Ark of the Elements
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| Type | Weapon – Crafting material |
|---|---|
| Damage | 560 Melee |
| Knockback | 8.5 (Very Strong) |
| Critical chance | 14% |
| Use time | 20 Average |
| Velocity | 16 |
| Tooltip | Left Click to perform a 5-swing combo that ends by throwing the blade Releasing while the blade is out will deal extra damage and give 2 charges Right Click to snip out the scissor blades in front of you Hitting an enemy with it will parry them, granting you brief invulnerability You can parry projectiles to make them deal 100 less damage for a short period Parrying will empower the next 10 swings of the sword, letting you use both blades at once Pressing Right Click while holding UP with empowered charges will provoke a Big Rip in spacetime and use all charges A heavenly pair of blades infused with the essence of Terraria, powerful enough to cut through the fabric of reality |
| Inflicts Debuff |  Elemental Mix100% chance |
| Debuff duration | 1 second (Swing, Solar Needle, Glass Star) 1.5 seconds (Parry attack) |
| Debuff tooltip | A beautiful elemental symphony is flaying you alive |
| Rarity |  |
| Sell | 22  |
| Research | 1 required |
Solar Needle
Glass Star
The Ark of the Elements is a craftable post-Moon Lord melee weapon that is the penultimate upgrade to the Fractured Ark. It uses a custom swing animation and performs a five-swing combo of an upwards slash followed by a downwards one that shoots a fast solar needle alongside an arc of four homing elemental glass stars, repeating the last two swings once, and then following it up with a medium-ranged throw, where the ark will be sent out spinning in the direction of the player's mouse, before coming back to them.
The solar needle deals 80% of the weapon's base damage, and each glass star deals 20% of the weapon's base damage. If the player releases the left mouse button right in the middle of the throw (between 30% and 60% of the way through, indicated by a blip sound alongside a pulse visual effect), the second half of the Ark will be sent out and both scissor blades will snap together, boosting their damage by 120%.
Right-clicking with the weapon performs a parry attack that grants the player brief invincibility frames on direct hits and reduce the damage of projectiles. Parrying and hitting enemies with the final part of the weapon's combo will fill up the weapon's charge.
Its best modifier is Godly. It cannot get modifiers that affect size.
Parry and Charge System
Right-clicking performs a parry, where the Ark's scissor blades will get rapidly snapped in front of the player. If an enemy is hit by the blades during the parry, the owner will gain a little more than half a second worth of invincibility. If a projectile is hit by the ark, the projectile's damage will be lowered by a maximum of 100 damage for one second. In both cases a sound effect will play and a line of text will pop up above the player to indicate the parry was successful. After the parry finishes, successful or not, it will go on a cooldown, indicated by a rainbow bar above the player's head.
The Ark of the Elements possesses a unique charge system, being able to hold up to 10 charges indicated by a small rainbow bar over the ark's inventory sprite. Swinging the sword will consume one charge per swing, hitting an enemy with the snapping blades during the throw part of the combo will restore 2 charges, and landing a parry, be it on an enemy or a projectile will entirely refill the Ark's charges. When the ark holds any amount of charges, its damage will be multiplied by 1.2 and its blades will get bigger. The charges are indicated by the two scissor blades being swung as one, instead of alternating during the combo, with the entire ark being thrown out during the last part of the combo (Functionally, it remains unchanged, but instead of throwing the second blade towards the spinning one, the two spinning blades will just shut close on their own).
If the Ark holds any amount of charges, Right-Clicking while holding up will replace the parry with a Big Rip attack, where a ghostly projection of the scissor blades is thrown in the direction of the player's mouse before snapping shut, creating a damaging spacetime rip in their wake before it gets stitched back up, depleting all of the weapon's charges in the process. The damage of the rip is dependent on the amount of charges consumed to release it, on top of receiving the 120% damage boost from the Ark being charged up. The damage is equal to the base damage (alongside the charge damage boost) multiplied by half the amount of charges consumed by the blast, meaning that using the attack with all 10 charges up will give the blast a 600% damage multiplier (1.2 * 10 * 0.5), while using the attack with only one charge remaining will give the blast a 60% damage multiplier (1.2 * 1 * 0.5).
Crafting
Recipe
| Crafting Station | ||
|---|---|---|
 Ancient Manipulator | ||
| Ingredient(s) | Amount | |
 | Ark of the Ancients | 1 |
 | Luminite Bar | 5 |
 | Life Alloy | 5 |
 | Galactica Singularity | 5 |
| Result | ||
 | Ark of the Elements | 1 |
Used in
| Result | Ingredients | Crafting station |
|---|---|---|
 Ark of the Cosmos |  Cosmic Anvil |
Notes
- Due to the Ark's unique swing animation, it is entirely unaffected by the player's attack speed.
- The parry doesn't work on harmless or static projectiles, or if the projectile is too large.
- The parry lasts for 5.66 seconds, with the actual parry lasting a quarter of a second, and the remaining time being taken up by the cooldown.
- The parry cooldown applies to all of the Fractured Ark's upgrades.
- The blast attack can still be performed even if the parry is on cooldown.
- Parrying a projectile that deals less than 100 damage will make it completely harmless for one second, but it can still work on projectiles that deal more than 100 damage, although the player will still be hit by the projectile for the remaining amount of damage.
- This can make it dangerous to parry strong projectiles that inflict debuffs, since the player will be inflicted by them even when successfuly parrying.
- The tooltip lines describing its custom features are all colored in a fiery gradient.
- The paragraph describing its combo is colored in a crimson color (#DC143C ●)
- The paragraph describing the parry function is colored in an orange (#FFA500 ●)
- The paragraph describing the big rip attack is colored in a yellow color (#FFD700 ●)
Tips
- While parrying a projectile makes it harmless for a second, it may at times be preferable to directly hit an enemy with the parry to recieve the 0.58 seconds of invincibility, due to the latter providing immunity to every source of damage, while the former only reduces the damage of a single projectile.
