How to Install Terraria and Join a Server

Terraria looks like a small game for about four hours. You chop some trees, build a wooden box, put a door on it, and an unimpressed man moves in.

Then you dig down. And you keep digging, past the dirt and the stone and the caves with the water in them, and eventually you break through into a layer of the world that is on fire, where the things that live there kill you in one hit and there is a boss down there whose defeat permanently changes every part of the world you have already explored.

That reveal — that the sandbox has an entire progression hiding underneath it — is what turned a 2D building game into one of the most played things on Steam. Listings collect on the Terraria hub.

The thing nobody tells you about multiplayer

Terraria has no in-game server browser.

There is no list to scroll, no filters, no populated tab of public servers waiting for you. Multiplayer is a menu with two realistic options: join a friend through Steam, or type an address.

This catches people constantly, because every other game on this site has a browser of some kind and this one simply does not. It is not broken and you have not missed a button. The way you find a Terraria server is that somebody gives you its address, or you find it on a directory — which is a large part of why directories exist for this game at all.

So the flow is: find a server somewhere, get its address, type the address. That is the whole mechanism, and once you know it the game stops being confusing.

Getting it

Terraria is a paid game on Steam, and an old and inexpensive one. Install it from your Library. The download is tiny and it will run on essentially anything.

If Steam itself is new to you, our Steam guide starts further back than this one does.

One thing to sort out before you go anywhere: characters and worlds are separate files. Your character is yours, stored on your machine, and you take it with you to any world you are allowed into. This is unlike most games with persistent progress and it is the single best thing about Terraria's multiplayer — the hours you put in on a server are not stranded there.

Choose your character type carefully

The choice you make when creating a character is not cosmetic and cannot be changed afterwards.

Softcore drops some money on death and nothing else. This is the normal choice and the correct one for a first character.

Mediumcore drops your items where you died, which on a public server means somebody else may collect them before you get back.

Hardcore deletes the character permanently. Some servers are built entirely around this and the culture on them is excellent, but it is not a first-week decision.

There is also a separate mode with creative-style controls, and characters made in it can only play worlds of the same kind. Keep them apart in your head.

Connecting to a server

1. Get the address. From a directory listing, a community's page, or a friend. Addresses gather on the Terraria server list, where entries are queried directly rather than trusting a server's own claims.
2. Open Multiplayer from the main menu and choose to join via IP.
3. Enter the address, then the port. The game asks for them separately. The default is 7777, and a host running several servers on one machine will have moved most of them elsewhere — use whatever the listing says rather than assuming.
4. Enter the password if there is one. Many community servers use one, handed out through their Discord or forum.
5. Wait through the world sync. You are receiving a world, and a large, heavily built one takes a moment.

If it fails, the usual causes are a wrong port, a password you were not told about, or a version mismatch between your client and the server. That last one is common after an update and there is nothing to do but wait for the server to update too.

Modded servers need matching mods

A server running mods needs your client to be running the same ones, loaded through the separate mod-loading application that Terraria's modding community maintains.

That application is its own entry in your Steam library rather than a setting inside the game, which surprises people. Install it, use it to subscribe to the mod list the server publishes, and launch through it rather than through the base game.

Getting this slightly wrong produces a confusing failure rather than a clear one, so follow whatever list the server publishes exactly rather than approximately.

The progression, briefly, because it decides which server suits you

Terraria is structured in two halves and the boundary between them matters enormously on a shared world.

The first half is exploration and a sequence of optional bosses, each of which drops materials for better equipment. You are digging, building, fighting things that are manageable, and gradually reaching deeper layers of the world. This is the part that looks like a small game.

Then somebody defeats the boss at the bottom of the world, and the world changes. New ore appears in the ground. Two biomes begin spreading across the map. Enemies you could handle become things that kill you in a few seconds, and the equipment you were proud of is suddenly inadequate. This is not a difficulty setting — it is a permanent, world-wide, irreversible transition.

