Video Game / Fargo's Mod

Fargo's Mod, despite what the title suggests, is not a singular Game Mod for Terraria. Rather, it refers to a duo of associated content and quality-of-life mods for the game. The mods revolve around a group of Hybrid Monster siblings (plus a lumberjack and a squirrel in a top hat) that stop by the player's town to sell useful items that help reduce the grind Terraria is infamous for. But as the game progresses further, it becomes much more apparent that the siblings and their impact on the world reach much higher than that, to impossible levels of cosmic power.

Fargo's Mod is split into two different mods:

• Fargo's Mutant Mod, which adds only the siblings, their boss/event summoning wares, the LumberJack, and other aspects of the mod that focus exclusively on quality-of-life. This includes some direct changes to vanilla, along with a few other tools that make certain structures almost mandatory for convenience in a typical run less painful to construct.
• Fargo's Soul Mod, which adds the Enchantments and Souls, an assortment of Purposefully Overpowered items that collapse the Set Bonuses of every armor set in the game and certain associated accessories into increasingly-dense compound accessories. It also adds new equipment to reward certain self-challenges and Eternity Mode, a Nintendo Hard difficulty that reworks much of the game and gives nearly every aspect of vanilla additional mechanics to make it tough as nails. This mod is optionally packaged with two smaller add-ons:
  • The Fargo's Soul Mod Extras that adds a few miscellaneous features and items, such as an Enchantment for the Eternity-exclusive armors.
  • Fargo's Souls DLC, which adds cross-mod Souls and Enchantments for popular mods such as Terraria Calamity and The Thorium Mod, ensuring they aren't left out from the player's journey. It has since been updated with the intention of providing Eternity compatibility for other modded bosses, as well as custom Champions and mechanics.
  • Fargo's Music Mod, which adds in custom battle tracks to the bosses added by Soul Mod.

---

Tropes:

• All Your Powers Combined: The crux of the Soul Mod. All armor sets from vanilla and compatible content mods can be crafted together with certain accessories into an Enchantment, an accessory that contains all of the unique effects of its components and then some. These can then be turned into Forces, which combine several Enchantments, which in turn can be turned into Souls. There are also Essences, which are made from weapons and give general combat buffs to different classes, and can also be upgraded into Souls. Finally, all of these Souls can be combined into the Soul of Eternity that blesses the player with the abilities of every single armor set and accessory in the entire crafting tree, which equates to almost the entire game and all compatible content mods installed.
  • The three siblings fight using the combined abilities of the events/monsters they sell summons for, and the Mutant also incorporates attacks from weapons made from Eternal Energy. If Terraria Calamity and the DLC extension are installed, he will also absorb the attacks of that mod's bosses.
  • The Champion minibosses all fight using the powers of the Forces they represent.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The whole mod was originally built on this. The Mutant Mod allows boss, event, and rare enemy summons to be directly bought for cash, and adds recipes, shop listings, and extra drop chances for items that are notoriously hard to find.
  • The LumberJack doesn't provide anything related to combat, but sells wood to lessen the player's dependence on trees in a world.
  • The Top Hat Squirrel allows you to purchase copies of Souls, Enchantments, and certain other compound accessories for a hefty price, easing the grind for them in multiplayer.
  • Dying ten times to the Mutant in their second phase causes all future attempts to skip the first phase until they are defeated. Not so much in Masochist Mode, where their first phase is now a fully-fledged battle instead of just a warmup.
  • The Enchantments require a large number of components to assemble, many of which are tedious or difficult to obtain even with the mod's various help options - and there are a lot of Enchantments. If you have the mettle to challenge the Champions, each of them will drop Enchantments without needing to find their ingredients, up to 3 per Champion kill on Eternity.
  • The more Forces and Souls you assemble, the more unique abilities you have that stack on top of each other - potentially causing the entire game to become Unintentionally Unwinnable because of lag or outright crashes. As a result, almost every single ability granted by an Enchantment or above can be individually turned on and off, and there's even a "minimal" toggle option that automatically turns off most non-essential ones. Minions have a transparency option for similar reasons.
• The Artifact: The Deviantt implying the LumberJack is somehow stronger than her or even her brothers, in reference to the now-deleted Stable Time Loop lore she would originally divulge once the Soul Mod was completed in the world. In that iteration of the mod, he was a Time Master who used his powers to make his victory over the present-day Player Character a universal constant.
