=Unavoidable content mods=
Mods in this category add content that you're almost guaranteed to see at some point.

 * Recipe Browser - Press the hotkey (check your controls to see what the key is or change it to a new key) to bring up an interface that lets you see every crafting recipe in the game. You can click and drop an item into the empty square in the top-left corner, or you can narrow results by typing the name of an item. You can also see which NPCs drop a given item, and so on. Even experienced players typically use this at least a couple of times in each of their modded runs.
 * Magic Storage - The boxes at spawn are replacements for chests. Right click the green boxes to deposit and withdraw items. Right click the blue boxes to craft items in storage without having to withdraw them into your inventory. Once you get used to how convenient this is, you'll never go back to playing without this mod. Listed under "Unavoidable content" because players always make Magic Storage's storage units at spawn on every world. It's just too useful to do without.
 * Thorium Mod - Adds a huge amount of content to the game, including enemies, weapons, accessories, armor, healer items, bard items, and many other things. The family heirloom item that you spawn with comes from this mod. If you keep it until the end of the run, after you've beaten the final boss of the game (post-Moon Lord), you can use it to craft a powerful weapon. The new final boss is also added by this mod. This mod even has its own wiki: https://thoriummod.gamepedia.com/Thorium_Mod_Wiki
Due to some of the items being OP, several of them are banned by a mod called Nihilism.


=Ignorable content mods=
Content added by these mods can be easily avoided most of the time, sometimes even for entire runs from start to finish.

 * WeaponOut Lite - Adds a bunch of weapons, accessories, armor sets, and other items that mostly revolve around using fist-related weapons, such as metal ("brass") knuckles. Much like how Thorium lets you play as whole new classes—a healer or a bard—this mod lets you play as a boxer, a pugilist, a fister, or whatever you want to call this new class. This mod also adds a small number of useful, unrelated items, such as guns, swords, and whips—another new type of weapon.
 * Box of Gadgets - Adds a wide variety of items, such as: an auto-reforge machine (sold by the steampunker) that uses money to automatically give weapons and accessories random prefixes, just like the goblin tinkerer, only it does so without input and it stops as soon as you get the desired prefix. / A net attachment accessory that turns critters into item drops as if you'd swung a net at them whenever you hit them with any weapon. Even shooting them with bullets activates the effect. / Enchanted polish, a consumable item with a 2% drop rate that drops from armored skeletons and blue armored bones. Its effects vary depending on what kind of prefixes your accessories have. For example, if you have 5 accessories that all have the warding prefix, you'll gain 8 maximum HP for each one, for a total of +40 max HP for several minutes after using the enchanted polish. / Reflector blocks, placeable tiles that reflect just about every projectile in the game. This can be a blessing or a curse for boss fights, as boss' projectiles will also bounce off these blocks instead of disappearing. / And much more.
 * Portable Storage - Adds a bunch of different items that increase your inventory space. Some have unique effects such as automatically collecting items you pick up, and automatically refilling your ammo slots. Arguably the most useful item is the quantum entangled bag, which is compatible with Magic Storage's storage units. This means you can deposit or withdraw items from storage at spawn without having to teleport back home!
 * imkSushi's Mod & imkSushi's Mod - Old Recipes Enabler - Lets players craft many, many items that would otherwise be uncraftable. It's worth using Recipe Browser to see if an item you want is now craftable for a fair price thanks to these 2 mods. Some examples include crafting magic mirrors, crafting cursed flames into ichor and vice versa, and crafting bands of starpower.
 * Assorted Crazy Things - Adds too many things to list, including slime waifus. See the official thread for more info: https://forums.terraria.org/index.php?threads/assorted-crazy-things-a-mod-full-of-crazy-things.74330
 * Boss Checklist - Press the hotkey (check your controls to see what the key is) to bring up an interface that lets you see a list of every boss and event in the game, including the ones added by mods, in order of their approximate difficulty. The ones that have been beaten on this world will automatically have checkmarks in the boxes next to their name. It's very convenient to check this list the first time you log in each day.
 * Critter Craze - Adds a ton of new critters, among other things. See the official thread for more info: https://forums.terraria.org/index.php?threads/critter-craze.69790
 * Wormholes - Adds wormholes to random areas underground. They're about the size of 4 players and generate a lot of light, so they're hard to miss. If you touch one, you'll be teleported across the map to whichever wormhole it's paired with. Don't jump through them 2 or more times in a row too quickly though, or you'll lose a large chunk of life each time. Wait for the wormhole debuff to wear off after a few seconds.
 * Ammobox+ - Adds almost 50 new types of ammunition & thrown items. See the official thread for more info: https://forums.terraria.org/index.php?threads/ammobox.72004
 * Banner Bonanza - Allows you to combine as many banners as you want into an area the size of 3 banners, using a new item called the banner rack. Making it requires killing the stylist and getting a 1/8 drop rate item, or just buying the required item (Stylish Scissors) from the wayfarer NPC's shop.
 * Chad's Furniture Mod - Adds several hundred furniture items. The trophies that bosses drop come from this mod. Although that basically makes this an unavoidable content mod, the trophies are purely aesthetic and provide no benefits so I'm not counting this as one.
 * Visual Radar - The radar item that tells you how many enemies are nearby will now provide a sort of SONAR effect. This lets you see small icons around your character showing you the location and distance of enemies relative to where your character is. This turns the radar from a fairly useless item into a very useful one, especially since it doesn't need to be equipped in an accessory slot to gain this effect.
 * Wireless - Adds wireless teleporters to the game. Check this thread for info on how to use them: https://forums.terraria.org/index.php?threads/wireless.48915/
 * Craftable Truffle Worm - Does what it says on the tin. Its crafting recipe is 100 mud blocks, 25 glowing mushrooms, 1 mushroom grass seed, and 1 worm.


