Movement speed

A fresh character runs at 11 tiles per second, which the Stopwatch reports as 15 mph. That number is fed by two separate stats. Move speed is the ordinary one, raised by percentages from accessories, armor and buffs. Sprint speed is a flat target value set by boots and by wings. Whichever of the two is higher at any moment is the speed you actually get, and once you are at or near your cap the game kicks up dust and plays a sound to tell you.

Small terrain is free. Walking up a one-block ledge costs nothing, so crossing a lumpy hill is exactly as fast as tunneling a flat corridor through it. Digging a highway is only worth it for very long distances or for asphalt.

Boots set sprint speed rather than adding to it, and when more than one pair is equipped the game takes the lowest one in your accessory slots. Wear Hermes Boots below Lightning Boots and you sprint at the Hermes number, having spent a slot to get slower. There is no reason to carry two pairs at once, and every reason to upgrade into a single combined pair like Frostspark Boots or Terraspark Boots. Wings sidestep the problem because only one pair can be equipped, and their sprint value takes over while you are airborne if it beats your ground number.

Flat percentage bonuses are summed first, then any multiplier is applied to that total. An Anklet of the Wind at plus ten percent worn alongside Magiluminescence at a 1.15 multiplier gives 26.5 percent, not 25. The gap grows the more additive sources you stack, so multiplier items are worth more the later you pick them up.

Reforging only touches accessories, and only one movement modifier applies at a time regardless of how many reforged accessories you wear. With every slot unlocked that caps the contribution at 28 percent.

A jump has two phases. In the first, you rise at a fixed rate for jump duration plus one ticks, which for a default character is 16 ticks, or a bit over a quarter of a second. In the second, gravity takes over and slows you until you stop at the peak. Releasing the jump key ends phase one early, so short-hopping is not a lesser jump, it is a truncated one. Getting full height means holding the key down.

Base jump duration is 15 and base jump speed is 5.01, which works out to a reach of about 6.27 tiles. If you want to work out a specific loadout, reach in pixels is jump duration plus one, multiplied by jump speed minus gravity, plus half the gravity multiplied by the square of jump speed over gravity minus one. Gravity is 0.4 below the Space layer. Divide the result by 16 for tiles. Stacked to the limit with the frog gear, balloons, Soaring Insignia and Moon Lord Legs, that reach reaches 48.85 tiles.

Falling accelerates at 30 tiles per second squared and tops out at 37.5 tiles per second, roughly 51 mph, unless an item changes it. That terminal speed is why long drop shafts are a viable travel method and why fall damage protection matters more than any speed stat when you are exploring vertically.

Water, lava, honey and shimmer all slow movement in every direction. A handful of items grant an ignore-liquids property, among them the Flipper Potion, Superheated Blood, Shrimpy Truffle, the Minecarp cart, Hardy Saddle and Fishron Wings. The catch is that they only fix horizontal movement. Sinking and rising stay slowed no matter what you wear. Shimmer is its own case and needs the Chromatic Cloak before you move normally in it.

Minecarts take an extra penalty on top: half speed in water and lava, quarter speed in honey and shimmer, unless merfolk or an ignore-liquids item is active. The Stopwatch also measures liquid movement differently from real movement, so treat its readout as unreliable the moment you are submerged.

Cobweb and Honey Block are the sticky tiles, and they work by clamping your speed before multiplying it. Horizontally, anything above 3.84 mph is cut to 85 percent and anything below is cut to 60 percent, with the input capped at 5.11 mph first. Vertically, rising keeps 96 percent while falling keeps only 30 percent. That asymmetry is the whole reason a honey block wall makes a good landing pad and a terrible escape route.

The horizontal record is 305 mph, which needs an Asphalt Block runway, a full stack of quick-reforged movement accessories, and four food and drink buffs applied in a specific order with the Happy buff sitting in the rightmost slot. Straight-line ascent tops out at 382 mph, and holding a Portal Gun pushes maximum fall speed to 179 mph.

One thing that never scales: hooks reel you in at a fixed rate no matter what you are wearing. The faster you get, the more a grapple feels like a brake.