I'm currently building a bridge off my floating island base to the east, in hopes of finding other floating islands.
It takes a lot of stone, and I'm going to need to mine a metric ****ton in bulk later to continue it.
It suffers from two design flaws, unfortunately..
1. It's not very smooth, so collecting fallen stars on it doesn't work very well. If you jump to grab one, you'll hit one of the blocks, and thus be slowed down temporarily. [When crossing with hermes boots.]
2. Enemies spawn like crazy on it. They practically pour from the sides of the screen when you're on it. If I didn't always use Cobalt Shield, I would immediately redesign it to stop enemy spawn.
It leaves me wondering though, how much wall is enough to stop enemies from spawning? Does it have to be an enclosed area filled with walls, or is there just a certain amount needed?
Anyway, any suggestions on how to improve my bridge design before I expand it another 4000+ feet?
Building it out of dirt instead of stone would allow you to plant grass on it, letting you collect mushrooms in addition to stars.
Leaving out the roof or keeping it right above your head would let stars land on it reliably.
Enemies still would spawn on it if there was no roof, but they're only a minor annoyance.
If you want to stop enemies spawning, you'd need to turn it into a tunnel. A person-height tunnel (three blocks of empty space, one stone tile above your head) seems to be mostly spawn-proof. Any stars that land on the roof are collectable from inside the tunnel.
There's just one problem: Any meteor that strikes the skybridge/tunnel is going to blast a hole in it and leave very little ore behind. So, you're better off either flattening part of the ground for mushrooms/stars, or building only a small skybridge for them, and finding floating islands another way (firing meteor shot into the air and seeing if it bounces back, for instance).
I'm still envisioning various traps. For instance, a variation of the common "bucket over the door" trap IRL can be recreated here. You just put a bit of cobweb right next to a door, put a bit of sand over that, and use a bucket to put some lava in a space above the sand. Make sure to leave a tiny one-tile space in the floor under the sand too, so that the flow of lava is not obstructed after it falls.
Awesome. Probably need two cobwebs and three tiles of sand to stop the lava from flowing off to the side, though, but the door should smash both of them when it opens, unless it opens outward instead of into the cobwebs.