The Horseman's Blade

Pumpking is the only thing that hands it over, which means running the Pumpkin Moon far enough into its wave order for him to start appearing at all, and then further still for the drop to become likely. The odds climb with the wave counter. In practice the sword is a reward for having an arena and a build that can hold the event together late, not for any one kill.

The blade is the less interesting half. Each swing drags a wide orange glow that reaches well past the metal and can catch three targets at once, including things standing slightly behind you. Every one of those connections calls in a burning pumpkin head that flies in from somewhere off screen, travels through terrain without slowing down, and hunts the enemy that triggered it.

If that enemy dies first, the head picks the nearest thing still standing and keeps going, switching targets as long as anything is in range. Only an empty room makes it sail off and vanish. That is why your damage feels delayed and then arrives all at once, and why the weapon is at its best in a fight that is already going your way.

Critters produce nothing, and neither does anything that came out of a statue. If your farm runs on statues, the sword loses the entire feature that makes it worth carrying and you are left swinging a slow broadsword for no reason. In player versus player it will not spawn heads at other people either, though a head already in the air will hurt whoever it runs into.

It is less picky in the other direction. Spiky balls, enemy projectiles like chaos balls and vile spit, and even bound NPCs waiting to be freed all register as valid things to chase, so a head will happily go pester a captive while you are busy elsewhere.

Anything assembled out of many parts is the ideal target, because each part counts as its own enemy. Two passes along a worm boss or a wyvern buries the screen in homing heads. The same compounding happens through the Pumpkin Moon and Frost Moon, where the crowd never thins out and every hit turns into more projectiles. Heads will even keep gathering around the Moon Lord's hands and head after those have already been destroyed.

Enemies are always shoved directly away from you, no matter which direction you swung. In a corridor that keeps things off your face and buys room to reposition. In a trap farm or a minion setup it scatters exactly what you were trying to hold in one place. Either lay the arena out so the push sends things somewhere useful, or swap weapons when you need enemies to stay put.

Against the Terra Blade it trades swing speed for heavier hits, far stronger shove and free homing damage on top, so it holds up through the moon events and most of what follows. Reforge to Legendary. Do not sell a spare either, since it goes into the Zenith later, which is the real reason to keep one long after you stop swinging it.

Nothing called a Headless Horseman drops it, which irritates people every October. The reference is Washington Irving's Sleepy Hollow, where the rider throws his head at the fleeing schoolteacher and it turns out to have been a pumpkin. Disney's animated take set that pumpkin on fire, which is close to what the projectiles look like, and their name is short for jack-o'-lantern. One last quirk: reforge prefixes attach to the very front of the name, so you end up carrying something like Keen The Horseman's Blade.