Starfury

It lives in the chests on floating islands, so the hunt is really a hunt for islands: build up, ride a gravitation potion, or use a wing slot you borrowed from a friend in multiplayer. Roughly one chest in four holds it, which usually means visiting several islands. If you would rather fish for it, the crates pulled out of water at sky height carry it at the same odds, and that is a lot less flying. Legendary is the modifier to hold out for.

The blade is unremarkable for its tier. What you are actually carrying is the star that drops toward your cursor on some of your swings, which hits harder than the sword and falls through terrain to reach whatever you pointed at. It carries no knockback and will pass through one target before it breaks. Aim with the cursor, not with your character, and expect the sword itself to be the backup.

The star spawns far above you and offset sideways, away from the direction you are facing, then falls toward the aim point. Keeping the cursor low on the screen gives you a near vertical drop that lands where you asked. Point at the top of the screen and the angle swings around wildly, which scatters damage across a crowd and is useless for hitting one specific thing. With practice you can catch two enemies in one swing, the near one on the blade and the far one under the star.

Only the opening frame of a swing can release a star, and the recharge timer runs independently of your attack speed. That produces an unintuitive result: adding melee speed can push the star onto every third swing instead of every second, so more attack speed can mean fewer stars. Speed does make the stars themselves fall faster once they exist. If the star is your damage, watch for the small sparkle and listen for the mana refill chime, then time your swing to it rather than mashing. A modest melee speed bonus keeps a Legendary one firing at its ceiling, and piling on more only wastes swings.

Stars light up everything they pass through and keep dropping glowing particles after they land, so the sword doubles as a cave scanner in unexplored ground. The other side effect is expensive: the star breaks fragile things where it lands, including the larva inside a hive you have not found yet. Swinging this casually through the underground jungle is how people meet Queen Bee with no potions and no arena.

It is one of the strongest swords you can hold before the first boss and it stays useful into early hardmode, mostly because the star ignores terrain and hits things you cannot reach. Star Wrath is the hardmode version of the same idea, with a whole torrent instead of a single star, and this one is a component of the Zenith at the very end of the game, so do not sell it. In the early days it was a magic weapon that cost mana and behaved much closer to that later sword, which is why old guides describe it as far stronger than it is now.