Drill Containment Unit

This is an endgame purchase in every sense. The luminite bill alone is larger than a single Moon Lord kill provides, so you are fighting him at least twice before you can start, and the rest of the list drags you through a chlorophyte farm, a glowing mushroom farm and a dungeon run for ectoplasm. Four different stations are involved before the last step, which catches people out mid-craft. By raw material value nothing else in the game is more expensive to build, and it sells back for pocket change. Nobody makes this to trade it.

It flies, hovers as long as you want, and dissolves whatever is in front of you from further away than any handheld tool reaches. Nothing in the world resists it, trees included, so mining stops being a task and becomes a matter of pointing yourself somewhere and holding a button. It also passes through liquid without slowing your flight the way swimming does, though it will happily drown you while you are busy.

One button clears blocks, another strips background walls, and holding both takes everything. The mount slopes the edges of what it carves, so tunnels come out clean with no follow-up hammering, which quietly makes it a terraforming tool as much as a mining one. Underground bases and cave systems that would take an evening by hand take a few minutes.

You cannot use weapons or tools while mounted, and the drill itself does no damage. If something finds you at the bottom of a shaft, your options are dismount or leave. Minions are the exception, since summons persist across mounting, and that alone is a decent argument for keeping a summon weapon on your bar whenever you dig. There is a trick where a yoyo or chainsaw already in use survives the transition, but the mount cannot drill while it is happening, so it solves nothing.

Unlike a pickaxe, it cannot reach past a block to take the one behind it. Everything directly ahead of you goes, in a line, which means you are always opening a corridor rather than picking a vein out of the wall. For bulk ore that is fine and fast. For a careful extraction it is the wrong tool. Bring a light source and a Spelunker Potion so you can see what you are about to fly past, since at this speed an unlit ore vein is gone before you register it. Mining speed bonuses from armor and accessories do nothing here, so there is no loadout to optimize.

• The lasers cut out after about a minute of continuous use, the same way a chainsaw does. Release and re-press rather than holding the button down forever.
• It counts as a hammer, which is how it slopes terrain, and that also lets it smash altars. Take it to a fresh pre-Hardmode world and swinging at one still costs you the usual health penalty.
• It is much slower underwater, so Neptune's Shell or anything else that helps you move and breathe below the surface belongs on before you start.
• Dye affects both the mount and the beams it fires, which is the only cosmetic control you get over it.

It was originally meant to be a ground vehicle that chewed through terrain and sloped it behind you, closer to what the digging cart does now. That version was buggy and unsatisfying, so it was rebuilt as a flying mount, and the old sprite is still sitting in the game files. It looks like it was welded out of martian plating despite needing nothing from that event, and for an item built on luminite it is one of the few that does not get finished at the ancient manipulator.