Rope

Rope hangs off a block from any direction, or floats in open air wherever there is background wall behind it. Once placed you ride it by holding up or down as you cross it. Descending is as quick as falling and cancels the fall damage when you step off the bottom, which makes a rope line the cheapest safe way down in the game. Climbing is nearly as fast. Sideways rope works but crawls, so keep those runs short. Flying into a rope preserves the speed you arrived with rather than dumping it.

New rope attaches to the top of an existing column and the whole line grows downward from there. You dig your hellevator, stand at the top, and keep feeding rope in until it reaches the bottom without ever descending yourself. The same works upward, because a rope column does not need anything above it to anchor to. Build one under your feet as you climb and you can reach a floating island with no wings at all, or shoot up out of the ocean depths in one go. Torches and other placed objects sitting in the shaft can interrupt an extension, so keep the column clear.

They all climb identically. The one functional difference is that silk and web rope ignore falling lava, while plain and vine rope get knocked loose by it the way torches do, and that only matters in the Underworld. Silk Rope is the efficient choice: turning cobwebs into silk first stretches the same pile of cobwebs considerably further than making Web Rope directly, at the cost of needing a Loom where web rope needs no station at all. Vine Rope comes from cutting vines with the Guide to Plant Fiber Cordage equipped.

• Every type crafts into a coil, which stacks ten times higher and can be thrown to lay a line into a pit you cannot safely reach yet. Coils convert straight back when you need placeable pieces again.
• Rope has bonus placement reach, so a column can be extended from further away than most blocks allow.
• Actuators will not toggle rope off.
• Streamers and chains behave exactly like rope in every way except that they will not become coils.