Bone Wand

This family of tools exists to get around a placement rule. A few blocks in the game cannot be dropped out of your inventory onto the world the normal way, and a wand is the workaround for each of them. None of them cost mana. What they cost is material: the wand is only the delivery mechanism, and the actual block comes out of a stack you have to be carrying. Run out of the matching item and the wand does nothing at all, silently, which is the mistake almost everyone makes the first time.

The Bone Wand puts down Bone Blocks and eats one Bone per tile. Mine the block later and you get the bone back, so nothing is truly spent while you are still shaping a build.

• The Bone Wand is a rare drop from the Dungeon undead. Cursed Skulls give it up, so do Dark Casters, Librarian Skeletons and ordinary Angry Bones. It is a grind, and it only opens up once Skeletron is down.
• The Hive Wand comes off Queen Bee, often enough that a couple of fights will produce it.
• The Living Wood Wand and Leaf Wand travel together in a Living Wood Chest inside a living tree, and both can also fall out of a shaken forest tree.
• The Living Mahogany Wand and Rich Mahogany Leaf Wand pair up the same way inside an Ivy Chest, found in living mahogany trees and jungle shrines underground, and they drop from shaking jungle trees.

The four tree wands are picky in a way their tooltips do not warn you about. The forest pair only accepts plain Wood. The jungle pair only accepts Rich Mahogany. Boreal, palm, shadewood, ebonwood, ash, pearlwood, dynasty and spooky wood are all refused, so a base built out of one of those still needs a stack of the right log kept aside just to feed the wand.

Living wood and leaf blocks are the reason most players go looking for these. They are the only way to build a treehouse that matches the natural living trees instead of approximating one with planks, and the leaf blocks let you shape a canopy that reads as a canopy rather than a green box.

The Hive is the one to handle carefully. Blocks placed by its wand behave exactly like naturally generated hive, which means breaking one can release bees or spill honey. A decorative hive wall inside your base is a hazard waiting for the day you tidy up.

The Living Wood Wand has a second job late on: it is the Shimmer ingredient that produces the Finch Staff, which is worth remembering before you throw a spare one away.