Originally posted by Extremely Rare Sigma Gurdy Champ:

Experiencing the same issue with getting mostly no prefix after a while. Tried verifying the game cache and disabling all mods but this one, same result. I have reforge history at 20 but it does happen even as low as 4. It happens easily with the Minishark but happens much less often with shortswords, from my own tests it seems that the more prefixes an item can have the less likely it is to happen.

This is my original comment of what was happening. I've done some extra tests as the author requested and found some more random stuff that might be helpful in diagnosing this.


With no mods enabled on tModloader I found that:

The Minishark and Copper Shortsword can reforged into No Prefix.
The Handgun, Gold Shortsword and Blade of Grass cannot be reforged into No Prefix.

Also I installed Thorium afterwards and tested two of their Symphonic weapons (Wooden Whistle and Zunpet) and it seems that those cannot roll Universal prefixes and was never able to reforge into No Prefix.


Now testing with Consistent Reforging enabled with reforge history set to 2. Thorium was enabled as well.

The Minishark and Copper Shortswords could still reforge into No Prefix.
The Handgun, Gold Shortsword and Blade of Grass still cannot reforge into No Prefix.

The Wooden Whistle and Zunpet could now reforge into No Prefix.


I was requested to try testing with reforge history set to 0 and 1, but the mod makes sure that it can only be as low as 2 even if modified in the config files.

So I have wanted to know if weapons could be reforged into having No Prefix normally but Terraria's wiki.gg page for modifiers is a bit vague outside of knockback and mana costs. From what I gathered from all this is that some weapons can. There is a vanilla feature where a weapon cannot roll a prefix that changes knockback if the weapon has a knockback stat of 0, the few weapons that I've tested with 0 knockback can be reforged to have No Prefix so that could be a source of where the issue comes from.
A second source of reforging into No Prefix that I found appears to be tied to the weapon's base damage, if it's 10 or lower it seems that the weapon can reforge into No Prefix, the only exception to this test was with Thorium's Symphonic weapons which might be because they use their own pool of prefixes. Thorium's Hellfire Minigun and Wooden Baton was able to roll No Prefix despite having a knockback stat higher than 0 but they both had a damage stat lower than 11.

• Consistent Reforging doesn't actually store No Prefix in its history which means on the few weapons that can roll No Prefix it can easily become the most available prefix, this becomes more consistent with a larger history setting.
  
• Consistent Reforging somehow breaks Thorium's Symphonic weapon reforges causing them to be able to reforge into No Prefix despite not being in their pool of prefixes.

Since the conditions to have No Prefix on a weapon requires very bad stats this may have easily gone unnoticed since by the time a Goblin Tinkerer is available you've likely moved onto weapons with better stats or you wouldn't reforge the items anyway. The only noteworthy vanilla weapon that would be affected by this is the Blade Staff which has a base damage of 6 and a knockback stat of 0.

That said all of this is under the assumption that this is a issue everyone is having and not just a select few people.