Mushroom Staff

Most pre-hardmode minions share invincibility frames on a target, so filling every slot with the same summon returns much less than the slot count implies. Mushroom Bois each carry their own hit timer instead, so ten of them do close to ten times the work of one. Linear scaling like that is rare this early and it is the whole reason to build around the staff.

The tradeoff is that a single hit is tiny, so anything adding flat damage per strike is worth more here than almost anywhere else. Whip uptime is not a bonus, it is the weapon. Spinal Tap or Snapthorn held down more or less permanently is the intended way to play it, and a Shark Tooth Necklace pulls far more weight than it looks like it should for the same reason. Obsidian armor beats Bee armor here despite Bee handing you an extra minion slot, because the whip bonuses feed every Boi at once. Outside a committed summoner build the staff does very little.

Each Boi runs and jumps at whatever is nearest and hits it with its body. When a target sits well above it, or when it has drifted too far from you with nothing to chase, it launches into a dive, detonates on impact and teleports back to your side. The explosion is free damage, but the dive has a cooldown, so a Boi that keeps resetting is a Boi that is not attacking. If you are airborne when one comes back it stays in return mode until you land, which is the usual reason a group of them looks idle mid fight.

They handle platforms cleanly, so for the Wall of Flesh a proper hellbridge beats a Water Walking Potion with this staff equipped. If you have Cattiva, she out damages a single Boi, so she is worth a slot even on a build that is otherwise all mushrooms, and she wants the same high tag whips so nothing else changes.

Fabled is the roll to chase. The staff and its minion are a crossover with Dead Cells, and the tooltip is a nod to the get fixed boi seed rather than anything about the weapon itself. Two unused jump and land sounds for the minion are still sitting unused in the game files.