Stealth

Stealth is a slider, not a toggle. Hold position with the right gear and your character fades out over roughly a second, and only at the end of that fade do you get the full package. That package is two things at once: an offensive bonus attached to whichever item granted it, and a defensive effect that has nothing to do with numbers. Ground fighters and flyers stop throwing projectiles at you once you are all the way down, provided you are not swinging anything. Town NPCs stop trying to catch your eye with emotes. In multiplayer your health bar dims and then vanishes from everyone else's screen.

It is not real invisibility. Contact damage still lands, plenty of enemy types ignore it, and anything already on top of you will stay there. What you reliably shut off is ranged fire from the two most common enemy behaviors in the game.

Bonuses scale with how far into the fade you are, linearly. Halfway down you have half the listed value, three quarters down you have three quarters, and the number printed on the item only exists at the very bottom. Standing still with the Psycho Knife, the slider moves 0.02 per tick, so it bottoms out in 50 ticks, about five sixths of a second. Twenty five ticks in, its melee damage bonus is running at half strength.

That is short enough to feel instant and long enough that impatience costs you most of it. If you swing the moment you see the sprite start to fade, you are attacking with a fraction of the bonus you paid an accessory slot or a whole armor set for.

Using an item does not only stop the fade, it holds it. The slider freezes for the entire use animation and then for another five ticks after that animation ends. Five ticks is under a tenth of a second, so the real cost is the animation itself, which means slow weapons hurt far more here than fast ones.

The practical shape of a stealth build is therefore burst. Stand still, let it finish, land one hit, stand still again. Holding the fire button down under Shroomite armor means the meter never reaches the bottom at all, and you spend the whole fight collecting a fraction of a bonus you never actually earn.

The knife overrides the armor. Run both and at full fade you get the knife's stat changes only, with knockback as the single exception, since knockback from both sources adds together. There is no damage reason to pair them.

Inside Shroomite the only decision is the helmet, and it is entirely about what you are holding. Shroomite Helmet favors arrows, Shroomite Mask favors bullets, Shroomite Headgear covers everything else. Pick the one that matches the weapon you will use for the fight, not the one with the bigger number, and keep the other two in a chest since they are cheap to swap between.

• Mounts block it outright. You cannot enter stealth while riding anything, so a mount and a stealth weapon are mutually exclusive choices.
• Teleports leave it alone. Blinking with the Rod of Discord, stepping on a Teleporter, or firing a Magic Mirror will not kick you back out.
• Grappling hooks leave it alone too, which is the useful one. You can reposition across an arena on a hook without losing the fade you already built.