Tinkerer's Workshop

You have a fixed number of accessory slots and far more accessories worth wearing than will fit in them. This station is the answer to that. It welds two or three items into one that keeps everything they all did, so the boots that make you fast and the boots that let you fly become a single item and you get a slot back. Almost every mobility and utility accessory in the game has somewhere to go, which is why buying it from the Goblin Tinkerer as soon as you can afford it reshapes a run more than most weapons do.

Whatever modifiers the parts were wearing are discarded, and the result rolls a fresh one at random with no memory of what went in. That has one clear consequence: never pay to reforge something you intend to combine later. Reforge at the end of a chain, once the item is in its final form, and not a single step earlier.

• The boot line, which runs through several stages and finishes as Terraspark Boots: speed, short flight, footing on ice, immunity to burning blocks and the ability to run across water and lava, all in one slot.
• The Ankh Shield line, which folds eleven separate protective trinkets into one item that blocks most of the debuffs enemies inflict and resists knockback. It is the biggest quality of life jump in hardmode and worth starting early, since collecting the parts takes a long time.
• The balloon line, which stacks the extra jumps together and then adds fall protection on top of them.
• The information stack, which ends as the Shellphone, carrying every readout in the game plus a set of teleports. No combat value at all, but it clears a whole row of clutter out of your inventory.
• The diving line, which gives you breath, light and movement underwater, and in Expert and above also keeps you from being chilled.

Because these are trees rather than single steps, it pays to think one level ahead. Do not sell an accessory that looks redundant until you have checked whether it feeds something later, and do not throw away the small informational trinkets you keep finding, because the phone eats a dozen of them before it is done. The two longest crafting chains in the game both run through this bench, which makes it less a crafting station than a long term shopping list.

Most of the music boxes you cannot record normally come from here, along with the entire wiring kit: pressure plates, The Grand Design and the multicolor wrench. If you have any intention of doing serious wiring work, that alone earns it the floor space. It is also a flat surface, so you can stand other stations on top of it, and it matches the wooden furniture set if you care what your crafting room looks like.