=Unavoidable tweak mods=
These are nearly unavoidable mods that alter gameplay, but without adding any tangible content.

 * Reset Mode - Check out the "What is Reset Mode (RM)?" and "I joined the server while it's in hardmode and I don't want to spend a long time catching up with everyone. Is there anything I can do?" questions in the #help-and-faq channel for more info.
 * Rewards - Same as the above. It should be noted that Reset Mode is completely broken at the moment, so it's disabled for now. Rewards is partially working (PP isn't always awarded properly, and it's not always saved properly when you log out), so it's enabled despite its glitches.
 * Nihilism - Disallows certain items from being crafted or used. Full list of items: https://pastebin.com/gvpBRPdR
 * Extensible Inventory - Adds another page worth of inventory space, essentially doubling how many items you can carry outside of your hotbar and equipable item slots. Click the left and right arrows below your inventory to cycle from one page to the other.
 * Wing Slot - Adds a dedicated accessory slot for wings. In hardmode, this essentially gives you 7 accessory slots (6 + the 1 for wings only).
 * Which Mod Is This From? - Hover your mouse over an item to find out what mod it's from at the end of its description.
 * MaxStackPlus - Increases the maximum quantity of most items in a stack. For example, it lets you fit stacks of 9,999 wood, dirt, stone, and many other common items instead of 999, or 99. It's very useful in and of itself, but even more so when you consider how many items from mods you'll be carrying around in your inventory and how much inventory space you save thanks to this mod. Once you go MaxStack, you never go back.
 * Short Respawn Time - Changes the respawn timer in expert mode. Players now respawn 10 seconds after dying, or after 20 seconds if a boss fight is ongoing.
 * Item Stats - Displays more accurate stats for your weapons by taking into account the modifiers from your accessories, armor effects, and other factors.
 * Better Buffs - Adds shadows to every buff icon to give you a decent way to gauge how much time they have left just by glancing at them for a moment (useful during boss fights), lets you left click buff icons to refresh them if you have the right item to do so in your inventory (such as an ironskin potion if you want to renew an ironskin buff), and lets you shift+left click buff icons to make them automatically renew themselves when they run out, so long as you have the necessary items on you.
 * Yet Another Boss Health Bar - Adds a giant health bar to the bottom of your screen so you can always easily see how much HP the boss(es) you're fighting have left. It can accurately display multiple health bars for multiple bosses at the same time, and works for modded bosses too.
 * Player & Enemy Stats Multipliers - This mod was added to balance out how easy things have gotten with the addition of all these mods. For now, the only global change that's been made is that enemies (including bosses) deal 1.5x damage. More changes may be made in the future.
 * No More Tombs - Stops players from spamming the world with tombs when they die.
 * Colored Damage Types - Changes the color of the numbers that pop up above enemies' heads so you can tell how much damage each of your weapons are doing. This is useful during times when you want to estimate how much damage you're doing compared to a teammate who's using a different type of weapon during a boss fight, how much damage your summoned minions are doing compared to the main weapon you're using, etc.
 * No Text Pulse - Removes the pulsing text effect from the game, making item descriptions easier to read.
 * Player Health and Mana Bars - Adds a health and mana bar directly below your character that only appear when you're below max health or max mana. Convenient during intense fights where you may not have time to glance all the way at the far corner of your screen to see how much health you have left and avoid those annoying "Wait, I died??? I didn't even know I was low health!" moments.
 * Player Team and PVP Icons - Displays a small, transparent icon over player's heads that lets everyone know what team they're on, if any, and whether or not they have PVP enabled.


