Handgun

There is no recipe. It comes out of the locked gold chests in the Dungeon, so the earliest you can hold one is after Skeletron is down and you have a Golden Key in hand. The other route skips the Dungeon entirely: Golden Lock Boxes pulled from Dungeon Crates and Stockade Crates roll the same table, so a fishing setup will eventually hand you one without a single skeleton fight.

Dungeon chests are not filled randomly one by one. The game walks a fixed list of items and assigns them to chests in order of distance from the entrance, looping back to the start of the list when it runs out. This gun sits at the very end of that list.

The practical result is that if your Dungeon generated with roughly ten chests or more, one of them is holding it, and it will not be one of the first chests you reach. A small cramped Dungeon is the only case where you can genuinely come up empty, and at that point fishing is the answer.

It is the first gun most players own that fires fast enough to feel like a gun rather than a musket, and it is the point where a ranged run stops being about landing single heavy shots and starts being about sustained fire. Ammunition becomes the constraint instead of damage, so buy musket balls in bulk before you commit to it. It is accurate, it has no windup, and it holds up for the rest of pre Hardmode without complaint.

Its real value is as a component. Combine it with hellstone gear and you have a Phoenix Blaster almost immediately, which is a genuine step up and carries comfortably to the Wall of Flesh. Do not sit on this waiting to find something better, and do not sell your spare if the Dungeon gave you two. Unreal is the modifier to chase if you are rerolling.

The sprite is an M1911A1, one of about a dozen weapons in the game drawn from a real firearm rather than invented for it.