Gold Chest

They glint. Put any light near one and it sparkles the way loose coins do, which is often how you notice a chest through a wall of dirt before you have dug to it. That is worth training your eye on, because unlike almost everything else underground these are placed when the world is made and never come back. Every one you empty is one fewer in the world.

A chest is not a random handful. It gets exactly one headline item, then the game walks a series of groups and, for each group it decides to include, drops in a single member of that group. That is why you never open one and find a stack of Wooden Arrows sitting next to a stack of Shurikens: they belong to the same group and only one can be taken from it. In practice the headline item is the only thing worth traveling for, and everything under it is filler you would have picked up anyway.

Where the chest generated decides what can be inside it, so searching is directional rather than lucky. Down near the bottom of the world they start carrying the same secondary stock as shadow chests, Meteorite Bars included, which is the reason a deep cave run can put a Space Gun and meteor armor in your hands before you have broken a single shadow orb or crimson heart.

The Lava Charm is the sharpest example. It only generates in chests sitting in the lava level of the caverns, so if that is the target, go down until you are walking past open lava and then search sideways along that band instead of digging deeper. Pulling the charm into a chest also thins the odds on everything else that chest could have held.

Dungeon chests are locked and each one needs its own Golden Key. The keys come out of the plain wooden chests scattered through the same dungeon, one apiece, so the boring furniture chests are what fund the good ones and skipping them is why people run dry halfway through. Dungeon gold chests are also the only ones that can hand out more than a single bonus item, so they get genuinely fat rather than one weapon and some rope. The Shadow Key hides in that secondary slot, and that is the item that opens everything down in the underworld.

A pyramid runs a short list of its own, weighted toward movement gear rather than weapons. Pulling a Flying Carpet out of one that early bends the rest of pre-Hardmode around it, and the Sandstorm in a Bottle sitting on the same list does much the same for vertical movement, so a desert with a pyramid in it is worth the detour long before you are strong enough to be comfortable down there.

For the Worthy puts locked gold chests on floating islands where the sky chests normally sit, purely as a callback to how the game used to work, and the loot inside is still the island loot. Celebration Mk 10 guarantees the pharaoh gear in pyramid chests along with a carpet or a bottle, and it makes the Lava Charm easier to find, which pushes the other headline items further out of reach.

Strip it and it behaves like any other container. Break it out, carry it home, place it, and you have storage with the same capacity as anything else plus a look you cannot craft. Selling one pays better than selling a plain wooden chest, though not well enough to be a plan. Keep them for the furniture instead.