Pumpking

He is a Pumpkin Moon enemy and does not exist outside it. Use the Pumpkin Moon Medallion at night once Plantera is dead, push the wave counter to ten, and he starts arriving with everything else. Nothing summons him on his own and he never spawns at any other time.

The event ends at dawn. Any Pumpking still alive when the sun comes up drops straight down through the ground and leaves, and the same happens if every player in the world dies while the moon is running. There is no partial credit for a boss you had at ten percent health when the timer ran out.

His head rotates between three expressions and each one is a different attack, so the tell is on the sprite rather than in the timing. The grinning jack-o-lantern face means he wants to be directly over you swinging his arms, and roughly five seconds into that mode he abruptly accelerates and rams. The grimace means scythes. The open mouth means burning globs.

The scythes are what actually kill you. They come off his arms and hang motionless for a moment, then begin to spin, then chase you at rising speed, and one of them hits for far more than his body ever will. The globs behave like the ones the Mourning Wood spits, falling to the floor and sitting there as a burning patch on solid tiles. He tracks you from further away in that mode, so you get more room and more floor hazards at the same time.

His two blades swing much like the hands on the skull boss, but they take no damage at all. They carry health and defense values internally that never come into play, which is a quiet joke at the expense of anyone trying to disarm him. Only his head is a target and only his head deals contact damage. The cloak hanging off it is a separate harmless object entirely. He also travels through blocks, so there is nothing to hide behind.

Contact damage is the mildest thing he has, which flips the usual approach. Getting in close under his head with heavy defense and eating the swipes is safer than sitting at range trying to read scythes, and short range homing weapons like the Flairon do enormous work from that position, because he parks himself right above you anyway. Wings plus the Soaring Insignia keep you there.

Once several are on screen the calculation flips again and mobility beats defense. The Anti-Gravity Hook, the Tabi line and the Shield of Cthulhu all give you a way out of a scythe cluster that armor does not. A recent change had him take up far more enemy slots than before, which quietly cut how many can crowd you at once, so a fight that sounds unmanageable from an older memory is calmer now.

Killing him gives more points toward the next wave than anything else in the event, so he is both the obstacle and the accelerator. His drops are tied to how late you get him: the higher the wave, the better the odds, and by wave fifteen he is guaranteed to hand over at least one thing from his standard table. Farming him at wave ten over and over is a wasted moon. Build the arena so you can survive deep into the night instead, and treat the early waves as fuel.

The Horseman's Blade comes from him despite the name pointing squarely at a different enemy, which trips up anyone hunting the headless rider for it.

Scythes he throws travel well past the boundary enemies normally respect. They will reach into houses and kill town NPCs who are nowhere near the fight. Run the event somewhere else, or accept that you will be rehousing the neighborhood in the morning.

• The name is pumpkin and king mashed together. He fills the same slot in his event that the Ice Queen fills in the Frost Moon: last to arrive, hardest to kill, and the only true flier of the lineup.
• A cloud shaped like his head shows up in the background from time to time.