Still bugged? That’s a little sad, I thought they fixed this already, reported this months ago
He’s not neutral on all layers. On one of the layers he’s aggressive and attacks NPCs. He will randomly get killed on that layer and then freeze/stay passive on all layers after that. After a fresh server restart (or sometimes at random) he becomes aggressive again.
He’s hostile from spawn until after he passes north of the Rotting Orchard. Sometimes he’ll fight the nightwatch present there, other times he’ll walk through them. Shortly after that, he’ll bellow out a roar on /yell, and then become non-hostile and stroll into Darkshire.
He’s been doing that since I first investigated it over a month ago.
The reason I think its layer related is, one time I was standing in darkshire and he was passive, but running around in random directions as if he was fighting stuff
Then after some time, the town crier yelled something like “The beast is slain!” and he froze in place for ~5 minutes at that point until despawning.
Layering as implemented in the beta(and the last stress test) can be weird at times. NPC’s seem to have the weird ability to sometimes exist on multiple layers at once. So you could have seen a player/players on another layer fighting him, so while you could see Stitches, you couldn’t see the person fighting him.
I’ve camped out near the Orchard many times immediately after client updates/server restarts or shutdowns waiting for somebody to spawn him. He’s hostile up until he does the roar north of the Orchard every single time, without fail.
Also: “The beast is slain” is also bugged if you check. That also happens every time he enters town as a non-hostile NPC. He’ll chill in town for a few minutes after his demise was declared, then despawn.