Genuine question about chess pieces sketches

[thevicelion]

So I ran into a bit of a problem the other day with some friends. The thing is you all know the mechanics to summon the shadow pieces, you reconstruct the sculptures with the suspicious marbles, then you either mine them at full moon night to get normal clockworks that when killed, they give you the sketches to build the statues yourself  so you can hammer them in new moon OR you wait for the new moon and mine the sculptures and get straight to the fight, right?.

Well there's the problem, if you do the later, the sculptures turn themselves straight into the shadow pieces, and leave no sketches behind, so after we defeated them and got to Fuel Weaver, we wanted to start another fight with the pieces for a second heart, but that's the thing; The sculptures are no more, there are no sketches, and there's no way to get the sketches back. I even went to the Wiki and apparently the way to get duplicates of the sketch is to have already unlocked them and search in tumble weeds for the trinkets to give to pig king, but mining the marble sculptures at new moon didn't seem to "unlock" the sketches, so we searched for the tumbleweeds for more than an hour and after countless gnomes, stacks of twigs and grass and other junk... nothing...              so we resulted to spawning them with console commands...

Genuine question, does killing the shadow pieces directly from the marble sculptures locks you out of fighting the bosses ever again? or is there a way to actually get the sketches? (and btw before you ask, no, no duplicates of the sculptures spawned in our world, so no more suspicious marbles than the actual ones)

[Anis5240]

No? It shouldn't be like that. If you do the fight in new moon, the sketches should appear when the pieces break out of the marbles. Maybe someone had taken them? If you have the potter's wheel, you should check that too.

[thevicelion]

3 minutes ago, Anis5240 said:

No? It shouldn't be like that. If you do the fight in new moon, the sketches should appear when the pieces break out of the marbles. Maybe someone had taken them? If you have the potter's wheel, you should check that too.

Oh well, now that you say that, that's what the wiki says, but I genuinely couldn't find the sketches nowhere, and the chess trinkets never dropped from tumbleweeds. I guess I could've been extremely unlucky and as you say someone took the sketches and burnt them or something idk. I'll have to investigate ig 

[Lovens]

Even if sketches after shadow pieces fight are gone, chess trinkets start appearing in the tumbleweeds right away regardless of what happened to the sketches or the bosses. Same with clockworks on the full moon - it's not the bosses that drop sketches, they drop the moment you mine the statues. 

Not getting them from tumbleweeds is just bad luck. They are on loot table now since you already mined the statues. You need to farm tumbleweeds and get trinkets, then trade them to Pig King for sketches. There is no other way unless you are ok with using console commands. 

If you want to optimise tumbleweed farming, I highly recommend you to make a temp small camp in dfly desert and work on walling off tumbleweed spawners. Make fences and place them with one wall gap in a line on the borders of dfly desert first. This will make all tumbleweeds stay within the desert and not roll off to nearby biomes. Then collect all tumbleweeds and split the desert in half with the same fence. Observe where tumbleweeds appear next time. Any area that has a tumbleweed, split in half again and so on, until you track it down to like 4 tiles. The smaller those sections get, the easier it is to farm tumbleweeds, you don't have to chase them. Watch out for lightning and wildfires, as well as fire hounds and dfly ponds. All these hazards might burn your setup. Once you found all spawners, you can wall them off with rock walls and check them every once in a while. All tumbleweeds will be conveniently bunched up in one place and you will spend less time picking them and find your trinkets eventually. 

Here's an example of how my tamed tumbleweeds look like. There are actually 7 spawners with about 7 tumbleweed per spawner, but two are offscreen because they are a bit further away. 

[thevicelion]

So in the end, as it turns out, I totally mistook the location where we actually summoned the shadow pieces lol, some friend of mine just pitchforked the set-piece and didn't even leave barren turf, he used the extra natural turf from base to cover up, and I was looking in another random marble trees set-piece for the sketches (whoops). And so while going somewhere to do whatever I just found them laying on the ground in a random corner of the map.

On 8/2/2024 at 9:24 PM, Lovens said:

If you want to optimise tumbleweed farming, I highly recommend you to make a temp small camp in dfly desert and work on walling off tumbleweed spawners.

Thanks everyone who commented, and I'll actually be looking to do some tumbleweed pens next time so this comes in handy!