Cactus Helmet

Judge this armor on the spines, not on the protection. Anything that makes contact takes a hit back and gets flung away hard, and the shove is worth more than the damage in early caves, where the thing killing you is usually a zombie or a crawler that has you cornered. It does nothing against arrows, spit or magic, so a room full of ranged attackers will chew through you at the same speed it would in wood.

A surface desert is the entire supply chain. No ore, no boss, no station beyond a workbench, and enough material within a short walk that a brand new character can be fully kitted before nightfall. All three pieces have to be on at once for the reflect to fire, so do not slot a leftover metal Helmet over the Breastplate and Leggings and then wonder why nothing bounces back. The first proper ore set you assemble ends its run.

The reflected damage scales with world difficulty, so the set holds its value longer in Expert and longer again in Master, where the melee enemies that hurt you most are also the ones losing the most for touching you. It did not always work like this. The bonus used to be a scrap of extra defense, and the switch to a thorns effect is what gave Cactus armor a reason to exist at all.