• The Baby of the Bunch: The Deviantt follows The Smurfette Principle among the siblings, is much more chipper and easygoing than her brothers, has an Absurd Phobia of hamsters, is only as tall as the Angler, and merely deals in summoning rare enemies, rather than events, minibosses, or bosses. She's also the weakest of the three in a fight, with difficulty comparable to a post-Skeletron, pre-Wall of Flesh modded boss on their highest difficulty setting; meanwhile her brothers are both post-Moon Lord.
• Beyond the Impossible: The Soul Mod is all about seeing just how far you can take your strength with all of your accumulated gear to the point of literally and metaphorically breaking the game.
• Bragging Rights Reward:
  • Truth be told, anyone willing and able to assemble the Soul of Eternity legitimately probably doesn't need it any time soon. Its components, however, still have some use if obtained early enough.
  • The Energizers if obtained early. While it is theoretically possible (and in some cases actually possible) to kill ten waves of ten of the same boss each to obtain their respective Energizers far before Moon Lord, Luminite or Abominable Scales are required to do anything useful with them, making them only useful against the post-Moon Lord encounters.
• Bullet Hell: Particularly evident with the later bosses, but many of the original and retooled boss battles in the mod liberally use massive amounts of patterned projectiles, and some take heavy inspiration from bullet-hell games like Touhou Project, Undertale, and Rabi-Ribi, to name a few. Learning to recognize and dodge each boss' shot patterns is a key skill for taking on some of the mod's hardest encounters.
• Cast from Money: The Scientific Railgun is a post-Moon Lord upgrade of the Coin Gun which inherits the function of its predecessor, but replaces the coin bullets with enormous lasers.
• Close-Contact Danger Benefit: The Sparkling Adoration, obtained from the Deviantt's boss battle, lets you graze incoming projectiles for a stacking increase in damage, which decays over time and resets if you get hit. It can interact with the Nekomi and Styx armor sets, while The Abominable Wand and Mutant Eye from her older brothers' battles can empower this effect.
• Charged Attack:
  • The Nekomi Armor will build up energy as you graze projectiles, consuming it to grant temporary rapid healing on taking a hit, or consuming it on command to fire life-draining hearts or a massive attack from Sparkling Love if fully charged.
  • The Styx Armor can gradually charge power as you deal damage or graze projectiles. The power can be consumed to grant Damage Reduction upon taking hits, or it can be manually consumed to fire devastating attacks proportional to how much you've charged, culminating in a massive Styx Gazer blade when fully charged.
• Chekhov's Gag:
  • The three siblings frequently joke about becoming bosses and selling summons for themselves, with the Deviantt adding that she'd probably have the Mutant do it instead of her. After several updates, you do actually gain the ability to fight them. And they are not Joke Characters, as they have clearly-defined fighting styles with unique effects and are required to progress in Eternity Mode.
  • The siblings sometimes ask where an "ech cat" has been. At first, this seems to be in reference to a painting of the Discord emote of the same name, but through an intentionally confusing-as-hell summoning ritual with Pandora's Box, you can summon a superboss version named Echdeath (though unlike the siblings, it's not meant to be taken seriously.)
  • The Mutant will sometimes joke that he's "all you need for a Calamity" if the aforementioned mod is installed. Prior to an update, facing him in combat under the same conditions would make him make good on that statement.
• Difficult, but Awesome: The post-Moon Lord Eridanus Armor is a multiclass armor that empowers one of the four classes at a time, cycling which class it empowers every 10 seconds. Naturally, this needs a lot of micromanagement and real-time weapon switching to make the best use of it, and it's easy to lose track of your switching in the heat of battle. If you can pull this off, however, you'll enjoy a massive spike in damage output, along with the armor's familiar launching devastating support attacks.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • Eternity Mode was originally called "Masochist Mode" (called such because it had no reward then) and began as simply boosted spawn rates and random boss spawns. It was then slowly retooled into a difficulty mode above Expert. Masochist Mode was later added again as an extra difficulty achieved by combining Eternity and Master Mode.
  • The mod originally had an explanation for why the siblings have their amalgamated appearances, with the Deviantt explaining that they're fragments of the Player Character untold eternities in the future after becoming an omniscient deity, sent back to the past to fulfill a Stable Time Loop. In a sense, this would make them Patchwork Kids of the player from the future, while also doubling as an Affectionate Parody of modded power scaling. This has since been deleted from the mod altogether.
  • The mod originally had an option to convert certain thrown weapons from other classes to throwing damage. As this often included magic weapons with high DPS like the Toxic Flask and Magic Dagger, this was removed due to giving the throwing class undue weight in balancing.
