide!

[Squishybrick]

@Kawaii Desu-chan I no longer have the original screenshot/world that came from, so I cannot. I did however give exact dimensions on the size/length of the structure.

I will inevitably have to make another mouse farm since I'm doing another 100% journey mode run, so when I build it, I'll re-upload a screenshot of the fresh structure.

[Blinky]

Would you mind updating the screenshot of the mouse farm? I can't click on it to enhance it

[Squishybrick]

Updated some info for the worms, frogs, and dragonflies to account for the labor of love update.