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.