One thing I've wanted to do for a while is talk about Terraria Content Mods. There's a bunch of them and I wanna like... make a tier list talking about them! So this will probably be a page on my site that gets updated a lot lol
With this first blog post I just wanna talk about the two most recent content mods I've played, Ancients Awakened Classic, and Terraria Origins. I wanna talk about them more in depth! And since twitter has really stupid character limits and I know a bunch of my friends won't really care to see me rant about this in a discord channel (can't blame them LOL), I thought that a blog post might be in store.
First things first. I play Terraria with a bunch of QOL mods and some mods that would be considered cheating. I don't really care to be honest, I play the game in a way that lets me have the most fun. I'm also REALLY bad at Terraria to be honest, but I still wanna play in Expert mode, so I use these to make the experience easier. Below is a list of mods I use in almost every single playthrough.
Recipe Browser, Boss Checklist, Magic Storage, LuiAFK Reborn, Ore Excavator, AlchemistNPC Lite, Boss Cursor, Census, Wing Slot Extra, Shoe Slot, Fargo's Mutant Mod, Shop Expander, Shorter Respawn Time, Better Boss Health Bar, Auto Reforge, Begone Evil, No Pylon Restrictions, Teleport All NPC Home, Antisocial, imkSushi's Mod, Friendly NPCs Don't Die, and Plentiful OresI'm only gonna be putting content mods I've played recently into this tier list, as I don't want to misjudge mods that I've played years ago, since they've probably gotten some new content since then. Hell, even mods I've played months ago I'm not gonna put here.
Let me expand my thinking on my ratings of these mods and why I put them in their own tiers. I'll Start with Ancients Awakened.
Ancients Awakened was one of the mods that I really wanted to play for a while, but since it wasn't ported to the 1.4 version of tModLoader, I couldn't play it. I genuinely can't go back to 1.3 without feeling super bad, 1.3 feels awful to play now. But the Ancients Awakened team released a 1.4 version of the classic Ancients Awakened a few weeks ago, and I had to play it. They're also working on a new version of Ancients Awakened, which has some content to it, but definitely not as much as the Classic version of the mod. I look forward to what they do with it, though!
The Classic version of this mod is genuinely amazing, though. This is the most fun I've had playing Terraria since I played Mod of Redemption. Ancients Awakened just adds so much content and it's so fucking fun to play around with.
The mod adds 4 new biomes which are basically available from the start; The Inferno, The Mire, The Red Mushroom Biome, and The Void. They're all really cool and I wanna go over all of them in detail!
The Inferno is probably my favorite, so I'll start off with that. It's basically a huge volcano biome, filled with lizards and dragons and stuff like that. The structures that spawn in the Inferno really give it a destroyed old village vibe, and I really like that. When it's night time, you can barely see in it, with ash covering your screen, making it hard to see. I like that! It makes it so you have to explore it quickly during the day time. Early game is a BITCH though, getting through the Inferno is hard, which I can say about almost every biome this mod adds lol.
The Mire is another biome, which is practically the opposite of the Inferno. It's a swampy wasteland, and it's SUPER eerie and depressing. You can only go through it at night, as during the daytime, it gets covered with a huge, thick fog that makes it hard to traverse. I wish I had spent more time in this biome! It was really cool and really fun to be in, and I really liked the aesthetics of it!
I spent barely any time in the Red Mushroom Biome, but I'll talk about it anyways. I have only a few complaints about this mod, and this biome is one of them. I really liked it, but I felt it needed some more content added to it. You go in there for like one boss and that's it, which sucks! The biome is the opposite of the Surface Glowing Mushroom biome, so it felt like a breath of fresh air! I think the new Ancients Awakened will add more content to this biome, which is good, because in classic, this mod felt like it was just there to fill some space.
And finally, the Void. This biome is more so a structure, but since it's classified as a biome, I'll talk about it here. It's in space at the top right of your world. It feels radically different from the rest of the mod, but in a good way! It feels like a black hole, with a weird structure that doesn't really become important until hard mode. That being said, getting into this biome for the first time was weird, but, again, in a good way.
The bosses in this mod were (for the most part) incredible. They felt balanced in a way where it was hard, but definitely fair. I'm not gonna talk about all of them in detail but the mods third to last boss is genuinely one of, if not my favorite modded Terraria bosses. It feels climatic in a way that makes you feel like you're on the cusp of an orgasm. It's SO fucking good.
The last two bosses are the only bosses that I really do not like. I'm not gonna go into too much detail, because all the other bosses in this mod are amazing, but these two bosses soured a lot of my experience, especially since they're the last two. The final boss went on for 16 minutes. No boss should go on for that long.
The rest of this mod was amazing, though! Exploration felt super fun with all the new structures it added, progression felt really good, the new summoner weapons were really fucking fun to mess around with, and the general vibe was amazing! It's one of my new favorite Terraria mods, only being beaten out by Mod of Redemption for me.
Terraria Origins goes for a completely different vibe. This mod adds two new evil biomes, The Defiled Wastelands, and The Riven Hive, both of which either replace the Corruption or Crimson. I personally only played with The Riven Hive, so I can't talk about the Defiled Wastelands, although I'm sure it has the same amount of quality.
The new evil biomes are the main focus of the mod, and I'll say it definitely delivers. The Riven Hive is a lot harder than the regular evil biomes, but honestly it felt like a breath of fresh air after playing with the crimson and corruption for so long. It also adds new stuff for summoner, my main class, so I really enjoyed playing it. It did feel a little unfair at times, and I think the difficulty of the Riven Hive could be nerfed a little bit, but I had fun overall.
Origins also adds a new class, which deals Explosive damage. As far as I can see, it's basically thrower, but all your weapons explode on content. I honestly would've tried out the class, as it looks super interesting, but the lack of a proper wiki for Origins right now made me a little bit hesitant, so I didn't. Maybe after the wiki gets updated a little bit more, I'll try out the mod again, playing the class. From the little I messed around with it, it's a lot more fun than other Thrower-esque classes, which is super neat! It has content all the way through the game too.
Origins adds a new mini-biome, the Brime Pool, which is right next to the Jungle. It's really neat to explore once you can, as it's just a little adventure you go on once and never again. It feels like a natural extension of the Jungle, which I really like. There's also the Fiberglass biome right underneath it, which you can access before hard mode. That biome, in my opinion, needs more added to it, as right now it feels very empty.
The bosses this mod adds are really nice! There's only around 4 overall iirc, and they're all really fun and really well balanced! I wish there was a little more, but I ultimately can't complain all that much, as Origins is moreso an addon to vanilla rather than a whole content mod (although, unlike other vanilla mods, I would never play this with other content mods LMAO).
Origins does what it wants to really well! The only reason it's in A tier and not S tier is because I think it needs a little more refinement and just more content in general. It feels a little empty as of now, but I'm sure that'll change in the future.
I plan on updating this tier list and this page as time goes on. Currently, I'm doing a Thorium playthrough with a few of my friends, so I'll probably do that one next! Afterwards I plan on playing through Secrets of The Shadows, a mod that I've never played before, but always been interested in. That's all for now!