Demon Altar

The Demon Altar is a crafting station that can be found in Chasms in the Corruption, Underground and very rarely in water above ground or in Dungeons.

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The Demon Altar is used to create the following items:


 * Night's Edge
 * Suspicious Looking Eye
 * Worm Food
 * Slime Crown

As of the 1.1 update it is possible to destroy these altars. Destroying them 'blesses' your world with one of the three new ores: Cobalt Ore, Mythril Ore and Adamantite Ore. Blessing your world turns some naturally generated blocks into the new ores, at underground level and below. By destroying more altars, your world will get more of the new ores.

The only way to destroy a demon altar is to use the Pwnhammer or Hamdrax. You can't destroy a Demon Altar with the Pwnhammer or Hamdrax if you haven't yet defeated the Wall of Flesh. The Pwnhammer is always dropped by Wall of Flesh. If you try to destroy a demon altar with a hammer other than the Pwnhammer or Hamdrax, you will take damage and the altar will be unaffected.

Trivia

 * It is possible to have 5 Demon Altars spawned directly below, and in the vicinity of, the spawn point.
 * It appears that all Demon Altars spawn within a very thin window of depth, only several blocks wide. Digging an horizontal tunnel through the map, albeit very time-consuming especially in large worlds (8400*2*3 blocks without holes), would allow one to find every demon altar.
 * In Alpha the Demon Altars were used to make certain armors.
 * If you try to break the Demon Altar, while you're in Pre-Hardmode or with a Molten Hamaxe or lower, you'll get damaged like said earlier, but if killed, the Death Message says only your name: 
 * It would appear that in 1.1 worlds, Demon Altars are spawned in amounts divisible by 3.
 * Sometimes, mostly in the corruption(maybe only in the corruption), a block may spawn stuck inside a demon altar such as demonite ore or ebonstone blocks, and if this altar is hit with a hammer, it will disappear, the world will not be blessed, and you will be hurt. This can also happen by the altar missing a part of it. Hammering it will do the same as above.
 * When an Altar is broken and the world is blessed with the ore X, the quantity of spawned ore will be (Ore X spawned first time) / (Number of times world has been blessed with ore X). So if the first Demon Altar spawned 10000 ore X, the second (Actually 4th because of ore cycling) will only spawn ~5000, the third ~3300, the fourth ~2500 and so on. (~ because of the ore spawning algorithm). Because of this, it may be wise to destroy only a few altars because while the ore-spawning is less effective, the world still converts random stone tiles into ebonstone or pearlstone rendering both biomes less controllable. Also, it may be wise to keep always at least one altar in any given world to avoid losing its crafting recipes.