Modding trends I've noticed

LadyLone

Steampunker
With the amount of time I’ve played modded Terraria, from tConfig, to tAPI, and now tModLoader, there’s quite some trends I’ve noticed. Here are my observances. Feel free to share yours too, this is a discussion after all. Due to the nature of modding, that technically anyone can do it, there are a lot of common trends.

  • Modded weapons tend to be more powerful than vanilla weapons around the same tier.
  • Early game ocean armors are included. At least Thorium, Calamity, and Tremor have some form of this.
  • Desert and Snow biome bosses are also a trend.
  • Items to start the blood moon are very common.
  • Marble and Granite biome weapons and armor are not that uncommon.
  • Modded bosses tend to be more difficult compared to vanilla bosses around the time they’re supposed to be fought according to Boss Checklist. By the time you fought modded bosses to get to vanilla bosses, the vanilla bosses can be quite easy by comparison.
  • Crafting recipes for the Slime Staff tends to be a trend likely due to how hard it is to get normally.
  • Due to vanilla lacking one and it being an official damage type, throwing emblems from the Wall of Flesh are quite common. Depending on how many mods you have installed, you could end up with several different emblems that all do the exact same thing.
  • Any summon weapons that drop from the Wall of Flesh tend to be flesh themed instead of steampunk themed like the official weapon drops.
  • Night’s Edge style weapons. I’ve seen it for flails, spears, hammers, bows, guns, staves, and even throwing weapons. However, I have yet to see a mod that has a summon weapon in this style. Often there will also be a Crimson counterpart to Night’s Edge style weapons, although they will all become Terra items.
  • Broken Hero items dropping from Mothron. With enough mods install you could get a lot of such items from a single Mothron kill.
  • Spectre Bars are rarely used for crafting recipes. Ectoplasm is almost always used.
  • Armor sets with different helmets are common. However, unlike the vanilla Beetle armor, I have yet to see any modded armors have multiple body pieces for the same armor type.
  • Due to vanilla lacking them, summoner and throwing helmets are common for hardmode bars.
  • Modded axes can be all over the place in terms of how long it takes to cut down trees. Sometimes I’ve seen early game axes with high axe power, but slow use speed. I also seen modded hardmode axes that take longer to cut down trees than vanilla axes around the same tier.
  • Some modded tools have a hammer power of over 100%. If I’m not mistaken, all walls break when hit with 100% damage, so hammer power over 100% doesn’t do anything extra.
  • No new rocket ammo is added unless it’s rocket ammo specifically for one weapon. This doesn’t include infinite versions of vanilla rockets. I think this is because the rocket ammos are hardcoded in behavior and therefore modders can’t simply add in anymore.
  • It’s very rare for any modded weapons to use fallen stars as ammo. I’ve seen it, but hardly ever.
  • Modded magic weapons tend to have the most DPS compared to other damage types of the same tier, like if weapons drop from the same boss or are crafted with the same materials.
  • Most modded summon weapons tend to fall into a few specific architypes: slimes, ramming ground minions, projectile firing ground minions, flying ramming minions, and projectile firing flying minions. An exception I’ve seen are minions that work like plant style enemies in which they are connected directly to the player and reach out to attack enemies.
  • Mods tend to have the most melee weapons and the least summon weapons. This matches vanilla due to how easy swords are to make and how hard summon weapons are to make.
  • Non-consumable throwing weapons that are not boomerangs are not that uncommon.
  • Post Moon Lord bosses can usually hit you for several hundred HP per hit.
  • Frostspark Boots and Lava Waders combinations are quite common, although all I’ve seen can’t be combined till hardmode. This is likely an attempt to maintain balance, from what balance can be found from running numerous mods at once.
  • Custom forges are common, usually requiring the Adamantite Forge or Titanium Forge to craft.
  • Ways to increase the spawn rate to have over a hundred enemies around at once is a trend.
  • I know of at least three mods to add a seventh accessory slot. One is a rare drop from Plantera, one is a Moon Lord drop, and one more is a post Moon Lord drop. None of these stack together for even more accessory slots. Nine accessory slots would probably be really OP, but just saying.
  • Accessories can have crafting recipes far more complex than the Ankh Shield or Cell Phone.
 
