After making it to Tremode today in a
non-Expert playthrough, I wanted to share some thoughts. I realize Tremor is no longer being worked on [Edit: or is it? I'm not clear on this], so this is more like a word of warning to people considering playing Tremor.
Prior to Tremode (which begins after killing Moon Lord), the mod generally feels well put together and pretty comparable to Thorium, which I personally consider the gold standard for overall quality in big content mods. My real complaints are with Tremode:
- Too many crafting mats at once: Tremode throws a LOT of new crafting mats at you all at once. I don't think this would be a problem if each material had a "theme" sort of like pillar fragments: Void Bars are for summoning gear, Carbon Steel is for melee gear, etc., but that's not the case. There isn't much rhyme or reason to any crafting material. If you poke around Recipe Browser, that Tremode item might require this and that and then a similar item in the same class (e.g.: ranged) might require completely different things. These materials also don't have intuitive or consistent sources. Dead Tissue supposedly drops from The Thing during nighttime, but it never spawned for me. I had to rely on Suspcious Bag drops for it.
- Early Tremode weapon balance: Not an uncommon problem in the super late game with mods like this, but the Megalodon in particular is completely broken. It's fairly easy to get its mats early in Tremode. I managed to build one (despite the slog that was getting Dead Tissue), reforge it to Godly, and used Ichor bullets to utterly steamroll anything that I came across. I'll admit I was getting a little bored at this point, so I cheated in the summoning items for the Tremode bosses in order (starting with Dark Emperor). Using Megalodon, Vortex Armor, and a by no means optimal accessory setup, I was able to first-try kill every Tremode boss up to and including True Andas with this setup. No need for anything else from Tremode. Given that it fires three rounds at once, the Megalodon has far too high a base damage for being so easy to build.
- New ore spawns can delete parts of your home base: This is the real dealbreaker. After beating The Trinity, the penultimate boss of Tremode, two new ores spawn in MASSIVE veins all the way up to the surface level, potentially including in your home base. I built mine just below the surface as I am wont to do. A Collapsium vein spawned on top of my Magic Storage setup, completely deleting every item I'd collected up to that point in the game. That was the moment I quit.
Is it worth playing Tremor up to the Moon Lord? Yes. Is it worth playing past that and into Tremode? Unfortunately I don't think so.
I suspect the devs just got lost in the weeds with Tremode and maybe quit development before they had to time to go through Tremode and really polish it up.