Lucky Horseshoe

Skyware Chests on Floating Islands are the usual source, so a horseshoe often arrives on the same trip as your first Starfury. If you would rather fish for it, Sky Crates and Azure Crates pull from the same group, which beats sweeping the sky when you only need the one.

Falling is what kills you in the first few hours underground, and this removes that outright. It earns a slot until you have something better, and better usually means a grappling hook plus a Cloud in a Bottle. Even then the horseshoe is more forgiving than either, because a hook takes a moment to reel in and a bottle jump only fires once per fall. Wings make it redundant, but wings are mostly a Hardmode problem.

The Stoned debuff switches it off completely, and stone form takes much heavier falling damage than normal. If something petrifies you halfway down a shaft, the horseshoe will not save you.

Every balloon in the horseshoe line starts from one of these, right up to the Bundle of Horseshoe Balloons, and an Obsidian Horseshoe wants one too. It also carries a small luck bonus, which quietly nudges drop and spawn rolls on a character built for farming. That bonus does not stack across its own upgrades, so pairing the plain horseshoe with a Horseshoe Balloon gains you nothing there.

Reforging can hand it the Lucky modifier, which leaves you carrying a Lucky Lucky Horseshoe. The Lucky Coin, Arcane Flower and Deadly Sphere Staff can all be pushed into the same joke. Its flavor line is shared with the Garden Gnome.