Top 10 Essential tModLoader Server Mods for Terraria 2026
Once you and your friends have completed the vanilla Terraria experience, tackling the Moon Lord and exhausting the 1.4.5 update content, a completely new universe awaits. tModLoader (tML) is the official modding API for Terraria, giving you access to thousands of custom items, bosses, biomes, and entirely new gameplay mechanics.
However, running mods on a multiplayer dedicated server is significantly more complicated than playing solo. Some mods cause terrible desync in multiplayer, while others demand incredibly high-performance hardware. If you are starting a modded Terraria server in 2026, here is the definitive list of the best, most stable mods to include in your pack.
Massive Content Overhauls
These mods essentially double or triple the size of the base game. Note: It is generally recommended to only run one massive overhaul at a time on a server to prevent bizarre item balancing and boss progression overlap.
1. Calamity Mod
The undisputed king of Terraria mods. Calamity adds over 30 new bosses, hundreds of lore items, several new biomes (like the Sulphurous Sea), and a robust post-Moon Lord progression system. The "Infernum" add-on for Calamity completely reworks boss AI into highly difficult bullet-hell encounters.
Warning: Calamity endgame bosses are incredibly CPU intensive. You must host this on a premium CPU like an AMD Ryzen 9 offered by Supercraft or the server will crash during the Supreme Calamitas fight.
2. Thorium Mod
Often considered the most polished and "vanilla-friendly" major expansion, Thorium adds two entirely new fully fleshed-out character classes: The Bard (support and buffs) and the Healer. This makes it the absolute best mod for cooperative multiplayer, as players can adopt dedicated MMO-style roles.
Essential Quality of Life (QoL) Mods
These mods do not add massive new bosses, but rather eliminate the tedious grinding and inventory management inherent in Terraria, letting your server focus on building and boss fighting.
3. Magic Storage
The single most important mod for any multiplayer server. Instead of building massive warehouses with 200 unorganized chests, Magic Storage allows your community to build a centralized, upgradeable storage network. You can search for items by name, auto-sort, and even craft directly from the storage network interface. It is utterly indispensable.
4. Recipe Browser
With massive mods adding thousands of items, keeping the wiki open on your second monitor gets exhausting. Recipe Browser adds an in-game UI where you can search any item, see what it crafts into, what drops it, and what crafting station is required.
5. Boss Checklist
When running multiple content mods, knowing which boss to fight next can be confusing. Boss Checklist provides an in-game book that correctly orders all vanilla and modded bosses by difficulty scaling, allowing your server to track its progression easily.
6. AlchemistNPC Lite
Tired of farming glowing mushrooms and blinkroot for hours before every boss fight? This mod adds several NPCs that will sell every potion in the game (for a balanced price) once certain progression milestones are hit.
7. Fargo's Mutant Mod
Specifically designed to reduce grind, this mod adds the Mutant NPC who sells boss-summoning items. This allows your server to easily re-fight bosses for missing drops without repeatedly farming the summoning ingredients.
8. Ore Excavator (VeinMiner)
Simplifies early game mining. By holding a hotkey while mining a block of ore, the mod will instantly break and harvest the entire contiguous vein of that ore. It is fully highly configurable for server admins to prevent abuse with dirt/stone blocks.
Multiplayer Utility Mods
9. Census - Town NPC Checklist
It can be very difficult on a server to know if you've met the obscure requirements for a specific modded NPC to move in. Census provides a simple UI showing exactly which NPCs can spawn and what conditions you are missing for them to arrive.
10. Auto Trash
When 5 players are digging a hellevator, their inventories fill with thousands of dirt blocks. Auto Trash allows you to slot an item in the UI, and any future pickups of that item are instantly deleted, saving precious inventory space during expeditions.
Hosting Requirements for Heavy Modpacks
If you plan to run Calamity alongside Magic Storage and an array of QoL mods, your server hardware needs to be exceptional. Not only does tModLoader demand significant RAM to hold the custom assets, but calculating custom AI for 5 players requires immense single-thread processing power.
A cheap 2GB RAM budget server will literally fail to boot these modpacks. To provide a seamless, lag-free experience for your community, choose Supercraft Terraria Server Hosting. With 1-click tModLoader installation, Ryzen CPUs, and 24/7 support, launching your ultimate modded universe has never been easier.