Copper Watch

A watch puts the in game clock in the corner of the screen. That sounds minor until you have tried to plan around dusk, a Blood Moon roll or an NPC that only sells at night by guessing at the light level. You can hide the readout without dropping the item by clicking the watch icon under the minimap with your inventory open, or through the equipment menu, so screenshots and cluttered HUDs are not a reason to leave it at home.

Informational accessories work from anywhere you can hold them. Inventory, Void Bag, social slot: all fine, and the clock still shows. That means the watch costs you nothing to carry, and there is no argument for equipping it properly unless you want a modifier on it. In multiplayer the readout is shared with teammates standing within about fifty tiles, so one person in the group carrying one covers everybody who is building together.

The metal decides the precision and every version rounds down rather than to the nearest, so a low tier watch tells you which hour you are in and the top tier tells you the minute. For knowing when night is coming the cheapest one is enough. For timing an event flip or a fishing quest turn in you want a Platinum Watch or its gold equivalent, which are also the two that feed the GPS and through it the Cell Phone. Every watch is also a wiring ingredient for timers.

Because a Copper or Tin Watch is made from the cheapest metal in the game, reforging one is close to free. Modifiers only apply while an accessory is equipped in a real slot, so this is the one case where wearing the watch beats pocketing it: roll it to Warding and you have bought defense for pocket change. Older versions could break the display if you ran negative luck, freezing the clock at whatever time it last read, but that behavior is gone now.