Zenith

One swing throws a spread of sword sprites out toward your cursor and then pulls them back to you. They ignore terrain, pierce through everything they touch with no limit, and steer themselves at whatever is near the aim point. The return leg is live as well, so anything standing behind you gets hit on the way back. Each blade in the fan wears the appearance of a different weapon from the crafting tree, and that is decoration only: they all share one hitbox and one damage figure.

The homing is anchored to the cursor rather than to a target. Every sword but the first looks for something within roughly twenty tiles of where you are pointing and turns toward it, which means you never have to track a moving boss. Park the cursor in the general neighborhood and let the blades sort it out.

The exception matters. The lead blade of every swing is always the Zenith itself and it never homes, so against something moving unpredictably that first hit is the one that misses.

This is the mistake nearly everyone makes with it. Attack speed does not raise how fast the swords travel or how many arrive per second. What it changes is how many sprites appear in a single swing, and it changes that downward. Stack enough of it and the fan collapses to the one blade that cannot home, which is a flat loss. Skip the speed buffs and the melee speed accessories entirely and take raw damage, critical strike chance and armor penetration instead.

The attack is not unlimited. The blades can only reach inside a rectangle centered on you, wider than it is tall, roughly the size of a zoomed-out screen. Anything past that edge is untouchable no matter where you point. Near the edge of the map the box slides inward to stay inside the world, so a fight against the world border gives you an off-center reach rather than a shortened one. Teleporters and portals also confuse the projectiles badly, sending them off at sharp angles while they try to find their way home.

Endless piercing plus homing means every blade connects with every segment of a long enemy at once, and each blade lands several hits per second on top of that. Against the Destroyer the output stops being a number you can read off the screen. Against a single large target it is still the highest sustained damage in the game with the right buffs and positioning, and it clears the Moon Lord on the hardest difficulty in about the time it takes to describe the fight.

Legendary is the label to chase, but it is not actually unique here. The weapon gains nothing from size or swing speed, so the reforges that only add damage and critical chance end up doing the same work. There is one real alternative: if your critical strike chance is already pushed to an extreme by gear and buffs, Ruthless overtakes the crit-based options.

The recipe reaches all the way back to the Copper Shortsword the game hands you in the first minute, and the tin version will not stand in for it. Players who threw theirs away, or who started in Journey mode and never had one, sometimes assume the sword is locked off forever. It is not. Copper can be pulled out of an extractinator, fished up, taken as a slime bonus drop, shimmered out of tin ore, or simply carried in from another world. Throw the finished sword into shimmer and it turns back into an upgraded version of that shortsword, which is the game being funny about where the whole thing started.