Magic Mirror

Using a mirror plays a short animation and then drops you back at your spawn point from anywhere in the world, and it never runs out. The windup is long by Terraria standards, long enough that you cannot treat it as an escape from something already on top of you. Start it before the fight goes wrong, not after. The teleport also wipes your fall speed, so a mirror will cancel a long drop if you have the time to trigger it on the way down.

Mirrors sit in ordinary chests through the Underground and Cavern layers, so most players pick one up in their first hour of digging without going looking. The Ice Mirror is the same tool with a different sprite and turns up in Frozen Chests in the ice biome. Journey Mode characters start with a mirror already in the inventory, and current versions let you craft one outright if your world refuses to hand one over.

A Recall Potion does the same job almost instantly, and in an emergency that gap decides whether you get out. The mirror wins on being infinite. Most players carry both: the mirror for routine trips home, potions for the fights where a second matters. If you have a steady potion supply and no patience for the slow version, dropping the mirror into Shimmer breaks it down into something more useful.

The mirror is the base of the recall chain. It goes into the Cell Phone, which folds the same teleport in with every information accessory, and from there into the Shellphone. It is also a component of the Scrying Orb. Keep a spare if you plan on any of those, since feeding your only mirror to a recipe leaves you walking home in the meantime.