Finding time where I wasn't playing Terraria to write this post was much harder than actually writing it.
God I love Terraria. Despite being the 11th best selling game of all time it almost feels underrated with how little people talk about it since it has virtually no cultural footprint, but that's a post for another time. The post for this time is about how I've dove in again after 600 hours of playtime with something that has made the entire game feel fresh and new: Mods. Let's start talking about how modded Terraria makes one of the greatest games even greater.
If you weren't aware, all sales of Terraria come with the tmodloader program on Steam that loads a slightly outdated version of the game with an interface that integrates the Steam Workshop to download mods. As opposed to Vanilla Terraria's workshop being primarily reskins and some gameplay tweaks, tmod's workshop is full of massive content expansions that have been developed for as long as 8 years! Mods like Thorium greatly round out the spots that Vanilla was missing content in such as bosses for the Desert, Dungeon, and Granite/Marble caves, a new biome beneath the ocean, as well as the new player classes Bard, Healer, and Thrower; mods like Calamity add amazingly unique biomes and greatly expand the post-game, adding stronger and stronger foes to defeat until you're slaying gods and dragons to authentically epic music; and mods like The Stars Above add massive amounts of dialogue in the form of anime girl companions, which was the last thing I thought Terraria would need but they sure pulled it off.
I have plenty I want to talk about in terms of the Calamity mod, but for now I need to talk about a much less flashy but far more significant mod. A mod without which the world of Modded Terraria may be more hassle than it would be worth: Magic Storage.
How many items do you think are in Terraria? Among all the block types, material drops, armors, weapons, accessories, fish, dyes, paint, furniture, potions... It's a very, very big number, but for the purposes of this, let's say a player will obtain an average of about 1,000 items in a playthrough. Now how do you go about storing them? There's practically nothing beyond chests, which hold up to 40 stacks of items, which means unstackable or unique items like weapons and accessories take up way more space than 9,999 dirt blocks. Last year I completed a playthrough with a very special someone and here's what our endgame storage space looked like.
6 rows of 5 chests with 2 stray chests, each chest holding up to 40 items, comes out to 1280 possible items. In addition to that, I have 11 different crafting stations which are positioned close to the chests that contain items relevant to the station, such as the Tinkerer's Table being closer to accessories and the Forge being closer to ores. If you added the content of something like Calamity or Thorium, or daresay Calamity and Thorium I have slight regrets, you're not only going to hit a much higher number than 1,000, you're going to hit 1,000 very quickly.
Here's what my current storage setup looks like in my Modded playthrough.
Rather than chests, you have storage units that can be upgraded over the course of the game. Each of these contain up to 120 items for a total of 1200, and those are midgame storage units that can be expanded up to 240 and above. The unit with the green sigil is my access point, and the unit with the blue sigil is my crafting interface, which has 41 crafting stations nestled within it. And that crafting interface? That lets me view everything I can possibly make, even if I don't have every material, and I can sort it by over 20 categories and even by which mod it comes from!
Terraria is a game about crafting, but its crafting system has been touched very little in the span of its 10+ years of development. This mod singlehandedly polishes the crafting tag to be solid gold, and a playthrough with no mods other than this would be a worthwhile experience because Vanilla Terraria is such a solid game in its own right. In the context of the thousands upon thousands of items made by community mods, Magic Storage is the mod that enables every other mod to be as expansive as they want to be without becoming overbearing.
Speaking of those expansive mods, I'll be back soon to start writing about the incredible design of the Calamity Mod that has refined itself year after year into a superb state.
When I find time where I'm not playing it.
Some day.
update 3/29 oh if you max out the row of crafting stations in the crafting interface you get another row lmao