Slasher's Mysterious Skull

Almost every other mount takes your wings out of the equation. This one leaves them equipped and then stops caring what they are worth. Any pair at all lets the raptor fly, at the mount's own top speed, in whatever direction you point it, including flat sideways travel that plenty of low tier wings cannot manage on their own. A set of Fledgling Wings pulled out of a sky island chest ends up outrunning wings you would normally have to beat a mechanical boss to buy. The animation swaps in a pterosaur that carries you while you are airborne, which is cosmetic, but it does tell you at a glance whether you are flying or running.

It does not move at one speed. Running and level flight are the slow settings, straight up is quicker, and holding a diagonal is the fastest thing it can do. If you are crossing a map or hauling yourself out of the underworld, angle the climb instead of going flat and then vertical. Over a long trip that is a real difference in minutes. None of your movement gear helps here, though: boots, speed potions and any other movement bonus stop counting the moment you transform.

No dash. The double tap is simply gone while you are transformed, so a build resting on the dodge and reposition of a dash accessory loses the trick it was built around. That is the only real sacrifice. You keep your weapons, you can drink and use tools normally, and every action gets its own raptor animation rather than being locked out. Falls barely register, which suits a mount that spends most of its time high up.

It takes up the same space a player does, so it goes through a standard doorway and down a two wide shaft without you dismounting. That sounds trivial until you compare it with the mounts that make you hop off at every entrance. Together with keeping your weapons, it works as a fighting mount in cramped ground rather than only in the open.

It is cheap enough to put together that it can be your first proper flight, well before you would otherwise own anything that hovers, and that is when it does the most for a run. It keeps earning its slot later because it stays out of the way of your gear. Nothing about it stops a weapon working, and if you have found a Soaring Insignia the endless flight it grants applies to the raptor too, which turns this into unlimited travel rather than a mount you have to land.

Head vanity mostly carries over onto the raptor, but not cleanly. Some pieces draw only a fragment of themselves, a few do not draw at all, and a handful of held items vanish from its hands, so expect to test a couple of hats before one sits right on a dinosaur skull. The design follows the Jurassic Park version of the animal rather than the feathered reconstruction paleontology settled on. The line in the tooltip about nasty big pointy teeth comes from the killer rabbit scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It is also one of only two mounts you craft rather than find, the other being the Drill Containment Unit.