buzzard Guide: Stop Crystal Buzzards and Save Your Farms

[Dingle]

Here's a simple guide on how to save your farms from the new Crystal Buzzards.
They can be dealt with, in a variety of ways! It's not the end of farms. In fact, it opens up new boss killing and farm opportunities.

GUIDE START

1. After lunar hail, watch the skies for buzzard shadows. There may be a delay of a day or so, after the start of the hail. This gives you a small warning period.

And then... PICK YOUR METHOD:

Passive Methods

Wormhole (Probably the easiest!)

2. Go through a wormhole, ideally one you don't use much. The buzzards will lose sight of you.

3. Don't approach the wormhole you went through again, unless you want them to resume following you.

Sinkhole

2. Go through a sinkhole.

3. Exit through a DIFFERENT sinkhole. Again, don't approach the original sinkhole.

Big Distraction

2. Get the Buzzards into a big fight, such as in an area with a lot of spider nests.

3. When they all land and are distracted, run.

4. Avoid that area until the rift is over. This may generate a lot of Shattered Spiders if you use spiders, which I believe stay behind. I think the Shattered Nests disappear, though, but I didn't test this enough.

Teleportation

For Wortox, Winona, Wanda. I assume things like the Lazy Deserter or Teletransporter will work, too, but haven't tested.

If you teleport a long enough distance, the buzzards will lose track of you. I'm not quite sure what the cutoff rules are. A 5 soul teleport should ditch buzzards. I'm not sure on the exact distance, it kind of seems to vary a bit.


Combat Method

1. As with the Passive Methods, watch the skies for shadows. 

2. Catch a spider with a trap.

3. Far away from your farms and anything that could distract you, drop the spider and kill it.

4. A buzzard will land. Kill it fast. It won't attack for awhile. If you kill it quickly, it won't even get to do a single flame attack.

5. Another buzzard will come down. Kill that fast, too. You should be able to kill them even as Wilson, before the next one flies down. I was using a brightshade sword, but this still works with a dark sword or glass sword. You just may take some damage when they melee you, just tank it to kill it faster.

6. Repeat until they stop coming down.

You can also use this mechanic to summon the buzzards wherever you want.

For example: on top of Bee Queen. They can kill Bee Queen and many other outside bosses, if you bring enough spiders with you and are good at hitting the buzzards before they can get the last spider you killed.

They're also good for all sorts of farming, except Spiders, because it makes Shattered Spiders. You can have them kill Tallbirds, bees, tentacles, frogs (they don't make bright frogs), and more! They do NOT eat meat, they just peck at corpses they can transform, which most of the time is just spiders!

 

FOR ALL METHODS

The buzzards sometimes come back after awhile, before the Rift ends. Watch the skies for them. In any case, you get some period where you're safe.

From my testing so far, it seems like the Passive Methods keep them away longer than the Combat Method, possibly until the next Lunar Hail. I didn't get enough time to test this extensively, though.

I also wonder if they don't spawn in Winter, but I'm not sure on this one. It's possible I did a Passive Method by mistake (likely involving being in the caves during Hail?) and simply never saw them.

Edited November 1, 2025 by Dingle
Added new Passive Methods, and clarified what weapons to use in Combat Method

[Kacpert25]

A rather tedious method. But it's better than nothing.

[Dingle]

25 minutes ago, Kacpert25 said:

A rather tedious method. But it's better than nothing.

There's probably ways to improve on this, I haven't been able to test them but I have some ideas.

In any case, yeah, better than nothing. And maybe it's a good start for a better system.

[Bumber64]

A better system would be something that kills them automatically. A crystal buzzard farm, if you will.

[Dingle]

10 minutes ago, Bumber64 said:

A better system would be something that kills them automatically. A crystal buzzard farm, if you will.

I'll test some things when I can. They're really vulnerable when they first land, so I think it's just a matter of doing 300 damage quickly and repeatedly.

I wonder if bunnymen would work, if you remove distractions for them.

[gaymime]

25 minutes ago, Dingle said:

I'll test some things when I can. They're really vulnerable when they first land, so I think it's just a matter of doing 300 damage quickly and repeatedly.

I wonder if bunnymen would work, if you remove distractions for them.

tightly-packed toothtraps can do about 400-500 depending on how lucky you get. i use them to reroll my hamlet townies

[yyyyyyyyyyyyyyy]

2 hours ago, gaymime said:

tightly-packed toothtraps can do about 400-500 depending on how lucky you get. i use them to reroll my hamlet townies

Planar Entity Protection makes Buzzards only take 37.7 damage, I wonder if it is enough to kill a lot of them.

[Dingle]

37 minutes ago, yyyyyyyyyyyyyyy said:

Planar Entity Protection makes Buzzards only take 37.7 damage, I wonder if it is enough to kill a lot of them.