=Ignorable tweak mods=
These mods alter gameplay in a way that doesn't add any tangible content, and can be avoided pretty easily.

 * Auto Trash - Adds a slot next to the regular trash slot. Click the tiny eyeball icon in the corner of the slot to enable it. Placing an item in it will automatically make items of that type be deleted the moment you pick them up. Extremely useful on long spelunking trips.  You can also remove items from your auto trash list if you change your mind about them later on.
 * VeinMiner - After mining one ore, all ores of the same type that are connected to it will be dug up at the same time. The default hotkey is `, but I recommend changing it to left click. This essentially makes VeinMiner active all the time whenever you mine. VeinMiner does not affect dirt, stone, and other common tiles.
 * Fishing Reward Recipes - Lets you craft the angler's fishing rewards.
 * Old One's Forgery - Lets you craft most, but not all, of the items you can get from the old one's army event.
 * Infinity - Adds infinite variants of many ammunition & thrown items, like infinite shuriken, similar to the endless musket pouch.
 * Better Taxes - Makes the tax collector give players more money as they progress.
 * Closer Pets - Forces pets to follow players more closely, even while traveling at high speeds.
 * Glowing Water - Makes the surface of water in the hallowed & glowing mushroom biomes glow.


=Unimportant mods=
These mods don't add anything note-worthy to the game; they're just dependencies for other mods.

 * Dark-Assassin's Mod Library (DALib)
 * Hamstar's Helpers
 * Terraria Hooks
 * The One Library
 * Time Limit


