Gonna go to bed but whated to post this. been 2-3 years sense last played, and never modded, looking to do a full expert (Death mode?) playthrough, and looking for mod suggestions. Running a (flexing) GTX1080 so i can handle mod overloading. from what i can tell this seems to be the opinions of people, but as time passes and mods update, it's nice to hear fresh replys.

Calamity: I hear Calamity is way more balanced now then before for vanilla content, and is more suitable for combining with other mods now.

Thorium: Perfect balance. do its post game before Calamity's post game, cause its not as hard.

Spirits: Seems to be mostly just a lesser version of thorium, but i love me some new biomes. has good balance with vanilla?

Tremor: Abandoned, kinda unbalanced, development is unsupported, and fragmented into new teams, and also has kinda bad spriteing?

i hear magic storage is probibly a must when using multiple mods, while i do really appreciate the inventory management of terraria, i bet adding like 3~~6x as many items to the game probably makes it an inventory hell, and seems reasonable to deprecate inventory for a magic chest. While i think id prefer a bigger invintory, i know full well first the piggy fills, then the bank vault, and then im really just delaying the inevitable. to many items, so i need magic storage.

what other quality of life, cosmetic, or generally cool mods do you all recommend? i'll probably end up playing calamity/thorium/spirits/magic chests but im down to hear more stuff. :)