Social slots

Next to your armor and accessory slots sits a second column that only affects how your character looks. Anything you put there is drawn over your real gear and contributes nothing else: no defense, no damage bonus, no set bonus, no accessory effect. The game treats those items as a costume and nothing more.

That separation is the point of them. Your appearance stops being a side effect of whichever helmet happens to have the highest defense this hour, and you can wear a full set you like the look of while the real stats sit underneath it.

The more useful application has nothing to do with fashion. Pressing the open and activate key on one of these slots trades its contents with the matching functional slot underneath, in one keypress, with no menu and no dragging. That turns every vanity slot into a parking spot for a piece of gear you want on demand.

• Park the Spectre Hood in the vanity helmet slot while you wear the Spectre Mask. One press converts your damage into healing when a fight goes badly, one more press converts it back.
• Park the Ankh Shield and swap it in the moment a bad debuff lands. The immunity clears it instantly, then you swap back out to whatever accessory you actually wanted in that slot.
• Keep the Ancient Chisel parked and pull it in for the length of a mining trip, then drop it again before the next fight.

You start with a fixed set and can add two. Eating a Demon Heart unlocks one extra vanity accessory slot, and playing in a Master Mode world unlocks another. Doing both on the same character in the same world gives you seven usable slots, which is the ceiling for anyone.

Those bonus slots belong to the world, not to the character. Take that character into a Classic world and whatever is in the extra slots goes dim. You can still pull the items out, but you will not be able to put anything back until you are standing in a world that qualifies for that particular slot, so it is easy to strip your own costume by accident just by joining a friend.

A vanity piece only hides the real one when both occupy the same part of the body. Climbing Claws render on the hands and Hermes Boots on the feet, so pairing them across the two columns shows both at once rather than one covering the other. Two accessories that both draw on the hands will collide, and the vanity one wins.

The visibility toggle beside each functional accessory only hides the functional one. Switching it off does nothing to the vanity item next to it, which is exactly the behavior you want when you are trying to show one and not the other. Dyes work per slot on both columns, so the costume and the real gear can be tinted separately.

• Putting the same item in both slots normally looks identical to wearing one. Three break that rule and draw twice: the Empty Bucket, Badger's Hat and Rabbit Perch will stack on your head.
• Nothing in a vanity slot counts toward a set bonus, even if the complete set is sitting there. The pieces have to be in the real slots for the game to notice them.