=Removed mods=
The following mods were removed due to lack of use, making things much easier than expected, creating annoying visual or audio effects, creating too much inventory clutter, being redundant, causing long load times, to reduce mod bloat, and to cut down on possible crash & lag sources.
 * Dynamic Invasions - Lets players summon invasions with custom enemy types of their choosing. This is done by crafting a cross-dimensional aggregator (check the recipe browser for more info), or by buying most of the items needed to craft an aggregator from the wayfarer NPC. The background music for each invasion will change depending on which music box recording you use, and you can use eternia crystals to lengthen each invasion.
 * Fargo's Mutant Mod: Summons and Souls - Adds a bunch of boss summoning items, a ton of very powerful, optional accessories, a small number of weapons and NPCs, and a few other things. Listed under "Unavoidable content" because every player spawns with an item called "The Mutant's Gift", and you may be wondering what that is. It's an item added by this mod that greatly increases the gameplay difficulty for everybody on the server. You're encouraged NOT to use it. Enabling it on a world after players have asked you not to is a real dick move. Don't be That Guy. Just trash the item.
 * Full Health Respawn - Makes players respawn with full HP.
 * Low Health Beep - Does exactly what it says on the tin.
 * Luiafk - Lets players do a wide variety of things, such as: combine large quantities of consumable items into infinite items. For example, 999 spiky balls from goblin invasions (also sold for a cheap price by the goblin tinkerer) can be crafted into a spiky ball with infinite uses. One of the main appeals of this mod is that it lets you combine 30 of most potions (60-180 for healing pots) to create buff potions with infinite uses and buff durations of 60 minutes. / Craft items that automatically build structures (such as boss arenas, subway tunnels, sky bridges, etc.). / Use fishing rods that don't require bait (and thus have decreased fishing power, making your catches worse) and gain more lines/bobbers as you complete fishing quests. / And many other things.
 * MechTransfer - Adds items that can be used to move other items between storage containers. This can be useful for setting up item farms, such as an automatic glowing mushroom collector.
 * No Lihzahrd Explosion/Impervious Lihzahrd Furniture - Makes lihzahrd tiles, even including the pressure plates and furniture, impervious to any pickaxe below picksaw tier. This makes the temple much more challenging, and gives me the freedom to make gimmicky maps in the future if I feel like doing that again.
 * Piercing Projectile Fix - Because of the nature of piercing entities in vanilla Terraria, including projectiles and friendly minions, some weapons don't deal as much damage as you'd expect and, counter-intuitively, summoned minions can drastically lower players' overall DPS. This mod fixes that, making piercing projectiles and summoned minions more powerful.
 * Random Improvements - See the official thread for more info: https://forums.terraria.org/index.php?threads/random-improvements.71918
 * Solutions Mod - This mod adds 2 new versions of the clentaminator and several dozen new types of solutions. This makes it easier than ever to convert individual blocks, or even entire biomes, into nearly any other common block type or pre-existing biome you see fit—so long as you have enough platinum/gold coins to afford this mod's items. These items are sold by the Terraformer NPC, who'll only move in at some point while a player has a clentaminator in their inventory, making this a somewhat late game mod.
 * Spears++ - Adds several low tier spears to the game, like iron spears and platinum spears.
 * Summoners Association - Lets you see your exact minion count by opening your inventory (the number is above your defense rating), and adds 2 items—the minion control rod and the blood talisman—that give summoners much more control over their summoned minions. Tip that a lot of players don't know about: even without this mod, you can choose a target for your minions by holding a summoning staff and right clicking the enemy you want them to attack. This even works on individual body parts for segmented bosses like Skeletron Prime.
 * Unusacies' Battle Rods - Adds a large amount of content to the game that revolves around combat and fishing. The wooden battle rod you start off with comes from this mod. There's only one new optional enemy, but there are dozens of new fishing rods that can be used for both fishing and combat, dozens of new, related accessories, several new armor sets, and more. This mod even has its own wiki: https://github.com/JPANv2/UnuBattleRods/wiki/Accessories
 * Upgraded Accessories - Adds tons of new combination accessories (an example of a vanilla one is the charm of myths). See the official thread for more info: https://forums.terraria.org/index.php?threads/upgraded-accessories.75219
 * Various Weathers - Adds about twenty new weather effects, some new enemies, and some new items to the game. For more info, view the official thread: https://forums.terraria.org/index.php?threads/various-weathers.76825
 * Vending Machines - Lets you kill friendly NPCs, collect their souls, and stick them into vending machines. An NPC vending machine acts identically to the NPC the soul came from. This lets you set up a single convenient location to buy things from the traveling merchant NPC without having to check your map to see where he's standing at the moment. This also lets you kill friendly, underground skeleton merchants and permanently buy their items whenever you want within your own base. You can also do several other useful things with this mod, but I'll leave them to your imagination.
 * Very Short Respawn Time - Changes the respawn timer in expert mode. Players now respawn 5 seconds after dying, or after 7.5 seconds if a boss fight is ongoing.
 * Weapons of Mass Decoration - Adds weapons that can paint tiles.