Fall damage

Falling is free up to 25 tiles. Past that, every additional tile adds 10 damage, and the climb is linear with no ceiling, so depth punishes you faster than it looks. A 50 tile drop costs 250. Doubling that to 100 tiles costs 750, three times as much, because only the distance past the safe line counts.

The result is treated as an ordinary hit. Defense and damage reduction cut it, and landing grants immunity frames, which is why dropping into a pack of enemies can be safer than it sounds while dropping onto empty ground at low health simply kills you.

• Only vertical travel matters. A straight drop and a zigzag descent of the same depth do exactly the same damage, so leaning into a wall on the way down buys you nothing.
• Distance is measured in whole tiles and partial blocks round against you. Falling from a half-height block, past two tiles, onto another half-height block counts as four tiles, not three.
• The counter resets the moment your vertical speed reaches zero. The top of a jump, a gravity flip, anything that stops your descent for an instant wipes it clean.

That reset rule is what you actually use in play. An extra jump partway down a shaft, from a Cloud in a Bottle or a Bundle of Balloons, zeroes the counter and the rest of the fall starts from scratch. One grapple that arrests you does the same. So does a gravity flip from a Gravitation Potion.

Then there are the outright cancels. Wings ignore fall damage entirely, and so does a Lucky Horseshoe or any accessory built on one, such as Obsidian Horseshoe. Landing in water, lava or honey does nothing, and neither does touching down on a liquid surface while Lava Waders hold you up, or hitting a Minecart Track in a cart. On current versions, being knocked back or slowed by an enemy mid-fall also resets the counter, which quietly rescues a lot of bad cave dives.

Stoned rewrites the formula and makes it far nastier. The safe distance collapses to three tiles, the rate doubles to 20 damage per tile counted past the second, and, most importantly, every accessory that would normally cancel fall damage is ignored. Wings will not help you. Neither will a horseshoe.

The safe surfaces still work, so liquids and tracks remain your outs. There is one accidental mercy: Stoned damages you as it applies, and the immunity frames from that tick can absorb a short fall entirely if the timing lines up. Do not plan around it.

The cheapest insurance for a long shaft is a Rope run down one side as you dig. It costs almost nothing, it gives you a way back up, and grabbing it mid-fall stops the counter dead. A Featherfall Potion is the other standard answer, since it caps your descent speed and lets you read the bottom before you reach it.

The mistake people make is assuming a full-length shaft is survivable because they have high health. It is not a matter of health at those depths. Either you have a reset or a cancel available, or the fall does more damage than any character in the game can hold.

For scale: dropping from the top of the world to the floor of the Underworld with no defense works out to roughly 10,090 damage on a small world and about 43,620 on a large one. Nothing survives either, and the gap between the two numbers is a clean illustration of how steep the linear scaling gets once you are thousands of tiles in.

Fall deaths also draw from their own pool of death messages rather than the generic ones, so if the log tells you that you invented gravity, that is the game confirming what happened rather than a random line.