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Terraria How to Install tModLoader (Linux)

This guide details how to install tModLoader for Terraria for people on Linux systems. I have guide up for our fellow Mac gamers as well.

This guide will be showing two ways you can install tModLoader on Linux, the first one being the fastest way, and the second one will be the manual way of installing it. This was all done on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic, but both sets of instructions will work on pretty much every distro. However, this isn’t guaranteed to work on every distro out there. If there is an issue, please let me know ASAP so I can troubleshoot.

This will probably not work on pirated/cracked copies of the game, and I don’t have any intention of making it work on those copies.

Prerequisites

Prequisites for the automatic way:

You need to ensure you have unzip and wget installed on your operating system. You can check if you do by running

sudo apt-get install wget
and
sudo apt-get install unzip

Prequisites for the manual way:

Make sure you have a copy of the game on Steam and have it installed.
You will also need to to grab the tModLoader files. Make sure you grab the Linux version.

Automatic way

Step one

Make sure you have the dependencies for my script installed (wget and unzip). They should be bundled with every Linux distro, but if you have a bare-bones distro, then you might need to install them.

Go ahead and go download my script from here. This should already be marked as an executble file, but in the case it isn’t, run

chmod u+x InstallTMod.sh

in a terminal

Next, run

./InstallTMod.sh

Make sure you are not running this command as root, as this will install tModLoader in a unexpected location. You can check if you are root by running the whoami command in terminal.

This is a pretty quick process, but if you experience any problem, PM me on Steam about the problem.

Once this is done, the next time you launch Terraria, you should have a tModloader Terraria!

Please keep in mind that tModLoader worlds are different from vanilla Terraria worlds. Your worlds/players are not deleted. Instead, tModLoader makes a new directory to store tModLoader worlds/players. You can put vanilla Terraria .plr and .wld files in the tModLoader directory, and they should work as expected.

Manual way

In the rare case that the automatic way doesn’t work (please contact me if this is the case), or you prefer to install it yourself, this step will detail how you can do just that.

Make sure you have Terraria installed, and grabbed the tModLoader files, link is in the prerequisites.

Step one

Extract the tModLoader zip file to a empty folder, then locate your Terraria install folder (commonly found at ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Terraria.)

Step two

Drag and drop the tModLoader files in the Terraria install folder

That’s it!

Like I said above, when you launch Terraria, you’ll notice that your worlds are missing. tModLoader doesn’t delete them, it instead uses its own tModLoader players/world (I think the format is tplr and twld, but I’m not too sure). You can move your vanilla Terraria characters and worlds into this directory and it will work as expected.

4 thoughts on “Terraria How to Install tModLoader (Linux)”

  1. great info, though you should probably change your script to use variables, that way the end user can update as appropriate (and point to there own directories. rather than try figure out what your trying to move and where) – just make sure you document them well.

    Reply
  2. Why do all these guides show the most easy part of the whole endeavor. Anyone with half a brain can install an app on linux. What 95% of the people posting questions want to know is “How to get the actual mods to load, on a linux TMod instance”

    Reply

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