- The rip attack is best used in situations where landing all of your shots is not guaranteed, as it can be used to deal a huge burst of damage in one time, alongside having piercing capabilities. If you're confident that you can land all of the charged shots and if piercing is not needed, it may be wise to refrain from using it, since the damage scaling on the rip makes it deal a bit more than half of the damage one would have gotten if they landed every shot with the solar needles.
- While the rip attack has infinite piercing, it has damage falloff, meaning the more enemies it hits, the less damage it will deal.
Trivia
- The inventory sprite of the Ark of the Elements features a semi-translucent second blade. To represent the player's dual wielding of both blades of the weapon when the ark is empowered, the background blade will become fully opaque, making its design as a pair of cosmic scissors much more apparent.
- The design of the Ark of the Elements closely resembles the Crags Pylon, which in turn is based on a future redesign for the Brimstone Crags.
- The Big Rip attack is not only based on the scissor-like nature of the Ark of the Elements, but also on a hypothetical model of the end of the universe also named the Big Rip, in which spacetime itself would get torn apart by the accelerating expansion of the universe.
- The Ark's design as a pair of cosmic scissors was inspired by the Rending Scissors from the 2013 Japanese anime television series Kill la Kill.
- The texture files for the individual scissor blades are internally named "RendingScissors".
- This somewhat fulfils Redigit's wish for the Scissor Blades, which was expressed in the internal name of the Stylish Scissors:
StylistKilLaKillScissorsIWish.
History
- 2.0.3.007: Now inflicts Elemental Mix for 1 second from normal swings, needles, and stars, and 1.5 seconds from the parry attack.
- 2.0.3.006: Fixed parry bar being offset.
- 2.0.3.003:
- Fixed parry meter being offset.
- Fixed tooltip incorrectly stating that the player can dash through the Big Rip.
- 2.0.2.001:
- Moved Life Alloy and Galactica Singularity below Luminite Bar in its recipe.
- Now uses 5 Life Alloys in its recipe but no longer uses Cores of Calamity.
- 1.5.1.005: Fixed a tooltip error that caused the game to crash when using a translation mod.
- 1.5.1.003: Fixed an issue that could lead to corrupted data.
- 1.5.1.001:
- Reworked:
- Buffed damage from 115 to 600.
- Now has a custom swing animation and no longer summons projectiles on each swing.
- Stars and beams are fired on the second and fourth swing of a five-attack sequence.
- The fifth attack launches the sword which spins in place before returning to the player.
- The player can right click to parry an enemy or projectile, granting the player immunity frames, reducing damage taken from said attack, and causing the sword to be temporarily empowered.
- The player can also project a damaging trail by using up all the charges gained from a parry.
- Projectiles no longer inflict debuffs.
- Resprited.
- Reworked:
- 1.5.0.001:
- Nerfed damage from 126 to 115.
- Sword beam projectiles now grant enemies 10 local immunity frames instead of 6-3.
- 1.4.5.001: Now uses 5 Luminite Bars and 5 Life Alloys in its recipe instead of 15 and 10.
- 1.4.3.002:
- Nerfed damage from 126 to 116.
- Projectiles now deal 50% base damage instead of 100%.
- 1.4.3.001: Swing now functions in PvP.
- 1.4.2.107: Projectiles are now briefly invisible upon spawning.
- 1.4.2.102:
- Main beam now inflicts Brimstone Flames, Glacial State, Holy Flames, and Plague instead of just Holy Flames.
- Decreased Brimstone Flames, Glacial State, Holy Flames, and Plague durations from true melee hits and other beams from 8.33 seconds to 2.
- 1.3.3.001:
- Buffed damage from 120 to 126.
- Resprited beams.
- 1.2.1.005: Buffed damage from 110 to 120.
- 1.2.1.004: Nerfed damage from 125 to 110.
- 1.2.1.001: Nerfed damage from 210 to 125.
- 1.2.0.004:
- Adjusted Eon Beam dusts.
- Decreased shot speed, removed the random damage feature from its orbs, greatly increased speed of orbs, and made orbs last 2.5 seconds instead of 2.
- Resprited.
- 1.1.7.901:
- Nerfed damage from 235 to 210.
- Beams no longer collide with blocks.
- Homing ball projectiles now last 2 seconds instead of 2.67.
- Now uses 10 Bars of Life, 5 Cores of Calamity, and 15 Luminite Bars in its recipe instead of 1 Terratomere, 5 Bars of Life, 1 Core of Calamity, and 10 Luminite Bars.
- 1.1.7.863: Decreased the randomness of projectile speed.
- 1.1.7.855: Pink beams now hit every 6 frames, blue beams hit every 5, green beams hit every 4, and orange beams hit every 3.
- 1.1.7.701:
- Buffed damage from 70 to 84.
- Now uses the
rarity instead of 
. - Resprited.
- 1.1.7.5: Now uses 1 Core of Calamity in its recipe instead of 3.
- 1.1.7: Projectiles now produce less dust.
- 1.1.6.15:
- Now has an orange beam variant.
- Resprited it and its beams.
- 1.1.6.13: Now has use turn.
- 1.1.5.094: Projectiles now despawn quicker.
- 1.1.5.093: Resprited.
- 1.1.5: Introduced.
| Elemental |
|---|
 Galactica Singularity Ark of the Elements •  Shiv •  Lance •  Planetary Annihilation •  Blaster •  Eruption •  Ray •  Augur of the Elements •  Axe •  Flowers of Mortality •  Disk Dye
|