After it, the progression becomes a ladder of specific bosses, each gating the next, running through mechanical constructions and a plant in the jungle and a temple, up to a final fight that arrives as an invasion of the whole world.

Why this matters for choosing a server: a world that has already crossed that boundary is not a place to learn the game. A new player dropped into a late-stage world will die to ordinary wandering enemies and have no way to build equipment that helps. Ask where a server is in that sequence before you join it, and prefer a fresh or early world for a first character.

What a server actually changes

Terraria's world is shared and permanent, which means the server's rules are about what people are allowed to do to it.

Griefing protection is the big one. A public Terraria server without administration tools becomes a hole in the ground surrounded by rude signs within a week. Established servers run server-side administration software that lets admins protect regions, roll back damage and hand out permissions, and a server that mentions region protection in its description has thought about this.

Whether the world is progressing. A server on a fresh world is a completely different experience from one where somebody defeated the final boss two years ago and the map is a network of teleporters and mob farms. Neither is wrong. Ask.

Difficulty. Expert and Master worlds change enemy behaviour and drops substantially, not just their numbers. A public server on Master is not a beginner's server.

Whether it is one of the special formats. Small-map races, hardcore-only survival, building-focused servers where combat is beside the point. Terraria communities have invented as many formats as Minecraft ones — our overview of server types like SMP and anarchy is written for that game and the categories map across almost exactly.

Hosting for a group

There are two ways, and the second one is better than most people expect.

Host from inside the game. The main menu will open your world to other players while you play in it. Fine for an evening with friends who are online at the same time. The limits are the usual pair: people outside your network need your router configured to let them in, and the world stops existing when you quit.

Run the dedicated server. Terraria ships one, and it is a small program that runs a world without a game window attached. It is one of the lightest servers of any game on this site — a world with a handful of players will run comfortably on hardware you would not consider adequate for anything else.

That lightness is the reason so many Terraria servers exist. Our comparison of what game server hosting costs puts this game at the cheap end of every bracket, and our guide to running a Minecraft server for free covers the general principles of getting a small persistent world online, most of which transfer.

Think about the slot count honestly. Terraria's world is shared and finite, and eight people mining the same cave system is a different game from three. Our note on how many slots a server should have is relevant here in a way it is not for a shooter.

Playing well with other people

Coordinate the progression. Bosses change the world permanently, and the one at the end of the pre-hardmode sequence changes it for everybody. Summoning it because you were bored, on a server where four other people were still building their houses, is the classic multiplayer Terraria argument.

Split the specialisms. One person building, one exploring for materials, one fishing, one who actually enjoys the boss fights. The game is wide enough that this works.

Build the housing properly. The non-player characters who move in sell things, and where they live and who they live near affects what they charge. On a multiplayer world this is a shared project worth somebody taking on.

Announce the events. Invasions and blood moons arrive on their own schedule and are much easier with four people than one. Say something before you trigger anything optional.

Do not tunnel through somebody's house. Obvious, constantly done, and the reason region protection exists.

Problems

"Version mismatch." Your client and the server are on different builds. Wait for the server, or check whether you have been moved to a beta branch in Steam.

The connection times out. Wrong port, most likely. Check it separately from the address — the game asks for them in two boxes and people paste the whole thing into the first.

You joined and your character has nothing. You brought a different character. They are separate files and easy to mix up.

Modded server refuses you. Mod list mismatch. Match it exactly.

Everything is already done. You joined an old world. Find a fresh one if progression is what you wanted.

If you like this

Starbound is the closest relative in feel — same side-on building and exploration, spread across planets rather than one world, with a stronger emphasis on travel.

Core Keeper and Necesse both take the mining-and-building loop somewhere else, top-down, with their own progression underneath. Both are far smaller and both are genuinely good.

And Minecraft is the obvious comparison, though the two games want different things from you — one is a building game with combat attached, the other is a combat progression with building attached, and people who bounced off one regularly love the other.

The thing Terraria has that none of them do is the moment the floor drops out. Four hours of a pleasant little game, and then a boss that rewrites the world you thought you understood.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Terraria servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.