  • The Mutant originally had the personality of an evil Knight Templar, eventually revealing during his bossfight that he was never your friend and in fact utterly despises everything about you, calling the gameplay cycle of Terraria as a whole a sign of weakness that must be culled from the world. This was cut and revised into his In Love with Your Carnage personality that he has now, with any signs of genuine malice being downgraded to one-off jokes.
• Fake Difficulty: Though Eternity Mode is usually pretty decent at keeping its gameplay modifiers skill-based, a big case of this trope comes up during the Lunar Event and the Moon Lord fight. Both inflict permanent debuffs while active that force the player to use different damage types for different parts of the encounter, which automatically hampers the DPS and performance of most players who typically spec into one exclusively. While the Lunar Event debuffs can be avoided using the Lunatic Cultist's Eternity Mode drop, the Moon Lord's debuff (which causes him to cycle through the four damage types as his current weakness) cannot be avoided until after he is defeated and his drop claimed.
• Foreshadowing: The mod's unique title screen is an animated blue background that changes the game's title theme to a new piece based on Sakuzyo's "rePrologue." This foreshadows the Mutant bossfight, which uses the same background and "rePrologue" proper.
• Gathering Steam: Several items grant you gradually ramping bonuses until you get hit, such as the Sparkling Adoration which grants you ramping crit damage as you graze projectiles, and the Tin Enchantment which grants you ramping crit chance as you dish out crits. The Soul of Eternity has a much, much stronger version of the latter.
• Geo Effects: In Eternity Mode, many biomes will inflict you with debilitating status effects just by being inside of them. Equipping the Pure Heart in Hardmode will make you immune to all of them, but considering it's a post-Mech item, you'll probably have to contend with these for a while.
• Glass Cannon: The Gaia Armor added by the mod can turn you into this with its set bonus, which lets you toggle between a regular state and an offense mode that sacrifices a large chunk of your defensive ability for a substantial boost in damage output.
• How Is That Even Possible?: Echdeath's second phase is supposed to be absolutely impossible to defeat, as a joke. If you somehow manage it, such as with One-Hit Kill gear from some other mod, its defeat message is simply "HOW".
• Hybrid Monster: The Mutant and Abominationn are humanoid creatures made out of the body parts and weapons of regular bosses and event bosses, respectively. Their sister, the Deviantt, however, is more accurately a Nymph wearing a patchwork outfit made of the clothes of different rare enemies.
• In Love with Your Carnage: The five NPCs of the mod are enthralled by your constant bloodshed, with their increasing inventories explained as them rewarding you for tearing up so many things in the world.
• Irony: Eternity Mode has a huge warning to not cross it with other content mods or their difficulty modes, as they all pale in comparison to how the mode alters vanilla alone and can make certain bossfights Unintentionally Unwinnable since the changes to AI stack. Yet if you're playing with another content mod, the Soul of Eternity's crafting tree will require crossing the streams at some point to obtain both of their Souls.
• Joke Character: A few bosses exist that aren't registered to other mods that normally keep track of boss kills in the world for this reason:
  • The Ceiling of Moon Lord and Guntera are two variants of vanilla bosses ripped from the satirical Earth Mod. While they have unique mechanics, they only exist to satirize the same kinds of fan ideas the original Earth Mod is built upon and don't drop anything useful.
  • Duke Fishron EX was originally the True Final Boss of Eternity Mode, but was replaced with the Abominationn altogether. His reimplementation in the Soul Mod DLC demotes him to this due to his redundancy in existing.
  • Echdeath, in reference to the Abominationn's mentions of an "Ech cat," is an absurdly powerful and effectively invincible superboss summoned through an intentionally convoluted process. It's a riff on anti-cheat in other content mods being used to protect unbalanced and/or unsustainable mechanics and thus exists solely to try and subvert as many cheats and forms of overpowered weaponry as possible.
• Lampshade Hanging:
  • If Thorium is installed, the Mutant will note how often content mods start with a boss fight in the desert, something Thorium pioneered.
  • Because of how much Terraria involves mercilessly ripping apart anything that moves when it comes to obtaining loot, the Mutant and Abominationn will comment that you are both friendless and hardly heroic in the traditional sense.
  • The Abominationn is well-aware that Terrarians don't exactly have the most uniform outfits without access to vanity:
  Abominationn: Why are you looking at me like that? Your fashion sense isn't going to be winning you any awards, either.
• Nerf: Aside from shuffling around the sequence at which certain items in the Soul Mod can be obtained and balancing them accordingly, the Rock was originally part of the Soul of Eternity's crafting tree with Calamity. As a hardcore character on Death Mode is required to craft it anyways by using one to obtain the Cosmic Plushie, the Rock was probably taken out either for redundancy or to not require going through an oppressively difficult encounter specifically designed to have no reward until a future date.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • Eternity Mode, which completely retools most vanilla mechanics, many enemies, and all bosses to be as torturous or unfair as possible while still being able to be beaten at the proper point in progression. Assuming you heed its warnings and don't switch on, say, Revengeance or Death at the same time.
