Sniper Rifle

There is no recipe for it. Skeleton Snipers carry it, and they only start appearing in the Dungeon after Plantera has been killed, so the gun is gated behind that fight rather than behind Hardmode in general. Farming it means running Dungeon corridors after that fight, and the harder difficulties roll the drop more generously.

Every part of this gun assumes the click lands. Rounds leave the barrel fast and hit hard, but the gap between shots is long enough that a miss genuinely costs you, and the built in critical rate means a large share of what does connect arrives as a crit rather than a graze. Against a slow or predictable target nothing ranged at this stage keeps up with it. Against something that darts around the screen it feels miserable, which is why ammunition matters more here than on a gun that sprays.

• Chlorophyte Bullets curve toward the target and quietly solve the aiming problem, which is the default answer if you keep whiffing.
• Crystal Bullets burst into shards on impact, so a target wide enough to catch all of them takes far more than the shot alone.
• Plain Musket Balls and Tungsten Bullets leave the barrel as High Velocity Bullets instead. They keep their own damage and pick up the piercing, so an Endless Musket Pouch turns the rifle into a line clearer with no weapon swap.

Holding the interact key drags the camera toward your cursor with no accessory equipped, the same view shift the Binoculars give. That is not only for sightseeing. Pushing the view out also moves the band where enemies spawn around you, so you can shove spawns toward a farm or away from the ledge you are standing on. A Rifle Scope, Sniper Scope or Recon Scope adds a little on top, though how much depends on your screen resolution more than anything else.

Unreal is the modifier to chase, and because the rifle sells for so little relative to its power, reforging to it is cheap. From there, stealth armor is the natural partner, since standing still to charge stealth feeds the exact two numbers this weapon already leads on. Vortex armor at full stealth with emblems and a scope will push critical chance past the point where every shot crits, and a banner bonus on top produces single hits that look like typos.

• No weapon in the game starts with a higher critical chance. It also ties the Revolver for projectile speed and the Meowmere for raw hit.
• A Coin Gun fed platinum matches it per shot and fires several times faster, so the rifle is not the ceiling if you have coins to burn.
• In player versus player it is the closest thing to a guaranteed kill, taken from off the other player's screen.