Spiked Jungle Slime

There is no summon and no event behind it. It spawns by itself in the jungle caves before hardmode, which puts it right in the middle of the trip everyone makes for stingers, vines and a bee hive, usually with early gear and no room to back up.

Treating slimes as a melee-safe problem is a habit this one punishes. It throws spikes at you from across a room, and in expert worlds it also has a close-range volley that goes off in every direction at once. The volley is what catches people, because it triggers at exactly the distance you close to when you decide to swing.

Both attacks need a clear line to you, so a corner or one block of cover shuts it up completely. Past about a screen away it cannot reach you at all. In the outer band it only has the single spike, fired on a slow enough timer that you can read it and walk. Step inside that band in an expert world and it switches to the burst instead, with a slightly longer wait afterward. If you are stuck with a short weapon, close in right after a volley goes off and leave before the next one is ready.

Most spikes poison you, and the higher difficulties stretch that to the point where it follows you through the next two fights. Carry antidotes or a regeneration setup that outpaces it, because the chip damage while you are mining is what actually drains you, not the slime. Royal Gel removes the whole problem, since it treats you as something not worth attacking.

• It poisons you and never drops a Bezoar, which would be the obvious counter to it.
• It carries less money than the plain jungle slime it upgrades from.
• There is a rose growing inside the body, and the spikes look like its thorns.