Wooden Crate

Fishing pulls these up anywhere: any biome, any depth, no progression required. That makes the Wooden Crate the one you see most and the one you stop reading the contents of fastest. The Pearlwood Crate is its hardmode equivalent, and the metal tiers above it, Iron and Golden, pull from richer tables while this one stays at the bottom.

Sailfish Boots are a proper running upgrade that most runs otherwise wait a very long time for. Tsunami in a Bottle hands you a second jump in your first hour. The Extractinator turns every pile of silt and slush you have been walking past into ore and gems, and on its own it justifies keeping a rod in the hotbar early. Everything else in here is bait, pocket change, low tier metal and a potion or two.

Aglet, Step Stool, Climbing Claws, Radar and the cordage guide all normally live in surface chests, so this crate is how you get them back if you looted the world before you understood what they did. There is a gap in that though. None of the early wooden weapons are in the pool, so you cannot fish up the ones you skipped.

A crate hands you an ore or a bar, never one of each, however the table is laid out for reading. It also never pairs the Extractinator with the accessory group. The part that matters most is invisible: when a crate rolls nothing from the main pools the game quietly rolls it again, so the real chance on the good entries is close to double what the listed figures suggest and you open far fewer duds than you would expect.

Hoarding crates to crack after the Wall of Flesh stopped working several updates ago. One fished in pre-hardmode gives exactly the same table afterward, and the change was deliberate so no crate can spill hardmode gear. Open them on the spot and take the inventory space back. If you are also stacking bait, Apprentice and Journeyman Bait come out of these often enough to keep a low tier rod fed indefinitely.