Hooks

A hook fires a chain, latches whatever it touches, and reels you to it. That covers most of it, and it is still the largest single change to how you move. Terrain stops being something you tunnel through and becomes something you cross. Journey characters start with a Grappling Hook in the bag.

The grapple key does not need the hook in your hotbar. It fires whatever sits in your equipment slot, and with that slot empty it takes the first hook in your inventory, reading left to right and top to bottom. Carrying several means the one nearest the top left is what comes out.

The number of chains a hook can have out at once decides how it plays. A single hook dislodges itself every time you fire again, fine for travel and useless for holding position. Multi hooks keep earlier chains attached, and once two are anchored you hang at the midpoint between them in open air. That is the real reason to own one: you can park over lava, over a pit, or over nothing at all while you build.

They also differ in what happens once every chain is out. Some allow one extra beyond capacity, some cut the oldest when the last lands, and a couple fall back to single hook behavior. All fire about as fast as you can hit the key, which single hooks cannot.

For pure travel that midpoint is a drawback, since dangling halfway across a gap is slower than being flung over it. A Dual Hook alternates anchors and slings you forward instead. For building, more chains is better.

Touching a surface with a hook clears three things at once: accumulated fall damage, your extra jumps, and wing or boot flight time. Most movement tricks are built on that: height gained by any method can be banked and regained.

The cleanest version uses an Ice Rod. Fly until the wings give out, place an ice block, hook it, and the flight time comes back. Repeat and your ceiling is set by mana rather than gear.

While attached you are also immune to gravity and knockback. Hooking the floor beside a lava pool means a hit that would normally punt you in cannot move you at all, the cheapest safety measure on a dangerous dig.

• A hook holds for ten minutes of real time before letting go by itself. The Hook of Dissonance is the exception at two and a half, and despite its tooltip it will not get you through a gap you could not otherwise fit through.
• You can drop a hook out of your inventory while hanging from it and stay put until you jump or fire something else.
• Slopes are the usual failure. Standing on one puts you technically inside the block, so the hook takes the tile under your feet rather than the wall you aimed at.
• Firing a hook cancels a mount, and it will not come back on its own.
• The Squirrel Hook grabs trees, which nothing else does, though it will occasionally shake loose from palms.

The pull is quick by default and a few hooks beat it, the Lunar Hook fastest and the Bat Hook close behind. With a sprint accessory equipped, the burst on latching drops you into sprint speed with no run up, which makes a hook an accelerator on flat ground.

The door launch is the strange one. Grapple a door while suspended, open it, and you are fired through the frame faster than anything else will move you, provided you fit. Put Frozen Slime Blocks on the far side and you keep that speed rather than losing it, which makes a sky bridge crossing nearly instant. Neither the Static Hook nor the Anti-Gravity Hook works for it, because neither pulls you in.

It anchors and lets you swing around the anchor instead of reeling you in. Rotating around a latch point counts as standing still for regeneration, so health and mana refill at the resting rate while you are moving, and it is the quickest dodge available when something has slowed you down.

Against fast enemies that track you, Mothron being the obvious case, moving sideways at speed with no run up beats raw flight. On a smooth wall you can climb absurdly fast by tapping grapple with the cursor held high and slightly ahead.

• Grappling to trees existed once and was cut for being irritating. It returned years later as the Squirrel Hook's one trick.
• The Grappling Hook's tooltip quotes Scorpion from Mortal Kombat, a joke at its own expense since no hook can pull an enemy toward you. The Bat Hook is Batman's grapple gun, and the Web Slinger carries eight chains, one per spider eye.
• The Lunar Hook fires its four colors in a fixed order, orange then green then pink then blue, so you can throw away the ones you do not want and land on the color you do.