JimboTex
Empress of Light
I'm interested in getting into playing modded terraria, but I'm wondering how should I use these big content mods:
Tremor, Antiaris, Calamity, Spirit Mod, Thorium, Terraria Overhaul.
Should I use these mods together for most content at once or are they best played seperately?
I'd appreciate what the modder recommends to do.
(I'm not familiar with the modding community or the mods enough to know what to do here, please advise.)
Generally speaking, I'd recommend playing through each mod individually first to kind of get a feel for the mod and what it has to offer. Once you do that, feel free to mix and match as you see fit.
As far as the mods you've mentioned, I can only speak for Antiaris, Calamity, Spirit, and Thorium, as those are the only ones that I've played. I couldn't drum up the interest to try Overhaul. I was skeptical of Tremor at first, but I will admit to considering giving it a go. That was before all the drama about plagiarized sprites, balance issues, game-breaking bugs, and controversial changes to vanilla crafting recipes blew up. Now, I won't go near it with a ten-foot pole.
Thorium was the first major content mod I played, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. While the equipment is generally more powerful than what you'd get in vanilla, it's still well-balanced and fun to use. There's also a lot of variety, especially with two new classes - Healer and Bard, so you'll never be hurting for interesting ways to play the game.
For my second major content mod, I ended up choosing Spirit, largely because of the playthrough that HappyDays was doing at the time. Like Thorium, there's a lot of variety and interesting equipment to discover, craft, and use against your opponents. As far as power scale goes, it's between vanilla and Thorium, so you may feel a bit underpowered if you're just coming off a Thorium playthrough, but you should still be able to get plenty of enjoyment out of it. It's my second favorite of the "Big Three" content mods, so you can't go wrong with it.
Calamity is a different beast entirely. The developer has put a lot of care into the development of the mod, and it shows, especially with all the worldbuilding and lore surrounding it. It makes for fascinating reading, if you can spare the time to do so. (Hell, it's probably the main reason why Calamity is the only major Terraria mod that has its own page on TV Tropes!) As far as actual content goes, it does a lot of things right. There are plenty of interesting and powerful items to obtain, and interesting enemies to fight. At the same time, it does some things that put me off a bit from fully enjoying it as much as I have enjoyed Thorium and Spirit.
The first barrier to my enjoyment of Calamity is the way a lot of really interesting and useful equipment is more or less gated behind Expert Mode, not because of being in a boss treasure bag like vanilla, but because some of the components for said items are themselves Expert Mode-exclusive. (I'm looking at YOU, Heart of the Elements!)
Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a problem, as the choice to make a Normal Mode world or Expert Mode world is often down to personal preference. In Calamity, however, some boss fights are ridiculously difficult without these Expert Mode-exclusive items (and even then, sometimes the fights are still incredibly difficult). What's worse, the attitude of the devs regarding this complaint, along with a not-insignificant portion of the Calamity fanbase, seems to be an extremely unhelpful, "Git g00d, n00b!"
Which brings me to my second point. You may have often heard the saying "Calamity is balanced around itself" bandied about the forums, often with the implication that much of the equipment is, to put it mildly, overpowered, especially later in the game. In a way, it's true, and to be fair, the devs have taken some steps to rebalance the mod as a whole. But even after the rebalancing, which was controversial in and of itself at the time, much of the post-Moon Lord progression in Calamity has a tendency to resemble the power scales in Dragon Ball Z, with bosses having health pools in the neighborhood of millions of HP, especially in the Calamity-exclusive difficulty settings known as Revengeance Mode and Death Mode, the latter of which (thankfully) only applies to bosses and is toggleable.
All of this leads to a mod that doesn't tend to play well with others, as if it wants to hog the limelight, balance-wise.
I'll give Calamity credit for one thing, though. It pushed me out of my comfort zone and got me to finally try Expert Mode, which has helped refresh my enjoyment of the game. (Normal Mode was starting to get a bit too easy. )
Finally, we come to Antiaris. While the developers of this mod were part of the team responsible for Tremor, they appear to have learned their lessons from Tremor's failure, as they are taking the time and care to make sure things go smoothly and that the content is as high-quality as possible. It's a strategy that has worked well for them, as the initial launch content (for the most part) is both interesting and unique without being too over- or under-powered. That said, this approach means that there's not a whole lot of content available to try at this point in time, and most of what's available is pre-hardmode. Unless you have another mod along to help fill in the gaps, the hardmode portion of any Antiaris playthrough is going to strongly resemble a vanilla playthrough, at least until future updates add more content.
So there you have it. My long, exhaustive, only slightly rambling assessment of some of the major Terraria mods. Hope this helps!