Bee Keeper

Queen Bee is the only thing that carries it, and she gives it up often enough that two or three trips to a hive will normally produce one. That timing is the point: a jungle-first world hands you a real melee weapon while everyone else is still swinging starter metal.

The blade on its own is unremarkable. What matters is that every connection spits out a small swarm, and those bees are the actual weapon. They hang in the air for a beat, then lock onto whatever is nearest inside a generous radius and accelerate hard toward it, switching targets if something closer wanders in. Each one punches through a couple of enemies or clips a few walls before it gives out.

• Segmented enemies are the reason to own this. Every segment you clip counts separately, so one swing into a worm buries the whole thing in bees at once.
• Water and lava erase them on contact. An arena with a pool in the middle throws away most of your output before it ever reaches anything.
• Hive Pack is the upgrade that changes the weapon rather than nudging it. It adds an extra bee some of the time and converts around half the swarm into Giant Bees, which fly faster, survive longer and bounce more before expiring.

Hits scramble enemy movement for a moment, so melee mobs crowding you stumble off in the wrong direction instead of pressing the attack. It is a defensive tool as much as an offensive one. The odd part is that this particular debuff also lands on other players, which almost no weapon manages, so the sword has a small following in PvP for reasons that have nothing to do with its damage.

Legendary is the roll to hold out for. The swarm scales off the sword itself and the bees can crit off your melee crit chance, so there is nothing to optimize separately. Long after it stops being a weapon it turns into a crafting component for Zenith, so the copy you keep should go in a chest rather than to a shop.