Fossil Pickaxe

Desert Fossil comes out of the wall with any pickaxe at all, which makes this one of the few tools you can jump straight to without grinding through the ore tiers first. Find an underground desert early, feed the fossils through an Extractinator, and you can walk past the Gold and Platinum step entirely.

It handles obsidian and both evil ores, which takes you right to the lip of the underworld and no further. Hellstone still needs a boss tier pickaxe, so this shortens the middle of a run rather than replacing the Nightmare or Deathbringer step. It is also a touch quicker at plain digging than the metal pickaxes it replaces, which adds up across a long tunnel.