  • Rarity colors for items tend to be all over the place
  • Many mods expand on the items offered by vanilla merchants often filling them up competely, they sometimes even offer the same items multiple times for different prices
  • There are often multiple ways to bypass the same vanilla item grind... only to end up playing the modded item grind for just as long instead (and it gets no bypass)
  • You already mentioned how everyone likes to combine the boots, but almost noone combines the balloons :(
  • Crafting boss items at demon altar? Nah, regular anvil will do for many new boss items
  • Additionally, most bosses don't occur naturally or in different ways, unlike vanilla. Instead for most mods you just have to use the item in the right biome.
  • Global drops can drop from monsters that are not supposed to drop any, like meteor heads and OMA enemies
  • Normal mode wings lol
  • Item descriptions for boots become more extreme for each upgrade, but how to compare 'Awesome speed!' with 'Amazing speed!'
  • Multiple combination items to make with the same vanilla accessories
  • Actually almost any vanilla accessory or weapon ends up being a 'material'
  • When having many mods installed you'll end up with multiple identical recipes that convert items into their other evil variant or other ore variant
  • QoL is spread rather arbitrarily among many big or mixed mods. There is no particular reason why say Calamity would add a fishing QoL item since it has got little to do with fishing, yet it does anyway. Or maybe it's the crystall ball that now also functions as a demon altar? Unlisted range increase on all vanilla hooks? You never know what small misc things mod makers put in their mods.
  • Class armor and accessories right at the start, often only giving a few % bonus
  • Only few big mods alter world-generation. For most mods that do it, it doesn't end up working very well especially when combined with many mods
  • Combination items often just don't bother listing all their effects, instead they just say something like 'Combines the effects of A,B,C,D,...' and then it still fills half the screen and it's probably an incomplete list too :p
 
  • Most modded summon weapons tend to fall into a few specific architypes: slimes, ramming ground minions, projectile firing ground minions, flying ramming minions, and projectile firing flying minions. An exception I’ve seen are minions that work like plant style enemies in which they are connected directly to the player and reach out to attack enemies.

This really confuses me. All enemies in terraria deal damage either by direct contact or firing projectiles, those are the most prominent damage sources in the game by far. Slime minions are 'ramming minions'. The plant minions you mentioned are 'ramming minions'. What's the difference?
 
This really confuses me. All enemies in terraria deal damage either by direct contact or firing projectiles, those are the most prominent damage sources in the game by far. Slime minions are 'ramming minions'. The plant minions you mentioned are 'ramming minions'. What's the difference?
I included slimes separately due to what seems to be a specific AI for them, mainly in that they hop around a lot compared to other ground ramming minions. I also separated plant minions because they're directly attached to you, despite touching enemies to damage them. On that note I don't think I've seen any other modded minions that climb along walls like the vanilla spider minions. I included this trend because summoner weapons tend to be the least diverse weapons among other damage types. Granted, it's really difficult to come up with a new behavior for minions and still have them remain useful. Enemies have a variety of behaviors that involve firing different types of projectiles or touching you. Then again, it makes me wonder if something like the Caster AI enemies could make good minion behavior.
 