8 tooth traps per buzzard in that case. But the trick is that they would have to run over the 8 tooth traps before they started flying around. And before they fly, they just kind of waddle slowly forward towards the meat.

I doubt it would work.

[Popian]

I think the pacifist way is more in line with what people want, but I don't know if I should spoil it as I found "getting it" to be fun.

[Dingle]

1 hour ago, Popian said:

I think the pacifist way is more in line with what people want, but I don't know if I should spoil it as I found "getting it" to be fun.

I'll look for it when they ever attack again. They don't seem to be spawning for me in Winter.

[Edible Coal]

3 hours ago, Popian said:

I think the pacifist way is more in line with what people want, but I don't know if I should spoil it as I found "getting it" to be fun.

pacifist would be just not hit them right?

[Popian]

18 minutes ago, Edible Coal said:

pacifist would be just not hit them right?

They will stop following you because of something you do that is not combat.

[Dingle]

9 hours ago, Popian said:

They will stop following you because of something you do that is not combat.

I still haven't seen them. They never attacked me again in my current world.

Based on what you said, I was going to try either feeding them directly, or killing a spider behind a gate and seeing what happened.

It's been hard for me to actually experiment with them, as I'm playing a normal world, and my first encounter with them was an enormous fight in the spider quarry. I think they didn't leave the spider quarry because of their endless battle with the spiders there, but the rift despawned them shortly after so I wasn't able to see if that made them stick in one area or not. This was also pre-nerf, where tons of them spawned.

If you post your findings, I'll add them to the top post. This is a very spoiler-y topic.

[Dingle]

Finally got a little more time for experiments. Big thing: the buzzard swarm can lose sight of you.

Easiest way to do this is to go in a wormhole. In quick tests, they lose track of where you are until you go back to near the area you ditched them.

It took me awhile to figure this out, as I don't use wormholes much as a late game Wortox! Oddly enough, his teleport does not seem to lose them.

What doesn't work: killing spiders in a walled pen. The buzzards get angry at walls, and use their flame attack.

I'll update the OP after I get to play with this more, or if someone else does. I assume sinkholes would work too, if you exit from a different one than you entered.

[Dingle]

Updated the OP like I said. I found 3 passive methods, and also added details for the combat method.

They're also very interesting for farming! I killed Bearger and Bee Queen with them, and used them to assist with Dragonfly. They're great!

[Ugur01]

On 10/30/2025 at 5:15 PM, Dingle said:

Combat Method

1. As with the Passive Methods, watch the skies for shadows. 

2. Catch a spider with a trap.

3. Far away from your farms and anything that could distract you, drop the spider and kill it.

4. A buzzard will land. Kill it fast. It won't attack for awhile. If you kill it quickly, it won't even get to do a single flame attack.

5. Another buzzard will come down. Kill that fast, too. You should be able to kill them even as Wilson, before the next one flies down. I was using a brightshade sword, but this still works with a dark sword or glass sword. You just may take some damage when they melee you, just tank it to kill it faster.

6. Repeat until they stop coming down.

I just tried it — it was easier than I thought.
 

 

 

I forgot to start recording at first, so it begins halfway through.

[Popian]

Nice job. Here's my understanding of it that works for me, but there may be more nuance to it:

Spoiler

Spoiler

The Buzzards infest biomes like the spaces on a board game. They can "move" when they are following you and you enter an adjacent biome.

Knowing this, the map will usually have branches where the biomes are like this:

1 3
 V
 2

If your desert base is in biome 1 you can walk to biome 3 and cross back to 1 to leave them at biome 3. You may have to do this more than once because of the follower cap that was added.

They may keep coming back as new spawns or some other kind of movement that I can't tell. It could be that distance affects it, as mentioned in that other topic.

 

 

[Dingle]

13 minutes ago, Popian said:

Nice job. Here's my understanding of it that works for me, but there may be more nuance to it:

  Hide contents

  Hide contents

The Buzzards infest biomes like the spaces on a board game. They can "move" when they are following you and you enter an adjacent biome.

Knowing this, the map will usually have branches where the biomes are like this:

1 3
 V
 2

If your desert base is in biome 1 you can walk to biome 3 and cross back to 1 to leave them at biome 3. You may have to do this more than once because of the follower cap that was added.

They may keep coming back as new spawns or some other kind of movement that I can't tell. It could be that distance affects it, as mentioned in that other topic.

 

 

Oh I see, that's odd. It explains why I had trouble pinpointing how teleport distance worked, as a long distance teleport to the same (large) biome could screw it up.

For awhile, I thought that Wortox teleporting didn't work at all, because I was doing the teleports between two adjacent, big biomes.

Now that I know there's different countermeasures, I really like this new mechanic! There's a lot to play with, but it's a big threat if you don't understand it or take it seriously.

Next up, I want to do a bigger post on exploiting them against bosses and using them for mob farms.