Loadouts

Loadouts give every character three complete sets of armor, accessories, the dyes for both, and the matching vanity slots. They exist from the moment a character does and need no unlock. Only the active set does anything, and the other two sit in their own slots without taking any inventory space. On desktop you switch with the icons beside the armor slots or with F1, F2 and F3, which work with the inventory closed and can be rebound. Each set also keeps its own accessory visibility settings, so hiding wings in one does not hide them in another.

The Equipment menu is shared across all three. Pets, light pets, mounts, hooks, minecarts and their dyes stay exactly where they are through a switch. So does the main inventory, which means a fishing loadout does nothing unless the rod is already on you and a building loadout will not fetch your blocks. Extra accessory slots from a Demon Heart or from playing in a Master world apply to all three sets independently rather than to one of them.

The obvious split is combat, utility and travel. The useful detail is what belongs in the utility sets.

• Building and mining: the Hand of Creation or its parts, plus mining armor. This one runs almost constantly, so assemble it first.
• Fishing: the Lavaproof Tackle Bag, a Fishing Bobber and the Angler set. Fishing power lives entirely in gear, so the set pays for itself on the first session.
• Travel: wings, Terraspark Boots, and Neptune's Shell or an upgrade of it. None of this helps you fight, which is exactly why it belongs in its own slot.
• In Expert or Master, pad the utility sets with accessories that attack on their own: Bone Helm, Volatile Gelatin, Spore Sac and Royal Gel. Angler and mining armor give you nothing defensively, and those activities leave slots free anyway.

This is where the feature stops being convenience. A defensive set built around warding prefixes and a Worm Scarf can be switched in for the moment an attack lands and switched straight back out, which absorbs a burst without costing you damage for the rest of the fight. A Charm of Myths or Philosopher's Stone shortens Potion Sickness, but only counts for the time it is actually worn, so a one second swap achieves nothing. An Ankh Shield swap clears the debuffs it blocks the instant it goes on.

• Summoners lose any minions the incoming set cannot support, and they do not come back on their own.
• Mages lose mana above the incoming set maximum, which regenerates but not instantly.
• Nothing with an activation resets. Switching to wings in mid air only buys you a glide, extra jumps stay spent until you land, and the Master Ninja Gear dash keeps its cooldown.
• You cannot switch while an item is in use, so the swap has to land between attacks rather than during one.

Anything you want in more than one set needs more than one copy. A Destroyer Emblem that boosts every damage type is exactly the item you will want in two places at once and will have to farm twice. Going the other way, vanity slots hold real armor and accessories perfectly well, and moving a piece from vanity into the functional slot takes a couple of clicks, so three loadouts stretch to six sets if you accept that half of them are slower to reach. Piece by piece swapping also has one advantage over the hotkeys: changing a single item avoids the minion and mana losses that come with changing everything at once.