Heart

Hearts are not something you carry. They pop out of dead enemies and smashed pots, glow faintly red on the ground, and are swallowed the instant you touch one. The game only bothers to produce them when the nearest player is actually hurt, so a clean run through a cave at full health drops none at all and every pot you break along the way is wasted.

One kill cannot produce a Heart and a mana Star together. When the drop check passes, the game looks at your mana first: if it is short, the Star gets first refusal, and the Heart only gets its chance if that attempt fails. In practice a mage burning through mana sees fewer Hearts than a melee player standing in the same room. Luck influences whether the check happens at all, not which of the two you end up with.

The grab radius is small enough that you have to walk over a Heart deliberately, which is awkward in the middle of a fight and worse in the air. A Heartreach Potion widens that radius enormously and turns every drop in the room into healing you collect without changing direction. It is the cheapest way to stay alive through a long fight without stopping to drink anything else.

Some enemies are far more generous than the base roll suggests. Creepers around the Brain of Cthulhu, the segments of the Eater of Worlds and The Hungry hanging off the Wall of Flesh all shed Hearts freely, which is why those fights feel sustainable without a healing supply. Present Mimics and the Halloween and Christmas event bosses dump a handful at once, and every non-event boss leaves a small pile behind on death. If you would rather not depend on any of it, a Heart Statue wired to a timer makes them on demand.

During Halloween a Heart is drawn as a Candy Apple and during Christmas as a Candy Cane. Nothing changes except the picture. Celebration Mk10 and Zenith worlds keep both skins in rotation permanently, so holiday sweets keep dropping in the middle of summer. There is also a heart-shaped cloud that occasionally drifts through the background sky, which has no effect on anything.