With all the vanilla-QoL-adjusting (summon blood moon/rain, genericized boss items, corruption/crimson swapping, etc) these mods do, it seems like someone should make a mod that gets rid of most of them or unifies them somehow, but...

standards.png
 
With all the vanilla-QoL-adjusting (summon blood moon/rain, genericized boss items, corruption/crimson swapping, etc) these mods do, it seems like someone should make a mod that gets rid of most of them or unifies them somehow, but...

standards.png
Yeah, I was thinking of that especially for so many of the repeat cases like throwing emblems, summoner and throwing helmets, post Moon Lord throwing armors, and more. Problem is, how would anyone even regulate that? Would it have to be some sort of community standard mod that adds in some of the most common features? How would certain features be agreed upon? Should the throwing emblem be called Ninja Emblem or Rogue Emblem? What should the stats of the summoner and throwing helmets be? Should a fifth pillar be added like Tremor does for its Alchemist class? If so, what would it be called? Would only big name content creators have any say? What about the smaller people like me? What's to even stop someone form ignoring a so-called community standard mod and make a different take of the same concepts in their own mods?

Basically, there would be too many problems and issues to come up. People seem to have trouble agreeing on stuff already in vanilla. Make yoyos throwing, remove the throwing class altogether, make the Bee Gun summon damage simply because the tooltip uses the word "summon", nerf the Reaver Shark, nerf magic weapons, nerf life steal more, and far more.
 
  • Worm bosses LOTS of worm bosses (rolls eyes at calamity)
  • lots of town npcs and every town npc sells items thorium mod and expeditions are only mods I've seen where npcs also do things other than sell items
  • summoner equipment that obsoletes vanilla summon equipment (Yuma's pendent from thorium > papyrus scarab and is easier to get, Bloomwind armor from spirit gives better summon stats than tiki and can be gotten BEFORE plantera, NUMEROUS prehardmode minion capacity increasing accessories)
  • using pre 1.3.4 style sentries even though that was 2 updates ago...
 
in Calamity I seen too much Quality of Life of recipes, an example is the Aglet recipe (ala Avalon, Calamity, and Tremor Mods), Frost Armour, Terra Blade and so on, content from suggestions (like @Tovlyn's Contagion with different items in Exxo Avalon, the Death Mode by me in Calamity, the Mother-Board by @Zoomo (the link to TO is not working as of mid-2016) in various mods, the Wall of the Shadow (@Zoomo again) in Tremor,...), and even extra throwables in HardMode (mechanical bosses or not), Post-Plantera (or an alt jungle's boss), and the PostMoonLord stage (which is completely op, obtained from the evil Moon Lord or even a Post-ML boss)
 
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One of the items in my unpublished mod (designed to be the best accessory in the game) has this ridiculous crafting tree:

Old Monarchy Emblem Crafting Tree:

----Old Monarchy Emblem----
Wailing Stone x1
Strange Symbol x1

---Wailing Stone---
Anguished Essence x3 (30% drop from an extremely rare custom enemy that appears anytime, anywhere, and doesnt harm the player)
Defiled Something

--Defiled Something--
Slime x100
Steamed Bile Sack x1

--Steamed Bile Sack--
Bile Sack x2 (very rare drop from certain worm enemies)

---Strange Symbol---
Celestial Sigil x1
Diamond x20
Emerald x20
Ruby x20
Amethyst x20
Topaz x20
Sapphire x20
Phantasmal Stone x1
(Must be under the effect of Strange Limitation)

--Phantasmal Stone--
Philosophers Stone x1
Strange Essence x3 (Drops from a sub-boss with highly specific spawning conditions)

--Strange Charm--
Causes Strange Limitation on use for 30sec

Ankh Charm x1
Strange Essence x3

--------------------------------------------------

In a solo run iv been doing im not even halfway done making this myself, and im about to fight the Moon Lord
 
Most mods start with a desert boss.
While we're on the subject, we could list some popular spots for biome-specific bosses:
  • Desert (usually early-game)
  • Underworld (usually around or immediately following WoF)
  • Snow (usually early Hardmode)
  • Ocean (place in progression varies)
  • Custom, mod-specific biome (place in progression varies here, as well)
  • Space (late pre-Hardmode at earliest)
I think I've only ever seen one mod (Thorium) have Marble or Granite biome bosses, but I could be mistaken.
 
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