  • Exaggerated with Masochist Mode, which occurs when you simultaneously enable Eternity and Master. On top of combining the heavy stat modifiers from Master with the mechanical difficulty of Eternity, Masochist Mode changes several bosses (most notably the Final Boss) and further enhances their attacks and stats, to the point of being ridiculously hard even compared to Eternity Mode.
• No-Damage Run: Not getting hit at all during the fights with the siblings is a requirement to assemble replicas of their gear, as doing so drops the parts necessary to accomplish that.
• No Fair Cheating:
  • Hoping to use Calamity's infamous obscene power scaling to crush the Mutant beneath your bootheel? Tough luck - he just gets extremely pissed and gives himself a massive buff to his HP, doubles his defense, quadruples his damage, and gains the ability to No-Sell every offensive mechanic in the mod. However, this was since removed in preparation for Calamity's 1.5 update that severely flattens its power curve, as the two mods' endgames would now be relatively similar in power level (with Eternity Mode content actually eventually surpassing it).
  • Echdeath parodies this, with its AI and stats being designed solely to exaggerate this trope to its absolute limit.
• Power Nullifier: During the Mutant's second phase, he strips you of almost all abilities from the Souls and their components, cripples your defense and damage reduction, nullifies all healing and dodging, and prevents escape through all means. You are thus required to rely solely on your dodging and aiming skills to succeed, which will need to be at their absolute best considering the Mutant's fight is also a Marathon Level.
• Purposefully Overpowered: All of the accessories added by the Soul Mod, their strength justified by the sheer grind and challenge required to collect them all. Although its components (which in themselves are absurdly strong by vanilla standards) are essentially required to finish Eternity Mode, the Soul of Eternity is most certainly this.
• Sadist: All three of the siblings enjoy bloodshed to an unhealthy degree, which is the main reason they like you so much (that, and because some of the challenges in the Soul Mod border on Macho Masochism.)
• Sequence Breaking:
  • Mimics and Pigrons spawn pre-Hardmode in Eternity Mode. They will still drop any associated loot if you can take care of them at that point in the game.
  • The true potential of Pandora's Box, if the add-on to the Soul Mod is installed. If you have enough patience and skill, even the post-Moon Lord enemies summoned by the box can be disposed of as early as pre-Skeletron to get a headstart on both crafting advanced equipment and obtaining said equipment outright. Depending on your luck and current progression point, this can snowball out of control quickly as weapons dropped by summons can be used to go to town on other summons, racking up even more materials and weapons.
• Shout-Out: In typical Terraria fashion, there's a lot of references, primarily in the descriptions of the different Enchantments and Forces, but also in some weapons as well.
  • The Scientific Railgun is a post-Moon Lord upgrade for the Coin Gun that references both A Certain Scientific Railgun directly in its name, as well as Mikoto Misaka's prominent usage of coins as ammunition for her own electrical powers.
  • The Supersonic Soul simply quotes: "I am speed."
• Sinister Scythe: The Abominationn wields a truly massive one called the Styx Gazer, which can also become a BFS. It shatters into the Abominable Wand and Broken Hilt at the end of his fight.
• Super-Fun Happy Thing of Doom : The Deviantt's weapon is the Sparkling Love. It's a huge axe covered in Meat Moss.
• Take That!:
  • "What's this about an update? Sounds rare."
  • The LumberJack will sometimes insult the other types of wood and trees added by Thorium, either because they don't grow into trees, or because they grow on turf.
• Time Stands Still: Continuing the Stardust armor's reference to Star Platinum, the Stardust Enchantment gives the user the ability to completely freeze time for a short period. Just don't try it in the Mutant's fight, or he'll outright turn it on you while shrugging it off.
• Was Once a Man: The Deviantt sometimes comments that she isn't human "anymore," not that she cares except for the fact that it excludes her from the Blood Moon's effects.
• Weaksauce Weakness: For whatever reason, Echdeath takes absurd amounts of damage from sand if restrained somehow using an item from another mod, bypassing its equally insane defenses.
• What the Hell, Player?: Played for laughs. The Mutant will ask "why would you do this?" if he's in a world with both Thorium and Calamity enabled, a reference to how mixing content mods (especially such incongruous ones) is often frowned upon in the community due to how much it messes with balance.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: The Deviantt is afraid of hamsters for some reason.