[Tutorial Video] Simple Rapid Fire Dart Trap Batteries (Practical Wire Guide) (2024)

For those on the 1.3.0 UPDATE, please see this new guide with updated designs.

Notes on how the 1.3.0 update affects this guide:

• Dart (and super dart) trap cooldown times have been increased from 3s to 3.33s (200 ticks). This breaks the firing pattern of all the designs shown below (with no darts firing half the time). Designs using faster mob types may be fixed by using a 1s timers instead and lengthening the plate run (increasing the number of traps). Alternatively, you will need to find the best plate in the run to wire back to the statue to automatically re-trigger a new mob after just over 3.33s (in place of the timer, like Diceman's bird powered design below).
• Also, skeletons now de-spawn immediately when off screen at surface level (during the day), so only use them if you are going to stick close by.
• Bunnies will now turn to run away from monsters within about 10 tiles of them, so be careful about placement of bunny engines.
• New engine designs are under construction!

For console/mobile users still on 1.2.4, this old guide and it's designs should still work just fine! :

+ Kill Invasions fast! Farm Drops Efficiently. Kill Bosses, Whatever:
The video is pretty much self contained, but I've posted it here to answer any detailed questions and for people to post up shots of their own implementations; I'm certain you can make a setup far prettier and more interesting than my demonstration models!:

Description: With just one mob spawning statue (crab, fish, rabbit, skeleton or piranha), 6 to 15 dart traps and minimal wiring, you can take out ANYTHING! Full construction tutorial and usage examples (with instructions.)

+ VIDEO INDEX:
0:09 Build tutorial with skeleton engine.
4:08 Piranha engine ('optimal').
4:43 Finding other suitable spawn statues (mob speeds).
5:05 List of statues, trap numbers and type (optimal/frugal/stingy)/
5:14 Bunny engine.
5:26 Goldfish engine & Goblins in 40s.
5:45 Arena/farm set-up
6:21 Piranha engine (version 2 - 'frugal').
6:45 Crab Engine ('stingy').
7:06 Hard mode grind examples.
7:39 Farming example (Antlions).
7:54 Boss arena (Eye of Cthulhu, skeleton engine).
8:05 Further Applications... Autofarms by DicemanX

+ All Six Rapid Fire Statue Engines Shown in Video:

Note: The optional, higher number of traps is when they are pointed to fire in the same direction as the statue spawned mobs's movement. A couple of extra traps must be added to avoid a gap in firing. This is because it makes the dart spacing narrower, compared to firing in the direction opposite to mob movement; the opposite trap staggering adds an extra 2 tiles distance between each dart.

Note 2: Skeletons always start off walking to the right during the day (not towards player, as in the night).

+ REFERENCES:
(1) Dart speed and Optimal Trap Separation calculated (my video).
(2) My Mob speed demonstration video (to calculate track lengths / trap number)
(3) Official Wiki - Monster Spawning (Distance limits slightly wrong by my reckoning.)
(4) Boss Autofarm videos by DicemanX!:
(4a) "Pre-hardmode Autofarm (5 bosses killed in under a minute)"
(4b) "Pre-hardmode AFK farm with Hoiks takes down 5 pre-hardmode bosses!"
(4c) "Super fast and compact Dungeon Guardian autofarm (kill time ~6min)"
(5 Not in Video) Yrimir does a similar trick: killing goblins in 40s, off-screen, using waterbolt. It can't actually be done any quicker than this, since the limiting factor is the spawn rate = '20' = ~3 goblins/s, with 120 kills to beat the invasion, that's 120/3 = 40s.

Originally posted on the old forum, see here for comments.

+ Addendum (2014-09-30) - Bird Engine (History) and Further Notes:
I started thinking about these engine designs after looking at DicemanX's WoF autofarm. He, in turn seems to have used the 1s timer bank primed by a bird engine design first published by Tuxlar in his Pumpkin Moon AFK grinder (Nov 2013) and shown in this (Spanish) video tutorial (from April 13 2014):

Notes:

• This engine is very compact in height, since the bird only requires 1 tile of space.
• It makes a very rapid stream of darts (about 5.3 tiles apart), which looks very cool, but requires 26 traps. You could get an even closer spacing by firing in the same direction as bird flight: ~3.3 tiles apart, requiring 42 traps. A bat engine would be the most extreme case for statue mobs: at 13.5tile/s flight speed, same direction would make dart spacing ~2.3tiles, needing 57 traps to fire a continuous volley.
• Dart spacings significantly closer than 7.5 tiles apart run the risk of reduced damage output to small (stationary) targets. 1/6th second damage cool-down on all monsters means a maximum of 6 hits per second, and a dart speed of 45 tiles/s means: 45/6 = 7.5tiles. In practice the width of monsters provides a buffer, since darts 'penetrate', so damage drop-off is not immediate (with reducing spacing), rather dependent on monster width. Monster movement towards traps compresses effect spacing, and away increases it, making things messy. Since bosses are very wide, a much greater variation in dart spacing is tolerable (while still causing maximum damage). They also tend to move very fast, so for minimum kill times a closer spacing (e.g. using bird engine) is advisable.

Above: all statue mob speeds (as demonstrated in my video also showing spawn distance limits). Useful for finding the right statue for your application and related calculations.

+ FAQ:
Q. Can I use super dart traps instead?

A. Yes, you totally can. Same speed, same setup. They do double base damage, so a lot better against armoured targets, although they don't critically hit, like the regular kind [1.3 note - no traps can crit now]. Don't wait until the end game to make your dart battery though, they can be useful all game!
​

Q. Why are only 2 darts coming out while the rest hit the other traps?

A. You need to put actuators (yellow cross thingies) on all the traps, activate them once to set the traps to background, then remove the actuators.​