Enchanted Sword Shrine

An Enchanted Sword Shrine is a small chamber just under the surface, walled in flower walls, with a low hill inside and water pooled to either side of it. The only thing worth anything is the sword planted in the hill, drawn as a background object rather than as an item lying on the ground. Break it and it hands you something.

Two thirds of shrines are sealed. The remaining third generate with a shaft one tile wide running from the chamber up toward the surface, and that shaft is the entire difficulty of finding one.

Twenty nine times out of thirty you get an Enchanted Sword. The thirtieth gives you the Terragrim, which does not swing so much as dissolve into a blur of slashes at whatever is directly in front of you. For the point in the game where you can find it, that weapon is absurd, and it is the only reason anyone hunts shrines deliberately rather than stumbling into them.

The Enchanted Sword is not a consolation prize. It throws a projectile with every swing, holds up through most of pre-Hardmode, and it is one of the blades folded into the Zenith at the very end of the game. Even if you find nothing else, keep it in a chest.

One block wide and potentially a thousand tiles long means that from the surface it looks like nothing at all. The trick is light. Several weapons throw glowing particles that fall through solid blocks, and where there is a shaft below you those particles pour down it in a visible line. The Starfury is the classic, and the Dark Lance, Jester's Arrow, Meteor Staff, Flamelash, Solar Eruption and Flying Dragon all behave the same way. Walk the surface swinging one and watch the ground rather than the enemy.

Light pets that respond to your input work too. Hold down with one of the wisp style pets and it drops light beneath you. Some mounts release a burst of particles when summoned, so toggling a mount just before you land pushes light five to seven tiles into the ground under your feet.

Two other tells. Shrines only generate in the outer two thirds of the world, on the surface or barely into the underground, never more than about a hundred tiles below the surface layer. And the shaft sometimes breaks straight through into open air, in which case it is a suspicious one tile hole in the ground and you have found it by walking.

The sword decides what it gives you at the moment you break it, not at world generation. Close the game without saving, reload, and swing again. It is as tedious as it sounds and it works, which is worth knowing before you take a casual swipe at the only shrine you have ever found.

One warning about seed hunting. Terrain generation shifts between versions, so a seed posted with a shrine at a specific spot will not reliably still have one in the current game even when the rest of the world matches. Check what version the seed was found in before you spend an hour on it.

A small world attempts one or two shrines, a medium world one to three, a large world two to four, and every attempt only lands half the time. Large worlds are the better bet, but no size guarantees a single one, and finding none is a perfectly ordinary result.

Odd generations are common. The shaft can run all the way up through a Living Tree, the chamber itself can sit on the surface with no shaft attached, and either can be partly Corrupted or Crimson, though at least some of the shaft always stays clean dirt and grass.