Terraria and the officially supported mod loader tModLoader offer a lot of content. Not only is the base game massive, but mods add in infinitely more content and so much more variety. Anywhere from much appreciated quality of life (QoL), to plain content, to incredible visuals – Terraria modding has it all. There’s almost too many mods. In this article, I’ll cover the five most anticipated or best mods for Terraria based on the Steam Workshop (which is also the in-game Mod Browser). Each one will be in a different large category: General content, quality of life, unique addition, decoration and custom world generation. Due to this, it won’t be in any particular order – but all are very high quality! Here are the top five tModLoader mods for January 2023.
Decoration
Let’s begin with decoration. From furniture to visual effects to post-processing effects like bloom and lighting, there’s a lot to choose from to make your game look better. Most large content mods contain a lot of decoration, sure. But some mods go a different route, like Immersive Projector by Moebius Meow.
The Immersive Projector mod enables you to take parts of the world and “project” them to other parts of the world. For example, you could build a foreground structure, build a background structure, and a middle structure. Then, you could project the background behind your area, and the foreground in front – creating a layered environment. This offers a ton of building opportunities, such as water reflections, backgrounds, details and even screens. With HSV tooling, lighting, parallax and more tools to mess around it, Immersive Projector allows for a ton of things to be done.
Mods like Immersive Projector allow for the community’s creativity to really shine, and I’m sure the builders will have a field day creating incredible things with this mod.
Quality of Life
There’s a ton of QoL mods out there to support the gameplay. Mods like Recipe Browser, Boss Checklist and Magic Storage offer a ton of benefits. These include easier access to recipes, progression, and reasonable organization. That being said, there’s a clear choice here – the well-named Quality of Life mod, by developers 枫林半叶, 逆风而行的信鸽, Lastprismer, Lacewing, 局长, Cyril, and 夜谷紫幽.
Quality of Life is a mod that adds just about everything you could ask for in a QoL mod. Popular edits like increased max stacks, no tombstones, instant town NPC spawns, and so on are in Quality of Life. Not only that, but more in-depth tools like autofishers and building wands are incredibly helpful. All of these options are configurable too, so if you don’t like something – turn it off! The amount of control this mod offers is incredible.
Finally, for mod developers, the mod is open source here, which is incredibly useful. (Do note – the creators are Chinese, and the mod’s source is documented in Chinese as well.)
World Generation
As with QoL, a ton of large mods come with world generation. Things like custom biomes, structures, and changes are pretty common to see. However, unlike QoL, very few mods are focused primarily on adding or modifying existing world generation. The most major exception in my opinion is Remnants by Wombat (mod icon by Stryke).
Remnants completely revamps all world generation. Not just some, not most, all generation. This makes for a wonderfully fresh experience for experienced tModLoader players. There’s mineshafts underground; the pyramid is more like a dungeon, the sky is full of clouds. Even typically forgotten places like the Underworld have fantastic overhauls. As the gallery above shows, there is nowhere that Remnants doesn’t polish, and polish heavily. In the most literal way possible, there’s an entire new world to explore.
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- The surface desert full of sandstone pillars and sandswept dunes.
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- The spawn area, with many more plants and variety than normal.
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- The jungle showcasing both the modified jungle generation and an abandoned set of buildings.
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- The new generation for the underground mushroom biome with fancy walls and actual mushroom blocks.
Keep in mind that, due to Remnant’s complete overhaul, most mods that add in world generation are not compatible with Remnants. So, mods like Calamity and Verdant might lose a significant amount of content. Otherwise, Remnants is for you!
Unique Addition
Most mods typically only add content, such as items and enemies. The remaining mods typically create quality of life or visual changes. Some mods, however, go out of their way to create entirely unique concepts. Mods like Overhaul and MrPlague’s Authentic Races offer either a massive overhaul to nearly the whole game despite adding little to no content, or major gameplay changes that last the whole game. That being said, New Beginnings by Team Spirit has to take the spot in my opinion.
New Beginning’s UI showcasing different origins for characters.
New Beginnings offers different origins for players to start with, in a somewhat similar vein to MrPlague’s Authentic Races. The mod is meant to alleviate the slow pace of the early game by making sure players have equipment to really move around, along with just changing things up. Origins like Trailblazer and Adventurer immediately give the player increased movement. Others like Knight and Thief offer a different set of starting weapons. There’s even a few origins that make the game significantly harder, like the Nobleman. The Nobleman can only play on mediumcore or hardcore, starts with 20 max health, making for a brutal run. The mod also includes a couple unlockable origins, further incentivizing more playthroughs!
Content
Finally, the most popular category of mods, the content mod. Content mods have always dominated the game, with mods like Avalon and Tremor holding fond memories in many players. Nowadays, mods like Calamity, The Stars Above, the Mod of Redemption, and more offer unique sets of content. From The Star’s Above anime style to Calamity’s unique and chaotic flavor, there’s a ton of choices to make.
Section of the underground in the Story of Red Cloud.
This was by far the hardest choice to make for this article. Personally, I prefer things that stick to or ideally innovate on the base game’s style of content – like the Spirit Mod or Thorium. However, sometimes something meshes with the style of the base game so well I have to make an exception – The Story of Red Cloud by Vibrent, Zeodexic, NephilimDeath, Collapsar and Marf Master of Desaster.
The Story of Red Cloud
The Story of Red Cloud offers something I haven’t seen in any other mod – a (more) story focused mod. The mod uses a prebuilt map and adventure mode in order to tell a Dark Souls like story with heavily Dark Souls inspired content. Alongside the story, the mod uses dodge rolls, ambushes and bossesto make the game feel more like a Souls game. The game’s progression is paced, allowing you to feel like when you progress, you progress. And because it’s in adventure mode, chests and containers contain some of the most important loot you can get, encouraging exploration that much more. Furthermore, the content the mod adds perfectly compliments this.
An arena for the Eater of Worlds in the Story of Red Cloud. – Top 5 tModLoader Mods January
Red Cloud is by no means a normal content mod. That being said, it’s finally using the underutilized tool of custom maps. Games like Minecraft flourish with custom maps and builds, yet Terraria simply doesn’t have many maps. Red Cloud is what I hope to be a look into what mods and maps can do together, for both stories and other tools! I’m only about 9 or 10 hours into what is an 18 hour playthrough, and it’s a very refreshing experience. Often very difficult, sometimes frustrating, but very refreshing. Of all of the mods here, I recommend this one the most – though, again, like Remnants, cross mod is mostly out of the question. New Beginnings, most quality of life, and decor mods still work, but you won’t be able to play mods like Orchid or Secrets of the Shadows.
Special Mentions
For very quick coverage, some mods I skipped over.
Thorium (Content w/ World Generation) – Very large content mod that fits in perfectly to vanilla. Some content and art needs reworking as it’s quite the old mod, but it’s still fun.
MrPlague’s Authentic Races (Unique) – Similar to New Beginnings but looks to get a much bigger game impact. Suffers from very inconsistent balance and lack of multiplayer support.
Camping (Quality of Life) – Very convenient tool that allows for 2 different spawns to choose from, such as on-the-go buffs and crafting.
With all this being said, sometimes browsing and downloading the most random mods can be a very enjoyable time. I myself sometimes download 6-10 mods and just see what the game looks like. It’s not as high quality and the mods listed here but it’s usually a pretty good time. Plus, it’s great to support smaller mods that don’t get much attention – it’s quite a bit of hard work.
What mods are your favourite? What types of mods do you like? Do you agree with this list? Comment below! I’d love to hear some feedback and input from the community about this!
