The Calamity Mod is one of the largest Terraria content mods ever. It features new biomes, new monsters, new gear, new music... new everything. Calamity completely changes the base game of Terraria without detracting too much from the core experience.
With the Calamity mod being such a robust update, even veteran players will need a primer before diving in. Beyond that, there are also reasons for downloading it at all, what it includes, and how to install it as well.
Updated April 25, 2023 by Ja Vaughn Marshall: The Calamity Mod is slowly but surely getting frequent updates in the absence of consistent content from the Terraria team. With smaller content patches coming for vanilla Terraria, there's no doubt that Calamity is the place to be if you're looking for exciting new things. Thanks to the shifting nature of a regularly updated game, though, Calamity is significantly different from how it was even a year ago– items, bosses, and features have not only been added but also removed to achieve a healthier game balance and improve the flow of progression.
10 How To Install The Calamity Mod
While mod support was added to Steam for Terraria at the end of March 2020, at the time of writing, the Calamity mod is loaded through the tModLoader. This bit of kit has been powering Terraria mods for years and is, at this point, fairly streamlined and easy-to-use.
Once you've installed tModLoader, you can head to the official Calamity Mod website or the tModLoader workshop page on Steam to find the download links. It's as easy as that– for a step-by-step process, TheGamer has a handy how-to guide for installing Terraria mods.
9 New Bosses
There are a lot of new bosses in the Calamity mod, and a lot is no exaggeration. This includes over a dozen mini-bosses (one of which is a giant angry clam), five new Pre-Hardmode bosses (such as the Slime God), nine new Hardmode bosses (like the terrifying Ravager), and 11 new Post-Moon Lord bosses.
There's even a super boss as well, known as the Supreme Witch, Calamitas. If you've finished Terraria and are looking for end-game content, Calamity is your mod. These bosses put even the hardest bosses in the base game to shame.
8 Vanilla Boss Reworks
Vanilla bosses haven't been left out of the fun, though, as every single boss that can be fought in the original experience has been given improved AI and new attacks to keep Terraria veterans on their toes.
Though the changes are fairly minor for some (like the Eye of Cthulu, which simply goes to its second phase more quickly), bosses like Plantera can go from a Pre-Cultist pit stop to a brick wall that requires significant preparation to conquer. Each boss also drops an item that expands on their lore in the context of the mod, making Calamity feel more like a sequel than a modification.
7 Adrenaline And Rage
If you decide to play Calamity on its harder difficulties, not all the changes are made to your detriment. In Revengeance mode and above, you can access two new powerful stats called Adrenaline and Rage.
The Rage bar grows whenever you're near an enemy and can be activated when full, giving you a damage boost for a short period as the bar drains. The Adrenaline bar exists in a similar niche for bosses, filling up as long as you avoid getting hit and giving you a large boost to damage when activated. Properly using these bars can mean the difference between victory and defeat against Calamity's hardest bosses.
6 The Rogue Class
The Calamity Mod also adds a whole new way to play Terraria in the form of the Rogue class. This class utilizes the Stealth mechanic that comes with Rogue-specific armor sets and weapons, and thankfully, there's a staggering amount of gear to choose from if you're looking to test it out.
Stealth works like this: if a player doesn't attack with their class weapons, their stealth meter increases. If you attack with a weapon that has a listed Stealth Strike effect while in Stealth, you deal extra damage and activate the effect. This class is incredibly fleshed-out for this being mod– it feels like it was always meant to be in the game.
5 New Biomes
Even though Terraria 1.4 added some new biomes to the base game, the Calamity mod goes a step further by adding five biomes waiting to be explored.
- The Sunken Sea, a peaceful underwater biome, is found underneath the Underground Desert.
- The Sulfurous Sea replaces the Ocean biome on the Dungeon-side of the map; though dangerous thanks to its acidic waters, it offers an entrance to the Abyss.
- The Abyss is one of the hardest biomes in Terraria's history, as the enemies and water pressure will quickly kill an unprepared player.
- The Brimstone Crag is a hostile biome found on one of the extreme ends of the Underworld, chock-full of biome-specific resources like Charred Ore.
- The Astral Infection spawns once the Wall of Flesh is defeated, spreading like a world evil and spawning enemies just as terrifying.
4 New Structures
Alongside the new biomes, there are a few new structures that spawn during world generation. Take the evil island as an example: this floating island is made from blocks opposite of the world evil (so Corruption or Crimson) and spawns with a locked Biome Chest.
There are so many structures to find and explore, each with its own secrets to uncover. A set of structures known as labs even unlock powerful weapons that run on energy cells, trading off infinite usage for huge damage between recharges.
3 New Items
If you thought Rogue was the only class to be given new items, you would be dead wrong– every class in the game has received a plethora of weapons, accessories, and armor sets that allow them to be competitive in the face of new, difficult foes.
Beyond just combat, decorations, furniture, and crafting methods have been introduced to make the moment-to-moment gameplay more complex and satisfying. A particularly useful item is the Momentum Capacitor, which unlocks your movement speed to eliminate the tedium of building asphalt sky bridges across the world.
2 General New Mechanics
There are a number of overall mechanical changes in Calamity, such as new debuffs, different types of fishing, changes to the rarity of items, a death mode, and several methods of death prevention. To cover them all would likely take several hours at the bare minimum.
One of the most interesting changes is how the buff and debuff systems work. Terraria was already pretty great at allowing players to adequately prepare for fights, but the Calamity mod takes it to a whole new level– as it does with most of the game, really.
1 New Town NPCs
Forget about the hard-to-spawn Truffle NPC, because the Calamity Mod is where it's at for a busy village. There are five new NPCs introduced in the mod who offer their services to you: the Archmage, the Bandit, the Drunk Princess, the Sea King, and the Brimstone Witch.
Each NPC offers a slew of new items that'll help you adjust to the difficulty that Revengeance and Death mode present. On top of that, they also help you fight if they happen to be close while you're battling a boss.
You can find out more about the Calamity Mod here. This list is really just to introduce this awesome mod to you and give a bit of information about a truly enormous mod.