Terraria is filled to the brim with powerful bosses and enemies that require you to build, mine, and treasure hunt to get strong enough to take them down. While typically accessories, pickaxes, and weapons get the most limelight, sometimes what you need to bring your world to the next level is a good set of non-standard tools.
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Tools in Terraria do so much more than just dig and chop, allowing their user to completely change the flow of the game and build the world as they see fit. Some tools can even be more useful than a powerful weapon in certain boss fights.
10 The Grand Design
The Grand Design is a tool that rolls all other wire-related items into one, allowing you to see wires over normal blocks in the world as well as place and destroy wires of any color. While wires tend not to be as ever-present as the Redstone machines seen in Minecraft, wires do have some interesting applications that make this item worth making.
Wires have their uses in making automatic setups like self-opening doors, lights that turn on when the sun goes down, and even false doors that you can move through but NPCs cannot. Plus, holding the Grand Design will allow you to see the wires that power traps in world-generated structures.
9 Shellphone
By combining the functionality of every single information-giving item in the game, as well as all three teleportation items, the Shellphone becomes the ultimate quality-of-life item of all the tools available in the game. While not every piece of information is useful, the number of items that do give you useful information can clog your inventory, making this all-in-one item incredibly helpful for saving space.
Further, the ability to teleport indefinitely to the beach, spawn, and Underworld with just one item is difficult to beat — who needs the Hermes Boots when you can do a round trip between the edge of the world and your house in under ten seconds?
8 Bottomless Water Bucket
The Bottomless Water Bucket doesn't really have that complicated of a function; the sponge's greatest enemy, this bucket is able to dispense water into the world without limit, and at a quicker pace than an average bucket.
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This is primarily good for making custom lakes, which aren't just aesthetically pleasing, but are also a place to work that brand-new fishing rod as you attempt to finish every quest that the Angler can give you. Plus, if you want a way to fly before beating Plantera, water-walking boots and wings mixed with the water-placing properties of this bucket can let you stay in the sky for as long as you please.
7 Terraformer
If Purification Powder isn't doing the job of pleasing your Dryad's desire to see Corruption and Crimson quickly destroyed, the Terraformer might be exactly what you need. The Terraformer is an advanced version of the Clentaminator with a 30-block range increase, allowing it to spray solutions over biomes even faster than before.
It isn't just good for satisfying your Dryad, though: you can change your world's biomes into Jungle, Snow, Desert, Forest, Hallow, and even Crimson or Corruption, making all of your design dreams come true. Just be prepared for a nasty glance from your Dryad if you decide to actively make your world worse just for your aesthetic.
6 Anti-Gravity Hook
The Anti-Gravity Hook is one of the coolest hooks in the game, functioning differently from the rest — this hook pushes you away from the target you latch onto, allowing you to encircle that point in space without regard for gravity.
This effect isn't just limited to one hook, though: you can hook to three different points at the same time, all influencing the way you move through the space. This can be used in boss fights where the boss utilizes attacks that charge into you, taking advantage of their linear path and letting you dodge them with ease.
5 Staff Of Regrowth
The Staff of Regrowth is an item that yields more seeds and herbs when harvesting certain plants, and also turns dirt blocks into grass blocks. It may not seem like a particularly powerful item at first, but it can play a vital role in stopping the spread of Crimson, Corruption, and Hallow across your world.
It's able to do this by allowing sunflowers to be planted on the grass blocks it creates, since sunflowers protect the blocks they sit on from being converted to any biome that infects adjacent blocks. On top of this vital role, they also give you the Happy buff, which is a nice bonus.
4 Snake Charmer's Flute
Are you tired of carrying stacks and stacks of ropes everywhere you go? Having trouble ascending when a cave naturally starts to climb back towards the surface? Then the Snake Charmer's Flute is the perfect item to get you where you need to go.
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The Snake Charmer's Flute creates a pot from which a climbable snake will extend upward, growing until reaching its maximum height or hitting a block. It's particularly useful for building in the sky, since you can build blocks off the side of the snake's body in midair — this also gives you quick access to the space layer if done properly.
3 Ultra Absorbant Sponge
The Ultra Absorbant Sponge is the antithesis to items that output liquids such as water, lava, and honey without a source — this item allows you to delete any liquid in your world without limit, making it a useful tool for building in areas full of fluids.
Additionally, the Ultra Absorbant Sponge is good for exploration through caves packed with water, since it can create air pockets that will restore your Breath Meter when used over your head while submerged — just be sure to not try it in lava, or else you'll find that your other items aren't nearly as absorbent.
2 Guide To Peaceful Coexistence
The Guide to Peaceful Coexistence isn't a necessary item by any means, but it goes a long way if you want to keep your world pretty once you've built it up. This tool can sit in your inventory without being held, and it will prevent you from killing critters or cutting down foliage when swinging your weapons.
Why keep critters and foliage around? Mostly, it's for aesthetic purposes. If you've spent hours creating beautiful fields with your Terraformer and Staff of Regrowth, it would be a shame to kill the bunnies and shrubs that add flavor to your landscape.
1 Gravedigger’s Shovel
While a pickaxe can technically break dirt and silt, you'd be hard-pressed to find an early-to-mid game mining tool that works as well as the Gravedigger's Shovel — it can't break through hard blocks, making it perfect for soft block collection without damaging structures.
The silt and slush that is so easy to collect with this tool can be used in the Extractinator to get rewards like coins, ores, and gems that are all necessary for recipes and NPC trading. Further, exploring underground in Snow and Desert biomes is made way easier due to the Gravedigger's Shovel's staggering dig speed.
Next: The Best Pickaxes & Swords In Terraria
